Get Thee Behind Me, 2008!

In the interests of putting 2008 behind me, this post combines my reviews of Interzone #218 and #219. They showed up in my inbox at about the same time anyway, and unfortunately I don’t have “that” much to say about #218.

Interzone #218 focuses on author Chris Beckett. He's obviously a fine author, but he's an author that doesn't quite line up with my tastes. No aspersions on him, but it leaves me without a lot to say. On a technical level the three stories here (and others I've read from him) are fine, they just don't work for me. Thus I felt that "Poppyfields" was a fine character change portrait, but it perhaps relied to heavily on knowing the character Tammy from other stories which I hadn't read. "Greenland" is well-told, but I didn't think it added much to the already much-hashed over ethics of human replications. And "Rat Island" is almost impressionistic. The character observes without acting and while there's nothing wrong with that, it's not quite to my taste.

The other stories in this issue left me similarly unmoved. "If" by Daniel Akslrod and Lenny Royter struck me as silly. Childhood brain implant companions stick around into adulthood even when the implants are removed, driving the adults crazy. The protagonist is working on a 'cure.' It seemed to be mostly surface and not much depth. "His Master's Voice" (Hannu Rajaniemi) is a heck of a story--two enhanced animals try to save their master after he's carted off for doing various illegal AI things. Amongst the things the animals resort to include having the dog be a DJ. Now, I'm a sucker for dog stories, but I had similar problems with this story that I did with one that it may well be compared to: Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. There's something about the tone and the world-immersiveness that left me permanently confused instead of enlightened. Can't quite put my finger on it, but there's too much density and intensity and perhaps not enough reflection. #218 ends up with "Corner of the Circle" (Tim Lees) which centers on character but spends too much time on its world-building. Basically it felt like the character elements and the world-building elements fought for attention instead of one clearly supporting the other. A young man whose parents divorce visits his aunt in New York at various points as he grows up. In this world, aliens come and go and the aunt is supposedly associated with one of them. After she dies, he goes into her apartment to try to figure out whether the stories were real or if she was just crazy. The note I jotted down about this was "All the characters remain ciphers instead of gaining illumination."


So we leave #218 behind us and move on to #219. This one starts with a hell of a bang. The very first story, "Everything That Matters" by Jeff Spock begins with a man being eaten by a ginormous shark in an alien ocean. Gosh-Wow! He survives due to his amazingly-nifty-high-tech diving suit (a feat only slightly more believable than the guy surviving a fall to Earth from Low Earth Orbit in Adam Robert's Gradisil). It turns out he had been out looking for a very valuable spaceship wreck to salvage. The story follows him as various factions try to get information out of him, he tries to heal, and he plots his revenge. The guy obsesses over sex, but I dare say that after having most of your body eaten and then reconstructed, I can see where that would represent quite a bit of your self identity. My main criticism of the story is that it runs a little long, but generally this story, while not being deep, is a heck of a ride.

Jason Sanford is back with "When Thorns Are the Tips of Trees" in which people can die simply from touching each other. Those who die this way become trees. If you touch the thorns of the trees you can interact with the memories of the people they used to be, but they're static--they'll never grow. After being infected but before becoming a tree, these unfortunates go into a sort of zombie mode, hunting down other people to infect. It felt like it could have easily fit in John Joseph Adam’s recent Living Dead anthology. The narrator and his father have to fight off some of the mobile ones, who may have an actual agenda. It's a unique set-up, and the metaphor for emotional distance is telling. Also the importance of letting go and allowing growth. Nicely done.

"The Shenu" by Alexander Marsh Freed was one that I found unimpressive. This guy dabbles in magic but isn't sure if he's just insane. His girlfriend and this other guy enable him. The scenes felt like disjointed vignettes that didn't add up to much, and I never ended up caring about the main character or the two supporting cast members.

