Lots of Cliches and Some Very Poor Pacing

The December issue of Baen's Universe offers a decidedly mixed bag. It has some good stuff, lots of cliched stuff, and one seriously flawed bit that just makes you shake your head.

The leading story, "Moon Race" by Ben Bova falls into the "cliched" category. A guy enters a race to prove that his robotic walker can beat the usual car-type moon buggies used for getting around on the Moon. The consequences for failure are repeatedly emphasized: if he doesn't win the race, he won't get any investment funding, he'll have to go back to Earth, and his crippled partner will be stuck for life. He plans to take a shortcut to the goal that the buggy-vehicles can't take, but when he does so the race marshall disqualifies him. He finishes the race his way anyway, and beats the other vehicles, but he thinks that all is lost. That the character can be so incredibly blind to the happy ending racing at him like a freight train is unbelievable, but otherwise this story is fine. It's also totally aware of its antecedents, repeatedly referencing the John Henry tall-tale legend.

Next up is "Pumpkin” by Bud Sparhawk. This one also has 'cliche' elements of the Western and Sea story varieties. A guy runs a ship on Jupiter that goes into dangerous storms to try to capture raw materials (asteroids and such) that well up from the depths during atmospheric upheavals. It's incredibly dangerous, and his girlfriend keeps trying to get him a stable job on one of the stations. He repeatedly avoids these opportunities--he's addicted to the danger and to trying to find the "one big strike" that will make him rich. Much of the story involves his close brushes with big ones that get away. It's a fun enough story, (Sparhawk has a talent for action scenes) but it's been told many times before.

"Loki's Net" by Marissa Lingen is not terribly memorable. It has a nice hook, in a near future where story-telling emerges as a major entertainment form. The main character is an assistant to the star diva story-teller, who obsesses over finding a missing scientist. Turns out the guy developed a serum that allows one person to truly experience what it's like to be another person (for instance, a male), which is probably every actor's dream. The scientist decides that this is too dangerous to exist and tries to disappear, but eventually the actress tracks down the serum, which he'd tested on himself (of course). This story centers on the idea of being able to be someone else, not on the characters, and certainly from a plot logic standpoint it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. However, this is a nice examination of the thesis.

"Some Events At the Templar Radiant" by Fred Saberhagen is another Berserker story. The setting is the post-Berserker future, where all research into their tech is verboten. Of course, that won't stop some curious scientists who don't understand the dangers. More cliches show up as the scientist works to both investigate and hide his investigations, and of course gets destroyed by his own hubris, both professional and personal. I suspect that if I were more immersed in the Berserker mythos I would recognize more nifty tidbits here to entertain me. Nevertheless, Saberhagen spins a satisfying, if foregone, conclusion.

The second installment of David Brin's "Shoresteading" continues to entertain. The plot follows the Chinese man, Wer, who can talk to an alien artefact as different factions use force and subterfuge to capture both him and the artefact. It's a big ol' game of capture the flag from the flag's point of view. I kept feeling like Brin was drawing out some of his scenes too long; once it's obvious where the next step is sometimes it felt like it took to long to get there. However, he brings in the concept of the smart mob that he's used in some of his zeppelin stories to start to help Wer gain some control over his fate... or perhaps just another capricious master. I'm considering following this story even if I'm not reading/reviewing the rest of the Baen's issues; I'm a sucker for Brin's idea-rich near futures.

The story that I had the biggest problem with, and ended up skipping, is "The Gossamer Mage: Intended Words" by Julie Czerneda. I'm surprised by this, since I had heard nothing but good things about Czerneda in the past. Most of my objections stem from the fact that this feels like a novel beginning instead of a story. The first section is simply being character and world building with no plot elements and no indication of why we should care about either the world or the character. But I got through that. The next section opens up with some plot! A mage is summoned to see the duke, who is apparently a very bad person to be on the wrong side of. So the mage goes hurrying off... only to be stopped in the middle for a whole bunch of paragraphs of world-building info-dumps. Let me give you the start of the action, then the paragraph starters that come afterwards:

"Saeleonarial puffed as he hurried down the wide, too-empty hall. No one came late without consequence to an audience with a hold lord, not even the head of Tananen's only magic casters. There was malice in the delayed summons. Well done, Harn.

