John's Reading

Asimov’s Science Fiction January 2012

2012-01-29T14:29:00.001Z

We get seven stories of various lengths and a couple of poems so not too bad for a single month’s magazine.

First up is Elizabeth Bear’s novella ‘In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely signal Burns’. In this tale we are taken to a future India where Sub-Inspector Ferron and her colleague Senior Constable Indrapramit are investigating the presumed murder of one Dexter Coffin. To go too much into the details will rather spoil the story, which is rather intriguing. Bear has spent some effort on creating a good murder mystery – particularly difficult in science fiction thanks to the possibilities of gee-whiz detecting technology, and in creating a rather interesting locale for the story. The Indian sub-continent gets rather neglected in terms of possible settings which is rather a pity given its rich mythology.

Next up is Paul McAuley’s novelette ‘Bruce Springsteen’ which is set on one of humanity’s poorer colonies where a woman inveigles a bar keep out into the bad lands to investigate the alien grave site that could be found there; presumed grave at any rate – there might not be any bodies left but there were definitely ghosts even if you called them psychic impressions… Despite this rather promising beginning, the story is rather more like Bonny and Clyde than Indiana Jones. There are also some living aliens, a !Cha to be precise, who’s main fun in life seems to be exploring Human tales. Not a particularly good story in my story – a bit light on both the ‘show’ and ‘tell’ aspects of tail telling but it did have some interesting points like the alien ghosts themselves. The title is rather a distraction though as Bruce fails to play much of a part in the story.

The first of the five short stories is Katherine Marzinsky’s rather disturbing ‘Recyclable Material’. It starts out fairly conventionally with the description of a street cleaner going about its business – despite giving it a few apparently human characteristics we’re introduced to its real nature quickly enough. The purpose of this robot is to be a rubbish collector and as such it has a fairly high degree of discrimination over what to do with what it finds – after all there are certain items that look like rubbish that are meant to be on the streets, then there are things that are rubbish that even Ross can’t handle but the discovery of a new born baby tasks even Ross’s ability to cope with situations until he realises he should take it to the hospital – after all, this is where humans are recycled. The bit of the story where he goes into the emergency room with the infant was almost pure robot-as-monster. Except, of course that it isn’t really. Overall, a very powerful story, especially as this is Marzinsky’s first published story. Hopefully there will be more!

Jack McDevitt contributes the story ‘Maiden Voyage’ takes us into the world of his academy novels – not one with which I am familiar, and its central figure Priscilla Hutchins’ initial training flights on the interstellars. In this tale, Priscilla is the main pilot on a supply run round seven stellar systems and on to her full pilot’s license including the system of Fomalhaut where there was a Great Monument belonging to a (much) earlier alien race. Diverted on the inbound flight, Priscilla and her co-pilot find evidence of a second artefact on an outer moon, this time much more intriguing as it appears to show a being that might be a member of the long lost race., this was interesting enough in its way as the two pilots debate the pros and cons of letting others know about this new artefact. The first of the Academy novels is ‘The Engines of God’.

‘The War Is Over and Everyone Wins’ from Zachary Jernigan isn’t particularly badly written though the author is new to me, but the topic is rather depressing even at the surface level story of the dysfunctional family coming together to bury the narrator’s grandfather. However, the story is set in a balkanised future where someone had come up with a ‘race’ determined genetic weapon and targeted it on the Caucasian minority (worldwide we are!). Narrator guy, with some remnant Anglo blood, has committed the almost unforgivable sin of marrying outside of his Indian enclave and is usually the last to be told of anything. He also divines some unpleasant truths as to the background of some of those behind the original plague. Jernigan asks us to consider whether this world is really better off without the Caucasians and while it’s fairly clear that he (and I) think it probably isn’t, the narrator’s father might have a different viewpoint…

In ‘The Burst’ from C. W. Johnson, Cayla was working as a research assistant to the secretive astronomer Maune examining the data sets for interstellar bursts of radiation. I have to say I didn’t find this particularly engaging.

Eric Del Carlo’s ‘Friendlessness’ is a rather interesting take on the growing trend of Social Media mediated interactions to rule your life. In this future, the basis of your standing is the number of Friends that you have, or how well you interact with other people. Daric Dandry had always found it difficult to make friendships but you could buy Friends. Up to a point, any way but now Daric was broke and his final Friend had given up on him leaving him broke and in despair. As he travels the roads in numb shock at the way his life had collapsed, Daric made his way back to his home town almost by accident where he finds an old school associate (‘friend’ is definitely too strong a way of putting it…) and redemption of a sort. The header for this story says ‘write about what you know’, though in this case it was more ‘read about what you know’…

‘Train Delays on the South Central Line’ from Fiona Moore is a rather interesting poem based on the author’s experience of the daily commute into London. The second poem is Robert Frazier’s ‘Seeing Oneself’ that takes some of the paradoxes of time travel as its central theme.

Sheila Williams’ editorial takes a look at the Center for the Study of Science Fiction based at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

Robert Silverberg’s ‘Reflections’ column, ‘Rare Earth, Getting Rarer’ takes a look at the growing problem of resource allocation and though he uses the rather emotive term extinction in his piece no-one can doubt the pressures being put on the rarer and not so rare elements involved in modern life. This is exemplified in the UK by upcoming changes (by March 2012) to steel based ‘copper’ coins from a cupronickel mix as at the moment and efforts to defeat metal thieves selling their ill-gotten gains to scrap metal merchants. I think that extinction is rather extreme in this particular case as you aren’t actually destroying the metal as you would be if a living species went extinct but it is certainly something to be concerned about especially as the known reserves of such materials are in areas not known for their liberal views thereby leading to one going without the latest gee-whiz bit of kit (or life-saving technology for that matter) or making unwholesome political and ethical compromises. A thought provoking article.

Analog Science Fiction and Fact – January 2012

2012-01-14T20:21:00.001Z

Ah, so here we are in the new year already (received the e-mag mid-December!). So what does the New Year bring us?

First up is a new serialisation of Robert Sawyer’s newest book, ‘Triggers’. In this story, we find ourselves in a future where the US is still sending out punitive expeditions to attack those that have harm it, but there doesn’t seem to be a lack of volunteers to attack the US on its home soil either, with small but very powerful devices taking out whole cities. When the US President is nearly assassinated and the White House destroyed by a bomb, things look bleak especially when his secret service detail learn who are responsible. But it’s what happens when an experiment being conducted at the hospital and the effects of the bomb are mixed together that cause the most problems; people start being able to read each other’s minds in a chain. This first part ends as the secret service agent in charge tries to work out who is reading the President’s mind. This creation of alternate styles of consciousness seems to have become something of a theme with Sawyer over the decades he’s been around.

The first of the two novellas is ‘Project Herakles’ from Stephen Baxter. In this alternate view of the sixties in Britain, while investigating the weirder aspects of scientific study, Chapman Jones discovers a military experiment to bread seriously large giants. Baxter has taken account of the biology in this and allowed a series of gruesome operations to enable his giants to survive, though I feel they were created far too fast; these are only the grandchildren of normal sized human, and carrying the foetus to term must have been interesting in the Chinese sense! As well as the giants, Baxter throws in a coup against Harold Wilson led by a newspaper proprietor and Lord Mountbatten. Again, I’m not so sure that the British people would have been so anti-coup as he suggests here (incidentally this part of the story was based on real events – Cecil King was a real newspaper magnate but in real life he failed to persuade Lord Mountbatten to act as his front man).

The second of the novellas was another of Rajnar Vajra’s Doctor Alien stories. In ‘Doctor Alien and the Spindles of Infinity’ all seems to be going well for the psychologist to the stars with his alien patients safely ensconced in an underwater habitat and nothing weirder than a patient that keeps forgetting everything it had learnt the day before then his Tsf supervisor turns up with some rather disturbing news; a rather large starship had turned up in Sol system and it didn’t have any idea as to why. Only that it belonged to a species with a member currently under Dr Al’s care. When it turns out that that alien had been faking its condition in order to assess Dr Al for a project of grave importance for its whole species, the doctor is not happy, especially when he learns that it will be necessary to act as a juror along with large numbers of other species. But it’s Dr Al’s insight that provides the answer to their quandary. After a somewhat disappointing tale in our last meeting, this is a really great return for Doctor Alien, the only worry being to see how (or if) Vajra will be able to top it!

The first of the two novelettes is Mark Niemann-Ross’s ‘Humanity by Proxy’ which looks at what makes us human by looking at the engineering challenges in building semi-autonomous devices, initially for use in combat then in caring for the elderly and looking at the real meaning of percentage failure rates. I wasn’t expecting to like this but it did rather pull me in. Illustrated by Laurie Harden

Like the Baxter novella, Sean McMullen’s ‘Ninety Thousand Horses’ is an alternate history (though perhaps ‘hidden history’ may be a better definition’). When Professor Claremont received a visitor at her workplace you might not have thought much about it except that she was working at Bletchley Park, a place so secret you could be shot for just knowing it existed. What he had to show her were the first recon photos of an otherwise insignificant place called Peenemunde with some strange tube like objects. What he wanted to know was what they were and how much damage they could do. The professor’s answer was (of course we can say now) ‘missiles’ and ‘lots’ respectively but uncertain as to how he could convince Bomber Command to flatten Peenemunde he asks her how she could possibly be so sure and so she tells him her tale of a family argument that led to the development of an early jet engine built into a railway engine and pointed at the family seat. This was an intriguing tale of espionage and societal expectations despite the possibly unlikely nature of the technology. Illustrated by Mark Evans.

Catherine Shaffer’s ‘An Interstellar Incident’ deals with a possibly lethal interstellar cocktail party between the Terran hosts and the Tuladan embassy. Not normally a problem diplomatic circles one would think but the Tuladan (vaguely cephalopodan in outline) ate creatures not too dissimilar to Earthly rabbits while still alive, and the humans ate cooked meat so when Stacy was tasked, along with her Tuladan equivalent to organise this meal from hell, they had to employ all their assets to make it go without a hitch. Shaffer makes this somewhat comedic in tone without making it farcical, which would have spoiled an excellent story. Illustrated by Mark Evans.

‘Listen Up, Nitwits’ from Jack McDevitt is the second and final short story takes us to a near future where the planet is only a few seconds away from the midnight chimes, what with American and Chinese battle fleets lining up for confrontation in the Pacific and everyone and their dog declaring themselves nuclear States. But before that deadly button can be pressed, SETI finally comes up trumps with a message from the depths of space. But was it a message of brotherly love, or even just a message advertising Someone Else’s Presence? Not really! As the title may suggest, the messenger was a little peeved about what Humanity was about to do to itself but it was less than forthcoming as to what it was and its refusal to communicate except through the head of the SETI team made the rest of the world suspect a hoax. But it did cause people to step back from their concerns for that vital breather.

Edward M. Lerner’s science fact piece, ‘Faster Than a Speeding Photon…’ (and a relatively long subtitle I’m not gonna bother with…), takes a look at that favourite SF trope Faster Than Light travel. Before delving into the science part of the piece, Lerner looks at the reason behind SF’s love affair with FTL despite Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity putting that all-important speed limit on this universe – basically the distances between even the relatively close stars is so huge you’d be looking at many thousands of years of travel time with any currently useable technologies to get to even Alpha Centauri. He then takes a look at some possible sub-light methods of transport and at the problems they would encounter as they reach appreciable percentages of light speed – the time compression effect is probably the best known, and least problematic in this context, of these.

Interzone #237 – Nov-Dec 2011

2011-12-11T20:09:00.001Z

There were only four stories in this edition of themagazine, which may explain why I felt it didn’t take a long time to getthrough the magazine, not that this was my initial thought while reading LavieTidhar’s ‘The Last Osama’. This is set in a background similar, I believe, tohis novel ‘Osama’ though set in a time after the American Special Forces unitkilled him. Only in this story spores from the executed terrorist spread out toinfect those they touch, turning them into Osamas of differing ages and degreesof radicalism. This seems to have destroyed all forms society, whether this isbecause the rest of the world has put the affected areas under an extremelyeffective quarantine or because society really has gone to pot is not veryclear though I tend to think it’s the latter rather than the former. This wasillustrated by Steve Hambridge.

‘Erasing the Concept of Sex from a Photobooth’ by DouglasLain is one of those oddball tales that don’t really seem to have a point –though this probably says more about me than the story. The narrator and hispartner Meg like their sex a bit extreme, not quite as extreme as was beingsuggested by the Etlands but extreme enough that they didn’t mind doing it inthe photobooth of the title but rather than getting pictures of themselves theygot pictures from the past, some rather improbably predating the invention ofthe ‘booth. Narrator man is an artist of sorts and he takes these snaps back touse in his installation where he finds that blacking out the images eliminateseveryone’s sense of shame – in this sense it’s a more mystical version of JerryOltion’s tale in F&SF. Thiswas illustrated by David Gentry.

Next up is Caspian Gray’s ‘Insect Joy’. Amy could tell whatthe animals in the pet shop where she worked were feeling, the less complicatedthe animal the better and at first it didn’t seem important but her partnerLuis hadn’t escaped uninjured from his last tour of duty and was now wheelchairbound. When she found that few of the crickets her shop held for lizard foodcaused Luis’s legs to start twitching, Amy reckoned that more was definitelybetter. Alas, she wasn’t entirely wrong, it was just that the price proved tobe rather high…

‘Digital Rites’ from Jim Hawkins was probably the most accessible of thestories in this edition, probably because at its heart it has all sorts of hightech gizmos. A mumble number of years into the future, the actors in films areall computer generated and while the crowd could be generated completely by thecomputers, the leads still required some form of human input and so a number ofcamera friendly people had been paid movie star wages to be injected with nanosthat enabled a quantum entanglement to be created between themselves and an AIavatar, giving the avatar that necessary dash of unpredictability. But when theleading movie production company starts losing its stars, production is broughtto a halt and the senior management find themselves with some importantdecisions: can the AIs manage to complete the film ‘as is’; why did the starsall die so close together, and ‘how about arranging some pay back?’. Quite abit of the story is set on Corfu where a number of these stars had dies. Atfirst the local cops reckoned personal rivalries but the bodies weren’t in toobad a condition (mostly) that the film company’s chief scientist wasn’t able toget a reading of their last moments. He, in his turn, is brought up short byCorfu's relatively low tech level when he finds out there isn’t a CCTV on everycorner (though whether that’s an actual lack is a question for another day…).The question as to whether the films could be completed with what was alreadyin the can turned out to be a definite ‘no’ and while the wrecking of theirchief opponent’s new set top boxes might have a visceral degree of revenge itdidn’t add anything to the bottom line (quite the reverse indeed!) untilsomeone comes up with the idea of using real live actors… This was headlined asHawkins having deep misgivings about the degree of obsession that the industryhas with technology rather than the humanity – Hawkins is part of the bizunlike me but I did get the feeling that he’s quite into the tech as much as anyone.The story was illustrated by Richard Wagner.

In David Langford’s Ansible Link, we get to see way thescience fiction community is (mis)represented by the outside world and hisR.I.P. gave the last rites to some notable names in the genre. The Book Zonedoesn’t have a specific author review but does have a fairly large number ofindividual reviews. ‘Reamde’ from Neal Stephenson has a rather mixed review inthat the reviewer quite likes the overall story but takes the opportunity tobash Stephenson over the use of stock characters and he puts the book itselfinto the technothriller genre rather than Stephenson’s more usual Sciencefiction – I feel this could have been done a few books ago.

