Samuel R. “Chip” Delany wants to push your buttons—I mean that in a good way—and really knows how to do so in the most esthetically magnificent, narratologically adroit, intellectually rich, and filthily transgressive fashion. More so than many writers, who only want to entertain, he wants his work to hit you where you live, in all the secret, tender places you only half-acknowledge, forcing you to reexamine all your preconceptions and biases. And at the very same time that he’s fingering your metaphorical panoply of G-spots—hot, sore, abraded, itchy, ticklish, painful—he’s satisfying his own obsessive kinks that involve 1) an unwavering poetic fidelity in the transcription of sensual and sensory reality (“Their second September at the Opera was a month of tarnished rains, of autumnal storms where platinum lightning electrified this or that half of the sky’s dark pewter, of literal ambles on leafy sand in hours off, with the stench of halides and wet wood, of ozone sharp under the nasal cavity’s roof…”); 2) a penetrating portraiture and explication of character; and 3) the literary staging of certain pornographic riffs dearest to his heart. So Delany’s ideal reader is bound up in a mutual, reciprocal give-and-take with the author—receiving frissons and quotidian epiphanies, bestowing attention and interest—in a love feast unlike many shallower reading experiences.

In other words, the identical romantic engine of mutual carnal and spiritual adoration that powers Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (TVNS), as incarnated and manifested in the two main characters, Eric Jeffers and Morgan “Shit” Haskell, is the same burning heart of affection and intimacy that should spontaneously ignite midway between Delany and his audience.

If, of course, readers can get past the snot-eating. And bestiality. And incest. And consensual underage sex. And coprophagy. And golden showers. Not “get past” really, no, that’s not what I meant, but rather “embrace and cherish.”

Let me back up a minute.

After gulping down all of Delany’s SF extant during my youth, I encountered his erotic writing at nearly the earliest possible time anyone in the world could have: simultaneous with, or at most a year or two after, the 1973 publication of The Tides of Lust, his first foray into that mode, as a cheap, undistinguished Lancer paperback. (I recall vividly finding the book by chance in a spinner rack in seedy convenience store.) Since then, I’ve held his hand through every subsequent outing along this libidinous path: the Nevèrÿon books, his autobiography, Hogg, The Mad Man, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue… And although you might make a case that every shocking, transgressive bit of those later books was implicit or even explicit in The Tides of Lust, each new volume has pushed the boundaries of Kinsey-parametered, consensus-polled, heteronormative sex a little further than the ones before. Their surface aggressiveness has made them harder to find a path into than the somewhat glossier Tides.

But that, you see, is Delany’s goal and point. In this book he states it outright, if he hasn’t said it often enough before. In the realm of sex, there is no “normal,” there is only what people do for pleasure: alone, in pairs, in groups. And he intends to chronicle in unstinting detail every permutation of desire between his gay lovers, Eric and Shit. This is his chosen narrative vehicle, and if you can’t climb onboard with an open mind, you’ll miss out on all the marvelous sights along the ride, as well as a no-dry-eye-in-the-audience ending.

But, more than that, Delany intends to limn the community that sustains them; the evolution of both the community and its inhabitants across some seventy-plus years of thickly described albeit narrowly confined history; the social dynamics of race and power (without being programmatic or predictable); and the moral basis of a good, rightly lived life. Doing so, he will fill some 800 pages of story. And so intense—involving, numbing, frustrating, enriching—is this experience, that TVNS becomes less a book than some garment you wear or house you inhabit.

We open in the year 2007. Eric Jeffers, handsome white boy, is sixteen, nearly seventeen. His stepfather, a black man named Mike, is forsaking custody of Eric and dumping him on Eric’s Mom, Barb, a white woman who lives in Diamond Harbor, a Georgia coastal town. (Eric’s long-absent biological father is white also, but he identifies as black.) Eric arrives in Diamond Harbor already sexually experienced to some degree. And he finds in Diamond Harbor—specifically, at the district called “the Dump,”—a wild paradise of sexual learning. The Dump has been established as a utopian community by a gay black millionaire named Robert Kyle, who grew up in Diamond Harbor. But Eric’s initiation into the carnal life of the town occurs even earlier, in a truck stop restroom on the outskirts of town, before he even sets his bags down at Barb’s trailer. And after that, the sexual circus is nonstop.

Eric falls in love with Morgan Haskell, an illiterate yet sharply, naively clever black guy two years older than himself. He soon is working with Shit and his father Dynamite, all three serving as garbagemen for the town. Then he’s living with the Haskells. And then—well, life happens. “The Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom, even when it takes you through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders.”

Employing a cast of dozens of brilliantly rounded individuals, the book gives us weather and sex; politics and sex; holidays and sex; mystical visions and sex; food and sex; commercial entertainments and sex; intellectual disquisitions and sex (Eric’s struggle with Spinoza’s work is one of the book’s sturdy ribs); misunderstandings and sex; vocations and sex; commerce and sex. To be brief, all the familiar, precious, overlooked, imperishable stuff that constitutes daily life, leavened with copious gouts of bodily fluids.

The plot? Nothing more nor less than the sheer advancement of time, its darkening, refining, destroying, enhancing hand. (If Thomas Disch had not preempted the title The Pressure of Time for his undone masterwork, it could have been applied here with perfect accommodation.) There is no real “narrative arc.” In some sense, and in a manner I found a bit frustrating at the outset, the book, like philosopher Elbert Hubbard’s definition of life, is simply “one damned thing after another.” But then you start to see some of Delany’s famous patterning emerge: events that play off earlier events from two hundred pages prior, crystallizing and extending the earlier happenings, opening up new vistas of meaning. I would contend that there is less of this patterning than in other Delany books; less perhaps than a volume of this size should have. TVNS is no Dhalgren. But ultimately, especially in the second half, the emotional payoffs are immense, and arise only due to the huge mass of events we have witnessed.

Because one of Delany’s themes is how our perception of time alters as we age—the famous maxim that subjective time accelerates for us as we grow older—he structures his book brilliantly so as to mimic the sensation. Right up to about the middle, Chapter 44, the book’s time has crawled, as young Eric experiences life at a young man’s density. It’s only 2013 by then—our first step into the future, by the way. But the older Eric and Shit get, the faster the book moves. Before too long, decades are disappearing between paragraphs (think of the famous chrono-gap in Crowley’s Little, Big), and the duo plunge into old age and the inevitable terminus of all pleasure.

If it’s not too absurd a comparison, that first half of Eric’s biography reminded me of Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, as if written by Victorian sex memoirist Frank Harris. If you look at the passage in Chapter 18, where Eric explores a spooky old mansion in the nude at midnight, you’d swear it was a lost episode from the biography of Doug Spaulding of Green Town, Illinois. This kind of naïve innocence layered atop the X-rated scenarios is deliberately fostered by Delany, I think, in order to point out that Bradbury’s type of tale tells only half the story of any life, leaving certain essential but taboo topics buried.

Given that the book achieves liftoff into SF territory halfway through, you need to know that Delany does not stint on his speculative conceits. His hand is as sure as of old. The future history he creates is genuinely insightful and innovative. But it’s always background, half-seen. Because our heroes are living in a semi-rural backwater and are self-professed “Luddites,” their mode of life is more archaic than the lifestyles of others. But the shifting world keeps bumping up against them, rather in the manner of Haldeman’s The Forever War. Eric and Shit move ahead almost in a series of discontinuous jumps, waking up at random moments like Haldeman’s returning soldiers to find the world growing stranger and less comprehensible and less welcoming around them. It’s as if they are riding a time machine whose intervals of travel are ever-increasing. By the end of the book, the two ancient lovers are relics, fossils, and the mutant children who, in a sense their actions helped birth, are golden-eyed and alien.

Delany’s focus on such humble men—both Eric and Shit proclaim their lives to have been full and happy and joyous, but ultimately inconsequential, and no other character beside Robert Kyle is a Bigtime Player, and he’s mostly offstage—is the ultimate enactment of the goals discussed in Ursula Le Guin’s essay “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown”. No wars, no heists, no inventions, no high drama, no bigger-than-life supermen propel this story. To pervert the title of Aaron Copland’s famous work, it’s a “Fanfare for the Common Horndog.” And yet by this very limitation, by the intensity with which Delany inhabits the simple lives of his heroes, the book assumes that majesty which all eternal and humble things acquire, when seen a-right.

I do not think that the name of Eric’s town, Diamond Harbor, is trivially intended. Despite a lack of overt Buddhist references, I kept thinking of the famous Diamond Sutra, and other Asian teachings on the nature of reality and life. Shit, after all, is the perfect example of a direct, almost simplistic Zen attitude toward existence. And while Eric—who talks and does much concerning an other-centered life of giving—comes to adopt Spinoza’s dictum that God and Nature are one and the same, it seems to me that the Buddhist observation that “Samsara [mortal existence] is nirvana [paradise]” applies equally well to this vast monument of a book dedicated to essential, representative lifetimes fully embraced.

Note – Kevin Donaker-Ring at oneringcircus.com has made available the text of a (short) omitted chapter, to be incorporated in the second printing of the book

A lot of reading this time.

Asimov’s, June 2012

Most of the stories this time involve aliens of some kind, in some way.

“Missionaries” by Mercurio D Rivera

Cassandra, with her family lost and stricken by cancer, has embraced her mother’s extreme religion of suffering and embarked on a missionary pilgrimage, an attempt to communicate with the aliens called Sagittarians and bring them to God.

“There are Savior conclaves visiting human colonies across the cosmos,” Bhodi says, “trying to make them remember what it is that makes us human. What they’ve lost amidst all the so-called advancements. The sense of the sacred. Of being part of something. Something greater than ourselves. God teaches us that suffering shared is suffering assuaged.”

Things work out rather differently.

The narrative is fragmented, going back and forth between flashbacks and the present, and quite unfocused. I see little signs of genuine religious faith in Cassandra, rather her attachment to the mentor who substitutes for her family. A great deal of the text is expended on a conflict between the missionaries and a scientific group that holds them in contempt for their beliefs. This plot thread goes nowhere in particular, from nowhere in particular; it’s quite unclear why the missionaries have come to the outpost at all. The potentially interesting story of how they made contact with the Sagittarian, on the other hand, is slighted. The ending is literally a God emerging from a machine: “Epiphany. Transcendence.” Which could have come without most of what went before.

“Possible Monsters” by Will McIntosh

Failing at a baseball career, Cooper returns home to discover his house inhabited by a very strange monster.

It was a tangle of barbs and bubbles and edges, leaned up against his fireplace, which was on the other side of the glass divide. The thing’s eyes locked on him. It had eight or nine of them, and they looked like they were a million years old.

Having nothing better to do but drink, Cooper moves in with the monster and drinks a lot. His future looks like more of the same. Then the monster decides to give him a gift, which Cooper takes at first as a curse.

A nice contemporary fantasy with a protagonist realistically balanced on the edge of becoming a total loser.

“Final Exam” by Megan Arkenberg

The test-writer’s marriage collapses just about the time devouring monsters emerge from the sea. The exam is her way of comprehending it all, afterwards. The best questions are those in which we see these life-altering events merge and illuminate each other.

7. The worst part was . . .
(a) when the first shambling thing ate the pink-suited reporter, and the camera man didn’t turn away, and you sat there petrified in the marriage counselor’s office, watching the flesh blossom and drip over the creature’s scaly lips. Jesus Christ, you said, reaching for Donald’s hand. He was gripping a magazine cover too tightly to notice.

“Waiting at the Altar” by Jack McDevitt

In an uncharted region of transdimensional space, the crew of the Copperhead detects a faint and distant radio distress call. Despite the fact that the signal is so old there could be no survivors of whatever catastrophe had struck, they decide to investigate. They discover the answer to a years-old mystery, the loss of a well-known exploration ship. And the log reveals a far greater wonder: earlier, the explorers had made contact with an alien ship. An unprecedented opportunity – lost.

A moving scenario, although the author’s narrative is the opposite of overemotional, with more focus on the deductive processes of the Copperhead’s crew than the tragedy of the Forscher’s loss and the loss of the chance of further alien contact. In consequence, I find myself noticing a number of quibbly bits that I might otherwise have overlooked. Why do we need to be told the details of some device that allows the crews to do without spacesuits? And isn’t it a bad idea for both members of a crew to leave their ship unmanned during possibly hazardous EVA? I don’t think I should be thinking about this sort of thing as I read this story – I should be too anxious about the fate of the explorers. But this narrative is so flat, it doesn’t generate anxiety, or much else in the way of emotions that the situation should call for.

“The Flowering Ape” by Alan DeNiro

A coming-of-age story. The nameless narrator is a student in a school for telepaths where they are trained to bond with aliens called shepherds; together they propel spacecraft. The narrator’s not-really-lover Kathy introduces the narrator to a group of senior students who are already bonded; the narrator feels like a fifth wheel in this company. They decide to hijack a spacecraft and go joyriding, which of course has Consequences.

On the surface, this story would seem to be largely about sex, but this is a deliberate diversion by the author, who adds a subplot about the students demeaningly calling their shepherds Girl and Boy, as if they were animals. The narrator is intersex, and extremely confident in her* sexuality; her insecurity stems from her failure, so far, to attract a shepherd bond. Her friend Kathy is a male who wears a dress and jewels in his beard, which is all perfectly normal; his insecurity is social.

It was easy to notice that Kathy craved the pack. He wasn’t quite a full member; apparently, he would have to ignore me a lot more to get there. They were assessing him, and so he acted louder, laughed at mild jokes a half-second too quickly and a half-second too long. But in some secret part of himself that he wouldn’t let anyone see, he was shriveling, a wilting boy in a beautiful dress.

DeNiro does a good job of capturing, within this milieu, the eternal struggles for status and acceptance among adolescents, and the behavior of the bullies who prey on the weak.

*The author isn’t very helpful here, but the cues from the narrator suggest an identification with the female pronoun. Or so I infer.

“The Widdershins Clock” by Kali Wallace

It’s 1953, not a good time for a young woman with academic ambitions. Marta was named for her grandmother, who encouraged her interest in mathematics and physics. But the 1950 spirit did its best to kill them.

Before we married, when I had been taking classes at the university and Stanley had been tutoring for extra money, I had daydreamed of the cramped, overheated office we would share, sharp with the smell of chalk dust and old books, surrounded by blackboards scribbled edge to edge with equations and proofs.

