New Lovecraftian Fiction

It’s always nice to see a new short fiction market come online. Through SFSignal’s Free Fiction round-up, I spotted Lovecraft eZine’s debut issue and decided to take a look. I see from their submission page that they pay $50 per story, nothing to sneeze at. However, to put it charitably, it may take this magazine a few issues to find its feet. (To be fair, I thought the same thing about Lightspeed’s first issue, and they’re already producing award nominees.) All these stories have merit, but some extra TLC in the editing process would help them really stand out.

Issue #1 has four stories, starting off with “Sledding and Starlings” by Bruce L. Priddy. This was a nicely atmospheric piece about a couple who (for no good reason) decide to go sledding in the middle of nowhere in a snowstorm. Despite an ominous flock of starlings, they have fun for awhile until the wife disappears in an even more ominous fashion, sending the husband into paroxysms of grief and madness. The main problem I had with this story came in its final paragraph, which uses the “I did not think about the thing that did not happen” structure heavy-handedly to let us view the wife’s disappearance retroactively. Between deconstructing the syntax and using a late flashback to depict the story’s climax, this served to severely distance the reader from the scene, diminishing the horror of it.

“Rickman’s Plasma” by William Meikle was a story with a great premise that I couldn’t quite bring myself to finish. The premise is a nice blending of Lovecraftian magic with sf. The titular Rickman is trying to use his Dream Machine to capture the zeitgeist of the city, but he’s getting nowhere. With a flash of inspiration he points it to deep space instead, and begins to create a hypnotic and driving groove complete with a ball of plasma, and overlays it with his dreams. The plasma takes on a life of its own and starts eating people, starting with Rickman. Two policemen come to investigate. The death of one of the cops is particularly horrific, although my suspension of disbelief was shaken when her partner is unable to stop the elevator doors from closing and is forced to watch her death from the elevator door’s window. Generally speaking even the crappiest elevator won’t close the doors with an obstruction in the way. But no matter, the death was distractingly gory! Moving on!

Unfortunately, the story becomes increasingly distanced after that. The narrative viewpoint draws back to the city police as the plasma eats some city blocks off stage. It eats the cops, it eats the National Guard. I put the story down for good when the viewpoint is removed again, to the national level, as the plasma eats the state of New York, off stage. This scene shift is accomplished using exactly the same words as the first shift, which is distracting and a bit silly and once again distances the reader from any ongoing horrors the story might contain. I can see where the technique could be used to establish rhythm and ramp up tension, but here it struck me as artificial and jarring. So I’m afraid this story didn’t work for me.

“The Brown Tower” by John Prescott is the story of two young men investigating a spooky tower in a spooky small southern town. It really hits its stride at the end, as they face the consequences of poking their noses into the unknown, at night, armed only with lighters. The unspeakable horror is effectively sketched rather than shown, and the ending is genuinely gripping. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of awkward phrasing and dialog to get through before we get to that point. This bit was almost a deal-killer for me:

“Its rather unsettling isn’t it?” Mark said, but made no inclination of opting out of not entering the tower.

I can easily forgive typos, but the double negative ends up meaning the opposite of what the author wants it to mean here. And the rest of the dialog has a bad tendency to jump around in tone:

“I wonder what’s up there,” Lane said and pushed the accelerator pedal to its max.

Mark moved in his seat, drank a little from his coke can and eased forward to get a better view of the monument. “I have always wanted to check that place out. I think it’s been here since the town was founded, or that’s what my grandpa told me. I asked him about it a couple times when I was still in grade school.”

Just the inconsistent use of contractions skews the tone: given the “what’s up there” comment, I’d expect the next sentence to start “I’ve always...” instead of “I have...” Skipping between informal and formal dialog is definitely jarring.

“The Crane Horror” by Bruce Durham is a strong historical story with elements from both Lovecraft and William Hope Hodgson. It ends this issue on a high note. The story is set in the late 1700’s (I believe) and the formal tone of the prose is appropriate and consistent throughout. It reads quite smoothly, which can be a challenge when evoking a historical tone. The shipwreck of a French ship on the shores of the great lakes brings horror to a nearby farmhouse. The narrator is a corporal in the local garrison, in love with the daughter of the homeowner. Despite his best efforts he cannot save the house or its people from the monstrous horrors of the lake. For Lovecraft fans, there’s a hint tying this story in with the overall Cthulhu mythos. Definitely well done, and raises my hopes for Issue #2.

By the by, I also wanted to mention that the artwork is pretty darn good throughout. It definitely adds to the atmosphere and continuity of the ‘zine. They’re all provided by an artist going by mimulux, for whom I’ll be keeping an eye peeled in the future.

Edited to add: Reflecting on this issue in the clear light of morning, it's a very woman-unfriendly collection isn't it? I mean, look at the stats:

• 4 stories = 4 male authors
• Story #1: one female love interest, disappeared/killed
• Story #2: one female neighbor, killed off-stage; one female cop, killed bloodily on-stage
• Story #3: Zero female characters
• Story #4: two female characters; mother killed off-stage, female love interest driven irredeemably insane
• Stories passing the Bechdel test: None

The overall effect is like a big psychic "No Girlz Allowed" sign on the front isn't it? It's interesting to note that as of last month, Weird Tales, the magazine that originally published Lovecraft, is now going strong under an all-female editorial staff, making Lovecraft eZine #1 feel all the more anachronistic. Still, this is easily fixed in later issues, so I'll continue to look forward to the next issue with interest.

More Numbers: 200 Short Stories

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've been reading a lot of short fiction. This has been partly for my column in Salon Futura (column #6 is here). I've kept up with the spreadsheet thing, although I've consolidated it into 1 sheet and moved more of my note-taking out of my Moleskine notebook and onto Evernote. Thanks to all this, I know that I have now hit 200 stories, and I thought I'd update the numbers here.

