100

Clarkesworld, February.

Clarkesworld, March

Clarkesworld, April

Clarkesworld, May.

Extrasolar—Postscripts 38, ed. Nick Gevers. (PS Publishing, 978-1-786-171-4, 30 pounds; 313 pages.) Cover art by Tomislav Tikulin.

 

The best story in the February Clarkesworld is “Assassins,” by Jack Skillingstead and Burt Courtier, which makes good use of a clever idea: an assassin who “kills” popular characters in computer games rather than people in real life—something that eventually leads her to be targeted by a rival who wants to do the same thing to her, or, rather, to her avatar. It’s smoothly and expertly told, a nice twist on the usual cyberpunkish assassin story. “How Bees Fly,” by Simone Heller, is one of those stories that tries to make you think it’s a fantasy, only to eventually turn out to be science fiction instead—although there are few experienced genre readers who won’t figure out what the “demons” are almost from the beginning. The story is about a villager in a harsh and unwelcoming post-apocalyptic world who becomes “contaminated by contact” with the demons and so is exiled from the shelter of the village to almost certain death outside, and who must thereafter reluctantly join forces with the demon family in order to have a chance of survival. It ends on a note of hope—perhaps a bit hollow, considering the state of the world as portrayed.  “Rain Ship,” by Chi Hui is an odd far-future story, the protagonists of which seem to be some sort of rats who have evolved to human-level intelligence and developed a society of their own millions of years after humans have mysteriously disappeared. Surrounded by immense (to them, as they are still rat-sized—something I find a bit unlikely) remains of human civilization, they have followed the human example by expanding their civilization into space. Now a crashed but still mostly intact human starship has been found on a distant world, and several groups are vying to explore it and exploit it in different ways. Most of the rest of the story is an fairly standard action tale as the groups fight it out for control of the human ship, but the background is intriguing, and the difference in physical scale between rats and humans, as seen from the perspective of the rats, is used to good effect throughout.

The most affecting story in the March Clarkesworld is Naomi Kritzer’s “Waiting Out the End of the World in Patty’s Place Cafe,” which is about just what it says it’s about. The fantastic element here is slight, about how society deals with the knowledge that Earth is about to be hit by a dinosaur-killer asteroid that will likely wipe-out all life on the planet. I’ve seen this scenario dealt with before a few times in recent years, and Kritzer doesn’t bring any startling new twists to it, but she’s very good at handling the emotional end, the human reactions and interactions as a random assortment of characters gather in Patty’s Place Cafe in a small town in South Dakota to wait out the clock on the end of the world. By the end, the story is quite moving. “Two Ways of Living,” by Robert Reed, also in March, tells the story of the rather glum life of a man who alternates between long stretches of hibernation and waking periods in which he stuffs himself with food to prepare for the next bout of hibernation. There doesn’t seem to be any particular reason given as to why he lives this way. He doesn’t seem to be trying to extend his life to live long enough for science to have found a cure for a fatal disease, the usual reason given for hibernating in most science fiction stories, nor does he seem to derive any sort of enjoyment from a lifestyle which is portrayed as claustrophobic, dull, and achingly lonely. One can only assume that he does it because he wants to cut himself off from the world to the greatest extent possible without actually dying.

“Sunwake, in the Lands of Teeth,” by Juliette Ward, is the strongest story in an otherwise somewhat week April Clarkesworld. In some ways, this is an old-fashioned story, about a human mission trying to get along with aliens with an elaborate class structure, and the dangerous cultural misunderstandings that can arise between them all when they’re not saying exactly what they think they saying. Reminiscent of Poul Anderson or C.J. Cherryh in the elaborate social structures it develops for its alien civilization, it delivers one of the fundamental pleasures to be had from reading science fiction in the first place. “Conglomerte,” by Robert Brice, also in April, shows a group consciousness wrestling with the problem of expelling one individual component of their shared mind from the group, and the effect that has on the rest of the components.