Now Marta keeps the house and does the laundry and the dishes and discourages every attempt her grandmother makes to bring her back to what she had wanted to be. Until the morning that her grandmother disappears.

A heartwarming and positive story, despite a depressing note. I suspect that readers will realize the secret of grandmother’s clock long before Marta does.

“Free Range” by Bruce McAllister

It seems that giant owls from another planet are invading Earth, starting with China. Fortunately, the black chickens have come to offer protection. Michael, at first, believes none of this until he sees the size of the hole in his girlfriend’s roof. And the clawmarks in the attic. His venerable friend Pham confirms what must be done. Chickens. A lot of them.

This isn’t really the gonzo humor that it might appear, owing to the well done characters. Johanna is the last hippie chick of Santa Ana. Michael can never seem to get it right.

I had no trouble with one relic of the sixties—weed—but she has this natural ability to keep everything about the sixties alive. And everything Millennially New Age, too. I couldn’t keep up. I couldn’t take it all seriously. I laughed when I shouldn’t—which wouldn’t have been so bad if I didn’t love her, which I did.

And Pham must be the incarnation of someone way high up.

“Scout” by Bud Sparhawk

Military SF. In a war against a ruthless alien enemy, Falcon is a turtle-shaped cybernetic scout housing the remains of a marine with devastating injuries. As his reports are transmitted from the ground, his commander overhead feels defensive and guilty for using him.

“Don’t refer to Falcon as a damned ‘unit,’ kid. There’s a marine down there; a damn fine one at that. I know Falcon will finish the mission. A marine that tough isn’t built to fail.”

An “ends justify the means” scenario, the sections with the commander pretty heavy-handedly done.

Analog, June 2012

An assorted cast of stories, in which I prefer the shorter.

“Crooks” by Paul Carlson

Another in the author’s trucker series. Claude rides the highways, trying to make a living in spite of pervasive government regulations in the service of political correctness and corruption. His robot partner serves as a foil for these observations.

Mek commented about the yard sales. “There are numerous product safety and national zoning and tax violations here. I seldom pass yard sales in the city, except in certain neighborhoods. These people do not conceal their illicit activity.”

But the big criminals are protected by clout, and they are subverting robots in their illicit activity.

This is a political work, in which the loosely-plotted events are the stage on which the author’s spokesman can have his say. The division into black and white is stark, and the good characters are all on Claude’s side against the “baddies.” No room for nuance here. The narrative assumes that readers are familiar with this series, in particular an event where Claude and his robotic co-conspirators subvert a corrupt politician’s campaign; that politician shows up again here, so that we know who the baddies are.

“Food Chained” by Carl Frederick

A surveying expedition in search of extraterrestrial life suffers a breakdown that prevents them from returning to Earth. Despite the strictures against contaminating the idyllic world, two of the surveyors insist on descending to wait for rescue. Only Elliott remains on the ship, in remote control of the survey’s rovers, while Mark and Boris exhibit little concern for the local ecosphere and mock vegetarian Elliott as a tree-hugger.

“I want meat!” Boris went on to request that Elliott send out the rovers to track down a Bunny-ears.

Elliott was aghast. “You just can’t just go off and hunt something,” he radioed back. “You have no idea what that might do to the local ecology.”

“I not care.”

Now, we know that no good will come of this.

The general scenario is hardly original, and it’s made much worse by the clichéd villain Boris, whose Russian accent makes him seem like a deranged idiot, and the sneering Mark. By the end, Elliott has turned into a passably interesting character instead of a stock tree-hugger [the author makes this tag into a good morbid joke], but it doesn’t really make up for Boris.

“Titanium Soul” by Catherine Shaffer

Connie has anti-social personality disorder, which is to say she’s a sociopath. Being broke and recently fired from her latest job, the offer of a thousand dollars to participate in a clinical trial of a prosthetic conscience is attractive. Even more so is the offer to waive a warrant for her arrest. But a conscience isn’t at all what she had expected.

Connie burst into tears. It seemed like she was always crying. Not those pretty tears she’d learned to cry for her mother, or to get strangers to feel sorry for her, but awful, gut wrenching sobs, so heavy she could hardly breathe between them.

This is an effective portrayal of a pathological personality, both before and after transformation, and especially as Connie tries to cope with emotions new to her. There are moments of real tension when she discovers herself in the presence of vulnerable people that she could harm – but will she?

–RECOMMENDED

“A Murmuration of Starlings” by Joel Pitkin

Evelyn Cole had been relegated by life to teaching Biology 101 in a backwater school when the pandemic hit, spread to humans by starlings.

Evelyn was at first surprised to find herself designated vital personnel. She had at best an undergraduate biology major’s knowledge of public health or immunology. But only about a dozen people in America, if that, knew as much as she did about starling ecology, starling life history, and by extension, about how one might begin eradicating this ubiquitous bird.

But she is astonished to find that the birds have suddenly adopted a different mode of behavior; instead of aggregating in vast numbers, they are spreading out evasively, as if it were a tactical decision. Then Evelyn herself comes down with the disease.

The turn the story takes is quite unexpected, even with the hint dropped by the author in the early pages. But the hint contributes credibility; the answer makes sense, within the story’s assumptions.

“An Ounce of Prevention” by Jerry Oltion

Tina’s grandpa comes to visit them on the moon, and her mother takes special precautions to keep the apartment sterilized against the presence of Earth-origin pathogens.

She’d had it drilled into her for as long as she could remember: Don’t waste resources. Do your share of the work. Think about your impact on others. Don’t endanger yourself or the colony. And apparently, don’t spread disease.

Grandpa, however, hasn’t had the drill.

I usually expect something interestingly clever from Oltion, but this disappoints with its characterization of the grandfather as totally without redeeming virtues. I’m also reminded that excluding pathogens leaves people without immunities, and I wonder whether Tina’s mother is protecting her or leaving her weaker.

“The Fine Print” by Michael Alexander

Sophie does mass spectrometry, and a friend wants her to look at some odd meteorites he picked up on an expedition to Antarctica. The results are impossible.

“But this stuff is one hundred percent carbon-13 and hydrogen-2.” I tapped the sheet. “It’s a way to tell anyone that the material couldn’t possibly be natural, even if the original chemical structures were destroyed.”

Which is to say, the meteorites are part of an extremely ancient message from some other intelligence.

A whole lot of chemistry neep in this short piece, which the author’s title suggests is an application of Feynman’s principles of nanoscience, in reducing an encyclopedia to fit on the head of a pin. Otherwise, it wraps up quickly after the revelation, with the story interest in the reaction of the characters to their discovery.

“Darwin’s Gambit” by Emily Mah

Thirteen-year-old Amber was born in a Mars base and has never been outside, seen the surface or the stars; this is apparently unprecedented. In consequence, she is agoraphobic, which threatens to keep her from the mission to Ganymede that her family has been accepted for. The mission’s psychologist insists she isn’t fit for it and must return to Earth, but Amber is stubborn and manages to pass the basic qualifying test. The entire voyage becomes a battle of wills between her and the psychologist.

“I passed, and I’m going.” Amber shook out her suit and hung it up in her locker.

“I wasn’t talking to you—”

“You were talking about me—”

Then the shuttle crashes on the approach to landing, and no one can reach the children, supposedly sequestered in safety, in time for them to escape the doomed craft.

This is a polemic, with the ostensible issue the competence of children in a space habitat, with the author clearly suggesting that this makes them more fit than children from a less forgiving environment. It’s a very adversarial story, and although the psychologist is sometimes actually right, I get the feeling that the author doesn’t want readers to like her any better for it. Dr Vickers is the enemy [she calls Elliana "Ellie"], and Amber, while sometimes wrong, the heroine.

“A Reasonable Expectation of Privacy” by N M Cedeño

Private investigator Pete Lincoln wakes up from a coma and discovers that fifteen years have brought profound changes to the world. Privacy is now antisocial.

The hardest thing to adjust to in my second life was using a public restroom. Walking by one and seeing someone going about his business through a clear wall is disconcerting enough. Being the person using the facilities and watching strangers pass is nearly impossible.

A client comes to him with an old-fashioned desire for privacy like his own, who covers her window with curtains. She is concerned that someone is stalking her, but Lincoln has barely begun to investigate when the police tell him that she has been murdered.

The changes in privacy expectations are awfully profound to have taken place in only fifteen years. But I can accept this more easily than I can Lincoln’s ability to function in this altered world well enough to work as a P I. I also wonder where were the police while he was on the scene of the crime, solving it.

Intergalactic Medicine Show, March 2012

I’m wondering about this ezine. While it’s supposed to be bimonthly, the March issue didn’t show up on the site until April. The editorial interest seems focused on the zine’s sponsored award, the Hydra Competition for Brazilian SF. There are five stories, including a contest runner-up, of which most end on a didactic moral tone. It makes me wonder if this is how the editors — or the authors — interpret the PG-13 submission guidelines.

“A Memory of Freedom” by D B Jackson

Historical fantasy. Ethan Kaille is a witch who was transported for participating in a mutiny, now free at last and back in Boston, where he works at a menial job and tries to hide the powers that could get him hanged. But he comes to realize that he is still not really free.

A standard sort of tale, rather moralistic. I have to take issue with the author’s word choices for this historical setting. The cook in a dockside tavern would not be called a chef, and the term “toughs” for the bodyguards is ahead of itself by a century.

“Our Vast and Inevitable Death” by S Boyd Taylor

Evocative title to this vignette, a single scene from a war, when a single battalion attempting to hold a pass against the enemy realizes that they will not survive the battle. Which makes me wonder if the narrator is relating this account from his grave, and how. The warlord’s cry despair is moving, but the narrator’s account of the end is overblown.

“The Salt Man” by Melissa Mead

A spectral figure that feeds on the tears of grief. When her husband dies, Giesela traps the Salt Man to force him to give back the dead, though he protests he has not that power.

“Oh no? You stand by deathbeds and open graves, shrouded in black. I’ve seen you. I’ve seen people cross the road to avoid you, even though they say they don’t know why they do it. What can you be but Death by another name?”

But confining the Salt Man in flesh has unintended consequences.

I’m not aware of any such figure as the Salzmann in folklore, but now I think there ought to be. Nicely imagined twist on a very old story.

–RECOMMENDED

“In the Fading Light of Sundown” by Nancy Fulda

It seems that there are Builders, who control the livewood and make it grow into structures, and Caretakers, who make the wood die and decay. Tobis, on an island where there are only Caretakers, found himself with the powers of a Builder and crossed the poison sea to the mainland to learn. But he always regretted leaving his childhood love. Now, in old age, with the mainland depleted from livewood overgrowth, he has returned to the island to find her.

The boat collapsed into a jumble of planks, creaking and groaning, desperate for sustenance. Roots coiled piteously, grew thicker, and clawed into the dirt like the grasping fingers of a mortally wounded soldier.

Simplistic dichotomy with the characters preaching at each other..

“By a Thread” by Flávio Medeiros Jr.

Alternate history. A steampunk war between the British and French empires, with the Brits deploying depth charges from dirigibles [naturally] against the French submersibles. The admiral and his crew are now hiding on the bottom after sinking a British ship, while his nemesis lurks above in his flying fortress. But the sub is damaged and running short of air, while the admiral and his second discuss the ethics of honorable warfare.

“The true enemy, that feeds the boilers and fires the cannons, was in those lifeboats. They were the ones who killed dozens of our soldiers who now lie on the bottom of those waters, and they just rowed over the carcasses on their way to the safety of the coast because we let them escape.”

Alas, the author has fallen into the AH trap of going back to the beginning of time to explain exactly how the current scenario has come to pass, and persons out of fiction have become real. Adding to which, he has inserted more backstory from the admiral’s life. With the inevitable result that the current action takes second place, what there is of it, for the narrative is primarily talk about the situation rather than actual action, which is left to the conclusion, when anticlimax happens. A remarkably dull story and yet another in the issue leading to a moral.

Strange Horizons, April 2012

An all science fiction month.

“Area 54″ by Hunter Liguore

There are things to which a reader may have an aversion. In my case, it is a strong aversion to stories in which the narrator repeatedly refers to her parents as “Mommykins” and “Daddykins.” Repeatedly. I had to force myself to get through this two-parter for review, as I would otherwise never have gotten past the first “kins” without hitting the DELETE key to keep from splattering my computer screen with urp.

So, the question is, is the story worth it? Van’s father is obsessed with the space aliens he believes to be flying around and abducting people; when her mother disappears, he tells Van that the Skylings took her. To evade the alien menace, they go on the road under various aliases, intercepting Skyling signals on the shortwave, but the aliens always seem to know where to find them.

[D] told me daily that if anything ever happened to him I was to go back home to find Bobcat, he’d know what to do. [D] kept a metal suitcase, locked and hidden under the passenger seat of the truck. I wore the key around my neck. The box contained our most important possessions, like our IDs, most of them aliases, reserve cash, the deed to the old house, bullets for the gun, and instructions of what to do if [D] was taken.

It’s ambiguous SF, where we’re supposed to wonder whether the aliens are real or Van’s father is just batshit crazy. Not uninteresting, but not really enough to overcome the urp factor.

“Beneath Impossible Circumstances” by Andrea Kneeland

Things have gone wrong with the Earth, like an increase in UV radiation, and governments have decided that the only solution is artificially creating animal species to replace the natural versions. “Harboring an unlicensed naturally bred species” is a felony. But the artificially bred creatures tend to die in large numbers; the narrator’s job is picking up the dead birds. Her wife seems to be a naturally bred human; she wants a naturally bred baby. This rejection hurts the narrator, who is not natural or even human.

When I tell her these things, she turns on the faucet or runs the vacuum or opens the refrigerator door wide and sticks her head in like she’s looking for something so she can pretend not to hear me and I can pretend not to see how damp and salted her reddening cheeks are, and on days like these, when I tell her things like these, the bed sheets between us stay cool and dry . . .

Now that is nice writing. There’s more of it that’s quite pretty: “The sky is tender as a fitted leather glove lined with silk; firm but soft. Safe.” But what does it mean? Unless perhaps it’s a suggestion that the narrator doesn’t think as naturally bred humans do. At any rate, the sky is far from safe in this world; it’s apparently deadly. Of course the scenario makes no sense. Even the narrator admits that it costs too much to be making all the artificial birds, especially if they’re all dropping dead. But this is SH, so it’s not about making sciencefictional sense, but the relationship. Which is moving, although the bit with the kitten is going too far.

Lightspeed, April 2012

The quality this month is mixed, but more good stories than misses.