Tony Lee’s ‘Laser Fodder’ section is a fairly scathing roundup of the vaguely science fiction DVD offerings of recent months (though someof the offerings themselves are pretty ancient), the most positive review beingthat for ‘The Woman', a low budget non-Hollywood offering from director LuckyMcKee about a feral woman caught and ‘civilised’ by an apparentlynormal country solicitor who then escapes to get her revenge – definitely morehorror than scify. He was fairly positive about the DVD release of ‘Silent Running' as well though I don’t quite have the same memories as he does… It’s rather telling that the best reviewswere, by and large, reserved for what might loosely be considered horror films.

In his film column, ‘Mutant Popcorn, Nick Lowe takes on amuch shorter list of films than Tony Lee’s DVDs but this in general just gavehis more space to hone his scathe though to be fair when it came to ‘Contagion'he seemed to be in two minds as to whether to love it or loathe it – it treatsa real scientific study, epidemiology in this case, very well but the nature ofthe bug itself has been completely hollywoodised, most tellingly in theobserved death rate (100%) against the declared survival rate of 75%... Despitethe rather stereotypical cover up nature of the plot, ‘Apollo 18' also receivedhalf a thumb’s up unlike ‘Real Steal' which received a great deal of mockery…

Fantasy and Science Fiction Nov/Dec 2011

2011-12-11T19:59:00.001Z

We get a bumper crop of novellas and novelettes in thisedition of the magazine, though only a single short story.

The first of the two novellas is Matthew Hughes’s ‘Quartetand Triptych’ set in a far distant future. The editorial introduction makes thepoint that this is really a short novel, it often being difficult todifferentiate between the two at times. Although it does not make the point theeditorial could also have stated that it is also rather Vancian in both itsrather baroque language and near magical technology. Luff is a thief, a rathersuccessful one too, and when he learns of alien artefacts held by the Voilluteshe obtains a life essence of a long dead ancestor of the present family anduses it to guide him to the Quartet and whilst on this trail he becomes awareof the Triptych as well. Along the way we meet an essence driven mad by a longexile and other strange beings of this far future age, apparently there arefurther stories to come that feature Luff but I’m not sure I would want to readthem. It is possible that I might have enjoyed this more had I read it as thestandalone short novel, but in a magazine with the reading broken by having tofinish my bus journeys it was too long for enjoyment.

Carolyn Ives Gilman’s ‘The Ice Owl’, while not directlyrelated to her earlier story ‘Arkfall’ (F&SF Sep 2008) is set in the sameuniverse where there is interstellar travel by the use of high bandwidth laser(think TRON here). Thorn and her mother were in the city of Glory to God, partof the Wasters, the transient class. The tale is of Thorn’s growing up, seekingan education that would let her break free of her eternal wanderings for totravel by light beam was to lose any friends left behind - you might arrive aged as you had been whenyou left but those not travelling would have aged at the normal rate… WhenThorn met the Magister he opened her eyes to whole new fields of learning butthe society they were living in took a lurch towards fundamentalism and it’slikely that the Magister is a war criminal and her mother is her usualirresponsible self so when it becomes time to leave, Thorn decides it’s time tohead out on her own… There’s quite a bit about personal responsibility here,not just with Thorn’s search for an identity away from her ditzy mother, butalso with the Magister’s non-autobiographical (yeah, right!) tale of thegenocide. All in all a great story and inspiration for the cover illustration.

The first of the novelettes, ‘Under Glass’ from Tim Sullivanis also the opening tale and a great representative of the Christmas ghoststory (it’s also the headline story on the cover but is not represented by thecover art). Bob Krovantz had been your typical recluse with all sorts ofstrange beliefs but it had been the many birds he had taken in that had donefor him. The strangest hobby he indulged in was the collection of souls and hisattic was stuffed with bottles full of them. His best friend and executor hadto collect Bob’s soul – supposedly the body’s last exhalation and then find ahome for the contents of the house. Most things were easy to dispose of, eventhe soul bottles – it seems as if there is a bustling market in them with evenan advert running in this edition of the magazine… Bob had left explicitinstructions for a couple of the bottles; his own went to the executor (andnarrator) and the bottle supposedly holding the soul of an ancient sorceress toan ex-girlfriend. The couple had to decide whether they believe these parting giftswere what they were supposed to be, and, if they did, whether it was right tokeep them imprisoned in this fashion. I most liked the way this tale manages afairly cool ‘yea, so what’ approach to the thought of the soul bottles with thetwo main characters not freaking out too much over this bizarre situation.

Evangeline Walton’s ‘They That Have Wings’ is a horror storyset during the chaos of the German invasion of Crete. A trio of survivors ofthe Allied defenders had made it into the central mountains but if the Germansweren’t going to get them it looked pretty certain that starvation or theweather would. In what appears to be a stroke of fortune the trio are taken inby a young woman and her grandmother. But why were these two women living so farfrom the nearest neighbours and what was meant by those dreams of people’schests being cut open?

‘Object Three’ from James L. Cambias takes us out into deepspace and far future. An ancient artefact had been found that had proven toimpervious to all efforts to examine or exploit it despite the many wars thathad been fought over who controlled local space with peace being imposed by thegod minds who, if they knew what Object One was, weren’t saying. Detailedexploration of local space turned up an equally impervious bar, immediatelydubbed Object Two but this didn’t help with Object One then rumours of a thirdartefact spread through local space and after one of the innumerable wars thatwere fought around Object One, it fell into the hands of a warlord and theninto the hands of a band of thieves made up of the various species making upthe inhabitants of Local Space, not that this was a great example ofinterspecies harmony. The story flicks between the current timeline of theheist and the meeting of the two human representatives on the team and as itcontinues it exposes various conspiracies within the group and although wenever get to see what relationshipObject Three has with Object One I, for one, was not left feeling disappointed(OK, I’d have liked to see what Object One was but…).

‘How Peter Met Pan’ from Albert E. Cowdrey is a ratherunusual fusion of science fiction and horror set in a fairly far future whereglobal warming has flooded out the central United States to recreate the InlandSea [wiki entry] and most USians are now Canadians. Pete and his pal Tim havegone hiking in the US as part of their summer vacation, Pete in particularattempting to forget the girl that rather publically dumped him. It’s ratheridyllic in its way but as they get deeper into the forests and away fromcivilisation the idyll is broken by a second couple who come powering past - just a simple meeting until they meet thegirl a bit later running screaming from the creature that had killed and eatenher partner. As the young men attempt to call for help, they too are attackedand Pete finds himself alone with the girl with no backpack or omni (thatgeneration’s all in one entertainment and communications device). Lost in theforest the couple wander aimlessly by the sea until they stumble upon avillage… this is not a gross horror but some of the scenes were surprising isthe best way of describing them.

‘The Klepsydra A Chapter From A Faunary Of Recondite Beings’by Michaela Roessner is the sole short story in this edition and is presentedas a discussion on how the Klepsydra of the title – an arachnid – wereuncovered from the investigations of a philologist into the derivation of theirname. In this tale, we see how a strange arachnid was rediscovered after a philologistbegan wondering how a bug could be named after a water jar. It seems as ifthese wee beasties could spend quite some time in a dormant state but if theycaught the scent of water, they could get quite vicious until after partakingof their fill. Although this form of storytelling is rather difficult to pulloff effectively, Roessner manages to make a good job of it with this tale

Analog Science Fiction and Fact December 2011

2011-11-27T20:17:00.001Z

In this edition of the magazine, we get three novelettes and four short stories along with a fairly long science fact piece.

Brad R Torgersen’s ‘Ray of Light’ takes us to a world that is covered by glaciers from pole to equator and a few thousand survivors of varying nationalities had escaped Snowball Earth by diving deep into the depths to huddle round the deep water hydrothermal vents. No, Torgersen is not a global warming denier – these conditions have been brought about by aliens putting billions of micro mirrors into orbit between the Earth and the Sun. The story itself is set as the first generation born under the water reaches its teens and begins to question the precepts they had been taught. This is a fairly fast paced search and rescue type tale as PoV character (first person narrator) takes off in pursuit of his daughter and her boyfriend when he learns they were overdue from a standard mission. What he finds is that the kids had formed a club, more like a sun cult, and were determined to make an effort to go to the surface and see the sun for real. Despite the rather gloomy nature of most of the story, the ending is rather upbeat.

‘The Impossibles’ from Kristine Kathryn Rusch takes us to a future where the Earth Alliance consists of humans and a number of other alien species and aboard a space station that acts as a legal clearing house for interspecies extradition cases. With so many cases to deal with, each individual case was barely more than the lawyers for the defence and prosecution stating their arguments and the judge handing down their ruling (usually for the prosecution). Kerrie had ended up on the InterSpecies Court for the First District as a public defender and had been there for 22 month of the mandatory 24 that would see her student loan cleared. Cynical doesn’t begin to describe her thought processes (well, actually she’s too exhausted even for cynicism by this stage) but when a senior colleague offers her a ‘sure win’ case Kerrie’s past caring except as far as seeing it as a way to get rid of some of her day’s caseload but as she delves into this one she works out a way of actually getting her client acquitted but is everything as it seems? Ms Rusch manages to make the ISC such an intriguing organisation, especially as seen from Kerrie’s perspective, that the final twist in the story is almost a wrecker to what has gone before. I doubt that Rusch could base many more such tales in this background – the excitement with this tale is in Kerrie being able to twist the system to her client’s benefit, which would be spoilt if too many such tales became a part of the history of the ISG.

The final novelette, Charles E. Gannon’s ‘Not for Ourselves Alone’ can be read as a fairly standard humans against aliens invasion story and at this level it’s reasonably racy even if the tale is told from the point of view of an analyst rather than a fighter. Of course, the analyst is the son of an ultra-nationalistic Russian who believes that the whole World Government thing was an insidious plot to destroy the Russian peoples and Sergei had inherited more of this attitude than was really good for him. But the invaders had destroyed the Terran colonies outside the solar system and now they were coming to do the same to the Home World. Along with a mixed bag of other analysts and fighters, Sergei found himself on a space station deep in Jupiter’s radiation belt, protected by Io and radiation screens. As he analyses the fragmentary data received from the earlier attacks, he finds himself at odds with the accepted principles on the alien weapons tech and to his chagrin, he finds that the American commander shares his doubts so the couple set up an initially uneasy alliance of their own in order to tease out the mystery of the aliens’ super weapon…

‘Turning It Off’ from Susan Forest, the first of the short stories takes a look at a world where electronics and health and safety have been married together so closely that even the dumbest piece of equipment has been fool proofed to such a degree that’s it’s virtually impossible to take any kind of risk and each person is cocooned in their own little bubble – quite literally! So when Carter and his girlfriend decide that they could do with some personal space they have to hack a lot of overrides. Although presented as a somewhat comedic tale, there is a fairly serious undercurrent of wondering just how far we ought to go in protecting ourselves from the vicissitudes of life.

Brad Aiken’s ‘Freudian Slipstream’ is a mixture of VR and interplanetary adventure. It opens with Jackson Carr on a deserted beach (except for the beach bar, of course) where he’s interrupted by the presence of a rather nice looking lady on horseback. As he yearns for her, the bar keep insists he has a job to do though Jackson is reluctant to interrupt his idyll. Eventually, though, he is persuaded to return to work developing a response to a bioplague that was decimating Earth’s first extra-Solor colony. All the adventures on the beach were to hide him from the fact of his space bound existence while he adapted to being aboard the ship.

‘Hidden’ from Kyle Kirkland is a rather antimilitary story – fairly rare beasts in this generation. There was a drug that had been developed that caused those given it when babies to develop prodigious intellectual powers, to be supergeniuses. Unfortunately they were rather erratic and tended to burn out in rather spectacular ways. Dr Robinson was what had become known as a mindfinder, or mindseeker as he preferred. Robinson had his own notoriety as the man that had called out the creators of the drug over its terminal side effects and he’s less than happy with the military in general, so when he’s called in to help out the general commanding an armaments factory both sides are wary. What he finds when he investigates is a fairly typical techno-military cover-up with a dash of originality based on the worry that Robinson can’t be sure that his supergenius may just be imagining the whole thing as his mental state deteriorates.

‘Art For Splendor’s Sake’ from Dave Creek sees us join Earth Unity Ambassador Chanda Kasmira on her mission to the planet Splendor, though in Kasmira’s experience there was little to recommend the place, not even the two races that called the planet home. Earth Unity was there to evacuate as much of the populations as could be managed before a cosmic cloud came ripping through the system and although the lowland and highland tribes could not survive well in each other’s territories, the two groups were inextricably linked together in that the lowlanders were the smiths and the highlanders were perceived as gods by the lowlanders. But Earth Unity was going to have to split the two groups up for the passage of the cosmic cloud so they were going to have to learn how to live apart. In addition, Kasmira has to help out when lowlanders were being kidnapped by renegade highlanders and make sure an off-world artist doesn’t offend the locals in his attempts to create a lasting monument to the endeavour. At times this did feel a little like Creek was adding elements to the tale just to make it a bit more exciting but overall it came together quite well.

The science fact piece was by Richard A. Lovett and his piece, ‘Poisons, Temperature, and Climate Change: Will Global Warming Make Everything Else Worse?’ is a somewhat different take on the perils of global warming. Whether you’re a Warmer or a Denier most of the focus on the effects is on the big geographical changes like increased coastal flooding or the spread of deserts. In this piece, Lovett focuses on the was the changes in temperature will alter the way complex molecules will, or won’t breakdown, in some cases leading to greater quantities of toxins being released into the environment, though in others it could let the reaction run faster thereby clearing up problem toxins faster. He also goes into some detail about how the local changes could affect relatively small scale ecological ranges in terms of the wildlife able to survive in them. All-in-all an interesting look at a situation that often seems intractable at the global scale, Lovett brings it to the local and while not offering solutions it does make a case for action.

In his ‘The Alternative View’ column John G. Cramer takes a look at the physics behind the fears behind the controversy as to whether mobile phones can cause cancer and as a physicist rather than a physician he expresses doubt as to whether they can; the signal strengths used in such phones is just too weak to adversely affect the molecules of a human cell.

Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine December 2011

2011-11-27T20:08:00.001Z

And so we come to the final magazine of the year. With seven stories, none of which are strictly seasonal, you might feel somewhat short changed but it’s an interesting collection never-the-less.

First up, as always is the novella, ‘All About Emily’ from Connie Willis, not a person I generally consider as a short story writer. In this tale we get to look at that unexpected element in even the most tightly programmed device. Emily is presented to Claire Havilland as a famous roboticist’s niece but Claire eventually smells a rat, after all, no real teen would know so much about the theatre as Emily did, and indeed Emily turns out to be what is known as an artificial – androids to you and me. Her creator swears blind that Emily couldn’t want Claire’s job, she’d not been programmed to be ambitious but Emily surprised both of them when she set her heart (CPU?) on becoming a Rockette…

Next up are the three novelettes:

Suzanne Palmer’s ‘Surf’ sees us far out in deep space and far into the future. A small group of researchers trying to decipher the mysterious emanations of the Rooans, space whales. Bari is thought to be a Northerner from the researchers' home planet and only on the expedition because she was space qualified. But Bari had other reasons to be on the expedition and with a rather unexpected twist in the tale (it’s not the one that was rather obviously telegraphed either). Palmer might not have managed a full up space opera style tale but the characters are reasonably well drawn and the situation reasonably well described.

