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.

The first four books this month are fantasies set in some kind of alternate England: Regency era for Kowal’s Without a Summer (third in a series); steampunk Victorian for James P. Blaylock’s The Aylesford Skull (a new clash between Professor Langdon St. Ives and evil mage Dr. Ignacio Narbondo); late Victorian for Thomas Brennan’s debut novel Doktor Glass; and modern for London Falling by Paul Cornell. Despite great differences in tone, all of them have some element of darkness: kidnappings, major threats to protagonists’ lives (or souls), two plots against Queen Victoria, and two villains addicted to child sacrifice.

While the Glamourist Histories series mixes romance in the manner of Jane Austen with a magic that can seem more decorative than dangerous, along with some genuine history, these were never entirely lighthearted romps or tongue-in-cheek takeoffs. Book two, Glamour in Glass, turned what was meant to be a pleasant European honeymoon for glamourists David and Jane Vincent into a nightmare of war, captivity, and an endangered pregnancy. Sequel Without a Summer brings them safely back to England, where their plans include both an ornate new commission for a wealthy client and the introduction of Jane’s unmarried sister Melody into upper-class London’s social ‘‘Season,’’ but once again Kowal’s take on genuine events helps to knock it all awry.

The title comes from an actual description of the year 1816, when ash from the immense explosion of volcano Tambora in the East Indies managed to affect weather over the whole world: reducing temperatures, causing famines and social unrest that mingled justified anger at the ruling classes with oubreaks of more paranoid, fervent hatred of enemies – both real and imaginary. In England, Luddites rebelled against newly mechanized forms of manufacture, some Irish began protesting against the harsh political occupation of their homeland, and tempers rose to a point where allies came to seem like foes. Without a Summer brings magic into the equation more as a target for such fears than as a destructive force in its own right. In these volatile times, all glamourists bear the taint of suspicion, but the most rabid hatred is reserved for the distinctive form of magic practiced by ‘‘coldmongers.’’

Unlike glamour’s supposedly effeminate, frivolous use by experts on the fringes of the upper class to amuse the elite (a description that applies to the Vincents more than they’d care to admit), coldmongers work the streets. While they resemble (proto-) Dickensian urchins dragging blocks of ice through the filth of a London summer to provide some relief for its sweating populace, after Jane’s chance encounter with one of them, Kowal gradually reveals fascinating specifics about the nature, and the perils, of their craft.

For much of the book, there’s a delicate interplay between such social issues (both real and fantastical) and Society in its narrower sense, as Melody attends formal gatherings and attracts the interest of a number of young men. When a specific romance seems to bloom, Jane wonders whether it’s truly suitable, until major events in the greater world of London make her question her own doubts.

A largely peaceful protest march draws violent governmental reaction, leading to trials for treason where she and her husband, along with Melody’s beau, are drawn into the mess, suddenly imprisoned and under threat of execution. The schemer who engineered their plight adds a touch of family tragedy to these later scenes, while the suspense heightens as the Vincents realize that glamour alone won’t save them – and could condemn them.

Romance, danger, history, and that touch of magic all come together to mingle and subvert tropes into a vivid new substance.

An Australian anthology from Fablecroft Publishing, featuring women writers, as well as some of the usual ezines.

Clarkesworld, May 2013

Three well-written stories of captivation by the other.

“Soulcatcher” by James Patrick Kelly

On a future world, one of Klary’s clone-sisters has been enthralled by a xeni.

Some liken the xeni to the faeries of Earth legend, their charisma so intoxicating that, at the merest nod, a groom will walk away from his new bride, a mother will abandon her infant. Is it telepathy? Pheromones? The lure of great wealth and power? No matter. Klary has steeled herself against the xeni’s insidious power.

Klary has been selected by their family to rescue Janary, whom the xeni keeps as a pet on a leash, and names her Nothing. It is an elaborate plot she has woven, and she is prepared, she believes, for the xeni but not for the presence of her sister, who clearly doesn’t want to be rescued.

The soulcatcher is the bait in Klary’s trap, but also the trap she falls into. No one comes out of this one. The last line is a cry of despair.

“(R+D)/I = M” by E Catherine Tobler

The equation is: risk plus distance divided by isolation equates madness. The theme is trespass.

A pair of young Martians is intrigued by the human settlement, particularly by their grapevines. They love the stolen fruit. For a long time, the humans never see them because they never expect to.

Our bodies grew as slender as the grapes did, tethered to the ground by delicate webbed feet the way the grapes held to their vines, spout-like heads spread open to collect whatever moisture the air produced. The leaves and coiled vines hovered in the air, held back by only the weight of the fruit upon them. Once plucked, the vine sprang back, looking much like we did when we jumped.

But there comes a time when it ceases being a game.

Some nice descriptions here. I love the grapes. The narrative suffers a bit from redundancy, however.

“Tachy Psyche” by Andy Dudak

A future China, disintegrating as its captive nations, like the Uyghurs, break away. Wang Zhe is an agent of the PRC, fighting to restore its unity. His brain has been modified to allow him to accelerate or slow subjective time, but the Uyghurs have learned to control the process in captive minds. As time fragments him, Wang Zhe abandons politics and finally love for enlightenment.

In the Bardo of his final moment, Wang Zhe has repeated these words thousands of times. They have become a mantra. The unmoving raindrops have become prayer beads. Past and future have melted away. He has worn his memories out. They’ve been rewritten too many times.

A very short, fragmentary piece, as Wang Zhe’s life flickers and strobes in his memories. He’s a character of inaction, trapped by his own superiors, by the enemy, by his out-of control mind. Even in love, he’s trapped and betrayed. There’s some irony in observing that his escape finally comes through Tibetan thought, as we can hopefully suppose that Tibet has probably also broken free by this time from the Han.

Apex Magazine #48, May 2013

Another good issue from Apex. This is becoming a regular thing.

“The Binding of Ming-tian” by Emily Jiang

A prose poem about footbinding, people forced into shapes they were never meant to take, people with yearnings for what they do not have. The master musician wants to paint. The apprentice musician wants his master’s daughter. The foot-bound daughter wants to dance.

The daughter of an er–hu master is not allowed to play the er–hu. Her father believes she needs to work on her dowry, so she sews. She closes her eyes and pictures the thread as an er–hu string. With each stitch the sound becomes higher, sighing a wail. She plucks a muted vibration, plucks against her heartbeat, until it shreds.

Strong symbolism here, evoking suffering: red shoes, bleeding fingers, even innocent-appearing pink ribbons. Like the er-hu, there are two strands to this story. One, the warping and mutilation of individuals in order to fulfill social norms that deny them their own forms; two, individuals who warp and distort their own forms to fulfill their hearts’ desires – in the process, risking the loss of everything else. These characters achieve what they strive for; why aren’t they more happy?

–RECOMMENDED

“Ilse, Who Saw Clearly” by E Lily Yu

A stranger arrives in a cold mountain town in Germany, offering eyes for sale. An old near-blind woman is the first to buy.

The stranger extracted three slim silver knives with ivory handles from the lining of his cloak. With infinite care and exactitude, barely breathing, he slid the first knife beneath the old woman’s eyelid, ran the second around the ball, and with the third cut the crimson embroidery that tied it in place.

Ilse alone refused to sell her own blue eyes, so she was left sighted when the rest began to fail. She sets out alone to find the charlatan and retrieve the townspeople’s eyes.

This one follows the fairytale template of the young person who journeys out into the world and returns home, wiser. Ilse doesn’t precisely have adventures, but she has numerous encounters that teach her the ways of the world, which is not a kind place overall. Nice updating of the classic.

“Come to My Arms, My Beamish Boy” by Douglas F Warrick

Cotton is dying of Alzheimer’s, clinging to his last memories as they are devoured. In his nightmares, his old biology teacher comes to him with spectral lampreys, that attach themselves to him with sharp teeth and drain it all away.

A strong depiction of this dreaded fate.

But he couldn’t remember the wedding, not a goddamned thing about it. He reached into that broken old icebox, strained a little further and tried to find the little details: what did her dress look like? How did she wear her hair? Was she smiling? Was she crying? It was gone. Melted.

The lampreys, likewise, are a strongly horrific metaphor for the process. Warrick depicts death as a mercy in such cases, and the horror being that humans, unlike fish, are aware of what’s happening to us.

One Small Step, edited by Tehani Wessely

An Australian anthology of 16 stories by women, with a theme of discovery. From the title and the subject matter, readers will probably expect science fiction, tales of exploration, new worlds, the conquest of space. That’s not what we have here. Most of the stories are fantasy of some sort, there is little exploration, and the discoveries that we find are generally of the epiphany sort. There are good reads to be found, however, some interesting settings and premises, once genre expectations are adjusted.

While not explicitly YA, a lot of the stories deal with a young woman’s coming of age, discovering who she really is. I was pleased to find, by variety, a few pieces with male narrators or protagonists. No one expects, these days, male authors to write exclusively about boys and men, but there is often a sort of expectation, for an anthology like this one, that female authors will automatically write female characters. I’m pleased that this self-limiting strategy has been rejected by the editors.

“Always Greener” by Michelle Marquardt

Humans have been colonizing a bunch of different worlds, most of which are flawed in some way. It seems they got scammed.

My father told me once how amazing it had been to see this new world as they descended from space. How beautifully, dazzlingly green it had been. How the colonists had laughed and hugged one another with joy that their world seemed so rich and abundant.

But the dazzling green turns out to be razor edged, and every day the colonists need to cut back the Grass in order to survive. Then it turns out that an alien species has laid claim to the place. Jessica’s father is lost in the ensuing battle. While waiting for the truce terms to be finalized, a pair of alien POWs is being held near her family’s claim, imprisoned by the surrounding Grass. Jessica at first hates them for her father’s sake, then becomes intrigued by them.

The discovery in this coming-of-age story is of both Self and Other. Things turn out to be not what they seem. Kindness is repaid. Cruelty remains.

