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Asimov’s, March.

Lightspeed, February.

Lightspeed, March.

Hwarhath Stories: Twelve Transgressive Tales by Aliens, by Eleanor Arnason. (Aqueduct Press, 291 pages)

 

The March issue of Asimov’s has some entertaining stories in it, but nothing really outstanding. Much the same could be said about the January and February issues, which means that after ending 2015 with a couple of very strong issues, Asimov’s is off to a bit of a weak start this year. There’s still plenty of worthwhile reading provided here, though. The best story in March is probably Ted Kosmatka’s “The Bewilderness of Lions,” a subtle story about predicting (and, in fact, affecting) the future through complex data-mining and the extensive mapping of trends, and also about how it’s difficult to extort someone into doing something if they not only don’t care if your worst threats come true, but actually want them to happen. Also good here is Dale Bailey’s offbeat “I Married a Monster from Outer Space.” The satiric device used in the Bailey story is that nobody else except the wife and the husband notices the Monster from Outer Space they’ve sort-of unofficially adopted when its Flying Saucer crashes nearby, so that, for instance, the waitress at Hooter’s never reacts to the fact that they’re sharing their table with an alien that looks like a giant bug with an exposed brain (which could lead to a reading that the alien is just a fantasy the wife is having as part of a psychotic breakdown—but I don’t think that’s where Bailey is going); this enables the author to insert the alien to satirical effect into a lot of ordinary situations, at the movies, at the gas station, at the diner, sitting around in the trailer drinking cans of beer, without the story becoming about everybody else’s reaction to its being there. If the story was just meant to be funny, it would be too long, but Bailey manages to justify the extra length by generating a surprising amount of poignancy as well, mostly with his portrait of how soddenly bleak and hopeless the life of the working-class housewife is, something that may send a trickle of unease through many of those reading the issue, whose own lives might not be that far off.

Ray Nayler’s “Do Not Forget Me” gives us an atmospheric exercise in nesting stories told by a succession of narrators, dealing with the arrival of the Great Poet in a little town in Central Asia long ago, and the tales of the uncertainty of life that are unfurled by his arrival. The eponymous “ship whisperer” in Julie Novakova’s “The Ship Whisperer” is someone whose job it is to interface with and interact with the sentient AI that controls a starship, and who runs afoul of a conspiracy involving an alien artifact of almost ultimate cosmic power that has been discovered on a alien planet; somewhat familiar stuff, although briskly and competently told (the obsessed Evil Colonel is a bit one-dimensional and cartoonish, though). R. Neube adds another story to his long sequence of “Grainer” stories with “A Little Bigotry,” this one showing how a down-on-her-luck refugee, a veteran of the war against the aliens who now control the station she’s seeking refuge in, is used by one of the aliens to teach a lesson in tolerance to his offspring. James Gunn’s “New Earth” demonstrates that finding an Earth-like planet to colonize may be only the start of the problems the potential colonists will face.

The February Lightspeed is rather weak—or at least, most of the stuff in it is not to my taste, not necessarily the same thing. The story I enjoyed most was probably Jeremiah Tolbert’s “Not by Wardrobe, Tornado, or Looking Glass,” a fantasy where “wormholes” have begun to open between various fantasy worlds and our own, allowing an exchange of population in both directions, with fantasy creatures taking up residence in our cities, and taking on human roles, as the original human inhabitants decamp to live in the fantasy world of their choice. The most elegantly written story here is Karin Tidbeck’s “Starfish,” a strange little story that exists somewhere on the borderland between reality and dreamlike fabulation, not quite a fantasy as we’re used to thinking of fantasy in the genre, closer to slipstream. “Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea,” by Sarah Pinsker, is ostensibly a science fiction story, but there’s something dreamlike about it too, with the scenario that all the rich people have gone to live on luxury ships in the sea while everything else in the world has fallen apart and gone to Hell operating on a dream-logic level that wouldn’t quite make sense in the real world; many of the actions of the characters seem to be operating on a level of dream-logic as well, which gives the story a drifting feeling, as if it’s only partially engaging with reality. Rachel K. Jones’s “Charlotte Incorporated” follows a desperate social-climber in a faintly distasteful future where you have to save up enough money to buy a body, and until you do you’re a brain and a bundle of nerves stuffed inside a jar on a scooter.

