Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 2009

“Dragon’s teeth”, Alex Irvine This is Lieberian high fantasy, with a strong but amoral protagonist and a bit of ironic wit. The King’s Guardsman Paulus is sent on a mission to slay a dragon for the queen. He does his duty, but he is also looking out for himself along the way. The story is littered with references to Paulus’ earlier adventures, giving the story a somewhat incomplete feel when read on its own. Despite that, it holds together well, and the story is one of the highlights of this issue.

“Bad matter”, Alexandra Duncan A university linguist, Dr. Saraih Hertz, investigates a mystery left behind by her late father, a famed anthropologist. He’s left behind another heir among the merchant spaceship crewes. The story is interesting and well-developed, but it felt like there’s too much going on here, lots of ideas thrown in the air but not developed, or at least not explained. Much is made of the protagonist wearing the hijab, and being uncomfortable with less modest dress in the crewes, but there’s no explanation of how a Dr. Hertz came to live in such a modest culture. Footnotes emphasize Saraih’s academic outlook, but don’t add much to the story. The crewes speak a highly modified language, but there’s not even a passing evaluation from the linguist protagonist on the connection of this dialect to English or other languages, and there wasn’t really enough length to the story for me to get the hang of it. A fine story, but a little bit busy.

“Farewell Atlantis”, Terry Bisson This story starts out with a disconcerting, disconnected statement, “I remember exactly when it all started, this incredible adventure. It was during The Look of Love, when she wakes up after the operation…”, and two people meeting in a movie theater. It’s a good mesh with the mental state of those two people, who turn out to be watching weeks of continuous movies as reorientation after thousands of years of suspended animation. The story goes on in a somewhat disassociated tone, eventually revealing the what and why of the characters’ past, or at least their conjectures about it. Quite good, even if it requires a bit of mental drift to get the hang of.

“Hell of a fix”, Matthew Hughes I could imagine this infernal comedy (as its been called on the F&SF forum) coming from the pen of one of the genre’s wittier 1940’s greats, maybe Kornbluth or Boucher, and the “deal with the devil” set-up has been a staple of the genre since at least that time. The idea that labor relations in Hell might echo those on earth also seems to make this a story out of time. One thing that distinguishes Hughes’ story from a piece from the 40’s is that it’s about twice as long as it likely would have been back then. But none of that makes the story unenjoyable. Hughes has great wit, and the story is fun all the way through.

“Illusions of Tranquility”, Brendan DuBois Eva is a worker on a struggling moon colony, one that needs to do whatever it can to obtain extra cash from Earth. Eva’s role is to fleece wealthy tourists by selling them “unique” bits of moon history; if that fails, she must sell her body. The colony is also trying to maintain the illusion of prosperity to give its donors confidence, so tourists and colonists are strictly segregated into regions with vastly different economic rules. The story didn’t work well for me. First, DuBois fails to convey the brutality (or hard-edged reality) behind the deception of the tourist zone. Worse, the shock line that ends the story, meant to carry earnest weight, comes off as light-hearted, or even comedic. Takes on a significant theme, but doesn’t support it well.

“The Blight family singers”, Kit Reed A portrait of a washed-up folk-singing act, living on the drama of their backstory. But with no sympathetic character, I didn’t find much entertainment in it.

“The economy of vacuum”, Sarah Thomas Astronaut Virginia Rickles is stranded on the moon when the American government crumbles down below. An excellent melancholy story develops as she survives thirty years alone, and then is discovered by a new spacefaring nation that doesn’t have the capability for compassion needed to rescue here. Another highlight story for the issue.

“Iris”, Nancy Springer Another melancholy story, a brief exploration of new discoveries at the end of life.

“Inside time”, Tim Sullivan Herel Jablov not only designed a time machine, he joined the first mission aboard it. When the mission goes wrong, he finds himself, with only one companion, stuck on a automated “station” somehow outside (or inside?) of time. Quite good, even though I saw the trick ending coming from a few pages away.

“The man who did something about it“, Harvey Jacobs Colin Kabe is an auto mechanic, but one who normally works on cars valued in the 6 figures and above. When he’s asked to work on an out-of-this-world vehicle, he finally gets his chance to do something about it. It’s not a story that would benefit from having its secrets given away, so I’ll only say its worth the read.

“I needs must part, the policeman said”, Richard Bowes The story starts out a bit disjointed, but it does reward holding on until you get into it. If this is fiction, its an incredibly nuanced exploration of the situation of an older man dealing with a serious illness. If this is autobiographical, its a much more revealing look at an author than we normally get in genre writing. I’m not sure I could read an entire magazine of such intense stories, but to have one like this come along once in a while is breathtaking.

