by Gary Westfahl

In the first version of an earlier review, I mistakenly described a moment from a film preview as part of the film itself – an inexcusable error, to be sure, but an understandable one, given the way that all contemporary action films increasingly blur together in one’s mind, each rigidly adhering to the same monotonous conventions. Figures with magical powers or high-tech vehicles race and chase each other through the sky at blinding speeds, sometimes aiming directly at the viewer (if it happens to be a 3D film); characters engage in long, brutal fistfights, repeatedly sending their opponents crashing into walls or the ground, with each blow accompanied by the absurdly over-amplified sound of crunching celery; objects ranging in size from cars to planets regularly explode in a colorful and spectacular fashion; and every so often, protagonists pause for a few minutes of conversation – to convey plot points, crack a joke, wax philosophical about the Deeper Meaning of beating the crap out of other people, or advance the romantic subplot, the five-minute chick flick embedded within every action movie for the presumed enjoyment of bored women dragged into the theatre by their boyfriends. And what is distinctively different about Man of Steel? One participant in all the mayhem is wearing a blue suit with a red cape.

All of this is to say that Man of Steel is generally a very ordinary film, and this is disappointing, since the track records of its creators – writers Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer and director Zack Snyder – inspired the hope that this would be an extraordinary film, the definitive cinematic version of the Superman story. And yet, while the film gets many things right in its generally intelligent and respectful reinterpretation of this iconic superhero, it also gets some key things wrong – which provide telling commentary on how the world, and its films, have changed since Superman first appeared seventy-five years ago.

For the most part, Henry Cavill’s Superman is the same character that we have gotten to know in various comic books, films, and television programs – basically a very nice guy who really likes people but feels uncomfortable around them, inspiring a lifestyle of awkward isolation from the world interspersed with periodic acts of altruism, as I explained while reviewing the previous reboot of the franchise, Superman Returns (review here). Indeed, the film’s revision of his early adulthood seems more in keeping with his basic personality; for while such a man might heed his parents’ advice and dutifully go to college and get a steady job, as he does in most versions of the mythos, he might actually prefer to become an aimless drifter, as he does in this film, holding a series of menial jobs that always end when his obsessive desire to help others leads to an overly revelatory superhuman feat, requiring a quick departure before he might begin to bond with any co-workers. And though the film must eventually start pushing this wandering Superman toward his inevitable destination – becoming a reporter at the Daily Planet – he still seems likely to remain the same charming but socially inept superhero that the world has grown to love and admire.

However, in one key respect, Superman is ill-suited to serve as the centerpiece of a contemporary film franchise: he really, really doesn’t like to beat the crap out of other people. As I said, he likes other people; he always wants to help other people; and although he really can’t, he wants to be friends with other people. Thinking back to the comic book stories of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s that defined his character, one does not recall Superman clobbering Lex Luthor or kicking Mr. Myxylptlk back into the Fifth Dimension; rather, the images that come to mind are Superman fixing a hole in a dam to stop a flood, Superman catching a falling Lois Lane, Superman lifting a sinking boat out of the water, Superman extinguishing a house fire with his super-breath. I am not going to undertake a statistical study, but I am quite sure that a vast majority of his super-feats involved saving people, not hurting people. As one of the ironclad rules of the contemporary action movie, though, there must be a despicable villain, and the primary task of the hero is to defeat or destroy that villain – as discussed at length in my recent review of Star Trek into Darkness (review here). Thus, Superman’s longstanding proclivities must be adjusted to meet the requirements of the new order.

In this respect, Man of Steel provides a fascinating contrast to Star Trek into Darkness. The Star Trek franchise has always been about a crew of experienced professionals doing their jobs, and they are instinctively altruistic like Superman, while lacking his peculiar social issues. Forced into the role of good guys battling bad guys in their most recent film, these veterans viscerally resisted being recast in this fashion, providing the film with the dynamic psychodrama of characters battling against the story written for them. However, the Superman franchise, at least in most films and television programs, takes the form of a bildungsroman, the story of the education of a young superhero, guided by benevolent father figures towards his true destiny. Confronting what they regarded as more malleable stuff, then, writers Goyer and Nolan provide their film with a different undercurrent: the training of a young man to become a good guy who will happily battle bad guys.

The process of indoctrinating Superman involves certain obvious steps: first, you introduce a figure for the individual to learn to hate, here the Kryptonian supervillain General Zod (Michael Shannon). Second, you allow the individual to observe as the figure engages in one despicable act after another against people that the individual loves, progressing from anonymous strangers to the individual’s own mother, Martha Kent (Diane Lane). Finally, when the individual has attained the requisite level of loathing, he is placed right next to the hated figure in order to engage in a violent, cathartic battle. (No, one doesn’t need to precede that statement with “Spoiler alert!”; surely, every member of the audience will know, after five minutes of watching the film, that it will conclude with a vicious, no-holds-barred, extended slugfest between Superman and Zod, with Superman of course emerging victorious. It’s the law.)

What does require a (Spoiler alert!) is the exact outcome of that struggle, since we are given to understand that, with his final blow, Superman actually killed Zod (though this is not absolutely, positively established beyond a reasonable doubt, perhaps to leave an opening for the character to return in a sequel). By the standards of contemporary Hollywood, I suppose this means that Superman has passed his final exam. However, even the intimation that Superman might deliberately try to kill somebody, or might do so accidentally without expressing much regret, seems to violate his longstanding character as a hero who does not kill. After all, this is one aspect of his cultural heritage – it should be recalled that the only reason Zod is alive in the first place is that the Kryptonians, opposed to executing criminals, set up the Phantom Zone to exile them instead – and a key element in his kindly personality as well. However, since Superman and his audience have been programmed to despise Zod, his death was undoubtedly regarded as his most satisfying fate.

What was encouraging about Star Trek into Darkness is that, in its final scene, both its characters and creators appeared determined to move the franchise away from fashionable melodrama and back to its original spirit; what is disheartening about Man of Steel is that, in the end, both its hero and his creators appear perfectly content with their changed circumstances. And if the film is successful, one can be confident that the first story conference for Man of Steel 2 will begin with a smart producer saying, “Okay, this time, we’ve got to come up with a villain who is so unspeakably odious, so reprehensively evil, that he’ll make General Zod look like a Sunday school teacher!” And I’m sorry to contradict such smart producers, but fighting villains is simply not what Superman is all about.

It might be objected that the film does include several scenes of Superman rescuing people in his classic manner, and that Jor-El (Russell Crowe) briefly makes a case for cooperative behavior in stating that he wished his son Kal-El to serve as “a bridge” between the peoples of Earth and Krypton. It is also interesting that during Superman’s battle with Zod’s associate Faora-Ul (Antje Traue), she argues that the Kryptonians have an “evolutionary advantage” over Superman because they lack his sense of morality; in having Superman defeat the character, the film is symbolically contradicting her position to show, correctly, that it is their altruism that truly provides humans with an “evolutionary advantage.” But a film defines itself by the way that it ends, and while Star Trek into Darkness concluded by denouncing its own plot (and, not incidentally, leaving its villain alive), Man of Steel validates its own plot by slaughtering Zod, when it should have ended with Superman pressing a button to send him back to the Phantom Zone.

So, if they do end up making a second Superman film, I would first advise Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer to carefully consider one of their own lines: when Colonel Nathan Hardy (Christopher Meloni) belatedly recognizes Superman’s benevolence, he tells his soldiers, “This man is not our enemy.” Indeed; Superman is not anyone’s enemy, and he should never be portrayed in those terms. I might also turn their attention to a story from Superman’s earlier days, “The Last Days of Superman” (1962), written by science fiction author Edmond Hamilton using the story from a 1950 comic. Superman comes to believe that he is dying from a lethal Kryptonian disease, Virus X (though he is actually being weakened by a piece of kryptonite accidentally embedded in Jimmy Olsen’s camera), and devotes his time to preparing for his coming death. He uses his heat vision to burn his final message to humanity on the surface of the Moon: “Do good to others and every man can be a Superman.” He pointedly did not say, “Clobber all the bad guys and every man can be a Superman”; instead, he just wanted people to be nice to each other, just as he had always been nice to them.

I would finally suggest to the people who make the next Superman movie that they should stop making the effort to liken the superhero to Jesus Christ, something which becomes annoyingly obvious in this film (in the various ways that Superman poses, and in one scene where a stained-glass image of Jesus is observed right behind him). For the analogy burdens the character with expectations that he cannot fulfill, and has no interest in fulfilling: he is much too sweet to regard the people around him as essentially sinful, in need of redemption, and he is much too shy and self-effacing to ever deliver a sermon. In fact, the only time I can recall Superman preaching to anyone occurred in the aforementioned story, when he believed he was about to die, and with the entire Moon available as a canvass for his thoughts, he limited himself to eleven words.

Having addressed the film’s central violation of the Superman canon, one can more briefly discuss the ways that the screenwriters otherwise dealt with the seventy-five years of established lore regarding the character and his supporting cast. (I am not intimately familiar with the various revisions and reboots of Superman during the last three decades, though, and so I cannot always be sure where certain elements of the film’s story originated.) Regarding its take on the planet Krypton, the film appears to have been most strongly influenced by John Byrne’s 1986 miniseries World of Krypton, which portrayed a Krypton that was unhealthily obsessed by cloning. (The film, I believe, does not explicitly mention cloning, but since its Kryptonians have abandoned natural births, and are not all dead, something resembling cloning must be taking place.) Jor-El also contrives to embed within his infant son the basic structure of all Kryptonians, so that he theoretically could be employed to revive the entire race (a device that might serve in a sequel to bring Jor-El and Lara [Ayelet Zurer] back to life, or General Zod for that matter). Visually, the film’s Krypton is impressively outré, with giant winged insects, floating robots, and vehicles resembling jellyfish that were probably inspired by the Byrne miniseries, but in a film that is supposed to be about Superman, there seems to be too much about Krypton, as the sequence extends much longer than is needed to set up the story and is filled with the same sort of pointless violence that mars the rest of the film, including an idiotic fistfight between Jor-El and Zod.

There are no complaints to make about Amy Adams’ version of Lois Lane, and Crowe’s thoughtful Jor-El provides Superman with the best screen father he has ever had; it doesn’t make much sense to have the dead Jor-El keep showing up as an interactive hologram, but his presence is welcome nonetheless. Jonathan and Martha Kent are also as they should be, but while the radiant Diane Lane makes Martha seem like a wonderful mother (unlike Zurer’s barely glimpsed Lara), Jonathan unfortunately has no impact at all, thanks to Kevin Costner’s lifeless performance. (One cannot say that he “phoned in his part,” since that would imply a degree of distant but personal communication that is never observed; say instead that he e-mailed in his part, or texted his part.) In the film, we don’t see much of the Daily Planet; Laurence Fishburne has the potential to be a great Perry White, but he isn’t really given anything to do, as is also true of Michael Kelly’s egotistical sportswriter Steve Lombard. Before the film opened, there was a minor controversy over the apparent decision to transform Jimmy Olsen into a female reporter named Jenny, but she proves to be virtually invisible in the film, though she briefly and incongruously becomes a center of attention. (This is a Nolan/Goyer trademark: superfluous sequences that suddenly and shrilly demand that we start caring about characters that we have no reason to care about. In The Dark Knight Rises [2012] [review here] it was Joseph Gordon-Levitt trying to help a bunch of kids on a school bus; here, it is Perry White trying to rescue Jenny [Rebecca Buller] from a collapsed building.)

The film also pins down the geography of Superman’s world. His hometown of Smallville is now located in Kansas, as we are told by a sign and reminded when our hero is seen wearing a Kansas City Royals t-shirt and watching a televised Kansas college football game. His adopted city of Metropolis is unambiguously identified as New York City: the Kryptonians’ sinister plot to transform Earth requires two stations at the opposite ends of the Earth, one in the southern Indian Ocean and one in Metropolis. If one draws a line through New York City and the center of the Earth, it indeed emerges in the southern Indian Ocean. This also opens the door for yet another risible effort to exploit memories of the September 11, 2001 attacks with lengthy scenes of widespread urban destruction and collapsing skyscrapers. (By now, audiences must be getting sick of this device; when will filmmakers feel the same?)

One other aspect of the film merits some attention, considering the complaint in one online headline that Man of Steel lacked the element of humor. (I usually strive to avoid reading any reviews of a film until I have finished my own review, but this film’s pervasive hype was inescapable.) Granted, there are only a few explicit jokes, and they are lame; but there is some buried humor throughout the film. In a sarcastic reference to the old tradition of Superman changing his costume in a phone booth, the battle between Superman and Faora-Ul results in the flaming destruction of a Smallville phone booth. Young Pete Ross is played by a chubby boy, and when he is reintroduced as an adult (Joseph Cranford), he is working as the manager of an International House of Pancakes restaurant, an obvious result of his childhood predilection for pancakes. Though Lex Luthor is never mentioned in the film, one glimpses in a Metropolis street the logo of his company, Lexcorp, perhaps a signal that the villain will be featured in the film’s sequel. And in light of his planet’s fiery destruction, it is richly ironic that, as shown by a photograph, young Clark Kent chose a standard science fair project, the construction of a volcano, using chemicals to simulate an eruption, and that when he is confronting a bully in a bar, Allison Crowe is in the background singing the Johnny Cash song “Ring of Fire.”

Despite such fleeting pleasures, though, it should be apparent that I did not enjoy this film as much as I hoped, and it is easy to see why; for I regard Superman as a very special character, and I feel strongly that he should never be the centerpiece of a very ordinary film. And if the classic Superman seems increasingly at odds with a world that no longer shares his quirky values, that is perhaps as it should be, since he is a character who should never fit into any society where he finds himself. A Superman who can be slotted effortlessly into a standard action film, in my view, is no Superman at all, and to be perfectly frank, I would rather see the character permanently retired than to watch another film like Man of Steel.

A rare occasion when the print fiction outnumbers the stories online. Promising issues from Analog and Apex.

Interzone #246, May-Jun 2013

An unusually large number of short stories here this time: eight, including the winner of IZ’s James White competition for newer writers. Of course, this means the stories are overall on the short side. As has become usual here recently, a mix of SF and fantasy.

“The Machinehouse Worker’s Song” by Steven J Dines

The machinehouse used to be a sweatshop where workers toiled body-to-body, but now there are only two men left: Jacob and old Samuels, who has entirely interiorized the workhouse mentality with his catchphrase: plennytado, as in, “There’s always . . .” But now Jacob is starting to ask questions.

“If we are to die,” I said slowly, “and they have not shown us the courtesy of providing our replacements, then the work dies with us, right? Then what has it all been for? Answer me that.”

A strong dystopian vision. Bad enough to imagine a factory prison where work is a life sentence tied to the machines, but even worse when the workers come to feel nostalgic for the place when it was in its functioning prime.

“Triolet” by Jess Hyslop

Mrs Entwhistle is Jim and Lisa’s neighbor. She grows poems, poem plants. Lisa has always wanted a poem of her own, and one day the old lady presents them with one, a triolet.

Two lovers lie together sleeping,
In their dreams their lives they share.
Entangled in their secrets’ keeping,
Two lovers lie together. Sleeping
Is the world without, none peeping
On the inner world, the bedroom where
Two lovers lie, together, sleeping.
In their dreams, their lives, they share.

At first, the poem makes their marriage bloom, but after a time, when things go wrong between them, Jim finds sinister meanings in it.

Nice premise. The story is a short one, and the deterioration in the relationship happens rather abruptly. The question, which the author handles with nice ambiguity, is whether the poem might be responsible. Me, I have to feel sorry for old Mrs Entwhistle, who only seems to want to grow beautiful things. She isn’t responsible for the uses that people make of them, out of their own weakness. At least, that’s how I see it, although I must admit it could be some sort of sinister plot on her part.