The March Lightspeed is considerably stronger. Best story here is probably “Redking,” by Craig Delancey, a fast-paced and involving postcyberpunk tale about a “code monkey” helping the police to track down the source of a virus that is infecting gamers and making them act erratically in unpredictable ways, sometimes killing themselves or others, and which threatens to spread until it becomes a virtual pandemic; there’s no ground here that hasn’t been covered by others before, but Delancey handles it all with a nicely-done professional competence that makes it a fun read. Also very good in March is Rich Larson’s “Sparks Fly,” the slyly amusing story of a “sparkhead”—someone who generates an electrical field that interferes with the operation of electronic equipment—trying to court a girl without either letting her find out about his socially disapproved-of affliction or setting off or frying her cellphone, computer, alarm clock, or TV set. There’s an unexpected twist at the end that enhanced my enjoyment of the story and made me smile. Lightspeed lists this as a fantasy, but it seems to me that it could just as well be considered to be an SF story of the “Wild Talents”/mutant variety—but then, I often have a problem with the way Lightspeed classifies their stories. The rest of the original stories in March are weaker. Caroline M. Yoachim’s “Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station/Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0,” in spite of the SFnal title, is actually a tongue-in-cheek satirical Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story rather than an serious SF story, amusing in places, but too long, as many comic pieces are. Marie Vibbert’s “Michael Doesn’t Hate His Mother” is a semi-surrealistic piece about a future where (for no reason ever explained) children are watched over by huge mechanical “mothers,” in spite of the fact that the mothers often act dangerously erratic and hurt their charges or even endanger their lives.

One of the most criminally overlooked and neglected of living science fiction authors, Eleanor Arnason has been producing a wide variety of first-rate stuff for decades, from the Space Opera of her Lydia Duluth stories to the Space Age fabulism of her Big Mama stories to her quirky and eclectic fantasy stories set in Iceland (recently collected in Hidden Folk: Icelandic Fantasies). In SF, though, Arnason has done most of her best work in her long sequence of hwarhath stories, unusual in science fiction for being stories told by aliens (the humanoid, space-travelling hwarhath) about aliens, with human characters rarely appearing and humanity often not mentioned at all. The sequence started with the unjustly forgotten novel A Woman of the Iron People in 1991 (one of the best SF novels of the ‘90s, and winner of the first James Tiptree Memorial Award) and has continued since through to the present day in novellas, novelettes, and short stories that have at last been gathered together in a collection, Hwarhath Stories: Twelve Transgressive Tales by Aliens, by Eleanor Arnason. This is anthropological science fiction at its best, with only Ursula K. Le Guin rivaling Arnason in cultural insight and in the sophistication, complexity, and evocativeness of her worldbuilding. The hwarhath serve as a distorted mirror in which we can clearly see our own follies, foibles, and peculiarities, and the inequalities of our society; the hwarhath, meanwhile, see humans as a distorted mirror in which they can see the peculiarities and inequalities of their own society. Arnason does her best work here at novella length, and I consider “The Potter of Bones” and “Dapple” to be among the very best novellas of their respective years, and as having an honorable place amongst the list of the best SF novellas ever written. “The Hound of Merlin,” “The Actors,” “The Lovers,” “The Garden,” and “Holmes Sherlock” are also very strong; in fact, there’s really nothing here that isn’t worth reading. Coming as it does from a small press, you may not see Hwarhath Stories: Twelve Transgressive Tales by Aliens included on many lists of the best collections of 2016 as the year comes to an end, but believe me, it’s one of them. It may even turn out to be the best collection of the year.