Locus, March 2013 Read online

  Yoon Ha Lee’s ‘‘Effigy Nights’’, also in the January Clarkesworld, at first seems to be one of her space opera stories, but it’s really a fantasy disguised as space opera, or at best a science-fantasy story, featuring spaceships and civilizations on other worlds, but also mages who conjure up paper folk hero guardians from out of scrolls of ancient poems and sagas to protect the people of the city from ruthless invaders. This turns out to be maybe not such a good idea.

  The last story in the January Clarkesworld is Helena Ball’s ‘‘Variations on Bluebeard and Dalton’s Law Along the Event Horizon’’, an opaque retelling of the Bluebeard story.

  –Gardner Dozois

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  LOCUS LOOKS AT SHORT FICTION: RICH HORTON

  F&SF 3-4/13

  Asimov’s 3/13

  Lightspeed 2/13

  Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 1/13

  Tin House #54

  Subterranean Winter ’13

  The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, John Joseph Adams, ed. (Tor) January 2013.

  The March/April issue of F&SF is (purposely or not) something of a theme issue, with the theme being slavery. Most obviously, there are two stories about hunters of runaway slaves. Deborah Ross’s ‘‘Among Friends’’ is about a Quaker family in Delaware who are part of the Underground Railroad. One day they encounter a slave hunter who seems a bit different. When it is injured they realize it’s an automaton and, after repair, not ready to return to its occupation. What worked best, for me, was the Quaker background. The central idea – paralleling automatons with black slaves – seemed both a bit obvious and not quite believably worked out. In ‘‘The Lost Faces’’, Sean McMullen takes on slavery in Ancient Rome, as a slave hunter is hired to find a woman who escaped from an ambitious merchant, leaving him a bit in the lurch, because his hopes for aggrandizement lie in utilizing a sort of ancient biotech she gifted him. It’s ultimately a revenge story, and the revenge taken is kind of interesting, but I found the Roman background to be unconvincing and the alternate- (or, just perhaps, secret-) history element interesting but a bit slight.

  These aren’t the only slavery-related stories. For example, Albert E. Cowdrey’s ‘‘The Assassin’’ is about a man in a conquered future US who tries to kill the dictator and ends up in a penal colony – it’s a decent story, finally, about levels of betrayal. ‘‘The Boy Who Drank from Lovely Women’’ by the late Steven Utley tells of a mysterious ancient man and his long-ago participation in the French force sent to put down the Haitian slave rebellion. The evils of slavery aren’t the focus here (though they are not forgotten), rather, the fairly predictable but still interesting revelation of the reason for the main character’s great age and its effects on him. Add Chet Arthur’s entertaining ‘‘The Trouble with Heaven’’, which deals with the ‘‘servant problem’’ on a posh space station (and thus eventually with both androids and with poor people living among the rich), and also ‘‘Solidarity’’, another of Naomi Kritzer’s stories of life in a purported Libertarian Utopia, which as the title rather strongly signals, suggests that economic forces can create something nearly indistinguishable from slavery even in (or perhaps especially in) a society ostensibly based on individual freedom. I find these stories (which seem well on their way to forming a novel) engaging and entertaining, but perhaps pushing a bit too hard to make their point. In this story, Beck has been kicked out by her father for helping expose the nasty labor situation on New Minerva, and while on her own learns of a plot to disrupt the funeral of the labor leader, Miguel, who was featured in the previous story.

  Finally I should mention a nice story, nothing to do with slavery, from fairly new writer Van Aaron Hughes. ‘‘The Long View’’ posits a fairly original solution to the problem of long interstellar voyages: a reversible genetic alteration so that people experience time much more slowly. It’s one of those ideas that probably won’t survive close examination, but is worth suspending disbelief in. Unfortunately, in a few people the alteration either doesn’t take, or can’t be reversed. The story then examines one character who ends up slowed forever, even as her family returns to normal speed. Solid, affecting, work.