Pamela Sargent’s ‘Strawberry Birdies’ is mainly set in 1950s America and told from the point of view of an eight year old girl. Initially it starts off being about how Addie copes with her younger brother who is suffering from something similar to autism though it’s never made explicit. There’re a set of twin babies also upsetting the family equilibrium as Addie’s father struggles to fund his way through his Doctoral course. So when Maerleen Loegins wafts into the family’s life it looks like their problems are going to be eased if not cured but things are not what they seem and as Maerleen takes Addie and Cyril, things start changing around Addie and somehow they’re related to the strawberry birdies her brother sees on his bedroom walls. Although this seems rather Mary Poppinsy it’s not the rather cloyingly sweet version of the story that we get in the Disney film as we learn more of Maerleen’s background and of her interest in Cyril.

Steve Rasnic Tem’s ‘Ephemera’ takes us to a nearby future where virtually everything is run through the web and a generation killing plague has left the survivors in mortal fear of any sort of contagion. Daniel is an information broker, one of those able to find their way through the vast quantities of data and make something useful out of it. But he also had an obsession with books and while he had a virtual library of all the world’s classics, he also had a number of real, physical, books bought from the flea market in the abandoned bits of town. One day, taking his son with him, he finds his dealer gone and the two undertake a search through increasingly murky sections of town and when they finally find the house, they are both horrified at what they find; the bric-a-brac of everyday life and all sorts of books piled up high in boxes throughout the house.

And then the three short stories:

‘The List’ from Tim McDaniel is the closest we get to a seasonal story. Kurt had… acquired ownership of a list that would allow anyone to be blackmail virtually anyone could think of though he knew it was unlikely that he’d live long enough to benefit. This was the most wanted list in the world with everyone from Big Red to the local street corner dealer wanting to have their cut. All Kurt had to do was survive one lousy night and he’d be home free and the front door was securely locked. But he’d forgotten Big Red’s abilities with chimneys...

‘The Countable’ from Ken Liu tells the tale of another disturbed child who’s having severe problems at home and doesn’t find school much fun until his maths teacher introduces him to irrational numbers and Cantor’s diagonal argument that seems to help him make sense of his world and the step father who has a tendency towards violence before David reaches a rational decision that enables him to do something about it… I’m not really into number theory so much of the more theoretical parts of the story skipped past me though Liu does provide links (active in the e-version of the magazine) for further reading on the concepts in his story along with an author note to warn us that Ms Wu has simplified her presentation in any case.

‘”Run” Bakri Says’ from Ferret Steinmetz takes us to some unnamed occupied country where a young woman and her friends are planning how to break her brother out of the jail where he’d been taken to explain his ingenious IEDs. So far so every day headline but Irena and her colleagues have an advantage for if the American guards prove reluctant about letting Irena get too close, Irena has been implanted with a temporal reset switch that allows her to relive a fifty minute sequence until she is able to work out a set of actions that enable her to survive the guards and get her brother out. But Irena has been reset so many times she’s unable to guess how long this takes in experiential time before she takes things into her own hands and blows away the reset device.

There were no poems in this edition of the magazine. Robert Silverberg takes a look at the history of the Patagonian Giants from pure myth to allegedly official reporting and some of the reasons behind such subterfuge – an interesting and amusing piece of investigation.

Interzone #236 Sep-Oct 2011

2011-10-19T06:07:00.001+01:00

‘A Time for Raven’ from Stephen Kotowych is set in the Canadian outback where the loggers are clean cutting the trees and the Native Americans are taking the money. As an elderly NA decides to take one last canoe ride down to the sea through the most dangerous currents in the Northwest Territories he reflects on his past choices and regrets his time on the logging crews before finding an answer of sorts. Despite my initial scepticism, this tale proved to be very good both in terms of content and scene setting. Illustrated by Richard Wagner.

‘The Ever-Dreaming Verdict of Plagues’ from Jason Sanford is a sequel to his earlier ‘Plague Birds’ (according to the blurb – I felt it was more a prequel) and apparently there are quite a few more stories in the sequence. Cristina de Ane finds herself in a village barely a generation away from the changed wild humans investigating the death of a young child. It takes all her skill and that of the AI that infested her blood to survive the conspiracy that they uncovered. Illustrated by Jim Burns.

Fiona Moore’s ‘The Metaphor’ was, in my opinion, the weakest story in this edition. It’s not entirely clear where this is set (but that’s part of the story) as a man is forced by a compulsion he tries to understand to visit each of five inns of varying levels of sophistication to undertake the same pointless procedures day after day. As he undertakes these actions, he speculates on why he’s there. Moore also puts in some background as separate sections that go some way to explaining who this lost soul is.

‘The Fall of the City of Silver’ from Jon Ingold is set on the mythical isle of Tartassos, like it’s almost as mythical counterpart, Tartessos, it was located near the Pillars of Hercules (the modern day Straits of Gibraltar), both of which were loaded with rich deposits of minerals. In this tale, silver is the isle’s sole means of survival and it appears to be a never ending stream but when, first her brother then her father disappear, a young woman takes her worries to the king who decides to end an ancient and evil bargain. This was an unexpectedly atmospheric tale as the evil burrowing at the heart of the land is exposed. Illustrated by Martin Hanford

‘Tethered’ from Mercurio D. Rivera is another story set in his future universe where humans have teamed up with the alien Wergen who had given human access to their system and the rest of the galaxy. Cara first meets the Wergen Beatrix when they are both young and the story follows their friendship as they grow up. The Wergen have a strange-to-human-eyes mating ritual; they seek out the most genetically compatible Wergen and then their tendrils lock the pair together and they begin to merge. Beatrix’s brother tried to stay as far away from Cara as possible for the Wergen were induced into a sort of pheromone induced slavery but when he and his sister prove to be the best genetic match available, Cara tries to make friends with him as well. This tale is less pleasant in some ways than ‘For Love’s Delirium Haunts the Fractured Mind’ but in focusing less on the pheromones it felt less squicky. This story was illustrated by Ben Baldwin.

This edition’s author interview was with the Israeli author Lavie Tidhar and the main review was of his book, Osama. From the sound of it this is set in a sort of alternative universe and requires a bit of work from the reader to fill in the details of the world – I’m not quite sure how easy I would find this, pretty well indoctrinated as I am with the sort of multipage info dump that can occur in books from, say, David Weber, but it does sound somewhat intriguing, apparently Tidhar has a love of the old pulp magazines and genre detective stories all of which apparently infuse Osama. The book to get one of the least positive reviews was Daniel H Wilson’s Robocalypse, a story about a robotic takeover of the US. Given that Wilson is Dr Wilson and his PhD is in Robotics (Dr Wilson has already written a non-fiction version of a robotic apocalypse, How to Survive a Robot Uprising) one should expect that the technology described to be good but the reviewer reckons that expecting cars, for example, to have the technology built in to target moving pedestrians is unlikely. I’m not so sure personally – cars are getting the sensors to detect the presence of obstacles ahead and take corrective action already. It would seem that Ian Sales’ (the reviewer) main beef about this book was the fact that it has already been put into production by no lesser a light than Stephen Spielberg.

Fantasy and Science Fiction Sept/Oct 2011

2011-10-15T21:29:00.000+01:00

I have to admit that the first novelette, ‘Rutger and Baby do Jotenheim’ from Esther M. Friesner did not immediately enthral but I stuck with it and was rewarded, as I should have known I would be, by this variation on the Scandinavian gods’ visit to the home of the giants. Rutger is an associate professor and realised that the young man who had guided Baby and him to his home was in fact the chief of the giants and Rutger and Baby were about to be put to the trials that had defeated the gods. But Baby proves more than equal to the challenge.

‘A Borrowed Heart’ from Deborah J. Ross is practically a horror story and one of the stories with an advisory for the younger readers among us. Lenore found life in the big city rather exciting even though her father found her lifestyle rather unpleasant. When she visits a youth to, ah, introduce him to the joys of adulthood, she is startled to find herself beaten to the draw so to speak by a succubus who she finds to be an empty soul despite all those hearts she wore on chains covering her body. When she’s suddenly called home by a father who had not spoken to her ever since she had started on her embarrassing career, it’s to find her sister near to death after being cruelly used by a lover.

Next up is Chris De Vito’s ‘Anise’, another story that’s rather more adult than usual, and rather more so than the previous story. In this future, so long as there’s not been too much damage to the brain, you can be brought back to life and Anise’s husband Robert is one of this growing number of returnees. Anise finds the gap between them almost unbridgeable and she finds herself attracted to a co-worker until she finds out he too is a returnee. I have to admit I found this a rather unpleasant story – none of the people are particularly pleasant, even Anise – and I have serious doubts about the economics of such a situation; I can’t see the technology being particularly cheap and yet Anise and her husband don’t seem to be in particularly well paid jobs, and then there’s what will all these people do?

Showing the main difference between this magazine and most of the others I get, Albert E. Cowdrey’s ‘Where have All the Young Men Gone?’ is a straight ghost story (it is the October edition after all!). Henry’s a fairly well respected military historian and he’s visiting Austria to attend a conference in Vienna when he decided to visit the town of Gmundt and its military museum where he finds a strange tale. It appears that the museum is haunted by the ghost of a young girl whose favourite victims are young men and in times past when the museum had been a barracks, she had her fill of victims but in these times, she has to make do with any one foolish enough to try and break in overnight. Despite the age difference, Henry finds himself attracted to the young receptionist and they agree to meet at the town’s festival but she finds a younger partner. When the young man’s boyfriend turns up at Henry’s room the following morning wondering where the others had got to Henry has a bad feeling about the situation that is confirmed when they investigate the museum… This was a strong and scary story and though you might not think the ending very hopeful it felt right with the tone of the tale.

The final novelette is ‘What We Found’ from Geoff Ryman is a fairly disturbing tale of a young man’s life in Africa as he contemplates his life. Physically different to his family and neighbours, and having a seriously disturbed upbringing, this tale opens with the man looking back as he waits for his bride. His father went crazy causing the family to lose their comfortable lifestyle and as he grows up he becomes a scientist who makes his name in replication studies but as he attempts to repeat them he finds that the results are becoming less and less repeatable until even what were thought to be scientific standards were beginning to fail. Rather interestingly, I read this story only a few weeks before that rather interesting experiment at CERN regarding the speed of light…

The first of the seven short stories is ‘The Man Inside Black Betty’ from Sarah Langan takes us to a possible near future as the world teeters on the edge of catastrophe after a black hole takes up residence just above the planet’s surface. Black Betty was only a small black hole, explaining why it was not instantly fatal, but only Nicholas Wellington had any successful ideas about dealing with the interloper but the powers-that-be weren’t listening. At first, at least…

Next up was Daniel Marcus’ ‘Bright Moment’. This takes us into the far future where humankind thinks nothing of redesigning entire solar systems for colonisation but when Arun finds that the latest project he and his family were working on would destroy a possibly sentient species, he finds it in him to rebel.

I did not like ‘The Corpse Painter’s Masterpiece’ M Rickert which took us to a strange township where a man had a weird profession – far too weird for me to feel comfortable reading.

‘Aisle 1047’ from Jon Armstrong was another strange tale of a time when the various brands have to go to rather extreme measures in order to sell themselves…

Donald Mead’s ‘Spider Hill’ is another story carrying an age warning. Set in the fifties, a young girl finds out just why her grandmother shows such a weird fascination with the pumpkin patch taking up part of a neighbour’s field. Although it got off to a rather shaky start (in my opinion) it was actually rather a good story overall.

‘Overtaken’ from Karl Bunker is set in the very far future when the bulk of what still calls itself humanity has committed itself to an existence cyber format. But there are relics of the old meat-style humans out and about, including those in the Aotea, colonists in hibernation, when the probe calling itself Rejoindre caught up with it. Rejoindre was attempting to persuade the Aotea to return to Earth space along with its colonists. But Aotea was still loyal to the beliefs of its original programmers and over time had developed the ability to make a series of important decisions in its own right.

‘Time and Tide’ by Alan Peter Ryan takes us back to Frank Parsons’ family home as his father prepares to make the old family residence into a bed and breakfast. Frank isn’t too happy to see that old wardrobe, bringing back memories of his dead younger brother but by the end of the story he has even more reason to have been unhappy to see that wardrobe.

Analog Science Fiction and Fact November 2011

2011-09-26T07:58:00.000+01:00

In this edition we return to the normal selection of novellas, novelettes, short stories and factual pieces.

The novella is ‘With Unclean Hands’ from Adam-Troy Castro takes us back to the world of his unusual diplomat Andrea Cort and one of her earliest interventions when she had to deliver a human murderer to the alien Zinn who had once occupied much of the galaxy until emergence of younger, more aggressive species caused them to give up their empire so what would such a pacifist species want with someone as vile as Simon Farr. Cort’s doubts were further enflamed when she met he Zinn child First Given and her parent Feeder of Prisoners and she began to raise the unpleasant questions her superiors were willing to ignore in their eagerness for Zinn technology. This was a bit too caught up with Cort’s past and her guilt to be truly absorbing but Castro captured the strange society of the Zinn.

The novelette ‘Ian, Isaac, and John’ from Paul Levinson is another story set in a continuing storyline – when I started this I was getting great flashing lights of déjà vu, but it is a new story. This time sending our PoV (not one of the title names) back to the early nineteen seventies where he aims to improve the image of David Bowieby emphasising the presence of John Lennon on the backing track of Bowie’s breakthrough track. But who’s fooling whom here?

The second novelette is ‘The Boneless One’ from Alec Nevala-Lee and it follows the trials and tribulations of an oceanographic expedition. Having made a few billion in industry, Ray Wiley was ploughing the results back into the first systematic sampling of the world’s oceans and give the results to the public domain. Trip had been invited aboard to interview the scientist but was finding it difficult to actually get the interview. When the research vessel ran into a group of bioluminescent octopi all the hidden tensions in the team suddenly flash into the open as Wiley is found dead. But what was the cause? Some of the scenes in this story were particularly gory.

The first of the four short stories is ‘Dig Site’ from Jack McDevitt. Set on the Greek island of Phoros, we meet the curator of the local museum who also had the job of verifying archaeological remains so when an ancient temple was unearthed it became his job to see who it was who was being honoured. This proves rather more difficult than first thought as the statuary looks nothing like anything found before; surely someone in the past had developed a high tech civilisation. I’m not really sure I buy the premise behind this tale – high tech civilisations would surely leave a more damaged environment than is the case. Despite these doubts, though, this was an exciting tale as the archaeologists find their expectations being overthrown…

Don D’Ammassa’s ‘The Buddy System’ is a nicely timed cautionary tale of man’s dependence on technological solutions to provide an oracular voice. Buddy had been a genius throughout school and was quickly picked up by the government when he developed a computer system that was capable of extrapolating information from apparently unrelated sources. He demanded that only good information be entered into the system and it worked but it was not long before the government demanded a system that used all data including speculative data and things seemed to be going well right up until the two systems derived the presence of the other and started to assume the data they were receiving was automatically right, and the humans using that information also assumed it was right even when it clearly wasn’t.

Jerry Oltion’s ‘Rocket Science’ is about a man’s quest to show that cheap space flight is possible despite the disapproval of family and friends. On the day he was pleased to see plenty of TV coverage for the grand launch, but less than delighted when the attention of the crews was hijacked by a guy who had used weather balloons to ascend into the sky. But his epiphany came when he realised that all advances are the result of a single idiot realising their dreams.

‘Chumbolone’ is a weird tale from Bill Johnson set in the murky world of politics where the Chicago Principle lay behind the winner’s votes – the cemetery vote is always decisive. So our PoV is looking at defeat for his candidate until an acquaintance introduces him to a lady with an intriguing proposition; if you can’t control the vote, why not make sure that your opponent won’t get it either? With its mix of almost supernatural and science fictional elements this tale took a while to get my head around.