“Sentry Duty” by Nigel Brown

Ssthra is on sentry duty protecting the human skycart against the Ra-Ki, but she’s also hungry with eggs to incubate and no time off to hunt. She’s surprised when the human approaches her, as she shouldn’t. But Jo is badly in need of a cigarette, which she can’t smoke inside the shuttle. A friendship grows between them, as two different beings with the same migratory lifestyle. Or so it appears.

The twist at the end comes as a surprise and a lesson against making assumptions about alien thinking and alien ways. The tobacco makes a neat final touch.

“The Angel at the Heart of the Rain” by Aliette de Bodard

The city is a refuge, and the 2nd-person narrator is a refugee from war, waiting to be released from the red tape to join the rest of her family. But the waiting continues, and the narrator begins to hear the voice of an angel, the spirit of the city:

His voice whispers, over and over, that where you came from does not matter, that everything is better here than everywhere else, and the wars and storm that rage outside cannot touch anyone within the city’s embrace.

Short-short, a brief, touching evocation of what it means to be cut off from home. The editorial note tells us that it was inspired by the experiences of the author’s family.

“Thesea and Astaurius” by Priya Sharma

An updating of the myth. See, it was never Theseus at all, that was just a disguise. With the Daedalus myth included:

Flight is so much more certain with polyurethane resin than with wax.

And not to mention single-malt. Fun stuff, despite which, this isn’t primarily humor but a way to turn the elements of the story on their side as metaphor – for freedom, for tyranny, for love. An imaginative revision.

“The Core” by Lavie Tidhar

Another Central Station story. Achimwene wakes to find that his vampire lover Carmel is missing again. He follows her, wondering what sort of story this adventure will turn out to be, because Achimwene sees life in terms of stories while the rest of the world sees it in binary form: the digital overlaying the physical.

But he knew, too, that there is more than one story in the world at a time; and that her story was not his. Their stories had entwined, but they had different trajectories, different conclusions. He could only hope the two stories would not separate.

Because he loves her.

Most of this one is quite incomprehensible without previous exposure to the series, as we have the same characters popping up over and over as if it will increase their residuals, while readers wonder who they are and why they are here. Yet there is a glow of illumination that casts all the repetitivity in the shade and briefly shows us something of the true heart. So I end up not at all as irritated with another Central Station story as I thought I’d be at the beginning.

“Cat World” by Georgina Bruce

Doctor Rain’s travel gum takes you away – really away. It takes Little One and her sister Oh to Cat World, where they can stay as long as the flavor lasts. When not in Cat World, they live under a tarp and Oh has to work so they can eat. So when Oh disappears, Little One decides she must have gone to Cat World and is waiting for her there.

A very depressing work, because readers know what Little One isn’t admitting to herself, that there is only one kind of work for girls like them, and as another older [age 12] girl tells her, sometimes girls just don’t come back, like mothers don’t. What we realize finally is just how ominous Cat World is, and why the child is afraid to go outside. Symbols that we might originally see as endearing are revealed in the end as sinister.

“You First Meet the Devil at a Church Fete” by Shannon Faye

In Liverpool. He asks Stuart for a fag. Just to introduce himself. The question is, how long does it take readers to realize this is Stuart Sutcliffe, that the band will be The Beatles, and just what the devil is offering him. Given IZ’s readership, I’d say it would be somewhere in the 2nd paragraph. It’s hard to think that a story about Sutcliffe’s tragically short life could be very happy, but this comes pretty close. Still, there’s no real fantastic content here, or much real creation.

Clarkesworld, June 2013

Tales of mishaps in space. Not my favorite issue, this.

“The Urashima Effect” by E Lily Yu

Japanese-American Leo Aoki is the sole astronaut on a joint US/Japanese expedition to a world in the Alpha Lyrae system. Even with coldsleep, there are still long stretches of solitude to endure, and mission control fears for his sanity, so he has lengthy recordings from his wife and parents. His message from his wife bears unwelcome news, preceded by a Japanese legend about a man who saved a sea turtle and was rewarded by her father the sea king.

This legend has much in common with those of the Celtic fairy mounds, when mortals enter. Thus it isn’t surprising when Urashima decides to return to his village and visit his old parents.

‘I have heard of two people with those names,’ she told him. ‘They had a son named Urashima who drowned on a clear day. Only his empty boat was found. But that was hundreds of years ago, when this town was a scattering of fishing huts by the sea.’

The legend as a metaphor for time dilation is apt, but there’s not much left in the story, and little characterization of Leo. If we don’t know which of his options he would choose, it’s because we don’t know Leo. Unlike Urashima, there’s nothing to him.

“This is Why We Jump” by Jacob Clifton

The narrator rejects names, but as I find them useful, I note that she has occasionally gone by Deals. She lives on the mined-out Uranean moon Oberon, where her father is a high administrator, but she has rejected the colonial lifestyle and moved to the center with the knife boys [I don't know if these include knife girls] and fostered a little boy too young for a knife, but aspiring to one. Her love for him is the center of her life, so she is always preparing to let him go, as her father refuses to do for her.

I can curl myself around him like an ammonite, and call him little names, and he will smile. Arms and legs getting bigger every day. A little starfish, crowding me out. It is my name for him, but only when he will be gentled can I say. It happens less and less.

Mostly, this account rubs my fur the wrong way. Deals is intolerable in her self-righteousness, and while she spends much story space justifying her position, it remains obscure. She calls her society “decentralized anarchist collectives”, but Deals is a parasite. She produces, contributes nothing to the world, yet she consumes. There’s much talk of taking showers, nothing of the cost of the water. Or the air she breathes, the food she eats, none of which comes freely in a world like Oberon, unlike love.

“Free-Fall” by Graham Templeton

This one I like, in a depressing way. It’s an If This Goes On story, as PhDs with millions in student debt struggle for scut work on a space station. The narrator is a journalist, going up the space elevator with three such hopeless cases, looking for a story, finding it when the elevator stalls. They wait.

Looking at my three fellow passengers, hot-shot scientists all, it is distressingly easy to imagine our mini-society devolving into tribalism; it’s obvious that in this group, I am most definitely the Piggy. They seem calm, however, which calms me.

No one contacts them, no one comes to repair the elevator. One by one, they jump, not so much in panic from their immediate situation but existential despair at the life circumstances that put them there.

The narrator has a nice satirical touch as he speaks of “the new class of mega-proles, people with the social credentials of a CEO, and the income of a cocktail waitress.” The conclusion is fitting, but I do find myself with a quibble, as it’s been established that the emergency hatch only works when the pod is the last in line.

Asimov’s, August 2013

An unusually large number of longer works this time, which ought to make me happy, but doesn’t, as my favorites are the shortest pieces. The issue features a novella by Rusch, which is to say a large chunk out of one of the author’s ongoing series.

“The Application of Hope” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Captain Cooper of the Ivoire has sent out a request for military support, being under attack by an alien fleet. If readers recognize the name of this starship, which has played a recurring role in the author’s Diving series, they will have a better chance of understanding what’s going on than those who don’t. We’re back in the age before the breakdown of the foldspace anacapa drive, which has caused so much trouble to the subsequent civilization. Captain Sabin, who may be a new character, receives the message.

The weapons she understood, the ones that worked against great ships like these, required a lot of space and often their own power system away from the ship’s engines. She had never seen ships so tiny with repeated firepower, the kind that could do damage on something like the Ivoire.

Suddenly the Ivoire disappears into foldspace, in a manner that suggests its anacapa drive might have taken a hit from the unknown enemy, perhaps with an unknown weapon. This is worrisome, and readers familiar with the series will already be aware of the profound mishap that will have overtaken the ship at some point – apparently this point. Sabin is asked to take charge of the foldspace search for the lost Ivoire, a mission with profound personal resonance for her.

Most of the text is backstory. That isn’t a Good Thing. The essential part is: as a young student in the Fleet, Sabin’s father was lost in foldspace. Obsessed with finding him, she developed the fundamental techniques that the Fleet has since used to conduct foldspace searches. Now, with the loss of the Ivoire, she has lost Cooper, a lover and confident, in the same way. But we get a lot more, extraneous, background than this. We get extensive scenes of her relationship with Cooper, of her parents and their dysfunctional relationship, of her nemesis in Command who has always tried to sabotage her career, of her attitude towards ship discipline, of various subordinates that don’t figure largely in this immediate story. It’s Sabin’s story, the resolution of her own lifelong personal crisis. But because it’s all backstory, which is to say emotionally remote, the character doesn’t come to life as a person. When she resolves her crisis, there is no catharsis for the reader. We’ve expected something of the sort, because this piece has to end somewhere, somehow. But it’s quite without feeling. It’s also really tedious to wade through, hoping for a return to the immediate storyline when, supposedly, something might actually happen.

I don’t know whether this one is part of some larger work, but the backstory is proportional to a novel, not the novella-sized piece we have here. If publishing history repeats itself, within a year or so there may be another installment featuring Sabin and her quest, which would make it part of another serial, part of the novel series, not an independent work. The resolution we have here seems like a stopgap, a setup for subsequent action. As a novella, a work that readers might have reason to expect to be complete in itself, it’s deficient. But unfortunately part of a longstanding pattern.

“Stone to Stone, Blood to Blood” by Gwendolyn Clare

Duyi is the half-brother of the planetary Regent, and Feng is his bodyguard/companion – a gift when they were children – with the programmed Imperative to protect him.

Then Duyi stepped close, and the floor seemed to shift under my feet, as if the whole world were forcibly reorienting me. I felt a pressure behind my eyes, and I knew with the sudden, precise certainty of a programmed Imperative that I must keep this boy safe, and more than that, I must make him happy.

Now Feng is helping Duyi to escape and join the revolution, a complex and hazardous operation. But otherwise Duyi will have to swear allegiance to the Regency and accept an Imperative that will override his free will.

The SFnal premise is a unique genetic implant in the Regency’s bloodline that allows it to telepathically activate a valuable material unique to their word. Because Duyi possesses it, his sister can’t really harm him, and the Imperative is considered necessary to control him. The revelation at the conclusion is sufficiently satisfactory for the plot, but the real story is the lifelong relationship between the two boys, who now call each other Brother.

“Arlington” by Jack Skillingstead

Starting off with a lump of really clunky prose as teenaged aspiring pilot Paul Birmingham gets lost in a cloud on a solo flight. This is an anti-hook:

VOR is short for VHF Omnidirectional Radio. Aviation is full acronyms—it was even back in 1982, when I got lost over the Olympic Peninsula. With a VOR you tune in the station, center the little arrow on a compass dial, and fly straight along the selected radial. Theoretically you don’t need VFR conditions to do that. It’s how I found my way from Crest Airpark, a small private field east of the Kent valley, to the logging city of Hoquiam. From there I turned north, switching to the next station, which was in Port Angeles—and that was the mistake. VORs are line-of-sight signals, and I did not have a line-of-sight to Port Angeles.

The cloud turns out to be an interdimensional aircraft trap populated by some kind of robotic beings that seem to feed on the crews and passengers of the disabled planes it catches. But just in case readers might take some interest, the scene switches first to Paul in his office, thirty years later, when he decides to relive the original flight that ruined his life, because when he flew back through the cloud, he reached the wrong world.

Here’s a potentially interesting Twilight-zoneish scenario, but the narrative does whatever it can to kill the enjoyment.

“Lost Wax” by Gregory Norman Bossert

In a city where Alchemist guilds have constructed autonomous golethem to patrol the streets, “alien and impartial enforcers of the city’s laws”, the devices are out of control and revolution is brewing. Leena and Nadin are crafting Augur birds, meant to deliver untraceable messages in aid of this sedition, but Leena keeps pushing the limits of the possible, a counter-alchemist. Nadin is appalled by the risks she takes and the consequences she suffers, at one point melting off her hand, then crafting an alchemical/robotic prosthesis. Ultimately, their relationship becomes a question of loyalty.

A remarkable and unusual setting that makes me think of an exotic 19th-century Paris [many of the names are French], a city known for its revolutions, or perhaps St Petersberg with its ubiquitous tsarist secret police.

Nadin grimaced and looked around for listeners. “I know, I know, we said we’d deliver next week. I think I’ve got the guidance problems solved, as long as his correspondents or whistle-blowers or whoever launch them from inside the inner twenty divisiones. They should be untraceable.”

At some points, a distant family resemblance to ancestral steampunk can be discerned, but here there is less of gears and more of yeasts, biochemical engineering. The author employs the art of lost wax casting as an extended metaphor for transformation, but he spends little time on explanations; readers just have to go along for the ride and pick it up as they go.

“The Ex-Corporal” by Leah Thomas

Gwyn’s Dad was a good father until he inexplicably developed epilepsy when she was twelve. He was also a science fiction reader, which might explain how he regarded the experience, for he insisted that his mind was traveling into other, fascinating worlds. Eventually she comes to believe him.

I sat at Dad’s bedside on countless lukewarm autumn evenings while gran mal seizures rattled him from head to toe. Every time his eyes rolled back and that awful snoring started, we decided Dad was abroad, stumbling through a distant jungle or ducking under crooked wind-bent skyscrapers in some distant dimension.

The real problem begins when the seizures seem to cause other people to occupy his body while his mind is absent. One of these is a nasty piece of work, the ex-corporal, to whom Gwyn’s world is a welcome refuge from jungle warfare. Gwyn is worried about what he might to do her and to her little brother [whom the copyeditor has allowed different names]. She has to get the real Dad back, while the ex-corporal is determined to remain where he is.

Disturbing stuff. The editorial blurb reveals that the piece is based on elements from the author’s life, except that her own father read PK Dick, not Moorcock, as Gywn’s did. I think that fact explains much about this story.

Analog, September 2013

A lot of fresh material in this issue. Here, I prefer the longer stories.

“Murder on the Aldrin Express” by Martin L Shoemaker

Rather than an express, the Aldrin follows a tedious and lengthy route ferrying passengers between Earth and Mars under the martinet of a captain whom Chief Carver privately calls Nick. The current set of passengers are the members of Professor Azevedo’s expedition, minus the professor, whose recent death on Mars is now related to evidence that it was sabotage and thus murder – a discovery that irritates Nick, who had been convinced that Azevedo’s own incompetence led to his demise. He begins his investigation with expedition videographer Tracy Wells, who happens to be Chief Carver’s ex-lover. An uncomfortable interview, that.

“Carver tried to warn you about their poor planning, I know he did; but you were Mars struck. Or should I say star struck, perhaps? The great Professor Azevedo was going to Mars, the first mission of the Civilian Exploration Program, and he was taking the best of the best with him! Or at least that’s what his press releases said. And he chose you, a practically unknown film student, to record his journey!”

But it turns out that there are a lot of personal issues involved, on almost everyone’s part. Which of course makes for an abundance of suspects.

An unusual detective story, in that the investigator turns out to be intimately connected to all the potential suspects as well as the victim; he’s anything but impartial, so it remains to see how his prejudices toward them will influence his view of the case. These personal hostilities lead to a bit too much bickering among the participants. But Nick turns out to be an astute observer of both facts and human failings. In fact, he turns out to be the SFnal Competent Man thwarted in his career by bureaucrats and other assorted fools. Otherwise, it’s got a nicely SFnal touch in the nano-contaminated climbing cord that allegedly caused the professor’s death.

“The Whale God” by Alec Nevala-Lee

During the US war in Vietnam, Exley is conducting a medical clinic in an oceanside village when the news comes that a whale has beached itself nearby. Without really considering what he’s doing, Exley leads an effort to return the animal to the ocean. Afterwards, he begins to have a strange sense of something present.