“The Sympathy” by Eric Gregory

Lauren leaves her husband and drives away. She picks up a hitchhiker to whom she finds herself unable to say No. Madison is a fugitive from something she calls the Sympathy, and now it is after Lauren, too.

She wanted to stuff the bills in her pocket. She wanted to kick apart the little line of iron filings, throw open the door, and race down the hall and stairwell. She wanted to call her mom and apologize for the short notice. But her head felt heavy, and the thought of running twisted her stomach. She closed her fist around the money, lay back on the bed and closed her eyes.

In essence, this is the story about the human thief who steals a treasure from the Queen of the Fairies. But the author has altered it in strange and unusual ways, bringing in a protagonist champion from outside. More interesting this way. I still wonder what “sympathy” is really supposed to mean.

“Forget You” by Marc Laidlaw

“She came into his life the way his cats crept into his lap.” Nice opening, seemingly warm, like cats, but leading to something faintly troubling. Because he can’t remember how he first met her. He can’t remember the time she wasn’t always there. And he knows that she hasn’t always been there.

It was a self-portrait he had taken, just a solitary photo of himself alone in the kitchen looking out the window as if at the emptiness of his life, which had been very empty then. This image had always seemed to him to capture the essence of his loneliness, and looking at it now made him wistful and sad, even nostalgic.

A very brief piece, a complete story sketched in with strokes so deft that it seems much more full than it is long.

–RECOMMENDED

“Ruminations in an Alien Tongue” by Vandana Singh

Humans have invaded a marvelous alien world, and the aliens have long ago fled through the probability actualizer, probably to a universe absent of humans. Later, Birha first identified the actualizer as what it was.

Streams of adventurers, dreamers, and would-be suicides, people dissatisfied with their lives, went through the actualizer to find the universe that suited them better. The actualizer became a wish-fulfillment machine, opening a path to a universe just like this one, but with your personal parameters adjusted ever so slightly, the complexity matrices shifted just so.

Birha, almost alone among them, has remained to grow old among the ruins of the human civilization, in part because she is waiting for Rudrak to return from his own universe, where he is constantly searching for his own lover Ubbiri, forever lost.

A lot of stuff here, with loops and loops, tangled past sorting, and a world full of wonders. The text is divided into a number of different sections, all from Birha’s point of view, some in her own voice, mostly reminiscing about her younger days spent recreating what she can of the aliens, their language, their music, their mathematics, but also of her lovers, past and probably-future. The author seems to be focusing on the lovers, but I can’t help thinking more of a culture eradicated by humans taking a place where they don’t belong.

“Nomad” by Karin Lowachee

The first paragraph hits readers with an off-putingly heavy load of jargon, some Capitalized, some not. Radical, nomad, integrated, uni, Streak, Fuse. What we have is sentient robotic armor fused with a human for the purpose of war. Mad’s human has been killed but Mad somehow survived. Now she [or so it seems] refuses to integrate with another, probationary human; she wants revenge. But the probationer claims to know how Tommy was betrayed.

Since they’d killed Tommy, the Gear Hearts had not crossed into Tora territory. In fact they gave us a lot of room to do our deals and transport our goods: guns, drugs, medical supplies to outlying paramilitaries. And we did not cross into theirs. It was an uneasy truce and now this probie made me wonder if it was one born from the blood of my Fuse.

The story is betrayal and revenge, driven by the nature of the bond between the integrated pair. This is the aspect that takes an amount of effort to accept, and for all the info-dumped background, it’s not quite clear how the fusion works, or why. I can’t help thinking it might have been contrived to fit the theme of the anthology in which it also appears. The jargon doesn’t help make it more readable.

“Mother Ship” by Caroline M Yoachim

Speaking of contrived: the narrator is a pregnant colony ship whose baby is deformed because of the ineptitude of her human designers. She can heal human babies, but they can’t heal hers. A very short and tearjerky piece.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies #92-93, April 2012

Issue 92 is concerned with combat and heroism. 93 is a dark issue of repression and rebellion.

“Bearslayer and the Black Knight” by Tom Crosshill

A reworking of Latvian legend based on historical events, the invasion of the Baltic by the Livonian/Teutonic Knights. In the traditional account, Bearslayer, national hero of the Lats, fights the evil Black Knight. Here, the powers of the combatants are even more exaggerated:

Bearslayer runs with no weapons, no shield. Now his legs ripple and bulge. Now his chest sprouts fur hard as stone. With each step, his head nears the sun: three yards, four yards, five yards high. From his ribs burst a dozen limbs on each side, their paws moving in concert.

But beneath, there are two men of ordinary flesh and bone, who have discovered something in common. Both have been sacrificed to the service of their people.

This does lots of interesting things. It evokes both the legend and the brutal history behind it. It shows us the way such legends develop, reflecting the national consciousness of a people, and how a people may not allow its heroes to be human and vulnerable, with personal needs of their own. By inflating their powers to a superhuman level, Crosshill illustrates the contrast between the image of the heroes and their humanity. I think we’re going to be seeing a lot more of this author.

–RECOMMENDED

“Sinking Among the Lilies” by Cory Skerry

A world where monsters collectively called anathema prey on the population. The church has the knowledge to defeat them, but Imuri Bane believes it should disseminate this information to the people instead of using it to maintain its own power. Bane has been expelled and now travels to the towns and villages, distributing the knowledge that she has summarized in a book and cleaning out anathema for a price.

“If you’d prefer to wait for a Disciple, I won’t argue. If the weather holds, they might even get across the mountains before the passes close. Whatever you decide,” I said, turning to address the pinch-faced woman and her wet-faced husband, “please decide soon. If you don’t require my services, I’m going back to my warm bed.”

But she soon finds herself sinking in a morass of evil worse than the anathema, and her own responsibility for it.

A dark twist on the aphorism that knowledge is power, for good or ill. A nicely-woven web of betrayal.

“The Ivy-Smothered Palisade” by Mike Allen

Dark dark fantasy. Daeliya escapes from imprisonment in an orphanage, hoping to find refuge behind the wall she has seen from behind the bars of her window. Instead, she finds herself in a far worse prison, the haunt of evil sorcerers and their deadly offspring.

“Let it be known then, Earl of Syburgh,” said Lord Audrind, “On your behalf I will send my children out into the world where I cannot go, and each night they will seek anew and never tire of the search until every sire and babe and servant and soldier of House Ayfel breathes no more.”

Daeliya injures herself in falling from the palisade, and she is found by an apparently young, fragile boy who heals her but will not let her leave, wanting her companionship. But she is constantly at risk of discovery.

Reading this one strikes me with the distinction between the story and its telling. The story here is a very dark one with a strong atmosphere of evil hanging over it. But the telling – We begin reading a letter to a person named Eyan, a person we know not whom, obviously involved with Daeliya in some armed conflict, we know not what or why. It is a farewell letter and a warning of great danger. This opening sets up certain reader expectations, that we will learn who Eyan is and why he matters, and what they are involved in, and why. But the narrative drops these questions and never raises most of them again, as the letter proceeds to relate the events of Daeliya’s life, beginning with the death of her parents in some conflict that may or may not be related to the one in which she is now engaged, and finally climbing the palisade and wishing that she hadn’t. All the while I am distracted by wondering about the story’s opening and how it will be eventually connected to these events, and thinking that the author might have found a better way to tell this tale.

“Pridecraft” by Christian K Martinez

Humanity has been overthrown by strange races who keep some of them alive as slaves, for their craft, which is empowered by a kind of magic just as the master races rule by it. Twin is a particularly valuable human, the Chief Engineer of the train line. Because they fear him, his hands and arms are confined in painful braces. But Twin has always had pride in his work and in his people.

They’d trusted me, everyone in the caverns trusted me. I’d stopped the deaths, when I took over. Bow deep, I said. Service and honor, I said. Bow deep, walk with quiet steps. Obey. Live. It worked, worked well enough that we’d forgotten how bad it could be. How bad they could be.

A strangely interesting scenario, well-imagined and well-written. The alien [?] races are fascinating; I’d like to know more of them.

–RECOMMENDED

Karl Schroeder can’t seem to stay away from Virga, the splendid Big Smart Object setting that started off as an excuse to write about flying zero-gee pirates, floating wooden cities, and revenge. But he also managed to pursue several of his more abstract interests, viz., the nature of nature, the nature of technologies, the technologies of nature, the varieties of post-human experience, and the possibility of rational social organization. It’s as though every Nifty Idea generated a plot-twist, which spun off an even Niftier Idea, which opened even more story options, which invited further elaboration – well, you get the idea. Or the Ideas.

Ashes of Candesce follows Sun of Suns, Queen of Candesce, Pirate Sun, and The Sunless Countries as the fifth and closing (says the author, though I’m taking no bets) volume of adventures set in and around Virga, a 5,000-mile-diameter balloon of air, water, ice, artificial suns, floating cities, and exotic critters, located somewhere out around Vega in the far, far future. I should warn those who are not caught up with the series that this review includes possible unavoidable spoilers about the nature of Virga and its neighborhood: the earlier books gradually revealed that outside Virga’s skin, something called Artificial Nature is the dominant force in the inhabited galaxy, and that AN wants to absorb Virga. That means getting control of Virga’s central sun, Candesce, which generates a field that suppresses the technologies that sustain AN and other advanced post-human systems. Nor is Virga’s bubble-habitat environment unique – it is coupled to a neighboring bubble, Aethyr, where some of the series’ characters found themselves stranded at the end of The Sunless Countries.

That’s where the main action picks up, with former (one might say escaped) university historian Leal Maspeth and some fellow survivors trudging across the frozen inner skin of Aethyr, looking for a way out while dodging icefalls and the unwanted ‘‘assistance’’ of a creature that looks like a dead friend but probably isn’t, at least not entirely. Leal and her companions take shelter with a group from outside Aethyr and Virga, refugees from the attentions of Artificial Nature who call themselves the Renaissance. This group is camped out in Brink, an otherwise uninhabited ‘‘metropoloid,’’ while working on some mysterious project that requires the various technologies that Candesce suppresses but that operate in Aethyr. The project is mysterious because we see it mostly through the eyes of Kier Chen, who initially presents as a child but, as is gradually revealed, has a stranger status and condition. Kier wants to escape from his nannies and is secretly building – or, to be precise, growing – the devices needed to do so. But why he wants to run away is something that unfolds only later, inside Virga.

Meanwhile, Antea Argyre, dismissed from the secretive and half-mythical Virga Home Guard, is looking for Leal and, by extension, for answers to various questions that had led Leal off into the dark and cold places at Virga’s skin. Elsewhere, governments and diplomats gather and discuss the recent upheavals, fleets assemble and jet off to undisclosed destinations, and the movers and shakers from earlier books – admirable Admiral Chaison Fanning, his wily and wildly adventurous wife Venera, and revenger-turned-sun-lighter Hayden Griffin – are right in the middle of it all, along with some new and dangerous operators. Artificial Nature has sent in agents and gained allies, and some Virgans are engaging in counter-maneuvers aimed at advancing their own ambitions, so there’s enough double-dealing to make it a challenge to keep track of all the players even with a program.

Because schemes and puzzles have been staples of these books from the start, one expects to encounter hidden agendas, mixed motives, secret histories, confused or conflicting loyalties, concealed plans, and unmaskings. But alongside the engagingly busy cut-and-thrust of the intrigue plot runs an equally intriguing component of the book – the play of ideas and science-fictional inventions that make this more than a cunningly engineered thrill ride – and a deeper kind of fun starts when those plot secrets and revelations connect with that layer. The biggest, baddest ideas revolve around Artificial Nature and the post-human and post-post-human conditions, notions that Schroeder has been playing with since Ventus. The Renaissance refugees represent one level of post-human existence, with their extensively re-engineered bodies and minds and their semi-autonomous technologies. Even Kier, who lacks full adult status, has a sensorium extended by swarms of remote ‘‘dragonflies’’ and a mentality enhanced by the ‘‘collection of processors, communication systems, and interfaces’’ called scry. Thus he experiences a kind of amputation when he gets to Virga and no longer has scry or his fireflies – but he also discovers new orders of experience.

The world that Kier’s people left was even more thoroughly and elaborately enhanced, to the point that even plants might have a socio-technological complex to protect them:

Woe to the gardener who tried to dig up a box tulip. At the first cut of the trowel their planetary mesh network would go on high alert. Tulip sirens would go off all over the neighborhood…. The tulip consortium’s AIs would harass you by tagging your scry with insults and slanderous accusations. Their shell companies and corporations would hire lawyers and sue you.

Don’t even ask what happens if you piss off the oak trees. This blurring of the boundaries between the made and the grown, the sentient and the non-sentient, the virtual and the real, and eventually life and non-life is part of the problem represented by Artificial Nature, which might be seen as the Rapture of the Nerds run amok.

All this clearly places Schroeder’s work in discussion with that of Greg Egan, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Ken MacLeod, Charles Stross, and Vernor Vinge, among others. And like most of these writers, Schroeder is also interested in systems of governance and political organization. We don’t see the focus on revolution or the ‘‘rights currency’’ that figured in earlier volumes, but there are observations on various related matters. On the question of moving people to action, Chaison Fanning explains that the big problem is velleity: ‘‘having a vague desire to do something, but not enough will to actually do it.’’ And because ‘‘you can’t worry people into acting,’’ he proposes as a ‘‘first tool… outrage and excitement.’’ He must have been watching the 2012 election cycle. The book is studded with similar observations and explanations, as when Antea Argyre explains, ‘‘Tyranny is shaped by the command-and-control mechanisms that are available – and not by the specific class that tries to use those means. So, in Virga, we are doomed to live lives straitjacketed by bureaucratic governance.’’

But this is still a grand flying-pirate-ship-chases-and-escapes-and-meetings-with-monsters adventure, and it ends not with a debate or a seminar but with a gigantic zero-gee battle around Candesce, a climactic unmasking and showdown, just desserts, and other satisfying stuff. In a recent (as I write this) Locus Roundtable post, Karen Burnham posed the question of the appeal of SF and fantasy – ‘‘Why do you enjoy this crazy brand of literature?’’ I responded with several paragraphs of babble, but I think I could have just offered this series as my answer.

This is my last Yesterday’s Tomorrows column, at least for the moment. It’s been six years since Charles Brown first invited me to write them, and it feels like time for a break. I’m enormously grateful to him for the opportunity, and to Liza Groen Trombi and the rest of the team for their continued support. I very much hope to reappear in these pages before too long. Liza has kindly allowed me an indulgence: a final column on an author whose work I love, but whom I might not otherwise have been able to justify writing about.

