Locus, June 2013 Read online

  Oberon’s Dreams, Aaron Pogue (Brilliance Audio, $19.99, 7 CDs, 8 hours: 18 minutes, 978-1-4692-8947-2) Unabridged version of Oberon’s Dreams read by Luke Daniels.

  Flesh Circus, Lilith Saintcrow (Brilliance Audio, $29.99, 7 CDs, 8 hours: 37 minutes, 978-1-4418-8707-8) Unabridged version of Flesh Circus read by Joyce Bean.

  Triggers, Robert J. Sawyer (Brilliance Audio, $19.99, 10 CDs, 11 hours: 28 minutes, 978-1-4692-8066-0) Unabridged audio version of Triggers read by Jeff Woodman.

  Agent to the Stars, John Scalzi (Brilliance Audio, $14.99, 8 CDs, 8 hours: 56 minutes, 978-1-4692-9806-1) Unabridged version of Agent to the Stars read by Wil Wheaton.

  The Human Division, John Scalzi (Brilliance Audio, $14.99, 13 CDs, 15 hours: 11 minutes, 978-1-4805-2749-2) Unabridged version of The Human Division read by William Dufris.

  The God Patent, Ransom Stephens (Brilliance Audio, $19.99, 10 CDs, 12 hours: 7 minutes, 978-1-4692-8942-7) Unabridged version of The God Patent read by Luke Daniels.

  Finch, Jeff Vandermeer (Brilliance Audio, $19.99, 13 CDs, 15 hours: 3 minutes, 978-1-4692-8045-5) Unabridged audio version of Finch read by Oliver Wyman.

  Fast Times at Fairmont High, Vernor Vinge (Brilliance Audio, $19.99, 3 CDs, 2 hours: 48 minutes, 978-1-4692-8043-1) Unabridged audio version of Fast Times at Fairmont High read by Eric Michael Summerer.

  Crown of Slaves, David Weber & Eric Flint (Brilliance Audio, $19.99, 16 CDs, 19 hours: 34 minutes, 978-1-4692-8039-4) Unabridged version of Crown of Slaves read by Peter Larkin.

  Torch of Freedom, David Weber & Eric Flint (Brilliance Audio, $19.99, 18 CDs, 21 hours: 29 minutes, 978-1-4692-8064-6) Unabridged version of Torch of Freedom read by Peter Larkin.

  PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED

  The Gridley Wave #364 (January 2013), monthly newsletter supplement to The Burroughs Bulletin. Information: Henry G. Franke III, editor, 318 Patriot Way, Yorktown VA 23693-4639; e-mail: .

  Instant Message #890 (April 17, 2013), #891 (May 1, 2013), and #892 (May 15, 2013), newsletter of the New England Science Fiction Association, with NESFA news. Information: Lisa Hertel, 504 Medford St., Somerville MA 02145; phone: (508) 574-8685; e-mail: .

  Mythprint Vol. 50 No. 1 (Spring 2013), monthly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, with news, reviews, etc. Non-member subscription: $25.00 per year US, $32.00 Canada and Mexico, $41.00 elsewhere. Information: Mythopoeic Society Orders Department, Box 71, Napoleon MI 49261-0071; e-mail: ; website: .

  The NASFA Shuttle Vol. 33 No. 4 (April 2013) and Vol. 33 No. 5 (May 2013), monthly newsletter of the North Alabama Science Fiction Association. NASFA news, reviews, etc. Single copy: $2.00, memb.: $25/year, subscription only: $15 year. Information: NASFA, Inc., PO Box 4857, Huntsville AL 35815-4857.

  Prometheus Vol. 30 No. 3 (Spring 2012), quarterly newsletter of the Libertarian Futurist Society with news, reviews, fiction, classifieds, etc. Non-membership subscription $20.00 per year US, $25.00 international. Information: Libertarian Futurist Society, 650 Castro St. Suite 120-433, Mountain View CA 94041; email: ; website .

  P.S.F.S. News (April and May 2013), newsletter of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society with news, meeting minutes, calendar, convention information, etc. Information: PSFS Secretary, Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, PO Box 8303, Philadelphia, PA 19101-8303; e-mail: ; website: .

  Vector #272 (Spring 2013), the critical journal of BSFA, with articles, interviews, reviews, etc. Organization information: Membership Services, Peter Wilkinson, Flat 4, Stratton Lodge,79 Bulwer Rd., Barnet, Hertfordshire EN5 5EU, UK; e-mail: ; website: .

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  GARDNERSPACE: A SHORT FICTION COLUMN BY GARDNER DOZOIS

  Interzone 1-2/13

  Interzone 3-4/13

  Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz: Three Adventures, Garth Nix (Subterranean Press) July 2013.