Looking out at the darkness, he felt a twinge of familiar apprehension. Night changed the quality of the landscape here in ways that made it easy to give in to your worst fears, whether they looked like sappers in spider holes or something more insidious. To the villagers, this was the country of hungry ghosts, of men who had died without the proper rituals, as far from home as that whale on the sand.

But instead of simply accepting the villagers’ viewpoint, he suspects the possibility of a psyops program.

A good link between local Vietnamese tradition and the secret operations of the military. The whale temples are quite real; I’m not so clear about the particular operation that Byers was running. What is very clear, though, is the way military forces have harmed and exploited the innocent creatures of the world in the course of their own wars. It makes me wonder why a whale god would bother with us.

–RECOMMENDED

“The Oracle” by Lavie Tidhar

When I first saw the issue’s ToC with Tidhar’s name, I was pretty excited, first because Tidhar is the kind of exiting, edgy newer author that I’d like to see more of in the digests. I’d also hoped, because this is a new venue for the author, with a new set of readers, that it might be new material, something – anything – but Yet Another Central Station story. OK, it’s Central Station again, a prequel in some ways. Does this mean it offers a simple and easy introduction to this complicated milieu, a guiding hand extended to new readers? Not hardly. It’s another jigsaw puzzle story, with the pieces seemingly thrown up in the air to land haphazardly, to be assembled. I think I’ve read most if not all of the previously published installments, and I found the assembly a chore. I can only imagine that readers already unfamiliar with the material would have a more difficult time. Achimwene? Who’s he? What’s he doing here? You’ll never know if this is your first CS experience. Asteroid pidgin? Huh? Not an entry-level piece.

The piece focuses on two characters: first we have Matt Cohen, St Cohen of the Others, one of the researchers behind the breeding and evolution of those autonomous digital intelligences.

Knowing that he did not know what he was doing, that digital intelligence, those not-yetborn Others, could not be designed, could not be programmed, by those who wrongly used the term artificial intelligence. Matt was an evolutionary scientist, not a programmer. He did not know what form they would take when at last they emerged. Evolution alone would determine that.

Parallel with his thread is the later one of Ruth Cohen the Oracle, who joined with the Others as the culmination of the usual sort of personal journey. Added to which, we have various of the author’s favorite characters and story elements included for color, effect, and increased confusion.

Tidhar has to be one of the most brilliant new writers working in the genre today. The Central Station milieu is a major creation, full of complexities and inventive wonders, and more, it has a beating heart. The problem is the publication in fragments, isolated in a series of different publications, with different sets of readers, making the material much more inaccessible than it needs to be. Ruth Cohen, such readers might suppose, is a character that has or will have play a role of importance in the overall story, but what that might be, we can’t tell from here.

“Full Fathom Five” by Joe Pitkin

The expedition to Europa hasn’t gone well. A reactor meltdown in their command module killed the rest of the crew, leaving Maria stranded alone below Europa’s ice with Ariel, the lander’s AI. There is also the Europan lifeform in the specimen tank, but it offers no companionship, being dead. Or maybe it isn’t dead, after all, as it seems to be emitting a sort of fluid.

What it was trying to communicate to her, she felt helpless to say. But it was saying something to her. She wished she might go on forever in solitude with the creature, becoming familiar with its alien, chemical language, deciphering in her dreams some message of peace, or love, or whatever might make one creature fill another’s dream with the scent of fresh apples.

What might seem like a standard stranded-in-space problem tale is revealed as something strangely different, full of symbolic and portentous dreams, many of them featuring her father. Maria’s alien has the form of a large human penis; her relationship with it is unusually possessive. She spends much of the time in her dreams, the ship growing colder while the AI does all the work of fabricating a new transponder to allow her to communicate with Earth. It’s not beyond possibility that Maria is hallucinating as she slowly dies in her sleep. I don’t really think so, but we have no way to know for sure. An intriguing story.

“Life of the Author Plus Seventy” by Kenneth Schneyer

After quitting as a lawyer and failing as an author, Eric takes a job at Catskill Comics, a position, as he points out, that would thrill most writers to the point that they would overlook the contract’s fine print, like the Hibernation clause.

“If we took the things you write as works-for-hire, then the copyrights last for ninety years, maybe a hundred and twenty. But if you retain copyright and we act only as a licensee, then the rights last for seventy years after the end of your life. And if you’re in
Preservative Hibernation . . .”

Notwithstanding, Eric signs on and thrives in the comics company until a complication arises in the form of a library fine now reaching seven figures and sent to collections, which is run by an unresponsive AI that threatens to attach his salary. Eric conceives of a Cunning Plan. Like all CPs, it comes with unintended consequences.

Clever stuff, amusing while not believable. I’m not buying it that Eric, being after all a lawyer, couldn’t take the collections company to court about the 30 books he actually doesn’t owe fines on. Or that a comics company in the next century would actually pay staff writers a salary. Still funny, though.

“Wreck Support” by Arlan Andrews Sr

Short short-short humor. Alexandros of Macedonia finds his Antikythera mechanism defective. Amusing, and also true to the nature of the actual machine as we know it. I suppose I’m the only person in the world who’ll be vexed by the author mixing up Greek and Latinized spellings, as using Macedonia instead of the “Makedon” form with “Alexandros”.

Apex Magazine, June 2013

An international issue, with authors from China, Israel and India.

“The Call Girl” by Tang Fei, trans Ken Liu

We assume at first that fifteen-year-old Xiaoyi is a prostitute. After school, she drives away in older men’s cars and comes back with a lot of money. But the service she offers is unusual. She sells them stories, interactive experiences, but the cost can be high for both parties.

He takes a step forward. The sea trembles; the sky trembles; everything in the sky and in the sea trembles. If, someday, a bird dives toward the surface of the sea, then he will feel the excitement and joy of that dive through the seawater, as well.

Perhaps it’s because of her age that there’s a sense of wrongness hanging over the scenario, because she’s still going to school where she has no friends, where the other students whisper about her and her clients, making, I suppose, the same assumption about her that readers will at first. Perhaps it’s because her mother takes money from her while averting her gaze, as if she’s ashamed. Does she make the same assumption? But they live in an apartment where the pipes leak and the wallpaper peels – why, if Xiaoyi earns so much? I can imagine her, older, in a sleek office with a receptionist to greet her clients, prospering. Is it because of her age that she meets her clients in beat-up cars? The story raises questions, mainly about the cost to Xiaoyi, of which the only suggestion is the way her shadow stretches behind her, the effort it takes her to walk. But does this effect occur every time? Will she become unable, at some point, to support the burden? Will she need to abandon her trade?

I always enjoy these translations by Ken Liu, with which he makes so much genre fiction available to non-Chinese-speaking readers. He chooses his stories well and does well with the prose.

“Titanic!” by Lavie Tidhar

Readers may note that this is the third Tidhar story reviewed in the current column, wherein I am finally granted my wish for material unrelated to his ongoing series. Here we find an aging Dr Jekyll in flight from the Law, escaping by ship with the seed of his evil other self in his black doctor’s bag. He voyages with hope.

England is a cesspit of corruption. It is too small, too confining. It looks not to the future, but to the past, it is rigid and unyielding. It is time for me to look elsewhere, to the New World; where a scientist may work in peace, where there is space to grow… and where he, too, could roam more freely, for it is a vast land and people may disappear there more easily; and never be seen again.

An uncomplicated story with an unexpected appearance out of left field. Jekyll is well-portrayed as a disagreeable individual, leaving readers to wonder how much of this simply marks him as a man of his time and place, rather than the monster he carries in his bag.

“Karina Who Kissed Spacetime” by Indrapramit Das

A love story. The narrator’s first kiss is with Karina, both of them college students, and it opens up possibilities.

So brief it was; the mere ghost of the future. I watched her walk away. Even then, I saw the ripple of spacetime warping behind her as she walked under the pools of streetlight that demarcated the pavement of North Pine. Her kiss, drying quickly in the winter air.

I like the prose here, the lyrical quality of some of the images. Rather than future-looking, it looks back at the past. The images of spacetime are less SFnal than a metaphor for the branching paths our lives must take, for asking ourselves in hindsight: would I have done the same, knowing the outcome?

–RECOMMENDED

by Gary Westfahl

Based on their track records, one cannot approach a science fiction film starring Will Smith and directed by M. Night Shyamalan with extreme optimism. Despite occasional ventures into more subdued projects, Smith has specialized in mindless, action-packed spectacles that, like roller coaster rides, provide immediate excitement but nothing worth remembering. And Shyamalan doggedly crafts puerile contrivances masquerading as thinking man’s cinema, infused with purported profundities recalling the sentiments found on Hallmark Cards. If reviewers now tend to approach their films with knives drawn, one might say, that is a fate they richly deserve.

Yet critics must also offer honest assessments of each new film they watch, and After Earth is, strangely enough, not as awful as one might expect; it may be mediocre, but it is not execrable, perhaps because the two massive egos dominating the project managed to restrain each man’s distinctive excesses. Developing a story about a father and son stranded on a future Earth inhabited only by vicious creatures, Smith might have been drawn to crowd-pleasing devices like the implausible discovery of a small band of human survivors led by a beautiful young woman, who could first school young Kitai Raige (Jaden Smith) in the art of survival and later function as a threatened heroine to be rescued from the latest monster; but Shyamalan, determined to appear mature and thoughtful, would reject such nonsense as a diversion from his inspirational saga of a young man learning to master his own destiny. And as Shyamalan worked on his revisions of Gary Whitta’s screenplay, adding platitude after platitude, Smith would start crossing them out, pointing out to the director that adventure films are often enhanced by laconic heroes who carry out their duties while maintaining a stoic silence. Still, while this creative tension may have had beneficial results, it may also be why the film is, by contemporary standards, unusually short (99 minutes): large amounts of material may have been omitted from the final print. (Shyamalan: “We have to take this out; it’s too mindless.” Smith: “We have to take this out; it’s too puerile.”)

As these imaginings suggest, After Earth is the sort of film that inspires viewers to ponder the drama of how the film was made, which was probably more involving than the drama unfolding on the screen; and while critics might envision the film as an ongoing argument between Smith and Shyamalan, others will probably focus on the film as an explicit mechanism to effect a Hollywood changing of the guard. Smith, approaching the age of fifty, recognizes that his days as an action hero are numbered, and that he will inevitably have to begin playing the avuncular fathers and grouchy bosses of action heroes instead; so, he crafts a story designed to pass the torch on to a new generation, namely, his son Jaden. Smith would play a mature, experienced general, Cypher Raige, who tellingly informs his wife Faia (Sophie Okonedo) that he will soon be “announcing his retirement.” Then, after being injured in a spaceship crash, he is forced to dispatch his son Kitai to carry out a dangerous mission while he provides some long-distance mentoring. With Jaden’s mother Jada Pinkett Smith and uncle Caleeb Pinkett also on board as producers in this obvious effort to launch Jaden’s career, the film may qualify as the world’s most expensive fifteenth birthday present ($130 million). But will the planned transition be successful? Smith, surely, will have no trouble adjusting to older roles, but whether Jaden will be able to fill his father’s shoes is more questionable; his character’s name, Kitai, is Japanese for “hope,” possibly reflecting his ambitions, but one does not always get what one hopes for. It appears that Shyamalan deliberately filmed in sequence anticipating that his star’s improving acting skills, under the tutelage of his credited acting coach, Aaron Speiser, would mirror the developing competence of his character; and in fact, Jaden’s acting in the film does progress – from embarrassing to adequate. It remains a performance, though, that will not impress any film producers whose last names are not Smith.

The weakness of its star at least should have the effect of defusing one brewing controversy, that the film is little more than a propaganda piece for Scientology, the controversial religion espoused by Smith and other celebrities like Tom Cruise, who starred in a recent film with a similar plot, Oblivion (review here). I must leave it to persons more familiar with Scientology to determine whether Shyamalan’s grandiose pontifications, or the film’s theme of overcoming fear to achieve one’s full potential, are closely related to its doctrines. However, even if there was some intent to promote Scientology in the film, it must be regarded as a hopelessly ineffectual effort, since absolutely no one is going to walk out of the theatre with an overwhelming desire to find a religion that will transform them into a person as wonderful as Jaden Smith.

If there is anything genuine moving about this film, it is something that may have been unintentional, namely, the way that After Earth illustrates everything that is wrong about modern parenting: it is both too distant and too overbearing. That is, encouraged to pursue their own interests above everything else, many parents devote almost all of their time to their jobs and their hobbies, never developing a genuine relationship with their children. Yet thanks to modern technology like cell phones, computers, and GPS systems, they are also able to constantly monitor and control their children’s activities, and they often choose to do so. Jaden’s experiences with his father epitomize these problems. Many cultures, as a rite of passage, send young men out into the wilderness to survive on their own and thus demonstrate that they are prepared for adulthood, and Smith’s story is clearly intended to recall such traditions, as the father is obliged to send his young son, the only other survivor of the crash, on a lonely mission to retrieve a distant signaling device. Yet this is a vision quest with a distinctly modern twist: Smith’s Cypher has previously been a cold and perpetually absent parent (as indicated by his name, Cypher, meaning “puzzle”), yet after giving his son some instructions and sending him on his way, he also utilizes futuristic technology to observe his every move and regularly tells him exactly what to do next. When an accident damages these communication devices, one might imagine that Jaden would welcome the freedom to search for the film’s McGuffin in his own way, yet as soon as he can, he eagerly reestablishes contact with his father, who fights to remain conscious despite his injuries so that he can issue a few more commands to his son. So are revealed the incongruous dynamics of the modern family: helicopter parents, who don’t really know their children, feel compelled to be the masters of their lives; the children, who don’t really know their helicopter parents, despise them, based on what little they do know; yet they also feel utterly lost without them, and whenever they are absent, they desperately miss them.

(In another minor respect, Jaden further reflects the plight of contemporary children: since we have filled their worlds with pollutants and contaminants, more young people than ever suffer from asthma, making them dependent upon inhalers; in the film, since Earth’s atmosphere has grown more difficult to breath, Jaden must periodically pull out and inhale a soothing substance from small discs that resemble smaller versions of today’s ubiquitous Advair inhalers.)

Having been trained in the art of writing science fiction by the likes of Roland Emmerich and Barry Sonnenfeld, Smith provides his film with a story that few devotees of the genre can admire. The initial crisis occurs after Smith identifies, by touching the side of his spaceship, a “graviton disturbance”; this quickly provokes an “asteroid storm” that damages the vehicle and forces it to crash-land on Earth. Unsurprisingly, the film’s credits do not identify a “science advisor” who assisted Smith in devising these gobbledygook explanations. While we are never told how they managed to change Earth’s atmosphere and climate in one thousand years, the film’s evil aliens are said to have rendered Earth uninhabitable by inducing rapid evolution that turned every creature on Earth into a killing machine, apparently making the planet into a version of Harry Harrison’s Deathworld, so lethal as to require all humans to emigrate to another world, Nova Prime. Yet Jaden is able to spend hours walking through deserted landscapes without being disturbed, and he even encounters one friendly animal, a large mother bird who adopts him as a surrogate son (and, following the pattern of the helicopter parent, keeps flying above him, observing his progress). Jaden’s mission is to retrieve and turn on a rescue beacon to bring assistance, but an advanced civilization would undoubtedly develop some sort of automatic signaling device for spaceships that fall to pieces, and they would also create one that is not easily blocked by an “ionic layer” in the atmosphere, dramatically requiring Jaden to climb up a volcano. In sum, Shyamalan may have impelled Smith to avoid major idiocies, but any number of minor idiocies proved necessary to keep the plot in motion.