[Caveat Emptor, same as the first: this is the most biased possible set of numbers. It only tracks stories that I've read, and specifically stories that I've finished. I skip a story if it doesn't grab me. So these numbers inevitably reflect my own taste. But there is an underlying field out there, and my own proclivities can only distort it so much. Elements here consist of a huge number of subjective classifications, based on nothing more substantive than my own whim. Also, I've been limiting my reading to venues that I can read in a convenient electronic form.]

Here are the genres that I've seen:

SF 108
Fantasy 76
SF w/ some F 6
Horror 3
Alt hist 3
Mainstream 24

This round skewed towards sf because of a couple of anthologies that I read for other review venues, each of which was sf-specific.

Protagonist gender:

Male 95
Female 83

Less perfectly matched than the last time, possibly because of the late skew towards sf. Other protagonist categories:

Child/Teen 20
LGB 8
Transgender 3
Gender Undefined 4
Alien 6
Ghosts 2
AI/Robots 2

The number of stories passing the Bechdel test perfectly doubled to: 40.

I've also found 34 protagonists that are human and identified by non-white ethnic markers.

I'm also keeping track of POVs, but there's nothing terribly shocking here:

1st 81
2nd 3
3rd lim 75
3rd omni 31
3rd mult 8

More interesting are settings. Of those stories set on Earth:

Earth's past 21
Earth Present 42
Near future 51
Mid future 24
Far future 17

A few more far future tales this time, although again that was skewed by a specific anthology.

How about physical settings? We're still sticking pretty close to home:

America 68
Earth 39
Generic Fantasy Earth 25

We've got 47 stories taking place in some sort of space setting, including extra-solar planets, space stations, etc.

Finally, I've been keeping track of some tropes. Here are some of the most common:

Violence 64
Aliens 40
Happy Ending? 32
Shape-shifting 25
Biotech 20
Gods/Goddesses 20
Ecological damage 19
Politics 17
Religion 17
Mythical beings 16
Magic artefact 15

So that's what I've got so far. I feel a bit odd about the themed anthologies skewing the data, but they are equally part of the field. I definitely feel the need to read a fantasy-oriented one (maybe Zombies vs. Unicorns) to even things out.

Once again, here are the venues from which I've been getting my short fiction. Let me know if there are other places I need to be looking!

Strange Horizons
Clarkesworld
Lightspeed
Futurismic
Fantasy Magazine
Abyss & Apex
Nature
Flurb
F&SF
Expanded Horizons
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
Port Iris
Crossed Genres
Basement Stories
Asimov's
Subterranean Online
Daily SF
Apex
Tor.com
Weird Tales
Brain Harvest
Midnight East
GUD
Absent Willow Review
Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine
Albedo One
Kenyon Review
Electric Velocipede
Analog
World SF Blog
Icarus [Much easier to access now that it's available through the Wizard's Tower Press eBook store]
Destination: Future [Anthology]

Insanity and Happy Frankensteins

Things are ticking along pretty well over at the Locus Blog. We've had some good posts and comments already, and there's even more interesting stuff developing behind the scenes. So I thought I'd come up for air and toss off some impressions about more stories from the SFWA Hall of Fame Volume I, edited by Robert Silverberg. I talked about the first two stories back in November, "A Martian Odyssey" and "Twilight."

The next two are "Helen O'Loy" by Lester del Rey and "Microcosmic God" by Theodore Sturgeon (skipping "The Roads Must Roll" by Heinlein since I had read it several times before). "Helen O'Loy" is a story I had read about but never read before. It's usually mentioned, as in the Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, as "One very obvious example of early sf's masculinist orientation..." Can't really argue with that. This guy builds the 'perfect woman' robot. He eventually falls in love with her, runs away with her, and lives out his life happily with her. At the end of his life, she kills herself so that no one will ever know she wasn't real. To say that this hasn't aged well is an understatement. A woman who literally exists for no other reason than to love and care for a man, where this is presented (mostly) as a positive, is just really creepy. Also, there's an aspect of what I'll call 'easy insanity' in this story as in many others from this period. The narrator suspects that towards the end, Helen's husband had simply forgotten that she wasn't human, and the narrator helps her keep up the illusion of aging. I might add that lots of people go conveniently and interestingly insane in these stories--I feel like that trope isn't quite so common these days.

"Microcosmic God" (1941) is one of the stories that will really stick with me from this anthology. When contrasted with Greg Egan's "Crystal Nights" (2008) it is especially chilling. The protagonist of Sturgeon's story is James Kidder, a self-made multi-millionaire who is good at everything he does. He goes to live on a private island to develop whatever sci-tech niftiness he sees fit. Eventually his banker (and only connection to the rest of the world) gets greedy and goes gunning for the golden goose. Kidder has been evolving a species of intelligent beings. He keeps them contained and forces them to evolve by presenting them with threats. He occasionally kills off some of them randomly to keep them from getting complacent. He makes sure that they can never survive in Earth's normal environment. When he gets attacked by the banker's forces (let's not think about that too closely), he directs the colony to invent an impenetrable force field, which they do. He is able to live out his life entirely in isolation after that.

I kept waiting for the colony to tell him to shove it and use their epic problem solving skills to escape and leave him hanging out to dry. Because that's pretty much what the beings did in Egan's story. Egan also has a self-made billionaire creating artificial life, only these are in a computer simulation. He also is using them to solve problems, although he wants them to investigate more about the nature of the universe. He also tortures them to get them to evolve: especially when he realizes that pain makes them evolve faster. In the end, hearkening back to sf's gothic roots (Frankenstein), they turn on him in a very satisfying way. To have Sturgeon's Kidder and Helen O'Loy's creator avoid the fate of all those other Dr. Frankensteins was jarring and quite disturbing. It seemed like some sort of ultra-colonialist hubris. Perhaps it's an indication of just how cocky and confident the Golden Age writers were that they thought that heroes could do things like this and not suffer any consequences for it. No wonder some people got all huffy when the New Wave came along and reminded them that the world isn't usually quite so accommodating.

That's not to say that the Sturgeon story isn't well written, I should mention. I'd put it in the top tier of stories here when judged by writing style (a tier in which I'd also include Heinlein, Blish, Keyes, and Cordwainer Smith). I also thought that this story was thoroughly thought-out and coherently executed in a way that "Baby is Three," the Sturgeon story in Volume IIa of the same series, wasn't.