The Knight, Gene Wolfe

This is the first half of a “novel in two volumes”, so I’ll just make a few notes here and wrap it all up when I get through The Wizard, which is near the top of my reading pile.

Somehow this story takes a premise that dates at least to Mark Twain, a young boy from the American midwest transported to a magical fairy-world, and manages not to make it seem trite; at least as long as I was immersed in the story. Luckily, there’s very few jarring incidents in the story to break the spell and make me step back and think about how primitive a skeleton underlies the flesh.

One of the jarring elements, though I suspect it’s intentional, is the way the protagonist clumsily integrates himself into a new culture. Coming from middle America, he’s not prepared to bow and simper before knights or haggle with shopkeepers. Magically grown into the heroic adult body of the knight Sir Able of the High Heart, he mostly gets through this by bullying those he encounters. Those bullying incidents make it difficult to wish Able well, despite the way they’re subtly presented in his own re-telling. However I expect to see Able grow out of his bullying ways in the second volume, which would turn what starts out as an unsympathetic rendering of the protagonist into a carefully played thread of character development. (But Stephen Frug’s review implies this may not happen.)

And then, this is Gene Wolfe. If you’re looking for an unreliable narrator, you’ve got it. If you’re looking for layers and mysteries behind what is presented on the page, they’re there. If you swoon for poetic prose, well, in this case Wolfe has done an excellent job of mimicking the style of a teenaged writer without allowing clumsy construction to interfere with the story.

I’m looking forward to see how this story wraps up.

The Compleat Werewolf, Anthony Boucher

Anthony Boucher is best-known in the SF world as one of the founding editors of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. As a writer he’s better-known for his mysteries and reviews, but this is a collection of science fiction and fantasy stories.

The balance is mostly toward contemporary fantasy, but with a bit of a science fictional flair. The fantastic elements are presented as mechanistic and analyzable, and the story often resolves with the characters coming to a “logical” new understanding of whatever magic they’ve encountered. And the science fiction stories have an element of the fantastic, as the technology is so advanced, at least relative to the time of writing, as to achieve Clarkian magic.

Many of the stories are pessimistic, usually involving protagonists’ wishes being fulfilled, but not delivering the hoped-for satisfaction. In “We print the truth” a newspaper editor wishes that his paper will only print the truth, but doesn’t reckon on the truth only extending to the limits of his circulation. In “Snulbug” a captive demon’s ability to travel to the future doesn’t grant the summoner the expected power to benefit from predictive knowledge.

Most of the stories are clearly dated, with the formal but terse diction of the 1940’s, and the purely anglo American male cast of characters, with women appearing mostly as scenery and objects to be won as prizes. Only Molly of “We print the truth” really breaks this mold, though even she can be pigeonholed as the tomboy type, ignored by the hero to his great embarrassment when he realizes her feelings for him.

One exceptional story, that would stand up well today, is “They Bite”, a dark fantasy in which dangerous desert dwellers turn out not to be the legends the protagonist believes them to be. And even the other stories, though they show their age, clearly rank with the best SF (broad sense) of their era.

Eclipse Three

I was able to “sneak” in to the World Fantasy Convention here in San Jose last week in the guise of press. It was great fun to meet some local authors, and I got a post for Metblogs out of it. I also got to sit in on a couple of readings and about half of Gordon Van Gelder’s panel on 60 years of F&SF magazine. To come to the point, though, this collection from Night Shade Books and editor Jonathan Strahan was my take-home from the dealer room.

“The Pelican Bar”, Karen Joy Fowler A willful young woman (as they used to say) is sent away for to a tough-love camp in Mexico, which turns out to be particularly brutal, and from which she dreams of escape. The story’s well-written, and especially strong in exploring the Norah’s psychology and internal dialog, but I never quite caught on to the motivations of the reform camp operators — why they ran the camp as they did, what they were gaining from it, and why they eventually allow Norah her freedom.

Asimov’s, January 2010

Marya and the pirate, Geoffrey A. Landis Space pirate Domingo Bonaventura attempts to hijack a water shipment on its way across the solar system, but runs into unexpected problems. As usual from NASA scientist Landis, the technology is all kept pretty close to the present day and seems very plausible. He doesn’t quite break out the greek letters to explain it, but he goes pretty deep into the technical details. And yet, he also works in a pretty exciting plot revolving around a major systems failure on a Earth-orbitting space station. The one glaring flaw its the wildly unbelievable relationship that develops between the pirate and the sole crewmember of the captured vessel. The story is a throwback practically to the 1940’s with its tech-heavy plot, which is great, but I don’t think the equally retrograde assumption that any female character is automatically available to our hero needs to be added to complete the nostalgic tone.