I suppose something should be said about the film’s setting, an Earth reclaimed by nature one thousand years after humans evacuated the planet in response to an alien invasion. Unlike other films about a devastated future Earth, including Oblivion, the heroes never encounter the ruins of iconic structures like the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building, which exemplifies one of Shyamalan’s peculiar strengths: he is drawn to the stupid, but he avoids the obvious. instead, the only sign of human history comes when Jaden enters a cave and sees some ancient cave paintings, also suggesting that his spaceship landed somewhere in present-day Europe (though the filming actually occurred in Costa Rica, Utah, and Northern California). Shyamalan may have wished to indicate just how fleeting humanity’s grasp on the planet might be, or to argue that it is only by returning to the beleaguered, simple lifestyle of their ancient ancestors that people can reconnect with their true identities (though Jaden and his father also seem completely dependent on their thirtieth-century technology to survive). Further, since all of Earth’s animals except one have now turned against humans, violently attacking Jaden at every opportunity, After Earth qualifies as another film about the revenge of nature, a theme that emerged, more risibly, in Shyamalan’s earlier disaster, The Happening (2008). Perhaps, though, the true inspiration for this vision of Earth’s future was the documentary television series Life After People (2009-2011), which speculated about what would happen if humanity suddenly vanished, and offered the subliminal argument that all of the animals and plants would be much better off if we left.

A critical essay I do not wish to write would explore the reasons why so many contemporary films envision a future that represents a return to the past, either in human history or human prehistory; only rarely does one glimpse a future Earth that is both technologically advanced and benevolently governed. (The only recent instance that comes to mind is Star Trek into Darkness [review here]). But After Earth returns to the past in an especially provocative fashion by presenting what is effectively a man’s world. The major women in the story, Cypher’s wife and daughter, are only briefly glimpsed in flashbacks, and while there are a few scattered females in the background, the people on the spaceship with real authority are uniformly male. Indeed, it says a lot about this film to note that its most well-developed female character is a bird. Granted, most contemporary action films continue to focus mostly on male heroes, but filmmakers are usually careful to feature a few prominent, powerful women as well; perhaps Shyamalan, focused on other priorities, simply forgot about this standard requirement. But this may also represent another message embedded in the story: it’s all right to have women in control during times of peace, but when a real danger emerges, like homicidal aliens, we need the men to take over. After all, Cypher may have named his daughter Senshi (Zoë Isabella Kravitz), which is Japanese for “warrior,” but she utterly failed to defeat an attacking alien, while her younger brother ultimately succeeded. (Pondering the paucity of assertive female characters in Shyamalan’s films who are not portrayed by Bryce Dallas Howard, I discern the outlines of another critical essay I do not wish to write, “Sexism in the Films of M. Night Shyamalan.”)

To remind everyone of how smart he is, Shyamalan is also impelled to work a lofty literary reference into the story, so we learn that Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) is Cypher’s favorite book, and in a flashback, his deceased daughter even displays a copy of the book. And yes, there is a large, dangerous creature menacing our wandering protagonist, since the crashed spaceship also contained a lethal alien, the Ursa, who escaped to carry on with its proclivity for seeking out and killing any humans who emit pheromones conveying their fear. Yet it is hard to discern any meaningful connection between the novel and film, since no one is vengefully obsessed with tracking down and killing the alien; rather, they are obsessed with avoiding the alien at all costs. More broadly, while this is not the occasion for an extended discussion of Melville’s novel, one can briefly note that none of its themes really resonate with the story of an adolescent who is struggling to overcome his fears. If Shyamalan had wanted to engage in a dialogue with a great literary work, he might have more fruitfully focused on the other masterpiece of nineteenth-century American literature, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884), the story of a boy who significantly matures during a long adventure that even involves, like Jaden’s journey, some traveling down a river on a makeshift raft. Unfortunately, exploring such a connection to Twain would have required the film to display what Shyamalan’s films never display, namely, a sense of humor.

Overall, considering a film that is sporadically entertaining but generally disappointing, I am obliged to emend a previous argument. In other reviews, I have decried the play-it-safe mentality of contemporary films, the desperate desire to incorporate the input of innumerable people to ensure box-office success that so often results in dull, mechanical exercises; I have called for filmmakers to resist Hollywood groupthink, make their own independent decisions, and craft original, idiosyncratic films that dare to break the rules. However, in the person of M. Night Shyamalan, we observe a filmmaker who has fought to achieve precisely that sort of freedom, yet he consistently abuses that freedom to produce really, really dumb films. Perhaps, like other successful writers and directors, Shyamalan needs a regular partner who might prevent him from so often shooting himself in the foot; and if Will Smith is not the ideal choice, there are other powerful creators around who might productively prod this talented but error-prone director to make films that could garner more positive reviews.

Mostly fantasy this time, as I lead out with a new original anthology. Real science fiction seems to be getting scarce, though not good fantasy. A Good Story award to K J Parker’s “The Dragonslayer of Merebarton” from Fearsome Journeys.

Fearsome Journeys: The New Solaris Book of Fantasy Volume One, edited by Jonathan Strahan

The title pretty much says it. Here’s a substantial original anthology with a strong cast of authors, twelve stories of what the editor describes as “mainstream fantasy” but turns out to be sword and sorcery, military fantasy, and the eponymous quest. The pieces are generally on the longer side.

“The Effigy Engine: A Tale of the Red Hats” by Scott Lynch

Battle magery with a mercenary company of wizards known as the Red Hats, which they don’t wear in the heat of the fray, lest they be seen by the enemy as targets.

Wizards working offensively in battle have a bad tendency to get caught up in their glory-hounding and part their already tenuous ties to prudence. Distracted and excited, they pile flourish on flourish, spell on spell until some stray musket ball happens along and elects to take up residence.

Working spells to ward the others while they work is Watchdog’s job. But the latest threat from the enemy is something none of them have encountered before, although readers will recognize it as a kind of tank.

This scenario could be described as Musket & Sorcery, and readers will doubtless be reminded of Cook’s “Black Company” tales, complete with a journal, albeit slightly less grim and dismal than that venerable series. This, too, has the unmistakable signs of a series, of which this would be the initial installment. The tone is darkly humorous, yet not unmindful of the price in human lives exacted by war.

“Amethyst, Shadow, and Light” by Saladin Ahmed

Zok the thief, all brawn and little brain, and his partner Hai Hai the rabbitwoman step into what is clearly a trap set for their kind. Thus he finds himself with an amethyst slave ring around his neck, compelled to find and steal the Diamond Diadem that the Amethyst Empress needs to defeat the evil Shadow Warriors.

At this point, readers may well be saying to themselves, “You’ve got to be kidding?” Taken straight, a premise like this one is a cliché hoary with eld, calling out for subversion, for irony, for some inverting twist. Such passages as this one suggest we aren’t going to get it:

They were tall and thin, shrouded in back rags and mail. Their strangely stretched faces were the yellow-white of moonlight, and their red eyes shone with a dull glow. Zok felt an unnatural fear seize him as he stared, and his guts twisted up until he felt like shitting blood.

Thankfully, the author comes through at the end, just in time, but perhaps not enough.

“The Camp Follower” by Trudi Canavan

During the long years of warfare, Captain Reny has taken a camp follower into his tent.

It was during the time between battles, after long meetings to discuss strategy, that he made use of the woman. Aside from the physical release and the sensual pleasure, he gained something even more valuable—a time in which he was free from thought and care. The past and the future did not penetrate his mind.

But Kala is more than she seems, with more insight into his affairs than the typical camp whore. Then one night when she hasn’t returned to his tent, he sees her among the wounded, not thieving but practicing some kind of magic. The soldiers have started to talk about Lady Death.

A look at battlefield politics and a reasonable explanation for the power of sorcerer kings, who benefit from unceasing war. Rather typical S&S with restrained prose and a hint for understanding a universal problem that persists to our own day.

“The Dragonslayer of Merebarton” by K J Parker

Dodinas le Cure Hardy, being a knight, is the guy people come to when a dragon shows up in the neighborhood. Although there aren’t supposed to be any dragons, not anymore.

But you do your best. You struggle, just as a man crushed under a giant stone still draws in the last one or two desperate whistling breaths; pointless, but you can’t just give up. So I looked him steadily in the eye, and I said, “So, what do they expect me to do about it?”

His wife has even more pointed remarks on the subject, as she always does. ["Hard, sometimes, to remember that when I married her, she was the Fair Maid of Lannandale."] But it really is a dragon, and somebody has to cope with it. He’s the knight.

Parker does a wonderful job with this, exhibiting a sound knowledge of medieval warfare and weaponry, but most of all giving us a wearied yet resigned narrator whose insights into the situation are both poignant and engaging. Superior stuff.

–RECOMMENDED

“Leaf and Branch and Grass and Vine” by Kate Elliott

In a kingdom beset by armed factions, the herbwife Anna and her family have always taken the side of General Olivar against the marauding Lord Hargrim whose soldiers killed her husband. When strife reaches the village, she goes to help the injured, but in the woods she stumbles across the general, wounded, and hides him from the enemies seeking his life. With Hargrim’s men controlling the roads, the general’s only hope is to get a message to the king’s court, and Anna volunteers to make the journey, carrying his token. The title represents the spell she uses to deflect notice – easily done, as men rarely notice an old, poor woman.

A long piece, with the fantastic element almost far enough in the background to be ambiguous. The story focuses on the lives of the ordinary common folk, for whom the presence of lords more often than not brings trouble. Anna is a determined and ingenious character, whose lies explaining her presence alone on the road are always convincing.

“My pardon, good dames, but I’m wondering if you know where I can find my cousin’s sister. She is laundress to the king’s sister, so they tell me. I walked here from the village to let her know that her brother is gravely ill.”

“Spirits of Salt: A Tale of the Coral Heart” by Jeffrey Ford

The narrator seems to be a scholar whose subject is Ismet Toler, known as the Coral Heart after his blade, which turns his opponents into statues of red coral. “As he wrote, ‘The weapon has a personality and if I’m not mistaken a will, which I am learning to merge with mine.’” The tale at hand deals with his youth and training by a retired assassin, and about his duel with the swordsman of red coral whose crystal blade turns his opponents to salt.

Toler crouched and brought his weapon up to block the downward chop of the crystal blade. The crystal clanged off the metal of his weapon, hard as blade steel. He absorbed the blow and rolled away, two somersaults backward and then into a standing position. As he lifted the Coral Heart in defense, he felt the beat of the pulse in his palm. His heart regulated it and regulated the sword. The training he’d done was paying off.

A rather enigmatic piece, in which we have the swordsman’s mentor/foster mother apparently at odds with her past/future self, a powerful witch who may have created his opponent as a test for him or as a challenge for her. In fact, it isn’t the Coral Heart who is the center of this piece, but the former assassin and her conflict with the witch/other self, in which Ismet Toler may only be a pawn. The story has a fragmentary appearance, as if it is a chapter at the beginning of a definitive history of the swordsman, but such a longer work may not actually exist. Not your usual swordsman-in-training story.

“Forever People” by Robert V S Redick

Majka is a widow with a secret, living alone with her young son and mother-in-law, when a strange traveler comes to the door. There is something different and unsettling about him. When her son plays a certain tune on the mandolin, he begins to tell the story that goes with the verses, about a clan that long ago defied the king.

“The king sent no word to the Forever People. He called instead for his sorcerers, and told them it was time to prove their loyalty. And the sorcerers locked themselves in a tower for five days and nights, and a blood-red glow lit the tower windows. When it was done a great shriek went up from the tower, and half the sorcerers went mad and never recovered. But the curse was cast, and it fell upon the Ve’saqra and heated their bones like irons in the forge, and all eight thousand were scalded to death from within.”

Majka knows he is telling the truth. Her husband had kept one of the incandescent bones of his ancestors as a relic, sealed in a lead jar. And now she understands that the king has found them again, the descendants of the survivors.

There’s a powerful legend at the heart of this story, and a strongly flawed protagonist in Majka, a woman who isn’t really sure what she wants, except for the safety of her son. The setting is full of dark portents, such as the demonic white weasel that haunts Majka’s farmyard. But the tale ends so abruptly it feels like an excerpt from some longer work, leaving readers with events pulled out from under them.

“Sponda the Suet Girl and the Secret of the French Pearl” by Ellen Klages

It seems that the emperor has offered a fortune to whoever brings him the secret of the French Pearl, which is supposedly hidden and warded by a wizard. Natto the thief purchases a map that supposedly gives its location. But such suppositions turn out to be highly misleading.

Low humor here, a nice serving of well-deserved comeuppance, and some clever dirty tricks on a trickster.

“Shaggy Dog Bridge: A Black Company Story” by Glen Cook

The Black Company is on the run, looking for a way out. The pursuing enemy has pinned them against what seems to be the Mother of All Gorges.

Whatever, a knife-edge wound slashed the earth for seven hundred miles, across the grain, through mountains and forests, swamps and plains, often more than a thousand feet deep, never more than an eighth of a mile wide. It drained lakes and shifted rivers. Our side, the west, boasted hundreds of square miles of dense hardwood forest on rounded mountains with deep valleys between. Tough traveling. From what I could see the east side was exactly the same.

Finding a way across it is their major problem. Even when One-Eye the sorcerer discovers the illusion-hidden magic bridge. And they find what lies on the other side, which is not nice at all, as usual in this milieu. A whole lot of action, mayhem and sorcery ensues, as potent forces of evil clash inside Croaker’s mind; it seems that a spate of torture in the Lady’s hands has rendered him particularly susceptible to the sendings of those enslaved undead spectres known as the Taken.

As one of the most long-running series in the genre, any Black Company story comes with a lengthy tail of backstory and series characters. Readers familiar with this story will recognize Croaker, One-Eye, Goblin and their evil nemeses. But Cook has a way of presenting this material that makes it accessible to those who haven’t been following the Company’s Annals since the beginning or anywhere close to it. Here is the usual dark humor mixed with unalloyed dark, coming to a conclusion that concludes even much less than usual, as the title suggests. This story will go on, but of course we knew that.

“The Ghost Makers” by Elizabeth Bear

A faceless man of bronze – a Gage, once the servant of a Wizard – has come to Messaline, City of Jackals, on an errand involving a murdered poet. There he encounters Serhan, a swordsman once part of the Caliph’s guard known as the Dead Men, also investigating the murder. The perpetrator is a Wizard known as a ghost-maker. “He kills for the pleasure it affords him. He kills artists, in particular. He likes to own them. To possess their creativity.” The two masterless men join forces to hunt down their common enemy.

One of the classic tropes of Sword and Sorcery is the pair of companion adventurers, and this one might well be first in a series, the origin tale of the partnership, which turns out to be of more importance than the immediate quest. The setting is typical of the exotic cities in which such adventures take place, filled with interesting gods and their priests and priestesses.

“One Last, Great Adventure” by Ellen Kushner and Ysabeau S Wilce

The Hero is getting on in years and considering retirement so, somewhat perversely, he sets off to Illyria with his companion/lover?/werefox to fight another, perhaps final monster. There may be a reward in it somewhere, involving rubies and a princess with perfect feet.

He doesn’t care what form it takes, or if it’s devious, cunning, or smells like a poopy diaper and can sing five-part madrigals with itself. He’s never met a monster he couldn’t kill. He’ll kill this one, too. And then he will claim his reward and be done with heroics for good.

But things in Illyria are not as they should be. The identity of the monsters is in dispute. The princess on display is a ringer and the real one locked up in the storeroom. Reynard, too, is up to something, the Hero knows not what.

I could have told the Hero this adventure was probably ill-advised. If a person is going to retire and already has the wherewithal to do so, he should stop going forth on adventures, not undertake another. Nonetheless, this is a light-hearted fun piece, which also offers some insights into such matters as the autonomy of princesses and the nature of monsters.