A Golden Age Odyssey

Starting in on the Golden Age, it feels like I’ve gone back to the beginning. When, at the suggestion of Charles N. Brown and Gary K. Wolfe, I started to beef up on the classics, I first picked up Adventures in Time and Space, edited by Healy and McComas. It collected fiction from 1938 to 1946 and was extremely influential--especially because it was part of a Random House anthology series, and thus stocked widely in libraries all through America.

The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume I is a different beast, even though it contains a few of the same stories. The Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) was founded in 1965 and promptly started handing out Nebula awards. However, they needed a way to recognize the excellent sf written before the Nebulas came into existence. Instead of doing some sort of retro-Nebula award, they created these anthologies. This one covers short stories from 1934-1964, as voted on by the 1966 membership of SFWA and then tweaked by editor Robert Silverberg and others.

I haven’t finished reading the anthology yet, but I wanted to put down some initial thoughts on Stanley G. Weinbaum and John W. Campbell:

The more I read “A Martian Odyssey” (1934) by Stanley G. Weinbaum, the more I’m impressed by it. For one, it depicts a human expedition to Mars crewed by an American, Brit, Frenchman, and German. Considering the fact that it was written between the two World Wars, that must have been about as progressive as writing about joint US-Soviet expeditions in the 70’s. Next, here’s what happens when our hero Jarvis, after crash landing on the Martian surface, first sees some alien life:

“All I could see then was a bunch of black ropy arms tangled around what looked like [...] an ostrich. I wasn’t going to interfere, naturally; if both creatures were dangerous, I’d have one less to worry about.

“But the bird-like thing was putting up a good battle, dealing vicious blows with an eighteen-inch beak, between screeches. And besides, I caught a glimpse or two of what was on the end of those arms!” Jarvis shuddered. “But the clincher was when I noticed a little black bag or case hung about the neck of the bird-thing! It was intelligent! That or tame, I assumed. Anyway, it clinched my decision. I pulled out my automatic and fired into what I could see of its antagonist.”

So instead of being instantly driven mad by something with tentacles, as so many protagonists in the 1930’s did, he takes stock of the situation, identifies a creature that might be intelligent, and acts to protect it. Very cool! So he and the Martian, Tweel, become friends, and the Martian helps him get back to his base. Here’s another amazing passage:

“...don’t get the idea that there was anything screwy about Tweel. In fact, I’m not so sure but that he couldn’t teach our highly praised human intelligence a trick or two. Oh, he wasn’t an intellectual superman, I guess; but don’t overlook the point that he managed to understand a little of my mental workings, and I never even got a glimpse of his!”

Basically Tweel and Jarvis manage to communicate, but mostly on Jarvis’ level. They established some math, and the fact that Mars is the 4th planet from the sun, but Jarvis could never make heads or tails out of Tweel’s language. The Martian never used the same word for the same thing twice in a row, and seemed amused by the human’s fixed name. So Tweel wasn’t just a friendly alien (rare enough in the 30’s), he was also Other in some important way.

I also regret even more Weinbaum’s early death at age 33 (from lung cancer). He died 18 months after “Odyssey” was published (his first publication!) and only published 13 stories in his lifetime. When I read this story I notice that the dialog flows better than most stuff written at the time, that it’s funnier than most others, and that the characters are at least slightly more natural than most--and I wonder: Could Weinbaum have been the Robert Heinlein of his day? Heinlein came on the scene five years later in 1939, with “Life Line.” Then I think about Heinlein’s leaning towards social engineering and politics, and Weinbaum’s obvious love of aliens, and wonder how the field might have been different if he’d lived to age 70.

“A Martian Odyssey” is followed by “Twilight” by John W. Campbell writing as Don A. Stuart (the stories are printed in chronological order of first appearance). Never has a story suffered more by placement. Technically, both "Odyssey" and "Twilight" are club stories (as was H. G. Wells’ The Time Traveller): a person has an encounter, and we hear about it when he tells it to someone else in a safe setting. However, "Odyssey’s" club tale is a lively adventure, packed with good-natured interruptions and jokes as things build to the climax--at which point, just like a real audience, the listeners get quiet as Jarvis finishes the tale. "Twilight" is being recounted by a real estate agent who picks up a time traveller in his car. The time traveller has gone too far into the past after having gone too far into the future. He tells the agent about a future where man has forgotten how to operate the machines that run the world, and mankind is slowly dying out. It is very elegaic, with mentions of sorrowful songs and the like. However, in no way does it read as if a real person were saying it out loud. In fact, it even mentions the agent trying to sing snatches of the mentioned music, heard third hand, and somehow getting some of the impact across to the narrator. Let’s just say that it doesn’t sell the premise very well, shall we?

The other interesting thing about the Campbell story is what it shows about the mindset of the sf community in 1966. Remember, these stories were chosen by nominations and votes of the SFWA members. For the anthology they limited it to only one story per author so as to get the maximum number of authors represented. (By the by, even in 1966 they managed to avoid the all-male TOC problem--they have Judith Merril’s “That Only a Mother” and Lewis Padgett, a pseudonym of husband-wife team Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, writing “Mimsy Were the Borogroves.”) I’m betting that if people had to choose a single Campbell/Don A. Stuart story today, they would pick “Who Goes There.” After all, it was turned into a movie a couple of times, and still influences the field (cf Peter Watts’ “The Things”). But apparently in 1966, people could point to “Twilight” as being more worthy in some way. (I’ll have more to say about alternate choices when I review more of the stories.) It’s interesting to see it laid out so clearly: that not only does the field evolve, but the field’s understanding of itself evolves as well.