“By Blood and Incantation” by Lisa L Hannett & Angela Slatter

Witchery.

She doesn’t go far now. Doesn’t flee the yard curving around her cottage, doesn’t breach the hedge encircling the lot. She doesn’t hare, or dash, or delve anywhere near the life-sucking wet. Instead, she spends her days tending circles. Bog, briar, yard. Cottage, hearth, wooden washtub. Circles within circles within circles. She keeps them intact, protected. Keeps herself, slump-shouldered Brona, at their centre. Forever staying put.

But Brona is careless, distracted with her own cares, and makes a mistake.

The neat thing here is the bog, treacherous with treasures thrown in over the ages, with bones of the dead, with evil wights. This is a women’s story, a womb story, of children wanted, unwanted and lost, and males tolerated only to the extent that they serve this end. But despite the interest of the bog and the things Brona pulls out of it, I’m not seeing much real discovery here.

“Indigo Gold” by Deborah Biancotti

Kaneko is a reporter whose boss has sent her out to make a story out of the nutcases who call the paper to say they have secret powers. Some of them say they were indigo children, meat to be the next wave of human evolution. If so, evolution hasn’t worked out for most of them very well.

“I was always finding stuff, even when I was a kid. Me Mum lost stuff, I found it. Earrings. Bank statements. Remember bank statements?” He said it like bank statements had been wiped from the face of the Earth.

This one turns out to be a murder mystery with a reporter who has a superpower of her own: tenacity that leads to discoveries. Some entertaining dialogue, but a bit too much coincidence, which isn’t a superpower for authors.

“Firefly Epilogue” by Jodi Cleghorn

Leah is spending her mid-life crisis touring the world and finds an Australian guy in Malaysia, who shows her the fireflies as he takes her downriver in his boat. She falls for both.

“They’re like … fairy lights. But more … spectacular for being part of nature. More … I can’t describe it. It’s like I’ve died and gone to the most beautiful place in all the universe.”

But Leah is standing on the riverbank looking for Andy and can’t find him. She finally remembers what has really happened.

Very short, poignant piece, in which Leah discovers where she is. The two scenes on the riverbank work well, though the stuff between them is cursory. I’m thinking it almost could have been entirely left out.

“Daughters of Battendown” by Cat Sparks

A postapocalypse world of hierarch and privilege contained in a tall ancient building where Topsiders rule in the sunlight and the most privileged daughters of Downbelow, those without defect, can be chosen to ascend as Birdman brides.

Brook and her spiteful entourage had it made. No shifts in the reclamation plants or, skies forbid, the mines. Not for them, their sisters or their mothers. If only they accepted privilege with good grace.

Autumn, not among the chosen, is pissed off at the entire situation and decides to see the sun, even if it kills her. So she climbs up the laundry chute to see it for herself.

Autumn makes lots of discoveries Topside. I’m not sure a lot of it makes sense, but it’s what we expect to find. This one fits the exploration theme better than most.

“Baby Steps” by Barbara Rosen

The narrator’s parents came from the Old Country where giants and fairytales live, and one might call him a refugee. Here, he lives a reclusive life in a place that regards him as a freak, spending a lot of time on the internet, where he finds a woman who says she’s looking for a tall guy. He tells her his life story, starting a couple generations back.

This is a long piece, full of fairytale stuff that works just as it ought, and it comes to the end with a neat and satisfying twist. This is one of the stories that is noteworthy that the narrator is male.

“Number 73 Glad Avenue” by Suzanne J Willis

Mary is time-tripping with Charlie, her tiny automaton partner, and very much enjoying 1923. Although ultimately from the future, their travels have taken them everywhen, to all the most special moments.

Silver waves of time flowed around her in a shimmering cascade as the buildings, the path, the people disappeared or grew or shrank into their new lines as required. Each step carried her quite gradually from 1852 to 1923, the bag clenched firmly in her hand, and she gave a little shiver.

But they are there on business, not just time tourists, and their clients pay with a small amount of their time.

Lovely setting, with a magical touch in the descriptions. Readers may catch a hint of steampunk. Although there’s a neat twist at the end, there’s a whole lot that isn’t revealed here. If this premise isn’t already the basis for some longer work, it would serve well for it.

–RECOMMENDED

“Shadows” by Kate Gordon

The Shadows have always been there, but only Lena can see them, not her parents. At least, so she believes. She also believes the Shadows had nothing to do with her mother’s recent disappearance. They seem to be almost benign.

I threw back the covers to find a Shadow hovering beside me. I swatted it away. At least it was only a small one this morning. Some mornings I woke up to a swarm of them and had to fight through them to escape from my room, down the stairs, into the kitchen. They tried to wrap themselves around me. They nudged their way into my pockets and pushed themselves down my pyjama top. They clung to my ankles and grabbed at my fingers.

What Lena finally discovers is the truth. The revelation makes this low-key horror, in which the reader’s imagination will have to fill in the blank spots. What we don’t know is how she will choose to use what she now knows.

“Original” by Penelope Love

In a far future when extreme body modification is common, Tek’tek signs up for Anthropology 404 because Sarah is in the class, not because he has any idea what’s going on. As Professor Xi explains with some exasperation,

“For the benefit of those who haven’t done their reading — Sara, you may keep sorting — the purpose of this class is not to study aliens but to study ourselves, our origins, with an anthropological survey of the Originals. The Originals rejected modern technology. The latest they accepted was the steam engine, a contraption so outdated I doubt you’ve heard of it.”

Now, most of the Originals live isolated on a reservation, but now, for the first time in centuries, one of them has come to the university. Communication with Enoch is difficult. But he has come because of a dire situation: centuries of inbreeding has doomed the population to death. To find a solution, they have to descend to the Old Stacks. But Enoch’s religion forbids him to accept it.

While the story has a humorous core and readers might at first take it as farce, it is more. The characters discover tolerance and respect for each other, despite their profound differences. I like the scenes where Tek’tek trades Bible verses with Enoch, attempting to convince him to accept modern medicine. The story offers insights into the real essence of humanity. I also note that Tek’tek is another male point of view.

“The Ships of Culwinna” by Thoraiya Dyer

Toman, son of the chief of the Pale People, is born into a time of famine, when tribes make war over scarce resources. When they prevail against invaders, he realizes, “It was technology which had defended the tribe. Our tools had been better suited to the task at hand.” But Toman and Doya share a vision of even more effective technology, and he leaves home to discover it. His journey does not prosper.

There are some potentially promising ideas here, but not well executed. Doya reminds me of Ayla The Too-Competent, and there are stiff, artless scenes comparing men’s and women’s roles. The second half of the story is much too sketchy; the parts don’t form a satisfying whole. There is another male narrator/protagonist.

“Cold White Daughter” by Tansy Rayner Roberts

The narrator is a snow woman, animated by the white witch she calls her mother. This witch is someone we know from other stories, although the names have been changed.

When my mother went abroad in that wide sledge of hers, drawn by reindeer, I was left alone in the house with the stone horrors. Sometimes I thought that the statues spoke to me, in voices so soft and painful that I could barely make the words out.

Then comes the thaw, and the narrator must save herself.

I like this inversion of the classic tale that exposes some of the weakness of the Lewis original yet still retains some of its charm.

“The Ways of the Wyrding Women” by Rowena Cory Daniells

A world in which some girls are marked at birth with the Wyrding sign. The Warlord’s sons took the narrator captive in a raid and call her Sun-Fire because she won’t give them her true name. Now they want to force her unborn child to carry the dead Warlord’s soul, and the ancient Wyrding Woman of the Warlord’s clan is too powerful for her to overcome. She vows to resist.

Closing my heart and mind, I invoked the Wyrding-mother, begging her to make the babe shrivel and die or better yet, make it a girl with the Wyrding-sign.

Yet she can’t resist the lure of the knowledge that the old woman offers her.

Here’s a strong, well-realized setting, peopled with strong and ruthless characters. The plot is full of murder, rape, and treachery. At its heart is Sun-Fire’s struggle to find her place, to choose between knowledge and revenge, between her birth clan and the clan of her captors, where she can win a place of power for herself and her child.

–RECOMMENDED

“Winter’s Heart” by Faith Mudge

Meriel was once a princess married against her will to a king she didn’t want. So she paid a wizard to remove her heart. Now, pregnant with a child she can’t love, she has come to ask the sorcerer Forsythian to find it, but he doesn’t seem to be at home.

My footsteps echoed in the great empty chamber; when I laid my hand on the bannister, it came away grey with dust. If what I saw and felt was an enchantment only, the illusion of abandonment, I was in skilled hands indeed.

He’s there, of course, and another denizen of the place assures her that she will eventually see him if he wants to be seen. Meriel eventually gives birth with no sight of the sorcerer. She does, however, finally hear him after he notices the baby crying.

A nice fantasy tale employing classic tropes to good effect. Meriel discovers her heart, but not as she had expected to. The point of view shift at the end works well in this case.

“Sand and Seawater” by Joanne Anderton & Rabia Gale

The dollmaker came to the island as a young woman and vowed to make it a paradise. For all the children she made bad luck dolls that would absorb all the misfortunes to befall them. She animated the dolls with the soil of the island’s volcano. But the dolls removed the children’s capacity to feel anything, not only pain. She has created an island of zombies. The islanders had thrown the dolls into the sea to wash the bad luck away, but now they are returning, very much like zombies.

The maker it remembers is a young woman. Straight back, dark long hair, and power in that hard gaze. She works the people of the village like they are needle and thread. Creating something beautiful out of them but binding them together, and to her, and to the very island at the same time. Now her eyes are dull, and squinting. Her face weathered and fearful, her back bent.

A rather complicated and contrived scenario. The authors muddy the waters of their story by having two factions of dolls with opposing purposes, and draw it out too long in quarrels between the dolls. There is a point of view shift here, as well, but I can’t see that it serves any good purpose in a narrative already overburdened. If anything is discovered, it is a lesson.