"The Fifth Zhi" is an interesting story about a whole bunch of clones who have been bred to attack a giant alien thing that's planted itself on the pole of the Earth and has been spreading horrible dreams. It has a protective field around it, and only this one guy, Zhi 5, makes it through. His mission is to implant a deadly bio-weapon in the alien plant, but as he climbs and thinks about how things have gone for him, he decides he doesn't want to do it. There's some good stuff here about free will, government control, and destiny. I think the ending is unrealistically happy, but that's not the worst fault to have in a story. A more serious complaint is that I think it's a little over-simplistic to use Chinese characters as the mass-produced-victims-of-an-oppressive-government. Sure, China is one of the few communist countries left, but it's a lot more nuanced now. This story harkens back to the time of Cordwainer Smith's story “When the People Fell” from 1959, and I think things have actually changed a bit since then.

"The Country of the Young" by Gord Sellar makes up for things with a better international perspective. Set in a post-reunification Korea, it imagines a future where Korean citizens can get perpetual-youth treatments, but foreigners can't. The main character is Korean, but her lover was Indian. He wasn't able to get a treatment, even though he was a valuable scientist. Eventually the main character begins to rail against the system and plot revenge. This has good depth as it fleshes out its world, but plot-wise it seemed a bit weak. I felt that it flinched at the end and became a bit vague instead of dealing with its consequences head-on. Still, I've been enjoying Sellar's work quite a bit, and I look forward to seeing more of it.

Finally, finishing off 2008 for my magazine reading project, we have "Butterfly Falling at Dawn" by Aliette De Bodarad. This is set in the same alternate future as her previous story, “The Lost Xuyan Bride” in Interzone #213, where the Chinese and the Aztecs uneasily share the western North American continent. The main character of these stories is Magistrate Hue Ma, who is Aztec by ethnicity but has risen through the Chinese bureaucratic ranks. The story tells a straight-forward murder mystery, leavened by the politics of its world and flashbacks to the Aztec civil war that left many scars on many psyches. There's some straight-up infodumping, but it's necessary, and there are some noir touches as the Magistrate muses on her troubled past. I enjoy these stories, but for my Chinese/Aztec dominated futures, I still prefer Chris Robeson.

My Hugo Recommendations to Follow Shortly!

Interzone #217: Better Late than Never?

First off, I want to note that there have been some problems with my Interzone subscription on Fictionwise. For some reason the upload to the Fictionwise site (and hence distribution to me) is lagging a looooong way behind their print distribution. I finally got issue #217 in October, and #218 is nowhere to be found. I've heard other people talk about it, so I know it's out there. This is a big contrast to my other subscriptions which are always delivered well ahead of the cover date (I have the January issues of Analog and Asimov's, and the December issue of F&SF as of today). I'm sure there are logistical challenges of which I'm unaware, but it does make me reconsider where my subscription money should be going.

Banalities aside, how was this issue? It certainly had some good stuff in it. "Africa" by Karen Fishler is an interesting future story: aliens kick all the humans off Earth because we've done too much damage. The main characters are the only humans left in orbit; their continuing mission to prevent any human from ever returning. However, over the generations their population has been reduced to a father and a cloned son, and they know that their time is ending. A human ship pulls up with a woman and her dying father; they're apparently all that's left of the portion of humanity that went outward. The whole living-on-ships thing turned out to be unsustainable. The woman has one predictable last request, and the clone-son has rather predictable qualms about turning her away. You have to swallow a lot to buy this story: the aliens leave humans to guard Earth? Isn't that rather like having the fox guard the hen-house? Also, why would the woman, many generations removed from the Earth, be so obsessed with it? Etc. However the emotional portraits of the son and the woman are moving and well-done.

Jason Sanford's "The Ships Like Clouds, Risen by Their Rain" is likewise implausible but with characters that feel true. The humans of a small town live on what appears to be a literal mudball. Ships come from far away and rain down organic material on them, and our main character's job is to keep watch for the ships so everyone can get inside. These drops replenish the soil, but also cause local flooding and devastation. Sometimes a child of the village is smart and ambitious enough to get taken up by the ships; at least that's what people think when they disappear. There is also a fairy-tale-like taboo about not digging around underground. Eventually the taboo is broken and answers are found. This is an archetypal story about thwarted dreams and the hope of realizing them. The old woman is a great viewpoint character and Sanford does a good job of bringing her alive.