The best story by far in the May Clarkesworld, and one of the best Clarkesworld has published all year to date, is “We Who Live in the Heart,” by Kelly Robson. Longer than stories in Clarkesworld have tended to be, this tells the story of malcontents who grow tired of living in underground colonies in an alien planet that consists mostly of vast oceans, and who opt instead for a more adventurous and much more uncertain life by taking control of and moving into what amount to immense organic submarines, enabling them to roam the seas at will—but also meaning that they must live in constant danger of losing control of their “ship.” The worldbuilding here is fascinating, as is the intricately worked-out detail of how the living “submarines” function and how it would be possible, to some degree at least, to control them, but the human relationships among the crew are equally complicated and equally compelling. By the end, the story has generated a great deal of suspense, as events show that their whole way of life may be insupportable. Nick Wolven’s “Streams and Mountains” is also good in May, about Park Rangers watching over a group of sasquatches in a reserve set aside for the in Pacific Northwest—but nothing here is quite what it seems, and some thorny ethical questions are raised before the story is through.

For the last several years, I’ve proclaimed one book or another by Jonathan Strahan to be the Best Science Fiction Anthology of the Year, but this year Extrasolar—Postscripts 38, edited by Nick Gevers, may give Strahan a decent run for his money. Unlike many of the past Postscripts anthologies, which have tended toward slipstream and soft horror with only a smattering of SF, Extrasolar is all core SF, it’s writers taking us on a “tour of the stars in our galactic neighborhood,” drawing on the knowledge about exotic stars and extrasolar planets derived from more than twenty years of observation by the Kepler telescope and other space telescopes, knowledge that paints a very different picture of what a solar system can be like than that which was gained by observing our own—and which has thrown new fuel on the fire of the debate about the Fermi Paradox. (Basically, if the universe is full of intelligent life and alien civilizations, where is everybody? Could it be that the Earth is the only planet where intelligent life has evolved and survived?—to date, anyway.) You’ll find arguments on either side here, as well as some ingenious compromises; like any good theme anthology, some of the stories here stretch the margins of the theme, some quite a bit, but for the most part Extrasolar delivers just what it says it’s going to deliver.

The best story here is probably “Canoe,” by Nancy Kress, in which the crew of an exploratory starship undertakes the largest-scale rescue mission in history. Alastair Reynolds’s “Holdfast” shows us two soldiers, one human, one alien, the sole survivors of their respective fleets of warships, still locked in mortal combat even as certain death races to overtake them; the story is grim, but does offer before the end a glimmer of a certain kind of hope. Kathleen Ann Goonan’s long, complex, and somewhat mystical “The Tale of the Alcubierre Horse,” starts with a group of supergenius children stealing a luxury spaceship, more or less an ocean liner that travels space, and taking it on a voyage of both inner and outer discovery that leaves them transformed in ways they couldn’t have anticipated. Jack McDevitt tells an affecting story of star-crossed love with an O. Henry twist in “Arcturean Nocturne.” In“Shadows of Eternity,” Gregory Benford shows us an apprentice Librarian searching through hundreds of years of SETI messages from alien civilizations who makes an ominous discovery.

There are three stories here set in already-established series universes, which may fit a bit uneasily into the theme, since in these series the universe is already known to be swarming with alien civilizations and little or no exploration of unknown new solar-systems is done: “The Residue of Fire,” by Robert Reed, is another story set in his long-running “Great Ship” series, one of the best in awhile, as an immortal being investigates a race of passengers aboard the Ship for whom time doesn’t exist, and has a showdown with a nemesis from millions of years in his past; “A Game of Three Generals,” by Aliette de Bodard, another in her long sequence of “Xuya” stories, deals with a political prisoner who is forced by circumstances to remain imprisoned long after her sentence is over, and her bittersweet reunion with her “daughter,” a living spaceship; and in “Thunderstone,” Matthew Hughes contributes an adventure of hardboiled “confidential operative” Erm Kaslo in the heavily Jack Vance-inspired Ten Thousand Worlds, just as the universe is making one of its periodic switches from rationalism to magic.

Extrasolar also features good work by Paul Di Filippo, Terry Dowling, Ian Watson, Lavie Tidhar, and Ian R. MacLeod. Surprisingly, since I’m usually enthusiastic about his fiction, the only story here that didn’t really work for me was Paul McAuley’s “Life Signs.” Perhaps what he was doing here was too subtle for me to grasp, but to me it seemed like the story ended just when it had set up an interesting character in an interesting and potentially dangerous situation. I actually turned the next page, looking in vain for the rest of the story. I’m sure McAuley felt he’d put enough words of the page to convey the meaning of the story, whatever it was supposed to be, but it went over my head, and I’m left with no idea what the story is supposed to convey. Of course, I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, so your mileage may vary.