The science fact piece, ‘Repairing a Broken Heart: Moving Beyond Electronic Pacemakers’ by Richard B. Robinson Ph.D. is a fairly detailed examination of a number of heart arrhythmias and how they are controlled at the moment – the insertion of electronic pacemakers and the potential downside of such devices; mechanical failure of the leads delivering the synchronising pulses for one. Dr Robinson then goes on to look at a number of genetic interventions that could ‘repair’ the damaged tissue, or at least replace it by stem cell material jiggered to replace the damage and the effectiveness of the various delivery techniques. This is one of the more technical pieces that I’ve seen in Analog but Robinson has footnoted the piece to allow you to read further on the various processes he describes. If you have a suitably equipped e-reader some of these also provide active links.

In ‘The Reference Library’, Don Saker takes a look at the past of robots making the interesting point that even Dr Asimov’s desire to have robots-as-tools is really a form of robots-as-menace, which is fair as the robots have made Spacer civilisation so risk averse that they have limited themselves to their fifty worlds in a galaxy teeming with planets and this was a condition recognised by Dr Falstolf in ‘The Caves of Steel’, before going on to look at some recent publications in the genre.

Asimov’s Science Fiction – October/November 2011

2011-09-26T07:48:00.001+01:00

We start this month’s edition of the magazine with two novellas.

The first of these is Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s ‘Stealth’ which takes us to the same milieu as her ‘Diving the Wreck’ novella and associated stories. This time through, the emphasis is not so much on the claustrophobic nature of the wreck dives (though there is a bit of this) but on what was done with the recovered technology. In this particular case stealth technology that had a nasty habit of ripping holes in reality. Squishy had been the empire’s premier scientist in stealth tech before one too many of these failures caused her to chuck it all in and turn to medicine and yet another career change turned her into a wreck diver, then back to scientist. Rusch splits the story between the tale’s present and a variety of pasts where we get to see how Squishy became what she is when the story opens. I can’t say that I’m generally a fan of this sort of thing but the individual jumps are long enough to tell their tale but not so long that they start becoming the main focus so the main thrust of the story doesn’t get too obscured.

The second novella is ‘The Man Who Bridged the Mist’ from Kij Johnson. Set on a far distant planet in the equally far distant future (though it could have been in another reality altogether) this tale is the story of an architect who has been commissioned to bridge a unique river – not humble water but the mist of the title, which is nearly solid and capable of killing those who fall in it, never mind what the denizens of the mist could do to one! If you are thinking the tale of a bridge being built promises to be boring at any length, never mind at novella length, then this story should prove you wrong. Johnson provides some details on the design work and the politicking around the building – the Mist river virtually cuts the local empire in half and far side isn’t too happy about having its autonomy threatened, but she mainly focuses on the societies of the riverside dwellers and how they have been affected by the dangers of the river and their isolation from the mainstream culture.

We have two novelettes in this edition, the first being ‘The Outside Event’ from Kit Reed. A bunch of writers are invited to a mysterious mansion where they have to compete for a prestigious prize – so it’s a bit odd that no one ever hears about the ones who don’t win ever again, but what’s the problem here? The tale is told in a series of Big Brother style confessionals (TV series, not novel, though…), which lead to a rather disjointed narrative and as a first person narration, we don’t get an overall view of the story which was particularly hard on me in this case.

‘My Husband Steinn’ from Eleanor Arnason was a rather unusual tale for the pages of even Asimov’s but suited to the season as it tells the tale of a young Icelandic woman and the efforts of a local troll to, er, woo her. This is set against the austere backdrop of the Icelandic ‘outback’. Signy had rented her remote home so she could write her book unimpeded by the distractions of the modern world but instead finds herself the focus of the amorous attentions of a local – when it was just bunches of flowers and fish being left for her Signy was worried but not concerned and the local policeman seemed more interested in why Signy was there than who was leaving all this stuff so when the troll reveals himself, it’s almost with a sense of relief that Signy realises her peril. Of course she knows how to deal with the philanderer – a bit harsh maybe but the troll’s intent was less than honourable as well. What Signy hadn’t counted on was the family – wife and two little trollings. Mama troll was none-to-pleased about Steinn’s elimination until she’d heard the details after which the two women become sort of friends and Signy is introduced to Troll Society as the trolls make plans to migrate away from the new dams that were being built to supply power to the proposed aluminium smelters. Although the tale is written rather matter of factually, this is part of the charm of the story. Apparently Ms Arnason has retired from employment but hopefully will remain active in the fiction field.

The first of the six short stories is Dominica Phetteplace’s ‘The Cult of Whale Worship’. Set in Japan, the protagonist is a bio researcher who’s main line of work becomes a way of saving the whales from humanity by finding a way of causing humans to stop eating the whale meat. As it happens the main focus of the story is more on the protagonist’s interaction with those around him.

‘This Petty Page’ from Jason K. Chapman is a rather intriguing take on the ability of people to affect their pasts. Kyle Preston is about to go out and meet his fiancée when the talking head first appears though it becomes obvious it isn’t the first time the talking head’s tried to warn Kyle about something – Kyle isn’t too sure what the apparition is on about and he’s eager to be off so he’s not paying proper attention anyway. The head appears to him at various other times too with its warnings of a dystopia brought on by Kyle’s great mumble grandson and Kyle becomes a believer as time passes so he resolves to leave a note to his descendant to be opened if a particular child was born…

‘The Pastry Chef, The Nanotechnologist, The Aerobics Instructor, and the Plumber’ from Eugene Mirabelli is a rather fantastical tale of the unlikely quartet as they’re brought together by the disturbing presence of voices emanating from the pastry chef’s household plumbing – Italian from the kitchen taps and French from the loo. It’s also a tale of relationships and how they are changed by the on-going sonological manifestations.

‘Free Dog’ from Jack Skillingstead takes us to a future where things can be rapidly and fairly easily duplicated so when Travis suddenly sees copies of his pet wandering about he quickly realises that his ex-wife must have copied it and programmed in the tricks that so entranced those who were downloading the template. In an attempt to sue his ex for damages – it was his dog and he’d done all the training – Travis finds out about the perils of IP theft! This is an interesting take on the problem and while we aren’t at this level of duplication yet, the growing availability of RepRaps is going to bring IP disputes into the third dimension…

‘To Live and Die in Gibbontown’ from David Künsken takes us to a post-human earth where the other primates rule (Planet of the Apes without the humans) . the various primates live in an uneasy peace with each other but otherwise in a society that wouldn’t be too unfamiliar with us today. Our PoV character is an impoverished macaque who’s come up with a great idea on how to earn a buck or hundred that would get the gibbon immigration authorities off his back but offering an assassination services so that the beloved elderly could become the dearly missed departed proved more of a challenge than he had initially anticipated. As noted above, the society as presented did not feel all that different to modern day society; the various primates all drove similar sounding cars and shopped in the same shops and I failed to get a great sense of that difference – it could have as easily been a tale about an innovative way of rebalancing the growing numbers of elderly in human society.

‘A Hundred Hundred Daisies’ from Nancy Kress takes us into a future where the world has warmed so much that great irrigation schemes are being developed to pump water from the great lakes down south to try and keep the people there alive but the people of the lakes area are also suffering and determined to not to see their own lives ruined. The PoV of this tale is one such person even though he barely remembers a time when the farm had any grass, and his sister knew only the dust bowl. The daisies of the title are a set of drawings made by the sister as she imagines what they would have looked like. The story is very tightly focussed on this community and their struggle to keep going but there are also just enough mentions of the wider world to indicate it is a much wider problem.

There are five poems of which the best was ‘Extended Family’ from Bruce Boston even if it was quite bleak, though not as depressing as ‘Galileo’s Ink Spots Fade Into Twilight’ by Geoffrey A. Landis. This latter poem telling of a time when the sun goes through an occasional period of cooling. Ruth Berman’s ‘Being One With Your Broom’ was probably the funniest.

Analog - October 2011

2011-09-10T13:06:00.000+01:00

This edition sees the final part of Edward M Lerner’s serialised novel, ‘Energized’. With a great deal of ingenuity, those trapped aboard the base on Phoebe have been rescued from almost certain death but with the supposed eco-terrorists still in charge on PS-1 their prospects haven’t improved drastically. With the Americans downside powerless to do anything but launch a missile attack that would leave the volume of space round Phoebe and PS-1 unusable for decades things look bleak until a madcap scheme is launched by Marcus and a few others to take out PS-1 by themselves but unsure if all the terrorists have gone they can’t properly inform groundside. Although some parts of this seem a bit rushed, I imagine that at least part of this is because of the nature of the serialisation so it might be rather interesting to get the novel when it’s released.

Janet Catherine Johnston’s ‘Of Night’ is, appropriately enough, a ghost story even if one played out on Analog’s rather strict hard science terms. A family camping out are joined by a rather wild looking young woman who tells them the story of the spaceship she rode out to the edges of the system in. This used a drive that circumvented the normal rules about how fast you could go and while such ships had a bad safety record, this mission was going OK until it was time to come home. After an expedition that saw all the crew undertake an exploratory mission, they returned to the vessel to find it subtly different, and not only because of the death of one their crew on the surface. As the ship turns for home, the members of the crew begin vanishing one-by-one until only Frances is left, doomed to be a sort of interplanetary Flying Dutchwoman. Back at the campfire, the family is suitably impressed by the story but disturbed as the tale teller claims to be Frances…

The first of the short stories is Jerry Oltion’s ‘The Last of Lust’ looks at how society changes when the area of the brain responsible for lust is de-activated – partnering between the sexes becomes the abnormal, and somewhat off-putting, partnership choice.

‘The Bullfrog Radio Astronomy Project’ from Brad R. Togersen is a rather whacky piece about what happened when a community radio project meets up with an eccentric dot com millionaire. PoV character Ron has been running his community radio for decades out in the back lands of the State, just about getting enough in contributions to keep things running when Andy Chang turned up in the locale. At first the millionaire was seen as a typical eccentric, except his particular eccentricity ran into radio telescopes, building and running his own observatory. Now usually radio observatories and transmitters don’t mix that well, but Chang doesn’t mind that much and after a while he comes to Ron with an offer that can’t be refused – the total re-equippal of the studio in exchange for a feed off the station into the radio telescope. Now, this is a technical breach of the rules but who’s going to complain and Ron’s equipment is being held together by gaffer tape so he accepts. When he is finally confronted by the broadcast authorities he finds they’re a bit scarier than he’d anticipated!

‘The Lycanthropic Principle’ from Carl Frederick is another story heading towards fantasy, particularly for Analog, but there is quite a bit of hardish science in it. A professor in the local college finds himself on the receiving end of the worst kinds of internet spam ruining his reputation and threatening his job. Fortunately the college IT support guy is an uber geek and agrees to help restore the professor’s reputation but it takes the professor into areas he’d rather he didn’t know about…

Edward M Lerner gets a second bite at the cherry with a factual piece, ‘Lost in Space: Follow the Money’. In this article we get a look at the various competing models for the non-governmental exploitation of space and I suspect we are probably best learning Chinese if we want to go into space any time soon though I could be wrong…

Asimov's - September 2011

2011-09-04T14:58:00.000+01:00

And so the latest Asimov'scomes down from the ether to my Kindle app (Android Smart Phone if you'rewondering) with twenty factual and fictional articles in this latest edition.

First of the three novelettesin this month's edition is Alan M Steele's 'The Observation Post' which takesus back to October 1962 - not the Cuban Missile Crisis itself but in the periodleading up to it. A real historical oddity in its way for the PoV is a navysignals ensign on an anti-submarine blimp suddenly ordered down to theCaribbean though they're not told why. Although they don't really like the newintelligence lieutenant it isn't until a tropical storm forces them down on oneof the islands that the lieutenant finds a couple claiming to be Germans thatarouses his suspicions that things start getting really weird. What the ensignand the lieutenant find in the couple's beach house would have made themenvious if they'd had the first idea of what they'd found but all thelieutenant could think of Russian agents. In his rush to inform his superiorshe refused to listen to the warnings of catastrophe if the American governmentlearned of the missiles too soon so someone has to stop him... The ensign findsit necessary to scrag the lieutenant in order to make sure that the governmentis not alerted too soon but he spends the rest of his life wondering what wouldhave happened if the alert had been raised. Then in his final days he saw ayoung woman whom he had last seen in the Caribbean so many decades ago. This story was the cover story

‘Shadow Angel’ from Erick Melton was a ratherstrange tale, jumping about all sorts of times. It’s set in a future where the variouspower groups have allocated areas of space and an inherited form ofinterstellar transport where the pilots guided their vessels through jump spaceby feel and Emil was one of the best but on his latest job, he was findinghimself being haunted by his old lover’s past avatar aswell as the Angel version of her that he used as his focus. But it was nothelping get the ship to its destination – only known to the captain andHanuel.

The finalnovelette in this edition of the magazine is Alan Wall’s ‘Burning Bibles’ which at first sight seems to be astandard crime/intelligence story with a report of a warehouse down in Cornwallsuffering the loss of hundreds of bibles in a fire. The case is drawn to theattention of a shadowy part of the intelligence community both in the UK andUS. The science fiction elements of the story relate to the method ofinvestigation as the US intelligence team send across a unique investigator.Apart from this, the story really focuses on the internal musings of thisinvestigator, which was not as bad as it sounds.

The first of theshort stories was ‘D.OC.S.’ from Neal Barrett Jr. this is setin a future after an undisclosed catastrophe of some form where the medicalprofession has been split into two types – the doktrs who could handleday-to-day ailments but were forced to report more serious conditions to theD.O.C.S., the ultra-high tech Department of Curative Science, who took awayeveryone else. When the D.O.C.S. turned up in Bobby’s home town he was terrified for heremembered what had happened to his grandfather and now his mother was not wellin a way their local GP could not help with. But it was his father’s defiance that crystalised Bobby’s dislike into hatred. This storykept me rather on the edge of my seat, mainly as I was waiting for a discussionof what had gone so wrong with the healthcare system.

‘Danilo’, from veteran writer CarolEmshwiller is a tale of a pair of women from the edges of society as they goout into the world. Lewella isn’t considered altogetherthere even in her society so when she tells her colleagues she’s found a lover and intends wedlock,they think she’s gone evenfurther over the edge but when she suddenly ups sticks and goes looking for herDanilo everyone is taken by surprise and the PoV storyteller joins her on hermission ‘just to make sure nothing goeswrong’. The two women find all sorts ofstrange things on their journey but the strangest, surely, is Lewella’s Danilo, unless it’s the man that Mary Ellen finds…

‘The Odor ofSanctity’ from Ian Creasy is a strangelittle tale. Set in the slums of Manila, it tells of the final days of FatherFrancesco and some of his followers. The father had set up a charity to workwith the slum dwellers and he had earned the same sort of reputation that theBlessed Teresa of Calcutta earned. Determined to ease his last days, Dorabought the scent of his Italian homeland from the scent shop but unable toafford the odour, she does a deal with the shop keeper; to capture the scent aroundthe dying man in order to capture the putative odour but the mission is goingbust and Dora finds another use for the captured scent.

‘Grandma Said’ from R Neube is set on a colonialworld that is suffering from cholly disease in all its multiple strains. We geta fairly detailed examination of the decontamination processes used against thespores and some of the consequences on the society of the colony. Our PoV character attributes his continued survival to some important advise from his grandmother.