  Big Mama Stories, Eleanor Arnason (Aqueduct Press) July 2013.

  Good-Bye, Robinson Crusoe and Other Stories, John Varley (Subterranean Press) April 2013.

  A Very British History: The Best Science Fiction Stories of Paul McAuley, 1985-2011, Paul McAuley (PS Publishing) April 2013.

  Interzone starts the year off with a strong January/February issue. Best story here is ‘‘The Book Seller’’ by Lavie Tidhar, another of his interconnected Central Station stories, envisioning a complex, evocative, multi-cultural future, set during a time when humanity – including part-human robots, AIs, cyborgs, and genetically engineered beings of all sorts – is spreading through the solar system. This one deals with a humble, introspective book dealer in Old Tel Aviv, in the shadow of the immense Central Station, where spaceships come and go, who gives shelter to a strigoi, a kind of cybernetic vampire who feeds on data, and with the odd, ever-deepening relationship that develops between them. The story doesn’t really resolve in any conventional sense, but it’s become clear that Tidhar is building a mosaic novel here, and what really counts in the Central Station stories is the many threads, some obvious, some subtle, that connect the characters and bind them into an intricate web. Tidhar may give a clue about what he’s up to with his protagonist’s musing: ‘‘Life was half-completed plots abandoned, heroes dying half-way along their quests, loves requited and un-, some fading inexplicably, some burning short and bright.’’ In the hands of some authors, this lack of conventional closure would be annoying and pretentious, but the world Tidhar is building here is so rich and multi-layered, and the characters so quirky and interesting, that I’m willing to give him a break on it. There’s a synergistic effect at work here, and the more of these Central Station stories you read, the more you appreciate the ones you’ve already read, and see depths and connections you hadn’t noticed the first time around.

  Also good in January/February is ‘‘Sky Leap-Earth Flame’’ by Jim Hawkins. The story is a bit murky at first, but as it goes along, once you sort out who is who and what’s happening, it becomes a gripping depiction of an emergency-rush project to develop a giant artificial brain, the only thing smart enough to be able to pilot a mission to divert a menace that could destroy the Galaxy – but, of course, there are unforeseen complications. New writer Helen Jackson turns in a solidly entertaining effort, taking us in ‘‘Build Guide’’ to a construction project in near-Earth orbit for a tale of ambition, larceny, greed, and cutthroat corporate politics. New writer Guy Haley contributes a brief autumnal glimpse of the world after humans are extinct and all that’s left of human civilization is wind-swept ruins, in the bleak but evocative ‘‘iRobot’’. And Tracie Welser gives us a glum dystopia, something of an Interzone specialty, in ‘‘A Flag Still Flies Over Sabor City’’.

  •

  The March/April Interzone is somewhat weaker overall. The strongest story here is probably ‘‘The International Studbook of the Giant Panda’’ by new writer Carlos Hernandez, a well-crafted and entertaining piece that centers around a scheme to encourage giant pandas to mate by using remote-controlled robot pandas to enflame their lust by performing simulated coitus in front of them, in the hope that one of the male pandas will eventually be encouraged to take a crack at the ‘‘female’’ robot panda themselves, thus depositing their sperm. The weakness of the story is that this is a ridiculously over-elaborate and immensely expensive way to gather sperm for artificial insemination, especially as much of the collected sperm is then just going to be sent to refuges where the pandas will be inseminated in the more usual way. The assumption that the female robot panda must be operated by a human woman is also unexamined; what difference would it make if it was a man operating the robot panda, or even if it was running on automatic pilot? Still, if you can ignore this, it’s a fun read. Also good in March/April is ‘‘Paskutinis Iliuzja (The Last Illusion)’’ by Damien Walters Grintalis, a sad and emotionally powerful fantasy about a wizard trying haplessly to pr
otect his family from Nazi genocide in World War II Lithuania. Chris Butler contributes ‘‘The Animator’’, a follow up to his previous ‘‘Tell Me Everything’’, an otherwise fairly standard story of suppression of art and progress by vested conservative forces, set in a somewhat unlikely world where people emit pheromones that enable them to read each other’s emotions; I had thought that these people were supposed to be humanoid aliens, or creatures of alternate evolution in some parallel universe, but a mention of Latin here pretty much puts paid to the idea that this is not our world, so now I’m puzzled by how these people came to be the way that they are.