 
John M. Ford (1957-2006) had a career that appears, at least from the outside, to have jumped from one genre to another. He was a very difficult author for readers to get a fix on. Although one of his books, The Dragon Waiting (1983) won the World Fantasy Award (and has been reissued in the UK as a Fantasy Masterwork), it doesn’t feel like he’s yet a part of the canon in the same way as the other authors I’ve discussed here. For those who knew him – and I certainly can’t claim to have – he was clearly an enormously erudite and witty polymath. Those characteristics come through in his writing, as I discussed in a long review of his last collection, Heat of Fusion (2004) in The New York Review of Science Fiction (April 2006). In brief, it seemed to me that a lot of his short fiction (and poetry) was spurred by formal challenges. Can you write a sonnet that’s a palindrome? Can you write a present-day retelling of the Oedipus myth as a road movie? Can you write a story embodying and describing a Kuhnian paradigm shift in how humans see the world? Ford could, and did. Inevitably, given the range of challenges he set himself, the works in the collection weren’t all as effective as his considerable best. There was also a sense that some of them foregrounded the technical challenge they were overcoming, so that the figure of the story occasionally didn’t emerge from the background of its predecessor works. But the relationship with predecessor works was clearly the starting-point for much of Ford’s work.

A lot of his early career was spent working in other people’s universes. For instance, he produced surely the funniest RPG scenario ever, The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues for Paranoia. A little closer to Locus’s remit are his two Star Trek tie-ins, The Final Reflection (1984) and How Much for Just the Planet? (1987). How Much for Just the Planet? might sound terrible if I paraphrased it as ‘‘The crew of the Enterprise encounter a book-long Wackiness Field.’’ The plot is, ostensibly, centred around a contest for dilithium crystals between the Federation and the Klingon Empire on the planet of Direidi. But Direidi organises its life around, well, the principles of the musical comedy. So viewpoints are articulated in pastiche songs, custard-pie fights are used to settle disputes, and an aura of sunny benignity presides over the whole. Most crucially, Ford
manages to juggle all these different registers without seeming saccharine or (too) silly. He certainly has the mannerisms of Kirk and his crew to a T, and even found a place in the plot for a full-scale inflatable replica of the USS Enterprise.

What’s clear from the book is that Ford had absorbed the Star Trek mythos, but wasn’t interested in doing a conventional take on that mythos. The word ‘‘mash-up’’ is so heavily overused these days, but that’s what Ford provides us with here: the genre in which Kirk and his shipmates existed colliding with another, entirely different one. Like Howard Waldrop – a very similar writer in a range of ways – Ford is fascinated by, as it were, the gravitational pull of certain cultural or historical artefacts and what would happen if you combined them. This is necessarily a fantastic gesture: even within the frame of Star Trek, the intrusion of musical numbers feels as invigoratingly unexpected as a trip to Oz. But Ford’s disinclination (like Waldrop, or any good magician) to repeat his effects may have contributed to his underestimation by readers.

The Dragon Waiting is subtitled ‘‘A Masque of History’’, and this is a useful way to understand it. It’s set in a 15th-century Europe altered from what history recorded – partly by some historical changes, and partly by the presence of fantastical elements such as magic and vampires. The presence and myth of Byzantium is one central idea behind the book; so is the myth of Richard III, as presented or traduced by Shakespeare. As often in his novels, Ford follows several young protagonists; protagonists who are able to visibly change and learn as the book progresses. So, for instance, in the first chapter, the Welsh boy Hywel learns about the cost of magic from a captured wizard:

I will not hurt you, novice, said the voice inside his head. Your strength will return. This is your first lesson.

Hywel turned back to Ptolemy, who sat back, head cocked to one side, eyes dark and very deep.

‘‘Time and energy,’’ Ptolemy said quietly, ‘‘never energy alone. Spirit is to matter at… I’ve forgotten the numbers; some astounding ratio. You cannot push down a stone wall with your hands… but if you will wait, find the keystone of the wall, the effort you can make will produce the result you want. So with magic. And the stones, falling, will crush something. So with magic.’’

If there’s a neater allusion to E=mc2 in fiction, I don’t know it; but the real point here – a persistent Ford theme – is that nothing comes for free. The use of magic costs (and hurts); so does the exercise of power, especially power over other people. The Dragon Waiting comprises thirteen long chapters, the first few of which introduce the main characters, subsequent ones bringing them together. There are plenty of historical jokes – including, I’m sure, plenty more that I wasn’t erudite enough to catch. As I suggested earlier, ideas of a masque – or, perhaps, of the theatrical – are helpful in understanding Ford’s approach. Each chapter is very visibly staged: the setting is outlined, characters are introduced methodically, epigraphs from Shakespeare frame everything. In the mind’s eye, one remembers the book as a series of tableaux, all existing within the proscenium of Ford’s historical knowledge and speculation. It’s probably the most plotted of Ford’s books, and also the one that makes most allowance for readers who may not be expecting the filigree intricacy of his stories. It can, and should, be followed right to the end.

Growing Up Weightless is a very different book, a coming-of-age story set on a human lunar colony. Of course, there are plenty of SFnal predecessors in describing this kind of setting – most famously, Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The worldbuilding is unobtrusively effective, and incorporates then-new ideas of virtual reality as an escape from the lunar world. I was especially impressed by Ford’s skill at one of the toughest tasks in the creation of any new SFnal world: creating a language for his imagined world that seems fully lived-in. Too often, SF writers come up with terms for new inventions that seem somehow superimposed, too clunky to be believed or used. In this world, terms like ‘‘frames’’ or ‘‘slates’’ have been adapted for uses that seem entirely plausible.

Once again, this is a book about power and its costs. The young protagonist Matt has an ambivalent relationship with his politician father – but one that we see from both sides. The VR adventures that he and his friends enjoy form a neat counterpoint to the main narrative – and again make clear Ford’s sense of stories as things that are staged, presented in a frame of prior stories. It’s very much to the book’s credit that it ducks some of the generic shortcuts of its own predecessors, that it offers no skyhooks out of the situation it describes.

The Last Hot Time was apparently completed some years before its publication. It’s a fantasy of Chicago – specifically, the myths of 20th-century Chicago crosshatched with Faerie. But that kind of experience can be made to stand for any young person’s arrival in a vast urban environment. For me, at least, Danny Holman’s odyssey through this gaudy metropolis was reminiscent of Fritz Leiber’s cityscapes, with magic potentially lurking inside the door of every strange bar or club. (Gene Wolfe’s Free Live Free (1984) is another possible ancestor, for similar reasons.) The telling of the story is dense and dialogue-driven; of all these books, it’s the one that requires the reader to do the most unpacking of its implications. It makes clearer than some other Ford books a particular burden imposed on his characters: they are required to recognise the story they’re in, and act accordingly. If, for instance, you’re given another name, you must understand the deepest sense of what that name signifies, of what it tells you about who you really are. Even trivial jokes or puns carry meaning: in this context, of course ‘‘Outsider’s Disease’’ is called ‘‘Loop Garous.’’

The Last Hot Time does contain the most poignant and adult relationship depicted in any of these novels, and it also reveals a fondness for Americana that’s not nearly so visible in Ford’s other works. (That’s not to say that his depictions of, say, Wales or Florence in The Dragon Waiting are inauthentic, but there is a sense of coming home in this book.) The experiment embodied in the book is whether Americana can coexist comfortably with the deeply European roots of the fairytales that Ford invokes.

A last Ford novel, Aspects, was left incomplete at his death. Whether or not it’s published, John M. Ford is one of the easiest writers for the critic to provide a recommendation on: start anywhere, and read. His work embodies the joy of a life spent wrestling with the texts and stories of the past, a joy that he wants his readers to share.

Interestingly, Nancy Kress’s short novel After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall also deals with a communal group of young people living in a dome, only this time it’s neither of their own making nor their own choice. In 2035, humanity has been virtually wiped out by a series of ecological catastrophes involving bacterial mutations, global warming, and tectonic shifts, which had begun more than two decades earlier. But 26 survivors were rescued by an unseen alien race and placed in a half-mile long, egg-shaped enclosure called The Shell, where, in the intervening years, they’ve given birth to six children, one of whom is the 15-year-old Pete, who is especially haunted by the question of why the aliens, called Tesslies (because of the shower of sparks that accompany their rare appearances), would bring about the destruction of the world and then presumably keep a hothouse full of survivors to eventually repopulate it. To aid in the repopulation, the Tesslies have also provided a kind of time machine, which enables the survivors to occasionally travel back to the pre-disaster world and – with only a few minutes allotted for each trip – grab whatever they can, from pillows and candy bars to the occasional child (only children can make the trip back to the future with them).

Parallel to this pure SF narrative are two others set decades earlier (the three narrative lines are what gives the book its title). One is cast as a kind of CSI procedural, set before the ‘‘fall,’’ with a talented mathematician named Julie Kahn working with the FBI to discern a statistical pattern in a series of unexplained thefts and kidnappings throughout the Northeast, and trying to refine her predictions of where the next might occur. (These, we are given to understand early on, are the various time-travel ‘‘grabs’’ from the future Shell-dwellers.) Another of Julie’s consulting gigs is with a biologist investigating the outbreaks of a new strain of plant-killing anaerobic bacteria. Almost as soon as she realizes the possible implications of this, the scientist is arrested and Julie suspects she herself may be in danger from some sort of vast cover-up conspiracy. The third narrative line most resembles a traditional cataclysm tale, with short chapters hopscotching all over the globe in 2014 and detailing in a detached, omniscient voice the various unfolding disasters, from the spread of the bacteria to mid-ocean earthquakes and the eruption of Yellowstone. These are spectacles that could show up in a dumb Roland Emmerich movie, except that Kress has actually (and characteristically) worked out the science, and that she treats them as background rather than the main event.

The chief engine of suspense in After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, other than the mystery surrounding the Tesslies themselves, consists of seeing how these three narrative lines eventually converge and complement each other, and Kress handles this with her usual superior craftsmanship and efficiency, devoting exactly the amount of time needed – but no more – to the personality clashes among the Shell-dwellers, the brief scenes of abductions and thefts, and the developing surmises and deepening humanity of her central viewpoint characters, Julie and Pete. Pete may at times partake too easily of what I’ve come to think of as the Hugh Hoyland prototype SF character from Heinlein’s ‘‘Universe’’ – the rebellious young investigator in a rigidly constrained society whose curiosity leads him to challenge received wisdom and to learn what’s really ‘‘outside’’ – and the novel may briefly flirt too conveniently with the Gaia hypothesis or gerrymander its plot elements to click too neatly into place at the end, but perhaps the chief virtue of After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall is that given the scope of its narrative space, it could easily come in at three or four times its length, and probably would in the hands of most other novelists. Kress has long been one of the most respected workshop teachers around, and has even produced handbooks on fiction writing from Writer’s Digest Press. This novel itself could almost serve as a workshop on point of view – when to use omniscience, which characters to give plot reveals to and when – and the management of narrative time. If we could get certain other professional novelists to recognize the virtues of economy and neatness that she practices here, we’d save ourselves a good deal of slogging.

A last-chance review of Weird Tales, along with the usual and less usual first-of-the-month ezines.

Weird Tales #359, Winter 2012

A sort of first and last, at the same time. I had for some time been wondering about the VanderMeer-edited version of this venerable zine, yet none of my queries had ever produced a review copy. Now, with the magazine sold and a new editorial team about to move in, I finally obtained a copy of the old crew’s last issue.

The settings are mostly contemporary, with a bit of the weird future thrown in, and, in this issue at least, there is a distinctly British tone. No Chthulu, no barbarians. I would characterize it overall as horror rather than dark fantasy, although the affect is more often depression and despair than fear or revulsion. Certainly several of the stories are worth reading, but overall I can’t say that I regret missing the zine so very much as I had supposed I might.

“Notes from the Apocalypse” by Stephen Graham Jones

Zombies. By now, every new zombie story has become a sort of challenge – can this one manage to say something new about such an overused and uncredible trope? Jones does. In a series of vignettes, he manages to show us how human survivors can be even more appalling than the devouring undead.

. . . whenever it happens, — and it will – that you’re making your mad dash away from whatever horde you’ve stumbled onto, and they’re gaining like they always do, then all you have to do is, without breaking stride, pull on the cat or puppy by whatever your dominant hand is, and splash it down onto the ground.

Nastily imaginative.

“The Magician’s Apprentice” by Tamsyn Muir

Cherry begins her apprenticeship at age thirteen, and it’s hard, tedious work that she masters very slowly and painfully under her master’s close direction.

Magic wore terrible holes in you. Just shunting water around would give her a headache and throbbing nosebleeds, so he’d fry up a steak or fresh brown eggs and watch her gobble them down while saying, “Elbows off the table.”

No glamour in these magic lessons, and more than a hint of pedophilia hanging over the growing relationship between master and apprentice, which the author makes explicit when their literary studies turn to Lolita. Readers may already be so creeped out by the time they reach the ending that the shock value has already worn off.

“Five Films Reviewed by Frankenstein’s Creature” by Even J Peterson

A set of vignettes, seeing the horror classics from a different point of view.

“The One That’s Worse Than Mine” by Tom Underberg

The narrator is a sin eater, technologically enhanced, working for a corporation that sends him out on the road. We don’t know what the corporation gets out of it, but the narrator is looking for someone with a sin worse than his own, the moment that haunts his dreams.

“It’s worth it. You’ll be free of the pain and sorrow and regret you’re holding inside. We all make mistakes,” I say, keeping my voices carefully neutral. “It’s what makes us human. This gives you a chance to go on.”

An odd scenario, in which apparently clients can only have a single sin removed over a lifetime, and we never learn what happens to the sin eaters after their sin-collecting implants are filled. The exact details of the narrator’s sin are never quite clear, although they involve the deaths of his wife and daughter. The setting is a decayed future when UV radiation traps the population inside during the daylight hours, giving the impression of a world of vampires, more depressive than horrific.

“Watcher” by Leena Likitalo

An artificial fantasy scenario in which three kinds of beings play out preordained roles, all envious of the others. While not exactly surreal, the situation can make no sense to the readers, who have no idea what purpose, if any, it serves. That, I believe is the point: the apparent purposelessness of existence.

