93

Asimov’s, June.

Asimov’s, July.

Asimov’s, August.

F&SF, July/August.

F&SF, September/October.

Clarkesworld, March.

Clarkesworld, April

Clarkesworld, May.

Clarkesworld, June.

Lightspeed, July.

Lightspeed, August.

Lightspeed, September.

 

I’m just back from having spent four months in the hospital, so I’ve got a lot of catching up to do. As a result, I’m not going to try to review the entire issues of magazines that I missed reviewing while I was in the land of surgeries and physical therapy, but rather just hit the highlights of those issues, the stories that have impressed me the most during that period (I did try to keep up with my reading, although it wasn’t always easy). Some issues may have one or two stories mentioned from them; some may have none. (That doesn’t necessarily mean that the stories in those issues were bad, by the way—just that there was nothing that stood out enough from the average to strike me as exceptional.)

Paul McAuley shows us the power of dreams, even the dreams of rats, in the strongest story in the June Asimov’s, “Rats Dream of the Future.” (Mercurio D. Rivera’s “Unreeled” and Jay O’Connell’s “What We Hold On To” are also good here, although not quite in the same league.) Rich Larson has had an impressive flood of good stories out this year in many different markets, including the best story in the July Asimov’s, “Masked,” which takes us to a near-future where your Social Media profile has become such an important part of your identity that, without it, you might as well not exist at all—as one unfortunate young woman finds out when she has to struggle with just such a situation. Also good in July is “Webs,” by Mary Anne Mohanraj, a tense tale of a future which unfortunately seems all-too-likely considering the mood of our country today, where mobs of scared citizens hunt down and attack those they perceive as different from them, and the government either does nothing or actively assists them. The August Asimov’s features two very strong stories, among the best to appear in Asimov’s so far this year, Matthew Claxton’s “Patience Lake,” a compelling story in which an injured and down-on-his-luck cyborg must make a dangerous and potentially fatal stand to defend the farm family that tried to help him, and the edgy and erudite “KIT: Some Assembly Required,” by Kathe Koja and Carter Scholz, in which an attempt to create an AI modeled on Elizabethan playwright and poet (and spy) Christopher Marlowe has some unexpected, and potentially world-changing, results.

The May/June F&SF and the July/August F&SF are full of competent and entertaining stories, most of them fantasy, but nothing exceptional—with the exception, in the July/August issue, of Lavie Tidhar’s novella, “The Vanishing Kind,” a moody, noirish, Alternate Worlds story about a Private Eye in an England that has been conquered and occupied by the Nazis trying to track down a missing woman through the Mean Streets of a world where just about everybody is corrupt and nobody is to be trusted. The September/October F&SF, on the other hand, “A David Gerrold Special Issue,” is a very strong issue, the strongest that F&SF has had all year. It features several major stories, most prominent of which are “Those Shadows Laugh,” by Geoff Ryman, and “The Further Adventures of Mr. Costello,” by David Gerrold. The Ryman takes us sideways in time to an island nation populated by women of another species of the genus homo, one that perhaps died off in our world, who reproduce by parthenogenesis. They famously keep to themselves, with most of the island forbidden to tourists except for an enclave run by the Disney Corporation, but now they are reaching out for scientific help from the rest of the world, allowing a geneticist to come and work with them to try to eliminate a major flaw in their reproductive system. The scientist falls in love with the land and the people, and one of the story’s strengths, in addition to the details of a fascinating social system quite different from our own, is his tragic realization that he can never be part of that world, no matter how hard he tries to fit in. Gerrold’s “The Further Adventures of Mr. Costello” is a posthumous sequel to Theodore Sturgeon’s well-known (or once well-known, anyway—these days, it’s entirely possible that many younger readers will be encountering Mr. Costello here for the first time) story  “Mr. Costello, Hero.” In this one, the eponymous Mr. Costello, a shrewd and persuasive con man with nobody’s better interests at heart except his own, arrives on a frontier colony planet to pitch a grandiose scheme that could change life on the colony forever, and becomes entangled with—and, eventually, opposed by, a pioneering farming family, one of whom gradually realizes the terrible effects Mr. Costello’s scheme could have if it succeeds. This one is a lot of fun, in tone reminiscent of Robert A. Heinlein’s “juvenile” novels, with a hefty dose of John Varley mixed in as well, an enjoyable fast-paced read. The September/October F&SF also features a prequel to The Last Unicorn, “The Green-Eyed Boy,” by Peter S. Beagle, a story about a dying alien desperately trying to find someone to help it, with tragic results, “The Voice in the Cornfield, the Word Made Flesh,” by Desirina Boskovich, a good near-mainstream story about racketeers and racetracks, with an interesting fantastic twist, “The Sweet Warm Earth,” by Steven Popkes, and a fairly routine ghost story that nevertheless does a good job of making us believe that it might have been written by James Boswell, “A Melancholy Apparition,” by Ian Creasey.