Paul McAuley's "Little Lost Robot" is just about the Exact Opposite of the Asimov story he references in the title. Asimov's lost robot was simply a man-sized robot trying to get away with something, trying to escape. McAuley's is a planet-sized solar-system-killing war machine... that finds itself with not much left to kill. It finds its way to a solar system and has a conversation with what may be a remnant of humanity. McAuley has done an interesting thing in giving the "robot" four distinct functional avatars: Librarian, Philosopher, Navigator and Tactician. However, the Philosopher got damaged somewhere along the way, and that lack gives and extra frisson of tension to the story.

"The Two Headed Girl" (Paul G. Tremblay) is much odder. A young girl has two heads, but the second one keeps switching between different historical figures. The main thrust of the story is her search for her estranged father, as she's been raised by her single mother. She also has to deal with ostracism and other emotional perils of young adulthood. It is a really weird story, and I felt like it didn't cohere. I didn't see the connection between the two-headed-ness of the kid and her need for her father. So it just ended up being weird. In contrast, Suzanne Palmer’s "Concession Girl" is a typical working-class heroine saves-the-day on an alien planet story, much fun.

"Comas of Central Park" is almost a story about the bitch-socialite character from "Stand on Zanzibar" who threw parties at which her goal was to humiliate her guests in creative fashions. In this story, one of the guests finds an incarnation of the god Pan in Central Park and brings him to the party--he's like a cross between a genie and a traveling orgy. In amidst all the sex, he helps the protagonist and the socialite learn important things about themselves. I can't say I liked it, especially because the characters seem largely stereotyped; but eventually the author does dig down underneath the stereotypes to get to some interesting bits. Here's a spoilery point: Pan reveals to the main character that she's really got suppressed lesbian desires for the socialite. She freaks out. I would assume she would freak out over being attracted to such a loathsome specimen of humanity, but instead she's freaked out at the thought of being gay. Huh? For that type of jet-set crowd? That struck an unbelievable note to me.

Interzone #216, the Mundane SF edition.

I was less than 100% impressed with Geoff Ryman’s Mundane SF issue of Interzone. While I can appreciate the impulse that led him to promote writing within those rules, just obeying them does not automatically lead to better writing. None of the stories here are bad (I read all of them all the way through), but none of them knock your socks off and convince the you of the inherent superiority of this breed of science fiction.

Buzz Aldrin may appreciate this movement. He recently went on record speculating that sf made space too exciting, raising people’s expectations, causing the real space program to seem boring in comparison. Buzz’s argument is that in this way sf has hurt the space program. Ryman obviously has similar concerns, which I share to an extent. While we look out to amazing adventures in post-Singularity, post-scarcity, post-everything worlds, we forget about the hard problems that still plague us back here: class issues, real economics, multiculturalism, etc. This certainly doesn’t mean all mundane SF need be depressing or, worse, boring. Bruce Sterling’s Hugo-nominated “Kiosk” is a fascinating take on future economics that I think would fall under the Mundane rubric, and Ryman’s own Air, or Have Not Have is a brilliant and moving portrayal of technology reaching into the least technologically advanced corners of the world and what that really implies for the people who live there. (And we’ll just forget about the mouth baby, shall we?) Mundane SF at its best is fully capable of fulfilling my criteria for really great literature, as set forth in my “Reviewing Philosophy” post—to help me think about the world/universe in a different way. However, the stories in this issue never really achieved that.

“How to Make Paper Airplanes” by Lavie Tidhar most obviously plays to Ryman’s preferences. It’s set on an island with more natives than white people, with a gay protagonist and a decidedly non-Western outlook on life. It has characters talking about sf, especially space operatic sf, and how it has turned out to be so much bullshit. The story is completely plotless and in fact is in danger of degenerating into a string of non-sequiturs at the end. However, the overwhelming theme of loss and powerlessness (we can’t go out to space, we can’t save the guy’s lover from dying of disease) keeps everything unified. In that way it is quite successful.

