Out of all the forms of fiction, surely allegory is the hardest to bring off successfully. If the subtextual parable is too dominant, too overwhelming and up front, then all naturalism is lost, and the characters are rendered lifeless, their actions clockwork, all to hammer home an arid lesson. If, on the other hand, the symbolism is too understated and obscure, then the fiction is all just plain mimesis, one- or two- or three-dimensional, deep and/or entertaining as the case may be, but still without any satisfying metaphorical layers: there’s just a vague, subliminal irritating buzz of lost meaning that refuses to resolve. Crafting a book that features the lifelike skin of a compelling naturalistic story clothing the skeleton of complex metaphor is an alchemical trick.

Luckily, science fiction lends itself more than other genres to good allegories, since the reification of metaphors is part of our essential toolkit.

With The Flame Alphabet, Ben Marcus has pulled off that exact wizardly stunt, with brio and panache. He’s created a novel that’s full of essential speculative estrangement—the surface narrative—but one which also conceals a multivalent subterranean (in one sense, literally subterranean!) allegory about time, human generations, individualism, interpersonal and societal communications, and nonhuman modes of epistemology and being.

Michael Chabon’s early blurb for The Flame Alphabet compares this book to Ballard, and the comparisons are deserved. Looking at a book like Ballard’s The Drowned World, with its hypnotic surface plot draping a meditation on existential challenges and the role of man in nature, one sees the model for what Marcus has attempted and brought off. And in fact, given the conceit of Marcus’s book—language, human-vocalized sounds and writing, as instruments of death—one wonders if the initial seed of his novel was not a very specific Ballard story, “The Sound-Sweep,” which posits a tangibility to noise much in line with Marcus’s novel.

We open in the “realtime” of an extraordinarily changed world, experience a long, long flashback that explains how the world got to its current state, and then resume the ongoing narrative, a very effective scheme. Furthermore, the book breaks neatly into two labeled halves (with a small, surprising coda). The first half focuses on the intimate and personal aspects of the apocalypse, while the second half examines Kafkaesque bureaucratic responses (without abandoning the private hearts). And the whole tale is delivered in the beautifully idiosyncratic voice of one tortured man, a fellow named Samuel, married to Claire, father to Esther.

Marcus’s MacGuffin is that the speech sounds of children suddenly acquire lethal power, sickening all adults (anyone older than eighteen) who hear them. Dinner-table conversations become deadly assaults, no less so when self-centered youngsters begin to revel in their lethality. Eventually, even adult speech and written text acquire the taint. Once understood, the plague (and echoes of Camus’s famous novel are here) causes the collapse of civilization, as despairing families are wrenched apart, with the ailing adults, still loving their kids, unable to do more than ineffectually quarantine a handful of cases. Feral packs of adolescents roam the ruins, gleefully assaulting adults, while at the mysterious Forsythe Institute, under the supervision of a mad genius named Le Bov, mute adults strive to recreate a language fit for the new conditions.

Compounding this scenario is the mysterious religion that Samuel and Claire belong to. They are “Forest Jews,” practicing their lonely rites in isolated huts that tap chthonic murmurings and instructions from unknown sources. This mystical technology—reminiscent of some anachronistic novelty dreamed up by cartoonist Ben Katchor—will come to play a part in the researches of the Forsythe Institute, and Samuel will exhibit powers above the norm.

Much of the strength of this novel derives from its rigorous, knowing use of some SF “power chords” (to employ Rudy Rucker’s critical terminology). The generational mutation theme harkens to pure Midwich Cuckoos/Bad Seed/X-Men tropes, but receives a great new twist. Likewise, an amped-up On the Beach/Day of the Triffids ambiance suffuses the book. But Marcus patinas all this with unique horrific visuals akin to glimpses out of a Bosch or Brueghel or Chris Mars painting. “On a bird-strewn incline I came upon women pulling a cart up a footpath. The tarp thrown over their cart so clearly covered the bulges of people.” His wasted adults (and the resemblance of their condition to that of AIDS and Alzheimer’s sufferers is part of the allegory) are some new species of humanity, a fresh take on the radiation-scarred victims of yesterday’s tomorrows, while his deadly kids are the post-literate Internet generation turned monstrous.

And as fitting for a book with such a theme, Marcus’s inventive, hypnotic language—knotted and convoluted, alternately banal, poetic and scientific, contorted by the conditions and by Samuel’s awkward prickly persona— emerges as a character in its own right.

Although a grim journey, The Flame Alphabet is not without its mordant humor: “Gesture was tested, mostly on the sick, to see how rapidly they would expire if exposed to unceasing and explicit mime.” But it is required reading to help us understand all the pathologies of our contemporary plague of deadly language and willful incomprehension.

It’s probably easier to explain what The Intergalactic Nemesis: Book One: Target Earth isn’t.

It isn’t a standard Broadway spectacular, with glam costumes and nubile dancers. It isn’t a fraught family drama that is instant Tony bait. And it definitely isn’t an angst-filled monologue about coming of age.

What I can unequivocally state is that it is live theater about, well, an intergalactic nemesis who is poised to conquer 1933’s Earth. All that stands in the way of our complete destruction are a hearty few who are in on the plot: Timmy, a cub journalist, Molly, a tough-talking Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, and Ben, a mysterious librarian.

But Jason Neulander’s creation isn’t a play or a musical. What it most resembles is a live-action graphic-novel radio drama and slide show. Think Garrison Keillor’s Guy Noir with alien sludge monsters.

The stage is simple. Three actors – each of whom plays multiple parts – stand in front of three old-timey microphones. A Foley artist is surrounded by the tools of his trade, which include a box of macaroni and cheese, a balloon, a small red door and two Jacob’s Ladders. A musician provides a (mostly) piano soundtrack. Above the performers is a screen, onto which comic book panels without dialog or sound notes are projected.

It shouldn’t work. Two hours of still pictures, live sound and talking people shouldn’t be as captivating as it is. And, yet, it all comes together to tell a fantastic tale that is long on imagination, sense of wonder, and nifty gadgets.

Perhaps what makes The Intergalactic Nemesis successful is its ability to blend all three mediums without ever making one feel more important that the others. At times, the visual images take lead storytelling duties. Other times, the actors or the Foley carry the weight. Watching how each aspect influences the other is a show in its own right.

The uniqueness of the presentation wouldn’t mean squat, however, if the story itself weren’t such fun. No, there isn’t much meat here; no one muses on what it means to be human. But it is stuffed full of epic Indiana Jones-style action that talks to the inner child-like geek a lot of us nurture — and makes it eager to see what will happen in Book Two.

The Intergalactic Nemesis: Book One: Target Earth is currently touring the U.S. and recently was featured on NPR.

When Margo Lanagan’s novella ‘‘Sea- Hearts’’ received the World Fantasy Award in 2010, it was already widely known that a full-length novel was in the works, and it didn’t seem at all unreasonable when a few people I spoke to expressed excitement leavened by apprehension, as is often the case when a well-formed tale is revealed to be part of a larger whole. Was More Than Human better than ‘‘Baby Is Three’’, or Flowers for Algernon better than the short story of the same title? In a sense it’s a pointless question, since novels tend to get read by far wider audiences than novellas, and ‘‘Sea-Hearts’’ originally appeared in an Australian anthology by Keith Stevenson that was virtually unavailable in the US. But the novel Sea Hearts (note the subtle difference in the title) is getting wide distribution as a YA title (like her earlier World Fantasy-winning Tender Morsels), although the American and UK editions are unfortunately retitled The Brides of Rollrock Island, which sounds like a rock musical Olivia Newton-John might have starred in 40 years ago. No matter; it’s a gorgeous piece of work, perhaps less startling and visceral than Tender Morsels, but in many ways a richer and more complex novel, and it ain’t going to be a musical anytime soon (though it might make a terrific opera).

Sea Hearts is a selkie novel, as distinguished from the spate of mermaid novels we’ve seen in the past couple of years, but as a Lanagan novel it’s distinguished in several other ways as well. In place of the vaguely European, folkloristic setting of Tender Morsels, it takes place mostly on Rollrock Island, a hardscrabble fishing community suggestive of the North Sea cultures that gave rise to the selkie legends in the first place. Daniel Mallett, the boy who narrated the novella, turns out to be only one of six narrators, who collectively recount something like three generations of life on Rollrock, centered on a tragic period during which the men of the island, aided by the witch Misskaella Prout, almost universally take the hypnotically beautiful seal-maids as their wives, in some cases sending their human wives (or ‘‘red women’’) packing off to the mainland town of Cordlin, often with families in tow. The sea-wives themselves are trapped in human form by having the sealskins from which they emerged locked away from them. The result is a disturbing, guilt-ridden, all-male society (it turns out that girlchildren born to the seal-women can’t survive in the human world, so there are only boys), at times resembling a darker Gothic version of The Stepford Wives, with the seal-women themselves taking such a strangely passive role that they kept reminding me of Paul Delvaux’s famous surrealist painting ‘‘Village of the Mermaids’’, with its line of otherworldly women sitting with proper gowns and folded hands while their sisters sport in the distant sea. (It’s significant that we never get the point of view of any of the seal-women, who remain as much a mystery to the human characters as to us. But then, I suppose, seals don’t generally narrate.)

Although Daniel is the only character who narrates two sections, the central unifying figure in the novel is the witch Misskaella, viewed by all the other characters as a fearsome, embittered old woman made wealthy by the fees she exacts from the men for finding them seal-wives. Her own tragic history forms the second section and sets up the terms for the entire novel. (Ironically, she also gets the most purely romantic idyll, in her youthful encounter with a male selkie.) Misskaella’s tale is followed by that of Bet Winch, whose mother unsuccessfully challenges Misskaella when she sees her own son taking a sea-wife, and later decides to leave with her family. Next is the tale of Daniel’s father Dominic Mallett, who had moved to the mainland after his own father died, but finds himself trapped by his own desires on a return visit. The last three sections are narrated by Daniel, who grows more and more troubled by the plight of the ‘‘mams’’; by Lori Severner, Bet’s daughter, whom Daniel had met as a child (the only human girl he’d seen to that time) and who now moves into her old family house on Rollrock; and by Trudella Callisher, a mainland girl recruited to serve as Misskaella’s apprentice.

This odd but compelling narrative structure, with each successive tale opening up and commenting on earlier ones, gives an almost panoramic sense of passing generations for what is not a very long novel (the effect is something like that of Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, with its seven stories of different characters in different generations illuminating each other until the whole becomes a coherent narrative). Given Lanagan’s distinctive language-bending style, it’s something of a challenge for her to differentiate the six narrative voices, though we quickly come to realize that, while they mostly share the island’s dialect, each tone is quite specific to the character – Daniel’s growing indignation at the plight of his and the other ‘‘mams,’’ his father’s weak efforts at self-rationalization, Misskaella’s bitter loneliness that leads her to seize what power she can from a community that both despises and needs her. Along the way, Lanagan develops, without benefit of an external narrator or sidebar lectures, some sharp insights into female passivity and victimization (at least on the part of the seal-women), male fecklessness and almost helpless self-absorption (early on, some of them pack their sea-wives away in cabinets the way an alcoholic hides his booze), the complex relationships of parents and children, and the fragile negotiations between community and nature. Except for a few comments from distrustful mainlanders, we learn about Rollrock entirely from within, and for a while we seem to live there. It’s not always a pleasant vacation, but it’s a deeply illuminating one, and Sea Hearts may eventually be seen as some sort of masterpiece.

Some more of the 2011 ‘zines that I dug belatedly out of the mailbox, one belated 2011 anthology, and some current monthly ezines as well as a first look at one: Something Wicked, which I find less wicked than its name.

Lightspeed, January 2012

Now incorporating Fantasy Magazine, to present four original stories in a month.

“How Many Miles to Babylon” by Megan Arkenberg

Apocalypse. Alien invasion has covered the Earth with darkness, and nightmarish creatures pursue the few survivors, which include the narrator and her husband. The radio has given them hope that there exists a stronghold of light calling itself Babylon, and they drive continually, hoping to find it.

Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great. The words ring in my head, as repetitive as a nursery rhyme. What if it’s true? What if Babylon is not our new Jerusalem with angels at the gates, but a charred skeleton city, a ruin with monsters nesting in its bones?