"In this part of the new wing, the floor was polished marble, so smooth he had to be wary of a slip...
"The merchants and seamen who came on the ships were polite but curious, their heads stuffed with rumor and wild tales...
"For freight was welcome up the Helthrom, but not foreigners...
"Tiler's hold lords kept it that way..."
"The latest, Insom the Second, was more than watchful...
"He would indeed demand answers...
"Saeleonarial's hasty steps and puffing filled the space... [no, he's still not actually at his audience yet, he's still in the hall]
'He was too old for this...
"The bells around his ears laughed at him."

And in fact at the end of the scene, he still hasn't gotten to the dreaded audience. That's where I gave up. If the author doesn't care whether the character gets there despite all his huffing and puffing, why should I? His urgent journey shouldn't be interrupted by a geography and history lesson! This is a page-long example of something that Samuel Delany pointed out in his book About Writing, but he did it in a single sentence: "After almost no time at all the string on which he had been pulling and pulling came apart into two separate pieces so quickly he hardly realized it had snapped." If you say that something is happening quickly, or urgently, your prose & diction needs to reflect that. Multiple diversions and digressions suck all the life out of the narrative. Again, this may be tolerable at the beginning of a novel, where the reader is expecting a slow build-up and is invested in seeing it through, but no way could this work at any shorter length.

After that we get a short and silly story by Mike Resnick, "A Very Formal Affair: A Harry the Book Story." Harry is a bookie in a magical version of Prohibition days, and he investigates some oddities surrounding a dance competition. Resnick, of course, has no problem getting into and out of a story quickly.

From new authors we get "In the Light of the Hunger Moon" by Kevin J. Cheek and "Johnny Plays 'Round Saturn's Rings" by Jason K. Chapman. "Hunger Moon" is a good story of religious and racial tension in a world of humans and trolls in which plague looms large. Lorgash's entire tribe was wiped out by plague and he's heading into the mountains to die, but instead he winds up helping a widow and her son hold out against a power grab by both humans and trolls. There are some silly made-up phrases (why 'turned-out' instead of exile?) but generally this is a good, well-rounded story. "Johnny Plays" is the story of a kid coming to accept that androids made from people's memories are real people too (his dad is about to become one) after one of the androids saves him and other people from a pressure leak on the space station they live in. So many of these android stories have a 1950's feel to them, and this one is no exception. In fact, it puts me in mind of the Twilight Zone episode "I Sing the Body Electric" (written by Ray Bradbury) in which a robotic grandmother persuades a young girl to love her after saving her from being run over by a truck. Nothing new under the sun, I guess.

Gimme That Ol' Time SF

Baen’s Universe, in it’s freshest-but-one issue, continues its rather classic sf feel. Its very first story, "Article of Faith" by Mike Resnick, feels very much like an Isaac Asimov story. Its “Real Year” may be 1950 or so. A robot comes to work at a church, and the pastor begins to discuss matters of faith and religion with him. The robot thinks deeply upon these matters and decides he wants to join the congregation. The congregation, driven by racism and suspicion of robots "stealing jobs," ends up beating the robot to death; the pastor gives up his position and goes to work in construction. In one way this is a universal story of people fearing the Other and it is as applicable now with people fearing Muslims or Mexicans as it would've been in the 50's with race issues. However, the whole treatment feels somewhat dated and unsubtle. As always Resnick writes it well, but this feels like older material.

Chuck Rothman’s "A Date with Patti Pleezmi" also feels older--a female bartender on the Moon has established a niche for herself. In her youth a boyfriend exploited her to make her the basis of one of the more popular VR porn characters available. She ran away from her old life in shame, but now the boyfriend has turned up again. She has a conversation with the VR character based on her, and learns that sometimes folks are understanding about past mistakes. There's very little about this story, at its core, that couldn't be written as a Western. Nothing wrong with that, but again it feels dated.