So my dislike of it is a result of my own prejudices: I want to read about people moving forward and solving problems, not stoically accepting the failures of fate. This, I recognize, is very Western of me. Although I intellectually respect the tradition of Taoism and Buddhism, I have enormous trouble identifying passivity/acceptance as a virtue. Between being a Westerner and an engineer, I’ve been trained to look at that as fatalism, something to reject. After all, if humans had always accepted those virtues, we’d still be living in caves. It’s a universal question as to which approach does more harm: If we had avoided Western progress through struggle we’d be ignorant about the stars, we’d have short life spans, and we wouldn’t be able to sustain large populations. On the other hand, we wouldn’t have global warming, and we’d have never discovered the horrors of mechanized genocide. While I’ve always felt that the good stuff has been worth the bad, it’s important to realize that not everyone feels the same. This fatalism isn’t new in sf, but coming from a Western tradition makes it difficult to appreciate. SF itself is so rooted in Western “progressivism” that this kind of story is very rare. This story doesn’t necessarily sell its attitude to the audience, but it does put it out there which is worth something.

Striking a completely different note, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro contributes a high-seas adventure tale, “Endra—From Memory,” but with a few twists. For one thing, the high-seas adventure is needed because global warming has knocked us back to roughly medieval/renaissance days, and the only way to move between far-flung regions in this largely flooded world is by sail. Another twist revolves around the gender of the main narrator, which is never specified. That makes the romance between the narrator and the charismatic woman at the center of the tale nicely ambiguous—you can read all their interactions in two or three ways, depending on how you choose to think of the narrator. The last odd note is Yarbro’s choice of narrator. All the narrators are land-bound and see the main character only as she passes through their port on her way to other adventures. In fact, the main narrator tries to persuade her to settle down and stop her roaming ways, which would obviously be like asking the wind to stop blowing. The question is, why pick the stay-at-home to tell about the romantic figure? Perhaps it’s because it’s on land where the myths and legends live, even when their subjects are off and away. Still, I would have liked to have read about some of these adventures directly, instead of second hand. It’s a good story, but nothing ground-breaking (which really describes most of the tales here, unfortunately).

“The Hour is Getting Late” by Billie Aul is an interesting story set in the near-future. It deals with the relationship between Art and Criticism in the context of a popular-mediated-media-saturated future. In the course of creating a new Woodstock version for the Internet-and-beyond age (as well as a sop for those poor schmucks who only exist in Reality, without online input), the Artist is trying to get back together with the Critic. The Critic is desperately trying to keep her own identity, to not be subsumed by the Artist and his continual agenda. However, the Artist is getting the crowd on his side, and one thwarts the will of the mob at one’s own peril. It’s a good illustration of power relationships mediated through pop culture and Art, with a good point about Reality (and the perils of ignoring it) at the end. Something about it doesn’t rise to the level of greatness, and I think it’s the execution. The reader doesn’t quite get fully immersed in the story—one has to spend a lot of time thinking about what’s going on. It’s a bit forced. This subject was also tackled by Walter Jon Williams in “Pinocchio,” his contribution to Jonathan Strahan’s YA Starry Rift anthology.

“Remote Control” by R. R. Angell is what I think of as “classic” sf. It’s completely idea-centered, and any plot and/or characters exist only to carry the idea around. Here the idea is over-the-top and satirical, although it’s depressingly easily extrapolated. Perhaps you’ve heard of the deer farm where you can sign up on the Internet to shoot a deer via a remote-controlled rifle? That’s real, and that’s twisted enough. And you’ve probably heard of the Minutemen, the folks who’ve taken it upon themselves to patrol the US’s border with Mexico to try to spot illegal immigrants coming across and stop them (they claim they take action only by calling the Border Patrol, not shooting). Combine those two ideas and voila, you’ve got Angell’s story. This one wouldn’t be out of place even in Analog. So the point is that dehumanizing immigrants is a Bad Thing, and that letting rednecks take pot-shots at them is also a Bad Thing. I’m going to go out on a limb here and figure that Angell is probably preaching to the choir here (I sure hope so). The rest of the plot doesn’t add much to the Idea—the characters are so thin that even the narrator refers to them as types instead of names (“Legal,” “Marketing,” etc.) and the actual plot makes no sense. You have to believe that it’s worth it for someone to spend several million dollars to get a truckload of immigrants across the border by using a robot decoy, and you have to assume that the coyotes who smuggle immigrants across the border have forgotten everything they ever knew about tunnels. The economics don’t stand up to the lightest scrutiny, and ultimately the story doesn’t add up to much.