Somehow, it doesn’t seem likely to me that a group of survivors would name their refuge after a long-extinct city, even if it does allow the author to use the nursery rhyme as her title. Otherwise unremarkable apocalypse tale.

“On the Acquisition of Phoenix Eggs (Variant)” by Marissa Lingen

After a stiff bidding war, collector Louisa Pickering brings home her latest-acquired phoenix egg, only to discover that it is not what she had in mind. The egg is humming. It is a variant.

I know a phoenix egg from a mere roc or a painted bird egg. I know what I am about here. I will not be taken in. Louisa Pickering knows her phoenix eggs, and I have never been wrong. I gave it another look, and again with my wizard’s loupe.

She has been cheated, and now all she wants to do is dump the defective thing.

The mannered tone of the narrative makes this one entertaining, even if the rather unusual premise is not entirely consistent.

“Blue Lace Agate” by Sarah Monette

Cops. Although in fact paranormal investigators in this scenario aren’t really cops, and there seems to be hostility between the two departments, for reasons not disclosed here. This is the partner story, with the rookie partner determined to take all the shit the senior one dishes out, for the chance of learning from him. While they are on an unrelated investigation, Mick picks up a ring and immediately flashes on a ritual murder. The experience unhinges him, and his partner wisely knows what to do about it.

All at once, Mick said, “Here!” his voice so urgent that Jamie slammed on the brakes in instinctive response, hard enough to throw them both forward against their seat belts. He swerved the car over against the curb; Mick was already clawing at the door, scrambling out, leaving the door not only unlocked but flapping open. Jamie locked the car and followed him more slowly, knowing that it wasn’t going to matter.

A bit thin. Usually, in the partner story, the junior cop has to exhibit some exceptional bravery or cleverness; Jamie manages on mere sympathy and niceness.

“The Five Elements of the Heart Mind” by Ken Liu

Tyra, sole survivor from her ship, has crash-landed on a world long ago colonized by humans who have by now lost knowledge of technology and advanced medicine. People from Tyra’s culture have eradicated most bacteria and intestinal flora; Fazen’s society uses ancient theories and herbal cures to establish a balance in what they call the “heart mind.” This resonates with the advice Tyra always got from her father: “Go with your gut.”

Heartwarming to excess, along with too much optimism and faith in human nature as well as in natural healing. The scientific idea behind the story is interesting, but the story itself is cloying: “Dances with Gut Flora.”

Strange Horizons, January 2012

Continuing the refreshing trend to a predominance of science fiction from this ezine.

“MonitorBot and the King of Pop” by Jessica Barber

In a future police state, Izzy is under surveillance because her brother is a member of the rebel army. She cooperates fully with the authorities and is therefore annoyed to find a protean MonitorBot in her room. But it turns out that the bot’s interest is extracurricular; it’s a fan of Michael Jackson, and Izzy is an impersonator, although struggling with a bad knee. A strange relationship ensues.

It’s kind of fantastic, actually—the bot seems to know what she’s going to do before she does it, and it bends in accommodation, shoring her up at just the right moments. There are a couple of jumps that she’s been phoning in recently—they launch off the wounded leg—but now she could swear the bot is doing something to let her fly higher, travel farther.

I like this unusual relationship, but I can’t really believe the ending is going to work out well.

“In the Cold” by Kelly Jennings

Nicola is a member of the second generation on a struggling planetary colony where the margin between failure and survival has grown too thin. She is often at odds with Hugo, the colony’s top executive, in large part because everyone is aware she is the one most likely to replace him.

Hugo would claim, I can hear his dry tones running as I scout the corridors, it’s not the getting caught, it’s the doing right, are we a community or are we not, do you work to build or do you tear down, a community can only tolerate so much dissent. This is how they defeat us, those ropes of language.

One night during a storm, she catches a fleeting distress signal from outside the dome – a child’s voice asking for help. But are conditions too hazardous outside to risk sending out a search team?

A story of leadership, responsibility, and hard choices. A bit didactic. I have to quibble with the author’s agronomy: pears require more chill hours than peaches.

“Recognizing Gabe: un cuendo de hadas” by Alberto Yáñez

A transgender story. Gabi has known as long as he could remember that he was really a boy, not a girl, but he couldn’t convince his parents he was serious until a visit from the family’s fairy godmother, who set them straight. Still, knowing it is one thing, accepting it is another. Gabi wants to be accepted for himself – a boy who likes to cook in the kitchen.

All the pretend I had to do for amá and apá, that all stopped after nina Tere’s visit. She mostly convinced my parents that I wasn’t crazy or willful or even a freak. I was just their son, Gabriel.

They missed Gabriela for a long, long time.

The fantastic element is minimal here. Nina Tere doesn’t wave a magic wand and transform Gabi physically; what she wields is moral authority. It’s a story of family, an awfully optimistic one.

Shimmer, December 2011

A nice issue of this little magazine, with several stories more science-fictional than fantastic.

“Food My Father Feeds Me, Love My Husband Shows Me” by A A Balaskovits

A carnivorous take on the Bluebeard legend. The narrator’s father is a gourmand who butchers his own meat, and she is his favorite daughter.

When all my sisters put their white and smooth hands to their chests and faint at the gore on his killing smock, I gently untie its knots and wash it with my bare hands until they stain red. Because of this, my father gives me the first and largest servings of leg and rib, and when he boils lamb’s head I am always allowed to chew on their glossy black eyes.

But when she marries, her husband turns out to be a former butcher, now a vegetarian who, with loving words, forbids her to eat the meat she craves.

A richly sensuous narrative (some readers will say “gross”) that hints of incest and cannibalism. Strictly speaking, there is no fantastic element present except for the apparent suspension of the process of decomposition.

–RECOMMENDED

“Chinvat” by Sunny Moraine

A future in which the Golden Gate Bridge has been closed due to earthquake damage, but jumpers still seek the place out. A man named Denn has become a local legend, patrolling the bridge to deter suicides, and journalist Carter Nolan – a suicide survivor himself – has come there to interview him. No one thinks this is a good idea, not Denn and not Nolan’s wife.

The fantastic element makes it a ghost story, although in essence it’s about Carter confronting his personal ghosts.

“Made of Mud” by Ari B Goelman

It seems that there are small semi-living creatures who form themselves from mud, and the narrator’s father discovers a pit of them in their yard. The narrator is happy to observe the mudlings but worries about the young sociopaths next door, whom his parents rather inexplicably tolerate. The ending is not particularly surprising.

“The House Was Never a Castle” by Aaron Polson

The orphaned narrator lives with his sisters, one living and one a ghost, in a house with no exterior doors where they take refuge from the war being waged outside. Occasionally they go through a crack to gather bugs and worms to eat, but this is risky, if they are discovered.

Surreal post-apocalypse. I am not entirely convinced that there is anyone actually alive in this world. Except the bugs and worms.

“Minnow” by Carlea Holl-Jensen

A surreal vignette in which the narrator “swelled up like a helium balloon” and floated into the sky to reminisce. It makes an arresting image, but no actual sense.

“Trashman” by A C Wise

This is a special trashman who performs a kind of trashomancy by which he knows everything.

He’s pieced your life together from the shredded stubs of each bill you’ve paid. He’s tasted the remnants of every one of your meals, scrying coffee grinds and tuna cans, egg shells and banana peels, laying them out like an augur’s bones.

This has always creeped out the 2nd-person narrator, but now that his lover has disappeared, he needs the trashman.

An ambivalent, almost godlike figure, ominous but benign at the same time.

“We Make Tea” by Meryl Ferguson

Science fiction. In the wake of a catastrophic war, the robots running an abandoned tea factory yearn for a human presence. Then a human arrives, but he is not quite what they had in mind.

“Now listen up, you brainless, stinking pile of metal. I am taking my construct and I am leaving. And when I get back, I’ll have a company with me. And we’ll be moving in here, and reprogramming everyone, and there will be no more of this damn tea!”

A Lite apocalypse. The neurotic desperation of the cook robot makes this one stand out a bit from similar scenarios.

“Bad Moon Risen” by Eric Del Carlo

Werewolves. Although the author is coy and doesn’t use the W-word. Surviving humans fight a desperate battle to hold them off, as so many survivors have done before, in so many other stories just like this one.

“Some Letters for Ove Lindström” by Karin Tidbeck

The narrator retreats to her childhood home where she writes to her newly dead father, but the question is really her mother – who or what was she, and where did she come from?

She was standing at the edge of the forest, her back turned. Her dark hair tumbled in tangles down her back. The hem or her red dress dragged at the ground. I was sitting in the sandbox. I couldn’t move. She walked in among the trees and there was a tinkling sound on the air, like tiny bells.

The fantastic element here is ambiguous, but it subtly evokes the legends of the animal wife who eventually abandons her husband and children. The ending suggests something more ominous, but nothing in the text implies what that might be.

“Gödel Apparition Fugue” by Craig DeLancey

Poignant homage to mathematical logician Kurt Gödel, a man whose genius is not sufficiently appreciated outside his field, whose brilliance was such that when he claimed time travel was possible, his views could not simply be dismissed. But ghosts?

“If numbers are real, but immaterial; and if our souls grasp them; then aren’t our souls real, but immaterial? But not Albert, might not Oskar, still exist? Might we not know them again?”

The story itself is an argument that it may not be fantasy, despite the hint of ghosts. Certainly the subject matter is otherwise the stuff of science fiction, as well as a reflection on some of the greatest thinkers in the history of science, who are still people with the usual needs of people, including love and friendship.

–RECOMMENDED

On Spec, Fall 2011

Another little magazine, this one Canadian. Nine stories in over a hundred pages, plus nonfiction and poetry. A few of the stories are a bit longer than the usual, which I like to see.

“The Silent Machete” by A A Hernandez

A story of ghostly possession. After Carmen’s father killed her mother with his machete, she left Puerto Rico, intending never to return; she married an Anglo guy and never spoke Spanish. Perhaps it was her fault for naming her daughter Esmeralda, after her mother.

Perhaps my mother’s spirit flew in and closed up her mouth, or maybe she’s just mute. But I can’t help thinking that her silence has something to do with my mother’s murder.

Eventually her husband has the idea of taking the child to Puerto Rico, where the supernatural really kicks in.

The powers manifesting here seem to me more malevolent than they do to the narrator, going well beyond revenge.

“The Rook and the Web” by Carolyn Watson

A long-married couple who don’t seem to notice each others’ existence notice the new visitors in their house: the wife lets a crow inside and the husband finds a spider making a web over the TV screen. Each becomes obsessed with these creatures, who quickly take over the house.

By the dinner hour, Eunice and the crow had become inseparable. Streaks of white poop covered her plaid dress and a few black feathers had lodged in her hair. The crow tugged Eunice’s ear when he wanted food. The ear tugging was painful, but Eunice had no time to complain.

Too absurd to be really frightening. It seems to be more of a cautionary tale for married couples than horror.

“Your Source of Tears” by Andrew Barton

Science fiction fantasy. A pair of astronauts is on an expedition to explore a comet, but too many strange things are happening, and Manfred is convinced that space has driven him crazy. First, a silver woman appears in the spacecraft, as if she were one of the crew. Now it seems that the probe piloted by his partner Zépherine is missing; Manfred leaves the ship and goes after her, onto the cometary surface.

There is more neurosis here than heroism, more weirdness than wonder. None of it seems real.

“The Observation Deck” by Kristin Janz

In this vignette, a member of the space station’s crew enjoys the naive delight of a young woman headed for the stars.

“When Ayanna Kapoor Waits” by Anthony J Rapino

The narrator would have us believe that Ayanna is “nothing more or less” than a human woman, except with three arms. But I don’t believe it, because Ayanna’s clairvoyance approaches the level of the divine; her parents considered her a blessing from God, and she may be even more than that. At any rate, Ayanna loves Peggy, and Peggy has just been diagnosed with a fatal disorder, and Ayanna knows how to save her.

It’s nice to have a goddess as a best friend. Lucky Peggy. A bit less lucky for the reader, for whom this piece offers no tension and no real surprises.