The Word for World is Forest, Ursula K. Leguin

The Word for the World is Forest was originally (1972) published in Again, Dangerous Visions. Le Guin developed it into a 1976 novel of the same name, but the copy I read has only a 1972 copyright, so I guess it must be a reprint of the novella version.

The story revolves around the colony world of Athshe, where Earth humans (one of several human races in Le Guin’s Ekumen) are exploiting the native human people and forest resources; disguising their avarice and brutality behind a facade of standard procedures and official protocols.

Roughly every third chapter is told from the point of view of Davidson, one of the most brutal of the human colonists. He refuses to recognize the natives as human, and wishes his commanders would simply recognize what he sees as “reality” and give him a free hand to use whatever means or methods can most efficiently harvest the timber the colony is meant to return to Earth. These chapters read today as somewhat heavy-handed in their depiction of the military-industrial mindset. But to me they had more interest as what looks a lot like a direct attack on the practical hyper-competent hero of golden age SF.

From the title, I had expected the book to dwell more on ecological issues. But, while ecological destruction by the colonists is a major issue, its just one of several conflicts going on in the story. I had also expected a more downbeat ending, probably with ecological impacts spiraling out of control, something the colonists ought to have expected if they had only reflected on the quirks of the native language. Thankfully, instead of pushing through with the plotline implied in the title, the story took a direction and came to a conclusion I hadn’t anticipated.

Another point of interest here is that the story does something that is surprisingly rare in SF, and shows a culture in the midst of a major technological upheaval. A major plot element is the introduction of the ansible, a means of instant communication across interstellar distances, eliminating the light speed barrier to communication. Rather than take the new technology as established, Le Guin shows it being introduced for the first time to the colony world, where some colonists disbelieve it, others pretend they can ignore it, and some fall right into line with the instructions coming to them from Earth over the ansible link. Unfortunately the introduction of the ansible points out what is possibly the the one critically unbelievable aspect of the whole story: the idea of a colony seperated from its homeworld by a 27 year lightspeed gulf continuing to follow any orders at all from back home.

Even with these few faults, its clear why the story was so well received in the early 70’s, and the story can still be read as an important comment on its time (and on the SF of the time), even if it doesn’t have the ageless quality that would maintain its relevance today.

Babel-17, Samuel R. Delany

Continuing what has turned into a recent tour of the New Wave, I come to Babel-17. This novel first appeared in 1966. It won the Nebula in ‘66 and was short-listed for the Hugo award in 1967.

Robert at The Valve was dissappointed by this novel; he writes that this book is representative of award winners that represent the mediocre mainstream rather than the greatest potential of art. I can’t support this argument. Considering that Babel-17 was in contention against a Heinlein novel, in only the second year of the Nebula awards, it shows a substantial bias towards art over popularity that the Nebula voters chose the Delany novel (in a tie with Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon).

It’s true that the novel has dated itself somewhat. Its main theme is an exploration of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (see Wikipedia) that language strongly limits thought. More recent linguistic thought has all but rejected Sapir-Whorf, more or less nullifying the premise of Babel-17. But remember, the premise could be recast with the word “language” replaced by “memes” and it would have seemed current into the ’90’s.

And anyway, the novel does still have something to offer. For one, the first half or so of the book is a long sequence in which the heroine, Rydra Wong, is searching out a crew for her starship amongst the Transport community, who’s habits are somewhat wild, to say the least. She’s accompanied by a Customs officer, clearly representing mainstream and “straight” (in every sense) culture. The interaction is a direct comment on what 1960’s mainstream American culture had to learn from the various peripheral subcultures around it, and it’s still valid today.

The second half of the book brings the Sapir-Whorf premise more into play, as Wong takes her starship and crew out to find the source of a mysterious language that has been recorded in radio transmissions preceding various attacks on the Alliance government. This section also reflects a bit of the 1960’s SF’s romantic infatuation with the aristocracy, another feature that dates the novel. Nonetheless, the later part of the book does develop an action-oriented plot, without sacrificing Delany’s poetic writing style.

Given Delany’s style, and apt social commentary, Babel-17 is still well worth reading, even if other aspects of the book have aged in the 43 years since the original publication.