"Shoresteading" is the first part of a new David Brin serial. I read it all the way to the end, and I suspect I will enjoy the whole story. Of course, I’ve long been a fan of Brin’s work. He sets “Shoresteading” in the relatively near future and it feels a bit like his novel Earth, one of my all-time favorites. However, this appears to be a more focused story than Earth's epic multi-character narrative. A Chinese man and his wife and child have claimed some sketchy property off the coast of China--it used to be a beach-front house before the sea levels rose. During his daily scavenging for food and useful things to shore up his tenuous position, he finds a valuable artifact. It may be tied to aliens who have recently come to Earth. Most of this first installment is set-up:introducing the character, the world, the motivations, etc. However, there's also an over-long chase scene that is entirely one-sided; the hero is running away from something he imagines to be following him. It's a bit odd and definitely takes up a too much of the section. I feel like Brin tries to hook readers with some whiz-bang action, but it would've been better if there were external motivation for it. No matter, I'm looking forward to seeing where this story goes.

"The Rings of Ragnaran" by J. Simon tries in a way to emulate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and does so marginally successfully. Many alien species get together, all with the goal of peace, and promptly begin tearing each other limb from limb in the name of diplomatic relations. There's also a super-computer that may be willing to destroy the whole universe to get some peace. It's a clever story, and elicits some giggles, but it goes on a bit too long.

"First Rites" by Nancy Kress has some good elements, particularly an international perspective I appreciate (along with Brin’s, above). A young boy, the product of illegal bioengineering experiments, gets smuggled from America to China by his surrogate mother. He has all sorts of psychological issues, and only medicine sent from America keeps him alive. His benefactor brings him back to America when the surrogate mother dies. The guy then has to deal with his girlfriend, his ethical issues, a difficult child, and the adoption bureaucracy. It all gets very complicated, then a super-giant solar flare approaches the Earth. I liked the story better when the consequences were personal instead of Earth- and Universe-shattering; I didn't feel that this story structure supported such weight very well. The ouroborous-ness of the ending seemed particularly implausible.

"Mudlark" by contrast is a neat little story by Pat Cadigan. A woman's elderly mother goes missing as they are vacationing in London. When she is finally found she is acting completely out of character, like trash-picking along the banks of the Thames. However, the police can do nothing; the mother is acting on her own recognizance and there's nothing the daughter can do about it. She has to learn to let go. The speculative element on this story is almost entirely unnecessary, the message about children letting go of parents as a mirror of parents letting go of children stands perfectly well without the supernatural-metaphor-for-death element that seems tacked on at the end.

"Soul Survivor" is a very interesting sf/ghost story. Following its "one-drop" policy, Baen's classifies it as fantasy, but I'd argue it is sf (about which more later). Anyway, a rich eccentric gentleman is the only survivor of a horrific future battle; he's mostly full of reconstructed parts. He buys some property outside of a decent, all-American small town. The property is crowded with ghosts, and he sets about fixing their problems and seeing them off to their final destinations. All the vignettes are great, and the hero is a Competent Man in the grand Heinlein tradition: hates government and most journalists and knows exactly what his rights are concerning defense of his property. Eventually he finds true love in the form of a totally sexual female ghost made physical again--of course there can't be a happy ending without lots of sex in a Heinlein story. I really enjoyed this, in all its rambling glory, despite some of the eye-rolling bits. (BTW, although I admit that ghosts per se are supernatural, hence fantastic, I see them as a trope of the horror tradition. In my idiosyncratic way of looking at things, horror isn’t a genre of its own, it’s an effect that can modify any other type of story. Mainstream horror, fantasy horror, thriller horror, or sf horror. I know this completely ignores John Clute’s much discussed arguments in The Darkening Garden a couple of years ago, and I’ll happily admit to being less well-read in the genre than he, but I still haven’t quite gotten talked out of this belief of mine.)

To wrap up, "Homo Sylvanus" is a pretty lame story that relies heavily on contrivances to get its plot where the author wants it. The story tells of a society that believes genetic engineering is mostly evil and cloning steals souls, but of course a kid with lots of genetic engineering who is also a clone is still a good kid. And the kid rebells against the system. Whatever. The final story, "Russian Roulette" is flash fiction about precognition. A neat package, but nothing Earth-shattering.

