94

Bridging Infinity, ed. Jonathan Strahan. (Solaris, 978-1-78108-419-9, 446 pages.)

Drowned Worlds: Tales From the Anthropocene and Beyond, ed. Jonathan Strahan. (Solaris, 333 pages.)

Now We Are Ten—Celebrating the First Ten Years of NewCon Press, ed. Ian Whates. (NewCon Press, 978-1-910935-18-7, 265 pages.) Cover Art by Ben Baldwin.

Asimov’s, September.

Asimov’s, October/November.

Asimov’s, December.

 

With 2017 looming as I write these words, here’s some more catch-up work.

Although it’s a bit weaker than last year’s Meeting Infinity, which was a particularly strong entry in the series, Jonathan Strahan’s Bridging Infinity still manages to be probably the strongest original SF anthology of the year, a feat that Strahan’s managed for a number of years in a row now. I speculate that may part of the trouble here may be that Strahan may have been putting Bridging Infinity together at more-or-less the same as he was his catastrophic climate change anthology Drowned Worlds, his other 2016 anthology, and that the line between the two anthologies got somewhat blurred; certainly several of the better stories here—“Cold Comfort,” by Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty, “Induction,” by Thoraiya Dyer, “Monuments,” by Pamela Sargent—would have fit just as well or better into Drowned Worlds—and that may have kept Bridging Infinity more focused on near-future Earth than some of the other Infinity anthologies, which have often taken us into the deep future and the furthest reaches of the Solar System, and even of the Galaxy, and shown us some mind-blowing stuff. Nevertheless, Bridging Infinity is still a strong anthology, and not without it’s share of Sense Of Wonder-invoking science fictional visions. Best stories here are probably “Sixteen Questions for Kamala Chatterjee,” by Alastair Reynolds, which follows a scientist who eventually is transformed into something more than human as she struggles to stay involved with a project that will take thousands of years to complete, “Six Degrees of Separation Freedom,” by Pat Cadigan, about a corporate headhunter trying to recruit people willing to abandon their previous lives and even bodies to be able to live in space, “Parables of Infinity,” by Robert Reed, about one of the builders of Reed’s Great Ship who issues a warning to the present inhabitants, and “Seven Birthdays,” by Ken Liu, about a woman who travels deep, deep into the far-future in order to bring about a reconciliation with her estranged (and long dead) mother. The anthology also features good work by Stephen Baxter, Allen M. Steele, An Owomoyela, Gregory Benford and Larry Niven, and others.

Jonathan Strahan’s other 2016 original SF anthology, Drowned Worlds: Tales From the Anthropocene and Beyond, is also a good one, featuring, like Bridging Infinity, a few of the year’s best stories—although there have been so many stories about catastrophic climate change in the last few years, with rising sea-levels swallowing cities and coastlines (and even, in a few cases, the entire land area of Earth), people watching as their homes sink beneath the sea, refugee camps full of people displaced by the flooding, nations falling apart and Balkanizing due to the social upheaval and chaos, and so forth, that inevitably some of these stories may strike readers as a bit familiar. I’m more impressed here with the stories that look beyond the familiar Doom and Gloom of the initial catastrophes and try to imagine how humans (who, after all, are extremely adaptable animals) and human society might be able to evolve strategies and ways of life that would enable them to survive and even eventually prosper under the new conditions pertaining to a post-Climate Catastrophe world. Not surprisingly then, for me the best stories here are those that attempt to do just that, namely “Elves of Antarctica,” by Paul McAuley, in which people adapt to life in a de-iced Antarctica, evolving new customs and even new superstitions and legends along the way, “Dispatches from the Cradle: The Hermit—Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts,” by Ken Liu, in which tourists visit and try to learn moral lessons from one of the sunken cities of our present civilizations, “Because Change Was the Ocean and We Lived by Her Mercy,” by Charlie Jane Anders, which shows us the essentials of family and even tribalism successfully adapting to a world that we’d consider ruined, which is to them normal, and (although I’m not sure this is entirely possible, scientifically) “The Future Is Blue,” by Catherynne M. Valente, in which, there being no other land available, civilization is rebuilt atop floating mats of garbage in the Pacific Ocean. (“Cold Comfort,” from Bridging Infinity, about the early days of reclaiming Antarctica for habitation, would have fit perfectly in this grouping as well.) Drowned Worlds also features good stories by Lavie Tidhar, Sam J. Miller, Sean Williams (whose story might have fit better in Bridging Infinity), and others. The anthology also reprints one of the earliest catastrophic climate change stories, and still one of the best, “Venice Drowned,” by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Another good original SF anthology is To Shape the Dark, edited by Athena Andreadis, an anthology of SF stories about women scientists struggling to do “science not-as-usual,” to push the boundaries of the possible, often against considerable resistance and even attempted oppression by the societies in which they function...as well as attempts to deny that they ever did the work at all or to claim credit for it (not too different, in other words, from what happens all-too-often in our own present-day society). There’s a wide range of styles and moods here, with settings ranging from the near-present to the far-future, including stories about women exploring and doing vital scientific work on distant alien worlds. Strongest stories here are probably “Fieldwork,” by Shariann Lewitt, “Crossing the Midday Gate,” by Aliette de Bodard, “Firstborn, Lastborn,” by Melissa Scott, “Of Wind and Fire,” by Vandana Singh, and “Carnivores of Can’t-Go-Home,” by Constance Cooper, but there’s also good work by Gwyneth Jones, Terry Boren, Kristine Landon, and others, all of it science fiction, some of it hard science fiction, and just about all of it worth reading.