  •

  Asimov’s theme for March might be strange ways of coming back from death. In new writer Garrett Ashley’s ‘‘Brother Swine’’, traditional Hindu ideas of reincarnation appear to be true: people return as animals or birds, with just enough memory of their past life to know where to go. This can be a problem, as here, where a man returns as a pig to his famine-wracked village, and a stepmother who was once a wolf, a half-brother who is in love with his fiancée, and a starving younger sister. Odd enough, but as ever Jason Sanford manages to be weirder still, in ‘‘Monday’s Monk’’. The title character, Somchai, is a not very successful Thai monk in a world much changed by nanotechnology. His region is dominated by a thuggish group trying to violently purge their country of anyone infected by nanotech, and they compel Somchai to perform funeral rites, including burning, of those nano-infested people they kill, among them, inevitably, the girl Somchai loves, who has been a leading advocate of nanotech. The burning is important because it prevents the nano from reviving its dead hosts. The story turns on the idea that even burning may not be sufficient.

  The most ambitious story this month, Alexander Jablokov’s ‘‘Feral Moon’’, is about Kingsman, a disgraced officer who has been reinstated after a prison term with the job of investigating the situation on Phobos, the ‘‘feral moon’’ of the title. It seems his ex-wife is on Phobos, one of a group of purposely disorganized ‘‘rebels’’ (the political situation is never really clear) – and perhaps their relationship can be manipulated to arrange a better outcome for what looks to be a disaster for both sides. The story is both cynical and somewhat hopeful. The military is portrayed as a mixture of hard-working regular soldiers, the occasional idealist, and more than a few opportunists. Eventually, we examine both the failure of Kingsman’s marriage, and the wreckage of his career: in both he is at fault to a considerable extent, but in neither case is he morally wrong. In all, a subtle story – perhaps at times a bit too subtle for its own good – and effectively worked out. It does seem likely part of something larger, and seems set in a future Solar System that reminded me most of all, in the smallish glimpses we get of it, of that of Paul McAuley’s Quiet War stories.

  •

  The best story in the February Lightspeed is ‘‘The Herons of Mer L’Ouest’’ by M. Bennardo, another very impressive new writer. This story, set in 1761, follows a Canadian man into the west of his land, following the murder of his Indian wife and their child. There he encounters a mystery – huge, heron-shaped creatures, and an abattoir of sorts in the woods. Are they real? The heart of the story is the portrayal of the main character, and of the Northern landscape – both effective and dark, with hints of lightness. I also liked ‘‘Harry and Marlowe Escape the Mechanical Siege of Paris’’, the ‘‘origin story’’ for Carrie Vaughn’s ongoing steampunk series about a (dare I say) spunky Princess of England and her engineer friend, in a 19th century altered by alien ‘‘aetherian’’ technology.

  •

  Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet returns after taking 2012 off. The new issue is very good, with a set of stories that mostly push the SF/Fantasy envelope in engagingly strange directions. Kevin Waltman’s ‘‘Notes from a Pleasant Land Where Broken Hearts are Like Broken Hands’’ is, once decoded, a familiar enough dystopia, but the surface is strange enough to intrigue. It’s told by stolid Bolder, who thinks he lives in a utopia (because he’s been told so), until his attraction to Palmetto lures him astray.

  Amanda M. Pawley’s ‘‘Vanish Girl’’ is also dystopian SF, here featuring a girl with an invisible house, an invisible leg, a vicious roommate, and a state-supported addiction: again, it’s oddness that reveals itself to be somewhat familiar, but then in the end spirals strange again. My favorite story remains quite strange throug
hout: Krista Hoeppner Leahy’s ‘‘Killing Curses, a Caught-Heart Quest’’. This is about a curse-killer who marries a sort of walking tree, only to lose her over the question of how to raise their child – but we also have a Quixote who swears to save the hero from his death, and a Midas who isn’t sure if his curse is good or bad, and a dangerous plague. The language really sells the story in the way it reveals the strangeness of the setting.

  •

  The new Tin House has several stories in a fantastical vein, the best of which is a horrifying Karen Russell story, ‘‘Reeling for the Empire’’. Set in late 19th-century Japan, it’s about women taken from their families to work in a silk factory where they learn that their work involves producing the silk themselves after drinking a special tea that changes them forever.

  •

  Subterranean for Winter is a special Walter Jon Williams issue, with a good reprint novella, ‘‘Surfacing’’, and a new one, ‘‘The Boolean Gate’’ (published last year as a chapbook), which presents Mark Twain late in his life, quite believably, as he encounters Nikola Tesla and a bizarre project. It’s been well-received in general, but I confess that while I thought it well done, in particular as to Twain’s character, it didn’t really work for me as a story. I did like another story this issue, ‘‘Hard Silver’’, by Steven R. Boyett, about an Indian and a white man (identities easily guessed, though never given), who come to a Western town and there encounter some terribly altered people.