“Waiting for the Thaw” by Joel Lane

One snowy February, the police are called to an apartment where the tenant has disappeared, and the landlord has discovered a pair of corpses in his place – an old man and a young boy, both apparently starved to death. There is also a notebook in which the absent tenant has written of his descent into despair. Naturally, the police discount the evidence of the notebook, which suggests that the tenant has become involved with something arcane, and fail to consider the full implications of the DNA evidence.

This works best as a metaphor for hope, as the tenant believes that he is engaging in a kind of spell that will bring the thaw of despair.

The city coming to life. Trees, birds, cats. And people. Life everywhere, breathing and dancing and caressing.

Something magical happens, but the details are obscure. It’s possible that the tenant was taken in by a bunch of con artists who recognized his vulnerability. Because snow in February is perfectly normal, and a thaw will come in its own time, even if we might think it never will.

“f/8″ by Conrad Williams

After personal tragedy blights his life, Tommy goes out with his camera and the apparent intention of getting himself struck by lightning. At which he succeeds.

He released the shutter again. This time, fifteen seconds into the exposure, the lightning came. Thunder surrounded him almost at the same moment. He jumped, lost his footing. He put out a hand to steady himself but wrenched over to one side when he realised the exposure was not yet completed; if he touched the tripod the shot would be ruined.

After he is released from the hospital, he looks at the images on his camera and finds one he can’t remember, of a longhaired, ragged figure that begins to haunt his daily existence. He experiences memories that are not his own.

An unusual sort of ghost story, which seems to be the most likely pigeonhole for it, if not mystery. Some nicely vivid images.

Clarkesworld, April 2012

A very mixed selection of SF and science fantasy.

“Fragmentation, or Ten Thousand Goodbyes” by Tom Crosshill

Rico realizes that he’s losing his wife, as she becomes someone different, someone less human, with every augmentation. He also fears that he will soon lose his totally unaugmented centenarian mother, and he’s concerned for her failing mind – as he sees it.

Every time Mom says goodbye to someone, it’s for the last time. She thinks — no, she knows — that she’ll never see them again. Not the mailman. Not her best friend Abby. Not me.

But the old woman is wiser than her son.

A nice examination of personal identity – the self that the self knows and the self that others know, or believe that they know.

“Draftyhouse” by Erik Amundsen

A ghost story set on the moon. The scenario is on the side of surreal, and we are less inclined to believe the protagonist’s account when he admits to being a habitual drunk. It seems that the moon has long been colonized, its denizens called astronauts because they wear leather spacesuits. Shenroos is now the only inhabitant of Draftyhouse, possibly the only human remaining on the moon. He was ordered to leave a week ago, but declined. He is drunk when a ghost enters the house, riding on a ghostly elk. In a dream, it asks him the question, “What is the purpose of the Draftyhouse?” And Shenroos wakes to find his hands covered by a thin film of soot.

Covered in soot. Shenroos is finding it on all surfaces he checks; fine, greasy, streaks in odd places in the rooms that fall under his titles. Other places are almost coated and his sensibilities tell him that there is more weight inside the house. Something new has arrived, bringing ghosts.

The most interesting of the stories here, eventually revealing itself as a mystery, which is the question asked by the astronaut ghost. There’s a mad elegance to the scenario, though the answer, when we figure it out, is entirely rational, in the context.

–RECOMMENDED

“The Womb Factory” by Peter M Ferenczi

Unlike other SFnal womb factories, this one exists to incubate biobots, expensive organic toys with a computer core. Mei is there unwillingly, rebelliously, unlike most of the other, more acquiescent girls.

Although it makes sense that a facility like this one would be located in China, where girls have long been considered a burden on a family, I see no reason why human wombs would be required for such a project at all. As Mei’s case makes clear, there are clear disadvantages in it – as opposed to, say, sows or some more easily contented species.

Redstone Science Fiction, April 2012

Two stories of artificial life.

“An Early Adoption” by Rahul Kanakia

A world where most people have gone “inside” to a virtual existence in which everything is possible. Chandrani is a long-time resident who has learned the drawbacks of flying elephants and housecats in the bodies of tigers. Her specialty is coding chili peppers for maximum faithfulness to the real thing. When a newly-arrived old friend issues an invitation, Chandrani is both embarrassed and contemptuous.

I pulled out my phone and used a disincorporation app to erase the elephant from existence. Normally, it would be considered shockingly rude to destroy a friend’s creation, but Maya clearly had no understanding of ordinary politeness.

Essentially a story of people who hide the truth about themselves from themselves. Chandrani is a disagreeable character, her critical attitude only exposing her own insecurity.

“Men and Their Toy” by Jacob A Boyd

Dolly is a sex toy, an expensive one who has been owned by a series of wealthy and powerful men who all had a far more powerful enemy. Now that man has purchased her in order to access her intimate knowledge of all those defeated rivals. Tersk is obviously a brutal man; his employees fear him. Dolly does not seem to.

“Only you could find and get to those who owned me before. Now, I am in the safest place I could be. All that was theirs is now yours. Who would want to attack you, let alone so much as insult you? What is there to be afraid of?”

The narrative here is essentially a dialogue between Dolly and Tersk. We see nothing of Dolly’s inner thoughts or feelings, to the extent that she may have them. Is she really so confident, or is she bluffing? The unanswered question makes this one intriguing. The ending has a sting.

Apex Magazine, April 2012

An “International SF” issue, celebrating the release of the publisher’s Book of World SF 2 anthology. Which makes it also a Lavie Tidhar issue, as he is the anthology series’ editor and also has an original story in the magazine.

“Love is a Parasite Theme” by Lavie Tidhar

Or is it meme? “It won’t let go, it hangs on and transmits from person to person, it’s a sickness.” So says woman whom the narrator loves. This is after the end of the world, and there may not be any other humans left; the narrator claims there aren’t, but he lies a lot.

There weren’t any more people but the two of them, but there never were, anyway. Life was love and everything outside of it was backdrop, it was scenery—

A poignant vignette about the possibility of love in the absence of hope.

“The Second Card of the Major Arcana” by Thoraiya Dyer

A story of riddles. The Sphinx, for it is she taking the role of the High Priestess, has been awakened by a person she takes for a priest, and she searches for him now to rebuild her temple for her. But it is a time far, far from the Sphinx’s, a time in our own future as well. Things have changed, and few people know the Sphinx’s riddles in those days.

A warty-nosed old woman stops her car at the side of the road to offer me a lift to Beirut. There is a basket of ripe pomegranates on the passenger seat.
“Ride with me.”
“Aphrodite rides with you already,” I say. “I am no human lover.”

The riddles make this one special, as the standard roles change and the old incantations work differently. The Sphinx, even more so than in her own time, is not to be trifled with.

Kaleidotrope, Spring 2012

Quite a few ghosts and such in this quarterly issue, but they are spirits of fantasy, not horror.

“Those Who Came Before” by Nicholas J Carter

An ogre hunts maidens in the land, and one of their ghosts watches him with a certain admiration.

I am transfixed by the way he strips and cures our meat, makes pale leather of our snowy-white skin, makes jewelry of our bones and ornaments of our skulls. A craftsman, that’s what he is. My own black hair he spun into a dream catcher dark as jet, and he hung my pretty fingerbones from several loose strands that dangled from it. They clack together when a strong wind strikes deep into the cave — though this is not often — and then I feel a tingle where my spirit thinks fingers should still be.

A very different point of view on the usual fairytale scenario. The ghost is quite convincing.

“Commuter Train” by Brady Golden

Urban legends. New to the city and new on the job, Lisa mentions to a co-worker that she has seen a ghost on the BART train. He tells her that it’s a well-known urban legend. One thing leading to another, they embark on an affair, despite Gabe being [unhappily, or so he claims] married.

So far, she hasn’t taken their relationship too seriously. It’s something new that’s happening to her, an affair, and its novelty has its appeal. She’s attracted to him, enjoys being attracted to him, and enjoys having that attraction reciprocated, but she’s not passionate about it. She’s had better sex with better-looking guys, long ago though it may have been. Still, secret lunches and secret lays give her something that she needs. Friendship. Companionship. Someone who will touch her. Hell, someone who will talk to her.

Essentially, this is a contemporary story about an affair, the ghost being, at most, a catalyst. Lisa’s behavior is hard to comprehend, except as self-destruction, but I don’t think even she understands why. It’s disturbing, much more so than the poor innocuous ghost.

“In Exchange for Sorrow” by Damien Walters Grintalis

Humanity has developed wings, but Lilita fails to grow them. As her parents consider euthanasia to eliminate the shame, she runs away to the forest, where Magic Happens.

As the clouds lowered their bulk and carried the sun below the horizon, she wandered until she reached a forest far from town. A place of shadows and tall trees and secret hiding places within the trees and without. When the wind blew, the trees did not whisper freak. They did not discuss doctors or cold needles. They did not know she was supposed to have wings.

Not adult fiction. Lots of emotional chain-pulling.

“Voices” by Lindsey Duncan

Quissara is an assassin. It’s a living.

The Contract had a monopoly, but you had to be as pathetic for escape as I was to join. The Orators gave us another legacy: if you ended a life, you lived with the spirit for the rest of yours. Find me someone who wants to live with an angry horde of victims roiling about her mind, and I’ll show you a candidate for the Contract.

But when about to dispatch her latest target, she is disconcerted to be confronted by a ghost – not one of her own dead, but one who seems to know her well enough to rebuke her for her way of life.

Readers will probably figure out the mystery before Quissara does, although the final twist is interesting. But this is because there is something wrong with Quissara that we don’t know. It makes rather a hole in the story. I like the interaction between the assassin and her voices – another case of the dead forming a bond with their killers.

“Dead on the Doorstep” by Peter Cooper

There’s a dead bloke at Eleanor’s door. A bother. “You! What are you doing here, in broad daylight? Don’t you know it’s against the rules?”

A really funny take on one of the oldest scary campfire stories.

“Weekend at Byron’s” by Justin Teerlinck

Egregiously ridiculous. It’s clear that this is what the author intended, for humorous effect, but I wish he hadn’t.

“What shall we do?” cried Shelley. “Lady Lamb is already at the door and she will not leave until she has had an audience. She means to force Byron to love her. Not only that, but several of Byron’s creditors have appeared with her, as well as a train of unclaimed bastards with questionable sireage begging alms and several lions, cotimundi, and tapirs with collars and tags bearing Lord Byron’s seal.”

“Traveler” by Colin Heintze

The narrator is some sort of alien consciousness who has been on Earth a very long time, entering the minds of human hosts and acting the role of a god. But other gods have taken over, and the minds of the hosts are no longer open to travelers.

These days I would have to push and struggle and sneak through the back-doors of consciousness just to steal a glimpse inside an uncooperative host. And, when my host’s mind realizes a trespasser has entered, I would be violently rejected by a consciousness unwilling to entertain a concept in conflict with its own understanding of the world.

The narrator decides that the fellow traveler/god inhabiting the mind of the warlord Timur is the enemy, and directs the dwindling number of its hosts to destroy him.

Ends in a sentimental religious epiphany.

GigaNotoSaurus, April 2012

“End Run” by Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon

Green Ensign Darlene Charles reports aboard he new assignment, meets every single officer and member of the crew and learns every single rope, in an appallingly prolonged and dull narrative. If this were the opening chapter of a novel – which I have my suspicions it might be – the length might be excusable. Not the dullness. And when the expected Crisis finally arrives, instead of our heroine’s competence, what readers are more likely to see are the dominoes so carefully set up by the author falling clickety into place without ruffling our composure by any narrative tension.

In Touchstone, Melanie Rawn chronicles the formation and wayward path to success of the title group of players, whose form of theater could only exist in a world where the creatures of our fairytale and fantasy have survived to become part of human life and culture in a land that resembles an 18th-century England – from a very alternate world history where humans aren’t the only sentients, religions took different courses, and magic has survived despite centuries of intolerance and violence.

Rawn’s characters come from an era when most ‘‘races’’ (belonging to the classical divisions Water, Fire, Earth, and Air) have mingled, to the point where Cayden, the first viewpoint character, calls himself a ‘‘mongrel’’ mixture of Wizard, Elf, Piksey, Sprite, plain human, and that rare blood Fae, plus a regrettable bit of Troll, ‘‘because where else could he have got a face like this? Hook-beak nose and long jaw, cheekbones that could cut glass, wide mouth….’’ So even though his gray eyes are elfin, lanky body wizardly, and ‘‘straight white teeth’’ the better part of human, Cayden (Cade) knows he’s ugly.

At least he’s a ‘‘tregetour,’’ which the concluding List of Terms defines as ‘‘originally a street magician, evolved into the word for a playwright’’ and he calls ‘‘a crafter of words, a designer of specific magics.’’ Cade works from behind the scenes while others play out dramas he has adapted from old tales, with the equivalent of scenery and special effects provided by specially adapted ‘‘twigs’’ of variously colored, bespelled glass. (For a flamboyant version of one scene, check out the book’s cover.) The shifting members of his foursome – the others known as ‘‘masqueur,’’ ‘‘fettler,’’ and ‘‘glisker’’ – won’t succeed onstage until they find a kind of catalyst in the elf Mieka, whose prodigious talent as a glisker has so few flaws he could pass for a pureblood.

Touchstone’s growing popularity also depends on a person they can’t acknowledge in a thoroughly sexist society: Cade’s longtime friend and neighbor the glass-maker Blye, who happens to be female, though women aren’t officially permitted into performances even as spectators. While some do sneak in to watch, disguised as men, Blye is more active, imbuing her own magics in the group’s ‘‘twigs.’’ But she keeps a low profile in the studio established by her glass-making father.

Another thing that sets the group apart and heightens the general tension comes from Cade’s troubling visions, where both dreams and waking ‘‘turns’’ reveal potential futures – some of which he’d do anything to avoid. When the focus passes to Mieka, it reveals further complications in both elvishness and the art of glisking. (As a final note reveals, Rawn ‘‘stole’’ some of her language from genuine outmoded words, and she effectively conveys her delight in them.)

Up to this point, I’ve been talking mostly about story, and an imaginatively detailed yet never overdrawn fantasy background. But what impressed me most about Touchstone proved to be its unexpected sense of realism. These are the personal adventures of brash, foulmouthed young people, where maturation is still a work in progress. Professional or moral failures could lie ahead – for their best and brightest? – yet hope lingers, while they find their own strange way to success.

