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Asimov’s, January.

F&SF, January/February.

Tor.com, January 12.

Lightspeed, January.

 

Asimov’s heads into 2016 with a fairly average January issue, one filled with lots of entertaining stuff, but where nothing is particularly exceptional and probably nothing is going to end up on Hugo or Nebula ballots. The most entertaining piece here is probably Allen M. Steele’s novella “Einstein’s Shadow,” an Alternate World story set just before the outbreak of this timeline’s version of World War II (taking place in a reality where Gregor Strasser has succeeded Adolf Hitler—a turn for the worst, not the better—and immense luxury Nazi airliners shepherd passengers back and forth across the Atlantic), featuring a hardboiled American PI who is press-ganged into acting as a bodyguard for Albert Einstein, whose life is being threatened by the mistakes of his past come back to haunt him, as well as by anti-Semitic Nazis. This is great fun, and my only quibble is that if the plan is to smuggle the PI into the ocean-crossing airliner as a secret bodyguard for Einstein, since nobody would suspect an American as being such, it would seem to be counter-productive to have him escort Einstein up the gangplank and into the airplane, obviously serving as a bodyguard; shouldn’t be hard for anyone to figure it out after that.

Also good here is Ian McHugh’s “The Baby Eaters,” one of two stories this issue about the disastrous social consequences of humans misunderstanding and misinterpreting alien customs and lifeways (the other is Genevieve Williams’s “The Singing Bowl,” which is less visceral and powerful, but also not without its points of interest). “Chasing Ivory,” by Ted Kosmatka, follows a scientist who, at some risk to herself, is monitoring a herd of resurrected mammoths in the Canadian wilderness; once the story gets her in place, which takes a number of pages, nothing much in particular happens thereafter, but the story does deliver some nice sensory impressions of what it would be like to be in close proximity to living mammoths. “White Dust,” by new writer Nathan Hillstrom, whether the young author consciously realizes it or not (and I suspect that he does not, considering his age), is channeling Algis Budrys’s once-famous (now, sadly, mostly forgotten) novella “Rogue Moon,” with resurrected versions of the same protagonist being teleported into a deadly environment to complete a task that kills him before he can finish it, so they send the next version of him in; for a first-sale writer, though, he handles the story elements promisingly. “Conscience,” by Robert R. Chase, is near-future Military SF, but I find it unconvincing that the military would give the protagonist a second chance after deliberately choosing to disobey orders during wartime operations; she would have been immediately grounded, arrested, or kicked out of the service. In “Atheism and Flight,” by Dominica Phetteplace, an amputee regrows his lost arm, with no particular explanation for this happening other than that he really, really wants his arm back.

The January/February F&SF perhaps has a slight edge over the January Asimov’s, and, unusually for F&SF, its science fiction stories are stronger than most of its fantasy stories; usually, it’s the other way around. Best story here is Gregory Benford’s “Vortex,” which takes us to Mars for a really ingenious and inventive look at some of the life we might really find there, life that’s light-years removed from old Martian favorites such as Dejah Thoris or Tars Tarkas, but still capable of delivering a real old-fashioned Sense of Wonder kick in spite of the fact that you can’t make love to it or have swordfights with it. Also very good is “Number Nine Moon,” by Alex Irvine. Running with the Martian subtheme of the issue, inspired by a Bob Eggleton cover, Irvine takes us to a Mars that’s being abandoned in the face of a shift in the political climate back home on Earth, and follows three mildly larcenous types who plan to get in some last-minute looting before having to leave—only to run afoul of an accident that may mean they won’t be able to leave at all, which is tantamount to being sentenced to death. How they work against the clock to try to save themselves is suspenseful, and in the spirit of the novel and the film The Martian (which obviously hovers over the issue), both scientifically plausible and inventive. We’re back to Mars again in Mary Robinette Kowal’s “Rockets Red,” where a fireworks expert struggles to put on a fireworks display on the Red Planet in spite of the well-meaning “assistance” of his aging mother, but this one was a little too sentimental to be as successful for me as the other two Martian stories.