“Ella and the Flame” by Kathleen Jennings

The people of the nameless town are afflicted by a persistent drought and blame the inhabitants of the green cottage, who appear to be witches or fairies or something of that sort, for failing to alleviate it, or perhaps for causing it, or simply for having good fortune that they refuse to share. A mob gathers to do what they call justice. The three sisters are prepared to die, but they are concerned for their child, Ella. A sort of magic happens, which may be what is discovered.

Meant to illustrate the power of story, but I didn’t find it as moving as it should have been, perhaps because of the scant background. It’s hard to make a feelgood conclusion from burning women alive, even if they accept their fate.

“Morning Star” by D K Mok

The final story in the book, and at last we get a great voyage of exploration across space.

After the Apocalypse, Ven the android is sent away with the last surviving human child. Almost a century before, a scientist named Arvel Hem speculated that humans suffer from a “chronogenetic species-wide pathology” that has now caused mass die-offs. The boy named Solomon may be the exception. There may be others. Ven’s quest is to find Hem, who took off across the universe to avoid the conflagration he knew was coming to Earth. On the ship, Sol grows up, Ven slowly deteriorates, and so does their vessel.

There were choices in life that required judgement, the weighing of necessary evils, of greater goods. Ven had not been programmed with wisdom, and had no way of assessing the psychological damage that would be caused to Sol by leaving him here, versus the physical danger he would be exposed to on Demeter.

The point here is not the destination, but the voyage. Which is just as well, because the destination disappoints in an overly triumphalist way, evoking vast swelling orchestral themes and massed choruses of hosannas. I’m not buying it.

Waylines #3, May 2013

The latest issue of this multimedia ezine has two pieces of short fiction. Unfortunately, the text of one is on a black ground.

“The Horses Under Her Skin” by Leena Likitalo

Somewhere on the steppes of central Asia, or so it seems, the late King Slavik engaged in a reign of atrocities so vile that his daughter took the extreme step of poisoning him. But from the grave he laid curses on the people until they agreed to give him his revenge by sacrificing her. The Sage of the people, a shaman, is in love with the princess, but there is nothing he can do to avert her doom, despite his efforts

I could sense the resentment that emanated from the hill tombs of the past kings and queens. They abhorred Slavik for using the curse he’d cast on his deathbed, for causing storms, draught, and famine upon a whim. I’d frequented the sauna to seek counsel from them too many times to count, but before a curse of this magnitude, the ancestors were powerless.

I like this setting, the details of shamanist practices, and the animated totemic animals the people have tattooed on their bodies. The conclusion comes rather too quickly; I would have liked to see more of this underworld and the struggle there.

The monthly digests for April feature a double issue of Analog. There’s good work in Asimov’s from Wilber and Schwartz. Also a nice lineup from Tor.com, where I give the Good Story Award to “The Ink Readers of Doi Saket” by Thomas Olde Heuvelt.

Analog, July/August 2013

With a double issue, you get novellas. Even with the conclusion of the Lerner serial, we still have two novellas here, plus a large number of shorter works. This is a lot of reading. Uncharacteristically, I find myself liking some of the shortest stories best, while having issues with the longer ones, even when they are promising.

“Other People’s Avatars” by Howard V Hendrix

The lives of Anderson McKinnon. In one incarnation he’s a loser addicted to pills, booze and games. In another, he’s the brilliantly successful co-creator of the most popular game system ever, living the high life in the exorbs, looking down on Earth. But which is real? At one point in his journey, a friend gives readers a hint that Andy ignores.

“What if—in that last instant of our lives, when our lives pass before our eyes—what if, when that life-review in its turn comes to its end, in the last instant of that review another life-review starts, and when that one comes to its last instant another starts, and so on, and so on? What if the last instant of the mind is infinitesimally infinite?”

In form, the story is a variation on Cheever’s “The Swimmer”, with hints of Hamlet. Andy, filled with the ennui of success, decides to game his way home from a party, completing the orbit of the Earth from one exorbital game palace to the next. But on the way, he repeatedly encounters in gamespace the Repentant Revenger, avatar of his uncle/collaborator Ishmael, who lectures him at excessive length on the destruction of humanity by the digital civilization they’ve created, that has now grown to engulf and eradicate the human mindspace. In a way, this is a reflection of the mundane life that Andy has lived on Earth, turning away from the real to lose himself in his artificial imaginarium. But largely and unfortunately, this aspect of the text is made of infodump and straw, condemning at length an artificial world that doesn’t exist and never has. Ishmael’s endless scolding is simply tedious, in contrast to the Cheever-like series of encounters with a fading civilization, which have an oppressing effect that Andy denies as long as he can. That seems to be his one consistent aspect throughout all his incarnations: denial. There’s a strong story here that I would have greatly enjoyed if it weren’t for the weight of extraneous infodumpfery and the constant jousting against an opponent that is never real, as opposed to Andy’s real enemies of the mind.

“The Chaplain’s Legacy” by Brad R Torgersen

Sequel to an earlier, shorter story published in this zine. Earth has now made a truce with the militarily superior aliens they call mantes, who, far from praying, can’t conceive of a god. They now maintain a tenuous contact with former chaplain’s assistant Harry Barlow on the world Purgatory, for the sake of studying this alien phenomenon of religion. But Earth authorities now fear the resumption of hostilities and have redrafted Barlow, who is the only human to which the mantes will directly speak. He is dubious about the prospects of maintaining the truce. “If mantis curiosity about human faith is the only thing holding back their war machine, then our fates truly do rest in God’s hands.” Or in the possibility of humans being able to employ the breathing space to improve their weaponry. Upon the outbreak of renewed fighting, he finds himself stranded with a small, author-selected group of mantes and humans on a desert world.

Every once in awhile lights in the sky would sparkle and flash— ships exploding in the emptiness of space, their fantastic vanishings visible even in the daylight. Human. Mantis. All perishing together in one pent-up orgasm of long-delayed, hateful fury.

A cross-country journey of self-discovery ensues.

A much longer and more interesting story than the earlier one in this sequence, based on which I greatly feared that penning up these characters together would lead to tedious scenes of theology-dump. Not so, I’m happy to say. Instead, we learn about the characters’ nature and beliefs by observing their actions under duress, the way a story ought to be done. Which is not to say that the author has failed to be manipulative. Our small, selective group of survivors is, with one notable exception, all pacifists. In fact Captain Adanaho’s actions would certainly be considered treasonous by today’s standards, while the rest of her command is portrayed as trigger-happy fools.

The main problem here is probability, on both the large scale and the small, as, most egregiously, when a mantis improbably manages to guide his group through a firefight on a human ship, directly to an emergency hatch where an unused lifeboat is waiting for them – as much of the ship’s own crew is sucked out through a hull breach. Not buying it. But the main problem is with the mantis civilization, which has previously exterminated several sentient races and has only temporarily put on hold its plans to add humanity to that list. This is a pattern of behavior that has to be attributed to something much more than the absence of religion among them, and in fact it turns out that religion isn’t the decisive element after all, but the recognition of a common personhood [that we would normally call a common humanity]. The fact that the mantes have never before approached such a concept, then suddenly manage to accept it, is a whole lot to swallow. As long as the story remained wholly within the human point of view, with the aliens alien, it’s one thing, but the heart of this story lies in the mantis point of view, and there simply isn’t enough of it here to see, although the key lies with the mantis Queen. Is her behavior reasonable, acceptable, or totally unlikely? We have no way to tell. But from what we can see here, it’s way too improbably easy: hey, mantes are human, after all! No problem!

The Queen’s behavior, in itself, is an interesting journey of self-discovery, one that really seems to need its own story. It also provides a parallel with the Hendrix story above, concerning the ways a sentient people can become enslaved by its own technology. But again, it becomes a question of whether we can accept it in the mantes, when the technology is shown here as so very vulnerable.

“Thaw” by Arlan Andrews Sr

This one is a puzzle piece. Readers are meant to wonder: Are we on an exo-world or a glaciated Earth? Are the characters aliens or devolved humans? If human, how and why have they changed? Have they adopted a Braille-like tactile script because their sight has failed, particularly for close work, or because their world is perpetually dark?

The central character is Thess, an ice broker and a Reader who has mastered the literate arts, which makes him valuable to the brutal local ruler, who sends for him when a dead God is discovered in a receding glacier. The God proves to be the key to answering many of the questions, both for Thess and, even more so, for the readers, who will recognize what he is.

Quite a bit of science informs this one. As global warming melts today’s glaciers, an increasing number of artifacts have been revealed to archaeologists. Readers will undoubtedly connect the God with the recent discovery of Ötzi the ice man. And the description of the different races suggests the evidence that scarce resources can lead to decreasing size in a population. By the end of the story, we not only have a pretty good idea what happened in this world’s past, but a glimpse into its future. This is suggested by the characters of Thess and his two sons, one suited to the past as a hunter and fighter, but the other clearly a natural scientist, full of “new ideas” that impress his literate father. But the sight of heads on stakes also warns us that it’s never wise to be too optimistic about the human condition; as global warming alters the environment, war over resources will be inevitable. And canny businessmen like Thess will profit from it.

“Tethered” by Haris A Durrani

When orbiting trash impedes business in Earth space, junkship operators like Charlie and Kalima go into business. Current satellites are supposed to be equipped with tethers that reel them back when they’re no longer useful, but one apparently hasn’t responded to its radio control and has to be retethered manually. Kal and Charlie have been contracted to do the job, but they encounter a complication when a message comes in from the Chinese military.

“That satellite has not been authorized for decommission. On this breach of international code of conduct, we would like to make it clear that our operations have a right to take any action we deem necessary unless your operations comply with our demands. Is this understood?”

So if they tether the Zombie satellite, the Chinese will shoot them down; if they don’t, they’re in breach of contract with the corporation. They’ve been screwed. Charlie wants to back off, but Kalima has her own priorities.