Now We Are Ten—Celebrating the First Ten Years of NewCon Press, edited by Ian Whates, is exactly what it says that it is: a compilation of stories by authors who have been published by NewCon Press, in celebration of NewCon Press’s tenth anniversary. This is a mixed (but all original) anthology of SF and fantasy—nothing here is as strong as the best of the stories from the anthologies mentioned above, but most of the stories are enjoyable and worth reading. The best of them is probably “Woman’s Christmas,” by Ian McDonald, but there’s also good stuff by Nina Allan, Nancy Kress, Jack Skillingstead, Eric Brown, E.J. Swift, and others.

Asimov’s closes out its year with a few exceptional stories scattered amongst its last few issues. The strongest issue overall out of the three end-of-the-year issues is clearly the September Asimov’s, which features several superior stories. The best of these is probably “The Visitor from Taured,” by Ian R. MacLeod, an exquisitely written and subtly characterized near-mainstream story that justifies its inclusion in a genre magazine with the protagonist’s lifelong obsession with S.E.T.I. and with experimentally proving or disproving the Many Worlds theory of reality—something that the ambiguous ending hints that he may or may not have finally done. Also good here is Rich Larson’s “All That Robot Shit...” (which I’m amused to see is rendered as “All That Robot...” on both the issue’s Table of Contents and the story’s title page. Can you no longer get away with saying “shit” in Asimov’s?) The Larson takes us to an island inhabited entirely by robots, except for one human castaway, and deals with the relationship that gradually evolves between the human and one of the robots. In spite of the fact that none of the backstory here is ever explained (how did all these robots get to the island and set up a tribal civilization of their own? Are they refugees from the collapse of the outside world or remnants of some lost island civilization? Is the human castaway merely the victim of his boat sinking near the island, or is he perhaps the last human left alive after some worldwide catastrophe, as may be being hinted here and there?), the growing empathy between the human and the robot, both of whom have lost someone close to them and are exiles, the human from whatever human world may still exist (if one does) and the robot amongst its own kind, from whom it is growing increasingly estranged, has become quite moving by the story’s melancholy end. Also good in September is Carrie Vaughn’s “The Mind Is Its Own Place,” about the patients in a hospital facility dedicated to trying to find a cure for a strange illness suffered by space travelers who have been too long in contact with a Faster-Than-Light drive, Robert Reed’s “Dome on the Prairie,” which plays in a sly and subtle fashion with reader expectations as to whom the viewpoint characters might be, and Jack Skillingstead’s “The Whole Mess,” which deals with a Lovecraftian Intrustion on a college campus that swallows people up and deposits them in Alternate Worlds.

The October/November Asimov’s is a “Special Slightly Spooky Issue,” which means that most of the stories in it are fantasy or soft horror, placing them out of my direct purview, although I did enjoy the stories by Alexander Jablokov, Michael Blumlein, and Sandra McDonald, as was pleased to see S.N. Dyer, once a regular at Asimov’s, return to it’s pages after a long absence. There is one SF story in the issue, “Water Scorpions,” by the ubiquitous Rich Larson, which, while not as interesting as “All That Robot Shit...”, does pack a powerful emotional punch in its story of a boy estranged from his adopted alien “brother,” and what brings about a reconciliation of sorts between them.

The December Asimov’s is weaker than the September Asimov’s overall, but does feature a few good stories. The strongest of them is Karl Bunker’s “They Have All One Breath,” which takes us to a future Utopia created for humans by AIs and robots, and shows us how it becomes claustrophobic for some of its human residents. I also enjoyed “The Cold Side of the Island,” by Kali Wallace, a soft horror story about a strange discovery made in the deep woods by children years before which comes to haunt the rest of their adult lives; the story does an excellent job of setting up an eerie, ominous, threatening atmosphere—although in the final analysis, nothing particularly horrific actually happens.