I’m glad to learn that Rawn plans to keep the project going. Told from this intimate perspective, any further chronicles of Touchstone should fall into a kind of middle ground between High Fantasy and Low, a place where sequels can be something other than the relentless breeding-ground for epics or the playground of light comedy.

by Gary Westfahl

If people go to movies in order to be excited, they should definitely see Wrath of the Titans, for no one can deny that it is a tremendously exciting movie; they may not always understand precisely what is going on, but if one thrill is disappointing, they can be sure that another one is on its way, after a brief pause for exposition or character development. There are even signs that somebody cared a little bit about the quality of the dialogue and the acting, which are rarely prioritized in movies that focus on providing excitement. However, filmgoers searching for interesting ideas in this film may feel, like its protagonists at one point, that they are lost in a vast labyrinth, filled with empty corridors, although dogged investigation may yield some modest rewards.

One subject to explore is the persistence of ancient tropes, despite visible efforts to modernize old stories for new audiences. As some might recall, the remake that inspired this sequel, Clash of the Titans (2010) (review), took the traditional, all-powerful Greek gods of the original Clash of the Titans (1980) and recast them as unjust authority figures that ordinary people should, and could, successfully challenge, appealing to our contemporary distrust of authority figures and admiration for surly young rebels like that film’s Perseus (Sam Worthington, who returns to the role here). In a sense, Wrath of the Titans maintains that theme, since its gods, like Zeus (Liam Neeson) and Hades (Ralph Fiennes), are no longer being strengthened by the prayers of worshippers and hence are rapidly losing their powers and even their immortality. Thus, Zeus must ask for Perseus’s assistance in confronting the threat of his reemerging father, the fiery, brobdingnagian Kronos. And, as a sign that humans are now controlling their own destiny, here it is not the gods but Queen Andromeda (Rosamund Pike) who plays chess, demonstrating her human mastery over other humans (in contrast to the gods’ mastery over humans), since her moves apparently correspond to the movements of her soldiers. Yet this film also, strangely, validates the whole concept of gods, since it turns out that they have been playing the valuable role of keeping Kronos and other menaces (like unspecified “demons”) under control, and their growing weakness means that humanity now faces a host of lethal new foes about to be unleashed. When one further considers that all of the film’s major gods – Zeus, Poseidon (Wally Huston), Hephaestus (Bill Nighy), and even Hades – are ultimately presented as sympathetic characters, this film is implicitly arguing that, perhaps, worshipping gods and keeping them strong wasn’t such a bad idea after all. (Indeed, Zeus’s appearance and positions at times seem almost Christ-like, as if he is suffering solely in order to benefit humanity.)

More to the point, this film, like its predecessor, refuses to take this argument to its logical conclusion – that ordinary people, having freed themselves from their arbitrary divine overlords, would then naturally seek to free themselves from their arbitrary human overlords as well. Instead, monarchy remains the accepted form of government: no one questions Andromeda’s rule, because she is not only of royal blood, but she also proves her worthiness to command by being a brilliant military leader and courageous fighter who accompanies Perseus on his quest to rescue Zeus and defeat Kronos. Further, filmgoers will quickly figure out that, this time around, Andromeda is going to play her traditional role as Perseus’s love interest (a big hint: the part has been recast as a beautiful blonde), which means that he is destined, as in the original myth, to eventually marry Andromeda and become a king, renouncing his previous determination to live as a humble fisherman. And no one will question his rule either, since his divine heritage, and proven ability to slaughter monsters, demonstrate that he is also superior by birth and hence deserves to become an absolute ruler. Granted, given the nature of the film under consideration, it is senseless to rail against the political implications of Wrath of the Titans, especially since countless other fantasies display the same sympathies; still, it is striking to see them surface again in a film series that originally seemed determined to reflect democratic values. (And parenthetically, one might add, everyone devoted to the genre of fantasy will someday have to engage in some soul-searching about the fact that their favorite form of literature is devoted to celebrating a system of government that almost all contemporary citizens of the western world would righteously abhor if instituted in their own country.)

The film also displays a conflicted attitude toward another form of authority involved in its creation, namely, the ancient Greek myths that inspired its story. The official closing credit that its screenplay is based on “characters created by Beverley Cross” (who scripted the 1980 film) might suggest that the filmmakers knew little about Greek mythology, for in fact, there is precisely one extremely minor “character” in this film, to be mentioned, that Cross arguably created, while all the others date back to ancient Greece or were concocted by this film’s writers, Greg Berlanti, David Leslie Johnson, and Dan Mazeau. However, when it was decided that Perseus needed an untrustworthy sidekick in this film who was also a demigod, the writers might have invented any character they chose; instead, they bothered to do some research and located an actual, but very obscure, mythical figure, Agenor (Toby Kebbell), who was in fact described as a son of Poseidon and was in fact an unsuccessful suitor of Andromeda in the original Perseus story, as he is in this film (though the mythical Andromeda originally preferred Agenor to Perseus, while the film’s Andromeda throws him in prison). Other details are consistently correct: Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades were the three sons of Kronos; Aphrodite was the wife of Hephaestus; there were originally three giant Cyclops, as seen in the film, and their association with Hephaestus is logical since all four figures were known for forging weapons; and Perseus did have a son named Helius, though his name is usually spelled Heleius, distinguishing him from the sun god. (My authority for all of this information, by the way, is Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths [1955], which in my old-fashioned way I trust more than Wikipedia.)

In other ways, however, the film visibly departs from tradition. For one thing, the original Kronos was not exactly a pleasant fellow – advised that one of his children was destined to overthrow him, he swallowed the first five, though the youngest one, Zeus, escaped this fate, got Kronos to vomit up his siblings, and led their successful revolt against him; however, while he was, by one tradition, imprisoned in the underworld of Tartarus, as in the film, there are no grounds for presenting him as a mindlessly destructive giant, this film’s equivalent to its predecessor’s enormous Kraken that Perseus must defeat after he is released. Also, the weapon traditionally associated with Hades is a “helmet of darkness” (or invisibility), not a “pitchfork,” but such a passive weapon, one supposes, was deemed insufficiently conducive to the bloody mayhem required in all action films. Finally, Hephaestus sends Perseus, Andromeda, and Agenor into an enormous underground labyrinth that he constructed as the only way out of Tartarus, and thus is the only way they can enter Tartarus to effect Zeus’s rescue; and once therein, Perseus is suddenly attacked by a bull-headed humanoid who is of course the Minotaur. Hey, someone must have thought, this is a labyrinth, there was a Greek myth about a Minotaur in a labyrinth, wasn’t there, so why not put a Minotaur into this one? But the labyrinth containing the Minotaur was in Crete, not the underworld, and the monster was deliberately placed there to be well fed by the annual sacrifice of a young man and woman; a Minotaur who somehow found his way into Hephaestus’s labyrinth would have been alone for millennia in its unused passageways and presumably would have long ago starved to death. But like the equally senseless dinosaurs that attack underground travelers in Journey to the Center of the Earth (review), the Minotaur shows up solely because films like these have to have some action every ten minutes or so, regardless of whether or not it makes any sense.

There are, as it happens, several things in this film that don’t make a lot of sense, though some matters might have been clarified if the screenwriters and director Jonathan Liebesman had had the courage to slow down the pace a bit and provide a little more in the way of explanation. In the previous film, the beautiful Io was described as immortal, but since she must be gotten out of the way to make room for Andromeda in this film, she is somehow killed off and buried before the film begins. (If they had really wanted to be contemporary, the filmmakers might have had Io angrily storm off, complaining that when she married the heroic Perseus, she never expected having to endure the dreary life of a humble fisherman’s wife; but like democracy, it seems, divorce can never be introduced into fantasy films.) We are further told that if Perseus combines Zeus’s thunderbolt, Poseidon’s trident, and Hades’s pitchfork, he will create the “spear of Trium” that can destroy the evil Kronos. Yet, if their weapons had this power, why didn’t Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades simply kill their hated father centuries ago, instead of imprisoning him in Tartarus? When Kronos emerges from captivity, some strange, two-bodied monsters also start attacking Andromeda’s soldiers, though their nature and motives are never explained. The last four problems identified could each have been addressed with a single line of added dialogue (Perseus: “Somehow, this labyrinth must be connected to the labyrinth in Crete”; Perseus: “To marry me, she had to give up her immortality”; Zeus: “We hesitated to kill Kronos before, out of misguided filial loyalty”; Andromeda: “Kronos has brought his demons to attack us”), perhaps lengthening the film by a total of thirty seconds. But no one wanted to delay, even briefly, the arrival of the next monster or the start of the next swordfight. In part, also, the absence of explanatory dialogue stems from the decision to present Perseus as a laconic, inarticulate figure, disinclined to say anything even when it would seem natural, or helpful to an understanding of the story. (For example, after his encounter with the Minotaur, he is asked “what happened?” but says not a word in response.) Perseus’s personality is summed up an exchange with Agenor as they prepare for the climactic battle: “Don’t give me the big speech,” says Agenor. “I wasn’t planning to,” Perseus replies. Yet big speeches can contribute significantly to the narrative flow and atmosphere of fantasy films, and big speeches didn’t seem to diminish the entertainment value of, say, the Lord of the Rings films. It seems strange that the filmmakers were determined to flout tradition in this minor respect, while dutifully following tradition in more significant ways.

Still, I am glad that they followed one minor tradition of this film series, an appearance by the mechanical owl Bubo, so that all three films include a special effect constructed by Ray Harryhausen, the true architect of the 1980 film that inspired these recent productions (though Bubo could also be described as a “character” from Cross’s script, justifying the aforementioned credit). In the 2010 film, Bubo is an artifact in a depository of weapons that Perseus ignores, suggesting (as I said in my review) an intent to transcend the occasional childishness of Harryhausen’s film to adopt a more mature attitude; here, Bubo is Hephaestus’s mute, motionless conversation partner (appropriately enough, since he is the god who built Bubo in the 1980 film), suggesting that the weakening gods are becoming senile and a bit childish themselves, in contrast to mature humans like Perseus. (The impression is heightened by the over-the-top performance of Bill Nighy, who earlier portrayed the distracted Slartibartfast in the farcical The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy [ review ], and who here resembles Michael Palin playing a god in some absurd Monty Python sketch.)

While Nighy’s Hephaestus provides the film with some brief, and jarring, comic relief, the film as a whole is relentlessly grim, particularly in its battle scenes, which constitute another departure from tradition in recalling modern warfare more than the conflicts of ancient Greece. The film’s villages and encampments are periodically afflicted by strange fireballs that function like guided missiles; blasts of destructive energy are like those from a nuclear bomb; mounted on the flying horse Pegasus, Perseus surveys a dauntingly devastated landscape; and huge fiery explosions accompany every attack by colorful monsters. Carefully edited, some scenes from this film could be taken as footage from the recent carnage in Syria, making Kronos and his cohorts seem far more sinister than the menaces in Harryhausen’s films. In addition, reflecting the realities of contemporary combat, characters suffer some serious wounds in this film; Perseus requires several stitches after fighting a two-headed monster, and even the decorous Andromeda is seen with a bloody bandage on her arm in the final scene. In combining the fanciful creations of computer-generated animation with such realistic damage and destruction, Wrath of the Titans again seems a film compelled both to honor tradition and to break with tradition.

The film finally raises one more question related to traditions, specifically the traditions of Hollywood: if this film proves successful (and it just might, since word-of-mouth reviews regarding the adrenalin rush it offers might be more persuasive than critical dissections of its flaws), will the producers start working on another sequel? On this issue, like so many others, the filmmakers seem at odds with themselves. On one hand, certain aspects of this film’s plot – like the seemingly complete collapse of the Olympian gods, and the death of one key character – suggest an intent to bring this saga to an end; on the other hand, with at least one god surviving, and with a son of Perseus ready to serve as a new hero should Worthington tire of this role, the door to one or more sequel was not entirely closed. Still, my guess is that everyone involved in Wrath of the Titans will now choose to look at some new properties instead of seeking to earn more cash from the titans. Indeed, I sensed at times that this film’s elegiac tone, with ruins and broken statues observed in every setting, reflected someone’s conscious or subconscious intuition that this sort of bombastic, even operatic fantasy film may be becoming passé, ready to be supplanted by edgier, more intimate sorts of adventures. And if that is the case, the broader lesson to be learned from all three films I have examined this month may be that it is now more profitable, and more aesthetically pleasing, for filmmakers to adapt stories that were recently and specifically designed for contemporary audiences, like The Hunger Games (review ), instead of struggling to revisit and revamp classic tales that were popular long ago, like John Carter (review )and Wrath of the Titans. Needless to say, this is not the sort of lesson that an old titan wishes to hear, but no one devoted to science fiction should ever be afraid of, or unwilling to acknowledge, change. So, we may forever cherish the old games, but it is also time to let the new games begin.

A mixed selection to close the month. The Good Story award goes to Interzone, to the Tem story, and to the Future is Japanese anthology, for the Sterling and the Valente.

Tor.com, March 2012

Tor has done a Pretty Neat Thing, and they call it the Palencar Project: a series of five stories inspired by a painting by artist John Jude Palencar. These are not just the usual stories; they are the work of genre masters like Gene Wolfe, James Morrow, and Michael Swanwick.

The picture shows a young woman looking at an apparition in the sky ahead of her – something that looks, to me, like a Cthuloid tornado. But that’s the interest in a project of this sort, discovering what the same image means to such a variety of different viewers. Some have interpreted the picture quite literally, others have used it as an imaginative springboard into different territory. What they have in common is a central female character and the presence of something resembling, in some way, a tentacled monster. From that point, they have gone their separate ways.

“New World Blues” by L E Modesitt Jr

Aleisha has not-quite-volunteered to go through an experimental portal to another world where she has a mission to fulfill, confronting an angry god. Although that’s not exactly what’s supposed to be going on. The woman who went before her no longer speaks, and Aleisha is only doing it because she needs the money, needs the benefits for her daughter.

Not that different? The gloom is overwhelming, a form of hell in purple, even though it is really not that dark. She turns, but finds no sign of the portal through which she had been thrust, no sign of the platform. She takes several steps, but her footsteps only carry her across the browned grass that stretches levelly in all directions. The grass bends under her shoes, but does not crackle or snap, for all its brownness. If anything, her steps release a sighing sound.

The author has taken the scene very literally from the Palencar image, creating a tale of empowerment. It’s clear what Aleisha has gained from the exchange; not so clear is what she has given, willingly or otherwise, in trade.