The Issue Before the Current Issue of Baen's Universe

Baen’s Universe continues to build its reputation for publishing solidly entertaining, though rarely ground-breaking, science fiction and fantasy. I suspect that this will continue to be a highly successful publishing model for them in years to come. Let me reiterate my praise of their DRM-free, let’s-not-treat-our-customers-like-thieves e-publishing business model, as well. Given that I didn’t find anything massively mind-expanding in this issue, let me instead highlight the stories that kept me well entertained.

These include “Discards” by Nina Kiriki Hoffman. Two adolescent scavengers on a trash planet find a living being in their trash heap and have to decide what to do with it. Unfortunately, the story feels like it stops just when it’s getting particularly interesting—they make the decision but the story ends before getting into consequences. I’d like to read more!

“Letting Go” by David Walton won a “NSF Contest,” and predictably centers on a pure physics problem—a capsule in a frictionless tube drilled through the Moon. I appreciated the physics even while I really disliked the main character—a domineering jerk who seems to think that if his daughter got married, she’d have to stop working. What? Real Year = 1950?

“Dragon’s Tooth” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch did not have such problems. The heroine is a magic investigator who finds an unlicensed magic store in Paris that has artefacts in inventory that could be particularly dangerous. She’s “retired,” but just has to solve one more problem… nothing groundbreaking here but a well-told-tale. I’ve consistently enjoyed Rusch’s sf work for the last couple of years, and I’m glad to see that I enjoy her fantasy just as much. (Although I find it less emotionally engaging than the sf, that has more to do with my relationship with the space program.)

My favorite in the issue is “The Super” by Bud Sparhawk. It describes a solo-around-the-Earth sea-sailing race (I was going to say “around-the-world sailing race” but in an sf story that’s much too ambiguous), where the prize is the chance to inaugurate a sailing competition in the clouds of Jupiter. One of the participants swings too far South to try to shorten her distance and her ship capsizes in the rough storms of the southern latitudes. Most of the story consists of her flashbacks as a hallucinatory Orca prompts her for her tale and she tries to hold on to her boat until help can reach her. The extrapolation of sailing technology, built-in drama, and science fictional stakes all made this a favorite for me. Add in the fact that I particularly enjoy non-fiction about these sorts of extreme outdoors adventures (sailing, mountain/rock climbing, etc.) and this one was written for me.

That’s the reason that I keep my Baen’s subscription: even though I know I’m unlikely to find much in the way of genre-bending/expanding award-winning new perspectives, they continue to tell tales that I *like*. Can’t fault them for that!

To Whit: Baen's Vol 2, No. 6

"Manumission" by Tobias S. Buckell (good)
"Virtually, A Cat" by Jody Lyn Nye (good)
"Indomitable" by Jack McDevitt (excellent, ss)
"Honorable Enemies" by Mike Resnick (good)
"Scraps of Fog" by Sarah A. Hoyt (OK)
"The Witch of Waxahachie" by Lou Antonelli (good)
"The Knight of Coins" by Margaret Ronald (OK)
"Red Tape and Cold Iron" by Lucy Bond (good)
"Extreme Reservations" by R. J. Ortega (good)

The editors of Baen's appear to know exactly what they want: good, enjoyable sf and fantasy. That's what you get here. It's all good and readable, if rarely ground-breaking.

Next up: F&SF for May. And it's still May!

Finishing Baen's with Fantasy

"Knight of Coins" by Margaret Ronald is a tarot-card based fantasy, which I usually enjoy. (Although not, I hasten to add, Piers Anthony's Tarot books. Those are just whacked.) In Ronald's story a man hires a private investigator (the second one in this issue) to track down three tarot cards that have been enchanted to curse his family. The PI has some magical talent, but hates magic and magical cases (of course). Luckily, "paying the rent" is always enough to motivate these hard-boiled protagonists, so the plot proceeds. Her dislike of magic is soon justified and things get complicated. It's another enjoyable story, nothing special.