The March Clarkesworld was fairly routine, although with a good space story, Jack Skillingstead’s “Salvage Opportunity,” and a good time-travel story, A.C. Wise’s “Seven Cups of Coffee,” but the next three issues featured some outstanding work. The strongest stories in the April Clarkesworld are “Touring with the Alien,” by Carolyn Ives Gilman and “The Bridge of Dreams,” by Gregory Feeley. The Gilman is just what it says it is, a woman driving around the rural countryside in a van with a dying alien (being killed by an addiction to our idea of consciousness, something it had never encountered before) as passenger; the interactions between the woman and the alien and human raised by the aliens since birth as a “translator” are strong and emotionally moving, and the alien’s view of existence is fascinating. The Feeley story rationalizes elements of Norse mythology in a way vaguely similar to the Marvel Thor comics and movies, but on a much more sophisticated level, and with much harder “hard science” being used to explain the abilities and limitations to those abilities of creatures who still fundamentally remain superhuman by our current standard—including an immortal cyborg who is the builder and maintainer of the equivalent of the Bifrost Bridge of mythology in the outer solar system (although I would have liked to see some explanation of why he does this, since nobody ever seems to use it for anything), who is summoned back to inner solar system to attempt an even-more dangerous task he’s reluctant to undertake. Also good in April is “The Cedar Grid,” by Sara Saab. The best story in the May Clarkesworld is “Jonas and the Fox,” another excellent story by Rich Larson, who has produced at least a half-dozen of them this year; this one brings us to a colony planet where a once-idealistic revolution has turned corrupt and bloodily violent (think the French Revolution and Madam Guillotine), and takes us on the run with a fleeing aristocrat who finds a very unusual place to hide—but one which he might not be willing to pay to price to maintain. Also good in May are “The Universal Museum of Sagacity,” by Robert Reed, about a seemingly ordinary woman with a cosmic secret, and “Left Behind,” by Cat Rambo, about a woman who helps clients who are about to become disembodied uploads design “memory palaces,” and who becomes a little too deeply involved with one of them. The best story in the June Clarkesworld, and one of the strongest they’ve published all year, is “Things With Beards,” by Sam J. Miller. This is a hard-hitting—in fact, frankly brutal—story of a man with a secret so horrifying that he can’t even bear to remember it himself, and constantly struggles against doing so; this story is not for the squeamish, so be warned, but it is one of the year’s most powerful stories. “And Then One Day, the Air Was Full of Voices,” by Margaret Ronald, is much more cerebral and less visceral than the Miller, but has a fascination of its own, as a future in which SETI has finally provided an answer to the question of whether or not we’re alone in the universe must deal with the implications of that voice from the sky falling silent. Also good here is Zhang Ran’s “The Snow of Jinyang.”

The strongest story published in Lightspeed this year so far is “The One Who Isn’t,” by Ted Kosmatka, about a child hopelessly lost in the maze of his own mind, which appeared in the July Lightspeed. Also good in Lightspeed were “Those Brighter Stars,” by Mercurio D. Rivera and “Taste the Singularity at the Food Truck Circus,” by Jeremiah Tolbert in the August Lightspeed, and “The Lives of Riley,” by Sean Williams and “Unauthorized Access,” by An Owomoyela, in the September Lightspeed.