Anathem, Neal Stephenson

I finally broke down and read this 900-page monster. Of course, it was worth it.

One of my first impressions was that the book reminds me of nothing so much as James Clavell’s Shogun, where the enjoyment is partly the sense of accomplishment from learning a heap of Japanese words (just checking Wikipedia I was surprised to find that Anathem doesn’t just share its excessive page count and foreign vocabulary with Shogun, but also the name Erasmus, the protagonist in Anathem and the hero’s ship in Shogun). Stephenson got to make up his own language to pick out some indicative vocabulary words to salt his book with. So we get “saunts” (instead of saints) living in “concents” (instead of convents) and the variations in the words do tell you something about the world where the action is played out, and give a feeling of richness to the imaginary world.

Certainly the action is a bit abstruse, and spread rather thin through those 900 pages. It would be fair to say the book is unbalanced, favoring world-building above character and plot development. But Stephenson’s genius is that he can make a story about a bunch of monkish philosophers sitting around a table discussing the fine points of Platonic Idealism (excuse me, “the Hylaean Theoric World”; luckily there’s a glossary so I don’t have to look far to get the spelling of these things) into a page-turner. This book is probably 60% infodump, but I didn’t resent it.

Other reviews of Anathem:

• The Washington Post
• Scribbles and Dreams
• Jo Walton at Tor.com
• /usr/share/morlock: three different posts

Edward Teller, the Real Dr. Strangelove, Peter Goodchild

Edward Teller is a giant in the history of the 20th Century. He is a central figure in the story of the Physicists coming down from the ivory tower to create the weapons that defined the second half of the century as the “atomic age”. Teller is maybe most commonly examined as an antagonist in the epic and theatrical tragedy of Robert Oppenheimer (about which, more someday…), and his attitude does reflect a contrary view to Oppenheimer’s, but his influence continued long after Oppenheimer was pushed off the stage.

Teller began his career as a brilliant physicist who collaborated with many of the early investigators of quantum mechanics, and contributing a couple of key results himself. Pushed out of Europe by the anti-semitism of the ’30’s, he came to the U.S., and when war came, he naturally and enthusiastically joined the Manhattan Project to develop nuclear weapons.

In the Manhattan Project, Teller was somewhat sidelined because he hoped to bypass fission weapons and begin developing a fusion weapon (the H-bomb, or “super”) immediately. After the war he continued to work on the H-bomb project, although conflicts with his former colleagues at Los Alamos led him to push for the creation of the new national lab at Livermore, which he joined. Later in his career he became a political advocate for weapons research, weapons testing, and later for the SDI or “Star Wars” defense system created under Ronald Reagan.

This biography paints a portrait of a genius, committed to the security of his adopted country, but with two great flaws. Goodchild is really only explicit about describing the first of these, but he might have had both in mind as he draws together multiple threads of Teller’s life to demonstrate them both.

Interzone 224

“Sublimation angels”, Jason Sanford A small human colony scrapes out a meager existence on a one of the most inhospitable planets imaginable. Eur is so cold its atmosphere has frozen into a global ice sheet, in which the colonists have burrowed their cave home. In the lower depths of the cave, the air is sour and lacking oxygen, while in the upper regions the air is sweet. At the top of their society are the brutal “moms”, and at the bottom are the “low kids”, near starvation and short on breathable air. At the top of the heap is Big Mom, an AI transformed to human form to run the colony.

Sanford has recently labelled an ongoing “movement” in SF writing with the name SciFi Strange. This story may be (deliberately?) an exemplar of the style. First for its unflinching description of the painful realities of life with limited resources under the control of arbitrary and gruesome authority, a theme easily found in the New Weird that Sanford cites as a major influence on SciFi Strange.

Also in an ending that leaves some of the major questions opened in the story unanswered (What motivates the AI overlords and the Aurals, for example). That kind of unrevelatory ending is one of the marks of SciFi Strange that Sanford doesn’t mention himself, but it does strike me as characteristic of many of the writers he names in the SciFi Strange family. To me its something where the author is walking a fine line between leading the reader to come up with answers for themselves, and leaving the reader confused and feeling short-changed. Here, Sanford just manages to keep me engaged with a few ideas of what he’s getting at, but not a complete grasp of it.

Although I found myself infuriated (well, mildly infuriated, anyway, if that’s possible) at points by the pessimism of the view of the future of human society presented here, I can’t deny it’s true to human nature, and you can’t beat a story that triggers real emotion like that.