Robert Reed’s ‘Stalker’ takes us to a world where thereare AI entities that are able look after those they are configured for. To knoweverything about them. In this tale, told from the point of view of one ofthese stalkers, who’s been melded to apsychotic personality and twisted to accept his views until things take a darkturn…

There are fivepoems and the most telling one was Jessy Randall’s ‘I Have a Remote in Each Hand’ as the poet goes through the remotesthey own and what they do. ‘Elvin Alvin’ from PMF Johnson was rather fun asit tells of the eponymous elf who is a rebel with a cause.

Fantasy & Science Fiction Jul/Aug 2011

2011-08-27T12:54:00.000+01:00

There is a novella, Robert Reed’s ‘The Ants of Flanders’, which is basically an alien invasion story but is actually rather a complex story as the Earth is invaded by one set of life forms while an ancient set of defenders are woken to stop the incursion more-or-less regardless of the consequences. The story is told through the point of view of Bloch, a sixteen year old boy whose main claim to fame was that he did not feel fear. In this conflict, Bloch’s ‘disability’ is used as a part of the weapon that he becomes. Although the overall effect of the tale is very definitely not a cosy story, Mr Reed manages to turn this into a story with a very definite human tale. This was the cover story.

The first of the three novelettes was Peter David’s ‘Bronsky’s Dates with Death’. Now, most people usually only have a single date with Death when all is said and done but Bronsky had inadvertently found the perfect escape; he was always going on about death and that it was his time to die but Death in this story comes only to those who were not looking for Him so Bronsky comes in for some special attention…

‘The Witch of Corinth’ from Steven Saylor is one of his Gordianus tales when the youthful crime solver and his companion are travelling round the known world in search of the Seven Wonders of the World. On this part of their trip, the travelling companions find themselves in Greece having been to the Olympic Games and on their way home, they pass the destroyed city of Corinth and Gordianus’ companion asks that they stop over to investigate the destroyed city. When they do, they find the local garrison riven by fears of ghosts and witches but such creatures are not real surely? Gordianus is a hard headed scion of Rome but when he and Antipater decide to study the remains, they find that they are not as dead as they might appear!

‘The Ramshead Algorithm’ from KJ Kabza started off rather weirdly, almost as if someone had been smoking something they shouldn’t have but it soon became somewhat less weird. Ram has a job in the wider reality repairing and maintaining it against those that would cause trouble but back home he’s the spoilt eldest child of a multibillionaire who’s expected to do nothing but flaunt his wealth. When his father decides that the maze that is the entrance to Ram’s external realities Ram finds his two realities colliding as he has to persuade his sceptical siblings to help him move the gateway.

Peter S Beagle’s ‘The Way It Works Out and All’ is a strange tale of how Beagle was introduced to a new way of travel by his old friend Avram Davidson (a former editor of this magazine amongst other things).

‘Less Stately Mansions’ from Rob Chilson takes to a future world that is slowly dying. Dying from the drain of people to the space habitats. Dying from the increasing cold suffered by Earth as the habitats steal the solar radiation needed to warm the planet. Jacob Mannheim was a farmer, an increasingly rare breed as more and more food was produced hydroponically and his distant relatives attempt to declare him mentally unfit to run the huge farm he owned as they attempted to buy their way out to one of the colonies.

‘Hair’ by Joan Aiken was a bit of a surprise particularly as Joan has been dead a fair while now… A man meets a free spirited woman on a trip out East and the pair fall in love and marry. Sadly the woman threw herself so much into all the activities around her that she soon dies leaving her grieving husband with her hair to return to her disturbing family.

‘Sir Morgravain Speaks of Night Dragons and Other Things’ is from the pen of Richard Bowes and takes us to the post defeat of King Arthur as he and his noble knights await the call to Britain’s defence. Unlike his fellow knights Sir Morgravain is no noble knight but a gadfly to his overweeningly pure colleagues, forcing them to look at various aspects of their lives they’d rather forget. But who put Sir Morgravain in amongst these valiant defenders of the realm?

‘Someone Like You’ from Michael Alexander is a tale of alternate realities. When our narrator finds that the person she likes to call her real father was killed by an unknown person, she becomes obsessed by the thought of racking down this mysterious killer. When she discovers she has the ability to move through time the identity of the killer becomes clear but with the present changing as the past is changed will she be able to follow through on her self-imposed mission?

The science piece in this edition, ‘Pattern Recognition, Randomness, and Roshambo’ – Roshambo is otherwise known as Rock, Paper, Scissors and an on-line version can be found at the New York Times, looks at the art of pattern matching used by computers and humans and how the latter still have the edge when it comes to picking out truly random solutions (though even there, not as random as you might think).

Interzone #235 Jul-Aug 2011

2011-07-23T19:45:00.000+01:00

In this edition we get the traditional five stories of middling length and good quality. I think that this session of subscribing to Interzone in all its incarnations is now the longest and the current publishers have reintroduced the option of ‘life-time’ subscriptions (ours, or the magazine’s depending on which is shorter) charged at a ten year subscription – see ttapress.com for details.

The stories open with the best of the bunch in my opinion, ‘Insha’Allah’ from Matthew Cook and if it opens feeling rather derivative of current events in North Africa and Afghanistan, Cook eschews a story based on a science fictiony peace-keeping mission with high tech kick-assery, dwelling instead on the effects the conflict’s having on the local population. As may be guessed from the title, the planet in question has been colonised by followers of the Prophet and they had developed a fairly easy going version of Islam until the aliens appear, followed by the Concordiat defenders which allowed the hard-line Islamists to enforce their brand of sharia. Shaomi, the PoV character is the local village’s preparer of the dead – a role tolerated by the extremists for it would be improper for the men to do what needs doing to females (or vice versa for that matter). Shaomi had been educated as a nurse and as such always feared being found out by the local Black Turbans as she also acts as the local healer. When the pilot of one of the defending craft is brought into her home both Shaomi and the pilot are put at extreme risk. Shaomi does not hesitate to ease the suffering of the pilot as she lays dying, too far from anywhere capable of saving her. It’s Shaomi’s quiet dignity in the face of the obstacles put in her way by the situation she finds herself in that makes this story. This story was illustrated by Richard Wagner.

‘For Love’s Delirium Haunts the Fractured Mind’ from Mercurio D Rivera is a rather odd tale of contact between humans and aliens. Not the least strange thing about this tale is that it’s told from the alien’s point of view. The Wergen should, by all that’s fair, be the senior partners in their joint colonies with the humans; after all it’s their technology that has given humanity access to the solar system and the stars. But they suffer from one slight problem; there’s something about being in the presence of humans causes them to adore us utterly and completely. The story looks at the effect this has on the Wergen by looking at one of their indentured explorers as he travels the road from pheromone enslaved humanophile to cold blooded analyst of the situation after his senses had been chemically neutered. This story was illustrated by Ben Baldwin.

‘The Walrus and the Icebreaker’ from Jon Wallace is a more traditional near-future dystopia. With the world’s oil reserves virtually exhausted and climate change having done horrible things to the world’s land area, a fleet of ships has been dispatched to the Arctic to plunder the reserves thought to lie under the oceans there. As part of the defence team, a genetically enhanced walrus and his handler is along for the ride; months and months of monotonous darkness and cold and praying that they aren’t spotted by enemy vessels undertaking equally desperate surveys of their own. But the two fleets do find themselves in contention for the crude and a not entirely sane crew finds itself in action. The best part of this tale were the feelings of claustrophobia and disconnect that Wallace manages to bring to the mining ship. Mark Pexton illustrated this story.

‘Eleven Minutes’ from Gareth L Powell is the length of time it takes the signals that Gary and Carl receiving and sending to their Mars rover to make the round trip. Gary and Carl don’t get on all that well with Gary being a health food rationalist and Gary not; Gary reads science fiction – save us! When Gary spots a strange shadow in the pictures being beamed back home, those eleven minutes become vital as the team reposition the probe to see what it was. A boot came the answer. A woman in a space suit and given the flag a member of the British empire… this was definitely written for laughs with Carl and Gary being typical American stereotypes.

I was sort of expecting Al Robertson’s ‘Of Dawn’ to be a horror story, what with us meeting Sarah as she’s burying her brother after his death in Iraq and she starts seeing his body in all sorts of unusual places. We’re also treated to a number of flashbacks as the pair grow up and develop their talents. This led to Sarah learning about an old-time musician who had written a series of tone poems about Salisbury Plain and Sarah’s adventures lead to a greater understanding of her brother and a sort of closure. Although my initial uncertainty over where this story was going did sort of ebb, I still did not find it particularly at home in Interzone. Illustrated by Richard Wagner

The author interview was with Lisa Goldstein and her new book ‘The Uncertain Places’ which sounds like a rather interesting take on a supposedly supressed Grimms Brothers fairy tale of a young girl who falls asleep for seven years in payment for her family’s good fortune., bringing it into the modern world and a new culture. The pick of the rest of the reviews was ‘The Steampunk Bible’ put together by Jeff Vandermeer and SJ Chambers which documents most aspects of this rather remarkable genre .

Analog Science Fiction - September

2011-07-10T15:46:00.001+01:00

With electronic delivery, I seem to have gone from famine to feast with the arrival of this latest copy of the magazine almost three months before the cover date – at least no more editions lost in the post!

For a single month edition, there are a fairly good number of stories in this edition; the third part of the serialised novel, two novelettes, three short stories and a science fact piece along with a plethora of editorial pieces.

We are at part 3 of Edward M. Lerner’s ‘Energized’ and with the world laid low to what appear to be ecoterrorists, it looks like it’s curtains for the world but who’s really responsible? If you’ve read the first two parts you’ll know of course but at long last the Americans begin to realise just how badly they’ve been manipulated (or should that be ‘how well?)!

The first of the novelettes is ‘Therapeutic Mathematics and the Physics of Curve Balls’ by Gray Rinehart. Joey had been sold to a freak show by his uncle after the deaths of his parents. In the freak show, Joey was the boy who had survived a baseball being smashed through his skull, leaving it too dangerous to remove. In reality the ‘baseball’ was a growth the size of a ball. But Joey was a freak. Just not in the way the carnies thought he was for Joey was a mathematical whizz, if not wiz, and he was not so mildly telepathic. He really does like baseball though – all those stats (though cricket must run it a closish second…). On an unauthorised visit to a baseball game, Joey finds his mind being attracted by another member of the crowd whose attention was not on the game but on a problem to do with Manhattan (the story’s set in the early days of America’s Second World War). As he enters the man’s mind, Joey spots an error and the possibility of a new life. This is a rather nice tale with the bleakness of Joey’s life in the show being counterpointed by flashbacks to his life with his father (though I’m going to guess he was either home schooled or not old enough to have started before, ah, joining the circus). Joey’s psychic abilities did seem to grow as demanded but apart from that this was, eventually, an uplifting tale.

Carl Frederick’s ‘Helix of Friends’ takes us to an intriguing parallel world where Mark Smith is awaiting the return of his best friend from a sabbatical. Gary had an adopted son, Adrian, who had had a disturbed childhood much like Mark himself. Mark had reacted by blocking off his memories and it was looking as if Adrian was coping by creating an imaginary friend. In order to help Adrian Mark proposed a mind linking of friends and associates so Adrian could share his blocked memories. Mark, a powerful linker, tries ‘surfing’ the linked minds through to Adrian only to find himself travelling a bit further than he had anticipated; all the way across the walls of his own reality into the mind of Eric, Adrian’s not-so-imaginary friend. Once there (or , rather, here) Mark is startled by the technology available and overwhelmed by the shear variety of flora but disturbed to find himself taking on the characteristics of a nine year old boy. He had to get back home while he could! But with Adrian being the one to initiate contact both he and Eric had an anxious wait. Once back home, though, Mark finds he has recovered the memories of his lost childhood and as an adult is better able to deal with them. This was a bit slow to get started but it did pick up a bit once Mark’s consciousness transferred to Eric and Frederick makes our reality feel genuinely different as Mark adjusts to his new habitation.

Emily Mah’s ‘Hostile Environment’ takes us to a fairly well established Mars Base where Mala and her brother Jasraj have come to stay with their father. The two youngsters are not finding the confines of the base easy to come to terms with especially when Jason, the base commander’s son is the cause of the problems they’re getting blamed for but it’s when the two youngsters appear to blow up the weather station after fooling about with the rover that the adults lose all patience with them. This time the children are completely innocent, though! It took a rather interesting practical demonstration to show that Mala might have a possible hypothesis for the disaster, one with implications for the imminent arrival of the next supply shuttle. Although this got a little emotionally manipulative at times, Mah did manage a nice tale of life on a hostile frontier.

‘The Chaplain’s Assistant’ from Brad Torgersen is a POW tale. A human invasion force has been incarcerated on an alien world and has been there so long that they have their own little society that has largely forgotten about the force screens imprisoning them. The Chaplain’s assistant is startled to be confronted by one of their captors though in this case not a warrior caste but a scientist wanting to know more about this thing called a soul, oh yes and bearing the news that the prisoners were about to be disposed of… the assistant makes a deal; the scientist can bring in his researchers if he stops the planned genocide. At first, it looks as if there would be no deal as the force fields start contracting but eventually the assistant sees signs that the deal had been managed, at least locally. A rather intriguing tale of humans versus aliens in that I don’t recall many such tales where humanity is in such desperate straits. Torgersen is the subject of the biolog – maybe it’s his Norwegian heritage that engendered this bleak tale.

‘Asteroid Monte’ from Craig DeLancey is another tale set in space but this time, although relative newcomers, humanity is at a far more equal level to the rest of galactic society. Our POV in this tale is a member of an elite interstellar peacekeeping force who finds himself partnered with a grizzly bear not too keen on herbivores, or omnivores for that matter. Their first mission is to work out how the spores of a hybrid machine/vegetable lifeform are being smuggled out of a quarantined system. Super drive spaceships are the suspects here but the human’s memories of an old carnie trick enable the duo to work out how they’re being tricked! This was an enjoyable tale by-and-large, though I’m not so sure that carnivores really tend to act more rationally in stressful situations than herbivores, or omnivores, as DeLancy was implying.

The science fact piece ‘Shake, Rattle, and Roll: Is Missouri Really America’s Most Dangerous Earthquake Zone?’ is from regular columnist Richard A. Lovett. Now, most people are aware that America’s west coast, and California in particular, is pretty prone to quakes, being part of the Pacific Ring of Fire tectonic plate fracture zones. Missouri, on the other hand, is pretty much bang in the middle of the North American continental plate and so should be fairly stable. It would appear, however, that there was a fairly large quake in the early 1800s and estimates put it between 7 and 7.5 on the Richter scale; quite powerful if true. There are doubts though as none of the (relatively few) inhabitants of the then territory were geologists and there was no network of seismographs to make an impartial record of the event. However, the likelihood of such a big quake happening sometime within the next 25,000 years puts Missouri into a higher category of risk than California. Lovett looks at some of the potential risk factors that do exist in Missouri’s geology – there’s a fault but it doesn’t appear to be under any great strain.

The Reference Library section looks at the development of Transhumanism – the development of a better form of intelligence from our present. In the last few years this has generally been seen as replacing humans with some form of machine assisted higher intelligence – Vernor Vinge’s Singularity but the development of the species has been part of speculative fiction since the eighteen hundreds - basically since Darwin developed his theory of evolution. Before this it was generally though that

Technorati Tags: analog science fiction,short stories,factual,novelettes,serials

humanity was a devolved or lesser form and the gods were the overall rulers.

Asimov's Science Fiction - August 2011

2011-07-06T21:02:00.000+01:00

In this edition of the magazine we find nine stories and poems. Three of these are novelettes, four are short stories and two are poems.

