Locus, June 2014 Read online

  Much more successful as an individual short story is Karl Schroeder’s ‘‘Jubilee’’, posted on Tor.com on February 26. This has at its core another fascinating idea, one that I understand is also at the core of Schroeder’s new novel Lockstep – a social system whereby whole communities go into a synchronized pattern of hibernation and awakening that allows them to wait out the hundreds or even thousands of years it takes for spaceships to travel between the stars (no Faster Than Light travel or wormhole shortcuts in Schroeder’s scenario) without falling hopelessly behind the space travelers, thus making it possible to maintain social continuity even at interstellar distances. ‘‘Jubilee’’ cleverly humanizes this rather abstract concept and gives it immediacy by making it a story of star-crossed love, and using for its protagonists people who aren’t a part of the lockstep system, so it becomes emotionally something like a story about Elf Hill – once your loved one goes in there, you may not see them for decades; you may grow old waiting for them, or you may never see them again… while to the one inside, no time at all will have passed, although their lover may be old and spavined or dead by the time they come out again.

  •

  I must admit that I may have been inclined to like Rich Horton’s reprint anthology Space Opera, not only because I generally like space opera stories, but because I bought and originally published five out of the 22 stories here, and have reprinted five others in one or another of my annual Best of the Year anthologies. This naturally inclines me to think that Horton has excellent taste, but I don’t think most readers will disagree – this is a big, meaty book that delivers a lot of good core SF, some of it space opera as good as anybody has ever written it, and well worth the money.

  The best story here is probably Ian McDonald’s complex and wonderful novella ‘‘The Tear’’, but also first-rate are Greg Egan’s ‘‘Glory’’, Gwyneth Jones’s ‘‘Saving Tiamaat’’, David Moles’s ‘‘Finisterra’’, Robert Reed’s ‘‘Precious Mental’’, Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette’s ‘‘Boojum’’, Ian R. MacLeod’s ‘‘Isabel of the Fall’’, Aliette de Bodard’s ‘‘Two Sisters in Exile’’, and Naomi Novik’s ‘‘Seven Years From Home’’. There’s also good work by Yoon Ha Lee, James Patrick Kelly, Gareth L. Powell, Chris Willrich, Michael F. Flynn, Una McCormick, Kage Baker, Paul Berger, Jay Lake, Justina Robson, Alastair Reynolds, Lavie Tidhar, and Benjanun Sriduangkaew.

  –Gardner Dozois

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  LOCUS LOOKS AT SHORT FICTION: RICH HORTON

  Robot Uprisings, Daniel H. Wilson & John Joseph Adams, eds. (Vintage) April 2014.

  Sleep Donation, Karen Russell (Atavist Books) April 2014.

  Interzone 3-4/14

  Asimov’s 6/14

  Analog 6/14

  Strange Horizons 4/14

  Lightspeed 5/14

  Robot Uprisings is John Joseph Adams’s latest project, teamed this time with Daniel H. Wilson. The theme is clear enough, and the stories as a set are a fine examination of variations on it, from a nicely varied set of writers, too, both from within the genre and without. As with many themed anthologies, read all at once there might be a bit of a sense of too much repetition, but by and large this is a strong book.

  My favorite story was a reprint that I missed on its first appearance in 2010. Cory Doctorow’s ‘‘Epoch’’ is about BIGMAC, a ‘‘doomed rogue AI.’’ Its story is told by Odell Vyphus, the sysadmin who has inherited responsibility for BIGMAC. Apparently, it was something of a dead end: ‘‘there just weren’t any killer apps for AI.’’ Now it’s obsolete, and expensive to maintain, and Odell’s boss wants him to kill the AI. Naturally BIGMAC finds out about this plan, and implements its own plan to save itself. The story is funny and intelligent and moving and believable: the same can be said for the characters. Very strong work.

  Other good stories include Ian McDonald’s ‘‘Nanonauts! In Battle with Tiny Death Subs’’, in which a self-absorbed remote operator of nano-machines tries to pick up a woman with tales of his battles to save the President from bad nanotech. A nice mixture of humor, a look at a dark side of nano-enhancement, and a subtle closing twist. I also liked Seanan McGuire’s ‘‘We Are All Misfit Toys in the Afermath of the Velveteen Wars’’, about a doctor trying to treat children recovered from the robot toys who rebelled and kidnapped them…. The real nature of what happened is wrenchingly revealed at just the right pace.