“The Halberdier, by Moonlight” by Scott H Andrews

A setting that resembles our 16th century in warfare, although the concept of the afterlife is different. When war spread across the countryside, the icevintner’s son joined in, despite his father’s pleading. Now, killed in battle, he only wants to beg forgiveness, but the dead cannot speak to the living.

If he couldn’t speak to his father, perhaps he could leave some message that his father might find. Or perhaps his presence might give his father a presentiment of his regret. Or would just standing in the same room bring him the barest spark of atonement, even if his father had no sensation that anyone was there?

A tragic, moving tale, an effective portrayal of the horrors of war, as well as an individual’s yearning for atonement. The afterlife is well-conceived.

“Oh Most Cursed Addition Engine” by H S Donnelly

Humor. Two brothers live together on their family estate, each obsessive in his own way. Walter, faced with the troublesome task of keeping the estate’s books,

began to ponder the question of whether, in this modern age, with locomotives and steam engines performing the labours previously performed by animals and men, it might also be possible to invent an intelligent machine: one that could perform the tedious but mechanical process of arithmetic.

Mr Babbage of the Royal Society has taken an interest. In the meantime, his brother Toby, a retired military man, is constantly digging up the grounds to recreate the battles of Wellington’s Peninsular Campaign.

A comedy of errors that nevertheless comes much closer to the original spirit of steampunk than all the clockwork fairies currently infesting the fantasy field. Clever and amusing.

“Hexenhaus” by Megan Fennell

Hansel and Gretel, after the witch is dead. Hansel has gone rather psychotic and refuses to eat or to leave the house, as it rots around them. All the responsibility has now fallen on Gretel, who has by now grown up. A sort of twist ending comes from an aspect not original to the fairy tale.

“The Virgin’s Tears” by Priya Sharma

In the reign of Louis XV, the young alchemist called the Comte de St Germain shows up in Paris and begins to climb the social ranks. He is befriended by Sophie, an aging saloniste who is soon inappropriately infatuated, to the point of jealousy. But St Germain’s real interest may be in her library, where she has a rare volume describing the properties of the Virgin’s Tears, said to confer immortality.

This historical fantasy plays with the rich material of the Parisian salons. A novel take on St Germain, who of course is a figure of legend that has long fascinated fantasy authors, but this time, it is Sophie who stands out as a character, interestingly flawed.

My caustic tongue. Too much. Too blunt. Now he would take offense and I would be prostrate with apologies. Or else embarrassed and ridiculous and in need of reassurance. How tiresome these games were.

–RECOMMENDED

Something Wicked, January 2012

Issue #17 of this monthly “Science Fiction and Horror” ezine from South Africa. There are four stories, posted one a week, each accompanied by pieces about the authors. I don’t really see any overt horror.

“She Can See Tomorrow Today” by Mel Odom

Emily is a precognitient being pursued by a sinister government agency that forcibly recruits her kind for sinister government work, when all she wants is to be left alone. At first, she keeps up a line of denial to the agent who has tracked her down, but at last she goes on the offensive.

“I don’t have a television because I don’t want to see people I know bad things are going to happen to. I don’t read newspapers or magazines for the same reason. If I’m not careful, my life is one nightmare after another. Did you know that?”

The basic scenario is not new, but the interest here is in the way knowledge of the future can be used against an enemy. I’m not sure, however, that a member of that particular sort of agency would be so easily manipulated.

“Concerning Harmonies and Oceans” by K A Dean

A dystopian future where ocean-going cities engage in destructive status wars for no good reason. The cities have learned to employ song as a weapon, using harmonics that shatter enemy structures. Within the cities, there is the familiar division into castes, with extreme hostility shown to the lower orders, for no good reason. Harin is a boy from the lowest level who gets a chance to audition for the chorus, despite the contempt in which his caste is held.

The plot here is rather standard, but the scenario is so strongly distasteful that it stands out, not really in a good way. The reader is suppose to sympathize with Harin but might be distracted by thinking it would be an improvement if all the cities were to sink to the ocean floor and rid the world of their presence.

In the eyries of towers and in roof gardens the aristocracy of Seventh giggled and gibed, titillated. Dressed in slim, fitted clothes, dark suits, starched and crisp, with sharp creases and formal ties, they lacked the ostentatious flourishes favoured by the citizens of Third City. Across canyons of steel and concrete, glass and silver, the well-dressed and gaudy lords and ladies of Third reciprocated, braying.

“The Lighthouse” by Genevieve Rose Taylor

The nameless narrator keeps seeing a ghost, perhaps a premonition of her death.

From the safety and warmth of my little garret room, I watch her stagger by, clutching her belly with one hand, searching for something she will never find. Even though I’ve never seen a ghost before, I know this isn’t a living woman stumbling along the cobblestones. She’s long past needing the help of shelter and a warm fire.

The narrator has been fortunate in finding shelter herself, with a kindly older woman who assumes she is pregnant, but the narrator’s problem is actually some kind of malignancy that will eventually kill her. Her interest in ghosts leads her inexplicably to explore an abandoned lighthouse.

The ghosts here have a thematic presence as a reminder of mortality and death, but they don’t otherwise figure in the story, to the point that some readers may feel a bait and switch going on, promising a ghost story and not delivering one. The connection between the ghost stories and the lighthouse is a weak one. At its heart, this is a mundane story about the burdens of dying. I like the prose, but it has an archaic quality that gives the impression the setting is some time in the last century.

“Jack of Spades, Reversed” by Cat Hellison

Fantasy war. Louise has paid Attery to guide her through the jungle as she undergoes the change from human to pseudo-bird, but the Queen’s scientists are on their trail. There is war between the humans and the old beasts who seeded the world with the spores that bring on the change, but only the changed ones can function in the Space Between and face the enemy there.

. . . it’s bad enough to be turned half-way into a giant butterfly and press-ganged into a war I couldn’t give two shits about. I don’t need a mage scrabbling about in my brainpan on top of that.

Interesting premise, from what we can see of it. The details of the human society, which may or may not be based on Tarot cards, are only hinted at, as are the motives of the Queen’s Jack. I’d like to have seen this world expanded, to know more of it.

River, edited by Alma Alexander

The editorial forward describes this 2011 project as

a collection of stories any of which may or may not take place on the banks of the same body of water as any other in the treasury of tales… and yet which would all tell of the same River, in essence, the River that flows through all the stories of all the world.

For me, this theme evokes the ancient belief that every river, stream and spring is a divinity, a concept illustrated in many of these stories. The volume has obviously been crafted with loving care. The ToC is in the form of a map with the stories placed along the river’s banks, arranged thematically from wellsprings to the merging with the sea. Unlike many anthologies of this sort, most of the stories seem to have been written specifically with the theme in mind, rather than dragged out of the trunk to be repurposed.

The problem is the too-great-similarity of tone. It’s like reading through a twelve-course meal where every other dish is dessert, and even the meat and the bread and the vegetables have been sprinkled with sugar. There are too few tart or savory dishes, too few palate-cleansers. Too many benevolent forces hover over the stories to make sure the characters won’t suffer the consequences of their acts. There is little narrative tension. There is no real edge.

“The Well-Keeper and the Wolf” by Tiffany Trent

Elspeth the eternal well-keeper tells us that

I guard the Well at the center of the world, the Well from which the great River flows. Here it is but a spring, a trickle, forced up from the bedrock of the world by magic, infused with the dreams and terrors that slumber deep within the cosmos.

But someone is at the door and wants in, an old lover who would drink up the well with its magic and dreams, if she let him. A tempter.

Mostly backstory, the old tale of lovers who take different paths, separated by jealousy and envy. There are apparently “masters”, not-quite-godlike beings who teach the well-keeper that her river is only an avatar of a cosmic river of stars. She believes them, but I feel she may be too credulous, as they are the agents who have brought discord into her world. The story, however, doesn’t seem to note this.

“Rites” by Mary Victoria

Set in Cyprus during a lengthy drought. A mad English painter [aren't they all?] comes to the village where unloved Effie lives with her cranky grandmother, where water no longer flows from the tap in the garden.

A child of six at her grandmother’s house that first summer, she had been thirsty and wrestling with the garden tap, in quest of a drink. She turned the spigot too far; water had spurted out in a fountain of droplets. It made her giggle, because the afternoon was so hot, the fountain of water so high, and the drops on her face so pleasantly cool. And while she was standing there, drenched with water and bliss, she heard the voice.

The painter seems to have the ability to capture images not seen.

Nice use of myth, melding it with the image of the spring, appropriate to the anthology’s theme. I would have liked to see the laurel leaves reworked more subtly, though. As they are, it’s a bit much.

“The Fall” by Irene Radford

A waterfall personified, a minor goddess or nymph.

Then back to the top of the cliff, and repeat. The joy of my existence sends me plunging over the edge. Ever constant, ever changing, ever picking at the rock behind and underneath me, molding it to fit my will.

The story element is fairly inconsequential. It’s all about the joy of being the stream.

“They Are Forgotten Until They Come Again” by Jay Lake

Another personified river goddess [capitalized, too] in a devolved future where humans offer Her human sacrifice. But the men of the tribe make a mistake when they steal Angry Eyes’ crippled baby as an offering, because she is particularly favored by River.

Her dance grew stronger, stranger, faster. Wind whistled around Smallish Boy, and where moments before had been a blue sky only a little ragged with clouds, fat raindrops flew hard and fast from west to east, stones slung by Ocean to be borne by Storm to this
place.

Smallish Boy makes an interesting and insightful protagonist, not yet susceptible to the sex magic employed by the woman, like Odysseus with his ears full of wax. He also seems to have better judgment than any of the other characters. Mostly I liked this one because things went wrong and people suffered the consequences of their acts.

“Scatological” by Deb Taber

Mudfrogs.

Back from the river they came each night, and the trails they left of froggy turds froze on the benches and crunched in the streets as the winter turned mild days into interminable cold nights under the cloud-softened sky. And the frogs, if they truly—impossibly—were frogs, continued creeping in from the river, raising their numbers from tens to hundreds at a time. And when they died, if they were truly— impossibly—alive, they continued washing back to their flowing home.

Annalee moves into town and discovers that, while the frog shit stinks, their song is sweet.

A story of ecological balance and imbalance, in which shit necessarily plays a major role, as little as we like to admit it, or smell it. A good point.

“Floodlust” by Jacey Bedford

When Zanna was a child, she met a man by the bank of the river and promised to marry him. Of an age to marry, she has met him again, but now she understands he is a sort of river “angel”, and in order to join with him, she would have to trust him and breathe the water. She has seen too many men drowned in the river, including her father, and she can’t bring herself to do it. As the result of her weakness, she is trapped among her husband, her human lover, and her river lover, the father of her elemental child. No good can come of this.

Actually, Zanna gets off more easily than she deserves, even though she has to pay for her mistakes. It could have been a higher price. Maybe should have been. You don’t break a promise to a god and get away with it.

“Five Bullets on the Banks of the Sadji” by Keffy R M Kehrli

Named for their rivers, the Sadji people have been enslaved by the Koretl and some still carry on the resistance; thus the narrator’s brother was killed and when he finds himself against his will harboring a fugitive from the poison hounds, he remembers the magic of his river.

The limitations of river magic may be stark as the walls of a stone gorge, but properly channeled, a river can move boulders. I had seen my mother move water before. I dropped the oars and clapped my hands once before shoving them down into the river.

I like the way the author uses the rivers as a metaphor for political power, with the trunk overwhelming the tributary and the people assimilating as the waters mingle downstream of the confluence. But the parallel isn’t exact; here, power can move upstream.

“The River” by Joshua Palmatier

A despairing mother drowns her children in the river, and Erick the Seeker is sent to find and kill her. The problem with this one can be found in the author’s endnote:

If you enjoyed “The River,” check out The Skewed Throne, where you can learn more about Erick, Varis, Bloodmark, and the Mistress.

Nope. I have no interest in reading about characters from some series I’ve never heard of, who don’t really do anything in the story at hand, which engages too little of the author’s attention.

“Lady of the Waters” by Seanan McGuire

A riverboat with a strange crew docks in a town where the locals are sacrificing girls to a magician in exchange for good fishing. I found the crew of centaurs and other anomalies to be a distraction, except for the interesting fish-woman. The mystery was less solved than revealed.