“The High King Dreaming” by Daniel Abraham

“The High King is not dead but dreaming, and his dreams are of his death.” He seems, however, to be dead, lying on his pyre holding his sword. His cunning man declares,

“He waits now in places beyond our sight, but he is not gone. All of history remains before us, and we have lost him now only because he must rest. When he is needed, the High King shall rise and Justice shall again protect the land.”

This tale seems awfully familiar, although the names have changed. The story is about the strength of legend and the hope placed in it, like the sword you don’t need because you know it’s there. An optimistic piece, more so than I think realistically deserve, but the case the author makes is well done.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies, May 2013

A three-issue month, for a total of six stories. #120 involves sailors and clockwork automatons, whereby I note that this trope has secured its place as a genre cliché. #121 gives us loneliness and titles containing similes, while #122 is set in empty worlds.

#120

“The Clockwork Trollop” by Debra Doyle & James D Macdonald

The title says it. Near the turn of Victoria’s century, Professor Haversham perfects the clockwork whore, considering a chess-playing automaton an insufficient challenge to his talents. He intends it as a benefit to society, but unexpected consequences put a spanner into the gears. This is humor of the somewhat absurd and farcical sort, but even so, I don’t believe that even the lowest tavern owner is going to let random streetwalkers into his back rooms to ply their trade without getting his share of the take.

“The Drowned Man” by Laura E Price

The Teachout sisters, Corwyn and Gwen, are returning by ship to claim their pay from the museum after acquiring a mysterious and dangerous music box that Corwyn must keep, sealed with wax, strapped to a wound on her thigh.

But the songs still seeped out and circled round her head. At first they were pleasant enough, but after two days of almost hearing music that clawed at her ears and attention, she got disgusted with the whole business. By the third day, she managed to ignore it.

While at sea, they spot what seems to be a drowned man floating in the water, but he turns out to be alive and, once on board, a thief who breaks into their cabin. Matters become worse when his wife shows up, along with their spawn.

Among other things, a twist on the siren story, with the water dragon being the sort of creature often identified with such deadly singers. There’s quite a lot going on here, and the clockwork sailors are a minor element. The primary focus is on the sisters, a fascinating pair of adventurers, with many hints given about their prior activities; I suspect a series could be in the making.

#121

“Singing Like a Hundred Dug-Up Bones” by Alex Dally MacFarlane

Knowe is a solitary character who enters the scene appearing rather like a ghoul, but she resolves into a nascent archaeologist. The setting seems to be somewhere in the islands north of Scotland – the Orkneys or Shetlands – and not in our own century. Knowe has taken an interest in the ancient burial mounds, but one day, while looking for bones, she meets one of the ghosts who reside there. Another thing about Knowe is her love of songs, although her own voice doesn’t serve well for carrying them. The ghost, a musician herself, is the first person who doesn’t mind this.

There’s a strong sense here of the connection between the present and the distant past.

She knows there’s still more in that first chamber, more again in the three un-opened chambers: people with close-kept histories, locked up in metal and stone, in the state of their bones—stories for Knowe to spell out in slow, small pieces. Her ancestors’ stories.

There’s also a strong sense of loneliness. Knowe hasn’t had a happy life; she claims she doesn’t really like people much. The ghosts appear to be her first real friends, the only people with whom she can share herself. That’s a sad state of affairs. The situation may be due in part to patriarchy, at least to the behavior of her father. This is a profoundly misandristic work; men are portrayed on a scale of useless to oppressive. Most notably, there are no males among the ghosts, which is, to say the least, peculiar. A lot of men appear to have died at sea, but even the few who are buried in the mounds don’t join the ghosts, to their relief and satisfaction. There are only mothers, daughters, sisters, no brothers or sons. Their songs are all about women, and not about loving men. Which goes a long way to explain Knowe’s contentment in this society. She sees herself as part of this line of daughters and sisters, among her own at last, and learning their songs.

Which makes for a problem. The author makes the point that hundreds of years passed between the time the ghosts lived on the island and when it was repopulated, during which the language they spoke had been lost. Yet the ghosts are fluent in Knowe’s language. Tolnait explains that while the current people don’t linger among the mounds, she’s learned some of their words, but some words don’t make a whole language. I’m not buying it. Also not quite buying how the songs, in the language Knowe doesn’t understand, can be as moving as she claims. The tunes, perhaps, and the stories they tell – yes, but those stories were told to her in her own tongue. Of course, I’m a story person.

“Our Dead Selves Lie Like Footsteps in Our Wake” by Jeff Isacksen

Another patriarchal society, in which women, even of the ruling magical caste, and deformed males are not valued. But Mikale and Adalia, talented beyond the norm, have each other.

Most spells alter threads. They can turn air into bursts of fiery energy or freeze water in a glass. Others destroy threads or create them. The formula on Adalia’s nightstand binds things—ties threads together.

Time, however, unravels threads. Apart for too long, Mikale turns into a lush, Adalia takes out her hostility in duels. The story becomes Mikale’s struggle to recover and realize his talent.

A failed love story that was never really a romance. I found it rather short on heart, couldn’t feel for the characters.

#122

“The Penitent” by M Bennardo

No 17596 has occupied his cell for four years under conditions of total solitude.

Everything in the prison was kept as quiet as possible. Even the guards wore rags wrapped around their feet to keep the soles of their shoes from ringing on the flagstones. Above all, the prisoners must not be reminded of the world outside their cells. Above all, the prisoners must not be disturbed in their term of penitence.

Now, for the first time, the door is unlocked, and he walks out, discovering all the other cells are empty. The entire city is empty. The guards are long gone. But then who has been pushing his tray of food under the door every day?

An odd fabulist piece, entirely concerned with the existential relationship between the penitent and his place of confinement, as the rest of the world has ceased to matter. Although there’s some evidence that the conditions of his confinement have driven him somewhat round the bend, I see no suggestion of ambiguity here; the details are too clear, too specific to be a delusion, despite the situation being quite inexplicable.

–RECOMMENDED

“Dreams of Peace” by Dana Beehr

Chaladon, last of the Deep Dancers, has spent most of her life following the call of a voice from her dreams and seeking to end the Ever-storm that is consuming the world. Chaladon takes shelter in an abandoned town but wakes to find herself apparently transported back in time to when it was a bustling, prosperous place full of ordinary humanity, except that it all seems an illusion.

As with the hotel furnishings, it seemed—just for a moment—that Chaladon could see devastation beneath: tattered carpet; splintered floorboards; shattered furniture; thick dust…. ”

And the magical barrier preventing anyone from leaving the place.

There is an excessive number of Capitalized Fantasy Elements here – the Fire Veil, the Deep Dance, the Garden of Forking Paths. The text is also mostly backstory, as Chaladon recalls the places she has been, the people she once knew, the things she has done. It’s all quite uninteresting until we get to the end, when the author employs a radical twist as Chaladon makes her choice. Problem is, the impact of this choice depends on a bunch of last-minute revelations that the author has kept to herself.

Tor.com, May 2013

A lot of fiction posted this month.

“Jack of Coins” by Christopher Rowe

A bunch of teenagers in a decaying city encounter a strange man who seems out of place there. He seems to be lost, including his memory, including his name. But readers will suspect he’s from Elsewhere.

This didn’t trouble Les as much as it did the rest of us. “I’m going to call you Jack, then,” she said, and even though it sounded right to us because his visage and raiment were so like the card, the man just nodded, unsure.

Jack, in fairytales, is the name of the guy who climbs between worlds. This one is sort of a reverse Pied Piper. While for the teenagers this setting seems to be a mundane dystopia, everyone else, including the police, know that magical forces are clashing. There’s a potentially interesting conflict between Les and her brother David, who, the narrator tells us, eventually joins the police, takes the other side. But we know too little about him, them, all of it, to understand the reason.

“We Have Always Lived on Mars” by Cecil Castellucci

Nina is part of a too-small colony stranded on Mars and wishing she weren’t.

I hate this cramped life. This small space. This constant living on top of one another. I long to run. To be alone. To be away from these others clinging to the end of humanity. To not have to check my gear one million times before I step outside.

One day outside the habitat her suit rips, but she survives without it. She can breathe the Martian air. To the colonists, she seems to be a miracle of directed evolution, a sign of hope. But the author has set up a really hoary old twist.

I suppose it’s part of the point of all this YA publishing, an audience that hasn’t seen all this before, that won’t recognize the genre’s oldest clichés and recycled plots. The rest of us can only groan.

“Fire Above, Fire Below” by Garth Nix

The tarmac of a car park starts to melt, and in only minutes the entire Oldgate building is engulfed. The problem is the dragon down below, forgotten by most of the city along with the old pact that it is now clearly time to renew. A lot of stuff has been forgotten and built over where it shouldn’t have been. The fire chief sends for a representative of the Dragonborn, who requests the service of a volunteer to assist and carry the gold. Gold is important to dragons.

“The dragon is too old and weak to . . . do what it needs to do. It cannot make its way through all the tons of rubble that now lie above it. It is dying,” said Ylane through the open door. “It gathers its remaining strength to breathe fire all about itself, in the hope that it can burn its way free. I do not believe your chief would like another fire such as the one that consumed the Oldgate tower.”

Good original legendary premise, well-executed, with a neat conclusion. Readers will have suppose that Ylane isn’t telling Jaxon everything, and they’ll be right.

“Shall We Gather” by Alex Bledsoe

The Reverend Craig Chess is called to the bedside of a dying old man who “wants a man of God to tell him he ain’t going to hell.” Thing is, Old Man Foyt lives among the Tufad [fairies] over the line in Cloud County, which is run by the First Daughters, and Craig doesn’t want to be viewed as an interloper. Another thing is, the old man has sort of absorbed some of the Tufa by living among them for so long, leaving him “a little bit in the middle.” So the First Daughter wants Craig to ask him whether, at the end, the Tufa go before the same god as the Christians do.

A warm story of simple faith. When Craig first gets the phone call from Lula Mae Pennycuff, I thought this might be hillbilly mockery, but it turns out to be no such thing.

“The Button Man and the Murder Tree” by Cherie Priest

A Wild Cards story. Raul Esposito works for the Chicago Mob in 1971, but he’s also turned a card as a joker, with mushrooms, button mushrooms that grow on his skin.

He started at his wrists, since those growths had blossomed first, and were largest. He pruned them one by one, scraping the blade along the clustered stalks. They popped free and dropped into the steel waste bin with a spongy little ping that made his teeth itch. Some as small as his pinky nail. Some the size of his thumb. Brown-capped or gray, with creamy undersides and speckles.

Lately, the bosses have decided to post the names on the hit list to the Deadman’s Tree, and Raul isn’t happy to see Harriet’s up there now. Harriet’s an old flame, and he knows he’ll probably get that call. But when he does, he discovers that Harriet has a secret of her own, a lot like his. The bosses haven’t been telling him everything.

This one feels like it should have been set about forty years earlier, if it weren’t for the constraints of the series. Otherwise, it’s relatively unconstrained and reads well on its own.

“Super Bass” by Kai Ashante Wilson

In Sea-john, a city with something of the flavor of our Caribbean, Gian is a hero back from the wars with what we would call PSTD. He’s vowed to leave all that behind, to find happiness and love at home, and he’s found the man he wants it with. But he never brings his man around to meet his mamas-and-papas, like he’s ashamed of them, which he is.

“We can’t hardly step in the street, but somebody don’t stop us to say they just now seen you, hugged up with some fella we ain’t even met once. Now, all of a sudden, you going to services out of parish. What it feel like, Gianni, is you cutting out the people who love you best.”

Cianco is the Summer King [this seems to be a relatively permanent position] at his own parish’s temple, which is having a healing ceremony today. The priestess there doesn’t think much of his boy Gian, like he doesn’t belong. She wants someone better, someone prettier. Gian has to prove himself, through faith and love.

A complicated background here – both Gian’s personal history in the war and the society of his home town. Of great importance is the local religion, in which a lot seems familiar, largely suggesting voudon, but its own unique self. The ceremony is fueled by offerings, community fervor, faith and sex. As Cianco’s sissy, Gian serves as a necessary channel of power, a thing he has never previously done. He soon learns it’s a matter not only of power but wise judgment in the employment of it. The description of the different cases and their disposition of them is quite interesting. There’s also lively language and dialog.

But there’s not a whole lot of conflict, except Gian’s inward ones. Of much stuff that could go wrong, or threaten to go wrong, he pretty much does it right. It looks like his heart’s desire is all going to fall into his hands, and Cianco is going to love Gian’s own family, too. Cianco is a great guy and Gian seems to be a lucky one to have him, but it doesn’t make for a lot of story tension.

Let it never be said that authors from Australia and New Zealand don’t have a huge influence on American YA. From Margo Lanagan to Justine Larbalestier to Garth Nix to Elizabeth Knox, they are widely represented on best-of lists and have earned legions of devoted fans on the other side of the world. Karen Healey, whose first two books were set in her native New Zealand, is a relative newcomer to that list, but she’s already established a reputation for novels that are as thoughtful as they are enjoyable. Now, with her third YA novel When We Wake, she makes two departures from her previous work – the first from fantasy to science fiction, and the second from New Zealand to a future Australia. Heroine Tegan Oglietti is a 16-year-old girl who’s not particularly unusual. We’re introduced to her through her own vibrant, engaging voice. She loves the Beatles and freerunning, is newly in love and, if not as inherently political as her longtime friend turned new boyfriend, enough of a believer to attend a protest with him – oh, and the year’s 2027. Except that’s the day Tegan dies, cut down by a stray sniper bullet meant for a dignitary, not for a normal teenage girl, but for someone important, as it were.

But Tegan does not stay dead forever. When she’s revived, it’s 100 hundred years later, and the mere fact of her waking has made her the exact opposite of the typical teenage girl – in every way except on the inside, of course, where that’s precisely what she still is: a teenage girl who finds out she was cryogenically frozen and is the first person considered a successful revival. She’s at the center of a military project, Operation New Beginning, and she believes in the good in that, in helping bring back soldiers, because her father was one. So she’s not just left to deal with the circumstances of her awakening, but to grieve for a past she never got to experience. Everyone she knew and loved is dead. The world has undergone vast changes. And Tegan’s new celebrity status puts her in the crosshairs of religious fundamentalists who believe she’s a soulless abomination, and of people who believe Australia’s zero tolerance immigration policy should be enforced for ‘‘revivals’’ like Tegan as well. In a time of overpopulation and catastrophic environmental changes, there’s no room for the past’s dead to come back to life, they argue.

Healey here does something rare in YA science fiction (which we are thankfully beginning to see more of lately). This is not a dystopia, though the world has its problems, but it’s not a utopia either. What it is instead of those perhaps simpler and definitely more extreme options is a convincing, compelling future. From computer tech to the global political environment to changes in music, Healey has meticulously constructed a world that feels like it could happen. And yet it is different enough from our own to be a constantly entrancing ‘‘what if.’’ What if this happens? What if that does? What if eating meat was not only expensive but socially disapproved of? What if tiny mobile video cameras made the paparazzi even more omnipresent?

Tegan’s allies in this new world are not as powerful as her keepers, and it becomes quickly clear that the military has a bunker’s worth of dark secrets and a serious agenda where she’s concerned. But, to keep her happy, she’s allowed to live with the doctor who revived her, Marie (who she very much likes). Healey shows off her effortlessly integrated talent for building worlds that feel truly diverse, in a way that’s never forced. At school, Tegan makes fast friends with budding journalist Bethari and her ex, pharmaceutical whiz Joph, and meets a dreamy boy on a third world talent visa, Abdi. Some of the other kids taunt and torment her, but Tegan is not willing to play their games. And, as she learns more, she may not be a willing participant in those of the military’s or the radicals’ either. All this results in several high stakes showdowns, related to us in Tegan’s unmistakable voice, the last of which isn’t resolved. But, that’s okay, because there’s another volume on the way. And I, for one, can’t wait to see what Healey’s political, intelligent teens are going to do in When We Wake’s follow-up installment.