  •

  One story that has gotten a lot of attention in the wider literary world (partly for its venue: it’s a digital-only release from a new outlet called Atavist Books) is Sleep Donation by Karen Russell. It deserves the attention on its own merits. A plague has swept the Americas: people are suddenly unable to sleep, leading inevitably to death. A treatment is discovered: those who can still sleep can donate their sleep to those who need it.

  Trish Edgewater is a volunteer for a ‘‘sleep bank,’’ using the story of her older sister, one of the plague’s first victims, to motivate new donors to sign up. Complications arise – one of Trish’s ‘‘clients,’’ a young baby, turns out to make particularly effective donations, which sometimes even cure insomniacs, but her father is concerned about the exploitation of his child. Another donor’s sleep is infected with a terrible nightmare that drives some people to become ‘‘elective insomniacs.’’ Trish herself wonders about her exploitation of her sister’s story. The fundamental idea is in places preposterous, but Russell’s extrapolations of the social impact are dead on, and the story examines our disaster-driven culture, perhaps our general ‘‘sleeplessness,’’ and the power of dreams very nicely.

  •

  The March-April Interzone is an excellent outing for the magazine. John Grant contributes another very fine piece, ‘‘Ghost Story’’, in which Nick, a happily married man, gets a phone call from a girl he was infatuated with at the age of about eight. It seems she’s pregnant, and he’s the father, but the childhood connection had not continued, and they haven’t met in years – how can this be? An uneasy visit explains nothing really, but Nick is pushed to wonder about what the girl is convinced they did together, and what history she came from. Really fine work, and very well resolved.

  Suzanne Palmer’s ‘‘Fly Away Home’’ is a solid adventure story, marred perhaps just a bit by excessive sneering from the corporatist/religious villains. But given that slightly over-egged setup, the story grabs the reader and doesn’t let go, telling of Fari, a woman working as an asteroid miner in a society where most women are apparently sex-slaves. She is the best at her job, but only given half-pay. When she is raped, the response of the new very ‘‘devout’’ Rep is to try to force her to marry her rapist… so she takes things into her own hands. Fun, if dark, offworld SF. Also good is ‘‘Ashes’’ by Karl Bunker, set in a world in which advanced AI has led to tremendous advances but also terrible wars, and apparently usually to dead ends. A man is given his ex-lover’s ashes and a mission to accompany an AI to a site special to the dead woman: a place where AIs had perhaps tried to develop a starship, before transcending, as AIs seem to do. No conclusions are really reached, but the story is thought-provoking.

  •

  Suzanne Palmer also has a story in the June Asimov’s, ‘‘Shatterdown’’. Cjoi is the lone surviving member of a group of children engineered by Giardal Corporation to dive into a gas giant’s atmosphere and retrieve valuable Pahlati Diamonds. Both the corporation’s treatment of the children, and their exploitation of the diamonds, which turn out to be part of the life cycle of living creatures, is illegal. Cjoi has returned to the scene of the crime, as it were, with plans of her own. There she encounters the woman who had been her lover, in what seems to have been a less than equal relationship. Helene is part of the group protecting the diamonds… which means she won’t be sympathetic to Cjoi’s plans. The ending is surprisingly reminiscent of the ending to ‘‘Fly Away Home’’, but I thought the setup more emotionally convincing.

  The two other novelettes t
his issue are good as well. Lavie Tidhar’s ‘‘Murder in the Cathedral’’ is an outtake from his steampunk Bookman trilogy in which England is ruled by alien lizards. The Orphan (hero of the series) travels to France on a mission for the Bookman and ends up in danger of being framed for killing an automaton version of E.T.A. Hoffman. The best part is a gleeful rendition of a ‘‘Worldcon’’: in this alternate history writers like Verne, Wells, Dumas, and, yes, Hoffman have engendered an eager fandom much like our familiar SF fandom, and Tidhar has a lot of fun with this.

  ‘‘There Was No Sound of Thunder’’ by David Erik Nelson, is very good indeed, another story about a time portal and the unexpected consequences of changing history. Taylor has returned this time to the ’90s, slightly different from our history but still pretty recognizable, and tries to recruit a group of young radical vegans to help him try to improve the present by taking a trip to the past. Their idea is uniquely vegan, cleverly dark, but does violence lead to a better future, no matter how well intended? And how did this particular changed future arise? Interesting ideas, well told, often funny (though the story is not a comedy) with a neat alternate resolution impacting a key historical event of the ’90s. (Though that does bring up one quibble – the alternate history this story is set in is shown to be in many ways radically different to ours… so how likely is it that certain events would still happen on the exact same day?)