"Red Tape and Cold Iron, or A Proposal for the Reintroduction of the Faery Folk To The United Kingdom" by Lucy Bond is a satirical story. A gullible politician agrees to let an activist government Folklorist gather up the denizens of Faery and get them back onto the British scene. The descriptions of the Folklorist are both funny and slightly sinister. It starts off by simply making government eco-do-gooders look ridiculous, which is not hard, but one gains some respect for the Folklorist by the end, with her cucumber sandwiches and her very practical brown boots. The moral of the story is to be on the lookout for all the agendas when one is dealing with government proposals. However, the ending is pretty abrupt. I would've liked some more detail about what happens when the Faery-folk finally cross over. Still, it's better to leave the reader wanting more, I suppose, compared to the alternative.

Finally, we close with a flat-out hilarious romp. "Extreme Reservations" by R. J. Ortega describes a man trying to continue the family business: running an inn and saloon out of an old paddle wheel river boat permanently moored in the Sacramento river delta in California. Just as he is coming to the conclusion that this business his uncle left him is simply not profitable, he finds out about a very unique annual engagement that his inn hosts. It's a gathering of immortals, both from legend (The Flying Dutchman) and story (John Carter, Ayesha, etc.). This is a classic homage-packed tale with a little bit of adventure and at least one truly awful, groan-out-loud pun. I have to admit, I love stories like this. It shamelessly appeals to the fan-girl in me, and this one is well done.

Science, Fantasy, or Science Fantasy?

Baen's has an unusual practice of explicitly segregating their science fiction stories from their fantasy stories. This can provide fodder for the ever-popular "Guess the Genre Label!" game. For Mike Resnick's story in this issue, it's an easy call. It's set on another planet, it's got aliens—no problem, it's sf. Things get a little trickier with Sarah Hoyt's story. It features the possible reappearance of a figure from the past to help a woman deal with her issues. At the end the figure disappears. The choice here is between reading it as mainstream (everything is rational and she's slightly delusional) or fantasy (an ancient king reincarnated for a day just to help her with her relationship issues—totally!), not between fantasy and sf. This is clearly a genre magazine, so clearly the story must be generic—fantasy it is!.

It may have been a bit harder to categorize Lou Antonelli's story. It's got a multiple-worlds thing going, where one world is science-based (Superconducting Super Collider) and one is magic-based (animal telepathy). His world-building indicates that the basis for this split lies not in differing physical laws but differing research grant allocations. This is really a science fantasy, the sort of thing that John W. Campbell banished to the pages of Unknown back in olden times. Unknown was a place where Analog (Astounding back then) authors could go to "let their hair down," i.e. not be "scientifically rigorous." (Stop laughing.) It spawned such tales as The Compleat Enchanter series by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt. Here Eric Flint seems to have applied the same general philosophy that Campbell did. Let's call it the one drop rule: one drop of fantasy makes it a fantasy. It's probably the only realistic way to draw the line if you're going to be throwing labels around, but thinking about it made me giggle a bit. On to the stories themselves!

"Honorable Enemies" is Mike Resnick's new mystery novella. It continues the adventures of Jake Masters, previously seen in Resnick's contributions to the SFBC anthologies Down These Dark Spaceways and Alien Crimes. In this story his alien partner has been murdered (a darn shame, I really liked the little guy), and Masters has to cozy up to some mighty shady customers to find out who did him in. He also has to decide what retribution is appropriate when he finally gets his answers. It's a fun read, with some good mystery twists, but nothing exceptional.

"Scraps of Fog" by Sarah A. Hoyt is unusual in its use of Portugal and Portuguese history for its setting. The protagonist is a female cop. She is losing her faith in her ability to do anything useful, given the macho culture of Portuguese police. She's contemplating marriage to an old friend. They're not particularly in love, but he needs a wife to host dinners and go to society functions, and she's talking herself into it. Her grandmother, her last link to her family's past, has recently passed away and she is settling the estate. Then, she gets a call about a young man who has turned up claiming to be the reappearance of King Sebastian, an almost mythical figure from Portugal's past. In dealing with the young man, the cop gets a reminder in the importance of being grounded. Once she regains her sense of history and place, she can move forward with her life. It's a good character story, if perhaps not the most useful self-help message. I always feel a bit sorry for the mythical or otherwise super-powered beings who have to show up and help people sort out their relationship problems. Who knew that having the brain the size of a galaxy (see my review of Elom in SFSignal) or that having helped the poor and the sick, engaged in productive diplomacy, ruled well, and waged war in Morocco would also require you to show up later as a therapist for well-off people with issues? I'm not sure I'd take fame and immortality on those terms.