Here’s a nice exciting space action adventure that would be a good read on its own. But the author is more concerned with the politics behind it. Thus the action is interrupted regularly by historical squibs unnecessarily detailing the background all the way back to the dawn of the satellite age. If this weren’t enough to distract readers, the text also breaks away from time to time to give us the background of Kal and Charlie’s love affair. All this extraneous material reminds me of orbital debris deflecting the core story from its path. I also find a minor irritation when the author informs us that Kalima is “is a tall, slender woman bathed in mahogany skin” but doesn’t find it necessary to tell us what Charlie looks like. It’s far more important what Kalima does than how she looks, and she does a lot.

“Not with a Bang” by Rosemary Clair Smith

Paleo Lite: What really killed the dinosaurs. A future world when science has become sexy to the news agencies, in large part because of the time jumper. Marty is a biologist on the first expedition to the Late Cretaceous , Julianna is a scientific reporter; he’s in love with her, but she seems more in love with a hot story. The usual encounters with dinosaurs ensue, while the male scientists ponder the fickleness of females across species. Readers may wonder what either of the male scientists see in Julianna.

“Ready, Set” by Mary Lou Klecha

Short-short. A sad tale of a person whose entire life is spent waiting to be somewhere else but here.

Even if Earth is the only place I’ve ever been, it’s not really home. It’s just where I’m staying until I get the word. I don’t know where home is; I’ve never been there. I’ve never been within thirty million miles of there.

“Milk Run” by Alec Austin & Marissa Lingen

To make life interesting on a routine supply run, every crew should have an eager newbie.

“How exactly,” said Zubiondo, sitting absolutely still and letting him do all the squirming, “does one manage to get through two safeties and a cover hatch to f ire the pulse cannons accidentally Private Chovnik? If one might raise the question purely as an academic matter, of course.”

There’s some nice acerbic wit here, which I always enjoy.

“A Quiet Little Town in Northern Minnesota” by K C Ball

Namely, Blackduck MN, the town AI, which has suddenly developed ambitions after the new DARPA project came online nearby, an abiotic, egocentric, self-organizing electronic perception system that displays independent thought and judgment.

In six weeks I intend to be all of Beltrami County. In nine months, the entire state of Minnesota. And within three years I will be the world.

Blackduck’s only problem are the technicians who’ve spotted a hacker in the system, but the frailties of human nature give the AI the advantage. Humor.

“Cronus and the Ships” by Seth Dickinson

Another short-short. It seems that humanity has created armed spaceships named after its greatest myths and legends: Edda, Ramayana, Sundiata Keita, Argonautica, Valayapati, Shahnameh, Lady of the Lake, Savitri, Iliad. Out in the cosmos, they have encountered a far-spanning power that consumes new species, following their radio signals. “Jealous gods evolved to extinguish competitors in the cradle. Cronus machines.” The ships now meet to decide upon a course of action. A surprisingly cynical resolution, well-informed by myth.

“Love” by Rick Norwood

When Stephen was six years old, a beautiful lady kissed him on the cheek, and he fell in love. As a young man, he meets her again and they have a brief, one night affair. She tells him this is all it can be. She is a starship captain, and time dilation makes it possible for her to have lasting relationships on Earth. But Stephen is deeply in love.

This is sweet without being cloying, a hard trick to pull off.

“CREP d’Etoile” by Bud Sparhawk

Space farce. Which we know it will be because the first character we see is the Naval Commodore, Ugg, who is for some reason commanding a luxury star liner that features a very expensive executive chef, the eponymous Etoile. Etoile earns his pay by transforming the ubiquitous recycled food product [the CREP of the title: "every passenger ate the same food every ten days"] into culinary productions that show no sign of their origin. He is also highly temperamental, and stroking his ego is just one of the jobs of the ship’s executive officer, whose trials are many: the real theme of the story.

Asimov’s, July 2013

Only one longer work in this issue, the Wilber, which is still short of novella length.

“The Art of Homecoming” by Carrie Vaughn

With her head on the block following an embarrassing diplomatic incident, Major Daring considers retirement. In default of a real home outside the service, she decides to go to her sister, now a farmer on Ariana.

I’d fought in battles to protect worlds like this. Made the battles seem worthwhile, though they didn’t often seem so while I was in the middle of them. I liked it better when all the sides stayed at the negotiating table, or pillar, or cloud drift, or wherever, and all I had to do was stand there looking official. Captain Song pulled this vacation on me because he thought I’d get bored. That was going to backfire. I could retire to this. I could stay here forever, under the sun.

A low-key piece with a heartwarming quotient, as Wendy wonders where she really belongs.

“Yubba Vines” by Rudy Rucker and Paul Di Filippo

The editorial blurb calls this one “gonzo transrealism”, which, given the authorship, sounds about right. Bengt takes Cammy to Lifter, the transient diner reputed to be the latest deep underground thing. When the chef/maitre d’ tells them, “No charge for first visit Lifter. You pay later, pay a lot.”, readers will suspect that trouble and weirdness will ensue, especially after the diner puts a tag through Bengt’s ear, as if he were livestock.

Wildly imaginative stuff, with colorful characters who live off blogging and have their own private codes and networks that the uninitiated can’t access, speaking in colorful language.

Olala gave him yet another odd, sly look. “Oh, you’ll find it. But let me put an app on your phone. Why? Let’s pretend that it predicts Lifter’s locations based on feeds from HowSquare,WebWhere, UseeMEseeU, and ShotSpotter. Yeah, yeah, that’s what I’m saying it does.”

Much crazed fun.

“What Is a Warrior Without His Wounds?” by Gray Rinehart

Miroslav has the wounds – an arm and leg lost in combat in Chechnya – and now he expects to be discharged, discarded. Instead he gets secret orders to report to the military academy from which he graduated as a cadet. There he discovers that he’s meant to be the beneficiary of a secret program, tellingly initiated by a [mad] German scientist captured in the Great Patriotic War. But he recoils from the cost, an innocent life. It’s also chilling for him to realize that his might have been the innocent life, if things had been different back then.

An overtly moralistic work set in a corrupted system. Miroslav is chosen for the program not solely on his own merit but because of his family connections. “We would not want to disappoint your powerful friends.” But I see insurmountable problems with the scheme. The “early graduated” cadets, returning home to their families with no recollection of who they had been, would raise immediate suspicion. The author contrasts the Russian program with the advanced prosthetics available to wounded US soldiers, which makes me wonder how recently the story is set. Fighting in Chechnya went on for a long time.

“At Palomar” by Rick Wilber

Another Moe Berg story, a sequel to the author’s “Something Real”, which events Moe only vaguely remembers as the story opens. But once again Wild Bill Donovan has come to him with an offer of a secret job in the war, and there’s a familiar-looking woman watching him from the baseball stands, who makes him an offer of her own.

It hadn’t gone the way it was supposed to the last time in Zurich, when he’d thought he was supposed to kill Werner Heisenberg to end the Nazi superbomb program, and instead he shot that bastard Carl Weizsäcker; but maybe that was why he was here. Things hadn’t gone right and so he was now in the repair business, fixing things. Or maybe the train business, getting things back on track. Shit. Whatever.

The alternate history in which he finds himself after a multitude of small timeflips has indeed gone not right, with America fragmented into many subnations and the Germans now ready to fight the Japanese over California after nuking New York. His task is to assassinate a German agent named Miriam Ruggiero, except that maybe she’s working for some other side, and make sure the superbomb gets into the right hands, whichever hands they are, instead of blowing up the new Japanese telescope on Mt Palomar. As his handler tells him, “There’ll be a moment there when it could go wrong. I can’t tell you more, but you’ll make the right decision.” Problem is, everything keeps flipping around.

Again, we’ve got a fast-paced mix of action, physics and baseball, although the ending this time is quite a bit more ambiguous than in the earlier story, which had an ultimate explosive conclusion. The history here has been warped out of recognition, making it more many-worlds theory than strictly AH, and Wilber throws in a nice surprise in that regard, a young Hugh Everett who, we may suspect, is responsible for the theory behind all the flipping. With the open-ended ending, I’m also suspecting more sequels to come.

–RECOMMENDED

“Haplotype 1402″ by Ted Kosmatka

Post apocalypse, the downfall in this case being antibiotic-resistant bacteria. A few communities have some resistance, notably American Indians. Nathan, part Indian, has joined a small caravan of survivalists hoping to find room on a reservation. Their leader is a sinister character whom Nathan believes is responsible for the death of some of their members.

“It’s all immunity haplotypes and chance. For this bug, survival reaches its highest frequency in native Americans,” and he smiled with his shark teeth, and Nathan knew he was more than just a dentist. “What goes around, comes around,” he said. “It’s our turn to die.”

But Doc has no intention of being the one to die.

Pretty predictable outcome. I’m not sure why Nathan failed to intervene when Doc killed Marcus, as it’s established that he’s prepared to use his gun.

“Blair’s War” by Ian Watson

Alternate history. A world in which Britain is more socialist and sends an expeditionary force, led by General Eric Blair, to aid Republican Spain against the fascists. It also brings over Basque refugee children after the bombing of Guernica, and the story is seen through their eyes as they struggle with the differences between their own language and culture and the British.

“Eton is a school for the sons of the rich. In England, these expensive private schools are called public schools. Much in England is not rational, for example the spelling or the pronouncing of hundreds of words.”

A lot of this is backgrounding, but the author makes it go down pretty smoothly as the children listen to wireless reports about the war and their caretakers translate the tricky bits. The identity of General Blair is the AHnal key, and the author throws out plenty of clues along the way [Sir Richard was at Eton with Blair], which makes it fun, even though he gives it all away at the end, for those who might have missed it. More of a political work than it might seem at first, in keeping with that identity. Which makes us wonder how Blair’s subsequent literary history might have evolved.

“Today’s Friends” by David J Schwartz

Alien invasion.