The first of the novelettes is ‘The End of the Line’ from Robert Silverberg. This story takes us back to Silverberg’s magnificent creation, Majipoor. This gigantic planet is home to a growing population of humans and an assortment of other alien races as well as its native race, the Metamorphs, who have the uncanny ability to change form to mimic almost any other living creature. In this tale, the human rulers are becoming aware that the natives are growing restive under the threat of the growing numbers of aliens but are split. Stiamot belonged to the party that wanted an accommodation with the Metamorphs but there were others who wanted to exterminate the Metamorphs. Lord Coronal Strelkimar, lost amongst his own demons, ignored the bickering and suddenly announced a Progress amongst his subjects. The tale is told from Stiamot’s point of view as he comes to a small city in the back end of nowhere and uses the opportunity to learn more of these mysterious Metamorphs. What he finds is an exiled noble acting as a doctor to these same Metamorphs and an answer as to what had destroyed the Coronal’s peace of mind. He’s also given a new job as Majipoor’s unique system of government swings to put the Coronal’s diadem upon his head. But there are dark tides flowing through the massive jungles of Majipoor that would throw Stiamot’s beliefs into turmoil.

‘Corn Teeth’ from Melenie Tem is a rather unusual tale of a pair of young human children who have been taken in by an alien family group – a very alien grouping indeed. The young boy is too young to really remember his real family but the girl is just about old enough and she is conflicted about the plans of the family group’s plans to adopt; at first she hopes that she’s becoming like her adopted family as her teeth begin to drop out but eventually she learns the horrible truth that she won’t become physically an alien...

The final novelette, from Lisa Goldstein, is 'Paradise Is a Walled Garden' and provides the inspiration for the cover illustration. This is an interesting alternate history tale set in an Elizabethan (First of England) age where the Moors had not been kicked out of Andalucía but had gone on to established a technological based civilisation that has led to quite a high degree of automation. Tip is a young girl masquerading as a boy working in a manufactory when she witnesses a golem going rogue. With her supervisor and a number of other crown advisors, Tip finds herself on her way to the magical world of Andalucía to see what had caused the damage. Although the basic premise has probably been done to death, this tale is rather unusual in taking this Elizabethan Age as a proto technological era and in having Tip as a girl pretending to be a boy (ok, not too unusual in itself, perhaps). Goldstein managed to invoke the wonders of Andalucía and makes it different to Tip’s home society while not investing it with the attitudes of today’s West.

The first of the short stories is Philip Brewer’s ‘Watch Bees’. This is set in an unexplained post-apocalyptic future where the hinterlands of the US are a wild wasteland where the isolated farmlands are at risk from bandits. In order to defend the farms, biological defences in depth surround the farms and it takes a brave, or desperate, enough person to risk the bees that defend these farms…

‘For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I’ll Not Be Back Again’ from Michael Swanwick is another somewhat post-apocalyptic future – aliens have conquered Earth but the occupation seems rather benign except that some people are unable to believe in anyone telling them what to do. An American, shipping out off-world, takes the opportunity to go to Ireland where he meets up with a beautiful Irish singer who gradually ensnares him in a deadly web. Can he break free?

‘We Were Wonder Scouts’ by Will Ludwigsen is a rather interesting take on Charles Fort – the man behind the Fortean Times. What if he had started an organisation similar to the Boy Scouts, only focusing on the strange? This tale is a tale within a tale as a founding member of this organisation recounts that first camping expedition at a world jamboree of the Wonder Scouts.

‘Pairs’ from Zachary Jernigan could also qualify as a post-apocalyptic story, though horror story comes to mind as well! Humanity has been destroyed, only existing as souls imprisoned in soul boxes and being sold off to interested aliens. Although the salesmen are the aliens who destroyed Earth the couple who deliver the soul cages are as human as their cargo. But one is a little upset about his employment conditions…

The first of the poems is ‘Bribing Karma’ by Danny Adams, looking at the various ways that your karma can be affected.

‘The Music of Nessie’ from Bruce Boston is a rather nice reflection on those events that happen on the edge of consciousness.

Robert Silverberg’s Reflections column is a look at the strange planet that we all live on with a particular emphasis on the Albanian Highlanders’ revenge code.

Interzone #234 May/June 2011

2011-06-14T05:11:00.003+01:00

We get the standard five stories in this edition but given that one of these is barely two pages long we might consider this a bit of a short change but this would be as we get a few that are a bit longer than average as well so it probably evens out overall. Mind, it took a while to arrive – I was fearing that this magazine was lost in the post – but it did eventually turn up.

The first story is ‘Sleepers’ from Jon Ingold that tells the tale of a moderately far future Earth at a time where mankind having tried to plant a colony on Centauri a few generations ago was about to try again. A priest tending to the grandchild of one of the original colonists finds the ancient a source of tales of the doomed colony and finds him putting himself forward as part of that mission. The priest has suffered his own scourge, twisted by a sweep of radiation. Illustrated by Mark Pexton [markofthedead.deviantart.com]

‘In the Season of the Mango Rains’ from Lavie Tidhar is a rather strange, and short, tale of a person’s farewell message to their lover as one opts to be put into suspended animation while the other accepts the limitations of their normal lifespan.

Next up is ‘The Ceiling is Sky’ from Suzanne Palmer is a rather neat story. On a planet far, far away (no not that one!) most of the planet only has access to the occasional bits of work and it’s entirely up to the individual to get any training above the most basic and, needless to say, its everyone for themselves. Our protagonist gets himself involved in a project to design a set of sea based mining platforms for a world even farther away. On an initial selection of ten for the team, the group is quickly whittled down to our protagonist and a couple of colleagues but our protagonist is having a crisis of faith; quite literally when a monk agitator from the threatened planet arrives to try and stop the development going through. Our protagonist finds that having a conscience can be a confusing thing. A really fine piece of writing! Illustrated by Richard Wagner.

‘Her Scientifiction, Far Future, Medieval Fantasy’ from Jason Sanford puts us into an apparently medieval setting with castles and princesses at risk of being born away from her home by raiders. The mixture of weapons used by invaders and defenders alike is your first indication this is not a straight fantasy. As Sanford unfolds his tale we learn more of this world we find ourselves in and this is an artificial reality maintained by an AI and the Princess is the offspring of reality and AI and all disgruntled teen! Illustrated by Richard Wagner.

‘Incompatible’ from Will McIntosh introduces us to Leia and Byron who both have issues. If they leave their power places as they’ve learnt to call them, they find their surroundings being filled by a mass of black spheres that multiply until they’re driven back again. Trouble is that Byron and Leia’s power spots are the antithesis of the other’s so that once the pumpkin sale was over, there were few places they could be together and they found they cared about that a great deal! But were the spheres real and could they have a real effect? Illustrated by Mark Pexton.

The author interview this edition was with David Wingrove and if he's known for anything, it was his eight volume Chung Kuo series starting off with The Middle Kingdom, a near fantasy view of the future with China having, quite literally taken over the world. Now, with that future a rather more chilling full science fiction possible real future, Wingrove is rebooting this series and adding a whole slew of addition books to the series, boosting it to a rather mind boggling 20 volume series! The first of these, Son of Heaven, is already out and takes us back to the beginnings of that reality as the Chinese begin their absorbtion of what had been Europe. It's not quite as hard on Wingrove as it sounds - the origial eight books will be republished as part of this epic undertaking, but we still have another 11 novels to go... It might be interesting to see if reality catches up with fiction before Wingrove finishes!

Fantasy & Science Fiction May/June 2011

2011-06-12T17:13:00.000+01:00

This month there was a large number of short stories along with a couple of novelettes and a novella. However, the most interesting piece was Maria E Alonzo’s special feature ‘Jesse Francis McComas: The Traveler Returns’. McComas was Alonzo’s great uncle and whilst the piece is basically a tale of the search for a lost relative it also has a degree of relevance to this magazine as McComas was a co-founder of a magazine by the name of ‘The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction’ still going strong these many decades later :-). Gordon Van Gelder’s editorial is also the tale of an unknown person – F Gwynplaine MacIntyre is, or, rather, was a regular contributor to the Curiosities section of the magazine. But apparently he was not quite who he said he was – with a name like that, could he ever have been?

Anyway, the stories:

We have a single novella, ‘Rampion’, from Alexandra Duncan which takes place in that period of history where Christianity and Islam were contending for control of the Iberian Peninsula. Although a beautifully written tale, I found the story a longer than my attention span found worthy.

‘The Black Mountain’ from Albert E Cowdrey is set in New Orleans where a local entrepreneur has disappeared after a project to build a new rec centre had come to grief when the project would involve the destruction of a cathedral built by a group of East European immigrants. Although the people had long gone, they retained a reputation of being a clannish bunch and there was that cathedral lying in the path of Wallaby’s philanthropic bulldozers. Alex is the founder of a local charity dedicated to saving New Orleans’ lost treasures find himself being dragged into the project as an advisor and as he delves deeper into the history the more he feels that there is some real power behind the place, especially when they uncover the altar piece fresco. But it’s the disappearance of his developer protagonist that makes Alex examine the artwork more carefully... although this was a rather long build up the end came as a nice shocker.

‘Music Makers’ from Kate Wilhelm is the final story in the magazine as as it started with a musical piece, so we end with one. This starts with a reporter going to interview the surviving members of a blues group in the back streets of Memphis. He’s not feeling very positive; the dead man was virtually unknown as far as he could see and the reporter knew anything he wrote would be massacred to fit an end-of-piece column. What he finds is a haunting story of music and love. Normally I would find have found such a tale rather sentimental but in fact I rather enjoyed it.

The first of the short stories is Chet Williamson’s ‘The Final Verse’, the first of the musical pieces. In this tale an old time singer is looking a break that will get him back into the big time and when a song collector came to him saying he had a line on his favourite piece but would mean a trip up into the backwoods of the Appalachians he jumped at the chance. The pair do find the source of their song but that final verse proves to be real interesting!

Robert Reed’s ‘Stock Photos’ is weird – sorry just no other way of putting it. A man is approached by a man and a girl to pose for a series of photos. Not for any particular reason but for ‘just in case’ situations. No real plot or answer...

‘Agent of Change’ from Steven Popkes is a rather fun piece in the form of a set of transcripts about the sinking of a ship out in the pacific and the discovery of a creature long thought dead.

‘Fine Green Death’ from Don Webb takes us to a post-apocalyptic future where the temperatures are soaring.

‘Signs of Life’ from Carter Scholz is the tale of a man forced to analyse the data from a gene sequencing project but in a desperate attempt to keep his funding, the director of the project forces him to concentrate on a side project that led to some bad things.

‘Starship Dazzle’ from Scott Bradfield was a mess of a story in my opinion, more of a stream of random thoughts of the eponymous Dazzle, a thinking and talking dog sent out to promote Earth and its products to anyone caring enough to listen. Apparently this is the last in a series.

‘The Old Terrologist’s Tale’ from S L Gilbow is set in a future where the terraforming of planets appears to be fairly straightforward and relatively common. Set on a newly created world, the commissioning terrologist is entertaining a number of potential clients. A story is told of lost hopes and destroyed reputations.

Ken Liu’s ‘Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer’ takes us into a world where the vast majority of the human race are uploaded personalities living in realities that they can create from the consensual reality. Renee is a young girl in this reality and the tale tells of a trip she takes with her mother after her mother had been accepted for humanity’s first expedition to the stars.

And finally is Robert Reed’s ‘The Road Ahead’, which is a sequel to his earlier story ‘Stock Photos’. This acts as a sort of explanation to the earlier story and reading the two together gives us some sort of description of the society.

Analog July/August 2011

2011-05-21T18:05:00.000+01:00

A varied selection in this month’s edition.
We have the second part of Edward M Lerner’s novel ‘Energized’. In this story, the action heats up with the NASA team getting a go to make an onsite check of its power satellite project but the protestors get a massive boost when an earthbound project that uses beamed power goes tragically wrong. A number of strands introduced in the first part of the story are expanded on but as this is only part 2 of 4, we still have a way to go before everything is drawn to a conclusion.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch turns up here as well, though in her novella ‘Coordinated Attacks’ she only goes as far as the moon though this is a very well developed lunar scene and split between four years ago and the now of the story. This is a murder mystery story as we look at detective Nyquist’s only failure to get his man and in the present as a wave of terrorist attacks against the mayors of the various lunar Domes threatens to spread chaos throughout the cities. Rusch tells a great tale with the action flowing quite neatly and while I was not sure about the switching between the past and the present, the two timeline were merged in a relevant fashion.

Richard A Lovett’s novelette ‘Jak and the Beanstalk’ started out in a fairly light-hearted fashion with the titular Jak living up to his fairy tale name, always climbing, trying to find the biggest high so the beanstalk was an irresistible magnet. Once we get on the beanstalk, though, things grow darker as Jak travels up and the political situation deteriorates beneath him, tipping over into a limited nuclear exchange and while it might have been limited, the results are almost as serious as a full out attack would have been. Jak loses himself in his climb even when it becomes obvious that the beanstalk’s tethers have been blown free. At the halfway point he reaches the habitat holding the remaining people on the beanstalk. After a relatively unsatisfactory time as the gofer.

The novelette ‘One Out of Many’ from Kyle Kirkland takes us to a future where scientific research is monitored by a research council but there are people who disdain all sorts of scientific interventions though they range from those who just don’t like some aspects of technology all the way up to the terrorists who would kill to move society in their way.

The first of the short stories is Scott William Carter’s ‘A Witness to All That Was’ was a tale of lost love and the efforts to which some people would go to stand witness to the life flowing past them.

‘Death and Dancing in New Las Vegas’ from Ernest Hogan takes us to a terraforming Mars and the splits that the colonists find springing up between the groups that roamed the surface and those who preferred the safety of the underground shelters. This was a touch too froody for me to enjoy.

In this edition, we get two science fact stories:
C W Johnson’s piece is ‘Before You Get to String Theory’ is a bit of a lament about the habit people have of just wanting to know about the theory without concerning themselves about the underlying experimental evidence – especially his students :-). He then goes into detail about the various competing theories of everything – a bit more challenging than I was really feeling up to.

The second science fact piece from Kevin Walsh was the less mentally challenging ‘So Long, Proxima Centauri’ though no less interesting and important for our position in the universe. Not that our nearest extra solar system star is about to go bang, just that it’s very likely to lose its title to ‘nearest neighbour’ status as more sensitive astronomical devices are set to start picking up brown dwarf bodies. Walsh then takes a look at the various temperatures these bodies radiate at and their spectra, which give a good indication as to whether this is a still-young proper start or a warm brown dwarf – some of these dwarf bodies are the same spectral class as M class stars. On the other hand, the temperatures of some of these bodies can drop as low as 150 K (Kelvin = -273.3 Celsius, so you’ll need artic gear for these) and should be detectable by the WISE spacecraft if there are any as far away as 10 light years.