Fast Ships, Black Sails (and stuff)

It would have been great if I'd finished reading this in time for "Talk like a Pirate Day," but alas it was not to be. Since starting this work/school schedule, I've dropped from reading 4-6 books a month to only finishing 2. And I'm writing even less. It appears that for this semester at least, actual writing has been displaced by doing stuff with the fencing community. Then I'm working full-time, plus an extra 6-7 hours a week to make up for time spent in class, then 5-10 hours a week on the homework... anyway, it's a very stressful semester. Next semester should be better--the class I'll be taking will have just as much homework, but it will be offered in the evening instead of the afternoon. I'll be able to work normal instead of extended hours, and I expect life to be quite improved. And someday I'll be finished with my Masters altogether! (ETA Winter 2010) I can hardly conceive of all the free time I'll have then... but I dare to dream.

But what about the book? This anthology is a lot of fun, opening with delightful stories by Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette, Rhys Huges, and Kage Baker. One thing I found most interesting about this compilation is how it lays out so many tropes associated with the pirate tale sub-genre. "Boojum" by Bear & Monette takes on the ship who cares for her crew (here with a literally sentient ship swimming in the vastness of space). Baker's "I Begyn As I Mean to Go On" takes on tales of hidden treasure, curses of the dead and terrifying islands and islanders. She also focuses on the historical and religious context of the pirate tale--particularly the Catholic faith of the Spanish traders, sailors and missionaries involved in the Atlantic of the time of piracy's romantic peak--themes that other authors in the collection also utilize. Howard Waldrop's "Avast, Abaft!" runs a bunch of stock tropes together in a literal mash-up involving the HMS Pinafore, the Pirates of Penzance and Dick Deadeye, amongst others. Kelly Barnhill's story involves the lure of sea, and people for whom saltwater flows in their veins--such people cannot be kept shorebound. Justin Howe's "Skillet and Saber" aims a ship's boy towards violence and cannibalism. Conrad Williams' "68 07' 15" N, 31 36' 44" W" portrays monomaniacal obsession.

In another sf take on the take, "Pirate Solutions" by Katherine Sparrow looks at piracy, either maritime or cybernetic, as freedom. Also on the sf side, David Freer and Eric Flint's "Pirates of the Suara Sea" shows us how ships that are the prey of pirates can turn the tables, even on alien seas. The final sf offering, Jayme Lynn Blaschke's "The Whale Below" shows how even the most straight-forward plunder can go horribly wrong when the deckhands take things into their own hands.

Brendan Connell's "We Sleep on a Thousand Waves Beneath the Stars" deals with colonialist relationships with non-European islanders. Offering an alternate-history twist, "A Cold Day in Hell" by Paul Batteiger gives us the cat-and-mouse game of national navy vs. pirate in a 16th century where the "little ice age" instead froze the very seas. (We'll not inquire as to how any of the surviving population found food.) Naomi Novik, counterintuitively not writing in her Master-and-Commander-with-dragons universe, takes on the kidnapped-aristocrat trope and the woman-going-to-sea-disguised-as-a-man trope all in one go in the enjoyable "Araminta, or, the Wreck of the Amphidrake." Closing the book on a strong note, Garth Nix's creations Mr. Fitz and Sir Hereward plot a course (sorry, couldn't help myself) for the (almost)-impossible-to-reach-bastion and creatures from the abyss in "Beyond the Sea Gate of the Scholar-Pirates of Sarskoe."

And for flat-out over-the-top fun, I will mention my favorite of the anthology, located right near the front: Rhys Hughes' "Castor on Troubled Waters," one of the tallest of tall tales I have ever had the pleasure to read.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention a few stories that didn't work for me. Steve Aylett's "Voyage of the Iguana" seems to be absurdist humor in the vein of W. E. Bowman's The Ascent of Rum Doodle. That would be fine--I for one love Bowman's comic novel--except that in "Iguana's" case things seems to simply drag on too long. Chalk this up to senses of humor being notoriously individual; I imagine a lot of people will find it hilarious, but I ended up skipping to the next story after a few pages. I also found "Ironface" by Michael Moorcock to be a weak offering, but that is probably because I have not yet found my way into his "Eternal Champion" universe, of which this three page vignette appears to be part. I imagine that people better versed with Moorcock will find it more enlightening.

However, as a whole I found the stories here both fun to read and thought-provoking. I had never before reflected on the richness contained within the microcosm of pirate's tales until the amazing variety of the stories here drew it to my attention. Bravo to the authors and editors!

A Very Short Fiction Collection

This is a slim volume of short stories, perfect for airline or beach reading. In The Flattered Planet, A. R. Yngve proves himself to be an author of idea-a-minute inventiveness, but not much maturity. Especially with the politically oriented stories; they have all the subtlety of a brick to the head. (On a more general note, with the election of Barack Obama, stories that assume that the default 'President’ is like Bush Jr. aren’t aging well.) Of course, subtle is hard to do in stories with a maximum length of about 20 pages (small pages with large font and significant margins) and a minimum length of 6 words. (Of the flash-fic my favorite is: “He killed for the elixir of eternal youth. He got life.”) And some of the ideas are good: there's beautiful imagery in a story of underground women whose habitat is threatened by oil drilling (although inasmuch as they are portrayed as a threat, they contribute to a rather myopic treatment of women throughout). There’s also a good one about quantum observers and how even mundane things may effect the universe.

On the other hand, some of the stories devolve into outright silliness: in the opening story, one of the longest, increasingly powerful NASA telescopes discover an Earth-like planet. Following an unrealistically accelerated timeline, they see more and more detail, realizing that it's not just Earth-like, it's *exactly like* Earth. Eventually we send a probe, and they realize they're being watched. They paint their Moon in such a way that we can see it, claiming that we are poor copies of them. The viewpoint astronomer believes that they're a poor copy of us, and conceives a plan to send up a message flipping them off. In another, a thinly disguised Cory Doctorow is repeatedly revived after death, and forced to perform for the amusement of tormentors, since the ‘copyright’ on his life and experiences has expired and people can do what they want with him.

That's really where these stories fall down; even when the ideas are intriguing, Yngve tends to take the low road to silliness instead of examining them with any thematic depth. Still, it's much easier to forgive stories when they are <4000 words long; at least you haven't invested that much. So if you want a light read that throws around ideas like they're confetti, you could do worse than this. However, even with all the ideas in the air here, due to execution none of them completely rise to the level of thought-provoking.

