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Asimov’s, April/May.

Tor.com, January 6-April 13.

Lightspeed, April.

Slate, April 26.

 

The April/May Double Issue of Asimov’s is a substantial one, full of good stories, almost all of them core SF—probably few if any of them will make award ballots next year, but taken together they make the issue more than worth the money it takes to buy it in entertainment value. The best story here is probably also the most ambitious one: “Flight from the Ages,” by Derek Künsken, a story taking place over a timespan of billions of years, ultimately all the way back to the beginning of the universe, in which a banking IA operating a customs and tariff spaceship tries to deal with the inadvertent release of unimaginably powerful forces from a ancient alien weapon of war that threatens to destroy not only our galaxy but all of spacetime. There’s some great and very original conceptualization here, although as there are no human protagonists and a number of chewy scientific infodumps to get through, some readers may find it a bit abstract or austere, but stick with it and your persistence will be rewarded by a pure dose of that Sense of Wonder stuff that science fiction is supposed to deliver. Also good in April/May is Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “Matilda,” which deals with the dysfunctional relationship between a human pilot and another AI-operated sentient spaceship, and how they have to learn to function with each other in order to survive a dangerous mission in enemy territory. Another spaceship pilot (although the ships here function more like tugboats than what we usually think of as spaceships) is at the heart of new writer Suzanne Palmer’s long novella “Lazy Dog Out,” as a tough, formerly homeless woman whose job it is to shepherd bigger spaceships in and out of a planet’s huge docking facility, a city in its own right, finds herself embroiled in a sinister conspiracy that threatens not only the station’s impoverished homeless population (with whom she’s maintained some contact) but her own life and the existence of everything she holds dear. This is a rare example in science fiction of a story that features someone in what is more-or-less a blue collar job (most SF centers around the upper classes, professional people, rich people, executives, scientists, celebrities, politicians, if not the actual aristocracy themselves—not necessarily royals, but whoever the aristocracy of that society may be), and is well-told and suspenseful, although I did find it odd that the docking facility was planet-bound, where you have to push the big ships up out of a gravity well with your “tugboats,” rather than a station in space. Robert Reed’s “The Days of Hamelin” is the melancholy story of an unknown plague that starts killing children, and how the surviving children are affected emotionally and psychologically by having been passed over. T.R. Napper’s “Flame Trees” is an emotionally grueling story about an emotionally scarred veteran of a future war trying to hang on to the memories of the horrors he’s seen in the face of well-meaning government attempts to take them from him, in spite of the fact that the PTSD they generate make it impossible for him to truly function in society.

Also in April/May, in “Of the Beast in the Belly,” C.W. Johnson rationalizes the old fantasy tale about a whale so big that it has the shipwrecked sailors it’s swallowed living in its belly (think Disney’s Pinocchio) as science fiction, with mixed results; I must admit that I was longing for the characters to get out of the alien “whale’s” belly long before they actually did, as those scenes dragged a bit for me. In “The Return of Black Murray,” Alexander Jablokov brings us along for the reunion in a now abandoned amusement park of old high-school friends whose lives were changed forever by one traumatic event that took place there one hot summer night many years before; this probably would have worked better as a mainstream story, with some more mundane reason for the tragic breakup of the classmates’s friendship, than it does with the rather trumped-up and unconvincing fantastic element that appears toward the end of the story. “Three Paintings,” by James Van Pelt deals with an artist coming to the slow realization that he’s unintentionally involved in a elaborate art scam, somewhat reduced in impact for me buy the fact that I find it hard to believe that he’d agree to put himself in the situation he’s in in the first place, where he kills himself for the sake of increased creativity. The issue’s only fantasy, Esther M. Friesner’s “Woman in the Reeds,” is not one of Friesner’s more familiar Comic Fantasy tales, but rather a rather grim tale about a mother struggling to save her baby from a malign supernatural Entity.

Since they started posting new stories on January 6th, the first nine stories posted on Tor.com were fantasy stories of one sort or another, listed as Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, and Epic Fantasy. Some of these were good stories, such as “The Glass Galago,” by A.M. Dellamonica, posted on January 6, “Two’s Company,” by Joe Abercrombie (reviewed here a couple of months back), posted on January 12, “The Maiden Thief,” by Melissa Marr, posted on January 27, and “Breaking Water,” by Indrapramit Das, posted on February 10, but the lack of science fiction stories was beginning to worry me, as SF had been somewhat light on the ground at Tor.com in 2015 as well, and I didn’t want to see it disappear from the site for good. Other than a pleasant steampunk Sherlock Holmes pastiche, “The Great Detective,” by Delia Sherman, posted on February 17, the first stories on Tor.com that could reasonably be called core science fiction stories didn’t begin to show up until toward the end of March—but at least they were good ones when they did appear. An argument could be made that “Listen,” by Karin Tidbeck, a sequel to her previous story “Sing,” is science fantasy rather than science fiction per se; as with the previous story, it’s expertly crafted and features psychologically complex characters, but I find the science here—a moon that emits “radiations” that in some unexplained way cause human beings to lose the ability to speak when it’s in the sky—dubious at best, more a poetic conceit than something that would actually be able to happen in the real world. There’s no doubt about the classification of “That Game We Played During the War,” by Carrie Vaughn, though, which was posted on March 16—undoubtedly SF, and a good example of the form, taking us to a planet where a debilitating war between two races, one telepathic and the other not, has just ended, and the playing of a simple game of chess becomes a bridge between the two races, strengthening the still-uneasy peace, as it’s played by two individuals who had once been Prisoners of War, each held captive by the other’s people. Even stronger is “Terminal,” by Lavie Tidhar, posted on April 17, a touching portrait of the ordinary people (some of whom have terminal illnesses, some who do not) who accept the government’s offer of a one-way trip to Mars; this is beautifully written and beautifully felt, deeply emotional, certainly one of the best stories of the year to date.

Carrie Vaughn, in a less serious mode, also provides the best story in the April Lightspeed, “Origin Story,” concerning a woman who discovers that her old high-school boyfriend has become a bank-robbing supervillain, in a comicbook-inspired world where superheroes and supervillains, and the epic battles between them, are common; good fun. Also in April, Patricia Strand does a good job in “The Birth Will Take Place on a Mutually Acceptable Research Vessel” in working out the implications, complications, and unexpected political consequences of the birth of a child with a human mother and an alien father—but never deals with the issue of how such a pregnancy could be possible in the first place, a subject that’s never even raised in the course of the story.

An example of a first-rate SF story popping up unexpectedly in an unusual place is “Mika Model,” by Paolo Bacigalupi, which appeared in the April 26 issue of the online magazine Slate, which doesn’t usually run fiction. This is a gripping story about an AI-run sex robot who kills “her” owner; is it murder, or is it just product malfunction? This territory has been covered before, notably in Elizabeth Bear’s “Dolly” from 2011, but Bacigalupi does an excellent job of exploring the issue of machine sentience and its implications for the relationships between humans and robots/AIs—something that may not remain the province of science fiction for long, as we continue to hurtle (sometimes, it seems, with accelerating speed) into the unknown territory of the 21st Century.