The debut of a new publication, some occasional ezines, and a couple of the regular monthlies. I particularly enjoyed Electric Velocipede this time around.

Electric Velocipede #26, Spring 2013

Of all the genre’s small press zines, EV is in the top rank for quality. Here’s one of its best issues, a particularly quiet and thoughtful one, with well-realized settings and compelling premises.

“Grandmother of Ghosts” by E Catherine Tobler

A novel look at the passage of souls. The narrator is in the place of the ferryman, the conductor, the psychopomp, but the setting is different: there is both a shore and a train. But something has recently been going wrong. The boats stopped coming some time ago, and now the train is late. There are almost no more passengers.

I pluck the sticks that lay strewn in the field where they have lain since dropped. Nineteen in all. There used to be so many more. I tie them into a bundle and hoist it onto my back. So light, when once the burden was so great. Tonight, I will burn the sticks into nothingness and release the people who brought them.

Except that the narrator begins to think: what if these are the last?

The main thing here is in the setting, the variation on the classic trope. A lot of symbolism adds to the interest, even if readers may not be quite clear on the significance in every case, but the images are very strong, such as the overturned and abandoned rowboats littering the beach, like the carcasses of dead whale calves washed ashore.

–RECOMMENDED

“The Entomologist’s Three Ballgowns” by Brooke Wonders

Phil, cripplingly shy, finally works up the nerve to ask his lab partner Kendra out on a date. They go dancing – her idea – and he realizes there is something peculiar about her dress. It’s made of grasshoppers. The next time, it’s scorpions.

The dress, when he slides it off her shoulders and to the floor, scatters, sending dark bodies skittering toward darkened corners and beneath furniture. All over his body stinging points of pain bloom where she’s touched him.

Some delightful similes in this short piece about mating.

“The Tempting: A Love Story” by James Alan Gardner

The 2nd person narrator, another “I”, lives in a magic Palace where time is plastic; every season has its room. It’s the sort of decadent place where inhabitants become bored and seek novelty and Drama. Our narrator has decided to get a new Slave, the old one being worn out. The Slaves are from Earth, with no resistance to magic and thus infinitely manipulable. But the enslaving itself must be done with temptation, not force.

You show the new Slave the wonders. A hundred variations on waterfalls: falling down, falling up, in silence, in song, falls flowing with honey instead of water, or lemonade, or the Souls of the Damned™, or champagne (and the bubbles pop crinkling in your nose). Oh and the castles, the caves, the jungle isles, the desert ruins, the minaret cities, the Valleys That Time Forgot, the Mines That Were Dug Too Deep, the Rivers Of Initiation, the Temples Of One-Note Gods.

But in all this fantasticality, there is a growing sense that all is not right, that the narrator is not quite as omnipotent as he claims to be.

A what’s-going-on story, in which the mystery rests in the identity of the narrator. The author isn’t coy about this; the revelation is made in due course, in terms that readers will certainly grasp. And, in a gravitational pull of significance, the revelation alters our understanding of all the rest.

“The Still Room” by Jamie Kellen

Not a distilling room, but a room of almost absolute stillness. Almost. The two men trapped inside the room are moving at an imperceptible rate, caught in the middle of a duel. The boy’s mother tells him their family are the room’s guardians, charged with keeping it closed. But the war has come, and the air raids. Instead of going to the shelter, the boy and his mother go down to the cellar, where they will be safe from the bombs.

“It’s not just the room either, it’s the house; this house has survived everything. The Great Fire, Cromwell, every other horrible thing that’s happened in the last six hundred years, all of it.”

A neat premise, an intriguing one. The boy’s mother has a theory about the room, why it exists and how the situation there might eventually end, but it’s impossible to know if she’s right. There are hints, however, ominous ones. Readers will have their own speculations.

“Paradigm Shift” by Julie Day

Short-short. The narrator is dragged by her mother to pageants; at sixteen she gets back by going cyborg. There are hints about possible immune issues and about identity, but overall this is an extreme case of teen rebellion, a couple of steps beyond piercing and tattoos.

“The Irish Astronaut” by Val Nolan

After the Aquarius mission is lost and the program shut down, Dale goes to the Irish coast to bring home the ashes of his crewmate and friend. The visit is cathartic.

They were on the true Burren now, a vast, wrinkled plain of undulating stone weathered into near oblivion. A kaleidoscope of grey, it spread on and on, beyond history, beyond the night, out of sight beyond Dale’s unrelenting dreams. Behind them, the few stray streetlights of the village sparkled in the distance, and, above, the wash of moonlight made it seem another world entirely.

A contemplative story about the human spirit, friendship, and landscape. A strong sense of place here, well evoked.

–RECOMMENDED

Lightspeed, May 2013

Stories of romantic encounters.

“Water Finds Its Level” by M Bennardo

Jennifer meets Roger in the Collision, when parallel universes merge and they discover they are occupying the same apartment. There is no Jennifer in Roger’s universe, but there’s another Roger in Jennifer’s. She doesn’t want to think about that other man. Roger can’t leave it alone.

My Roger was the one who had talked to me all those nights. This person, no matter how good the copy, hadn’t done any of that. That shared history had shaped some small part of my Roger—we had laughed together, cried together, discovered things together. None of that could be replaced, not even by this identical twin.

This one is a situation, but its development into a story is minimal. Readers are left to conjecture what might happen next, how it might turn out. The author isn’t a lot of help.

“The Traditional” by Maria Dahvana Headley

One of those 2nd-person narrations where “you” reads as “I”. The narrator is pointedly untraditional. She was engaged in her usual occupation of preying on young men when the world, apparently, ripped open and the worms came out. They eat people. It’s no use wondering if she and her lover might have gotten together under more normal circumstances. They’re together now. But altered circumstances require adjustment.

This is a new kind of love for both of you, but not a new kind of love for the world. In the pre-catastrophe world, things that loved one another sometimes ate their mates. You both consider this. The thought of lapping at blood and chewing flesh becomes tempting. You’re both getting mad scared of the dark.

Here’s extreme, audacious stuff, grotesque variations on the traditional anniversary gifts: paper, cotton, leather, etc. Here, instead, we get mutilation, cannibalism, madness, and the end of the world, all edging into the surreal. The prose is sharp and intense, defying the limits. And it’s a love story.

–RECOMMENDED

“Always, They Whisper” by Damien Walters Grintalis

Medusa, a revisionist version. Medi is living in a place that might be Los Angeles, dwelling on her past and disguising herself as an ugly old woman whom no one would notice. Until one day the disguise fails, and she’s left with the face that has always been fatally attractive to men.

This one is too blatantly a metaphor and a polemic about the abuse of women and the men who blame her for what they do. Medi rejects their blame, the whispering voices that say it’s all her fault, rejects the myth. That’s about it.

“Leaving the Dead” by Dennis Danvers

Darwin notices that everyone in the Target is dead, except for one cashier, who’s starting to nod off like the rest. He wakes her up.

He gestured at all the dead. Some had fallen facedown into their carts. Others were still reaching out for the bottom shelf. Most had dropped where they stood. Dropped phones were dropping calls everywhere. They were dead too. Personal devices without a person.

As they figure they’re the only people left alive, life starts to look pretty good. Better than it had been. The only one of them with much sense is Elvis the dog, whose blind man is dead. Elvis can hear the coyotes out there.

So what to make of this? It’s clearly not meant to be taken literally as a postapocalypse scenario, all grim survivalism, despite the misgivings of the dog. My first notion is to take it as a metaphor for the mind-killing life of working in places like Target, people shuffling through their workday, dead inside. But no, the story makes it clear that everyone is actually fall-down-and-rotting dead. The question then becomes not why they died, which we never do learn, but why Darwin alone did not [for Gabrielle was clearly about to die before Darwin, Christ-like, {Death-like?}touched her]. But we never learn that answer either, only that he and especially Gabrielle led unhappy, unfulfilling lives until the deaths of everyone else liberated them, largely from the expectations of family and society. Now they’re free to fall in love and gambol in the meadows. Even the responsible dog is at last seduced by a Frisbee. So I’m tempted to conclude that Darwin and Gabrielle may not have left the dead at all, but joined them in Elysium. Does the text support this notion? Not strongly, but then it doesn’t strongly support any alternative interpretation.

Strange Horizons, May 2013

SH is really slighting readers with the fiction this month: only two stories, one of which is far too short to occupy two slots.

“Hear the Enemy, My Daughter” by Kenneth Schneyer

Military SF. Humans are at war with the Sheshash, a war fought anachronistically hand-to-hand, at which the Sheshash’s paired warriors excel. Halima was working to crack the alien language when her husband was killed in combat. Ever since, their young daughter has been exhibiting symptoms of disturbance. Now Halima is suddenly called to interrogate the first paired Sheshash POWs, and she begins to conclude they are mother and daughter.

Then the dwarf Sheshash’s eyes opened fully and it shot out of the pouch, throwing itself at the barrier to get at me. I didn’t back away this time, but felt my heart pound in my chest. The dwarf bounced off the barrier but tried again, bounced again and kept trying. Its mouth was open and it was uttering the shriek we had heard on every battlefield: Kri’ikshi! Kri’ikshi!

This one follows the formula whereby the protagonist has a SFnal problem and a parallel personal problem; engaging in one produces an epiphany that throws insight on the other. In this case, not a whole lot of insight. The child’s identification with the aliens who killed her father is an interesting psychological problem left mostly unresolved. I’m not buying the military aspect. Even now, such battlefield actions are becoming rare outside of civil warfare.

“Hiding on the Red Sands of Mars” by Anaea Lay

When a stranger shows up at her mother’s isolated cabin, Pence comes of age with the need to discover who she is. Her mother was once one of the leaders of the revolution; afterward, she hid them away from the eyes of the ubiquitous drones, telling Pence a story about going to the safety of Mars. Now her old partner wants her to return to the struggle, but Harriet refuses.

“It sounds great, when you listen to him. It’s all adventure and glory and fighting the good fight. He forgets about the people who chase you off because they’re afraid you’re going to make things worse, or the people who are too stupid to understand that just because you have enough this year doesn’t mean the water tables aren’t going to drop another two inches next year.”

An If This Goes On scenario, with repressive states using deadly force to control increasingly scarce water resources. The drones, the anti-terrorist edicts, the climatic degradation are all out of today’s headlines. Also familiar is the passivity of the US Midwestern population.

I very much wish SH hadn’t split this one into installments. The first half is the weaker, a fairly unremarkable postapocalyptic YA scenario, with Pence knowing very little of her situation. Readers who lose interest will miss the stronger second part when Pence confronts her mother’s past and her own future.

Adventure Rocketship! #1, edited by Jonathan Wright

A new British publication, a sort of hybrid that I’d call “a magazine in book form” more than an anthology, with this first issue/volume being subtitled: Let’s All Go to the Science Fiction Disco. The theme being the intersection of music, the future, and the counterculture. More than half the material here is nonfiction, and altogether it forms a history of the relationship of SF and music from the 60s onward; the nonfiction is presented chronologically by decade, and the fiction follows in its own section.

There are 6 stories, most fairly slight — glimpses into the place of music in several different genre settings, although I find the predominant direction of the authors’ glance is pastwards, not into the future. A few moments of counterculture, too, most notably Ziggy Stardust.

“Starmen” by Liz Williams

The narrator, as a boy in South London, has his grey-toned life blown open by a chance viewing of David Bowie’s Starman.

But in bed that night, I closed my eyes and the purple door opened and I saw that sidelong smile, and that long finger pointing right at me and the starman came. I was standing on the edge of somewhere, a world I’d never seen before, with coloured striated
light like fallen rainbows, drifting over the bright ground, and a sky that hazed from azure to green to purple. The sun was a huge crimson ball and someone was walking towards me, holding out a hand.

Certainly it’s hard to think of a figure in the rock music world more intimately connected with space. In an odd coincidence, an astronaut on the ISS has recently recorded what is probably the first music video in space, appropriately covering Bowie. Williams reminds us that he was once Mrs Jones’ lad Davy.

“Between the Notes” by Lavie Tidhar

The narrator is different from the other time-travelling serial killers. He does it out of love.

Musicians, like writers, fade out young. They are spent quickly, like bullets. To die young is to live forever. To die old is to be a legend diminished, a shadow-self.

But this is love for the music. The narrator discovers that love for the musician is quite a different thing.

Like the Williams story above, this one comes out of the author’s personal background, featuring an artist less widely known than Buddy Holly or Mozart. I’m reminded of Lewis Shiner’s seminal Glimpses, but even moreso the ancient Greeks whose motto: “Those whom the gods love die young.” Yet even Zeus cannot save his beloved Sarpedon.

“Blues for Ahab” by Nir Yaniv

Future music. G’s band is fading in popularity, and the only solution, according to their producer, is the Leviathan, a human musical processor. The band reluctantly agrees after initial protest.

No way. He never created his own music, always rode like a leech on the body of creation of other bands. That was how he became popular, and that’s why we despised him.

What this one is saying is that musicians and musicianship will remain much the same, despite possible future enhancements. The ending is mean; I like that.

“Musicians” by Martin Millar

Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin playing cards in the afterlife.

“Mind if I join you?” said Howlin’ Wolf.

“You’re welcome,” replied Jimi Hendrix. “Provided you have something to stake.”

Howlin’ Wolf laid a harmonica on the table. “I learned how to play that from Sonny Boy
Williamson,” he said.

“Which Sonny Boy Williamson?”

“I forget. But they were both good, so I figure it will do.”

Essentially a ghost story celebrating the highs and lows of musicians’ lives. A reminiscence, in which the prose is the feature. No connection to science fiction or the future.

“Flight Path Estate” by Tim Maughan

The nameless narrator [aren't they all?] is an aspiring journalist who makes contact with a charismatic young soon-to-be-rising star at a protest against the demolition of some old housing towers, unique because they are still free of the ubiquitous surveillance, cameras and drones always watching. Melody12 has the indefinable star quality but also an authenticity that the narrator values. She has a plan. It works out, almost as she’d mapped it out.

For moments – minutes I guess, maybe four or five, the length of one of Melody’s stark rhythms – everything came together in unrepeatable harmony. I was transfixed, everyone was; even the avatars – who I kind of pitied for not being able to experience this outrage first hand, for not being able to feel the bass – but I knew it couldn’t last.

This story about getting what you wish for, the longest in the issue, is essentially about today, or an extrapolation from it: the security state, the surveillance state, the terrorism obsession, the anarchist souls who fight back on behalf of the individual’s liberty. And the yearning for stardom, for recognition, the need to matter. And the parasites who fatten on it, drain it, consume it. We recognize it all. The music here is fairly peripheral to the heart of the story, a means to the end.

Melody12 embodies a fundamental contradiction. She and her buddies want to evade surveillance, they want a place where they won’t be watched, they want privacy and anonymity. But while she makes an alliance with Anonymous, her craving for stardom, for the notice of the public, makes privacy impossible. She becomes more watched than anyone. Only thus, the story seems to be claiming, can the surveillance establishment be toppled. Or maybe Melody12 just didn’t know what she was doing, and the consequences.

“One Door Closes and then Another Door Closes” by Stanley Donwood

In a dystopian future, a man who has forgotten his name

looks from the window. It is winter, the trees are bare or dead, the sky is a dirty yellowish colour and the clouds are a chill grey where they tear against the horizon. There is some kind of conflagration in the distance, far away. The wind stirs the ragged treetops. Bruises of pale half-sunshine bloom fleetingly across the rooftops of the houses. He cannot see a single human being, nor hear any evidence that human beings exist.