Next we get the science fantasy by Lou Antonelli, titled "The Witch of Waxahachie." The hero is a newspaper editor who tags along as a scientist tries to run one last experiment on the incomplete ruins of the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas. (They claim this is being done secretly. You really can't power up something like the SSC quietly, but it's easy to give the author that bit of hand-waving.) After the inevitable catastrophe, they find they're in the same place, but the SSC is gone, the road is dirt, there's no cars... They hitch a ride into town, and luckily get to an encyclopedia set before being picked up by the authorities. (A trick also used by Robert Heinlein's world-hoppers in Job and The Number of the Beast. An excellent argument for never going completely digital—how else will dimension-hopping protagonists gather the vital information they need?) In this new world, the advances of the Enlightenment focused on magic instead of science. It turns out that each person exists in both universes, and their different fates are sobering. They get back home relatively easily after comparing notes with the folks they know on the other side. It looks like Antonelli is setting up a story cycle here, since at the end the narrator reminisces about other adventures they've had with their other-world counterparts. This is a fun story with a lot of potential in the world-building, so I'll look forward to other stories in this setting.

Baen's Universe does fun, poignant

Baen's Universe (Vol. 2, No. 6) starts off with a strong action story by Tobias S. Buckell, "Manumission." The protagonist is a man without a past, enslaved to a shadowy intelligence agency he doesn't necessarily understand. He's assigned to track a woman, and she turns the tables on him. She makes him an offer he can't refuse and can't accept. It closely follows the conventions of action/thriller movies such as the "Jason Bourne" movies, where the hero goes rogue against a no-name agency implied to be evil. It's well written and engaging. Does it answer any fundamental questions of existence? No, but that's not its purpose.

Next up is a fun story, "Virtually, A Cat" by Jody Lynn Nye. A computer programming genius has been assigned to the first interstellar flight, just in case anything goes wrong with the software. He is shattered when he learns this will mean leaving his beloved cats, Parky and Blivit, behind. He goes, but torments all his crew mates with incessant stories of his cats and their doings. When every single person on board finally tells him to shut up about the damn cats, he falls into a depression. Fortunately, the crew figures out a solution. They put him in a full-body tactile suit (used for maneuvering robots outside the ship) and program the suit to act as if there's a cat there. The geek is overjoyed, and goes back to being a useful (and less annoying) crew member. The crisis comes when they get to the new star system. They record so much information that they start deleting anything non-essential from memory to carry more data home. Obviously, the cat program has got to go. The geek's reaction to this is refreshingly not what you'd expect from the geeky stereotype personality. It's both refreshing and satisfying. My only fault in this story is that it ends rather abruptly. I'd have liked to see him return home to his real cats, but the story ends with him still in space. It's a minor quibble, and as a rule it's better to leave readers wanting more. Although I'm significantly more of a dog person than a cat person (see below), this was a really fun story.

"Indomitable" by Jack McDevitt is a very short story that almost perfectly distills an important aspect of the psyche. A young boy is touring a museum with his father. He knows, with the obsession of youth, the names of all the spaceships and all their crews - all their flights and their fates. He particularly wants to see the Indomitable, one of the last of the interstellar explorers. It's in pieces now - a historical preservation group is trying to raise funds to restore her. Ships like that aren't needed now. We've gone about a thousand light years all around our solar system and found tons of planets that can support life. Enough to support human expansion for the foreseeable future. No aliens, though. So why do any more exploring? Why waste the money? The little boy knows why. This story reminds us all of the belief that exploring is intrinsically worthwhile, even if there's no immediate profit to it. It may be the faith of a child, but it's one I hope we never lose.

Alexander, Resnick, finishing off Feb. Baen's

There are two more stories in February's Baen's Universe that I finished. They were both perfectly readable, if nothing groundbreaking.