“Vodnik Laughter” by Ada Milenkovik Brown

An interesting variant on the river-spirit legends, Czech vodniks that trap the souls of the drowned in lidded cups. As a young child, Iveta ignores her mother’s warning and falls into the river, where a vodnik grabs her. Iveta asks him to take someone else instead, and the vodnik takes the soul of her unborn brother, along with her mother in childbirth. Because Iveta is a musical prodigy, her widowed father exploits her as a young female Mozart, but Iveta keeps hearing the voices of the vodniks in the music, taunting her.

The frightful hand held up a pretty porcelain cup decorated with swans, such as one would use to sip chocolate or coffee. It had an ornate lid, like a beer stein. The scaly thumb bent and the lid flipped up. She dared not turn to see if her brother was inside.

I like the vodnik story, but I’m not sure how closely the prodigy story fits with it. And Iveta gets off way too easily.

“River-Kissed” by Joyce Reynolds-Ward

Marthe is on a journey downstream, changing into a sort of mermaid, a metamorphosis supposed to have Significance. That’s about it.

“Beyond the Lighthouse” by Nisi Shawl

Leelah is an older woman who seems to have everything but love. She is now infatuated with a younger man who reminds her of her first, long-dead, lover, yet convinced she is too decrepit to attract him. She is also an out-of-body adept, taking the form of a bird when she flies over the river, attracted yet fearful of where it joins the sea, of being lost in it – the river serving here as a metaphor for life, and the sea for its dissolution. As a warning, she has established a psychic lighthouse on the last island before the river’s mouth.

Unlike everyday lighthouses, her Cracker Isle beacon’s beam stayed steady, unwinking. Also unlike other lighthouses, it warned of water, not rocks or sandbars or navigational hazards. It warned of dissolution, boundarilessness.

This is by far the best-written work in the collection, full of depth and symbolism. Yet I find I can’t really like Leelah very much. Her obsession with Felix comes uncomfortably close to stalking, even perhaps to psychic manipulation. And the author throws in a distasteful gratuitous slap at a white woman, just because she can, I suppose.

All Men of Genius makes no attempt to hide its main sources of inspiration: an odd couple of famous comedies, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Rosen’s twins of two sexes, a female character’s masquerade as a young man, several cases of infatuation spurred on by interfering tricksters, plus the names of many people and places, all derive from Shakespeare – with the Bard’s imaginary land of Illyria transplanted and updated into something like Wilde’s late-period Victorian Britain of peers and ditherers. In itself, that’s an ambitious task, but Rosen has more in mind. While holding true to the antic spirit of both plays, he also manages to bring in the exploratory worldview of SF.

This requires a solid earthly setting, where steam-driven and the even newer electrical vehicles have begun to show up in a city which resembles London on the brink of the modern age. Some historical figures join the cast (notably, Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace and inventor of the Analytical Engine). Showing far more interest in science than her brother Ashton, female twin Violet adopts his guise in order to satisfy her passion for knowledge. Only males can enter the school founded by and named for that late, great master of Victorian science, the Duke of Illyria, but she regards this as an absurd prejudice. If she can sneak in amongst them, surely she can equal or surpass those spotty boys!

In philosophical moments, Violet thinks the field could benefit from a woman’s perspective. As she tells one male friend who’s in on the ruse, ‘‘Really, I don’t know what it is with your gender, that they must divide science and beauty into separate fields…. In my opinion, the way a planet spins only adds to its beauty.’’

This book’s version of Ernest (now the Duke’s son and heir to the administration of Illyria College) may strike most people as a slacker and general disappointment, yet he anticipates the future with his own kind of passion, imagining how new developments could transform ideas about life, genetics, transportation – maybe even make space travel a real possibility.

While Violet has something of Fever Crumb’s defiance of convention (Fever herself grew up among scientists who downplay the feminine mind), and Ernest shares Arlo’s devotion to flight, some of the alternate science in All Men of Genius is wackier than anything Reeve devised. In particular, genetics has taken strange turns, leading to bizarre hybrids like a foul-mouthed pet rabbit who’s part macaw. (Thanks to him, this book would never get a G rating.)

Bad guy Volio retains his Shakespearean liability to fall head over heels in love. Rosen fleshes out the portrait with memories of a sad youth that might make the man almost sympathetic, if not for another part of his heritage in this world that makes him truly dangerous. It leads to mayhem in climactic scenes set at a science fair at the Crystal Palace, where Violet had planned to make a triumphant debut and reveal her sex. Volio’s machinations help bring down those dreams, turning a high-toned event into chaos worthy of H.G. Wells – one further inspiration for an author who mixes genres with fearless panache in his novelistic debut.

New year’s stuff, with a little leftover old year’s stuff. I dust off the Good Story award for the de Bodard piece from Clarkesworld.

Clarkesworld, January 2012

Beginning the new year with three new stories, all SF.

“Scattered Along the River of Heaven” by Aliette de Bodard

Set in a far future. Xu Wen has come to the funeral of her grandmother, the great hero who liberated the Mheng space colonies from the occupying San-Tay by turning their own bots against them. Wen has never met Xu Anshi and knows almost nothing about her, but we learn in flashbacks of her revolutionary career and the poems she wrote about it.

Summoning bots I washed away
Ten thousand thousand years of poison
Awakening a thousand flower-flames, a thousand phoenix birds
Floating on a sea of blood like cresting waves
The weeping of the massacred millions rising from the darkness

A story about language and the course of revolution, which isn’t over when it’s over. There’s truth here. The narrative might be confusing to some readers until they realize just who is telling this story.

–RECOMMENDED

“What Everyone Remembers” by Rahul Kanakia

Post-apocalypse. While the land burns, two survivors in a boat offshore have bioengineered an intelligent cockroach. They agree on little; one calls the insect “she”, the other “it”. One expects it to repopulate the Earth, the other to assist human survivors [although it is not clear how.]

A lot of irony here, though it’s beneath the surface, which is narrated by the cockroach, who is both naive and uninformed.

“All the Painted Stars” by Gwendolyn Clare

Space battle. Ohree is an enforcer on patrol when it comes across a fight in progress, six cruisers attacking a ship that once belonged to an allied race.

Even through the haze of plasma blasts dispersing over their shields, I recognize the ship as a Bright construct—too much glass, arranged in sharp geometric panels so the entire upper surface glitters with reflected starlight. Still, I know the pilots must not be Brights. First, because they fly clumsily and appear not to know how to fire the main cannon. Second, because the Brights went extinct some twelve hundred solar cycles ago.

Ohree is rashly eager to get involved in the fight, which leaves it stranded, with no more purpose for its existence, inside the Bright ship with its human crew.

This one has the sense of a sequel, although I can’t identify another story with this setting. It turns quite positive by the end, perhaps too much so, too easily. I don’t really like the species name “Sheekah”, which has other connotations.

Tor.com, December 2011

I’d say, “I knew I’d forgotten something” at the end of last year, except that wouldn’t be exactly true. I knew I would forget something.

“If Dragon’s Mass Eve Be Cold and Clear” by Ken Sholes

Mel Farrelly and her father celebrated the feast of Dragon’s Mass Eve every year until he died on that day.

If Dragon’s Mass Eve be cold and clear
The Santaman’s grace may find us here.
But if Dragon’s Mass Eve be clouded sky
The Santaman’s grace may pass us by.

Mel has never seen the Santaman and doesn’t believe he will ever come; she’s never quite understood why they sang the hymn if they didn’t believe in it. In the meantime, she keeps up the mine, even though it’s been eighty years since it’s yielded a shred of hope, and despite the menace of the raiders in the north.

What this one has is a well-imagined universe, derived in some way from our own, when “myth became life.” The world rested on a dragon’s back until its back was broken, and the hope of the Santaman keeps everyone going, as long as they can pretend to believe. We don’t get a detailed explanation, only a few snippets of story and song, as well as the unremarked fact that Drummond Farrelly was a troll. The rest is left to the active readerly imagination. A warm-hearted seasonal tale about hope.

“A Clean Sweep With All the Trimmings” by James Alan Gardner

The editorial blurb informs us that this one is reminiscent of Damon Runyon. If Runyon is writing about aliens, or what people in the story are calling spacemen.

I think the green drips must be the dead guy’s blood, and this raises serious questions about the guy’s place of origin. I have seen several persons with holes of this nature, so I know what most citizens have in their stomachs. It is not black wires and green blood.

The narrator operates a specialist cleaning service, and Madame Rosa, in whose establishment the spaceman is perforated, wants a “clean sweep” of the body and associated fluids. The problem being that there are more spacemen around and they keep coming, because what they are after is Kitty, the new doll in Madame Rosa’s employ.

Entertaining. A reader could find some faults, if looking for them, but the story is still fun.

Apex Magazine, January 2012

Authors mine the horror inherent in popular culture.

“So Glad We Had This Time Together” by Cat Rambo

Proving that there could be something even more horrible than reality TV: Unreality TV. A bright young thing has the idea for a survivor game in a haunted house, with real vampires and demons.

Think “Fear Factor” with more blood. Think “Survivor” with life or death. Think “Punked” with ghosts.”

This is dark humor, not horror, and the target is the TV industry, with a bloodsucking punch line.

“Sweetheart Showdown” by Sarah Dalton

Extreme plastic surgery crossed with extreme beauty pageants where the evening gown category seems to have been replaced with the gladiatorial arena.

“Boy, have we got some hot honeys for you today. In just a few moments they’ll be fighting for their lives and the Super Sweetheart trophy…”

This one carries the absurdity so far that the effect is lost.

GigaNotoSaurus, January 2012

“Mother Doesn’t Trust Us Anymore” by Patricia Russo

The setting is vaguely postapocalyptic, but the world may not be Earth or the characters human. At least as we know them. What it is, is dark; that is, there isn’t any natural light, which seems to be hidden by clouds. The boys have discovered a new light in the ground and the gray kiddies seem to know how to make it work. But Mother doesn’t want them to go near the gray kiddies.

It wasn’t because they were gray, Mother explained. It wasn’t because they had six fingers, or eyes that were too big and too round. It was because they weren’t really people, and real people needed to stay away from things that looked almost like people but weren’t.

A dismal scenario, yet intriguing, as readers will try to figure out what’s going on. I doubt they will have much success. But at the heart of this strange scenario is the constant of family love, despite everything.

Redstone SF, January 2012

A pair of dystopian visions, in which mood-enhancing chemicals are used for evil purposes.

“Ice in Our Veins” by Rhiannon Held

In this case, “Ice” is an illegal street drug. Artemesia is a drug counselor whose latest client seems to know too much and spins her a conspiracy theory about corporate masters who use drugs for control.

“When the target is loyal, reward them with a dose of pleasure. When they’re not, let them crash into depression. Make them need the next dose, until they’ll do anything you say. Build yourself a corps of brainwashed slaves.”

Artemesia makes the mistake of not believing him.

One of those stories that’s all idea, no drama. The narrative is mostly people talking to each other in an office, and not much actually happens. Stories are better with happening.

“Motherhood” by Christopher Miller

Prefaced by dire warnings about “adult themes”, we have a corporation that picks defective children out of the trash, repairs their brains, and trains them as sex slaves. It seems also to be a world in which euthanasia is routinely practiced. Not nice.

There is strongly vivid language here that makes it clear the narrator loves her charge Prissy, even down to her snot.

She breathes through her nose, a bubble of clear mucous expanding and popping with each breath. Each is beautiful. She is beautiful. I study one tiny crystal balloon. In it I can almost see the future, before it bursts.

The scenario strikes me as unrealistic. The neurological work of repairing and enhancing damaged brains is not cost-effective when it’s clear that this is a world in which perfectly sound children will be routinely discarded, easily picked up at less expense. In addition to the sexual exploitation, there are also offensive descriptions of several ethnic groups, making this a work that, despite some strengths, many readers will regard with distaste.

Kaleidotrope, Winter 2012

Eight stories, ranging from very dark to very ridiculous. This issue doesn’t rise to the level of the previous.

“The Unexpected Geographies of Desire” by Fábio Fernandes

Using the Brazilian urban legend of the dead blonde in the school bathroom. The narrator is a Brazilian photographer who spent some time in his youth in Europe, where he became fatally involved with a Finnish girl. After subsequent years of sexual dissatisfaction, he returns to the site of his youthful infatuation and encounters its ghost.