Asimov's Science Fiction - July 2011

2011-05-21T15:59:00.001+01:00

With eleven fiction pieces (including the three poems), we have a fairly substantial magazine for a single month edition though this does not include any novellas. We have two novelettes, six short stories and the three poems.
Rather unusually, both the novelettes are by British authors. The first is ‘Day 29’ from Chris Beckett which takes us to a colony world where the protagonist is a data cruncher about to be rotated back Earthside. Now, rather than decades or centuries aboard starships, modern travellers are squirted between the stars in beams of energy more or less instantaneously. There is a downside, of course; from about the 40th day before transmission the likelihood of forgetting what happened in this period increases to a certainty of forgetfulness at day 28, so day 29 is the last day you can possibly remember. This story follows our protagonist through this progression from anger at the enforced 40 day holiday through a period of making up for lost time in socialising with the local humans to a rejection of their friendship…

The second novelette is Paul Cornell’s ‘The Copenhagen Interpretation’. This is the third in a series of stories following the adventures of Jonathan Hamilton, an intelligence officer of the British Crown set in an alternate history where Newton had come up with a theory of folded space rather than the rather simpler mechanics he did in ours. Hamilton is sent to Copenhagen in order to verify the identity of a courier who had turned up in our embassy there. Unknown to his superiors, the pair had had a closer relationship than Hamilton had admitted to at the time of her initial disappearance but while Hamilton had aged his former lover still retained her youth and no longer spoke a normal language when they are attacked in the supposedly safe confines of the embassy, the pair are forced into the company of a pair of desperadoes determined to find out the secrets of the deep interstellar depths. As might be expected from Cornell, this was a well plotted story with plenty of action while not necessarily following the usual genre boundaries. Incidentally, the title is a not particularly subtle play on the location and the fact that the Copenhagen Interpretation is a set of hypotheses regarding quantum mechanics.

And onto the short stories:
First up is ‘Pug’ by Theodora Goss who, according to her biographical introduction is a well-travelled lady. Pug is a small dog that has a special skill. While all those around him can see him, only those who somehow have not really fulfilled their potential, either because of illness or other limitations can follow him through the gateway he provides in order to meet likeminded people across time and space (both limited). This was a rather nice story even though it doesn’t deal with world shattering events.

‘Dunyon’ from Kristine Kathryn Rusch, on the other hand does have, quite literally, world shattering events occurring in the background. In this story a galactic sector is embroiled in war and the refugees have flooded out to the remotest spot they can find where the determined can still find a measure of success. Although very well written with a real sense of place, there is no way this story can be said to have a happy ending – the immediate problem may have been settled but it’s a clear harbinger of things to come.

Norman Spinrad’s ‘The Music of the Sphere’ is an interesting take on why it is that music is generally tuned to middle ‘C’ as well as looking at how music may need to be adapted to play to other denizens of the planet.

‘Bring on the Rain’ from Josh Roseman takes us to a post apocalyptic future where the vast majority of the world’s water has evaporated and most of the surviving population live aboard ships converted to travel across the scorched continents, dependant on infrequent rains to replenish their water supplies and combat to defend those supplies from other marauders. This is mostly a fairly straightforward adventure story as two of these travelling cities fight it out over one of the largest storms in living memory.

Leah Cyprus’ ‘Twelvers’ doesn’t do much to brighten the mood either though in this case the despair is quite literally on a personal level. Darla Tarpin, like most of her age mates was born from the newly developed uterine replicator but unlike them, Darla had been kept in the replicator for a full year that had left her with a few problems relating to those age mates and now as they were reaching their teens the others were noticing Darla’s restrained ability to show emotion with even her best friend giving her the cold shoulder. But while Darla may be slow to anger, she is not incapable of feeling it and when she finds out her friend’s secret she wreaks a serious revenge.

‘The Messenger’ from Bruce McAllister is a more up-beat tale of time travel when a gent goes back to visit his parents. Nothing too surprising about this perhaps but in this case he’s fifty and they’re thirty five. Yes, we’ve another time travel tale. Now, I said above it is upbeat, which it is in comparison, but the son is there on a mission; back ‘home’ mother’s long gone and father’s dying unsure of her love for him and it was this question the son had gone back to check out the relationship.

There were three poems and while R M Kaye’s ‘E’ must win a prize for shortest possible title, Kaye swings the rather meaningless jumble of words to Einstein’s equation.

‘Page twentyfourhundredandseventythree’ is W Gregory Stewart’s rebuttal of the probability of the infinite number of chimps and their likelihood of coming up with Shakespeare (or anything else meaningful for that matter!).

Jo Haldeman’s ‘Gene’s Dream’ is his lament for a time of innocence and a call for Mr Spock’s rationality – during the original Star Trek episodes, Joe was in the steaming jungles of Vietnam.

In the non-fiction section of the magazine, Sheila Williams muses on what makes an attractive title – rather important as she’s one of those deciding what goes in the magazine!

Asimov's Science Fiction - June 2011

2011-04-22T15:13:00.000+01:00

This month sees a relatively small number of stories:

We have one novella, ‘Kiss Me Twice’ from Mary Robinette Kowal, which takes us to a future where the police have the help of an artificial intelligence in order to help solve their crime, but when the crime is the theft of the central core of the local station’s AI things become tricky as the younger cops try and work in a situation where they have to depend on their unaugmented abilities as they try to find who could have managed such an audacious theft (or is it a kidnapping – AIs are generally considered property). Kowal manages to write a neat mystery story, and the theft of the AI (replaced by a backup) meant that the fact of an all-knowing AI would not overwhelm the human detective elements of the tale. She also uses the opportunity to look at whether it's correct for AIs to be looked at as property though the answer to this is somewhat ambiguous.

Ian R. MacLeod’s ‘The Cold Step Beyond’ takes place in the same universe of his story ‘Breathmoss’, also an Asimov’s story all the way back in 2002. Warrior Bess has been sent to an apparently idyllic forest clearing, there to wait for an unnamed terror breaking out from the underspace that allowed interstellar travel. I have to say the Ten Thousand and One worlds setting is a rather strange one, and not one that I particularly like though I can’t really point to anything in particular that I dislike.

Carol Emshwiller’s ‘All the News That’s Fit’ takes us to a remote mountain village where they are desperately waiting for the arrival of the man who tells them of the goings on in the outside world. But he does not come. Fearing that he had fallen to one of the many fates on the long round between his town and the village, one of the village women sets off on the treacherous road down to see what had happened. What she found was stranger than she had been led to imagine. Although rather sad, the ending was rather positive as well.

‘Walking Stick Fires’ from Alan DeNiro was a rather strange mix of a road trip story and an alien invasion story, made even less comprehensible by the fact that the aliens were the ones doing the travelling across an alien occupied Earth.

Felicity Shoulders’ ‘Apocalypse Daily’ takes us into the on-line gaming world, where a designer and her team has to come up with an innovative way of destroying the world (OK specifically Seattle) while dealing with a team that was eager to steal any ideas and an indigent sister that was disturbing her own home.

‘The Fighter’ from Colin P. Davies takes us into the world of genetically enhanced ring fighters and what happens when one received a blow too many.

Of the three poems, William John Watkins’ ‘Red Eye’ gives us an interesting take on the phenomenon of red eye in photographs – not a trick of the light but an indication of the real thoughts of those being photographed. I always knew there was a reason I hated having my photo taken!

Sheila Williams takes the opportunity of the release of the new digital anthology ‘Enter A Future: Fantastic Tales from Asimov’s’ to review Asimov’s digital history.

Analog - June 2011

2011-04-10T15:18:00.000+01:00

A paper copy (though probably the last) this month as well as the Kndle version. I preferred the paper copy. This was a fairly thin magazine on the face of it; a new serial, two novelettes and two short stories and the science fact piece.

The serial comes from Edward M. Lerner’s latest book, ‘Energized’, which takes us to a post catastrophe future – and this one’s a really nasty one; a Middle Eastern nation (or combination of the same) has gone fundamentalist in a big way lacing its oil fields with nukes and when the inevitable happened, either accidental or purposeful, the ones who knew were dead, the nukes went off irradiating not only the local oil fields but their neighbours’ as well. Oil prices are through the roof even in America and everyone is scrambling to find alternative sources of power. Marcus Judson works for NASA on a demonstration microwave satellite project and this has brought out the protestors, some a bit more reasonable than others. There are those wanting to renounce all technology and return to a pastoral never-never land and they don’t care what they do to get there. Probably a bit early to tell, this is rather an interesting start to the book. Three more to go. Lerner scores a number of points for his perspicacity in thinking about trouble in the Middle East if not necessarily the sort of trouble (so far...).

The first of the novelettes is David D. Levine’s ‘Citizen-Astronaut’ which tells the tale of a blogger and his journey to Mars. Finding his ratings collapsing due to the boring nature of his official upbeat news postings, Gary Shu contemplates unemployment when he gets back from his 106 days on Mars but when disaster strikes the inhabited Martian module, he finds a way to enliven his reports and maybe, just maybe, save the space programme. Rather interestingly, Levine got the idea for this story based on his experiences as part of a simulated Mars Expedition undertaken in the Utah deserts.

‘Kawataro’ from Alec Navela-Lee takes us to the poor back villages of Japan’s fishing villages and an inbred community that had developed its own language to overcome the deafness that was par of this. The main point of view character is a camera man helping out an ethnologist as she studied the villagers and in particular their children. But the pair get caught up in ancient myths when they are attacked by a strange yellow coloured creature with a strange sac where it’s throat should be. Although Navela-Lee initially plays this as a fantasy story (not what I was expecting from Analog) we are given a suitably scientific solution to the mystery.

The first short story, ‘Take One for the Road’ from Jamie Todd Rubin, takes us into a future where manned exploration of the solar system has come to an end. Our narrator finds he’s moved in right next door to the last survivor of the mission to Mercury, the one that happened just after a series of unexplained serial killings, or the Cubbies made it back-to-back World Series. Nothing more about the mission itself than it took place and of the four who went, three returned. So what really happened? Over a number of weeks, his elderly neighbour gave Rick the lowdown on what really happened on that ill-fated mission.

Alastair Mayer’s ‘Stone Age’ is basically an archaeological piece. Set on an alien planet sufficiently far in the future that interstellar travel is common place if not exactly every day we are introduced to Dr Carson and his whacky ideas that the pyramids are the remnants of a predecessor interstellar community as recently as twenty thousand years earlier. It took what looked like an initial run of bad luck when his expedition was taken prisoner at gunpoint to show him that he had missed something vital in his latest dig.

The science fact piece from Carol Wuenschell, ‘Nanoparticles for Drug Delivery’ looks at the current state of play at getting medicines to targeted sites in controlled quantities. No miniature machines, though, just particles designed at the nano scale for specific areas.

The Reference Library from Don Sakers takes a look at the current state of play at the military science fiction sub-genre and how much variation there is within this rather derided genre – mainly because it often throws any pretence of scientific accuracy out of the airlock.

Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction - March/April 2011

2011-04-03T08:57:00.001+01:00

This edition of the magazine provides us with a novella, two novelettes and eight short stories, one of which has an author list almost as long as itself!

The novella is ‘The Evening and the Morning’ from Sheila Finch, set in the far future and is another of her long running series of “lingster” stories, a collection of which were published in 2007 as ‘The Guild of Xenolinguists’. The lingsters are people with highly trained communications skills, able to deduce a new species language from almost subliminal clues. Out in the galaxy, the guild has found its main reason for existence coming to an end and in an attempt to stave off total collapse of the guild, it is turning to the once banned world of politics. In a last act of defiance, Xiankang Pei – Crow to those few close to him – is fulfilling the final wish of the Venatixi Tu’ve and a deep desire of his own – to travel to the long silent world of Earth. But when he and his fellow travellers arrive on the ancient home world, they find all signs of humanity eradicated and not even ruins to mark its passing. Finch’s tale attempts a detailed look at a theory of language but I felt that it got bogged down in Crow’s feelings of age and inadequacies. According to the story’s strap line, this is the final lingster story. This story inspired the cover art.

The first novelette is Albert E. Cowdrey’s ‘Scatter My Ashes’, set in a present day north west America and while it started rather unpromisingly, I found the action picking up quite nicely. It’s not a great action adventure story, with the answer to the questions Harry’s investigations into the Cross family raised coming from Harry’s intellectual abilities. Cowdrey does cheat a little by hiding a crucial name by a spelling change but it’s a mistake made by his point of view character so we can cut him some slack here...

‘The Second Kalandar’s Tale’ from Francis Marion Soty sees us taken into the world of the Arabian Nights. This man was a prince. Lost in a shipwreck, enchanted by a jinn and threatened with death, his tale has to enchant the three women holding him prisoner by means of his silver tongue if he is not to lose his head. This is a retelling of one of the Arabian Nights tales taking the Sir Richard Burton translation for its inspiration – a copy of this can be found on Project Guttenberg.

And now the short stories:

The first is ‘A Pocketful of Faces’ from Paul Di Filippo. In this disturbing tale, we find ourselves in a future where the knockoff artists aren’t concerned with scamming music tracks but they’re providing the faces of celebs and the less well-known to either be worn by the blank faced twists that can be programmed to act in any required fashion or used in any other weird fashion. While searching out the latest face makers, Detective Smoke and his colleague, Detective Roy find themselves uncovering a multi-layered scandal reaching all the way up to the Senate. All in all this was a fast paced story and Di Filippo fills his characters’ talk with zingy slang – always a bit risky as these tend to become outdated almost as quickly as computer tech in stories.

Ken Liu’s ‘The Paper Menagerie’ is a charming (but sad) tale of a man’s realisation of what his mother had gone through in order to become his father’s bride and his mother. If you are wondering what this sort of tale is doing in a fantasy magazine then fear not; our point of view character’s mother was an origami artist, but not your average origami artist, her creatures moved! It’s after her death that Jack finds her last testament that causes him to realise the sacrifices she had made and the magic is renewed.

‘Night Gauntlet’ from (wait for it...) Walter C. DeBill Jr., Richard Gavin, Robert M. Price, W. H. Pugmire, Jeffrey Thomas and (finally, phew) Don Webb is a near pure horror story replete with gothic mansions, beautiful scientists and weird relatives. Based on the Cthulhu mythos, this story takes us on a scientific exploration of the origins of humanity and a period where ancient beings were revealed in their full horror. If you are wondering about the number of authors, this was written (apparently) as a round robin; each author writing their section before passing it on. It appears to have worked rather surprisingly well.

In James Patrick Kelly’s ‘Happy Ending 2.0’ JT and his wife aim to revisit their youth and visit her cousin’s cabin where they had fallen in love. Now twenty years on, love and looks had fled. But this is a special visit and JT ends up with a girl out his memory. I’m not awfully sure how well this defines a happy ending but JT seems to think he’s ahead of the game...

‘Body Guard’ from Karl Bunker takes us to a doomed planet far from earth where a man is taking on the body guard of the title from the inhabitants of this planet.

‘Botanical Exercises for Curious Girls’ from Kali Wallace opens with Rosalie contemplating the bit of the outside world she can see from her window and as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that there is something strange both about that world and Rosalie herself. I didn’t particularly like this story (but I would rate it higher than ‘Body Guard’) – just something about it did not appeal.

‘Ping’ from Dixon Wragg is a very short story – at twenty one words it’s not much longer than the author list for ‘Night Gauntlet’ – but is a reworking of Fredric Brown’s ‘Last Man on Earth’ and is an answer to that tale’s ‘question’.

James Stoddard’s ‘The Ifs of Time’ takes us to the house of Evenmere, a place that is central to the well-being of time, maintained by the immortal Hebrew Enoch. When he feels a strangeness in the halls, Enoch finds that he has to track down the selfish beings that had found out how to cheat death for their actions were putting the rest of existence at grave risk with their tales of unchanging times.

‘Metaversal’ by Sophie M. White is the sole poem in this edition and is an eulogy for some what might have beens.

In his ‘Books to Look for’, Cahrles de Lint laments the increasing difficulty in finding books that give him a wow factor, but as he says, the more you’ve read, the harder it is to have this wowness - something I can sympathise with.

In his ‘Books’ column, James Sallis looks at the working partnership of C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner, particularly as it relates to the collection, 'Detour of Otherness' of the twenty four tales of theirs that it contains – this represents a bare tithe of their actual short stories, a total of over 200.