  •

  Fritz Leiber’s long-running series of stories about those two oddly matched but swashbuckling rogues, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, is one of the foundation stones of the sword & sorcery subgenre, and their influence has spread throughout fantasy and into other genres as well; in SF, Michael Swanwick’s Darger and Surplus are clearly inspired by them, and I suspect that Joe R. Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard thrillers may be too. Probably Fafhrd and the Mouser are also one of the inspirations for fantasy’s most recent pair of oddly mistmatched adventurers, Garth Nix’s Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz, some of whose adventures have just been collected in Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz: Three Adventures. Sir Hereward is a fairly standard swashbuckling hero, good with a sword and a dead shot with a pistol (although his being an artillery expert, a master gunner, adds an unusual touch), but his companion, Mister Fitz, is an intriguing creation: a thousand-year-old living puppet who is also a very potent sorcerer, wielder of deadly ‘‘esoteric needles,’’ and who brought Sir Hereward up from infancy. This adds a different edge to their relationship, as does the fact that, rather than running into dangerous adventures while searching for treasure, like many heroic fantasy heroes, they are indifferent to treasure, roaming the world seeking out and destroying rogue gods, as agents of the mystical Council of the Treaty for the Safety of the World. All three stories here are entertaining, although the best of them is probably ‘‘Beyond the Sea Gate of the Scholar-Pirates of Sarsköe’’, in which the adventurers enlist the aid of pirates to fight a Lovecraftian-like god, an immense man-eating starfish deity.

  •

  Like the Nix collection, Eleanor Arnason’s Big Mama Stories is a relatively thin volume of quirky, offbeat stuff that’s unlikely ever to get a regular trade edition, so it’s worth the money to buy it from a small press. In Arnason’s sly, satirical cosmology, Big Mamas are huge primordial beings who walk through space as though strolling across a meadow, able to change their size at will (from human-sized or even smaller to so big that spaceships bump against their ankles), nearly indestructible creatures who also have the power to leap across space and time, so they can just as easily pop up in the Cretaceous as in another galaxy. This isn’t Arnason at the top of her form, by any means – that would probably be stories in her long-running Hwarhath series – but there’s a deliberate tall tale or folk tale quality to the Big Mama stories which makes them a lot of fun. In her Afterword, Arnason cites inspiration from folk tales about Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, John Henry, Mike Finn, and other folk heroes and says that the stories arose from her desire to try her hand at ‘‘space-age tall tales.’’ Here we get to meet Big Ugly Mama, Big Black Mama, Big Green Mama, Big Red Mama, and Big Brown Mama, as well as Big Poppas of various hues. Arnason occasionally tromps too hard on the political message pedal in a few places, but on the whole, the stories are good light-hearted fun, and full of sly physics jokes as well as satirical shout-outs to other science fiction stories. The best of them overall is probably ‘‘Big Ugly Mama and the Zk’’.

  In her Afterword, Arnason wonders if American kids still learn tall tales. Sadly, the answer is no. Kids today draw their folk heroes from cartoons, anime, TV shows, movies, superhero comic books, and computer games, not from the old folk tales. Even from commercials. Everybody knows who the Geiko Gecko is, but probably not one kid in a thousand has ever heard of Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill.

  •

  John Varley’s reputation has faded a bit in the 21st century, but he was an important new writer in the ’70s, injecting new energy and enthusiasm into the field at a time when it was sunk in the dull gray doldrums that had been left behind after the ferocious tempest of the New Wave Era had blown itself out. Varley was one of the first new writers to become interested in the solar system again, after several years in which it had been largely abandoned as a setting for stories because the space probes of the late ’60s and early ’70s had ‘‘proved’’ that it was nothing but an ‘‘uninteresting’’ collection of balls of rock and ice, with no available abodes for life – dull as a supermarket parking-lot.

  Instead, Varley seemed to find the solar system lushly romantic just as it was, lifeless balls of rock and all (and this was even before the later Mariner probes to the Jupiter and Saturn system had proved the solar system to be a lot more surprising than people thought that it was). In retrospect, it’s also clear that his work, along with work by writers like Cordwainer Smith and Frederik Pohl, was a precursor to the Posthuman work of the ’80s and ’90s that would be done by people like Bruce Sterling, Greg Egan, Michael Swanwick, Iain M. Banks, Charles Stross, and many others. The best of Varley’s early stories have been collected in Goodbye, Robinson Crusoe and Other Stories, and the best of the stories here, such as ‘‘In the Bowl’’, ‘‘Retrograde Summer’’, ‘‘Blue Champagne’’, ‘‘Bagatelle’’, and the eponymous title story, deserve a permanent place of honor in the SF pantheon.

  •

  I won’t even pretend to be impartial about the work of Paul McAuley.