  •

  The June Analog has a nice Tony Ballantyne story, ‘‘The Region of Jennifer’’, a somewhat cynical (or realistic?) look at the choices the‘‘Jennifer’’ of the title (and by extension many other people) makes: she has been bred and raised to be a womb, in essence, and the young man who loves her tries to ‘‘save’’ her before her arranged marriage to an alien ‘‘Slavemaker’’. Nice to see Ballantyne back; some years ago he contributed a number of very well-imagined pieces to Interzone. This issue also includes a good Michael F. Flynn novelette, ‘‘The Journeyman: In the Stone House’’, second in a series which obviously is becoming a novel. Here Teodorq and Sammi, the slightly mismatched chance-met pair introduced in ‘‘The Journeyman: On the Short-Grass Prairie’’, encounter a different society and end up recruited (shanghaied?) into a sort of Foreign Legion analog, along with an old enemy of Teodorq’s. Good stuff, but far from a complete story.

  •

  Strange Horizons in April features ‘‘Pavlov’s House’’ by Malcolm Cross, a fine SF story about ‘‘uplifted’’ (more or less) dogs who were created to be soldiers. The protagonist cannot adjust to civilian life – a familiar theme that’s given a stark edge by merging these issues with those arising from his unusual origin.

  •

  The standout story in Lightspeed’s May issue is ‘‘Selfie’’ by Sandra MacDonald. Susan is a teenager with a mother living on the Moon and a father who researches trips to the past. Her Dad wants to drag her again to an old resort hotel, but she wants to visit her Mom instead, so she convinces her Dad to let her send a ‘‘Selfie’’ – a robot uploaded with a version of her mind – on the trip to the past.

  All this is intriguing setup: an interesting future with space travel, time travel, and other neat tech, and a well-depicted teen narrator (admittedly a familiar type – I detected echoes of, say, Heinlein’s Podkayne and Barnes’s Teri Murray), but MacDonald has a different idea. I won’t spoil it, but I’ll say that the story goes in a sadder but just as SFnally interesting direction than I expected.

  Recommended Stories

  ‘‘The Reign of Jennifer’’, Tony Ballantyne (Analog 6/14)

  ‘‘Epoch’’, Cory Doctorow (With a Little Help)

  ‘‘Ghost Story’’, John Grant (Interzone 3-4/14)

  ‘‘Nanonauts! In Battle with Tiny Death Subs’’,Ian MacDonald (Robot Uprisings)

  ‘‘Selfie’’, Sandra MacDonald (Lightspeed 5/14)

  ‘‘We Are All Misfit Toys in the Afermath of the Velveteen Wars’’ Seanan McGuire (Robot Uprisings)

  ‘‘There Was No Sound of Thunder’’, David Erik Nelson (Asimov’s 6/14)

  ‘‘Shatterdown’’, Suzanne Palmer (Asimov’s 6/14)

  Sleep Donation, Karen Russell (Atavist)

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

  –Rich Horton

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: GARY K. WOLFE

  The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eight, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Solaris 978-1781082164, $19.99. 624pp, tp) May 2014. Cover by Dominic Harman.

  The Madonna and the Starship, James Morrow (Tachyon 978-1-61696-159-6, $14.95, 180pp, tp) June 2014.

  Sergeant Chip and Other Novellas, Bradley Denton (Subterranean 978-1-59606-638-0, $40.00, 232pp, hc) May 2014.

  Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 2, 1948-1988: The Man Who Learned Better, William H. Patterson, Jr. (Tor 978-0-7653-1961-6, $34.99, 648pp, hc) June 2014.

  The Heritage of Heinlein: A Critical Reading of the Fiction, Thomas D. Clareson & Joe Sanders, Foreword by Frederik Pohl (McFarland 978-0-7864-7498-1, 222pp, $45.00, tp) January 2014.

  As Locus readers are aware, every February the contributors are invited (cajoled? blackmailed?) to write up summaries of the past year’s SF, identifying highlights and tracking notable trends – or pretending to, anyway. I’ve always felt somewhat incompetent at this, since a good portion of my reading during the year consists of novels, and I don’t really get a good sense of the past year’s shorter fiction until I start seeing what the editors of the various year’s best anthologies have served up for examination. Of course, even then we might simply be discerning trends in a particular editor’s thinking rather than in the field as a whole, which is why I’m starting with my annual exhortation to read all the year’s best anthologies you can get your hands on. Individual editors do have biases, of course, and sometimes an agenda, but it seems likely that we’ll discover a significant portion of the outstanding short fiction of the year if we follow their various leads. So as a kind of experiment, I’m going to see if the trends I can discern in the volume at hand – Jonathan Strahan’s eighth annual volume – are also discernible in the annuals I’ve not yet seen. If they are, I will know that I’m completely right about everything.