A creepy work, the genesis of a serial killer. Although it might be considered horror, the element of the fantastic is negligible. The narrative is disjointed, which lessens its impact.

“The End of Owln’s Malt” by A A Garrison

A cynical and sometimes surreal piece, in which a malign force plots to harvest the souls of a town’s residents. It begins when posters appear, advertising a public debate on a nonexistent bill. It then falls into a nightmarish timeloop, intersects another timeloop, and comes out approximately where it began, in what may or may not be ordinary human fanaticism, may or may not be a duel between God and the Evil One.

The text is unsettling in a number of different ways that horror can take, including torture, madness and ick:

When he could wait no longer, he bent to the dog and, straining, eviscerated it into several crude pieces that didn’t look like they would fit back together. It came apart with the brittle of a walnut shucked, bones and ligaments tearing in desiccated snaps. Rodney went tailor-style and perused the apportioned beast, absorbed in this work. A car passed, and the driver gave Rodney a look.

A less ambitious author would have gone directly from opening to close without all the looping, which turns it from absurd to something more disturbing. I would just as soon not have read it, which is a mark of success in something like this.

“Gallery of Vanquished Art” by Daniel Ausema

A memorial to genocides.

[The Abarians'] . . . highest form of art was a display of smoke rising from a carefully tended fire. With particular woods dried to a specified degree and placed in elaborate arrangements, they made sculptures of smoke, towering monoliths and delicate intricacies that lasted only as long as the next breeze. It is fitting, then, that the only memorial to them here is the fleeting memories of their brief resistance among those of us who fought.

Very short, rather repetitive, seen it before, but perhaps not with such an ominous final line.

“Tea in the Sahara” by Daniel Braum

Three sisters from London are traveling around the world when they meet a mysterious stranger who declares he can give them their hearts’ desire in exchange for three wishes – one from each of them. Petra and Helene are game for it, but Marti holds back.

Her mind simply said, no way. This can’t be. But beneath the logic was that part of her that so very much wanted to throw her hat in with Petra. No one’s asking you to believe, it said, just to say yes. Listening to this inner voice was what had brought them out here in the first place, away from schoolbooks and potential husbands, and dreary old London.

I really like this fantastic setting, Arabian Nights mixed with a touch of fairy tale, and the story holds neat surprises.

–RECOMMENDED

“Bird Nest Soup” by Madeline Bridgen

Bernhard lives by harvesting birds’ nests in the Borneo jungle. One day he wakes to a strange silence. All the birds and animals seem to be in a trance.

They were crowded all over the ceiling, resting in their rubbery nests. They chirped in unison, as if brainwashed, or possessed, singing along with the pulse. Not a single beak broke the pattern. They sat without responding to him, lolling as if dead, the only sign of life in them the high-pitched monotonous cry that pricked into his mind like the teeth of spiders. Overwhelmed by revulsion, Bernhard lashed out at the nests. When he knocked their perches off the wall, the birds still didn’t respond; they just fell limp to the floor below.

Bernhard falls, too – further than he could have believed.

This one quickly goes bizarro, along with an unsubtle bit of role-reversal. I wasn’t amused.

“Double Rations” by Nicky Drayden

More bizarrity, culminating in awful pun.

“The Red Threads and the Green Man” by Kenneth Burstall

Dark and secret rites in late-medieval England. Not very credible.

“The Falcon” by Michael Aronovitz

Adam is born with wings that his mother unsympathetically tries to keep sewn shut, but when he makes love with Katie Claypool he makes the mistake of letting them be seen.

A story of revenge, conventional in most respects. But it’s not clear why the mob doesn’t settle for cutting off his wings, or why they refer to the way “them zealots up in Coatesville did to them other Jews.” Are we to understand this literally, that Jews in this universe are diabolically winged? Or does the term just mean a stranger, someone different, a convenient victim?

Fantastique Unfettered #4 (Ralewing), Winter 2011/2012

Another example of the kind of zine I tend to like, when done well: surreal and strange fantasy based on unusual ideas. This one is clearly a labor of love. It has a variety of content: fiction, verse, interviews and other editorial matter, and full-page illustrations. The issue features Mike Allen and Hal Duncan. There are seven original stories.

The editors say the issue coalesced around a theme of Death; I would say, rather, peril. The tone is definitely a darker one.

“Three Tales of the Devil’s Wife” by Carmen Lau

A set of vignettes, each quite different from the others. The first, “when I was a human girl,” is just that: a few paragraphs suggesting that the girl who eventually married the Devil was once a normal one, nothing suggesting how this unusual union might have come to pass. The second story has the classic fairytale form and seems vaguely familiar if devils were giants, or vice versa. The third, most interesting, suggests the many legends in which the Devil is tricked or taken advantage of, but it raises more questions, particularly about the Devil’s baby, which seems demand a story of her own, that we do not get.

“The Butterfly Collection of Miss Letetia Willoughby Forbes” by Alma Alexander

A haunted house story with overtones of Sleeping Beauty. A pair of burglars decide to break into the unlived-in mansion and steal the valuable collection of butterflies reputed to be there. The house has other ideas.

“It’s as though that house doesn’t mind in the least that people get into it, or how they get into it. It does seem to have an opinion about people getting out though.”

About the most straightforward and least unusual of the tales here. The prose is sufficiently interesting to retain readers who know, from the beginning, that things will not go well for our crooks.

“Mr White Umbrella” by Georgina Bruce

A cross between Alice in Wonderland and manga. Mr White Umbrella is a regular customer in the coffee shop where Kiko works. One time, he slips her a card telling her to come to the Crocodile Bar. From then on, things get very weird as time fragments, trapping her.

“See how you shot me dead just now? That really happened. But I don’t feel like dying today. So what to do, what to do? I just pluck the moment out of time. Just like a feather out of a bird. Pluck!”

Weird, fractured narrative may take some work to follow, but there is a real, nightmarish story here.

“Azif” by Lynne Janmeck

An author’s note tells us that the title is from the Arabic, meaning “Whistling (of the wind); weird sound or noise.” Vivienne studies inscriptions at a museum, so she doesn’t understand why a colleague has recommended her to help a scientist with a very odd theory: that massed groups of insects can produce human language.

An ambiguous fantasy, with the preponderance of the text on the side of Emile being batshit crazy, but just enough doubt to make the story subtly disturbing.

“The Bachorum Principle” by Brenda Stokes Barron

A dystopia from nightmare. After some undisclosed apocalypse, a dictator rules a barren world premised on forgetting. One thing they are supposed to forget is the existence of women, who are Impure, but this doesn’t work out very well. The women sort of suspect that they exist, anyway, and the men keep crawling into their tents.

It is easier without us, He says. We are a liability because of our vulnerability. I struggle to hold my breath when the urge comes to speak the impossible words: The Invaders were nothing more than a man’s dream. So he became He. And the Invaders became the Impure.

Not a scenario to be taken literally, this is a metaphor for misogyny, for cultish mind control. Disturbing but not convincing.

“Vérité” by D Harlan Wilson

A surreal scenario in which recognizing an actor on the streets makes him disappear.

… According to preordained estimates, the abduction process exceeded the combined span of the film’s fight sequences. It unfolded in slow motion, and the actor disappeared into the sky on a beam of white noise.

About the artificial nature of celebrity. I think.

“Sons of the Law” by Hal Duncan

The Bible condensed into the archetypes of Western film. It works surprisingly well that way, but essentially it’s a polemic.

Over this, from outside, there comes the slow creak . . . creak . . . creak of wood under a swinging weight.

We immediately know who it is swinging from that gallows, and the author isn’t particularly coy about the identities of the other figures, either.

Ishtar, edited by Amanda Pillar and K V Taylor

Sometimes it’s steam engines, sometimes it’s steampunk. 2011 seemed to be the time for revived interest in the Mesopotamian love goddess variously known as Inanna and Ishtar, in particular the story of her descent to the underworld. Here we have a rather unusual anthology from Australia: three novellas from as many authors on the subject of Ishtar – in past, present and future settings. The tales contain links to each other and share a strong feminist sensibility. It’s an ambitious project and an interesting one, but alas, not entirely successful.

I find it strange that the stories all focus, more or less, on one of the goddess’s more obscure aspects, as leader of an army of the stillborn dead. I would have liked to see greater variety, more attention paid to the power of sexual love, for which she is best-known. In this, the Warren story is most successful, as it looks at all the aspects of the goddess’s power. Yet of the three, it has the least conventional plot. I also find it jarring that the pieces by Biancotti and Sparks seem to take place in Australia, a place with which Ishtar is not normally associated.

“The 5 Loves of Ishtar” by Kaaron Warren

Recapitulating the mythological material, the story is narrated by the line of Ishtar’s washerwomen [Ishtar's clothes get very dirty] who know the goddess better than anyone, including her lovers. It’s the story of her five favorite lovers and of the gradual decline in the goddess’s power as her lovers become less godlike, from the divine consort Tammuz, to the demigod Gilgamesh, to mortal kings.

The use of the original material is sound and effective. The author presents Ishtar as a goddess of war as well as sexual pleasure, but definitely not a goddess of wisdom [that is the role of the washerwomen]. She is impulsive, she is ruled more by desire than her brains, she is often capriciously cruel. As Gilgamesh famously pointed out, her favor is as likely to be a curse as a blessing. It is a feminist work, celebrating the carnal source of the goddess’s power: lust and desire. But the tone of the story is depressing as Ishtar’s power fades, as her temples are deserted and men worship other gods.

Now, womanhood was used as a curse. Ishtar heard this once; a man cursing another to become a woman. She was so furious she struck the curser down and turned him into a maggot wriggling in a sour, stinking dead camel’s stomach.

It’s a long story – too long, particularly as Ishtar begins to take her mortal lovers. It becomes repetitive. Kings wage wars, the land suffers from drought, again and again. The repetition, of course, is true to the history of the ancient land where the tale is set, and it’s also necessary to the story, illustrating the decline from an age of divine green to warlike mortal iron. But it unfortunately makes the reading drag in several places.

“And the Dead Shall Outnumber the Living” by Deborah Biancotti

A murder mystery turns to horror in a contemporary Australia [of all places]. Adrienne is a detective investigating a strange serious of murders that she thinks might be linked to male prostitution and possibly to a cult of goddess-worshipers. But she is reluctant to consider supernatural involvement, despite the impossible condition of the bodies. At first.

The body looks like a sack pushed up against the grate, spread out, blocking nearly the whole outlet. Water rushes around it, making the skin ripple. It’s naked, and the dark hairs on its chest and arms and legs, the dark V of hair around its genitals, are pressed flat by the weight of water. The insides must’ve floated away by now, out to sea.

This is Ishtar goddess of war, with her army of the dead. Powerful, and evil with it, insane with it. The images of the dead are quite strongly disturbing, which contrasts with the diminutive figure of the goddess, who doesn’t seem quite sure of the extent of her power or why, exactly, she is choosing to exercise it as she does. As a character, her motives are unclear, but she is a goddess, above that sort of thing. At one point, the author seemed to be hinting that Adrienne herself was becoming an avatar of the goddess, or, at another point, the triunion of Adrienne, Nina and Grace [warrior, lover, mother] could challenge her; alas, these interesting possibilities remained unrealized.

“The Sleeping and the Dead” by Cat Sparks

Out in the middle of a post-apocalypse desert, Dr Anna [guess who?] runs a fertility clinic; desperate would-be mothers make their way to her in hopes of implanting an embryo; insane child nuns create a cult of death. When three soldiers show up, escaped from a deep desert bunker, Anna thinks of them at first as sperm donors and warns them about the child-nuns, knowing that the men, being men, won’t listen. Then she learns about their leader and his lion tattoo, and knows it to be her lover Thomas.

Nothing else matters when love is true and strong. Not the ravages of time, nor the cruelties of truth — small things so insubstantial in the face of passion and divinity. When you love so deeply and completely, flames cannot be diminished. Nothing can hold you back from destiny.