“The Invisibles” by Elisabeth Vonarburg is about a somewhat Asimov-Caves-of-Steel future where humanity has had to withdraw to climate controlled domes. To manage the population, transportation of people is automated. You key in a district as your destination, and you get dropped off there. However, for two people, they find themselves in places they don’t recognize for the first time in their lives. The story is told in two second person POVs, then an explanatory first person narration at the end. It seems to be about emotional traumas jarring us out of the ruts of our lives, and using those opportunities to make drastic life-altering changes. This seems like a fairly trite message, something we’ve read about a number of times before, and left me at the end thinking “So what?” A bit of a let down.

“Into the Night” by Anil Menon is about the perils of aging. An old Indian gentleman (from India) goes to live with his thoroughly modern daughter after his wife passes on. His daughter is totally secular and has no respect for the “superstitious” religious habits which have seen him through his long life. She tries to introduce him to up-to-date immersive internet tech, and he immediately finds himself in an unpleasant and compromising situation. His mind is going already, which doesn’t help. In the end, there will never be understanding between the two generations. The main problem I had with this is that aging is so universal an experience that the Indian background of the family had no impact on the story. It was simply wallpaper. The resistance to change, the failing mental faculties, the generational misunderstanding, the adherence to “God did it” in the face of complicated science—all of that could come from a WASP family, a Jewish family, a Chinese family, etc. I didn’t feel like I learned anything new about the culture of the characters from reading this story—apparently everyone reacts to the complications of aging in about the same way. Oh well.

Finally we have Ryman’s own contribution. “Talk is Cheap” deals with a low caste man wooing a high caste woman, although the man never thinks of it that way. He eventually gets her to leave her house and go on an actual walk with him. He’s a bit disappointed when she goes off with some new people she met on the walk, but she also comes around to him again. There is a lot of imagery in the story that didn’t necessarily make sense to me, with people’s roles being described in totemic, animal-metaphor style (he thinks of himself as a Dog, she jokingly calls herself a Hamster). Unfortunately for the closing dialogue to make any sense you have to decipher what the animal imagery means to Ryman, and I felt like I never got a handle on that. Which meant that, for me, the ending seemed to dissolve into a series of non-sequiturs. Probably if I read it a few more times I’d figure it out eventually, but the rest of the story doesn’t have enough going on to entice me to do that.

So in the end, after reading the whole thing through, there aren’t any stories here that made me really sit up and go Wow! That’s unfortunate, since these stories are being presented as a showcase of a movement. It might have been nice if Ryman had been able to set his own deadline, (when I have enough really great stories, then I’ll put together an issue), instead of being yoked to the magazine’s publishing schedule. I have no doubt that awesome fiction following Mundane rules will continue to be written, but the stories collected here don’t quite rise to that level.

Interzone #215 Wrap Up

"The Endling" by Jamie Barras; (skipped)
"Dragonfly Summer" by Patrick Samphire; (meh)
"Crystal Nights" by Greg Egan; (excellent)
"Holding Pattern" by Joy Marchand; (OK)
"Street Hero" by Will McIntosh; (good)
"The Imitation Game" by Rudy Rucker; (meh)

Well, I'm very surprised. In the previous two issues of Interzone that I had read, the quality was head-and-shoulders above what I'd come to expect from my sf short-fiction magazines. While not every story was my all-time favorite, they were mostly above average and several of them were even better than that. This issue, with only two good stories (even if one of them is amazing), is disappointing.

Here's hoping for better with Interzone #216. That's the Mundane SF issue edited by Geoff Ryman. It's already generated a bit of discussion, and I'm looking forward to reading it (as soon as it shows up on Ficitionwise).

Next up, Baen's Universe for April & May. W00t! I'm getting this one reviewed while it's still the latest issue available! Real-time reviewing is coming ever closer.