  •

  And there is one anthology to recommend this time, John Joseph Adams’s The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination. It is perhaps the nature of such a book, featuring stories told from the point-of-view of mad scientists, to show a tropism towards snarky, not quite serious, but quite enjoyable tales of villains justifying themselves. Perhaps the best of these is Heather Lindsley’s ‘‘The Angel of Death has a Business Plan’’, whose heroine makes the money to support her nefarious plans by coaching other supervillains. Her plans take a change, though, when she is hired by a supervillain with, it seems, real potential: a sharply amusing piece.

  In a different tone is the longest story in the book, a quite an enjoyable piece from Diana Gabaldon. ‘‘The Space Between’’ is about a widowed Scottish wine merchant who escorts a beautiful young woman to Paris, where she is to become a nun. We see where that’s going of course, but the plot is driven by a time-travelling man looking for the secret of immortality who thinks Joan might be a key to his plans. It only barely fits the book’s theme and, I suspect, fully appreciating it would require being more familiar with Gabaldon’s novels, but I did find it a nice read. Finally, the book closes with a series of darker stories, of which the best is Jeffrey Ford’s ‘‘The Pittsburgh Technology’’, in which a nebbish, after meeting a suddenly successful man he used to torment, tries the title process under the promise that it will transform his life, only to learn that some losers are destined to remain losers.

  Recommended Stories:

  ‘‘The Herons of Mer L’Ouest’’, M. Bennardo (Lightspeed 2/13)

  ‘‘Hard Silver’’, Steven R. Boyett (Subterranean Winter ’13)

  ‘‘The Pittsburgh Technology’’, Jeffrey Ford (The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination)

  ‘‘The Long View’’, Van Aaron Hughes (F&SF 3-4/13)

  ‘‘Feral Moon’’, Alexander Jablokov (Asimov’s 3/13)

  ‘‘Killing Curses, a Caught-Heart Quest’’, Krista Hoeppner Leahy (Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 1/13)

  ‘‘The Angel of Death Has a Business Plan’’, Heather Lindsley (The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination)

  ‘‘Reeling for the Empire’’, Karen Russell (Tin House #54)

  –Rich Horton

  Semiprofessional magazines, fiction fanzines, original collections, original anthologies, plus new stories in outside sources should be sent to Rich Horton, 653 Yeddo Ave., Webster Groves MO 63119, , for review.

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: GARY K. WOLFE

  Sister Mine, Nalo Hopkinson (Grand Central 978-0-446-57629-5, $23.99, 310pp, hc) March 2013.

  Prophet of Bones, Ted Kosmatka (Henry Holt 978-0-8050-9617-0, $26.00, 360pp, hc) April 2013.

  Love Is Strange: A Paranormal Romance, Bruce Sterling (40K, No ISBN, $6.99, 370pp, digital) December 2012.

  Bushman Lives!, Daniel Pinkwater (Houghton Mifflin 978-0-547-38539-6, $16.99, 250pp, hc) October 2012.

  Christina Rossetti’s ‘‘Goblin Market’’, probably the greatest fantasy poem about sisters, may be an astute choice to provide the chapter epigraphs for Nalo Hopkinson’s Sister Mine, but by the time the home-invading possessed feral kudzu shows up, we’re pretty much in the territory of Dylan Thomas’s equally appropriate ‘‘The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower’’, and when we later encounter a homemade magic carpet and a musician who began life as Jimi Hendrix’s guitar, we could hardly be blamed for thinking we’ve landed in Electric Ladyland. In other words, there’s a lot of stuff in Hopkinson’s most wildly imaginative novel since Brown Girl in the Ring (though last year’s YA The Chaos gave us something of a preview of Hopkinson Unchained). Originally titled Donkey, the novel marks a return to her fantastical, near-future Toronto after the comparatively restrained magic realist character study of 2007’s The New Moon’s Arms, though it shares with that novel much of the depth of insight about family relationships that Hopkinson has gained since the pyrotechnic Brown Girl.