This one presents itself at the outset as dystopian SF, but it resolves as fantastic horror. For the story to work at all, Anna must actually be an avatar of Ishtar/Inanna. But I find the references to myth [Thomas/Tammuz, etc] to be too overt and consequently less effective; there is more of Mad Max here than Uruk. And if the setting is in fact Australia, the goddess is badly out of place.

With Earthbound, Joe Haldeman completes a sequence begun with Marsbound and Starbound. Last year, I called Starbound ‘‘a complete there-and-back-again narrative,’’ and in Earthbound the ‘‘back’’ part kicks in with, if not a vengeance, then at least a very stern warning. The warning is not the first, though explaining that requires a ‘‘Previously in the Marsbound series’’ opening montage. The first book detailed how humans met aliens on Mars who turned out to be not native Martians, but creatures created tens of thousands of years ago by the inscrutable, incredibly powerful Others for the purpose of keeping track of us if and when we achieved spaceflight. Warning Number One came when the planet-scouring bomb they devised to eliminate us dangerous pests didn’t scour the Earth as intended. Warning Two came in Starbound as a result of the first-ever interstellar expedition, sent to confront the Others in their presumed home system of Wolf 25, where new levels of inscrutability and power were revealed. Warning Three was a suggestion that we curtail all space-travel, delivered by pulverizing the moon into a spacecraft-proof rubble cloud. And when clueless Earth politicians chose to ignore that suggestion, Warning Four set the scene for this volume: the Others disabled (or, to be precise, redirected) all electrical power on the planet, effectively putting an end to technological civilization. Take that, nasty monkeys. And don’t make us have to come down there again.

The through-line character and primary narrator of the series is Carmen Dula, who starts off as a bolshy, adventurous teenager and matures into a thoughtful, resourceful, but still human-scale hero. Most of the rest of the core cast comes from the extended, multi-species family/tribe that made up the long Wolf 25 expedition: her husband Paul; her five other human companions, including a trio-marriage of military-intelligence agents; and the pseudo-Martian Snowbird. Earthbound picks up immediately at the cliff-hanger finale of Starbound, with the returned explorers wondering how Snowbird can survive on Earth without her own food and how the humans can survive at all in the short term before confronting the long-term realities of the crash of civilization.

The immediate problem comes from the persistence of the yahoo element of humanity. When the lights (and everything else, from aircraft to phones to snack machines to wristwatches) go out, the first response is gunfire, and that sets the tone for the rest of the book: with seven billion people facing starvation, the guys with the guns will call the shots. Fortunately, Carmen’s group includes four people with military training, especially the ferociously able (and genocide-haunted) ex-Mossad Namir Zahari, so they are not helpless. On the other hand, as the bumper sticker reminds us, shit happens, and Haldeman is not afraid to have it happen to his characters, especially when there is so much of it to go around – so even though they survive their first encounter with the armed and stupid, not every such meeting ends well.

This is part of the relentless procedural and operational realism that marks all of Haldeman’s work, and it means that where earlier volumes anatomized interplanetary travel and pioneering, alien encounters, starship life, or domestic polyamory, this one is almost entirely focused on getting through the early stages of total social-system breakdown. The author does give his protagonists some good cards to play: in addition to military and medical savvy, they also have a possible connection with a sustainable-technology commune (if they can get there) and eventually a channel to the Others in the form of the sporadic presence of the human-looking creature they call Spy, who was created as a kind of interface for whatever Otherly systems are dealing with humanity.

Even Spy can’t explain exactly what its operators will do or why, so the breakdown of civilization gets interrupted by a number of apparently arbitrary events, starting with the power coming back on for long enough to allow Carmen’s group to solve some immediate problems and move around the country a bit: to visit the seat of what is left of government in Washington and leave in something close to disgust; to find the commune; to leave the commune – before winding up in a situation not unlike the one at the book’s beginning. Along the way, they encounter various modes of coping, some of which result in mutual aid, while others require exchanges of gunfire and thus a steady reduction in the numbers of the star-traveler party and whatever allies they acquire. What is heartbreaking about the pockets of rationality and community spirit they find is that they are surrounded by seas of understandable desperation or outright viciousness, generally outgunned, and thus probably doomed. The resolution to this unhappy situation will remind experienced readers of certain other Haldeman novels, copies of which I will leave behind the Spoiler Curtain. You’ll recognize the pattern when you get to the end.

This tour of an unraveling society puts Earthbound squarely in the tradition of postapocalyptic novels, a tradition that seems to be having a mini-revival lately in work by John Barnes (Directive 51, Daybreak Zero) and Stephen Gould (7th Sigma). The current variations examine what happens when you pull one or two essential pieces out of the interlocking stacks that make up our civilization – plastics or petroleum or metals or electricity. One wonders, why these nightmares now? Is it just a turn of the story-generating machinery, or are these bad dreams being triggered by events in our waking lives? The accompanying, enabling motif, with deep roots in SF tradition, is that of the Others, powerful and hostile aliens whose literary ancestors include Wells’s Martians and whose modern cousins include John Varley’s Outsiders, both of whom (which?) are mysterious but not arbitrarily monstrous – they are merely Others with agendas and viewpoints that remain minimally intelligible to the monkey-folk whose lives they disrupt. As tempting as it is to see the Others as personifications of the hostile universe-at-large, that is not a symbolic gesture Haldeman seems much interested in, though there are several comparisons of humankind to lab animals who may or may not have their cages sterilized at the end of the investigation. Instead, their perhaps-capricious, perhaps-Otherly-rational treatment of our unruly species serves as an occasion to examine how much baggage we drag around with us, no matter how far into the future or out into the universe we travel.

Wrapping up the year, although we’re already into the next one. Here’s the January/February issue of F&SF for 2012, and the Dell digests are even further along in the calendar date.

F&SF, Jan/Feb 2012

A large number of mid-length and shorter pieces, too many of which are silly.

“Small Towns” by Felicity Shoulders

After WWI, toymaker Jacques Jaillet’s town has been destroyed and most of his life with it. He constructs a model replica of the town as it used to be, but it is a dead thing until Fleur Perrot arrives. Fleur is the tiny daughter of a dressmaker whose mother kept her in seclusion for her safety, but after her death, Fleur is left on her own. A determined individual, she is happy at first to discover Jacques’ model town, but not so happy with his plans to keep her isolated there.

“I know nothing of the world because I have not been allowed to learn! I have been kept like a bird in a cage all my life, but I will not be kept any longer! I am a person, neither a doll nor a fairy!”

A warmhearted tale, highly improbable, but that doesn’t seem to matter very much, even though it resists being classed with the fairy tales.

“The Secret of the City of Gold” by Ron Goulart

A moldy bit of nostalgia, exhumed from the grave of the author’s series featuring detective Harry Challenge, were-jaguars, and a large cast from Central Farce Casting.

“You, sir,” shouted the belligerent Bowman, halting a few feet from Harry, “I intend to give a thorough thrashing. Since in my agitated and heartbroken state I came out without my horsewhip, I shall have to rely on my sturdy fists to teach you — ”

Not amusing.

“Umbrella Men” by John D McDaid

It didn’t look powerful; it looked dusty. Dark-blue nylon, steel tip faintly mottled with rust acne, and an ornate handle of turned wood, its lacquer rubbed dull by years of use. It didn’t appear to be some mystical object; it looked, well, like an umbrella. [João] had been disappointed and said so.

The umbrella is the heritage of João’s family, and its magic is to bring peace. But the household is disturbed when a strange man appears, tracing the history of the umbrella that he believes to be behind a dark conspiracy.

A story of family and of human ties. The plot avoids predictable routes, and the characters are very appealing, especially the nascent SF writer João.

“Alien Land” by K D Wentworth

Solution to the housing crisis: aliens.

Apparently, the Kryi needed somewhere to live, so they just helped themselves. And when it came right down to it, many foreclosed-upon homeowners, already evicted, professed that they would just as soon aliens took over their property as see the bank get its grubby hands on their former home.

Mary-Christina and her neighbors are not at first so tolerant, but once they discover that the aliens can play Texas Hold-em, relations improve.

A sort of silly story. The narrative is confused. First the authorities try to arrest the aliens, then they don’t, then they do again. I also find it unconvincing that so many of the women in the neighborhood, who seem to have no children, live the existence of dullness typical of a stereotypical housewife, sipping sherry and playing cards because they have nothing else to do. The setting isn’t 1950.

“Mindbender” by Albert E Cowdrey

Brown works at the Agency, where his primary assignment is the pursuit of an assassin codenamed Mandrake, but he gets stuck with shepherding a Russian defector into the protection problem. Milo was supposed to read minds for the Russians, but the president thought he was getting too close into his own mind. Brown is pretty sure the Russians can’t find him in Moccasin Gap; Milo is pretty sure they can. But he gets along pretty well in Moccasin Gap.

On Sunday morning everything’s closed and there is nowhere else to go, so I go to Church of Rock-Ribbed Gospel. The singing is nice, they serve good food afterward, and when I tell them secret police are after me, they appoint themselves my protectors.

“Milo, you’re not supposed to be telling people the secret police are after you. You’re in hiding.”

“The guys at Eff-Ess-Beh already know they’re after me. So why shouldn’t church people know too?”

An entertaining light piece with a neat character in Milo.

“The Color Least Used by Nature” by Ted Kosmatka

The story of a man’s life, beginning at the end when men come to kill him, and leading to that point from the beginning. Kuwa’i is a skilled boatbuilder living on a fantasy Hawaiian island that is slowly in transition from the old ways to the new ones of the outsiders. He loves several women, and this has consequences. When he builds his last boat, it is coveted by the local administrator, and Kuwa’i doesn’t want to sell it to him.

The convergence of all things suffused him with a kind of dread different from all the other dreads he’d suffered in his life. This was the shifting and shapeless dread of one who fears he’ll live to see the far shore of what he cannot imagine: that time hanging out there in front of them all when there would be no boat, and no walking trees to replace it, and no Rebecca bringing them coconuts of cool milk — and [his son] on this island without love and without prospects.

A poignant piece about humanity and cultural displacement, only nominally a fantasy by virtue of the walking trees, called the best wood for building boats; after the arrival of the Kuhiki the trees have thrown themselves off the cliffs, except where the islanders have tied them in place.

–RECOMMENDED

“The Comfort of Strangers” by Alexander Jablokov

The narrator is an interspecies prostitute, specializing in aliens without access to mates of their own species. It’s an expensive profession, but highly remunerative.

One by one, I clean out and monitor the status of my various sex organs and orifices. By their nature, such things invite infection, as well as suffering simple wear and tear. My own original-issue genitals are down there somewhere, unused for years. Humans never come out this far. Sometimes I pretend to myself that I have forgotten which kind they are, since my biological gender is of no significance in these encounters.

The actual story, beneath the series of bizarre encounters, is very thin. While the narrator claims that actual gender is of no significance, it’s notable that the clients are all male, while the role the prostitute plays is invariably the female. This says something, but it’s not something about aliens.

“Maxwell’s Demon” by Ken Liu

WWII. Takako is forced by the Americans to go to Japan as a spy, and forced by the Japanese to assist in the war effort by enslaving the spirits of the dead to work as Maxwellian demons, as her family was originally from Okinawa and she has learned the local skill of talking to spirits.

“You will teach your spirits to power this engine, to separate the hot molecules from the cold. When you succeed, we will have a limitless supply of energy, spontaneously generated out of air. We will be able to build submarines that require no diesel and never need to surface, airplanes that never run out of fuel and never need to land. Powered by the dead, we will bathe New York and San Francisco in a sea of fire, and we will bomb Washington back into the swamp from which it rose.

The physics experiments actually play no really important role in this story, which is about war and intolerance. The setup, unfortunately, is too contrived to be convincing. What is convincing, because it is real, is the bureaucratic web that traps Takako in the internment camp. The story tells us she is loyal to America, but we see no reason here why she should be.

“Scrap Dragon” by Naomi Kritzer

A revisionist account of a dragon-slaying, frequently interrupted.

One afternoon Heather took her book and her lunch, called for her dog (whose name was Bear), and went to sit by a wooded lake not too far from her house.
The dog had better not die in this story.
The dog’s not going to die. Not in the story, anyway.
Good.