Edited to Add: A. R. Yngve's Response

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!

A Walk on the Quirky Side

December’s F&SF shows off the magazine’s quirky side. First up: “A Foreign Country” by Wayne Wightman. In it, a third-string reporter gets assigned to cover one of the nut-job third party candidates in a Presidential race. The candidate, Faber, wanders around the countryside, talkin’ to folks, eating lots of food, and promising “happy times” ahead. To the shock of everyone not reading the story, he actually gets elected. And he makes the reporter/narrator his chief of staff. Faber doesn’t appear to actually do anything except eat; the reporter has to make up all sorts of stuff to tell Congress. But then things get really weird: people, usually unpleasant people, start disappearing. And then folks start to forget all about the unpleasant people, so they’re not even disturbed by the sudden absences. The reporter is going nuts over all this, but only finds one other person, also a reporter, that is similarly upset. Faber won’t answer any questions directly. The ending feels a little old-fashioned once you finally glean what’s probably been going on, but over all I enjoyed this little Twilight Zone episode.

Completely different in both tone and subject matter is “Fallen Angel” by Eugene Mirabelli. Set in 1967, an angel comes crashing through this guy’s roof. She’s messed up and has a hell of an attitude. He becomes devoted to her. The story centers entirely on their relationship, as screwed up as they both are. Its got sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll, and it’s very intense, especially since it’s set entirely in a studio apartment. The sense of claustrophobia is pervasive. It doesn’t end easily, either. There’s an extent to which the speculative element is almost unnecessary—this story could have been written almost as well about any two fucked-up young folks; but the intensity of this story stays with you. Another one to remember come awards time.

“Leave” by Robert Reed examines attitudes towards war. The story centers on the son of the narrator and his wife’s best friends. All the adults were peace activists back in the day. The other couple has a son who turns out to be quite a golden boy; as such he risks being recruited for a secret alien war. The background of all this is fascinating: people who had disappeared years ago start returning, telling stories of an alien conflict out in space, sometimes even with artefacts. It’s also a good character portrait on several levels. Golden boy himself is almost incidental—the center around which everyone else revolves—but his parents, his sister, and the relationship between the two older couples are well-drawn. In the end we get a brief glimpse of the boy and his motivations on his way out the door, and then the narrator has to decide what to tell the parents. As endings go its not terribly challenging, but this does strike a well-thought-out note on its theme of how different people feel about wars and how that can affect relationships.

This year being F&SF’s 60th anniversary, they’ve been running some classic reprints; not the stories that get anthologized over and over, but the quirky stuff that perhaps younger readers haven’t seen before. “The Alarming Letters From Scottsdale” by Warner Law definitely delivers the quirkiness (the intro refers to it as ‘demented charm’). Told in epistolary form, it involves letters between a publisher and a popular mystery author. The writer has recently picked up a dog, and becomes increasingly obsessed with the animal. The dog may be a reincarnation of another writer, perhaps it’s a muse. The letters get weirder and weirder. The publishers try to get help to the author, but it doesn’t end well, either for the author or the dog. Yet the way Law writes, it’s funny even while you’re feeling bad for the dog. I have to say: nice choice on the part of the editors.

Albert E. Cowdrey, who is on my list of authors to watch, contributes “A Skeptical Spirit.” Set, as usual for Cowdrey, in the South, this story deals with a spirit researcher who takes up residence in a haunted house. He gets to know all the spirits with the help of his house-keeper, who runs seances. However, one of the former inhabitants of the house causes serious problems, not least of which revolves around the fact that the spirit, having been a skeptic and an atheist in life, cannot now believe that it is dead. Not central to the story, but pervading its every scene, is a depiction of race relations and how they’ve changed over the last century. There are still obvious race and class boundaries in the modern day, but compared to what the old spirit was living with, it’s an amazing difference. This story isn’t award-worthy in the way that “The Overseer” was earlier this year, but it will make a fine addition to the eventual collection of Cowdrey’s short fiction that I hope to see someday.

Finishing off the quirky for the issue we have “How the Day Runs Down” by John Langan. This is his contribution to John Joseph Adams’ zombie anthology of 2008, The Living Dead. This story has the oddest structure: it’s written as if describing a play, with the stage manager on stage, narrating different vignettes to the audience, with stage, lighting, and sound-effect cues thrown in. It’s incredibly effective, and although I’m not a huge zombie fan I really appreciated this story. It’s especially impressive as the fourth wall between the action and the audience gets progressively thinner. Langan has a masterful command of atmosphere and tone in this story. This is one that sticks with you, possibly award-worthy. In fact, it makes me want to read some other stories in Living Dead to see if there are other gems like this that I might have missed.

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.

In Which Suspension of Disbelief = FAIL

Analog's December 2008 issue starts out in a less-than-promising way. "Misquoting the Star" by David Bartell begins: "No one wanted to be remembered as The Voice at the End of the World, so when the asteroid nicknamed "Big Bastard" exploded into the Earth, the event went unnarrated. No one wanted to direct the angles from the cameras on the Moon, on the Earth, in their orbits and Lagrange points, so the video feeds cycled mosaics of them all, automatically." This didn't help me suspend my disbelief for the story; it is my fervent belief that a number of journalists/newscasters secretly hope that the world will end someday, just so they can report it. In my own personal experience I've heard paramedics wish for a jetliner crash, just so they can respond to it--same concept.

After that opening, I never fully trusted the story. The basic background, that a handful of people escaped the Earth before it was wiped out by a dinosaur-killer asteroid, was no problem (and apparently was described in a previously published story). However, this story centers on a woman who administers one of the colonies. She starts to fall for an African guy. Then she discovers he's got AIDS (all the people in the colony were supposed to be screened against this sort of virus, but his father had given up his seat for him). Aaaand she discovers that it's still incurable, despite a quack doctor's attempt to do so (not quite sure how that was necessary to the story, except to delay the inevitable). But here's the part that I really had problems with: she eventually understands that when they resettle Earth, things won't be perfect no matter how much she wants them to be, so she will eventually let this guy return to Earth instead of forcing him to stay on the Moon forever. Really? You're going to let a guy with AIDS possibly re-introduce this deadly virus to an otherwise virus-free population (maybe you'll ask him to promise nicely not to have unprotected sex?) just because the future won’t be a utopia? There's not-perfect, and then there's being stupid, and I felt that this character ended up on the wrong side of that line. Oh well.

