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A Flight to the Future, ed. Kathryn Cramer.

Asimov’s, May/June.

Asimov’s, July/August.

F&SF, July/August.

The Best of Subterranean, ed. William Schafer. (Subterranean Press, 978-1-59606-837-7, $45, 752 pages.)

 

A Flight to the Future is an odd multimedia project edited by Kathryn Cramer (although Eric Desatnik is also listed as “Creator and Producer,” whatever that means). Sponsored by an X Prize and by the Japanese airline company Ana, A Flight to the Future collects thirty very short stories, many of them by leading science fiction authors, all working from the same starting point: Ana flight 008 takes off from Tokyo on June 28th, 2017, and, having inadvertently passed through a space/time warp of some kind, lands in San Francisco on June 28th, 2037—a literal flight to the future. The stories then concern themselves with how the passengers deal with and react to the future world they’ve been abruptly dumped into.

Considered as an anthology—there doesn’t seem to be a separate physical book available, but the stories are all accessible online at https//seat14c.com/future_ideas—there are several problems with this. This is definitely a futurist anthology, and a few of the stories really don’t deal with much except the protagonists wandering around gaping in awe at the Wonders of the Future, what we used to call Tour of the Great Steam Grommet stories (“And here is our marvelous Great Steam Grommet Factory! And over here is—”). Then there’s the fact that the future depicted in some of the stories doesn’t seem to be the same future in some important details, and some stories even depict what happened on the flight differently from others. More importantly, even those authors shrewd enough to add a personal human story to their Steam Grommet tours often rely on the Introduction (available both in written and animated forms) to set up the situation with time-jumping Flight 008, and don’t bother to cover the basic set-up again, which means that they don’t stand on their own feet very well as individual stories outside of the context of the anthology, being dependent on that context to make a lot of sense to a reader who doesn’t know the basic setup.

The stories that do the best job of standing on their own feet, and also add an involving human story, are probably “Collapse,” by Nancy Kress and “Transitions,” by Eileen Gunn. Although they suffer from the above problems to one degree or another, and few of them can stand alone, making for interesting reading if you can make allowances for that are “Incorruptible,” by Peter Watts, “Gap Year,” by Justina Robson, “The Urge to Jump,” by Karl Schroeder, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” by Mary Anne Mohanraj, “A Passing Sickness,” by Paolo Bacigalupi, and “The Trouble With Brothers,” by Jon Courtenay Grimwood. A Flight to the Future also features work by Bruce Sterling, Gregory Benford, Brenda Cooper, Kathleen Ann Goonan, James L. Cambias, Sheila Finch, Hannu Rajaniemi, Chen Qiufan, and others. (There’s a contest for you to write and submit your own story for what happens to the passenger in Seat 14C, with the selected author winning $10,000 and a free flight for two to Toyko, but since the contest closed on August 25th, I’m not going to bother to explain the complex rules.)

The May/June issue of Asimov’s is an average issue, with a couple of standout stories. Best story here is “Triceratops,” by new writer Ian McHugh, taking us to a near-future in which hybrids of Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens have been created, forming an entirely new race which doesn’t fit comfortably into either world—and who may be developing a way of life that their creators couldn’t have anticipated and which may have unforeseen implications for the future. Also substantial here is “The Runabout,” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, a long novella (listed as a “Novel” on the Table of Contents page) set in her long-running (six novels and a number of novellas to date) “Divers” universe, a far-future milieu in which salvage experts dive down to explore the wrecks of spaceships lost in the tides of space and time and multiple dimensions that sweep subspace, often at the risk of their own lives, and often, if they survive, returning with enigmatic and sometimes hugely dangerous artifacts. Also good in May/June is Jay O’Connell’s “The Best Man,” a comedy that proves that it’s not easy being green, especially when you have to serve as Best Man at the socially prominent wedding of a high-powered billionaire, Dale Bailey’s “Come As You Are,” about a drug that lets you know more about yourself than you really wanted to know, Karen Joy Fowler’s superbly crafted but enigmatic “Persephone of the Crows,” and Leah Cypess’s “On the Ship,” in which the protagonist has to figure out the nature of a mysterious crisis affecting the voyage of a Generation Ship (although it takes her a bit longer to figure it out than it will probably take most experienced genre readers).