A little of this sort of thing can be amusing, but it can easily be carried too far, as the author does here, as if she doesn’t trust the actual story hiding behind all the verbiage. Which, although slight, works perfectly well. Which it wouldn’t have, if it started out to be a volcano instead of a dragon, so we can’t tell what the narrator was thinking.

“In the Trenches” by Michael Alexander

WWI. Hans is a soldier on the German side, near the starving end of the action, when Gamlin the kobold emerges from the trench. He thinks the humans are crazy and Hans doesn’t disagree. The kobold takes him far underground where he finds a French soldier, and they immediately make a truce between each other. They can understand each other, but they can’t understand the kobolds, who can’t understand them.

We’ve been watching this sort of thing forever, it seems. Every time we come up for a look it gets crazier. Back when you just stood in rows and used those gun things to shoot each other. Now you line Frenchies up in one ditch, Prussians in another ditch —

An unusual viewpoint on the horrors of war and on being human. The tone is light, but the horrors are genuinely dark. The combination works.

“Canto MCML” by Lewis Shiner

The privileged few who can afford it get to live in a gated community where they can pretend it’s 1950. A brief glimpse at dystopia.

Asimov’s, February 2012

Featuring a good novella by Robert Reed.

“Murder Born” by Robert Reed

The author’s blurb states that this one had its origin in the notion of justifying public executions, but of course Reed doesn’t just leave it at that. The premise is actually the weakest aspect of the story. It seems that scientist inadvertently invented a new painless method of execution, which has the side effect of bringing all a murderer’s victims back to life. Suddenly the death penalty is popular. Too popular, as safeguards protecting defendants are eroded in the zeal to retrieve victims.

The narrator is Shawn, a photographer famous for his photo of a massacre victim before she was killed. His daughter has recently been murdered, and his vicious ex-wife is obsessed with executing the killer and getting Kaylee back. But things aren’t so simple, and Shawn recognizes that the case against her teenage boyfriend is flawed.

They didn’t find a second suspect because there weren’t any candidates. They didn’t find blood splatters because the boy disposed of his clothes and washed his body. The detectives didn’t think it was unusual that an adolescent male without any criminal record might stab his girlfriend to death, and dumping her body and the murder scene into a stretch of deep water was the most reasonable thing in the world. And while they never found the murder weapon, they reminded the jury that there was more than twenty miles of ground between the sandpit and home, and that knife could hide anywhere.

Technically, it’s a murder mystery, with a powerful and unforgettable ethical issue at its heart. It’s the characters who make it real: Shawn with his doubts, vengeful Lauren, and the perjured witness with his own terrible secret. But the descriptions of Shawn’s photos of the victims make it even more.

–RECOMMENDED

“Hive Mind Man” by Rudy Rucker and Eileen Gunn

Diane suspects that Jeff is a loser who can’t hold down a job, but he’s also a good lover so she reluctantly lets him move in, along with his smartphone and his crazy cyberschemes.

“I sold my Goob Doll options yesterday, and I used the profit to upgrade my access rights in the data cloud. I’ve got a cloud-based virtual growbox where I can raise my own simmie-bots. Little programs that live in the net and act just like people. I’m gonna grow more simmies than anyone’s ever seen.”

But unscrupulous entrepreneurs see Jeff an easy mark for exploitation.

People tend to regard this sort of thing as science fiction, but in fact it’s fantasy – made-up stuff. The editorial blurb calls it “gonzo”, which fits this light entertainment. Jeff and Diane are a fairly likeable pair of characters, but overall it’s something we’ve seen often before.

“The Voodoo Project” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

In a dystopian future, Rebekah Zahedi was recruited by the Company in the eighth grade and now knows that it won’t be long until her unwelcome retirement. The future is what she does, what she sees, but there are some futures opaque to her.

She used to wonder if her glimpses into the future were real or imagined. Then she tested those glimpses—or rather, the Company did—and whatever she saw, whatever she did not act upon, whatever she did not actively try to change— came about.

A short, hard punch.

“Observations on a Clock” by D Thomas Minton

Somewhere, far from Earth, a clock is running down in the dark, observed only by the monk Chevalier. When the clock runs down, the Revelation will appear, and Chevalier’s job is to beam it to Earth, to humanity waiting for salvation. But he is not entirely alone, for inside his mind [we know not why] are a voice of doubt and a voice of faith, competing for him.

A story of faith and temptation. Readers will probably be reminded of the little devils and angels that sit on characters’ shoulders, although we have no way of knowing which of the MEMs in Chevalier’s mind is right about the clock. A dark and depressing vision, with readers left to guess at the answer.

“The People of Pele” by Ken Liu

A one-way trip, a race to claim distant planets as the nations that sent the colony ships descend into war and nationalist xenophobia. At first, the colonists regard the time dilation that separates them from their families on Earth as a personal tragedy. But things change among the people of Pele.

It’s rather disappointing to see Liu wasting so much of this short piece explaining the non-mysteries of time dilation and suspended animation. The piece is cursory and quite unoriginal.

“Going Home” by Bruce McAllister and Barry Malzberg

A science-fiction writer story. With the Singularity fast overtaking humanity, Mitch wants to spend his last days reviving the Golden Age of Science Fiction.

Those were the days, Bob—imaginary stories, yes, but more real than reality to the heart—and if we can find no value in them still, there is no value in us—as dreamers, storytellers, listeners, or human beings—for a human who cannot choose the dreams he lives by, the stories that tell him who he is, no longer has a heart . . . and is no longer human, despite some Singular circuitry that may claim otherwise.

Take-off from the Matrix movies. Pretty lame.

Analog, March 2012

Less short fiction as the Sawyer serialization continues, but it’s a good selection.

“The Ediacarian Machine” by Craig DeLancey

Steve has just been tossed out of the microrobot company he founded when an old palaeontologist friend shows up with a proposition. It seems that Karen has found a functioning machine embedded in 550-million year old Precambrian rock.

It looked like a flattened nose cone, sleek and smooth, about fifty centimeters long, and sticking about ten centimeters up out of the rock. I bent over and stared. Pale gold lines traced complex patterns on the surface. The patterns reminded me of a silicon chip, except that the lines crossed back and forth at every angle.

What she wants from Steve are his microrobots, to explore the object.

A very classic skiffy scenario. It has robotics, alien wonders, mysteries to be solved, exploratory adventures, and cosmic scope. It has ethical issues to be worked out. No one is an idiot or a villain, even when they don’t agree. Fans should really like it. While critics who live in misspelled houses should be wary of throwing orthographic stones, I think the term is actually “Ediacaran”.

–RECOMMENDED

“Upon Their Backs” by Kyle Kirkland

The title lends itself to unfortunate double-entendres of which the author cannot have been unaware. It seems that an exploring anthropologist has made the interesting discovery of eight human bodies in some kind of suspended animation. Then two of these bodies walk out of the hospital and disappear, which results in a government security expert being called in. He is intrigued by the theories of one of the scientists studying the bodies, that they may be vessels for some alien force.

The six remaining hibernators rested in their cocoons, appearing lifeless except for the tell-tale LEDs that announced their torpid vital signs. The young scientists and technicians had moved closer to Poe Weffle, afraid of missing a single word of what he said. The older ones had distanced themselves, as if worried that Poe’s heresies were contagious.

Here we have a mystery to which the solution can only be tentative. In comparison with the DeLancey story above, there is less adventure, more neepery. But beneath it is a Cautionary Tale about the intrusive reach of security agencies into all aspects of normal life, a paranoid world of lies and secrets with which the narrator has become disgusted. [I note that by the end of both stories, the government has taken over the scene.] Given this fact, however, I can’t really believe in the decision they make at the story’s conclusion.

“Mother’s Tattoos” by Richard A Lovett

“In the days . . . when your skin was your own and anything it said was yours.” Those days are past, but the narrator still remembers how he loved his mother’s classy tattoos when he was a child. Now, nanospam can write ads on your skin with nothing you can do about it. Except to join Homeland Services and get implants that make your skin flash warnings when it detects suspicious scents or sounds or statements. The narrator does it for the money and tries to impress his mother with it; the narrator is a slow learner.

It’s a story of values, true and false. And a society that lacks them, all superficiality. There are good bits, like the first line, but I don’t think the story threads come together to make a unitary whole.

“Ernesto” by Alec Nevala-Lee

A Hemingway story, set in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway the skeptic investigates stories of miraculous cures, accompanied by stigmata, at the tomb of St John of the Cross. But political considerations always have to come first.

“The Segovia offensive needs to take place,” Ernesto said slowly. “If we don’t recapture Segovia, Franco will push north until he reaches Bilbao, which will cut the Loyalists in half. If that happens, the war is lost. And if I write about this shrine, it will only complicate the situation.”

A story of cynicism and realpolitick, with a nice bit of speculative historical medical detective work. It gains ironic force for modern readers who know how this war turned out, how many sacrifices were in vain.

–RECOMMENDED

Beneath Ceaseless Skies, December 2011

A good month for this ezine, with three biweekly issues. #83 has a pair of stories dealing with wartime atrocities; #84 is concerned with the price of magical power; the stories in #85 test the loyalty of killers.

“The Gardens of Landler Abbey” by Megan Arkenberg

It begins like a comedy of manners, but it is no such thing. Dr Grey is formerly a professor of medicine, now being introduced into aristocratic society by his patron. The Abbey is a near neighbor of the patron, with its famous gardens lying in neglect. Society is now titillated to learn that the Abbey’s owner, Lady Landler, has returned from her long absence and begun restoration. But what everyone avoids mentioning is the fact that there has been a war in which atrocities were committed on both sides. In Lady Landler’s gardens, it is not possible to ignore what took place.

“For as long as I could, I pretended ignorance. All through the war and all the years after, I told myself it was medical services the military needed. Then nine months ago, when I was still working for the University, I found a sheaf of old documents ready for the rubbish heap. Recognizing the names of several students, I picked it up. They had been awarded medals of honor for ‘obtaining valuable intelligence’ from the enemy.”

A horror story in two ways: an ambiguous ghost story and one about the horrors of war. The opening scenes with their vapid aristocratic twits have given me considerable pause, for at first I found the tone quite jarring in contrast to the rest of the subject matter. But upon further consideration, I think the scenes work by distancing the setting from a contemporary one, for the moral issues with which the story deals are very much contemporary, and it presents us with a foolish mask that fits certain contemporary figures very well indeed.

–RECOMMENDED

“Princess Courage” by Nadia Bulkin

A young king, ruler of an empire that believes itself destined to expand, claims a rich forest as the newest part of his domain. He considers himself a benevolent ruler and means no harm to the forest’s indigenes, but of course his conquest does them harm and they fight back. He enters into a long and odd relationship with a young girl of an indigenous tribe, foolishly hoping that she will eventually understand him.

This one gives a sense of reliving Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, if Caesar were a captive of fate instead of its captain. It’s less subtle than the previous, which emphasizes the responsibility of individuals for their actions. Here, the author seems to be suggesting that events take their predestined path regardless of the wishes of individuals, who are helpless to change it. But the scenario is pretty unoriginal.

“Heartless” by Peadar Ó Guilín

Here, we have a city where humans are transformed into “witches” and caged to generate magical power for their owners, who squander it in vain and foolish schemes that require more and more witch-power, as witches fade and expire.

A hundred people filled the square below or swooped, laughing, through the air on cushions. Others rode about the edges on the backs of unicorns. The crowd had caught themselves a vagabond and families fought to get at the poor man and claim him for themselves.

The demand for more witches has grown out of control, to the point where families are enslaving their own members. Only Malern seems to recognize the obvious fact that this trend is insupportable.

Which is the problem with the story, despite its striking premise. The problem is altogether too obvious. The torture scene that opens it is also gratuitous.

“The God Thieves” by Derek Künsken

A sort of alternate history in which Christianity [the god that won't fight] has been mostly superseded by the use of ancient gods as weapons of war between the great commercial powers.

Genoa stole the secrets of domesticating the gods from the Venetians. The Venetians stole from Genoa. Always chasing. Always fleeing. Always hunting up new gods with which to destroy each other.

Mateo is one of Genoa’s top agents, but he is also a Christian who yearns for salvation, all the while knowing that his job imperils his soul. He is now being sent to Venice to steal the plans for the Enlil engine, with his own soul augmented by a dragon’s, a powerful weapon of magic itself.