When the Grays first got here they couldn’t leave the birds alone; they were always reaching into their tiny brains, winding them up so tight that all they could do was sing their songs. Sometimes the birds’ hearts would stop before they could even let out a chirp. Now the birds stay well away from the cities, and the streets are always quiet.

The Grays don’t like sound but they do like human music. Berto makes the mistake one day of absentmindedly humming, and a Gray reaches into his mind to pull out the song – along with lots of other stuff. The Grays like to take things apart to figure out how they work, and that includes humans. They’ve been getting better at it.

The title comes from the telepathic address that the Grays use with humans: “TODAY’S FRIEND WISHES TO HEAR YOUR SONG.” We see the way this kind of contact has already altered human society after a few years, and suggestions of what it might becomes after several generations of living with the aliens. Everyone Berto meets has a story of a meeting with the Grays. Even a bird. The story subtly makes a strong impression.

–RECOMMENDED

Tor.com, April 2013

Another month with a long lineup of original, independent short fiction. I find this is often due to some factor like the site declaring “Courgette Week”, to which I am usually oblivious. But for whatever reason, it’s a good overall selection this time. My particular favorite is the Thomas Old Heuvelt story.

“Backscatter” by Gregory Benford

Crashed on an isolated icy asteroid, running out of oxy and other good things, Claire goes looking for help, and her spotlight hits something entirely different.

Fronds . . . beautiful emerald leaves spread up, tilted toward her from the crusty soil. She walked carefully toward the shining leaves. They curved upward to shape a graceful parabola, almost like glossy, polished wings. In the direct focus the reflected sunlight was spotlight bright. She counted seven petals standing a meter high. In the cup of the parabola their glassy skins looked tight, stretched. They let the sunlight through to an intricate pattern of lacy veins.

The hard SF problem story is a classic form in the genre. A protagonist, often in a spacesuit stranded on a desolate, airless planet, has to save herself using scientific knowledge and ingenuity. Here, however, Claire’s salvation is owing less to her own ingenuity than the author’s godly beneficence in planting a phototropic garden exactly where she needs it. The text is livened with banter between Claire and her less-than-helpful AI. I can’t help feeling a moment of irritation with the notion that there is nothing so wondrous and lovely that some human won’t decide to exploit it for her own purposes.

“Rag and Bone” by Priya Sharma

A twist on an old trade. We’re in either a sort of alternate 19th century or a socially regressed future in which income inequality has reached extreme levels. The world has apparently been divided into petty kingdoms ruled by plutocrats. Liverpool is devoted to shipping and dark satanic mills, and any attempt to escape is punished by death. Tom, working as a rag and bone man, is relatively free in having no immediate boss, but the Peels are everyone’s boss. It seems that there’s a kind of transplant technique available only to the plutocrats, and they want Tom to serve as their agent, signing up tissue donors. “The Peels keep people in tanks like fish, cutting off the bits they want.” But when Kate Harper volunteers to be a donor, needing the money to support her young daughter, Tom is moved to protect her. This is dangerous. Kate is the widow of a martyred revolutionary, and the Peels want to find her.

I have previously admired this author’s prose, but this is a work in which setting predominates. There are strong scenes, as when we learn how the mutineer leader was executed by tying him to the ship’s anchor before it was dropped. Anyone familiar with the history of early 19th century mutinies will recognize the truth here. Other aspects of the setting, however, are less credible. I find it hard to believe that Peel surveillance can follow Tom’s every move through the slums, yet can’t find a sign of Kate Harper. The twist at the end works effectively, but it doesn’t really change anything essential to the story. The character I’d like to see more of is the Peel agent, who seems to know Tom’s secret and protects it – to a point.

“Sing” by Karin Tidbeck

Here’s a fine opening:

The cold dawn light creeps onto the mountaintops; they emerge like islands in the valley’s dark sea, tendrils of steam rising up from the thickets clinging to the rock. Right now there’s no sound of birdsong or crickets, no hiss of wind in the trees. When Maderakka’s great shadow has sunk back below the horizon, twitter and chirp will return in a shocking explosion of sound. For now, we sit in complete silence.

This is the world-moon Kiruna, a fantastic place where human speech disappears at the rising of a certain companion moon and the people communicate in birdsong. This is possible because the birds lay their eggs in human children. Sometimes there are crippling side-effects, such as the tailor Aino suffers. As deformed, she is shunned by the rest of the population in an act of collective denial. When an outworlder arrives and speaks to her directly, Aino is glad for the companionship. Petr claims to love her, but he also insists he will remain on Kiruna, while she is desperate to escape the place for the low gravity space station where her affliction will matter much less.

In sciencefictional terms, this setting makes no sense whatsoever. Read as fantasy and relinquishing the sense requirement, it seems like a pretty neat place, or at least a neat idea for a place. Still, the people of Kiruna are pretty weird. I’m not really convinced by Petr’s desire to make his home there, when he would always be an outsider. And if he really loved Ainu, would he so utterly reject her request? It’s noteworthy that while Ainu likes him, is grateful to him, she never does claim to love him. That makes the difference.

“Do Not Touch” by Prudence Shen

Not an outtake from the author’s graphic high school novel, currently being promoted at this site. Other than the comic-style cover illo, it’s entirely prose with lite witty touches, entertaining stuff suitable for adults. It seems that people [usually kids who ignore the warning signs] keep falling into certain paintings. Today at the art museum, the painting is Seurat’s unfinished Le Cirque, and Lane is the guy whose job is to go in and retrieve the kids. Adventures in the not-so-belle Époque ensue.

Lane hits the sawdust and dirt ground with a thud, landing heavy on one shoulder because there’s no graceful way to tip over from the edge of the frame into the stereoscopic image of an artist’s state of mind. Eugenie doesn’t do much better, flopping down with her fingers still tight in Lane’s, her skirt going halfway up over her head in the too-hot crush of the circus, night pressing into the opened flap of the tent and up against the cluster of people standing at a break in the bleachers.

There’s fun in this, but I’m not really buying a kid who will run away from the circus to find the Moulin Rouge.

“The Ink Readers of Doi Saket” by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

Based on Thai myth and observance of the Loi Krathong festival, when people send ornamental floats down the river, bearing offerings along with their wishes. Doi Saket, according to this tale, is a village downstream on the Mae Ping river with a special tradition of its own: they gather the floats from the river, dedicate the offerings to their temple, and hold a festival at which they send their own wishes aloft in balloons while they grant the wishes from the river. Some of them. Somehow. Or so they believe. Young Tangmoo is one of the villagers, but he has no wishes of his own to make. Tangmoo, for some karmic reason, has already achieved without realizing it such a high degree of enlightenment that he has transcended desire.

A delightful world, full of supernatural forces, gods, and divine purpose – never doubt it. Like the festival itself, there is a casual mixture of the predominant Buddhism with older forces, like the river goddess herself and the potent phallic stone outside the village’s Buddhist temple. The narrator comments on these matters with a certain respectful irreverence.

The Gentle Abbot had an exceptional talent for invoking Buddha’s teachings on all relevant and irrelevant matters people came to him for advice on. Even when a dilemma seemed nigh on impossible to solve, he would astound his audience with the only correct and always uniform answer: that the question was confusing and therefore by definition irrelevant, as the purpose of any spiritual life is to avoid confusion. And this was why the Abbot of Doi Suthep was the most beloved man in northern Thailand: he made everything seem so conveniently simple.

The story is clearly intended for readers foreign to this tradition, as the author has supplied us with footnotes of explanation, particularly with regard to the matter of personal names. In these, as in the rest of the text, there is a tone of wry affection. The bearers of the names are a varied cast of characters, by no means all admirable, and the narrator details their well-deserved fates in prose crafted to leave readers convinced of the spiritual forces at work here. A general spirit of karma wafts over the tale, extending to all creation, even unto a mating pair of dragonflies. What might otherwise be considered tragedy is here transcendent.

–RECOMMENDED

Tanith Lee is fantastika’s Joyce Carol Oates (if you allow the stipulation that while Oates certainly contributes to our genre, she is not of it, so to speak). Immensely talented, immensely prolific, intrinsically fluent and fluid, writing all over the imaginative map, Lee nonetheless assume a kind of background permanency as an invariant feature of the landscape that allows her to be overlooked when the biggest names of fantastika are arrayed. Perhaps, like Oates, and paradoxically so, her very productivity is partly responsible for any invisibility. At her ISFDB entry, I count nearly ninety books and perhaps three times that many stories. That’s a lot for any reader to assimilate, especially a newcomer, even when spaced out over a forty-year career. (Lee’s first book appeared in 1971.)

Lee initially assumed genre prominence in 1975 with the appearance of The Birthgrave. DAW Books Number 154, I ascertain via Google just now, although everything else about buying and reading that book remains fresh in my memory. It was an exciting, feverish, obsession-laden sword and sorcery epic, unlike anything then current—or, arguably, since. Maybe if Leigh Brackett had been channeling both Robert E. Howard and Pauline Réage (The Story of O), with John Campbell’s censor Kay Tarrant taking out the naughtiest bits, Brackett might have produced something similar. All credit for launching Lee in this fashion goes, of course, to DAW’s founder, Donald A. Wollheim (1914-1990), whose other discovery of this era, C. J. Cherryh, completes that editor’s late-career triumphs.

Fittingly enough, an old, truly appreciative essay by Wollheim prefaces Lee’s new collection, Tempting the Gods. This volume, the first of several, happily offers those of us who have been fans for a while the chance to reassess her work, its range and vibrant vitality, and offers newbies a perfect entry point for a lifelong Lee habit.

“Tiger I” tells the tale of a woman journalist who goes to visit the enigmatic Mary Sattersley, rich recluse with a strange menagerie. Lee’s understated presentation perfectly shepherds the reader to the big reveal, whose impact is not diminished even if foreseen. The story as a whole resonates with the work of Ballard, Zelazny and Sturgeon, and glows like a lost New Wave gem.