"Hourglass" by Alma Alexander is a sort of puzzle-fantasy story. A bard of sorts has gotten himself to the point where he's wandering through a rural landscape in the dead of winter, inadequately dressed for the occasion. Luckily for him, he is rescued by the owner of a cabin. While he warms up, he finds the interior cozy, possibly luxurious, and filled with interesting-looking objects. His host is very friendly, if not totally forthcoming, and our hero settles in for some sleep. The host gives him the pro forma warning not to touch anything, but of course he does. Troubles ensue, but our hero gets out of them remarkably easily and with little consequence. All in all, a well-told but somewhat pointless tale.

"Sluggo" illustrates Mike Resnick's amazing craftsmanship. When he aims to evoke an emotional response, by gum he hits it right on the head. It's really no wonder that he's sf's "most awarded" author at the moment. There's nothing unique about this story: an incredibly hideous mutant finally finds work as a disguised circus freak - eventually makes one friend, a little girl - meets a leprechaun who offers to make him normal - must make a choice. And they live happily ever after. Resnick aims at saccharine sweetness for the mature audience (the grimy reality is too much described for a flat-out children's tale), and he nails it, of course. And he makes it look way too easy. This is a master craftsman on display, not an innovator. While I've enjoyed reading Resnick's work over the last three years, sometimes I roll my eyes because there's rarely anything new there.

The rest of this issue of Baen's had a reprint story by Rudyard Kipling, "Unprofessional" which I decided to skip after reading a bit. Then it has chapters from three ongoing serials, which I also skipped. I'm averse to starting serials in the middle (I even try to avoid reading series novels without beginning at the beginning), and I don't really have time to go back and get into these. Next it had "End of the Line," by Holly Messinger. This looked like a promising tale set in the Old West, dealing with some sort of supernatural goings on. I definitely liked the main character, an old guide and tracker having to adapt to the reality of the railroad making his profession obsolete. However, the narrative leans a little too heavily on a previous story that I haven't read. Then it bogs down quite a bit getting the plot moving. So after getting through a significant chunk of build-up just to find some more build-up, I skipped this one as well.

After that came the non-fiction columns, which were mostly interesting: I like Eric Flint's take on the eBook/digital rights (DRM) bruhaha. However Barry Malzberg's column was a weird mish-mash of stuff that didn't go anywhere. I can't imagine that's typical for a writer of his stature, so I'm looking forward to checking out another column of his in the next issue.

Three Skipped Stories

So far in this issue of Baen's I read the first two stories, but then skipped the next three.

"Waking Ophelia" by E. Catherine Tobler starts out with a deep space pilot, Bel, being awoken from hibernation early. Her ship has been hijacked! By pirates! And there's very little she can do about it. She appears to be heading towards a romance with the lead pirate, which made me roll my eyes and ask the "should I keep reading this" question. I hadn't been given much reason to care about Bel or her journey, so I figured I could live my life free of regret not knowing what happened to her.

David Gerold's "Spiderweb" starts with an astronomy lesson: "All right, let's talk about the Oort cloud. It's big. It's not flat. It's round. It's a sphere. It's 7500 trillion kilometers thick and it starts about 7500 trillion kilometers away." I'm a physicist who used to concentrate on astronomy, so lengthy reviews of things I already know bore me. Usually I can skim forward to see why the author is telling me these things, i.e. why I should care. However in this piece the lecture seems to go on and on with no end in sight. Pass.

"The Temple of Thorns" by John Lambshead also suffers from a slow beginning. We start with a woman in a medieval setting. It appears she's about to be banished. She leaves town with a guard. I got no sense of her personality, why she was being punished, and where she would be going. There didn't seem to be a driving force moving the story forward; instead it was simply trudging along. The woman seemed like a nobly wronged heroine from central casting. After several pages, I moved on.

"Premature Emergence" by Eric James Stone

"Premature Emergence," although accurate, is an unfortunate title for a story. Likewise the opening sentence: "During a hyperspace slide, cargo haulers like the KMC-85 did not need a human pilot on board," isn't the best either. Mmmm, acronyms AND cargo haulers. Sign me up! However, this story overcomes its inauspicious beginnings and is readable throughout.