Next up is a story by Jason Sanford, whose work I had previously enjoyed in Interzone ("The Ships Like Clouds, Risen by Their Rain"). Here he gives us a story with another interesting background. This near future Earth has a made-up religion, and its members are terrorists trying to keep people on Earth, away from space. Before the story started, they exploded a bomb that damaged a lot of satellites. This keeps a woman raised in this religion from becoming an astronaut. She's pretty disillusioned, but eventually agrees to help one of her co-religionists with a repair mission (they've been challenging the blockade with high-altitude aerostat balloons). However, she realizes that her repair mission is supposed to be one-way, and would threaten a NASA installation. She eventually saves the day, causes her priest and employer to be arrested, and winds up back in NASA's good graces. This is a good adventure story, no doubt, but I felt like the world-building could support a deeper examination into religious fanaticism, and I was a bit disappointed that it didn't happen. No worries, Sanford's world-building skills are good enough that I'm sure he'll get there someday.

"Moby Digital" ended up being a "skip" story for me. It features a VR environment where students can immerse themselves in a fictional world. A group of students gets trapped there while examining "Moby Dick," and a tech has to go in to save them. They'll die if he doesn't, because when the power runs out on the VR modules they contract and crush the user. I refuse to follow a story motivated by incredibly bad/stupid/unsafe engineering (especially in our time of over-engineering and over-warning-labeling everything because of liability issues). Basically, if the engineering of the modules was half-way competent, there'd be no story. I’ll pass.

Lastly, we get the second installment of Robert Sawyer's new serial, "Wake." I reviewed part one and liked it, and I liked this section as well. It introduced a new plot thread in having two sign-language capable simians talk to each other over the Internet, and a chimp subsequently developing the ability to paint figures instead of abstracts. The math-whiz blind girl develops more abilities with her new implant, and also deals with a boorish high school dance date. There's an unfortunate moment when a sulky walk home could have been avoided if she'd brought her cellphone, and it's hard to imagine a Western teen being without one even at a dance, but I still like the way the character is written. I'm waiting to see how all the plot threads connect; I can see their thematic similarities, but they're not meshing yet.

I'm not planning to continue this project of keeping up with this much magazine short fiction in 2009, as I've already mentioned. However, I am considering finishing "Wake" and also the serial that David Brin is running over at Baen's, "Shoresteading." These are reliable authors, good storytellers, and I'm always curious to see what they'll come up with next.

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.

W00t!1!!!

You are now reading the blog of an official (if probationary) Editorial Assistant at the award-nomination-generating Fiction Department of Strange Horizons! Yay, go me! I am very grateful to the current team for giving me this opportunity, and I'm looking forward to getting started with it.

If you look over my current list of activities--getting a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering, writing book reviews for several outlets, writing a paper for ICFA 2009, designing a research project for ICFA 2010, keeping my house in some semblance of order, and trying to read and review all the fiction short stories from Analog, Asimov's, F&SF, Interzone and Baen's Universe--fitting in being an Editorial Assistant means something will have to go. Given that my SH work will revolve around short stories, my short-story reading habits are at the top of that list. So 2008 will possibly be the last year in which I'll be a truly informed Hugo award short story nominator; it's a sacrifice I'll just have to live with. Being able to help out future award-winners is much, much cooler. I'll try to finish out the 2008 issues, even if it takes to Feb. 2009, but that will likely be it for short fiction reviews around here.

I do have a favor to ask of those of you who read this. Given my new position, I'm tempted to finally apply for membership in SFWA (as an affiliate). My understanding is that my review work for SH qualified me before, but now it seems more official. For affiliate members they require you to list three SFWA members who would be willing to vouch for you (in lieu of requiring story sales). I'm willing to bet that I can wrangle up three people to say nice things about me, but I don't know which of my friends are SFWA members. Help! If you are, or know someone who is and knows me but doesn't read this blog, could you drop me a line via email or comments? Thanks! I'm planning on securing my status as a unique little snowflake by possibly being one of the only people with memberships in IAFA, SFWA and IEEE--if you know anyone else doing this, for the love of ghod don't tell me!

The Issue Before the Current Issue of Analog

Analog continues to deliver thoughtful stories that are more or less well-written. In the nature of thought-experiments, of course most of these stories are rather shamefully contrived. In "The Last Temptation of Katerina Savitskaya" by H. G. Stratmann aliens have terraformed Mars and allowed only two people, a man and a woman, to live there. Then they put them through a series of tests and offer them ultimate power. The story focuses on the reactions of the humans, but I would have liked to see more about the motivation of the aliens—what the hell could they be thinking?

Likewise in "The Fourth Thing" by Stephen L. Burns—aliens wake a woman up one morning, tell her the world is going to end in an hour or so, they can only save a few people (including herself), and she can only bring four easily carried things with her. Luckily she's an assistant librarian... you can see where this is going. I’ve noticed that short story writers can never go wrong appealing to people who love books. Can’t imagine why that could be.

However, one story stood out for me with some particularly interesting speculation. "Invasion of the Pattern Snatchers" by David W. Goldman investigates the possibility of the brain being damaged in such a way that it consistently fails to recognize certain patterns... say a parasite that wants not to be noticed. (In a broad sense this is perfectly possible. In my Neuroscience class I just learned about patients with damage to their right parietal lobe. They simply fail to notice things on their left. If you show them a clock and ask them to draw it, they’ll draw a circle and numbers 1 through 7, then leave the left part empty.) The plot involves long-distance territorial conflict between planets. One planet’s modus operandi is to drop slow-acting biological agents that lead to planet-wide sterilization over a couple of generations. Then they swoop down and colonize. The send a human agent to a planet where this failed to work. The ability of the brain to recognize both patterns and their significance comes into play as the un-conquered population recognizes what is going on and modifies the agent's pattern recognition facilities. The story is nothing particularly ground-breaking or award-winning, but the speculation on the power of the brain and how it may be modified was well done. The brain works in mysterious ways and it seems that the more we know about those ways the more mysterious they get.