Last bits for Interzone #215

Three more stories finish off this issue of Interzone. "Holding Pattern" by Joy Marchand is a claustrophobic tale that takes place on an airplane. The stewardess is convinced that one of the passengers is an alien. As the tale progresses we get vignettes about the lives of the other passengers, and we find out why this flight is special. It's an OK idea, but the story never sold it to me. I could never really suspend my disbelief — it was all too convenient and arbitrary. I suppose it's gauche to complain about a story set in the air not being grounded enough, but there you go.

"Street Hero" by Will McIntosh is more interesting. Kilo Orange is the hero of his own running internal monologue. He's got friends and mad martial arts skillz, which he needs in the plague-ridden eco-dystopia in which he lives. Through the story he makes various attempts to fit into the world: gang-banger, superhero, hippie drop-out, until he finally finds the right place for himself. Sometimes the transitions can be a little awkward and a little rushed. That makes sense; the author is writing a fairly complex bildungsroman into a short novella (or long novelette, Interzone doesn't label their stories by length, which makes things difficult come awards time). It's a satisfying piece that avoids the easy answers of some coming-of-age stories.

The last story, "The Imitation Game" by Rudy Rucker, is a short secret history providing an alternate explanation of Alan Turing's death. I'm always leery of stories that mess with real historical figures, and this one is no exception. Throw in a piece of bio-technology that Turing not only couldn't have access to in the 50's, it'd be impossible even today, and this story really didn't work for me. Basically, I wasn't sure if I should read this as secret history, sf, or science fantasy of some nature. If it's secret history, the tech should be plausible for the era. If it's science fiction, the tech should be plausible for any era (and I don't buy it at all), and if it's science fantasy then what's the point? I was probably also peeved that I read the entire story with only minute amounts of comprehension. Then I went to Wikipedia, looked up the circumstances of Turing's death, and realized what Rucker was actually doing. Any historical work, especially alternate or secret history, depends largely on the reader's appreciation of what the author is doing. This time, I didn't have the knowledge I needed to appreciate Rucker's approach, and that also soured me on the story. It may be much more attractive to Turing devotees.

Interzone #215, Blah, Blah, EGAN

I was disappointed that this issue of Interzone led with a skippable story. "The Endling" by Jamie Barras never cohered for me, and I finally abandoned it. It starts with a paragraph about "Asha," who is looking for icebergs to carry out some sort of scan. That's the last we hear from her for five pages (presumably the printed version of the story has clearer indications of scene shifts than my electronic copy - one of the few complaints I have with it so far.) Next we get an "as you know, Bob" - style dialog between the human Wright and the alien, Antonov. Antonov has obviously had a rough time in his past. So as they're working together on something, Wright asks questions like "How many of your fellow captives had died by then?" With no background on their relationship, this seems like the sort of thing he should already know, or the sort of thing a polite person wouldn't ask. As the dialog continues, they continually refer to things such as the Melzemi, the Stro, the colony on Chard IVe, the VXIIers, etc. I have no problem with made-up terms in sf, but if you're going to use them for long you have to give the reader some context to work with. After awkward info-dumping dialog that didn't enlighten me in the slightest, I decided to skip it and move on.

"Dragonfly Summer" by Patrick Samphire was also disappointing. Two men and two women had been the best of friends during a year of college. Eventually sexual tensions got the better of them and their friendships were ripped apart. Twenty years later they reunite because one of them is having disturbing dreams. They discover that the abandoned windmill where they used to drink and laugh and fuck is now gone. It's not just that it has been torn down, it apparently never existed. No one remembers anything like that ever having been there. The main character, who was the source of most of the trouble back in the day, has to face the consequences of what he did. That appears to be the message of the story: actions have consequences. Well, duh. The disappearing windmill, and the dragonflies that used to buzz around inside it, are nothing but metaphors: it's never explained and doesn't have any plot significance. I understand that this is supposed to be a character story, but I feel that it is cheating the reader when things like that are used but not explained. You'd think at least one character in the story would be more concerned about the wholesale re-writing of their reality, but they're all obsessed with twenty year-old sex scandals, so the disappearing windmill is ignored. I finished the story, always waiting for something to happen, but it never does. The character lesson is learned, and the story stops.