  Jonathan, of course, is the reviews editor of this magazine and a valued co-podcaster and friend, but he is also a reliably eclectic editor whose tastes run toward the literary and who is willing to test genre boundaries. His opening selection this year, for example, is Joe Abercrombie’s ‘‘Some Desperado’’, a spaghetti western with a kick-ass heroine, which depends on a general tone and a few select word choices (marks as the unit of currency, for example) to qualify as fantastic at all. But with the very second story, which is science fiction by anyone’s definition, we can begin to discern some real trends, and two in particular. Greg Egan’s ‘‘Zero for Conduct’’ seems to me one of the best stories of the year, and a valued reminder that not all of Egan’s stories involve physics exams (‘‘Learning to Be Me’’ is another classic example). The title is a dual pun on superconductivity and Jean Vigo’s classic short film (which may qualify as the first real YA dystopian movie), and the story concerns a young Afghan girl whose brilliance at computers and chemistry lead her to a monumental discovery, which does her no good at all at school.

  One trend here is the story’s allusion to an earlier story (which we’ll see again in such pieces as Neil Gaiman’s ‘‘The Sleeper and the Spindle’’, not a major story but a clever recombination of the Sleeping Beauty and Snow White motifs; Lavie Tidhar’s ‘‘The Book Seller’’, one of his better Central Station stories which pointedly alludes to C.L. Moore’s ‘‘Shambleau’’; and Ian McDonald’s ‘‘The Queen of Night’s Aria’’, a quasi-sequel to The War of the Worlds). Another involves its non-Western char
acters and setting. It may be that the most salutary trend in SF and fantasy over the last decade or two has been its rapid diversification, with authors from Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and other cultures, as well as a growing number of newer nonwhite authors, beginning to gain considerable recognition. Strahan includes several such authors, but never with a sense of arbitrary cultural representationalism. Ramez Naam’s ‘‘Water’’, for example, is solid, traditional satirical SF concerning sophisticated neurological advertech; it could almost be a radical updating of The Space Merchants. ‘‘Fade to Gold’’, by Thai author Benjanun Sriduangkaew, is a chilling and powerful tale involving a soldier whose life is changed by her encounter with the Southeast Asian spirit called a krasue – a figure so gruesome it makes you wonder why horror writers are still hung up on zombies and vampires.

  Sriduangkaew’s story represents another sort of diversification present in Strahan’s anthology, however: diversification not just of authors, but of cultures and settings as well. Familiar spaceships, cities, and heroic fantasy lands may be hard to come by here, but the number of stories with nontraditional settings is striking. Thailand is also the setting of Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s ‘‘The Ink Readers of Doi Saket’’, a well-structured if fairly conventional tale based on the tradition of wish-lanterns, while Richard Parks’s ‘‘Cherry Blossoms on the River of Souls’’ tells of an Orpheus-like underworld journey drawn from Japanese mythology, and E. Lily Yu’s ecumenical fable ‘‘The Pilgrim and the Angel’’ concerns a Cairo coffee merchant taken on hajj by the angel Gabriel, though it takes a more predictable turn when he is reunited with his émigré son in Miami. Even Ted Chiang’s characteristically provocative ‘‘The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling’’ takes place partly among the Tiv of West Africa, where the introduction by missionaries of written records created a conflict with oral tradition; the contemporary parallel, involving how lives fully recorded on personal cams might conflict with memory, attains a pathos reminiscent of John Crowley’s ‘‘Snow’’. Iceland provides the setting for most of Eleanor Arnason’s ‘‘Kormack the Lucky’’, concerning an Irish slave who makes his way home through a series of adventures that feel like a mini-epic. The Irish, in fact, have an unusually strong presence in this year’s selection: Val Noonan’s ‘‘The Irish Astronaut’’ is a largely realistic tale of an American astronaut visiting an Irish village in memory of one of his colleagues who died in a Challenger-like disaster, while Ian McDonald’s ‘‘The Queen of Night’s Aria’’, one of the book’s more old-fashioned SF delights, concerns a fading Irish tenor reducing to touring the front lines during a Wellsian war on Mars.