A lot of neat stuff in this scenario. I particularly like the soul-weighing scale. The story is a clear analogy for the perils of arms wars. While there is sufficient magical-agent action, the real emphasis here is on the religious issues, the struggle for personal salvation and the peril of the soul.

“The Death of Roach” by Spencer Ellsworth

Roach comes from a line of semi-divine assassins, trained since childhood to kill. The author makes their ruthlessness clear.

[My mother] made her way back to my father. He ordered her death, and he held her as they cut her open. She died apologizing for her failure.

Roach, however, is flawed by a tendency to mercy.

Roach’s confession is a lengthy one, but the point behind all the killings and cruelties never becomes clear. Without understanding the issues, it’s impossible to understand when mercy is misplaced.

“The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Her Field-General, and Their Wounds” by Seth Dickinson

Treasons, treacheries and tests in a world where the ruling Throne never trusts its subjects or its agents. Baru Cormorant was an agent of the Throne when she raised rebellion in Pyre, to smoke out disloyalty there. But she is still surrounded by spies, and there is always another test.

Here, the shape of the intrigue is clear. Baru’s wound, which has blinded one side of her, allows her to survive in a world of lies and distrust. The symbolism is perhaps overly obvious, but still effective.

It goes on and on, and after a moment Baru finds it too much to take. She turns her chair to the left, so that the duchess Tain Hu falls away into nothingness, and the howl of her laughter reaches Baru only as an echo.

–RECOMMENDED

Strange Horizons, December 2011

Only two stories, the longer being split.

“Penelope Napolitano and the Butterflies” by Aliya Whiteley

Penelope is borne away by butterflies to get a lesson from her mother in the nature of true love. Which would have been perfectly possible without the butterflies. I like the prose style and the story of the digestive biscuits, but the rest is too much and too slight.

“Ash and Dust” by Jennifer Mason-Black

The two-parter. Dystopian SF. Earth is dead and dry, and the remaining population is gathered into refugee camps, waiting to be sent to offworld colonies. But no more ships are taking off, and it’s said that the colonies are refusing to take in any more people.

The land has grown sullen, angry. The soil holds nothing, just blows in dense clouds that choke travelers when the wind picks up speed over the great emptiness. We were not meant to be here long. A month, maybe two, they said at first, when the fires burned and the colonies opened their doors wide for the final exodus from Earth. Then, three months, six. Then they stopped talking time at all, just directions and rules and reminders not to forget the laws of a civilized society.

The narrator is a midwife who serves the population of women as best as she can, there being almost no one left but women and their children, who apparently keep being born despite the absence of men.

A dreary piece that tries to generate hope where none belongs, and an oddly optimistic sense of shared humanity where the humanity we knew would more likely be preying on each other. The narrator speaks of a trade in breast milk, which suggests a lot of pregnancy despite the shortage of men, yet the real shortage is apparently of water, without which there is no milk. Overall, not pleasant to read and not a payoff sufficient to make it worthwhile.

Fantasy Magazine, December 2011

The last issue; hereafter to be folded into the new publisher’s SF zine Lightspeed.

“Her Lover’s Golden Hair” by Nike Sulway

Lily has died, and her lover comes back alone to their country house with Lily’s plaited hair to grieve.

They used to sit on the step at night, lights out, wine glasses warming in their hands, watching the possums and bush turkeys scramble through the underbrush. The trees, wound in vines, whispered to each other of comfort: of long, strangling embraces. The mountain bulked beneath them. The red soil fed the trees that threw down leaves to rot beneath their feet. The sky was so clear they believed they could see to the end of seasons, the limits of time, watch the stars burn out and die and fall into their open hearts.

The fantastic element in this story of grief is ambiguous; the transformations seem symbolic, not actual. It’s dense with emotion, but instead of climbing up from it, sinks.

“Crystal Halloway and the Forgotten Passage” by Seanan McGuire

The title of a Harry Potter book and scenario out of a children’s D&D game.

“You could return to your world of origin at any time, leaving us to our fate, and yet you choose time and again to stay and fight for our survival.” The spider straightened until the largest of its eyes were on a level with Crystal’s own. “You are not the first to come from your world to Otherways, but you are far and away the bravest.”

This must, we assume, be irony. But not really. I’m rather sorry to see the zine go out on such a note, when it began so differently.

Lightspeed, December 2011

Cosmology and clones.

“The Sighted Watchmaker” by Vylar Kaftan

Directed panspermia. The creation of the Makers, now disappeared, is now a creator, seeding a planet in hopes of generating intelligent life. As this is a lengthy process, he has a lot of time for teleological speculation.

Umos had millennia to think of what to say. He must be ready. He’d give the awli more than the Makers had given him—he’d give them answers. He would practice until he was satisfied.

Less SF than theological fiction. I like the title, but the narrative is rather dull, one character talking to himself.

“The Parting Glass” by Andrew Penn Romine

Jake gets an offer of new employment from his old boss, from whom he was cloned. They didn’t part on good terms.

I stagger from my squeaky stool, the frayed myomers in my back groaning with the weight of my armored skeleton. I’ve never wanted to see Santiago again unless it was to kill him. In what passes for dreams during my sleep cycles, I’ve already done that a thousand times. Bastard has it coming for the things he did to Mama and me. But there’s no way around it: I’m falling apart. I can get a new body or kill Santiago with the particle beam emitter concealed in my right arm.

But the old man is crazy, full of religion, and what he wants from Jake is more than just a job.

Here is the setup for something potentially interesting, but it rushes at the conclusion and thus doesn’t offer real satisfaction to the reader.

Is it time to be talking about the neo-New Space Opera, or possibly the post-neo-New Space Opera, or even the Phase Space Space Opera (in the sense of all possible states of a system being represented at once)? It’s been more than five years since Hartwell and Cramer’s massive and argumentative Space Opera Renaissance anthology, and more than eight since Locus’s much-discussed ‘‘New Space Opera’’ special issue, and even then people were dating the movement to as far back as M. John Harrison’s 1975 The Centauri Device or Iain M. Banks’s 1987 Consider Phlebas. So the original movement, depending on who you listen to, might be anywhere from two to four decades old, but I guess the reason we can keep calling it ‘‘new’’ is that it seems to keep mutating like a virus in a medical potboiler, infecting even remote areas like Neal Stephenson’s weighty Anathem, which somehow segues from an austere reconsideration of the history of Western philosophy into slam-bang space battle acrobatics, or Hannu Rajaniemi’s post-Dickian, post-Eganian The Quan­tum Thief, which seamlessly fits a wisecracking spaceship and pyrotechnic space battle into its information-drenched future. Both Alastair Reynolds’s Blue Remembered Earth and Paul McAuley’s In the Mouth of the Whale provide continuing evidence, in quite different ways, that the old New Space Opera is alive and well.

One of the characteristics of what I’m going to continue calling the phase space opera, until you stop me, is that it doesn’t necessarily ironize the adventure templates of the classic space adventure in New Space Opera mode, but may unapologetically celebrate them. At least one key scene in Reynolds’s Blue Remembered Earth virtually cries out for a pulp Wesso illustration, with a caption something like ‘‘Trapped on a runaway spaceship, traveling faster than any human being ever had!’’ Before we even get to that, we’ve encountered buried secrets on a remote part of the moon, terrifying encounters with monster machines on Mars, and daredevil efforts to sneak aboard an abandoned space station that may harbor still more secrets. And yet Reynolds casts all this in the context of elements that are decidedly more New Space Opera-ish, with morally ambiguous heroes and villains, political and economic struggles, and a post-Westernized version of the 22nd century, which seems oddly optimistic in comparison with his other grim futures.

By 2160 or so, the world has survived a series of catastrophes and upheavals, including earthquakes and floods which have redrawn entire coastlines (and presumably lend the series its title, Poseidon’s Children). Although Reynolds mostly refrains from infodumps about global warming, he offers a number of clever details – such as characters drinking an Icelandic merlot – that tell us all we need to know about Earth’s altered climate. Africa has become a center of technological development, and one of the most powerful families in Africa is the Akinya clan, whose matriarch Eunice, a legendary space explorer and entrepreneur, has just died as the novel opens. Two of her grandchildren, Sunny and Geoffrey, are renegades from the family business, Sunny eking out a living as an artist on the moon, and Geoffrey consumed by his research with a tribe of elephants in the Amboseli Basin, with whom he is striving to develop a neural link that will enable him to see through their consciousness. After Eunice’s death, two rather officious cousins named Hector and Lucas, now managers of the family business, send Geoffrey to the moon to discover the contents of a safe-deposit box Eunice had left there. This not only serves to reunite Geoffrey and Sunny, who had been close companions as children, but leads to the discovery of a sequence of enigmatic clues left behind by Eunice, clearly designed as a kind of test to prevent her great secret from falling into the wrong hands. Aided by the old family retainer Memphis, Sunny’s rather pallid boyfriend Jitendra, Geoffrey’s more colorful adventurer ex-girlfriend Jumai, and a virtual ‘‘construct’’ of Eunice herself, which Sunny has cobbled together from existing documents and records (but which of course can’t reveal any secrets that weren’t available in those sources), they set off on a quest to discover Eunice’s secret, leading them to desolate corners of the moon, to Phobos, to a wild region of Mars given over to self-evolving machines, and even to a suboceanic city back on Earth. Along the way, they form an uneasy alliance with the cult-like Panspermian Initiative, which hopes to colonize even extrasolar planets and whose charismatic founder, a former friend of Eunice, seems to have turned herself into a whale (vaguely reminiscent of Dune’s Guild Navigators).

Despite a plot hook that could as easily power a YA franchise (a dying matriarch leaves behind a series of mysterious clues, each of which leads toward more portentous implications), Reynolds both develops a richly detailed portrait of a resurgent, postapocalyptic Earth society and economy, and leaves himself plenty of room to expand his narrative space exponentially (mostly through the discovery, thanks to an enormous, solar system-wide telescope, of a giant artifact on an extrasolar planet that is clearly the work of an intelligent civilization). And despite the moral complexities he raises, both with his characters and with such movements as the Panspermians (are we supposed to view them as crackpots or visionaries?), it may be that odd sense of optimism, together with a pair of villains who are more annoying than genuinely threatening and a pair of likeable, reluctant protagonists called upon for heroic acts, that echo some of the values and rewards of the old, classic space opera form. By the end, when the plot accelerates from its initial methodical pace of investigation into flat-out, cliffhanging adventure, we realize that we’ve read a fairly long novel that seems like a pretty short one (I read this on a Kindle, and was surprised to learn the actual page count later). If Reynolds can keep this up – and there’s enough planted here for future volumes to already suggest that he can – he might have one of the most enjoyable series of the still-young decade.

Sometimes, you (or, to be more specific, since I can’t really speak about your reading habits, I) need a nice little bite of well-done whimsy in order to keep pushing through all of the unpleasantness that life can dish out. Hellbent by Cherie Priest is that perfect bite. No, this tale of Raylene Pendle, vampire and thief, and her adventures in tracking down a box full of bacula, isn’t deep or profound. What it is is pure, unadulterated fun.

Priest’s voice is lighter here than in Clockwork Century books like Boneshaker and Ganymede. With those books, you can feel her exertion as she erects the infrastructure of that unique steampunk tent. But there’s an effortlessness to Hellbent and its predecessor Bloodshot that makes them easy to engage with and enjoy. Priest isn’t building a world here so much as playing with how much she can get away with in an environment that readers can immediately recognize.

In Hellbent, Raylene, who now has a family of sorts, finds herself on her aforementioned quest, while she is forced to protect those she now cares about, including a blind vampire, a Cuban drag queen/Navy SEAL, two adolescent waifs, and a kitten. Complications ensue.

Frankly, it doesn’t matter what those complications are. The characters are broadly if not deeply drawn and the language is fun. Take Raylene’s description of an Atlanta McMansion: ‘‘It would be probably be uncharitable to call the look ‘neoclassical Georgian plus IBM taupe and gingerbread revival meeting in a dark alley for fisticuffs and insults.’ But there I go anyway.’’

Like Raylene, what you see is more or less what you get in Hellbent. Sometimes, that’s all you want.