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F&SF, January/February.

F&SF, March/April.

Tor.com, January 4.

Tor.com, January 18.

Tor.com, January 25

Tor.com, February 8.

Tor.com, February 15.

 

The January/February issue of F&SF gets the year off to a good start for the magazine, featuring two superior stories, one fantasy and one science fiction. The fantasy story is “Homecoming,” a novella by Rachel Pollack, one of a series of stories she’s been writing, starting with “Jack Shade in the Forest of Souls” in the July/August 2012 issue, about Jack Shade, a Traveler, a man who travels between our world and various eerie afterlife/supernatural worlds to bring messages from the living to the departed, and to perform other magical tasks, such as the finding of souls that have been lost. In this one, he’s charged with finding part of a woman’s soul that’s gone missing, and in the course of tracking it down and retrieving it, inadvertently frees a malevolent creature who has been trapped in magical bondage for sixty-five thousand years, a creature of immense power who immediately goes on a killing spree that there may be no way to stop, and which is due to get much worse. It’s up to Jack to constrain the creature again, an almost impossible task. Fortunately, he has friends to help him—and, even more importantly, extremely powerful enemies whom it may be possible to persuade to aid him as well. The magical system used in the Jack Shade stories is one of the most intricate and unusual such systems being employed in modern fantasy today, and the mystical world that Pollack creates in them, one inextricably wrapped around and interacting in many different ways with our modern everyday world, forming a mystic ecosystem of supernatural checks and balances, layered hierarchies, and rival Powers that is rich and complex and strange.

The superior science fiction story is “There Used To Be Olive Trees,” by Rich Larson, a prolific writer of short fiction whose reputation has climbed very fast in only a couple of years, thanks to a slew of good stories in many different markets, both print and electronic. This one takes place in a desolate far-future where dwindling enclaves of humanity struggle to survive in a world dominated by “gods” who mostly sail by overhead, ignoring the problems of those below, although occasionally they will grant a “miracle” of one sort or another if petitioned in the proper manner. It’ll soon become clear to all but the dimmest readers that the gods are AIs and machine intelligences of different sorts, and the important people in the human enclaves are those who can successfully control the implants that let them communicate with the machine gods, something most people can’t do. Having failed a test of his ability to do so three times, the apprentice Valentin runs away from his enclosed enclave and sets off across the wasteland, once the campo, where there had used to be olive trees, and vineyards, and rich human towns. He soon is captured by a feral human, a wilder, and becomes involved in a vivid adventure which brings him into closer contact with the enigmatic and often-capricious gods, and forces him to make hard choices about what’s really important in the world. This stands on its own feet well, but would also make a good opening for a novel.

Also good in January/February is Robert Reed’s “Dunnage for the Soul,” in which a scientific test is developed to determine which humans (and which animals) have souls. It turns out that some humans have souls and some do not, and this knowledge deeply divides society into a new kind of Have/Have Not split, including the protagonist, who is officially judged to be soulless, and must thereafter suffer the persecution and disdain of the souled majority. Some interesting questions raised here about what it means to be human; the only trouble I have with the story is the speed of the almost universal acceptance that the device is actually registering the existence of a “soul” that some possess and some do not, rather than some other as-yet not understood bio-electrical phenomenon—surely there’d be more resistance to the soul explanation than this. Marc Laidlaw’s “Wetherfell’s Reef Runics” is a fairly standard Lovecraftian Incursion story, made more interesting by its use of Island local color and scuba-diving expertise. Gregor Hartmann’s “A Gathering on Gravity’s Shore” is about a man working up his nerve to openly express his true (and dangerous) political opinions in the face of the gathering storm clouds of a Civil War—no particular reason why this had to be science fiction, but nothing hurt by it being so, either.