  Makeda and Abby began life as conjoined twins, the daughters of a human, or ‘‘claypicken,’’ mother and a demigod of vegetation, whose squabbling family of godlets (including one who is for all purposes the Grim Reaper) come to play an increasing seriocomic role in their tale, mostly because of an unresolved secret involving the twins’ birth. After they are surgically separated, only one sister gets a dose of the mojo from their supernatural forbears –Abby, who develops a preternaturally powerful singing voice. As the novel opens, Makeda, tired of living in her sister’s shadow and having no mojo of her own (though she repeatedly tries to convince herself she does), decides to move out and find her own apartment in a rundown section of Toronto, an act of separation that echoes their surgical separation at birth, and turns out to be not much less problematic. To help make the rent, she takes on the position of assistant to the building’s super, a struggling bandleader named Brie. But before Makeda can begin to establish her independence among the claypicken ordinary humans, she is attacked by her personal shapeshifting haint, and then finds herself confronted with the disappearance of her father from the nursing home where he lives (at least in his human aspect). When he is found on the verge of death, Makeda learns a devastating secret about herself, which effectively propels the rest of the plot, part of which takes place in the well realized, gritty underside of Toronto, and part in the ‘‘palais space’’ of her semi-divine family, which at times oddly recalls Bradbury’s ‘‘Homecoming’’ family, with its unmagical young protagonist feeling left out of the party of his own supernatural relatives.

  And it’s quite a party, with particular mythological powers assigned to such colorful figures as Cousin Flash, Uncle Jack, Hunter, General Gun, Grandma Ocean, the twins Beji and Beji, and Quashee the renegade kudzu, with the vaguely mentioned Big Boss overseeing them all. (I’d almost be tempted to view this as a ‘‘Canadian Gods’’ answer to Neil Gaiman, except that they aren’t all that Canadian, and the kudzu in particular is an interloper from a different ecosystem.) Unlike The Chaos, which more or less wore its multicultural mythic allusions on its sleeve, Sister Mine offers a more original and consistent myth system, though with distinct echoes of the petulant rival god families of familiar mythologies from Greek to Norse to Caribbean. It’s a family we wouldn’t mind visiting again, as long as we don’t have to deal with them ourselves. More impressive, perhaps, is that Sister Mine offers Hopkinson’s most fully worked-out plot (this has not been her strongest point in ear
lier novels) and some of her most accomplished prose to date; at one point, she conveys the multivalent perceptions of Makeda through stunning passages of pure synaesthesia, and the recurrent use of music as a controlling metaphor is impressive (music as a metaphor of transcendence has defeated more than a few fantasy writers, but Hopkinson avoids the easy lyricism in favor of a convincing account – particularly in one scene – of what it feels like from the inside out). In the end, even though Sister Mine sounds like a pretty mundane title for such a phantasmagoria, it reminds us that the tale really begins and ends with the two sisters, trying to negotiate between love and freedom, and trying to survive one hell of a family.

  •

  For the last several years, Ted Kosmatka has been producing short fiction striking both for its bold explorations of genetics and anthropology and its moral ambiguity, so it came as a slight surprise when his first novel, last year’s The Games, seemed to follow more in the Michael Crichton/Dean Koontz school of monster stories disguised as cautionary tales, with most of the character complexity flung aside with the same abandon as the monster’s faceless victims. There almost seemed to be two Kosmatkas, one crafting sophisticated science fictional puzzles around the intricacies of genetics, the other determined to carve a bestselling paranoid pursuit-and-gunfire thriller out of these same materials. What makes his new novel The Prophet of Bones particularly interesting is the manner in which it combines these two impulses. An expansion of one of Kosmatka’s most compelling stories, ‘‘The Prophet of Flores’’, it’s set in a sort of creationist alternate history in which, way back in the 1950s, carbon-14 dating established the age of the world at 5,800 years, and Biblical zealots have rejiggered paleontology to consign most geology and all of evolutionary theory to the dustbin of prohibited books. But Kosmatka has created one particularly thorny problem for this revisionist science: the fossil record remains intact, and when the scientists of this world discover the Homo floresiensis fossils – those famous Indonesian ‘‘hobbits’’ that were actually found on the island of Flores in 2003 – the evidence that they would have to have diverged from human evolution earlier than the entire 58-century age of the world poses a threat that must be suppressed at almost all costs.