Jonah is the pilot of the cargo hauler that doesn't need a pilot. Damn unions. The job is supposed to be simple: using faster-than-light-but-not-instantaneous drive, you go in at one terminal and come out a few months later at another terminal. Foolproof. Except he comes out of hyperspace somewhere else, nowhere near a terminal, and light years away from anything. Whoops.

So Jonah is well and truly screwed even before he gets into an odd combat situation with a ship piloted by a rogue AI. (In the past, humans and AI fought. The AIs moved out into space and never the twain were supposed to meet... Whoops.) In the end the well-and-truly screwed Jonah tries to honor the worthy AI, in which resides his only chance for a happy ending.

The story is told in a straight-forward, unadorned style. However, the passages with the AI towards the end are genuinely moving, and Jonah's determination to do what's right even when there's no realistic hope of payoff for him is noble. Generally, this story reads like a classic Analog story. Nothing wrong with that, but nothing outstanding either.

"The Smartest Mob..." by David Brin

The lead story in February's Baen's Universe is by David Brin. It reads as if it were a submission to the David Moles/Jay Lake-edited All Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories anthology, but instead it appears to be a follow up to the story Brin wrote for that volume. "Sky Light" had the same main character, a plucky female journalist named Tor, starting a zeppelin journey from San Diego to Washington, D.C. In "The Smartest Mob..." Tor is heading towards Washington, perhaps finishing the same voyage.

Although the plot is obviously an excuse to show off the nifty future he's developed, Brin is a talented writer who knows how to pace things and build dramatic tension. Tor's zeppelin is being delayed getting into Washington, because of suspicions of terrorist threats. Because of disinformation campaigns by various bad guys, it's impossible to know which threat is the real one, but Tor begins to suspect that it involves her zeppelin. She summons a smart mob from the internet, basically a real-time wiki/forum group, to advise her as she investigates. She gets some expertise by mob members who used to work on zeppelins. She polls the group when it comes to decisions, although since it's her butt on the line she ultimately has to decide what to do. In real-time her interest and reliability numbers go up and down, and the mob's numbers fluctuate accordingly.

Although the inclusion of real-time wiki groups accessible everywhere seems very "now," this story is closely related to one written by Brin in Earth in 1991. The fact that Tor's glasses use the same brand name, "TruVu" as the ones in that book suggest that it's basically the same universe. There he had scientists using the internet and subvocal interfaces to collaborate in real-time about quickly evolving crises. Things weren't as anonymous in that book as they are here, but that's the only significant change. The fact that the story works well using roughly the same concepts he used 17 years ago is a testament to Brin's talent as a forecaster. Compared to Earth this story backs off a little on the eco-catastrophe that he predicted: in this story parts of Washington are just being reinhabited after a terrorist attack and the zeppelins are a response to the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in long-distance travel. Comparatively in Earth, much of the coastal areas all around the world were essentially underwater already. Perhaps this story pre-dates Earth in that timeline, although it isn't clear.

Despite the wiki/Web 2.0/global warming elements of the story, I realize that I couldn't imagine Cory Doctorow or Charles Stross writing this story, and I'm trying to figure out why. In the near-future short fiction I've read from Stross he tends to write about the people who write the software, the ones pushing the boundaries (I'm thinking of Manfred Manx from "Lobsters," particularly). In comparison, Tor is simply a user of the tech that others have developed. She is not an innovator herself. I haven't read as much of Doctorow's short fiction, but I feel like his tends to get deeper into the fundamentals of how tech changes society. Here society, even with "reliability ratings" and instant polls, is roughly the same as ours (which may be more realistic in the long run than making the rather large conceptual leap to a fully reputation-based economy, as Doctorow did in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom). It seems that stories like Brin's function more as showcases for new futures, not so much as interrogations of them. That may be the main difference I'm sensing between Brin's fiction and our current cutting-edge guys.

This isn't a perfect story obviously, and I wouldn't go so far as to say it's worth the price of admission alone. It is contrived, and some twists are predictable, and sometimes he slows things down to admire his nifty toys and futurism. However, it's a good story, and when I asked myself if it's worth finishing the answer was Yes. Baen's is certainly continuing to attract top talent to their pages, and this issue is no exception.