“Dormanna” by Gene Wolfe

A voice comes to Ellie while she is asleep, and she takes it to be another imaginary friend.

“She came in a dream, only after I woke up—sort of woke up, anyway—she was still there. I’ve been trying to think of a name for an imaginary friend that comes when you’re asleep. Can you think of one?”

Her mother suggests “Dormanna.”

The striking thing about this story is the kindness and wisdom of the women characters, Ellie’s mother and her teacher. And Dormanna, if she can be so considered, as Ellie does. Wolfe inverts the impression of the artwork. Instead of something powerfully menacing, it is very much otherwise. A positive, inspiring tale.

“Thanatos Beach” by James Morrow

When Inez is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, conventional medicine offers her little hope. So she is receptive when she hears the theory of Dr Philoghast, that tumors are in fact independent organisms that can be persuaded to remove themselves from their host’s body, lest they perish along with it. But Dr Philoghast leaves some crucial details out of his contract with his patients.

Morrow’s inspiration takes him considerably further from the literal, well into the domain of the absurd. His story delights with its prose, with its wit.

A vigorous breeze wafted through the open window, cooling her bald head. Glancing toward the far corner, she noticed a pleated skirt, a long-sleeved blouse, and various undergarments folded neatly across the back of a cane chair. A pair of leather boots rested beneath the seat. She lost no time shedding the smock, that hideous uniform of the unwell, and arraying herself as a citizen of health’s holy empire.

–RECOMMENDED

“The Woman Who Shook the World-Tree” by Michael Swanwick

Mariella Coudy is a precocious genius who, as an adult scholar, has found her ideas on the nature of time not well-received. Everything changes when a young man named Richard Zhang volunteers to work with her and produce demonstrable proof of her theories. They first prove that time is not real, then produce a map of reality, and Richard has ambitious of developing instantaneous transport.

Richard called it the Monster. But in Mariella’s eyes it was not monstrous at all. It had the near-organic look of certain fractal mathematical formulae. It flowed and twisted elegantly, like branches frozen in the act of dancing in the breeze. It was what it was—and that was beautiful.

More important to Mariella, they become lovers. But the burdens of success threaten to come between them and destroy her happiness.

Here, the elements of the painting become more metaphorical. This is a love story, and it captures the loneliness inherent in the female figure standing in a landscape of [emotional] desolation.

“The Sigma Structure Symphony” by Gregory Benford

In an intriguing future, Ruth is a SETI librarian on Luna, working in the Library of collected and unread signals. Ajima, a junior dataminer, had been working on the advanced Sigma Structure, declaring it required “intuition, not analysis” before he inexplicably committed suicide. Now Ruth is assigned the task. She discovers the musical nature of the Sigma signals, and more.

“They’re not primarily pieces of music at all. They’re mathematical theorems. What we regard as sonic congruence and other instinctual responses to patterns, the Sigma Structure says are proofs of concepts dear to the hearts of its creators, which it calls the Overs.”

But the Structure has its own intentions, and Ruth finally learns what happened to Ajima.

In keeping with the musical nature of the signals, the story is structured symphonically, as a series of movements. There are a large number of hyperlinks to definitions of technical terms. The use of the Palencar image is, again, quite literal. The connection between mathematics and music has long been established; here, we see it mirrored in the conflict between the analytic and the emotional. What I have trouble reconciling, though, is the initial description of the Structures as impenetrably complex, far beyond the ability of the human mind to penetrate, and the emotionally present, yet so greatly reduced figure of Sigma as it seeks to communicate with Ruth.

Interzone #239, March-April 2012

A larger number of stories this time, with more of the fantastic and less of the futuristic and SFnal than usual. The overall quality is high, with fresh and original scenarios. A superior issue.

“Twember” by Steve Rasnic Tem

Strange and vast phenomena move across the land: towering, mostly insubstantial cliffs of fossilized time that Will calls “escarpments.” For the most part, they do no harm to humans, but Will’s son had once been caught in one and rendered helpless in body and mind; his wife still blames him. His mother calls the current state of the world “Twember,” because the seasons are all confused; the skies are dark and there are no leaves on the trees. And where the escarpments have passed, things have changed.

As he walked closer he could see how here and there sprays of the shiny stuff must have spewed out of the passing escarpment, suggesting contents escaping under pressure, like plumes of steam. He dropped to one knee and examined the spot: a mix of old coins, buttons, bits of glass small metal figures, toys, vacation mementos, souvenirs, suggesting the random debris left in the bottom of the miscellanea drawer after the good stuff has been packed away for some major house move – the stuff you threw in the trash or left behind for the next tenants.

This is fine prose, rendering the escarpments wondrous as well as inexplicable. The story shows us the people who have to find a way to keep on living in this changed landscape, coming to terms with each other and with themselves.

–RECOMMENDED

“Lips & Teeth” by Jon Wallace

The narrator is a political prisoner in a dystopian version of what seems to be North Korea. He has been re-educated, which is to say that he has forgotten who he is and why he is in the prison. The only one who speaks to him is the pickaxe with which he breaks stones; its name is Jin-Song, and it constantly urges him to resistance.

As pickaxes go his blade is blunt, but his words are sharp. He thinks our incarceration is unjustified, our labour pointless. He also gets mad and spews treason about the Dear Leader, which I guess is why he’s in here with me.

Then one day the Dear Leader dies and changes are set in motion.

Readers may suspect that Jin-Song is in fact the narrator’s displaced ego. It’s a harrowing story of the degree to which the human spirit can be crushed, and the means it may use for preservation.

“Tangerine, Nectarine, Clementine, Apocalypse” by Suzanne Palmer

We’re on a space station named Utopia, a name that many other worlds have given themselves. This one is based on the principle that “with adequate technology, cooperation supersedes competition.” The Apparatus that runs the station produces all it needs, and individuals are chosen to share the supply with others. Echa is the apprentice to Bota, an elderly fruit-sharer. Bota sees fruit-related visions; a nectarine means death, a tangerine means a broken vow. And the pomelo carries a terrible doom.

A nicely-realized setting, in which we learn that even Utopia can’t always be perfect.

“Bound in Place”

Haunted houses are in. The ghosts function as both servants and appliances; spells keep them confined, wipe their memories, and supply instructions. Jolene had not wanted to live in a haunted house, but her husband Derrick was attracted by the prestige. Derrick, however, is rarely home as he devotes himself to business, and Jolene succumbs to depression.

The dysfunctional marriage is not unusual, though it seems like something from another era, out of Mad Men. The ghosts, on the other hand, are something different, as we see the story from their point of view alternating with Jolene’s.

Ghosts roam the wide halls and large empty rooms of the Victorian on the hilltop. Their memories are so perishingly short that the place seems to unfold into new rooms without end. They pass each other and exchange quiet nods, neither knowing whether they had met before nor caring.

“Rail Riders” by Matthew Cook

Bindlestiffs in space. The scenario isn’t quite clear at first; there are no rail lines between planets. Our group of mostly-female hobos stow away in cargo holds between the worlds, then ride the rails between cities. Naturally, they are abused and exploited wherever they go, because some things never change. Which is the problem here – the author is simply lifting hobo life from a century in our past and transplanting it whole into a distant future. Not enough things ever change for this to be convincing as SF.

“One-Way Ticket” by Nigel Brown

It seems that an alien species has evolved a kind of quasi immortality that it has offered to humans suffering from incurable disease. At the end of a long journey, the pilgrims pass out of sight and disappear; no one knows for sure what happens to them. Kyra is a journalist dying of cancer whose last assignment is to record the end of the process and send it back. But on her way, she develops misgivings.

I find the grazers’ lifecycle potentially more interesting than Kyra’s journey of enlightenment, but the author doesn’t develop it. The ending is rather weak and moralistic.

Lightspeed, March 2012

Supposedly, there are two fantasy stories and two science fiction stories in this issue, as usual, but as I read them, there are two light fantasies and two horror stories, the SFnal elements being only nominal.

“Alarms” by S L Gilbow

Clara yearns to be a superhero, but instead she has developed a supercurse: she sets off alarms when she goes near them. This is a metaphor for being out of control; Clara’s real problem is OCD.

Establishing order meant lining up the books in the living room until their front edges made a neat line across the bookshelf. I liked things neat. I liked things straight. I liked things perfect. I thought it was my job to establish order in the bedroom, the house, the world.

One of those stories told in short sections and with lists, all numbering five, this being a number of significance to Clara, representing control. The fantastic element is well-enough developed for readers to credit it as something more than a metaphor, but that’s what it is. Told with a self-deprecating humor.

“Beauty” by David Barr Kirtley

Nicole meets a beast in a bar; he buys her a drink, she falls in love with him, which breaks the spell. Things aren’t the same anymore. More of a fable than anything. Readers will probably see this one coming.

“Test” by Steven Utley

A cursed voyage.

Soon after the Stephen W. Hawking left normal space on the first manned faster-than-light voyage to the stars, the terrible dreams began, dreams of black tentacles coiling about the ship, reaching into it, touching us in our sleep, dreams of choking darkness.

Things aren’t working onboard. The narrator believes that a monster has trapped them in hyperspace and is pulling the ship – and its crew – apart. The engineer thinks it’s a gremlin and crawls inside the engine trying to find it.

Space horror, an ambiguous fantasy in which either the entire crew has just gone crazy, or the monsters in space have made the entire crew go crazy. Which isn’t really much of a distinction.

“The Day They Came” by Kali Wallace

In this case, the 2nd-person narrator is actually telling the story. It seems there has been an alien invasion. It happened the day the narrator’s father died. Now everyone is restricted to a five-mile radius and picks up rations at a distribution point. Every week, there are fewer people there.

You’ve explored the boundaries along your invisible border. You’ve walked to an intersection that marks the extent of your five-mile radius. Nothing stopped you, but there were shadows darting at the edge of your vision. They hid behind fence posts, crouched in the ditch, ducked into a culvert when you turned your head. They were watching. You didn’t cross the road.

The nature and purpose of the invasion and the aliens – if aliens they are – is obscure. The story is about the narrator, alone in her dead father’s house, watching the lights go off in the other houses, remembering how it used to be, before. Which wasn’t really so great, but it looks good in retrospect, as is often the case.

The Future is Japanese, edited by Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington

My first thought on seeing this title was that the Future was Japanese in the past. That is, it was back in the 80s that SF writers were imagining the Japanese economic empire dominating the earth. In these recessionary days, this particular future seems much less likely. But such visions were largely the product of western imaginations who were often, the editorial introduction suggests, not well informed about Japan itself. The authors here are divided between Japanese and others, the latter, we are to assume, being the well informed sort.

The introduction claims that the anthology is meant to bridge a gap, but rather than bridging, this collection seems to create a one. There are more western authors than Japanese, and while the non-Japanese have made their stories, in one way or another, about Japan or Japanese characters, the Japanese authors as often as not, haven’t. So that it’s not really clear what the subject matter here is supposed to be. Japan in the future? Japanese SF? Japan however? None of the above? It would have seemed that a volume like this one would have presented an opportunity for readers to see Japanese SF authors writing about the future of Japan, but not so.

The quality of the fiction is mixed. Some of the stories are quite good. Others are not. Fortunately, the good ones make the collection worth it.

“Mono no aware” by Ken Liu

Hiroto calls the Hopeful his world, but it seems in fact to be a generation ship propelled by a solar sail on its way to 61 Virginis. It seems that Earth suffered an asteroid strike, and Hiroto was one of the few who made it onto an American evacuation ship, where he now spends much of his time reminiscing about the past and the superiority of the Japanese people, as taught to him by his father.

“Yet it is this awareness of the closeness of death, of the beauty inherent in each moment, that allows us to endure. Mono no aware, my son, is an empathy with the universe. It is the soul of our nation. It has allowed us to endure Hiroshima, to endure the occupation, to endure deprivation and the prospect of annihilation without despair.”

I can’t help thinking this piece is unbearably smug. While inferior nations riot and break into wars at the prospect of annihilation, the Japanese line up in an orderly fashion, reciting poetry. At least, as Hiroto recalls and idealizes the events from the perspective of the young child that he was at the time. It’s a sad situation. Isolated on the ship, he remembers his father’s lesson that life is transitory, but he clings so hard to what has already passed away that his connection to present and future is tenuous.

“The Sound of Breaking Up” by Felicity Savage

In a future where almost everyone lives totally virtual lives, Asuko is a sort of divorce agent, a go-between who keeps the breaking-up couples from having to confront each other directly. Suddenly, jarringly, she falls face-first into reality.

I wanted to go home. I’d spent my whole life chasing reality, trying not to get sucked into a WORLD-based existence like most people, but now I didn’t want this to be real.

The problem with reality is it doesn’t care what you want.

The shift between Asuko’s normal life and her introduction to reality is so abrupt readers are likely to get whiplash. The first part has a distinct Japanese tone to it [eg, natto icecream] while the second is a universal SFnal scenario. I can’t help wanting more integration between them.

“Chitai Heiki Koronbīn” by David Moles

It seems that Earth has been invaded by aliens who take the form of giant robots – actually, many different forms, although their “real” forms seem to be somewhat humanoid. It seems that for some reason no one understands, these aliens can only be fought effectively by specially selected and trained teenagers piloting giant robots. There are three Americans, who have joined the original Japanese teenage robot pilot, Tanimura the boy wonder, who is even more war-weary and screwed up than they are and keeps running away – either from the war or back to it.

Jacob is still wearing his helmet. He takes it off now and flings it across the tarmac. Some
of the Ländespolizei look round at the clatter and then hurriedly away. Without his big Malcolm X glasses Jacob’s face looks naked. Maddy and Abby can see that he’s crying.

What Moles is up to here is deconstructing manga, imagining how it might be if such scenarios were real, involving real people. None of it makes any sense, which is also real, as soldiers often feel their situation doesn’t make sense, can’t give a coherent answer to the question, “Why are you here?” when it’s likely to be unrequited love or some other teenage affliction that has sent them to war.

The setting is thoroughly multicultural and polyglot, with Japanese officials, Canadian doctors, possibly-German guards, and robots named after the classic characters of French pantomime, which is unexplained, as is the title, with which the author offers the clueless reader no assistance that I can catch. Colon beans?

“The Indifference Engine” by Project Itoh

Another war – tribal warfare in a future African nation with the odd name of Shelmikedmus, given by Dutch colonists. It’s so much like our own placetime that the fighters use the apparently immortal AK-47, but with American forces deploying advanced robotics. Enza was a child soldier of the Xema tribe, brought up to believe that killing the Hoa was the only reason for existing. Now peace has been imposed, and he’s supposed to coexist with the enemy.