Music here only seems to exist in its absence. Not sure why this particular story is included.

Bourbon Penn #7, May 2013

Seven stories that the issue’s title classifies as cross-genre. Not sure I’d call it that, but there is a definite literary sensibility to them, crossed with the sort of subject matter characteristic of the speculative genre. The quality of the prose is generally high, with a good deal of originality and unpredictability. Refreshingly different.

“The Ant Singer” by Benjamin Parzybok

Alex Volchovok solves ant problems. He’s been in business for a long time.

Settled into an office for decades, waiting for a call upon his unique services, listening to music from another era and drifting in and out of slumber in a chair that, through long exposure to his body, fit his shape absolutely.

But Alex’s own problems are personal, involving a couple of old friends and late-blooming jealousy.

Nicely done with a light fantastic element, but mainly a character piece. I like the way Alex’s emotions manifest in ants, as Bernard’s do in locks, letting Alex in and out of his own office depending on Bernard’s moods.

“Electric Prayer Wheel” by James Freetly

A dark comedy about death and letting go. The narrator is a kind of loser whose wife died of brain cancer, leaving him alone in a trailer park with their young daughter. When she was first diagnosed, Kelly placed a prayer in their neighbor’s dashboard prayer wheel – it apparently didn’t work, although the narrator doesn’t know what it said. Now the neighbor drives his truck into the retention pond in the first of many futile suicide attempts. Attempting half-heartedly to save him, the narrator takes the prayer wheel from the dashboard, an act with Consequences.

Now the only sounds were Chopra crying outside and the squeak of the prayer wheel. I reached out to stop it spinning, but immediately popped my fingers into my mouth. The thing was moving like a buzz saw. I searched the pedestal for a switch, found it and received a shock when I touched it. It didn’t stop. The squeaking grew more frantic.

This shouldn’t be as funny as it is. The characters are all depressing, a trailer park is always depressing, and so is cancer. But it’s hard not to think that Chopra, despite his inability to die, is still on Earth just to finish up some business with the narrator, or maybe for Kelly, or maybe he was an avatar all along. At any rate, I can’t help thinking Chopra has taken a great step towards Enlightenment and the narrator and his family may be facing better times. Maybe.

“The Barrel” by Holly Day

The little boy wonders about the barrel that his father feeds in the back yard, where he is forbidden to enter.

He could see it from the window of his bedroom, could just see what he thought must be its black gaping hole of a mouth. Did a long, pink, sticky tongue come out and delicately lap food off the plate? Did some sort of hose protrude at mealtimes to suck the food off the porcelain surface of the plate, like a vacuum cleaner extension, or the way mouths of the tiny tank snails worked in the fish tank at the doctor’s office?

Well, we know nothing good is going to come of this, but at the end we still aren’t quite sure what’s happening, only that it’s some sort of horror.

“Your Fairy Is Serenity Elfsong” by Samantha Henderson

Not quite what you had in mind.

She’s got black leggings and ankle-high combat boots. Her wings, aphid-color, droop from under the jacket, tattered and useless in the damp. Her face is pretty in a sharp, hateful way and her fingers are long and stained nicotine-yellow.

The narrator could always see the fairies, but once she was out on the streets, they were occasionally helpful. So it’s not really quite clear why she hates them so very much. It’s not like they owe her anything, not like she ever did anything to them. So good for the narrator for dragging herself up mostly by herself and turning them down, whatever they want from her. But it doesn’t seem like they put her on the streets to begin with, and I think it’s not really the fairies she wants to hit.

“Consumer Testing” by John Greenwood

Strange, strange, weird, creepy people. The narrator was raised in isolation and ignorance by deficient parents whose maxims were, “Keep yourself to yourself” and “No good will come of it.” Which it didn’t. Unseen neighbors used to throw trash and worse over the wall into the garden, but the timorous parents made no objection. After they were dead and buried in the potato patch, someone threw a television set, not a normal one [for one thing, the narrator's house has no electricity, but the TV works anyway]. A figure on the screen invites the narrator to participate in the Mystery Shopping Consortium, by writing reviews of items that would be delivered to him.

I had no reason to be surprised. Do not think that I question those things that it is not my business to question (by which I mean everything). Of all those languishing in ignorance of the workings of the television set, I may be the most pitiably green. Any surprise I expressed, one may put down to feebleness of imagination.

There’s a definite surrealism here, as well as a generally distasteful atmosphere. But what strikes me most strongly is the perversion of a child’s life by ignorant parents – the view held by so many that parenthood bestows such a right over a child. It’s sad to read of the moment when the boy managed to escape into the real world, to see a television and play with green plastic army figures, to almost make a friend before his keepers dragged him back into the house full of trash.

“Caretaker” by Will Kaufman

Emeline lives on the cemetery’s vast grounds, a janitor of the gravestones. There’s a whole company of the caretakers, and the manager reminds them constantly how lucky they are to have work.

A compatible husband, picked by the company. Her children, raised in the cemetery until they were old enough to sign or leave. A burial in the worker’s section, with a three-minute video tribute, recorded and edited by a representative of the Cemetery Corporation.

But Emeline loves Mary, and they dream of escape together beyond the too-distant wall.

A depressing work. Emeline is trapped, and although she pretends to have hope, it’s pretty clear that there are no good alternatives for her. There may not even be a wall, only graves forever, voices of the dead speaking to no one, no one to hear them.

“Jawbreaker” by Sean Doolittle

Warren is in the gumball machine line.

But in the end, when it came right down to it, he was a gumball man. Plain and simple. Dependable. One shape: you knew what you were in for. But what color? Just the right dash of suspense. Lord knew it wasn’t a glamorous line, but he’d built a life with it, with his hands and shoe leather and his father’s hardware nails. And it had always been enough of a life for Warren Ballard.

But the gumball business is dying, and there’s a punk who wants to buy him out, wants his locations so he can put in his own machines. And the main reason Warren doesn’t take his offer is that he doesn’t like the punk.

A story of revenge and prejudice. Revenge, in fictional contexts, is generally supposed to be sweet, but here it leaves a bad taste. Not that Horn didn’t deserve it, in terms of an eye for an eye. But Warren had other alternatives and chose not to exercise them, chose instead to involve innocent others and exploit their own ethnic bigotry. His action made the world a worse place.

I have to wonder when the story was set, which seems to be a decade or so in the past. How long since we’ve seen a gumball machine? How long since it was a novelty that vending machines too credit cards? There is no fantastic content here; it’s a strictly mundane account.

At the SF Encyclopedia, John Clute sums up the career of Bruce McAllister (the first of whose eighty-some short stories appeared in 1963) with his trademark critical “excessive candour.” “Because his first novel was published in a dying series (it was a late Ace Special), because his second novel speaks unrelentingly of painful matters, and because his shorter work remained scattered until late in his career, McAllister continued to be relatively obscure long past the point at which he should have attained considerable prominence.”

It is within your power to help remedy this relative neglect of a fine writer by devoting some attention to McAllister’s third novel, The Village Sang To The Sea. But the deal is hardly a one-way street. In return, you will receive a magnificent reading experience, shimmering and vital, at once otherworldly and naturalistic, that recalls such fine ancestors as Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine and Jeffrey Ford’s The Shadow Year.

The first thing to mention about the book is that it is a “novel in stories.” Or, rather, that its several well-integrated parts, cohering into an organic whole under these covers, first appeared separately in such places as F&SF and Asimov’s. But, additionally, new material is here to form bridges.

After a prologue which looks evocatively back on the matter which is to follow, with the sensibilities of the writer that the protagonist has become in adulthood, we are plunged into the vivid immediacy of a young lad’s immersion in foreignness. Brad Lattimer’s family—just himself and his parents—has to relocate under US Navy orders to the Italian seaside town of Lerici—famed in history for hosting Mary Shelley during her Frankenstein reveries. To start us off, the town and its ambiance are limned with the exactitude and poetry of Lawrence Durrell’s travel books in Chapter II, “Magic.”

Chapter III, “Poison,” begins to assemble Brad’s native peers onstage, and to sketch his mother and father. While Dad is given less focus, Brad’s Mom emerges keenly as a sad and distraught soul, continuing to grieve over the death of Brad’s younger brother as an infant, and to oscillate between anger and over-protectiveness. Partly due to this fraught atmosphere, Brad feels he must go alone to confront the local witch, or strega, whom he feels poisoned his cat. But what he learns about the woman and her strange herd of lizards is not what he foresaw.

Chapter IV, “Ombra,” is small vignette that nonetheless solidifies certain lessons in Brad’s life. But it’s the next chapter, “The Bleeding Child,” that represents the first full liftoff of the book into Robert Aickman or Thomas Ligotti weirdness. The nearby deserted village of Magusa holds eerie mysteries that entrap Brad when he ventures in pursuit of a stray dog he seeks to befriend. The affairs of the villagers are intimately entwined with Brad’s own desires for a canine companion, leading to the beautiful bit of wisdom that ends the section:

“It was okay, I told myself even then, to know love and magic—to have good friends or a scrawny dog or a terrible night in a village forgotten by God—for just a moment in time, and then to move on, living your life as you need to live it to become what you need to become, in a world where war sometimes does not feel like war at all, and blood does not have to mean dying.”

This type of quiet poetic epiphany, hard-won, typifies this novel’s tone and stance. It’s a book whose joys are bright, but always in danger of being swamped by shadows—shadows invited by inattention, misapprehension, or just the treacherous, seductive nature of the cosmos.

Two equally dramatic and satisfying chapters—”The Woman Who Waited Forever” and “Heart of Hearts”—further deepen Brad’s maturation, his Odyssean voyage across the terrain of his own fears and longings. In the former story, a playful visit to an abandoned hospital with a rowdy fellow American and some other pals leads to mortal danger for one kid, and the attentions of a mysterious savior. “Heart of Hearts” propels the endgame of the book. A strange girl named Livia puts Brad under her spell, with his life and destiny in jeopardy, and only a pilgrimage across Italy—recounted in the subsequent chapter, “Canticle of the Animals”—holds the key to his recovery, which ultimately necessitates his return to the USA, and the close of this Italian idyll-cum-testing.

McAllister’s book radiates an elegiac and meditative aura, as of puzzles that continue to perplex even after their solutions seem conclusive. It charts the slippery interfaces and interstices between the quotidian and the supernal, a realm most of us shut out and pretend does not exist. If classic Italian cinema still flourished—a world in decline and decay and evanescence, much like Brad’s memories—then it would require a combination of the talents of Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini to film this haunting biography of boy and his village.

by Gary Westfahl

J. J. Abrams’s Star Trek into Darkness is such a superb piece of cinematic entertainment that it seems a shame to say anything critical about it; yet after the adrenalin rush dies down, and one begins to think about the film in the context of the entire Star Trek franchise it is so triumphantly sustaining, certain misgivings do begin to emerge. For despite Abrams’s energetic, and largely successful, efforts to perfectly recreate the ambiance and dynamics of the original series, there remains a definite tension between what this film does, and what Gene Roddenberry originally sought to do, which emerges even more strongly in this film than in its equally accomplished predecessor, Star Trek (2009) (review here). What is heartening about Star Trek into Darkness, however, is that Abrams himself appears to be aware of the problem, and he effectively announces his determination to correct it in the next Star Trek film.

Before my extended complaint about the film’s story, I should praise the film for all of the things that it does so well. After watching both of his Star Trek films, one can see that Abrams has not only replicated, but improved upon, the cast of the original series. For the characters who were most interesting (Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scott, Chekov), he found actors who looked and talked like them (Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Carl Urban, Simon Pegg, Anton Yelchin); for the characters who were not particularly interesting (Sulu and Uhuru), Abrams found very different actors (John Cho, Zoe Saldana) and provided them with new, more intriguing personalities. And, for the most part, both sets of characters seem better the second time around: Kirk is finally maturing beyond the overgrown child persona introduced in the previous film; Spock, McCoy, and Scott deliver more of the distinctive dialogue that made the original series so amusing; and Uhura is establishing herself as a new element in the Enterprise crew, its woman warrior. Only Chekov and Sulu still seem like works in progress. Fans will appreciate the film’s numerous references to the original series: there is a cameo appearance by the first Spock, Leonard Nimoy, and it is mentioned that Christine Chapel transferred to become a nurse; as in the previous film, the series’ introductory narration and theme song are included; McCoy talks about once delivering octuplets from a “pregnant Gorn,” referring to the reptilian alien of “Arena” (1967), and performs an experiment on a tribble, the alien furball from “The Trouble with Tribbles” (1967); and on one mission, two characters are told to “lose the red shirts,” officially to prevent their being identified as Star Fleet personnel, but unofficially to knowingly comment on the well-known tendency of red-shirted individuals in the original series to get killed. Viewers unfamiliar with the original series can enjoy the film as well, since it offers everything that they have enjoyed in other well-crafted science fiction adventures: heroes to root for, villains to despise, and lots of action-packed scenes, rendered with impeccable special effects, featuring the heroes fighting against the villains. Yet that, I will argue, also represents what is problematic about this film: in all respects other than its beloved characters, it strongly recalls other contemporary films, but not the original Star Trek.

Admittedly, there is much to criticize about the world-view that Roddenberry brought to Star Trek, particularly when an excessive devotion to his own philosophy spawned the lamentably lifeless first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation; but at its core was an appealing idea that unquestionably inspired many fans of the original series. Essentially, Roddenberry envisioned a future universe in which everybody could get along; intelligent beings might have their differences, but they could still respect each other and strive to resolve their conflicts without resorting to all-out war. Thus, the Klingons and the Romulans might have been adversaries of Captain Kirk’s Federation of Planets, but episodes foregrounded individual Klingons and Romulans as sympathetic, even likable characters. Various aliens might threaten or bedevil the Enterprise, but they did so only while pursuing their own agendas, which were often presented as quite understandable; even in “The Man Trap” (1966), a rare episode about an inimical alien that must be tracked down and killed, the homicidal salt vampire was driven by its desperate desire to survive, not an implacable hatred of the human race. A few episodes were largely focused on lovable rogues, comic misunderstandings, or diplomatic intrigues, featuring no characters who seemed particularly dangerous or sinister.

In the science fiction films of the past three decades, however, an entirely different attitude toward the future has come to the forefront. Now, we are advised, humanity’s future is going to be dominated by evil people, and evil aliens, and our principal avocation will be constantly battling relentless adversaries who must be slaughtered before they can slaughter us. Three forthcoming science fiction films previewed before Star Trek into Darkness illustrate the us-versus-them mentality that now dominates the genre, following three common patterns: humans versus aliens (Ender’s Game), humans versus zombies (World War Z), and humans versus ruthless totalitarian dictators (Elysium). One might explain the ubiquity of this grim vision in various ways, but one factor in its emergence, surprisingly, may have been the fates of the first two Star Trek films. Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) was completely congruent with the spirit of the original series: an enormous alien construct approaches Earth and threatens to destroy humanity, but investigation reveals that it is merely being motivated by a confused recollection of instructions that the machine absorbed when it merged with the space probe Voyager, and when it then combines with a human partner, it peacefully leaves Earth to pursue new goals. All of this contrasted sharply with the enormously successful film that inspired the revival of the Star Trek franchise, Star Wars (1977), wherein apparently evil foes turn out to be actually evil, and the rousing conclusion was the spectacular destruction of a huge alien vehicle. Since Star Trek: The Motion Picture was derided as dull, and was not especially profitable, producers apparently decided that their next Star Trek film should resemble Star Wars more than Star Trek. As their source material, they chose a typical episode of the series, “Space Seed” (1967), featuring Khan, a ruthless but admirable superhuman from Earth’s past who seizes control of the Enterprise; though he is defeated, Captain Kirk appreciates the determination to dominate his surroundings that drove his actions and, instead of killing or punishing him, provides Khan and his comrades with an uninhabited planet that can become their new home. For the film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), though, Khan was refashioned as a thoroughly evil villain, determined to kill Kirk and his crew, and the easily anticipated happy ending was his explosive death. And this proved to be the Star Trek film that truly revived the franchise, as its enormous popularity led to additional films and a new television series.