“Death Loves Me” recounts the intricately intertangled lifelines of several folks from the Classical Era: Lukon, a chariot racer who senses his own imminent death; Urtemis, a rich housewife losing her husband; Tilat, Lukon’s concubine; and Red Shaizek, Lukon’s rival. The shape of their destinies reveals the hand of an ironic Fate, and recalls the fables of Thomas Burnett Swann, a writer unfortunately forgotten these days.

Saki or Roald Dahl might have composed “Anna Medea,” which concerns a rich family terrorized by a horrid son and daughter. When the governess Anna Medea comes to take charge, in a distinctly non-Mary Poppins way, all seems calm. But the father’s misapprehensions threaten to undo her good work in a most inconvenient outcome. Lee’s facility with contemporary mimesis and her black humor stand out.

“Ondralume” exhibits a kind of Robert Sheckley or William Tenn ambiance, as the seemingly disjunct narratives involving a primitive tribe and a futuristic businessman collide at the climax in a quietly spectacular fashion.

The eternal rivalry between dragon and swordsman gets a pathos-inducing twist in “After I Killed Her.” Original to this volume, “God and the Pig” is an apocalyptic fable composed of Jesus and old candy wrappers. The book’s longest entry, “The Kingdoms of the Air,” is Lee’s Arthurian Grail quest, yet with all its trophies and symbols and personages reimagined in a fresh manner. The ghost of William Morris presides benignly over the tale. Merely one paragraph long, and the oldest piece here (hailing from 1968, when Lee was only twenty-one-years old), “Eustace” is charmingly silly, like a Charles Addams cartoon.

As in most stories by Lord Dunsany that feature a thief who overreaches himself, the grave-robber protagonist of “These Beasts” comes to a most untidy end. An idiosyncratic incubus maintains a domineering homosexual relationship with a young lad named Hilton in “Cain.” Lee proves adroit at the traditional ghost story in “The Lady-of-Shallot House,” which manages to be both mournful and somehow full of satisfactory atonement. And finally, in “Where Does the Town Go at Night?”, a domestic drama between estranged parents and their son gets a supernatural resolution, as the village of the title awakens from its staid ways and goes wandering to mermaid-rich maritime realms.

Tanith Lee’s lush fiction is marked by exotic venues, precisely and elegantly invoked, populated with passionate characters whose deep emotions drive them to outstanding feats of folly and bravery, sacrifice and love. You can imagine these timeless stories whispered around an oasis campfire or in a starship’s engine room.

The first thing you notice about Sofia Samatar’s extraordinary debut novel A Stranger in Olondria, quite literally from the opening sentence, is the hypnotic lyricism of its prose: ‘‘As I was a stranger in Olondria, I knew nothing of the splendor of its coasts, nor of Bain, the Harbor City, whose lights and colors spill into the ocean like a cataract of roses.’’ On rare occasions, her fondness for figurative language almost overreaches (‘‘We passed through like a wayward draft’’), but there is no doubt that we are in the hands of a gifted stylist whose language alone is enough to draw you into her tale. The other first thing you notice is that the novel features a frontispiece map – often a signal of an oncoming quest narrative – filled with mellifluous but unidentifiable place names, sometimes suggesting vaguely Celtic roots (Belenduri, Balinfeil, Olondria). I confess I’ve come to approach such maps with a degree of apprehension, since experience teaches that some authors who go to such lengths with geography fully intend to trap us there until we’ve passed through every last village somewhere in volume thirteen.

It turns out there’s not much to worry about, though, because A Stranger in Olondria is less a conventional epic than a gorgeously imagined ghost romance, which undermines its apparently familiar quest setting at almost every turn. I have no idea if Samatar intends to revisit this world (although an incipient war at the end certainly leaves open an invitation to do so), but the fact is that her Olondria has less in common with Middle-earth or the Four Lands than with Le Guin’s Orsinia or even Thomas Mann’s Venice, and that map actually becomes quite useful in terms of understanding both the trade routes and cultural isolation that are central to the narrative. Both of these are crucial to the coming of age tale of her narrator, Jevick of Tyom, whom we first meet as a quick and intellectually curious child in the remote and almost entirely illiterate village of Tyom on one of the ‘‘Tea Islands,’’ some distance from the mainland. Jevick’s household includes his brusque father, a successful pepper merchant, his birth mother and stepmother, and his mentally challenged older brother Jom. Realizing that the future of his business – and his family’s well-being – depends on Jevick, the father hires a tutor named Lunre from Bain, the major city and trading port of the fabled and sophisticated Olondria. Jevick takes to his lessons eagerly, discovering, in one truly remarkable passage, that letters and numbers might be arranged to tell stories, and not merely to total up accounts.

From here on, the novel becomes in large part a romance of reading, and a celebration (quite literally) of the power of story. When his father dies unexpectedly, Jevick inherits the responsibility of traveling to Olondria to sell peppers, and aboard the ship encounters a young woman, Jissavet, who is dying of a hereditary wasting disease and hopes to find treatment in Olondria. Upon arrival, Jevick is quickly seduced (also quite literally) by the glamor and excitement of the city, and gives little further thought to Jissavet and her mother – until he finds himself haunted by Jissavet’s ghost, or what the Olondrians refer to as an ‘‘angel,’’ who implores Jevick to rescue her buried body and burn it according to her native tradition. When Jevick reveals that he has met an angel, he finds himself under arrest and at the center of an ongoing struggle between a materialist government determined to wipe out all traces of what they view as local superstition, and a priesthood who view him as a valuable asset in retaining their own power. After escaping a deadly massacre, Jevick undertakes an arduous mountain journey, trying to save a wounded companion while hoping to find a way to release the spirit of Jissavet, with whom he is increasingly falling in love. Jissavet’s own tragic tale, revealed late in the narrative, is only one of several interpolated tales (including Lunre’s) which lend a surprisingly dense complexity to a novel which, by most genre fantasy standards, is relatively modest in scope. But just about every piece is in place here – it’s the rare first novel with no unnecessary parts – and, in terms of its elegant language, its sharp insights into believable characters, and its almost revelatory focus on the value and meaning of language and story, it’s the most impressive and intelligent first novel I expect to see this year, or perhaps for a while longer.

by Gary Westfahl

Since Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion is both an entertaining and interesting film, a reviewer faces the pleasant challenge of finding the best way to explore its provocative virtues and revelatory flaws. At the moment, I can discern five appropriate descriptions of the film: as a typical sci-fi action film; as yet another response to the September 11 attacks; as an outgrowth of earlier science fiction films, especially 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); as a reflection of an era’s peculiar nostalgia; and as an illustration of the importance of casting. Undoubtedly, other perspectives would emerge from further rumination, but with a deadline to meet, I must do what I can in the available hours.

*****

To please one’s financial backers, anyone making a big-budget science fiction film today must provide an abundance of the fast-moving chases, exciting violence, and spectacular explosions that audiences for these films purportedly crave; and Kosinski was careful to meet those expectations. So, as a man in the year 2077 who believes he is maintaining drones to protect a dying Earth from alien invaders, Jack Harper (Cruise) flies around in a futuristic helicopter (officially, his “Bubbleship”), regularly pursuing or being attacked by malevolent drones; sometimes he is on the ground, riding a sleek motorcycle (officially his “Moto Bike”) or firing at drones or human opponents with various firearms; there are even moments of hand-to-hand combat. With necessary pauses for exposition or character development, these episodes occur with sufficient regularity, and are executed with sufficient skill, to satisfy any viewers who simply want an adrenalin rush without worrying about the plot. Yet these scenes can also seem like mechanical exercises, completed solely as a directorial duty, and one wonders whether audiences will really prefer these sequences to the film’s quieter dramas, especially since they have seen these sorts of things many times before.

Someday, then, such films may fall out of favor, as filmgoers grow tired of their tropes – a thought provoked by two items I observed amidst the interminable clutter of outright advertisements, promotional pseudo-documentaries, and traditional previews that now precede the showing of any motion picture. The first was an advertisement for Ask.com that parodied an iconic scene from the classic Western, two gunslingers having a showdown on a dusty street; the second was a preview for Johnny Depp’s The Lone Ranger (2013), which seems a desperate attempt to revive a famous Western hero with a bizarre combination of genuine Native American mysticism, over-the-top special effects, and an awkward jokiness. Long ago, Hollywood mastered the art of making exciting Westerns, featuring Native Americans throwing spears at white men, gunfights in deserted towns or on rocky hillsides, heroes on horses chasing after bank-robbing varmints, and other tried-and-true devices; literally thousands of such films and television programs were produced for appreciative audiences. And yet, rather suddenly, people decided that they were no longer interested in such adventures, and today the Western is a dead genre, surfacing only in the form of occasional homages and satires. As one watches Oblivion, it does not seem daring to predict that science fiction films foregrounding armored soldiers firing machine guns at robots will eventually suffer the same fate. Then, someone undertaking to make a film like Oblivion would have to deal with a much smaller budget, but would also be free to develop its ideas without worrying about having to include a lot of irrelevant bloodshed.

*****

Although science fiction films about aliens invading Earth, or other disasters afflicting the planet, have long been commonplace, it seems that all such films made after 2001 must refer in some way to the attack on New York’s World Trade Center; and Oblivion is no exception. True, in opening scenes depicting how the aliens’ destruction of the Moon and subsequent invasion devastated the world, there are images of a bombed Pentagon and half-buried Capitol Building and Washington Monument, perhaps to remind people that the 9/11 terrorists also targeted Washington D.C.; but the rest of the film is set in the area around New York City, and during his journeys Harper constantly encounters ruins of the city’s landmarks. The top floors of the Empire State Building are a key setting that he visits repeatedly; he rides his motorcycle past remnants of the Brooklyn Bridge; in one battle with drones, he flies over the hand of the Statue of Liberty, emerging from the ground; and he is lured into the devastated Reading Room of the New York Public Library, with its renowned chandeliers, walls of bookshelves, and long tables with little bronze lamps. Like other films, then, Oblivion seeks to heighten the poignancy of its future Earth’s plight by linking its unexpected alien invasion to the unexpected assault on New York City; even the fragments of Earth’s destroyed Moon, improbably lingering in close proximity and often observed in the sky, might be regarded as the film’s version of the World Trade Center, an iconic site cruelly destroyed by implacable enemies.