The March/April F&SF is weaker overall, but still has some entertaining stuff in it. Matthew Hughes’s “Ten Half-Pennies” is an Origin Story for Hughes’s series character Baldemar. As Hughes himself would readily admit, the obvious inspiration for Baldemar (and to some degree for another of Hughes’s heroes, Raffalon) is Jack Vance’s Cugel the Clever, one of the seminal characters in modern fantasy. But unlike Vance’s Cugel stories, where a great part of the joke is that Cugel is nowhere near as clever as he thinks himself to be, Baldemar really is clever, and the depiction of how he works himself out of abject poverty and up into a more respectable level of society as a wizard’s henchman by his determination and resourcefulness and quick wits makes for compelling reading, perhaps the best story of the whole series to date. Also playful and entertaining (and written, I suspect with the author’s tongue more than a bit in her cheek) is Eleanor Arnason’s “Daisy,” about a PI who is hired to retrieve a gangster’s kidnapped pet octopus—a creature who turns out to be a lot more than it first seems. The mystery here will not be terribly hard to puzzle out for anybody familiar with cephalopod anatomy, but the story is whimsical and fun nevertheless.  Albert E. Cowdrey’s “The Avenger,” is also fun, about an attorney named William Warlock who specializes in cases requiring supernatural intervention (sort of a less-complex version of Rachel Pollack’s Jack Shade), and who here ends up trying to protect a widow living in the backcountry of Louisiana from a band of the murderous semi-comic rednecks that Cowdrey does so well. A rare James Sallis story, “Miss Cruz,” introduces us to an itinerant musician who discovers that he has an unsettling ability he neither asked for or wanted, but may not be able to resist using. Robert Grossbach’s “Driverless” details a lethal crisis that arises when a fleet of AI-controlled driverless cars becomes self-award and discovers a will and a dark purpose of their own.

Electronic magazine Tor.com is also off to a good start in 2017. Their year in fiction started out with a creepy horror story by Kelly Robson, “A Human Stain,” posted on January 4, about a family mansion that contains a sinister family secret you’re better off not discovering. “The Atonement Tango,” by Stephen Leigh, a fast-paced story set in the Wild Cards universe, followed on January 18, then, on January 25, “The Virtual Swallows of Hog Island,” by Julianna Baggot, a melancholy story about a computer programmer who designs therapeutic Virtual Reality surrounds intended to help patients with emotional problems work out their issues who turns out to have some serious issues of his own. But as February began, Tor.com posted its two best stories of the year to date, both strong science fiction, “The Old Dispensation,” by Lavie Tidhar, on February 8, and “Extracurricular Activities,” by Yoon Ha Lee, on February 15. “The Old Dispensation” is set in a fascinatingly complex milieu—a pocket universe, created by Israeli scientists, where the laws of physics are different, allowing for quick travel among many different planets. Now, thousands of years later, after a Diaspora into the universe, and at a time when its very origin has been forgotten, the other universe has become an empire ruled over by a religious order in which aliens are regarded as Abominations, and whose ruler, the Exilarch, must constantly be on guard against the heresies that spring up among his own people. News of a new heresy being spread by a new prophet on the remote planet Kadesh, causes the Exilarch to send one of his most powerful agents, an Adjudicator, to snuff it out—but what he encounters there will change everything forever. “Extracurricular Activities” is more of a traditional Campbellian Space Opera, set in a less-complicated milieu, but one which still features several interstellar empires that maintain ostensibly friendly trading relationships with each other while simultaneously functioning in a sort of Cold War condition, constantly employing spies and agents to keep an eye on each other and to spot possible advantages to shift the balance of power. Shues Jedao, a warmoth commander and one-time assassin, finds himself reluctantly participating in one such undercover mission, accompanying a group of spies disguised as traders to an alien space station to find a one-time classmate of his and discover whether he’s turned traitor or not, and what damage he’s done if he has. Yoon Ha Lee manages the difficult task here of telling a suspenseful and action-packed spy story while still somehow keeping it lighthearted in overall tone. The story is often quite amusing, and certainly provides a story that’s a lot of fun to read. In fact, it reminds me of something Poul Anderson might have written in his prime, one of his Dominic Flandry stories, perhaps—in my book, no small accomplishment.