After that lackluster opening, Greg Egan comes in and more than makes up for their lack. "Crystal Nights" covers enough ground for any ten short stories. Actions have consequences here too, but messing with the nature of the universe is more than simply metaphorical. A rich dot-com-style billionaire sinks a considerable portion of his fortune into developing the fastest computer ever. And he keeps the technology all to himself. (Egan may not be familiar with how computer geniuses become billionaires - they can be obsessive geniuses, but usually if they keep the things they do secret they don't become the rich kind.) He hires a team of people to put together a complete simulation of a universe inside the computer. His plan is to evolve an intelligent lifeform inside the computer that will then be able to help him in the inevitable war of super-intelligences that he just *knows* is coming. (Again, I'm just not sure that people this unstable really run billion-dollar software companies.) He repeatedly tweaks the design of the universe to keep evolution going in the way he wants it to: towards abstract thought, towards spoken and written language, towards sophisticated mathematics. Entire species evolve and go extinct in a heartbeat. He's literally playing God. Let's stop for a moment and reflect on the implications of intelligent design. What if someone has designed us, and the world, to achieve an evolutionary outcome? Given all the incredible pain, misery, and suffering that goes on in the world, how fucked up would that entity have to be? Egan presents us with the answer to that question in this story's protagonist.

Eventually the billionaire talks to his creations directly, telling one of them essentially what he wants and why. He lays out the choices: help him, or he'll regretfully have to destroy them and start over. He leaves an "Easter Egg" for them on their Moon, in the form of a monolith straight out of 2001. Through this interface, they can interact, in the most limited possible way, with our universe. We've all read "Frankenstein," and we know what happens to unethical creator figures. The computer beings find a third way and forge their own destiny, and we can't help but cheer. This review may seem spoiler-ridden, but there's a so much more going on in this story than my bare-bones summary can begin to cover. Egan is one of my all-time favorite authors, especially when he's using hard sf to examine ethical propositions. Here he's in excellent form. All the world building, the descriptions of the artificial simulation and the computerized evolutionary process are fascinating. This one substantial story is probably worth the price of the issue alone, and I'll be keeping it in mind come awards time.

Interzone #214, Overview

"Far Horizons" by Jason Stoddard (OK)
"Psuedo Tokyo" by Jennifer Linnaea (Really Good)
"The Trace of Him" by Christopher Priest (Forgettable)
"The Faces of My Friends" by Jennifer Harwood-Smith (Good)
"The Scent of Arrival" by Mercurio D. Rivera (Excellent)

Nothing here that is less than perfectly readable. This continues my impression that Interzone is a high-quality magazine that matches my tastes very well.

Finishing off Interzone #214

Continuing with Interzone #214, we have "The Trace of Him," a not-terribly memorable story by Christopher Priest. A woman arrives at the room of her now-dead former lover. It's on an island in a world with some magic. He was famous for something. They were intimate briefly. His family doesn't approve of her. She reminisces.

Neither the man nor the woman ever get names, we don't find out what made him famous, the magic never comes into play. Perhaps the central question is whether death has meaning when you've already been estranged, but this piece seems to be more about tone and atmosphere. The writing is, as always with Priest, beautifully crafted. However, it's all so vague that there's nothing to permanently attach it to one's memory.

Next up is the winner of the James White Award, an award in honor of Ireland's premier genre short fiction writer. This year's winner is "The Faces of My Friends" by Jennifer Harwood-Smith, and her story seems quite worthy. It is set in a world where a certain group of people are forced to wear masks, stay silent and never express themselves, on pain of arbitrary death by any higher class person or mob that happens to be around. These oppressed people try to keep the memories of the dead, but with all expression forbidden it is difficult.

Harwood-Smith writes with genuine intensity, and the story is emotionally quite moving. The only quibble I have is that towards the end, we learn the identity of the oppressed group, what it is that sets them apart. The story would have been more powerful if their minority status were generic; then we could all fill in the blanks as it moved us. As it is, I had been imagining various alternatives, and I didn't like her group as much as my own, which made them less sympathetic. There is sometimes real power in keeping things generic, or perhaps universal would be a better term.