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!

Slowly Catching Up on Magazines

First off, I did read F&SF for August, and nothing there particularly stood out. I didn’t skip any of the stories, but neither did any of them rise above the RUMIR designation (again from Joanna Russ’ comment: “The stories are routine, unoriginal, mildly interesting, and readable”).

Most of the stories in the August Asimov’s fall into the same category (of course, almost by definition, most short stories everywhere will be RUMIR). “Old Man Waiting” by Robert Reed ends with a good twist but doesn’t have much else. “Lucy” equates a robotic probe on Saturn being abandoned with people in an apartment complex being unpleasant to one another. “What You Are About to See” by Jack Skillingstead has the misfortune to follow one of the non-RUMIR stories (about which more later) which does quantum effects much better, leaving this one suffering in comparison. (It doesn’t help that Skillingstead’s style has never worked well for me; I appreciate it intellectually but it’s usually so unrelentingly depressing that I remain disengaged emotionally. This one impressed me the most of his that I’ve read so far.) “Wilmer or Wesley” is a nicely ambiguous tale by Carol Emshwiller—the protagonist may be human but is being displayed as if he’s some sort of experimental ape. The moral seems to be “treat animals as you would want to be treated.” Finally “Radio Station St. Jack” by Neal Barrett, Jr. continues his post-apocalyptic future. Somewhere around northern Texas, various groups have devolved to roughly Civil War times. There’s a settlement that’s basically friendly with local “Indians,” and they’re all threatened by a big bad group of bandits. A local “priest” runs a radio station and as a local leader, has to try to save the town. I wasn’t totally into the story but I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt… until the end when it turns out that all of the priest’s actions didn’t matter and the story was resolved from completely out of left field. Quite frustrating.


However, none of that should detract from the two most interesting stories in the issue, “Lagos” by Matthew Johnson and “Divining Light” by Ted Kosmatka.

“Lagos” takes place in a near future Nigeria. Lower class women find work going into VR and controlling various remote robotic appliances for rich Westerners—robot vacuums, dish washers and the like. Safrat is our protagonist and her brother (who sells water to make a little money; he’s hoping for one of his relatives to find him a better job) discovers that she talks in her sleep, in English. Needless to say, the VR firewalls are acting a little funny. They go see a traditional healer and find out what the problem is. At the same time her supervisor believes that her dreams may point him to a fortune, but he gets a big surprise when he tracks it down.

I appreciated this story on several levels. One is simply the fact that it is set in Nigeria and all the actors in the story are Nigerians: good, bad, and indifferent. I also appreciated the extrapolation: much like some spammers already hire kids in third-world countries to decipher all those little random “type the letters you see” boxes meant to defeat automated spam-bots, one could easily imagine it being cheaper by far to hire third-world women to run appliances than to come up with adequate artificial intelligence to do so. Finally, I appreciated that the characters (to a limited extent) rise above the level of stereotypes—difficult to do with a short story. Particularly the supervisor is not one-dimensionally greedy and exploitive, although others around him are. Also, the “shaman” is neither the deus ex machina nor a useless impediment, but someone who helps to resolve the mystery. Overall, a nicely done story that helps to push sf to more awareness of the non-Western world’s future.

That said, the real stand-out in this issue is Kosmatka’s novelette “Divining Light.” I expect to see this in many Year’s Bests and a whole bunch of awards ballots. It’s one of the few stories to unflinchingly wrestle with the implications of quantum wave function collapse, and it does it with style and emotional realism. It is pretty bleak (the tone closely resembles his previous widely recognized story, “The Prophet of Flores”), but fascinating and unique.

Our protagonist is a burned-out scientist, once an up-and-coming star. A friend takes pity on him and hires him on at an R&D firm. To amuse himself, he starts replicating the famous double-slit experiment of quantum physics. If you fire a photon stream (beam of light) at two slits, the pattern on a screen on the other side will be a diffraction pattern; the photons act like waves and interfere with each other. However, if you place a detector on one of the slits, the pattern become two solid groupings behind the two slits—the act of measuring which slit the photons go through makes them behave like particles, not waves. That part is absolutely true by the way, and it’s weird enough.

Then comes the big “what if” of the story: what if it makes a difference whether or not an observer knows about the detector results? Here’s what he does: he runs the experiment with the detector on (one would expect 2 groupings on the screen behind the slits). Without checking the screen, he clears the memory of the detector, then looks at the screen—it’s an interference pattern as if the detector had never been on. He calls it retrocausality: the system behavior depends on the actions of a conscious observer in the future. If a conscious observer doesn’t “collapse the wave function” (cause the pattern to go from interference to blobs), it remains an interference pattern.

Kosmatka goes all the way with the implications of this: they start testing the meaning of a “conscious” observer. They rig up a series of lights so that animals have the capacity to collapse the wave function; none of them can. In a twist I hadn’t thought of but makes perfect, depressing sense, a pro-life group decides to test fetuses in the womb to see when they become conscious. They refuse to release their results—in fact as studies continue, it turns out not all humans can collapse the wave function. However, at this point the whole thing has already become some sort of test—of “humanness,” “consciousness,” or “soul,” depending on your agenda. In the end, the characters have to interpret and deal with what they’ve discovered. It’s an absolute triumph of taking pure, hard science and digging into the human implications. Although I might wish for a tone less bleak (I really think it’s possible to consider quantum indeterminacy without becoming an alcoholic wreck), I appreciate the characters he’s created and their investigations: pursuing the truth of the universe no matter how bizarre, and not shying away from the consequences. I haven’t done this story justice—go read it!