As a change of pace, Terry Bisson introduces us to a time-traveling robot (sort of) with a bewilderingly obscure but ostensibly very important mission in the offbeat and pleasantly wacky “Robot from the Future.” In the best of the issue’s fantasy stories, Matthew Hughes gives us another story of Raffalon the Thief in “Telltale,” as Raffalon tries to reason his way out of another of the complex and very sticky magical situations he’s always getting himself entangled in, this one even more difficult to extricate yourself from than usual. Albert E. Cowdrey gives us a (to me) somewhat unconvincing reason why a patch of Appalachian forest has been haunted for thousands of years, in “The Visionaries” (I’d have preferred the forthcoming asteroid strike, myself). Nick Wolven’s “Caspar D. Luckinbill, What Are You Going To Do?” gives us another satiric story of a man’s life being destroyed by the relentless hounding of computers and social media for no particular reason ever explained, not unlike his “We’re So Very Sorry For Your Recent Tragic Loss,” from last year; clearly this is an obsessive theme for Wolven, and I must say that he does a good job of making the wired and extensively networked future where everything is monitoring you and reporting on you to advertisers and/or the government, a future that’s always seemed like a terrible place to live to me, even though it’s sometimes put forth as a Utopia, seem even more unpleasant than it usually does. David Gerrold tells a rather sweet and loving ghost story, a combination you don’t see all that often, in “The White Piano”; the only problem I have here is that the story that the grandmother tells the kids is far too adult, with far too many adult terms and concepts, to have made any real sense to kids the age of the kids she’s supposedly telling it to. I know that E. Lily Yu’s “Braid of Days and Wake of Nights,” about a woman in New York City trying to catch a unicorn so that she can use it to cure her friend who’s dying of cancer, is supposed to be deeply poignant, but with all the best will in the world I can’t help but find it a bit silly instead.

Tor.com launches into the new year with a superior fantasy story, posted on January 12, “Two’s Company,” by Joe Abercrombie, in which the ferocious warrior woman Jarve, Lioness of Hoskopp, one of Abercrombie’s continuing characters, meets an equally formidable (but male) warrior coming in the other direction as she crosses a narrow rope suspension bridge. Since neither will give way to the other, these two mighty warriors must fight it out for the privilege of pride-of-place, much like Robin Hood and Little John meeting on the log across the stream, although in most versions of that story I’m familiar with, Robin Hood and Little John don’t end up extending their dominancy contest into the sexual arena as well. This is listed as “Epic Fantasy,” and it is that, with plenty of sword-swinging action and at least ten or twelve bodies left not only scattered around but chopped into little pieces by the end of the story, but (as shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to those familiar with Abercrombie’s work) it is also a very funny story as well, richly comic in a dark, robust, bloody way that might be too crude or cruel for those of a delicate sensibility, but which is nevertheless, well—funny. It certainly gave me a good laugh in several places, slyly satirizing Sword & Sorcery conventions while at the same time vigorously celebrating them.

There’s also good stuff in the January Lightspeed. Best story in the January issue is “Beyond the Heliopause,” by Keith Brooke and Eric Brown, which takes a journalist out on a mysterious mission to meet her estranged husband in a space station beyond the heliopause, past the outermost edge of the Solar System, where a cosmic secret is waiting to be revealed that will forever change everything the human race thinks it knows about the universe. Brooke and Brown tie this in neatly with a subplot about the journalist’s once-religious father, and how he came to lose his Faith. J.V. Yang offers us a biter bit story about an unpleasant, selfish, and shallow rich woman who wants to buy a new body, and how she becomes involved with the poor person who needs to sell her own body on the black market, in “Secondhand Bodies,” all of which is wrapped up in a satisfyingly ironic fashion. In “The Savannah Liars Tour,” Will McIntosh takes us to a future where people can take daytrips into the Afterlife to visit with their departed loved ones, sort of a literalization of Mexico’s Day of the Dead holiday, where people go to graveyards to picnic with and ostensibly visit with dead friends and family members. One man becomes obsessed with returning to the Savannah, Georgia of his youth to visit the spirit of his dead wife and recreate the happy days they’d spent together—and again the story leads to a twist ending, one that I saw coming, but which functions in a traditionally satisfying fashion anyway. There’s yet another unicorn story, the second this month, “Maiden, Hunter, Beast,” by Kat Howard, which takes the whole complex of unicorn mythology seriously, but which again I found mildly silly. Two unicorn stories this month! Is somebody putting a unicorn anthology together?