Finishing out the fiction in this issue is the long story "The Scent of Their Arrival" by Mercurio D. Rivera. This is a brilliant story, told in two alternating strands. In one, a human survivor tells the story of the destruction of Earth, documenting its overrun by vampiric creatures from another dimension. It is a bleak and hopeless tale. In the other, two alien scientists try to decipher the transmissions from a ship sitting in orbit over their planet. It's been sitting there broadcasting for quite some time, but they can't make any sense of the communication. They've isolated the pictures and displayed them, but without a scent track it is unintelligible to them, since their primary form of communication is through chemical scents.

While I'm sure scent-based communication has been done before in the literature (in fact it popped up recently in Paul Melko's excellent novel Singularity's Ring), this story is very well done. The relationship between the two alien researchers and the world building of their planet and culture are first-rate. The tonal shift between their straight-forward first-contact narrative and the bleak defeatism of the human narration is striking. The ending packs quite a punch as we realize how the threads tie together. The only small criticism I'd have is that the ending's impact is more intellectual than emotional; it would've been a bit better if the reader were so emotionally involved with the aliens that we'd be really shocked and dismayed at their fate instead of going "Wow, so that's how it all ties together. That's gonna suck." As it is however, this is another story that I'll keep in mind come award-nominating time.

Interzone #214, Two Stories

The Jan/Feb. Interzone kicks off with a novella by Jason Stoddard, "Far Horizons." A bioengineering genius, Alex, has made all forms of genetic engineering practical. However, his best, most useful discoveries (such as free, self-growing houses to eliminate homelessness) are suppressed by giant corporations. His sometimes lover, Adele, tries to fight the power from the inside (with predictable lack of success), and Alex, never stable, goes on the run.

He hooks up with some utopianists on the Moon, and decides that the best way for him to see the future he's dreamed of is to skip the intervening bits. He pays for an individual spaceship with hibernation capability, makes some plans involving Venus, and sets the alarm clock for 3000 years. Predictably, when he wakes up he doesn't find anything like what he was expecting.

Throughout it all, there's also a genetically engineered chimera he's adopted, named Shekinah. She looks like an angel, with beautiful features, body, feathers, and wings. She had been working for a strip club that was also a brothel for fetishists. Alex "rescues" her, but she is depicted as having enjoyed it there, having enjoyed the physical contact (creepy? yeah, a little). Alex of course refuses to exploit her, but his distance makes her sad. He "uplifts" her, giving her more intelligence and speech capability, and that hurts a lot as well. Eventually he leaves on his deep sleep voyage and she has to make her way alone.

There's a lot going on in this story, but the different threads never come together in a way that was satisfying to me. Alex doesn't really seem to grow or change much, none of his relationships ever really resolve, and the themes surrounding Shekinah seem separate from the themes surrounding the other plot threads. Perhaps they all deal with unintended consequences, but that is a flimsy ribbon to use to tie everything together.

A story that I like better is "Pseudo Tokyo" by Jennifer Linnaea. The travel technology of the future is teleportation. You pay a guide, teleport to your destination, spend a week or two, and jump home. You're expected to dress like a local and act accordingly so as not to disturb things. Hence, the guide.

Our protagonist, Sean, saves up all year for these jaunts. He wants to experience the world. However, this time he gets more than he bargained for. He is taken to another place, not on Earth, where everything is different. His guide takes off, never to be seen again. He has to make his way, alone, in a place where not only do people not speak his language, they're not even remotely human.

Thus he wanders around a surreal, dream landscape. He's in a city and can't find the exit. He keeps trying to grasp at familiarity: going into something he identifies as a bath house, he has a horrific encounter with some black tentacles. He can only barter for food by trial and error. The strong implication by the author is that tourists couldn't handle a truly alien experience, no matter how much we tell ourselves that's what we want.

Eventually Sean embraces the surrealness of it. He figures out some of the rules, and sets up a niche for himself. He goes native, and even finds a way to exploit the flaw that brought him here. It's a really fantastic tale. The dream-like qualities of it put me in mind of Haruki Murakami, especially some of the benign surrealness that accompanied The Hardboiled Wonderland at the End of the World. This is really first-rate stuff, and I'll be giving it consideration when awards nomination time comes around again.