The war is over, they would say. Gone is the necessity to fight and hate each other, they would say. So stop hating the Hoa and learn to study and work alongside them, they would say.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuck that.

But Enza can’t survive in a world where he can no longer tell Hoa from Xema.

There’s a good idea at the core of this, but it would have been better with less repetitiveness in the narrative.

“The Sea of Trees” by Rachel Swirsky

Aokigahara the suicide forest – haunted by its ghosts. Nao is haunted by her dead lover, who attempts to draw her into death with her.

Nothing stops Sayomi’s devouring kisses. Hair embraces me. Meat-lump tongue laps at my lips. She wants to pull me out through my mouth. Fill her ribcage with my heart. Fill her bones with my marrow.

Nao is also a scavenger, looting the bodies of the suicides, but this doesn’t pay well, so she accepts the offer of an American teenager searching for the ghost of her father. But the ghosts have turned dangerous, and the trees have closed in on them, refuse to let them go.

Japanese ghosts are a fascinating lot, more so than western ones, and the ghost forest is a real place. That makes this one contemporary horror, nothing SFnal.

“Endoastronomy” by Toh Enjoe

The narrator and his friend Leo spend a lot of time staring at the celestial bodies, which don’t seem to be the same as they are today. The moon doesn’t go through phases, Saturn isn’t in the right place, and the earth may be flat. Leo claims to have proved it is. In a world in which humanity has apparently devolved, Leo and the old guy who committed the heresy of subtraction are creating not only astronomy but mathematics and philosophy, all from bare logic. The narrator doesn’t quite know what to think of them.

Only then do I remember that Leo and the old man have been working on those calculations. That had been a formal pronouncement of theirs, I concede. In a universe that has lost its sanity, they have discovered laws that govern this activity, and they have predicted the next manifestation. The logic of delusion is incapable of predicting actual results, but if Leo and the old man’s astronomy correctly forecasts this lunar eclipse, then it must contain at least some part of the truth.

There’s almost no physical action here. The characters look at the moon and stars, speculate, and argue. They decide what’s important to them, to each other. Readers are left wondering what happened to the universe they used to know, but that’s not what the story is about; it’s about thinking about thinking. Heavy on idea, light on storyness.

“In Plain Sight” by Pat Cadigan

Cyberpunk. Goku Mura is an investigator for Interpol who receives a fraud case from his detective [?] friend Konstantin, whom he hasn’t seen in too long, even virtually. It hardly seems like a case for Interpol, and he wonders why she sent it to him. Perhaps a way of making contact? But her office insists that Konstantin couldn’t have sent him the case because she has been in the hospital, in what may be a vegetative state. Goku takes on the fraud case primarily as an excuse for visiting Konstantin, then he talks and talk and talks with the perp and the victim, distracted all the time by flashes of contact with her through his Artificial/Augmented Reality link. She’s still there, and trying to reach him.

Reading this one is an exercise in enduring extreme tedium as Goku’s interviews go on and on and on about the inconsequential fraud case, painfully extended dialogues that exist essentially to be interrupted for a few instants. The point being perhaps that police work is boring, though I’m not sure why the reader has to suffer for it. We learn a bit about Goku’s character, but it’s not worth the time. I note that the story has nothing to do with Japan, except to note that it has broken up and washed away, with people of Japanese descent like Goku assimilated into other nations.

“Golden Bread” by Issui Ogawa

The first story here by a Japanese author that explicitly involves Japanese characters, although taking place in the colonized asteroid belt. Yakuta is a fighter pilot from aggressive, expansionist Yamoto, who has crashed by accident into a remote asteroid inhabited by people of the neutral Kalif culture, destroying the communal food warehouse. Now he is stranded there among people of different customs and diet, and ungrateful about it.

Ainella, sitting across from Yutaka with her legs folded, coldly slid the dish of boiled
greens across the tea table. There was also some smoked fish and pickled red berries of some kind. As meager as the portions were, Yutaka tried to pack away as many calories as he could. And yet, he couldn’t help but ask, “Do you have any meat?”

I got a sinking feeling almost from the beginning, fearing that this would be another iteration of the Kipling novel about the spoiled kid who Learns His Lesson. So it proves. There is also excessive engineering infodump, and ridiculously obvious lectures from Yakuta on the superiority of his culture, intended by the author to indict it. The author also employs the leaden irony of Yamato culture being derived from European sources, while the superior, ecologically conscious Kalif have adopted traditional Japanese ways, despite their Caucasian genetic heritage. Just awfully bad.

“One Breath, One Stroke” by Catherynne M Valente

1. In a peach grove the House of Second-Hand Carnelian casts half a shadow. This is
because half of the house is in the human world, and half of it is in another place. The other place has no name. It is where unhuman things happen. It is where tricksters go when they are tired. A modest screen divides the world. It is the color of plums. There are silver tigers on it, leaping after plum petals. If you stand in the other place, you can see a hundred eyes peering through the silk.

In the human half of the house lives the calligrapher Ko. In the other half, he is a calligraphy brush named Yuu, who compulsively writes poems on the house’s other denizens. Ko the human calligrapher cannot write because he has no brush. Ko is lonely. The other side of the house is full of lively company, but Yuu the brush is not content.

Gorgeously done, poetic and poignant images inspired by Japanese legend. Nothing involving the future.

–RECOMMENDED

“Whale Meat” by Ekaterina Sedia

The narrator’s American mother divorced her Japanese father when she was six years old, and whenever she visits, she has felt the guilt of deserting him. On this trip, they go to the Kurils where tension exists between Japanese and Russians over, among other matters, a dead fisherman and Japanese whale hunting. Russians have salvaged the meat from a Japanese kill.

The whale proves to be a disappointment though: it turns gray when cooked and smells
sour, and it tastes like fish but has a confusing beef texture to it. It tastes like the ocean tinged with blood. It tastes like sin.

Set in a present Japan, the story is directed, not towards the future but the past – the past of a failed marriage, the past before Japan lost hegemony over the islands, the past when they weren’t forbidden to consume endangered species. A depressing piece that seems rather like a poem to guilt, as the narrator can’t help thinking of her father dying alone.

“Mountain People, Ocean People” by Hideyuki Kikuchi

Long after an apocalypse, winged humans live and fly on Earth’s mountains, where the children learn to glide from an early age, despite attacks by air monsters from above. Kanaan is a hunter for Everest village, but he yearns to fly higher, as his father did before he died.

“A good wind,” his father had said. “How I’ve longed to be swept up in that wind. It is a
wind that goes up to heaven. The villagers swept away in that current have all glimpsed heaven. I couldn’t attempt it when I was a hunter. The village and your mother and you have no use for me now, and for that, I am glad. Now I am free to go.”

But there are also humans living at a lower altitude, and one day an explorer appears from below, wanting to make contact.

The physical setting is interesting, but the rest of the scenario is oversimplified. It’s not clear whether the mountain people grow their wings or make them, as they are said to be invented, but a torn wing appears to be a kind of death sentence, as the old and disabled are begrudged a living. Kanaan takes one look at the city of world below and instantly considers it paradise, which is probably not the case if human history is any guide. Some characters have Japanese names, but the island itself has probably been long ago washed away.

“Goddess of Mercy” by Bruce Sterling

An actual story about Japan in the future, after North Korea smashes Tokyo with a single Bomb. In the aftermath, the island Tshushima is abandoned to the forces of lawlessness and disorder.

In the wake of the Korean [refugee] invasion came all of Asia’s waterborne criminals: Taiwanese arms dealers, South Korean drug merchants, and Hong Kong triads. Even the Russian mafia drifted south from the Kurile Islands. These network-savvy global marauders shared a single goal. They all came to rob Japan, a land without a government or a capital, the world’s richest and newest “failed state.”

The pirates take hostages, including Mrs Onegai from the Nagoya government. Now Miss Sato from the Federation of Nine Relief Societies has come to Tsushima to negotiate for her release. Her guide is an underground journalist and self-declared expert on world piracy, looking for a publisher and a payout. Adventures and mayhem ensue.

An interest-packed action piece, rich with dark, cynical humor rendered in lively, energetic prose. Despite the tone of absurdity, scraping off the mud reveals a lot of truth about the nastier sides of human nature, many of which are recognizable from today.

–RECOMMENDED

“Autogenic Dreaming: Interview with the Columns of Clouds” by TOBI Hirotaka

This story—leaving aside the question of whether this is in fact a story—is the record of an extended interview with that renowned man of letters and murderer, Jundo Mamiya. I can’t post the complete transcript, please bear with me. The interview can’t be related in a sequence of orderly sentences. It’s not even an interview in the usual sense. The subject—Jundo Mamiya— died thirty years before the conversation took place. And the interviewers—I and I—are not human either, in the ordinary sense of the word.

The actual story is not quite as complicated or obscure as the introduction above would indicate. It seems that all literature, in the most extensive sense of the term – words and images – has been computerized, and a myriad of search engines constantly generates cross-references, creating secondary works. In a sense the system becomes the entire world of expressed thought. But it generates a monster, rather like a cancer, destroying its own substance. To save itself and its universe, the autonomous collective of search engines recreates a myriad of copies of the one human whose power with words might overcome the monster.

Jundo Mamiya is a strong character who strikingly evokes the image of a Hannibal Lecter, superhuman in his physical and mental abilities. It is in part his works that have generated the process of destruction that threatens all literary works. Rather than realism, this one falls into the domain of the psychological, the story of power too strong to contain.

Walter Jon Williams keeps on mix-and-matching genre elements and coming up with satisfying concoctions. In This Is Not a Game and Deep State, he combined near-future SF and international-intrigue materials in a now-familiar techno-thriller way. In The Fourth Wall, a sequel to that pair, he adds to the recipe one of my personal favorite guilty-pleasure ingredients: the show-biz mystery novel.

The Fourth Wall uses some characters, technologies, and back-story from its predecessors, but its first chapters are pure Hollywood comic novel, with a flawed-but-knowing, down-at-the-heels insider introducing us to the sleaze and desperation beneath the glitz and glamor, someone who understands the way of his world:

I think about Gene Hackman’s character in Night Moves, the baffled, affable detective so completely unsuited to grope his way through the Hollywood labyrinth, through all the players who so completely fucked him over.

I’m not like that, I decide. I grew up here. I know exactly who’s going to screw me over and when.

My chief hope is that, if I just hang on long enough, I can get in a position to screw them all right back.

The speaker is Sean Makin, who should be sitting pretty after spending his childhood years on a successful sitcom, except that his parents looted his trust fund and decamped, leaving him nearly broke and all but washed up at 18. After a string of unsuccessful comeback projects (including the title-not-lead character in the languishing-in-litigation slasher movie Mister Baby Head), he is reduced to appearances on the pseudo-reality Celebrity Pitfighter show, in which he must duke it out with other has-beens under circumstances designed to extract the maximum of grotesquery and humiliation from the situation, for example, by filling the ring shin-deep in cottage cheese, which results in Sean getting not only pummeled into semi-consciousness by his hopped-up opponent but half drowned in gorp as well.

We get much of the official version of Sean’s career arc from his blog posts (each of which is accompanied by a thread of snotty reader comments), while from the off-the-record first-person narrative we gradually learn of the real disaster of his youth: his role in the death of a friend and colleague, a secret he would particularly not want revealed to the friend’s bereaved husband, whose brilliant directorial career declined terribly thereafter. All of this overture-and-back-story gradually comes into play when Sean gets hired onto the latest project run by online entertainment producer (and This Is Not a Game and Deep State protagonist) Dagmar Shaw. Dagmar is interested in Sean for the central character in Escape to Earth, a serialized, subscription-based, international, multi-platform, branching-plotline, quasi-participatory adventure narrative about an alien from an alternate universe. One reason Sean is being considered is because of his unusual appearance: as he grew up, he proved to have pedomorphosis, and as a result he is now six-foot-two with a ‘‘really, really huge head’’ and looks ‘‘like a sinister bobblehead doll leering unexpectedly at you from the dashboard of someone’s car.’’ But, hey, it’s not just a part, it’s the lead.

A number of other cast members from Deep State return, but as crucial as Dagmar and her crew are to the creation and unwinding of the central plot, this really remains Sean’s story, not only because he becomes a key player in the project (which neither he nor the reader entirely understands until the end of the book) but because he believes that the deadly events that start to plague the production are tied to his long-kept secret. The director Dagmar hires is that same bereaved husband out of Sean’s guilty past, and other professional friends and colleagues from his working days become part of the project. When a mystery SUV almost runs him down – twice – Sean chooses not to tell Dagmar of the incidents, lest she bounce him from the picture. Then one of the production staff is killed by a hit-and-run, and it is the beginning of a series of deaths that have Sean wondering whether there is a serial killer in the woodwork. He can’t figure whether it’s something to do with his personal dirty secret, or the production itself, or something that has followed Dagmar from one of her earlier problems (which even Sean has heard a little about).

What makes the book more fun than the usual mystery or techno-thriller is how the rest of Sean’s comic-novel of a life keeps rolling around and crashing into the Escape to Earth project. He still has to honor his contract with Celebrity Pitfighter, which means training for and fighting those bouts – and figuring how to fix them so that he doesn’t get injured or (worse) marked in ways that makeup can’t disguise. He has to deal with his mother, who sends ditzy e-mails from the ashram to which she donated $850,000 of Sean’s trust fund money. And then there’s the production itself. Because Sean genuinely loves acting, knows his craft quite thoroughly, and has an encyclopedic knowledge of film history and production, he makes an ideal guide to the culture and the processes (political, artistic, and technical) that make the magic happen.

Sean’s personal/professional world isn’t fundamentally science-fictional, but it’s as exotic and wonderful and textured and operationally detailed as any nifty-skiffy creation. Not that Williams altogether leaves out the tech stuff, which has that week-after-next, we’re-almost-there feeling you get from recent William Gibson novels. (In fact, there’s what I take to be an homage to Spook Country in the first chapter.) But what drives the foreground action is less the techno part of the thriller than the tangle of damaged relationships, mixed motives, wounded egos, hidden agendas, and raw ambition that make up the pocket universe of show business. And through it all strangely shines Sean’s genuine love and understanding of the only profession he has ever known. I’m recommending this one to my niece the actor. I don’t know what she’ll make of the technologies, but she will recognize the rest of it immediately.