  I bought and published lots of it when I was editor of Asimov’s and reprinted other stories in my Best of the Year series, both before and after my stint at Asimov’s. Suffice it to say that I consider McAuley to be one of the two or three best writers working in SF today, and believe some of the stories collected in A Very British History: The Best Science Fiction Stories of Paul McAuley, 1985-2011, especially ‘‘The Temporary King’’, ‘‘Gene Wars’’, ‘‘Recording Angel’’, ‘‘Second Skin’’, ‘‘17’’, ‘‘Sea Change, With Monsters’’, ‘‘City of the Dead’’, and ‘‘The Choice’’ to be among the best science fiction stories published by anyone in this period, not just the best of Paul McAuley.

  –Gardner Dozois

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  LOCUS LOOKS AT SHORT FICTION: RICH HORTON

  Asimov’s 6/13

  Analog 6/13

  Strange Horizons 3/13

  Lightspeed 5/13

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies 3/21/13

  Tor.com 3/13, 4/13

  Robert Reed’s ‘‘Grizzled Veterans of Many and Much’’ was a highlight last month, and this remarkably fecund writer is back with another oustanding novella, ‘‘Precious Mental’’, in the June Asimov’s. This is a Great Ship story, about Pamir, a former Captain of that hollowed world that humans operate as it circumnavigates the Galaxy. Reed has set dozens of stories in this setting, many quite remarkable. He uses its scale to tremendous effect – it is one of the great Big Dumb Objects of SF – but the best Great Ship stories focus on something else. In this case the former Captain is in hiding, using the identity of a man from an enclave of humans who resist immortality, lest the current Captains find him and penalize him for a long ago crime. He encounters a Kajjas, a member of an ancient species known for their remarkable engines and for their speculation on enlightenment, mental processes, original thought, and the way in which artificial brains and long lives might lead to a lack of new thinking. Before long, Pamir has been kidnapped and forced to try to rehabilitate the engines on a Kajjas ship. ‘‘Precious Mental’’ is a neat mix of cool SFnal gadgetry, vistas, and philosophical speculation, not to mention some nice action.

  I also enjoyed, with reservations, G. David Nordley’s ‘‘The Fountain’’, from the same issue of Asimov’s, which tells of an alien embassy to Earth, asking for human help
against a species that threatens to exterminate yet another alien species. The point is made that humans may have been similarly saved, long in their past – and that in a sense we must ‘‘pay forward.’’ The key human characters are the Empress and her somewhat rebellious daughter, who is unwilling to take on the responsibility of her position. It’s a talky story, debating the issue of whether humans should risk human lives in a distant war that may or may not have a future effect on Earth. It comes to an unsurprising conclusion, and along the way namedrops the likes of Heinlein rather cloyingly and unconvincingly. But, for all that, I was quite moved.

  •

  Analog in June features an outstanding story by Linda Nagata, ‘‘Out in the Dark’’, a fairly direct sequel to last year’s excellent ‘‘Nahiku West’’. Detective Zeke Choy once again addresses a ‘‘crime’’ defined by the somewhat draconian rules of his spacefaring society, which enforce original identity and genetic purity to a quite distinct fault. Here, he is investigating the suspicious appearance of a woman in the Outer Solar System who may be the same woman who was marooned and frozen long before. If she is, her later copy forfeits any right to their identity, and must be killed. This sets up a wrenching problem, mitigated for readers by what seems outrageous injustice in this society’s laws. Choy, who was forced in the previous story to a disturbing decision, has a similar dilemma here. I thought the resolution veered a bit in a conventional direction, but it’s still a strong piece.

  •

  Strange Horizons in March features three writers from non-English-speaking countries: Karin Tidbeck from Sweden, and Yukimi Ojawa and Toh En-Joe from Japan. I don’t know if this was planned, but it highlights something that is both notable and welcome: we are seeing a lot more SF either in translation or from non-Anglophone writers. Note that I say ‘‘we are seeing’’ more, not that ‘‘there is more’’ – the latter may be true, but it may be that we in the Anglophone markets may simply not have paid as close attention to it as before. Tidbeck’s ‘‘I Have Placed My Sickness Upon You’’ is fine work, as we expect, if not her best: a wry story about a psychiatric treatment involving a literal ‘‘scapegoat,’’ or, here, ‘‘Sadgoat.’’ Toh En-Joe’s ‘‘A to Z Theory’’ is a mathematical fable about a theorem simultaneously presented by authors from around the world, with names beginning with each letter of the alphabet – a theorem that at first seems revolutionary, then obviously false. In the end, I don’t think En-Joe does much terribly interesting with an initially amusing idea. My favorite story of the three was Ojawa’s ‘‘Town’s End’’, in which a young woman takes a job at a marriage clinic, and finds herself handling some very unusual, perhaps even sinister, cases: a bit slight, perhaps, but involving and original.