All these evocations of 9/11, however, neither weaken nor strengthen the film; one suspects that it would have had the same emotional impact if Harper had struggled near the ruins of the Hollywood sign and Disneyland’s Matterhorn, or the ruins of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe for that matter. Frankly, one suspects that the story’s New York setting was the result of Kosinski surrendering to the suggestion of some powerful idiot: “Hey, let’s move the story to New York! Then, everyone will think of 9/11!” But in the hands of a talented filmmaker, the ruins of any city can evoke strong emotions, and since they are not as stupid as some people believe, audiences recognize full well than any city can arouse strong feelings if victimized by terrorist attacks, as this week’s events in Boston demonstrate. (Right now, that same idiot is probably thinking, “If only we had known! We could have set the story in Boston!”)

*****

The argument can be made that, since 1968, all science fiction films, in one way or another, have necessarily been in dialogue with Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s masterful 2001: A Space Odyssey, and this is especially true when filmmakers strive to be profound or thought-provoking. Since such aspirations visibly inform Oblivion, its many references of the 1968 film seem inevitable. Even before the story belatedly moves into outer space, one notices that the menacing drones that increasingly bedevil Harper have the white sheen and circular shape of the astronauts’ pods in 2001, which seem menacing in precisely the same way in the scene when the pod controlled by the maddened HAL 9000 computer advances toward the doomed Frank Poole. In both films, unseen aliens are associated with stark geometric shapes: the rectangular monoliths of 2001, and the inverted tetrahedron, “the Tet,” orbiting the Earth in this film. The projected new home for humanity, and planned destination of an earlier space mission, is Saturn’s moon Titan, and knowledgeable viewers will recall that Saturn was the original destination of 2001’s Discovery (though it was changed to Jupiter when special-effects artist Douglas Trumbull could not convincingly render Saturn’s rings). When an astronaut floats through a cylindrical corridor, he looks like Dave Bowman floating into the emergency airlock, and that astronaut’s spaceship is, not coincidentally, named the Odyssey. The chambers in which certain astronauts are maintained in “delta-sleep” resemble the chambers holding hibernating astronauts in the Discovery. Most interestingly, the film’s true villain increasingly appears to be an evil computer, and when it is finally confronted, it is represented by a circular red light that seems exactly the same as the circular red light that represented HAL. In this respect, the film actually recalls not the original film but Clarke’s three sequels to the film, which began characterizing the monoliths as senile, damaged, and/or evil computers; in other words, Clarke makes his alien agents seem more and more like HAL, and this film does much the same thing.

More broadly, the central idea of 2001 is that the human race is not what it seems; instead of a natural evolution, humans are actually the product of an alien plan to create first an intelligent species, and later a super-intelligent species. In other works of science fiction, this scenario unfolds in the case of one individual, as a man (it is usually a man) discovers that he is not who he thinks he is – a favorite trope of Philip K. Dick, observed in classic stories like “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (1966), which inspired two less classic films called Total Recall (1990, 2012; review of 2012 film here). Oblivion is also part of that tradition, and most particularly recalls another film, Moon (2009; review here). Here, one must speak carefully to avoid overly specific “spoilers,” but the similarity might be conveyed in this vague language: in both films, a man who believes he is a normal human being finds out that he is actually a product, and he must wrestle with the implications of being a product. Without endorsing the plausibility of these revelations, one can praise all three films for recognizing, plausibly, that traveling into space is going to change the way that humans think of themselves – in contrast to the innumerable films that argue, implausibly, that humans in space will see themselves in precisely the same way that people on Earth now see themselves (e.g., all incarnations of Star Trek and Star Wars).

However, mentioning Moon also brings to the forefront one of this film’s most conspicuous weaknesses, which again must be discussed circumspectly. In the story of the person who learns that he is a product, a natural consequence is the character’s determination to see himself as a unique individual, despite his origins, and a story that validates that resolve; as one example, one might recall the scene in A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001; review here) when the robot David reacts angrily after seeing scores of identical Davids ready to be marketed and sold. And, if the character is indeed a unique individual, that means that he cannot be replaced. Yet the stories of both Moon and Oblivion reach a point when such a character does have to be replaced by another, similar character, who must become the new focus of the audience’s sympathies; Moon makes this transition smoothly and artfully, while Oblivion does so abruptly and ineffectively. The problem, again, may be another result of the intervention of a powerful idiot who accepted one of the most pervasive false beliefs in the film community – namely, that all films must have happy endings – a fallacy that I fulminated about in a discussion of The Twilight Zone (commentary here). Yet a film that repeatedly references the story of Horatius in Thomas Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome (1842) and also offers a glimpse of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859) should have the courage to provide a similarly tragic conclusion.

Still, while this film’s debts to 2001 and Moon seem most conspicuous, one can detect homages to many other science fiction films. A few example immediately come to mind: when Harper is told to enter Earth’s “radiation zones” to discover “the truth” about his situation, and later does so, he recalls the final journey of astronaut George Hunter in the original Planet of the Apes (1968), also referenced in the aforementioned glimpse of a buried Statue of Liberty; a scene in which Harper battles against attacking drones in a narrow corridor seems a shot-for-shot transcription of a concluding battle scene in the original Star Wars (1977 – no, I’m not going to call it “A New Hope”); and when Harper presents his romantic and business partner Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) with a flower in a can, he duplicates the titular robot’s loving gift of a potted plant to Eve in WALL·E (2008; review here). But spotting references to other science fiction films in Oblivion is a game that I must now bequeath to others and move on.

*****

In reviewing other recent films, I noted a tendency to envision a future that actually resembles America’s past, with a special fondness for evoking the lifestyle of the Great Depression in the 1930s; repeatedly, one observes future denizens who have abandoned universal aspects of contemporary life, like cell phones and personal computers, and rely instead on technology developed long before most filmgoers were born. Oblivion also reflects this strange nostalgia for earlier times. According to the film, Earth was invaded in 2017, and the film takes place 60 years later; this means that humans, even while dealing with an alien invasion and its aftermath, should have been able to maintain and improve upon the technology we have today. This seems the case with the film’s forms of transportation and weaponry, which are more advanced than anything we have today (but such transportation and weaponry, of course, must be present to provide the high-speed action that the film requires). Otherwise, however, this is yet another future world where nobody has a cell phone, nobody has a computer that can access the Internet, and nobody seems to watch television except to spy on other people.

Most provocatively, Harper seems fixated on a relatively distant past. One cannot pin down precisely when he was born, but by my reckoning, the earliest decade he could have reached adulthood in would be the 1990s, which means that his favorite music should be grunge and rap, and he should have grown up listening to that music on CDs or an iPod. Yet he instead collects vinyl records, which one imagines would be hard to locate in a world that was invaded 30 years after they were largely replaced by CDs, and he seems most attached to music of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s: on the dashboard of his Bubbleship, he keeps a Bobblehead that he calls “Bob,” but it is identified in the end credits as a likeness of Elvis Presley; his favorite song is said to be Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” released in 1967; he also plays the Led Zeppelin song “Ramble On” from 1969; his collection of albums conspicuously includes the Rolling Stones’s Exile on Main Street (1972); and the most recent artist in his collection seems to be the 1980s’s Duran Duran. Harper is also fond of picking up and reading books, but most of the ones he gathers look like they were published in the nineteenth century, and as noted, the volume that made the strongest impression on him appeared in 1842. Other surviving humans on Earth seem to share Harper’s outdated tastes, since they maintain a collection of paintings that includes Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World (1948), more old books, and a number of Greek or Roman statues – but no abstract art or classic DVDs; also, their leader Malcolm Beech (Morgan Freeman) can quote Macaulay’s ancient text from memory, suggesting that it is also one of his favorites. Even the places that Harper visits seem more antiquated than they should be: I have not recently visited the New York Public Library’s Reading Room, but a recent photograph suggests that it now includes some computers and no longer has a card catalog; yet the Reading Room that Harper enters has no computers and a visible card catalog, as if it had been abandoned in 1987, not 2017.

In focusing so strongly on cultural artifacts that were created before any of its characters were born, the film seems to argue that the technologies that we now depend upon have somehow made us less human, so that the hoped-for reemergence and triumph of humanity must replicate the lifestyle of an earlier age – as represented most clearly by the rustic cabin which Harper identifies as the permanent residence he would prefer. The irony is that this message was being presented in a darkened theatre where I could observe several glowing cell phones, held by people who had ignored repeated pleas to keep them turned off because they could not bear to be separated from them for even one hour. As they checked their messages and sent their texts, one wonders if they even noticed that all the characters in the film they were watching were living their entire lives without cell phones.

*****

Despite its intriguing themes, providing much food for thought, the success of this film is largely due to a factor that I rarely mention in reviews: its brilliant casting. Its chief virtue is its star, Tom Cruise, one of our greatest living actors. Those who would not agree with this assessment, including many of our most esteemed critics, simply do not understand the true essence of successful screen acting, which can be summed up as follows: always appearing relaxed and natural in front of the camera, and presenting a consistent, appealing personality while ostensibly portraying different characters in different films. This is why people love Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, and Cary Grant, all masters of this art; this is why people do not love George Arliss, Laurence Olivier, and Meryl Streep, who deliberately call our attention to how marvelously they are acting and particularly strive to impress us by playing radically different people in every film. But even in his twenties, Cruise was wiser than they, as he understood and quickly perfected the skill of playing the Tom Cruise character: the overgrown child whose good-hearted determination to do the right thing somehow enables him to succeed in a world where he does not really seem mature enough to prosper. In this film, he conveys this personality primarily by means of Harper’s devotion to sports: he wears a New York Yankees cap and cherishes an old baseball; he enthusiastically recounts the story of the final seconds of a classic Super Bowl game; and he relaxes by shooting baskets at his lakeside retreat. But these gestures are in a sense unnecessary, since Cruise (despite some unfortunate developments in his personal life) is effortlessly resourceful in making audiences like Tom Cruise.