"The Man With Two Left Feet, and Other Stories" P. G. Wodehouse

The Man With Two Left Feet was one of P. G. Wodehouse’s first short story collections. Its claim to fame is that it contains the first appearance of a Jeeves and Wooster story, “Extricating Young Gussie.” However, don’t turn to this collection if you’re looking for Jeeves—he only has two lines and is in every way a background character. None of the other stories deal with this duo, and “Young Gussie” is not the stand-out story in this bunch. The two stories about the dog stand out the best (“The Mixer” I & II). Nonetheless, I loved this collection. The stories are light, fluffy, and enjoyable—perfect for de-stressing. They are masterful works of light comedy. Most of them are trite and forgettable—even the Jeeves and Wooster story, if you don’t know what comes after it—but Wodehouse’s style is something to behold. Reading this collection gave me a better context to appreciate some authors today. I would argue that Connie Willis is the closest thing we have to Wodehouse today, despite her fiction noticeably lacking valets.

Most of the time when people call an author “Wodehousian,” they’re talking about imitating the Jeeves/Wooster pairing. For instance, the perfectly blatant Phule series by the late Robert Asprin and the (still living) Peter Heck. In that series (six books so far) a rich toff and his improbably competent servant get involved with a military force, In Space. Only slightly less blatant is Charles Stross’ novella, included in Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Two titled “Trunk and Disorderly.” In it a dissolute rich gentlemen bounces around various family and social obligations, surviving only thanks to his robot butler. It’s not a terribly successful story, but it is clearly a Wodehouse homage. Nonetheless, the writer who gets closest to Wodehouse today is Connie Willis. This has less to do with her plots (when she decided to directly reference a pre-WWI humorist she chose Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), not a Wodehouse story) and more to do with her style. Wodehouse’s key tactics involved caricature and comedic complication, things that Willis excels at.

Caricature is obvious in almost all of Wodehouse’s stories, at least in this collection. He exaggerates certain personality traits and makes them the stand-out core of the characters involved. The self-absorbed writer is 100% Self-Absorbed; Bertie Wooster’s terrifying Aunt Agatha is the personification of the Authoritarian woman making sure her family behaves Properly; the dog in the two “Mixer” stories is 100% Dog, always trying to please given his own understanding of things. Connie Willis does this wonderfully as well in her comedic stories and some of her serious ones as well. I’m particularly reminded of the Over Protective Mother, who is also Aggressively and Uselessly Helpful from Doomsday Book, the Single-Minded Historical Recreationist whose demands drive the plot of To Say Nothing of the Dog and the (equally as severe as Aunt Agatha) Aunt Who Insists on Proper Manners from Willis’ recent Hugo Award winning novella “All Seated On the Ground.” Given today’s literary expectations, these caricatures may lead some to suspect Willis of writing cardboard characters. What she, Wodehouse, and every political cartoonist in the universe knows however, is that those instantly recognizable exaggerations allow us make the character into the people in our own lives who fit the stereotype—we end up filling in the gaps with real people we know, a sort of add-your-own-realism reading experience.

The other aspect that Wodehouse and Willis share is the comedic complication. Wodehouse stories are almost impossible to summarize: you’re either going to give no explanation at all (the dog ends up saving the house from the burglar—but it’s really funny!) or you have to re-tell the entire story (so the dog’s adopted by a criminal, but he doesn’t know he’s a criminal, and the guy goes out to the country and trains the dog to ignore him but the dog just thinks he’s shy and… oh just read it, will you!). The relatively simply plots are kept entertaining by throwing more and more obstacles in the way of the happy ending, before having everything resolve in the most improbable way. Again, this characterizes a lot of Willis’ fiction. To briefly summarize “All Seated on the Ground” (a journalist and a choir director figure out how to talk to aliens) is to lose all the humor, whereas to convey the humour you end up telling the entire story (the aliens just stand there and glare until one day in a mall they sit down and the fundamentalist thinks they’re protesting the lingerie store and the biologist thinks it may be the scents from the Yankee Candle store and they lock off the mall with all the Christmas shoppers including the 7th grade choir and no one will listen to the director or the journalist and they look just like the journalist’s unpleasant aunt and… yeah just read it.) What’s particularly impressive about Willis is that she uses this technique in her dramatic books as well as her comedic ones—Doomsday Book and Passage have, if anything, more of this sort of thing than To Say Nothing of the Dog. I appreciate that, since it brings out that part of real life that tends to get left on the metaphorical cutting room floor of literature—the committee meetings, misunderstandings, and personality conflicts that arise whenever a group of people try to do anything, which consists of about 90% of everything we do outside the home. These things happen no matter how trivial or weighty the stakes, and one can either laugh at it or throw your hands up in despair. Wodehouse and Willis see how incredibly silly things can get, and yet how we always seem to muddle through anyways. They decide to laugh.

I’m afraid that I’ve said as much about Connie Willis as P. G. Wodehouse here (and not enough about Terry Pratchett, who also does this in spades but with a different spin). That’s because the style of the pieces in this collection was much more of a revelation to me than the stories themselves. The stories themselves don’t necessarily stand the test of time—the only ones that will really stick with me are the ones from the point of view of a dog, in which he captures a doggy spirit and perspective with absolutely perfect pitch. The other stories tend to concern men and women falling in love in New York: struggling playwrights, dancing instructors, former dancing instructors, vaudeville performers, athletes and bookshop owners. Boys meet girls, boys and girls find themselves flung apart for various reasons, silly things happen, and boys and girls find themselves together at last. It’s the style with which they’re executed that makes these particularly enjoyable. For one more comparison, look at Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books. Light, fluffy, but executed with remarkable style, especially in the caricature aspect, that makes them stand out. (Although to be fair, Pratchett has developed much more gravitas in his subject matter than Wodehouse ever did, I suspect.)

These Wodehouse stories are not the sort of classics that you should read because you have to. You should read these because they’re fun. They age well, and they strike a wonderful balance. You can feel noble and productive (you’re reading classics), while still having a stress-free and laugh-filled reading experience. Try doing that with Thomas More’s Utopia! (Which I’ll be tackling sometime soon, ghods save me.)