The July/August issue of Asimov’s is stronger overall. Best story here is probably “An Evening with Severyn Grimes,” by Rich Larson, a suspenseful, fast-paced tale in which a kidnapped billionaire has to try to outwit his kidnappers while in captivity, and at the same time deal with an angry young woman who has some very real personal reasons for wanting him dead; the story features some nicely inventive technology, and is, as they used to say, “a page-turner.”  R. Garcia y Robertson was one of the mainstays of Asimov’s in the ‘80s and ‘90s, selling many stories there, and it’s good to see him returning after a long silence with a lighthearted Space Opera romp,“The Girl Who Stole Herself,” featuring one of Robertson trademark plucky and resourceful teenage heroines, one who clearly has Robert A. Heinlein’s Podkayne lurking somewhere in her literary bloodstream. Although it deals with grim subjects such as slavery, kidnapping, military conquest, and murder, there’s something of a YA atmosphere about the story which lightens things up, and it’s fun to see our heroine tricking and out-maneuvering those who mean to do her harm. New writer Cadwell Turnbull turns in a poignant story about a man who learns to navigate between parallel universe and who experiences many versions of his rather dysfunctional family life, in “Other Worlds and This One.” In “How Sere Picked Up Her Laundry,” Alexander Jablokov takes us to the ancient and densely-layered alien city of Tempest, where dozens of different alien races dwell literally on top of one another, and folows a human PI of sorts as she tries to unravel a dangerous riddle that threatens them all.

In the brisk and inventive “The Patient Dragon”—not a fantasy, in spite of the title—David Gerrold shows us that involving a super-powered agent in your clandestine affairs may be the wrong move, no matter how right it looks at the time; James Gunn, in what is obviously part of a de facto serialization, tells the story of an alien soldier struggling to survive in a harsh and unforgiving military organization, in “Weighty Matters: Tordor’s Story” (there’s another story in the same sequence, “Transcendental Mission: Riley’s Story,” in the same issue, but the other is the more interesting); Sheila Finch tells a near-mainstream story about the hardscrabble street life of homeless people, with only a nearly subliminal fantastic element, in “Field Studies”; and in “Gale Strang,” Michael Bishop tells probably the only story you’re ever going to read narrated by a bird cage.

The July/August issue of F&SF is a somewhat weak one. Of the nine stories here, eight are fantasy, with only one real SF story, “In a Wide Sky, Hidden,” by William Ledbetter, about a man obsessively searching among the stars for his older sister, a famous artist who had disappeared to a unknown world to create her masterpiece, with a whole planet for a canvas. Of the fantasy stories, probably the most interesting is David Erik Nelson’s “There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House,” which injects a horror element into the basic concept of Robert A. Heinlein’s famous story, “He Built a Crooked House” (the shout-out obvious from the title)—although the result lacks the impact that Heinlein’s story had.

Subterranean Magazine, an online magazine intended mainly to be a loss-leader for Subterranean Press, attracting potential customers to check out Subterranean Press books by many of the same authors as those who appeared in the magazine, was launched in 2005, and for ten years was one of the best of all the online magazines. Although Subterranean Press itself is still going strong, editor William Schafer decided to pull the plug on Subterranean Magazine, which posted its last issue in 2014. I still miss it. In its day, it published a wide variety of excellent short fiction, from hard science fiction to fantasy to horror, perhaps the most eclectic editorial mix of any of the online magazines; although this is loosening up a bit now, with ezines such as Tor.com and Clarkesworld beginning to feature longer stories, Subterranean was for a while also one of the few online magazines, if not the only one, willing to run novellas and long novelettes, since most of the other online magazines refused to run anything over short story length.

The Best of Subterranean, edited by William Schafer, is a retrospective reprint anthology culled from the annals of Subterranean Magazine. At a $45 dollars, it’s a pricey anthology, but also a big one, with thirty stories from the magazine spread over seven hundred and fifty two pages, a reasonable proposition considering the almost-universally high literary quality of the stories contained within. The contents are eclectic enough that almost everyone will have their own list of favorites, but mine would include “A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong,” by K.J. Parker, “The Bohemian Astrobleme,” by Kage Baker, “A Long Walk Home,” by Jay Lake, “The Last Log of the Lachrimosa,” by Alastair Reynolds, “Hide and Horns,” by Joe R. Lansdale, “Valley of the Girls,” by Kelly Link, “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling,” by Ted Chiang, and “The Tomb of the Pontifex Dvorn,” by Robert Silverberg. The anthology also contains an unproduced Twilight Zone script by George R.R. Martin, plus good work by Daniel Abraham, Joe Hill, Rachel Swirsky, Ian R. MacLeod, John Scalzi, Kelley Armstrong, Catherynne M. Valente, and others.