Ah, some people reading this might think, if we all love Tom Cruise so much, why have several of his recent films bombed? The problem Cruise now faces is the problem that all great actors eventually face: they grow too old to play the part that made them famous. Inevitably, they then enter a period of slow decline when they can sometimes garner a role that enables them, despite their advanced age, to recapture that old magic (think of Cary Grant in North by Northwest [1959] and Charade [1963]) but otherwise flounder when they endeavor to adapt their personae to more age-appropriate roles (think of Cary Grant in Father Goose [1964] and Walk, Don’t Run [1966]). At the age of 51, Cruise has now entered this hit-or-miss stage of his career, but as demonstrated by this film and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011), he can still, at least occasionally, make successful Tom Cruise films.

Yet the other star of this film – Morgan Freeman – is equally crucial to its success. The makers of this film had to confront a significant difficulty: for its story to work, a group of individuals must be initially presented as despicable villains, yet audiences would have to change their minds halfway through the film and instead regard them as heroes. To achieve this shift in attitudes, the filmmakers employed a simple but effective device: they cast Morgan Freeman as their leader. And he is another great actor who always projects a consistent, appealing personality, since the Morgan Freeman character is invariably wise, authoritative, and kindly. From the first moment that he lights a cigar and reveals his face, Freeman informs us that he and his followers are all wonderful people that we should henceforth admire and root for. And I’m sorry, Philip Seymour Hoffman, but for all your vaunted acting talents, there is nothing you could have done with this part to achieve a similar result.

The film’s other stars are far less celebrated, but they were shrewdly chosen nonetheless. In the two female leads who compete for Harper’s affections, the film sets up a version of the classic triangle in a romance novel. Harper is the attractive hero. Victoria, with her red hair and British accent, is the Girl Next Door – friendly, intelligent, supportive, but not terribly exciting and even a bit maternal. Julia (Olga Kurylenko), with her black hair and Russian accent, is the Tall Dark Stranger – exotic, mysterious, even threatening, but powerfully and erotically appealing, and hence irresistible. As soon as they are both on the scene, we know precisely which two performers will appear together in the final scene. Finally, for the voice of “Mission” which directs Harper’s and Victoria’s activities, Sally, the filmmakers found an actor, Melissa Leo, who could do a convincing Southern accent, and hence effect another shift in the audience’s attitudes. For having cast the African-American Freeman as the victim of an alien invasion, the filmmakers linked his plight to the plight of all of America’s long-suffering African-Americans, and the region where they were historically most oppressed was the American South. Thus, once Freeman is introduced, a woman with a Southern accent, previously regarded as sympathetic, suddenly starts to seem rather sinister, which is precisely what the filmmakers wanted the audience to think.

In sum, one cannot discuss Oblivion without praising its cast, for if it had been made with an entirely different set of actors, I might now be explaining why, despite such promise, it turned out to be such an awful film.

*****

What, then, unites these disparate approaches to this film? Perhaps the link is to be found in the film’s bleak title, suggesting that it represents a sort of film that may soon be obsolete. That is, it represents a film genre that may be driven to extinction by repetitiveness and overexposure; a film haunted by an event that will grow less and less significant until finally, like the sinking of the Maine or the bombing of Pearl Harbor, it is merely a passage in the history books; a film obsessed with hearkening back to previous films, mining resources that must someday be exhausted; a film infused with the sort of compulsive nostalgia that is often associated with senescence and decline; and a film energized by casting decisions that may become more and more difficult, as the increasing infrequency of films makes it harder and harder for actors to establish an on-screen personality. (Matthew McConaughey, who are you?)

But aging critics must not fall into the trap of imagining that the world is falling apart merely because their bodies are falling apart. And after all, regardless of the fates of individual characters, Oblivion does conclude on a hopeful note, as humanity has apparently emerged from its darkest hour as a vibrant, reinvigorated society. Similarly, science fiction films might endure through these dark and dreary times to become new and exciting again in ways we cannot even imagine. In the meantime, we should appreciate the genre’s occasional bright spots, and Oblivion is most definitely one of them.

John Varley is another writer whose backgrounds and idea-sets were developed in magazine pieces before being fed into novels, and whose career cannot be fully appreciated without the short-form part of the canon. So a few years back, I was happy to see The John Varley Reader (reviewed in December 2004), which brought back into print a substantial chunk of Varley’s shorter work after an eighteen-year drought. Now I am made happy again to see a somewhat smaller chunk surface in the form of Good-Bye, Robinson Crusoe and Other Stories. The 11 items here collected date from between 1975 and 1986, eight of them clustered in the incredibly productive ’75 to ’77 period, and they are presented not in publication order (as was the case with the Reader) but as a ‘‘Grand Tour of the Solar System.’’ The fact that some planets are left out and that two stories that don’t fit the schema at all doesn’t bother me, since the Tour gives Varley an excuse to write headnotes reflecting on the state of understanding of the solar system when the stories were written and to offer some insight into the play of ideas (emphasis, I suspect, on ‘‘play’’) that generated them.

When Varley’s first collection, The Persistence of Vision, appeared in paperback in 1978, I immediately snagged it as the centerpiece for one of my science-fiction courses. His stories were great to teach, not only because they required students to pay close attention to what was on the page (‘‘Yes, he really does mean that literally’’; ‘‘Yes, that character really used to be female’’), but because they were early explorations of the fringes of the post-human condition, as well as fountains of exotic, playful ideas. If gleefully confronting taboos and unthinking convention and turning expectations on their heads are among the functions of art, then Varley is an artist. Nor does it hurt that he is also a craftsman, an entertainer, and a first-rate line-by-line writer.

Most of the stories in this collection belong to the Eight Worlds future that dominated the beginning of his career. Here the Nifty Skiffy technologies – nullfield vacuum suits, symbiotes, sex-changes, and the colonization of insanely hostile environments – compete for our attention with equally revolutionary and transformative changes in social, psychological, and moral realms. There is considerable conventional SF ingenuity at work in ‘‘The Funhouse Effect’’, ‘‘Retrograde Summer’’, and ‘‘In the Bowl’’ – notably the imaginary technology of the nullfield, which shapes the stories’ environments and enables the physical drama. (All three include strong survival-adventure elements.)

But it is the human context that is more profoundly estranging, particularly the familial and sexual environments. Once again, I noted how often the non-SF heart of a story turns on childhood or family dynamics, on new modes of parenthood and parenting, or even on new modes of dysfunction and child abuse. ‘‘Good-Bye, Robinson Crusoe’’ (1977) features a return to physical childhood (a companion piece to ‘‘Beatnik Bayou’’ over in the Reader), while ‘‘Retrograde Summer’’ and ‘‘Lollipop and the Tar Baby’’ turn on mother-child relationships and tensions (and dysfunctions) possible only to a culture with cloning technology. All of them – along with ‘‘In the Bowl’’ – also poke at our notions of children, kinship, and sexuality. These stories had a definite and useful shock value thirty years ago, and while sex changes and easy or routine somatic modifications are not surprising any more (at least in fiction), I suspect that some Varleyan notions might still raise eyebrows or blood pressures in a contemporary classroom – for example, the equating of religious evangelism with mental illness as a disqualifier for parenthood (‘‘Retrograde Summer’’), or his portraits of religious fanaticism (‘‘Equinoctal’’, 1977), or the casual mention of the possibility of sex between clone ‘‘siblings,’’ rejected only to avoid thermal overloading of one’s nullfield suit. (Though, to be fair, Heinlein was toying with related stuff back in 1959 in ‘‘‘All You Zombies – ’’’.)

Like McAuley, Varley has had some revisionist second thoughts about his future history. (There is a website that includes a detailed unpicking of the [in]consistencies of the Eight Worlds stories – Google up ‘‘Varley Vade Mecum’’.) At one time, it seemed that the world of lunar police chief Anna-Marie Bach (‘‘Bagatelle’’, ‘‘Blue Champagne’’) belonged with the Eight Worlds, but eventually Varley decided that, as he writes in the headnote to ‘‘Bagatelle’’, that world is ‘‘harsher’’ than that of the Eight Worlds. ‘‘Bagatelle’’ has a strong Larry Niven vibe, with its cop-with-a-problem foreground and nicely textured settled-Moon background. But despite the sophisticated technologies on display, this is far from the almost-magical milieu of its cousin series. There are no nullfields, no almost-perfect med-tech, no aggressively rationalist government. Instead, there is some pretty ugly general background, built up gradually from mentions dropped into the story: lunatic-fringe terrorist bombings, even with nuclear devices, and corporate wars are not-uncommon occurrences. ‘‘Blue Champagne’’ (1981) elaborates on the corporate and cultural side of this future, where some near-miracles, such as the paraplegic’s full-body prosthetic, are possible, but only at a very high cost that only starts with the money, and corporations withhold unprofitable disease cures.

The two non-series stories sort strangely with the rest. ‘‘The Manhattan Telephone Book (Abridged)’’ (1984) does not operate in anything like the same mode as the others – it is not even a parable. The best labels I can come up with are ‘‘secular sermon’’ or ‘‘reality check’’ – it’s a meditation on the difference between consolatory stories about apocalypse and the real thing. (For an extended and genuinely fictional take on a related subject, see last year’s Slow Apocalypse.) ‘‘The Unprocessed Word’’ (1986) is a goof, the sort of epistolary story that used to show up in the old Analog, but with a different set of in-jokes.

Between this volume and the Reader, the bulk of Varley’s short fiction is now available. The shelf life of much SF can be surprisingly short, but the freshness and vividness of these stories after nearly four decades suggests that Varley’s work belongs in the permanent canon. If I were still in the classroom, John Varley would be right there with me.