Now, one never knows precisely what studio executives are thinking, but it is reasonable to assume that, since 1982, whenever they considered a script about a generally harmonious future in which conflicts are resolved peacefully, they recalled the failure of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and said no; and whenever they considered a script about a future visibly divided into good guys and bad guys which concludes with the violent defeat of the bad guys, they recalled the success of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and gave it the green light. Such a decision-making process would also explain why, after presumably pondering other possibilities, they approved the story of Star Trek into Darkness; for it revives the character of Khan (Benedict Cumberbatch) – not the sympathetic Khan of the television series, of course, but rather the sinister Khan of the popular film. True, there is a moment in the film when Robert Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Damon Lindelof’s script seems to flirt with the notion of inviting audiences to relate to Khan’s point of view, and perhaps set up a reconciliation, but Khan’s efforts to justify his actions are only a ploy, as he reverts to pure villainy, while Kirk and Spock come to hate him more and more, just like their audience.

At this point, some might say that there’s nothing wrong with good old-fashioned melodrama, which can be traced back in America to nineteenth-century plays about moustache-twirling villains tying hapless heroines to the railroad tracks, and if such stories don’t exactly gibe with Roddenberry’s impulse to bring everybody together for a group hug, well, the biases of a dead creator should not be allowed to forever dictate how a franchise evolves, and nobody wants to sound like a fanboy, obsessively devoted to a familiar story and bitterly opposed to even the slightest deviation from the sacred text. But there are broader reasons to be concerned about Star Trek into Darkness and the innumerable films with similar stories. After all, if there is one complaint that is repeatedly made about contemporary American society, it is that we are all becoming too polarized; people with different beliefs cannot work together to achieve a compromise, and the airwaves are filled with people reflexively denouncing their perceived opponents. But consider this: virtually every weekend, millions of Americans go to movie theatres; they are shown a figure and instructed that this man/woman/creature is evil and should be hated; as they watch this figure do one despicable thing after another, their hatred grows more and more intense; and at the end of the film, they are expected to stand up and cheer when the hated figure is brutally executed, which is just what he/she/it deserves. Is it fanciful to assume that these repeated experiences in group-hating might be having an effect on the ways people think outside of the theatres? That is, when people are doing something that someone doesn’t like, the person should be thinking, “hmmm, I should try to understand why they’re doing that, and maybe we can work something out.” Instead, they are being trained by contemporary action films to respond quite differently: “these people are my enemies, and I must oppose them with all my heart.” Perhaps, just perhaps, some shift in the patterns of contemporary films might have a beneficial effect.

Abrams and his screenwriters, I believe, have come to a similar conclusion, providing Star Trek into Darkness with some understated but fascinating discord: throughout the film, the characters that Roddenberry created, representing his benevolent philosophy, repeatedly object to the story that they are being forced to participate in. Kirk is originally ordered to kill Khan, but when Spock points out that this is both illegal and immoral, he resolves to capture him instead. Another character, recognizing that this is a “military mission,” angrily asks, “Is this what we’ve become?” – the message being that the Enterprise should be exploring, not attacking. When new types of photon torpedoes are brought into the ship, Scott argues that they are too dangerous and resigns in protest; his final words to Kirk are “For the love of God, don’t use those torpedoes.” Asked to work on one of these devices, McCoy reluctantly does so while offering a characteristic complaint: “I’m a doctor, not a torpedo technician.” A character who emerges as a secondary villain is rejected by other characters because he allied himself with Khan in order to achieve his goal of a “militarized Star Fleet.” And (spoiler alert!) while Khan of course is defeated in the end, this superman, unlike his predecessor, is allowed to live (albeit for practical, not idealistic, reasons). It is also significant that the film’s opening sequence depicts an effort to save alien lives, not end them, and when a spacesuited Spock enters a volcano to suppress its impending eruption, he recalls the spacesuited Spock who made peaceful contact with V’Ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. In sum, Abrams may have felt obliged to tell a story about violent conflict, but he drops several hints that he is not particularly fond of it.

The most telling moment, however, comes at the end of the film, when Kirk makes a speech at a ceremony to rechristen the Enterprise. After noting that when battling evil, “we risk awakening the same evil within ourselves,” he recites the “captain’s oath” that opened the original series in order to urge everyone to “remember who we once were and who we must become again.” To me, the message could not be clearer: the stories of the last two films – both involving struggles against monomaniacal scoundrels intent upon killing everyone in their purview – do not represent the original purpose of Star Trek, which was to describe efforts “to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life, and new civilizations; to boldly go where no one has gone before”; and it is high time for the crew of the Enterprise to get back to their true mission. Accordingly, the film ends precisely as the original series begins: Kirk and his crewmates are beginning a five-year mission to explore the galaxy, with Kirk granted the freedom to go anywhere he wants.

Since a third Star Trek film featuring Abrams’s cast has been announced as a 2016 release, he may already be thinking about the sort of story that would logically follow such a conclusion. Given the mentality of the contemporary film industry, the question on everyone’s mind will be: this time, who’s going to be the villain? Yet it would be quite refreshing, and appropriate, for Abrams to respond: actually, this film is not going to have a villain. If one earlier film of this sort, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, is considered an unattractive model, he might take a look at Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, still the greatest Star Trek film, and another film without a villain, only a misunderstood alien probe that simply wants to hear the song of a humpback whale and some interfering officials who mistakenly believe that Kirk’s crewmates are enemy spies. Or, if such a story seems insufficiently focused on exploring new worlds and finding alien life, he might consider as his inspiration the two episodes of the original series that are referenced in this film: “Arena,” wherein Kirk is forced into a conflict he resists and ultimately refuses to kill his opponent, and “The Trouble with Tribbles,” a comedy involving benign but bothersome alien creatures and annoying bureaucrats. As the original series demonstrated again and again, it is possible to tell all sorts of interesting stories without aggressively splitting the universe into friends and foes; all it requires is a little creativity. And, if creativity remains something that the film industry fiercely resists, J. J. Abrams just might have achieved enough clout to insist, the next time around, on making a Star Trek film that imaginatively departs from the standard sci-fi template in order to better reflect the sentiments of its original creator.

There’s a lot of respectable thriller DNA in Paul Cornell’s first urban fantasy novel London Falling. From one perspective, it’s simply an account of the worst football fan in the world. From another, it joins the great game of Hidden London novels, which has seen recent entries from writers as diverse as Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, Dan Simmons, and Ben Aaronovitch; and from yet another it’s a well-researched police procedural with a gritty and convincing sense of setting. From still another, it invokes the venerable tradition of Second Sight – the capacity to see supernatural manifestations invisible to most of us (and sometimes to foresee the future), which we can trace all the way from Homer to Haley Joel Osment. Perhaps most important, at least in terms of the possible sequels that are clearly prepped in the end, is Cornell’s not-too-unlikely band of heroes – four metropolitan cops who, without aid of supernatural powers themselves, must face down seemingly all-powerful demonic forces. The most famous template for this is probably what Dracula critics have taken to calling that novel’s Crew of Light – a term equally apt for London Falling – and Cornell even provides a kind of analogue of Mina Harker in his formerly victimized female team member, but most modern readers are more likely to be reminded of Buffy’s Scoobie Gang. In other words, Cornell is pushing a lot of classic buttons here, and he knows it. While it’s easy to see novels like this as derivative, the traditions they invoke are so well established that they might more productively be seen as explorations of and variations on a particular form.

The novel lays out its police procedural street cred up front, beginning with undercover cops infiltrating the gang of a powerful drug lord named Toshack, who has somehow taken over most of London with the aid of some shadowy, unnamed assistants that even his gang members have never seen. It starts getting a little odd as he leads the gang from one empty house to another, looking for something, but gets odder fast, after Toshack is taken into custody and, just as he begins a promised confession, explodes in a torrent of blood in the interrogation room. With little to go on, Detective Inspector Quill, aided by a brilliant intelligence analyst named Lisa Ross and two of the undercover cops, Costain and Sefton, start investigating Toshack’s background, and discover his connection with a legend that anyone scoring a hat trick against the West Ham football team gets gruesomely murdered – but the legend goes back decades before Toshack could have been involved, and eventually leads them to the aforementioned football fan from Hell, a woman named Mora Losley, who we eventually learn has a history far deeper and more ominous than Toshack’s. As the team begins to zero in on Losley, encountering ever-more-bizarre experiences, such as houses that seem to fold in on themselves (this sort of ‘‘folding’’ also figures in Cornell’s series of Jonathan Hamilton steampunkish SF stories), they come in contact with a kind of magical substance that may be the source of Mora’s power, and become gifted with the aforementioned Second Sight, enabling them to see ghosts, demons, even a ghostly bus, that are invisible to just about anyone else. (In case you’re worried this is a spoiler, the book’s cover blares ONLY THEY CAN SEE THE EVIL). London becomes a lot more interesting, and Cornell makes the most of this new oneiric city, at times coming up with impressive setpieces worthy of King or Straub in their most pyrotechnic mode.

But London Falling, at its center, is not really a horror novel, despite such delicious touches as a mental trick that can cause parents of kidnapped children to forget they ever had children. Cornell keeps his focus on the procedural aspects of the story – they keep their operations board updated even as events clearly spiral beyond any normal investigative tactics – and on his Crew of Light, whose members are astutely chosen for a possible series – the stalwart Detective Inspector Quill, the brilliant analyst Ross (whose own backstory provides her with a grim connection to Toshack and Losley), and undercover agents Costain and Seften, both black, one gay, each with a particular set of London visions that seem appropriate to their character and background. Except for a couple of chapters, the novel never fully makes use of the weight of historical injustice that we’re meant to see as underlying the whole mythical backstory (backmyth?), but Cornell takes full advantage of his choice of football matches as a framework for the playing out of ancient curses, and gives us a band of likeable heroes we’ll look forward to meeting again. Ross is the most interesting and fully developed of the heroes in this novel, and Quill seems cut from the same cloth as any number of such wise and competent coppers, but this really just leaves room for every team member to get their moment in the spotlight later on. I suspect we’ll be glad to see what they’re up to.

If you do not know the enchantingly retro line of SF/F/H books published by Armchair Fiction, under the knowledgeable aegis of founder Greg Luce, who defines his venture as “a labor of love,” then I offer you now an eye-popping introduction. Visit his site and marvel at the vast range of vintage fiction, long out of print, lovingly repackaged with period artwork. Names as seminal as those of Fritz Leiber, Clifford Simak and Edmond Hamilton consort with the bylines of lesser craftsmen who contributed their own idiosyncratic tiles to the grand and glorious mosaic that we dub the fantastika of the twentieth century. The Armchair Fiction catalogue opens an essential window onto a vital and overlooked and still enjoyable portion of our history.

The latest entry in their “Masters of Science Fiction” series is awarded to Milton Lesser, who bears a name the majority of modern fans will probably be unfamiliar with. Lesser was one of those working-stiff writers back in the day who turned out intelligent, yet perhaps sometimes over facile, goods to suit whatever market was looking for material and paying a decent word rate. No “High Call of Art” here! Over a hundred SF stories and some two dozen longer works, according to this book’s short back cover introduction. (Sadly, exact publication information for each story is missing on this compilation’s copyright page, although easily obtainable at ISFDB.) Then, under the penname Stephen Marlowe, he was responsible for dozens of entertaining mystery novels that still command a following today. But what of his science fiction? Truly the work of a Master? Did it exhibit a genuine affinity for the mode, a sense of wonder, some unique ideation? Does it seem hokey and clunky today, or do its narrative virtues still engage and reward?

The short title story opens the volume with a nice bit of Cold War paranoia along the lines of Jack Finney or even Philip K. Dick. A tax collector for android usage fees uncovers a plot of conquest and ends up an ignored, transformed Cassandra. The action is swift and vivid, the fate of the hero creepy, and the overall impact like a good episode of The Twilight Zone.

Up second, a longer piece, “Voices in the Void,” illustrates Lesser’s virtues. The premises, characters and setting of his tale are introduced concisely and logically, yet with narrative engagement, not as an infodump. The reader inhabits the story instantly, in part thanks to simple, clear yet euphonious prose. And, like so many of his peers, Lesser employs a mix of his own fresh tropes—whispering interstellar voices; the teleportation of water from one planet to another—with lots of shared, off-the-shelf conceptual furniture (planetary miners; avaricious corporate overlords; professional spacers) that allows him to tell his story easily and familiarly without reinventing the wheel every time. The tale also features appealing mystery/noir conceits and attitudes without seeming like a mere transposed mundane adventure.

“The Double Occupation” takes a bizarre notion—inhabiting an alien body in a manner somewhat akin to James Cameron’s Avatar—and uses it to ponder some sophisticated questions. An alien planet, inhabited by sentient “lobster-mantises” who have lost a war, has come under the control of human peace forces. They upload human personalities into representative aliens, producing dual minds in each alien body, then send the “occupied” aliens out as a re-education cadre to civilize the world. Our hero, Ralph Cook, finds himself battling his host mind amidst a debate about the rightness of the human program, and respect for the Other. It’s a thoughtful and thrilling exercise in estrangement.

“No-Risk Planet” and “Code of the Bluster World” work the familiar Robert Sheckley/William Tenn humorous and satirical vein of 1950s SF. While they are not as hilarious as the best of those masters, they do produce some laughs. A more gonzo offering is “It’s Raining Frogs,” which has a Rudy Rucker/Thorne Smith vibe (along with a dose of period sexism manifesting mostly in wives getting spanked by their husbands). Meanwhile, “Music of the Spheres” is of that moralistic mode most familiar from The Day the Earth Stood Still: aliens deliver the wisdom our species needs.

On the other hand, “All Flesh Is Brass,” conjures up a gritty Samuel Fuller war movie, with its grim portrait of American infantry combat with the invading USSR, followed by a military invention spinning out of control. Another 1950s mashup of influences, reflecting the ubiquity of Ernest Hemingway and Ray Bradbury, surfaces in “Anything Your Heart Desires,” wherein a jealousy-plagued safari on Mars encounters powerful remnants of the native technology. Fans of Harlan Ellison’s “How’s the Night Life on Cissalda?” will enjoy a non-erotic version evocatively titled “Black Eyes and the Daily Grind.”

In the homestretch, we encounter two homages: one to Eric Frank Russell, “The Impossible Weapon,” and a riff on Murray Leinster’s “First Contact,” “From Hidden Worlds.” Rather Sturgeonesque, albeit falling far short of the sheer poetry and depth of emotion that Sturgeon always deployed, is “Pen Pal,” concerning a lonely woman looking for romance and her strange suitor. And concluding the volume is “My Sweetheart’s the Man in the Moon,” which satirizes the trivializing power of mass media.

Lesser’s breezy style, his fast-paced pulp plotting, and his penchant for mixing action with intellectual matters in a ratio that favored the former could not conceal his respect for the medium of science fiction, his genuine curiosity and wit, and his ability to deliver a story that met or excelled the professional standards of the day. Reading them not only still confers much pleasure, but also provides an archaeologist’s tranche across the strata of our genre’s history. Armchair Fiction has done well to assemble this latest labor of love.