Lucius Shepard’s ‘Films’ column laments the takeover of the indie film scene by big names and big money before pointing us to Gareth Edward’s ‘Monsters’ as an excellent showcase for low budget and no studio film making.

Interzone #233 March-April 2011

2011-03-31T18:49:00.001+01:00

The saddest news for me and a large number of similarly aged English guys into 1970s Doctor Who was the news of the death of Nicholas Courtney, aka Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart – the Head of the British UNIT in the 1970s Doctor Who series and an occasional character in the Sarah Jane Smith Adventures in the 2000s though his death was also covered on the BBC.

We have a total of four stories in this magazine but the first is an unusually long one and all were good. An unusual thing about these tales is the fact that they are all told from a First Person perspective, though this has become more common across the field in the last year or so.

We start off with Nina Allan’s ‘The Silver Wind’ is an alternate history story set in a dystopian future England where an ultra-nationalistic party has been in power for the best part of a generation and is involved in a war in the Gulf (no change there, then...). At home anyone who can’t show a long line of English ancestors find themselves on a boat back to their ‘homeland’. And you’d better not find yourself with bad genes, else you might find having children a problem. Our first person narrator has grown up in this world and so Owen Andrews is a rather strange being to him – a dwarf, but one who was useful to the government and it’s after Our Narrator finds a clock Andrews had built that he learns of the nature of the work Andrews had been doing. An attempt to change the past to consolidate the rule of the Party. After a trip to see Andrews, Our Narrator finds himself out in the wilds of Shooters Hill, risking his life against the army and the mutations caused by the time travel experiments to such a point that the army seems the better risk even when it means being locked up in a local hospital being used for the army’s experiments. An explosion during his incarceration leaves him alone and when he finds his way back to civilisation he finds himself in a different timeline; this one has brown faces and homeless people, and the war in the Middle East... I feared that this would be rather too long but in the end, I felt that it might have been a bit too short and that Allan rather overdid the friendship between the narrator and Andrews but overall I was intrigued by the story. This tale was illustrated by Ben Baldwin.

‘Tell Me Everything’ from Chris Butler is apparently set in a fantasy setting of some form where people are able to sense what others are feeling from their pheromones but certain people are capable of enforcing their view of the world on others in the same way. When a detective feels that one of these Dukes was the cause of his wife’s death, he has to find a way of proving the guilt of a man capable of enforcing unquestioning loyalty whenever you were in his presence. The way he achieves this is particularly devious and rather nasty though the latter is arguable.

Ray Cluley’s ‘Tethered to the Cold and Dying’ takes us to a post-apocalyptic world suffering from a form of nuclear winter and the survivors stuck in habitats. So far so similar to Fritz Leiber’s 1951 ‘A Pail of Air’ but where that story managed to be a rather upbeat tale of survival, this story deals with a degree of betrayal and backstabbing (almost literally) that almost made me wish that none of the protagonists would survive. On the other hand, the story was well enough written for me to continue with it. And it has a space elevator so it couldn’t be all bad! Illustrated by Paul Drummond.

Tim Lees’ ‘Crosstown Traffic’ concludes the story section of the magazine by taking us to a future New York, post contact and the great melting pot has attracted a vast number of alien types. Another first person point of view character story tells the story of the courier run from Hell as Our Character is tasked with getting a disgusting worm like thing from one location to another across the city. As the story is acted out, the PoV character finds his journey being interrupted by all sorts of aliens from the apparently normal (at first sight anyway) to the outright bizarre as he attempts to scam his employer, though in the end he’s left in no doubt that this was a bad idea. Illustrated by Russell Morgan.

The author interviewee is Paolo Bacigalupi with particular emphasis on his book’ ‘The Windup Girl’.

Analog Science Fiction and Fact

2011-03-18T13:12:00.002Z

In this edition of the magazine we are given one novella, two novelettes and three short stories along with the usual factual items.
‘Tower of Worlds’ from Rajnar Vajra takes us to a world that sees Erik Acharius Bateson facing execution on his twentieth birthday after coming up short in the Lottery so Erik’s feeling a bit annoyed as his wardens allow him a half day of freedom before escorting him to the location of his trial. He’s even more annoyed – downright angry in fact – when he gets there to find that his case has been prejudged a failure even as the medication he’d been given on ‘winning’ that year’s lottery began to go way off profile. Erik manages to escape before he is executed. But this leaves him with a fresh set of problems; on the run and greatly changed, until he meets his female equivalent. After joining up with her, he finds himself involved in a conspiracy of off-level aliens and discontented humans but the ultimate aim of the aliens is kept vague with threats of destruction for the whole of humanity if the royals are not overthrown. Once again, Vajra has managed to come up with a unique setting and a wide variety of aliens and humans forced to work together for the greater good.
Then the two novelettes:
‘Ellipses…’ from Ron Collins starts out with a work-at-home author becoming suspicious of his neighbours when he sees the man digging in his garden late at night. At first thinking ‘bodies in graves’ our hero decides to see what was really there before he goes to the police – no point looking silly after all! But, of course, it’s not a body. Indeed, he’s not at all sure what it is! Before he can call in help, though, the neighbour returns and our hero finds himself locked in the cellar along with a load of strange looking technology.. After escaping there are no traces of his neighbours and the authorities are really sceptical of his story. An incident in the local mall makes him reflect on how easily he accepted the strangeness of his neighbours just because they were the same colour when we still have so much difficulty accepting those of us who really are human but have a different skin colour. Despite the heavily laid-on nature of the message, the adventure elements of the story were sufficiently there to stop it from becoming overwhelming.
Bond Elam’s ‘Blind Spot’ is a more traditional PI detective story. Set in a relatively near future, the PI is asked to investigate who had stolen Van Buren’s nanotech Oblivion and wanted his masterpiece with it’s rather doubtful provenance in payment. Given they had an e-mail from Van Buren’s son detailing the terms of the ransom, it looked like an easy case. Alas not, for Oblivion had the ability to wipe the memory a person was thinking of when they were given the drug. As our PI investigates we learn a little about how memory may work and have a reasonably interesting adventure.
And after the novelettes are the three short stories:
‘Boumee and the Apes’ from from Ian McHugh is set in the distant past when many species were given a chance of intelligence. Boumee is a newly adult male elephant (elephants having speech and the ability to make tools) when he and his sister find a member of another clan under attack from a bunch of apes carrying sticks with sharpened points. The rest of the clans see the apes as something strange and therefore to be destroyed but Boumee can only see this leading to continuous violence on both sides until one or the other was destroyed and his insistence on talking peace gets him exiled from the clans and set on a path that has no guarantees for a happy life.
‘The Wolf and the Panther Were Lovers’ starts off being in a rather comic vein – after all who could take a wolf and a panther together, never mind ones that could talk and were confirmed lushes? Ace Craddock reckons the locals have an angle but they swear blind that the creatures are for real and it takes an accident at the card table (it must have been; Ace was no beginner in getting the cards to fall right…) for Cradock to realise what the creatures really were! The sudden twist at the end is rather shocking and more than a little scary.
‘The Old Man’s Best’ from Bud Sparhawk takes us out to Jupiter orbit where a space station is being built. Alas for the construction workers, the space station was an alcohol free zone. But where there’s a thirst there’s a brew. Though by the time everyone had been paid off in kind, there wouldn’t be much for the brew masters!
The science fact feature is a piece from Nick Kanas, ‘To the Outer Solar System and Beyond: Psychological Issues in Deep Space’, which takes a look at how deep space missions may/will lead to psychological difficulties – even in mission just to the Outer System, you are looking at transmission times of several hours just for a one way message so over a day for a two way conversation therefore you would very definitely be on your own and then there’s always the question of what you would do with anyone who becomes psychologically disturbed on the multi-year journeys. Kanas comes up with a number of possible techniques for mitigating the aging problems but in the end he basically admits there is in reality very little, as it currently stands that can be done.
In the Reference Library, Don Saker takes us on a historical tour of stories involving travel to the Moon starting with Lucien all the way back around 180 AD all the way up to the present day via Heinlein et al. The main focus of the column was Travis S. Taylor’s & Les Johnson’s ‘Back to the Moon’ which deals with the situation when a carefully planned NASA mission back to the moon is derailed when a supposedly unmanned Chinese rocket turns out to have a crew… I’ve not read this and while I did like his ‘Quantum Connection’ and ‘Warp Speed’ books as stories I wasn’t all that comfortable with his apparent attitude that any possible alien species are out to get us as expressed in these and other, factual, books of his.

Asimov’s Science Fiction – April 2011

2011-03-16T19:20:00.000Z

This edition of the magazine contains four novelettes and seven short stories along with six poems and the usual gaggle of non-fiction pieces

The first of the novelettes was ‘The Day the Wires Came Down’ from Alexander Jablokov, which also inspired the cover picture. In this tale we are in a sort of steam-punk type of future that sees us in a city that is decommissioning its mass transit system: a series of not-quite trams running from cableways suspended from the buildings so rather than street level access, you would get at them from the top levels of a building. The basic story is that of a pair of siblings who are searching for a present for their father but it quickly mutates into a tale where they explore the early history of this unique transport system. This is not a particularly easy story and I did feel my interest flag at times but I found the story within the tale sufficiently interested me to keep me with it.

William Preston’s ‘Clockworks’ is a prequel tale in his ‘Helping Them Take the Old Man Down’ from last year. Apparently there will be further stories set in this universe exploring the Man of... er, the ‘Old Man’s’ life. In this tale, we get to see The Man from the perspective of a gentleman who has undergone a rather radical procedure in order to bring him back to the side of the angels ;not really sure how moral this is – there’s damn little in the way of free choice involved with his conversion to good but The Man is a bit pushed for time as he tries to find out what our character was up to. When we find out, it looks like eldritch horrors are about to be released on the world!

‘A Response from EST17’ from Tom Purdom can be considered to be a first contact story – not one but two probes from Earth make it to the eponymous Extra Solar Target. Not actual men, though, but not just probes. These devices are nanotech factories able to build all the necessary ingredients to examine their new world. Trouble between the two probe groups starts almost immediately as they fight for precedence but the greatest danger lies with the inhabitants of the planet beneath them as they try to work out whom to pass the message on to. The inhabitants are rather interesting and the conflict between the two probe colonies is rather neat and the nature of the message diabolical...

‘Becalmed’ from Kristine Kathryn Rusch takes us to a ship in deep space that is part of a large fleet from Earth whose sole purpose is to arbitrate disputes on other worlds, hopefully peacefully but with overwhelming force if necessary. The ship’s senior linguist is stuck in her cabin wondering what had gone wrong on her latest mission; of the twenty seven linguists sent to get a basic understanding of the opposing force, only three had lived to come back and this would normally lead to exile but the ship had been damaged while escaping and was currently stuck in fold-space. Rusch has managed to create a reasonably believable pair of alien races, both equally alien and different from each other. As the tale unfolds it becomes clear that the Fleet itself has been manipulated into taking sides and this would really annoy them if only the ship can communicate with it once more!

The first short story is ‘An Empty House With Many Doors’ from Michael Swanwick takes us to a widower missing his late wife badly. Under the influence of drink during one of his walks our character sees something exceptional even in this state; a man dangling in mid-air, stuck in a twist of constant change. The man can only be perceived by our character and when he offers his comfort he gets to share in the pain until he passes out. When he reawakens he finds night has fallen and he scurries back to a home rather unlikely shining with light streaming out of the windows. And an unexpected person in the kitchen. His dead wife. Then he appears from another room. When our point of view character is kidnapped in the night, he finds himself in the hands of the colleagues of the Lost Man and returned to his empty house. Despite what would appear to be a rather bleak ending both the actual ending and the character’s outlook on life are given a massive improvement.

Nick Mamatas’ short story, ‘North Shore Friday’ was probably the most confusing of the stories in this edition. Set in a nineteen sixties north eastern American backwater, this tale looks at a test of remotely reading peoples’ minds and immigration issues.

Mike Resnick’s story, ‘The Homecoming’, is set in an unspecified future as mankind is spreading out to the stars but the old realities of growing old remain and old age still curses us with Alzheimer’s and fathers still fall out with sons, though in this case it was for a rather unusual reason; the son had gone out to the stars in order to study a xeno planet, requiring that he be changed rather radically. His parents had not spoken with him for years until he turns up one evening to see his incapacitated mother. The story concentrates on the father and son as they are forced to come to terms with their feelings over the conversion process (think of a giant crystalloid insect and you’re on the right tracks) and the fact that the father did not tell his son of his mother’s condition. Although I have my doubts as to whether such a radical change would enable the son to live on Earth, the story overall was a good-feeling story and was uplifting despite the trouble that had brought the family back together.

Rudy Rucker’s ‘The Fnoor Hen’ was another rather confusing tale but there was sufficient humour for this not to really matter

On the other hand, ‘Smoke City’ from Christopher Barzak was confusing and rather unpleasant.

Esther M. Friesner’s ‘The One That Got Away’ is, as you might expect, quite funny. We all know good old King Kong ended up splattering himself all over New York and Faye Wray got her man but we didn’t realise that a native girl had sneaked away from the Island as well and was earning her keep by being very friendly with sailors when she meets a sailor from an isolated north eastern town who appears to be a complete gentleman especially when he offers her a marriage deal. An apparently bad part of the deal is that he’s not the anticipated partner. The name of the town? A quiet little place called Innsmouth...

‘The Flow and Dream’ from Jack Skillingstead started off rather strangely but as it develops we find we are in a generation ship. Rather unusually for this type of story, the ship’s crew haven’t forgotten they’re aboard a ship but its suffered the other favourite of these stories; a plague but this one occurred after landing and before the colonists had been released from cold-sleep. Now it’s almost too late for crew and passengers alike.

Of the six poems, the one of most interest is ‘Ballad of the Warbots’ from Jack O’Brien. Then, he’s pretty much based it on Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Tommy’ though Darrell Schweitzer’s ‘Monsters of the Stratosphere’ was a fun lament of the super-science stories that were the mainstay of the nineteen thirties science fiction magazines.

Norman Spinrad’s ‘On Books’ section looks at just four books this edition; two from China Mieville, ‘The City and the City’ and ‘Kraken’, and two from Ian McDonald, ‘The Dervish House' and ‘Ares Express’, and while this may look like a rather limited examination, especially as none of these are particularly new, they share a number of thematic similarities; all are set in some version of a city and none of them are what might be considered standard science fiction but are what Spinrad defines as the New Weird, a sort of mishmash term for fiction that has elements of science fiction or fantasy but tends to lack the internal consistency of either and he came down rather hard on ‘Kraken’ in particular though I have to agree with most of his comments as my science fiction reading group recently had this as one of our books (incidentally if you are available on the second Tuesdays of each month between 5:00 pm and 7:00p pm and are in the Stockport (UK) area please come and join us!).

Amazon Science Fiction - March 2011

2011-02-13T17:44:00.000Z

On the basis of better-late-than-never, here are the reviews of the March edition of Asimov’s – the second Kindle version and the first of the Asimov’s subscription (the first Amazon SF magazine being a trial).

In this month’s edition we are treated to four novelettes:

‘Clean’ from John Kessel is set in a time slightly forward of ours where a young woman has to come to terms both with the disintegration of her parents’ marriage and the growing signs of Alzheimer’s in her beloved father. Once upon a time, he’d been a college professor and a vacuum radio hobbyist but now the holes in his memory meant that his recall was going and things were looking bleak until a radical therapy promises, well not a cure but a relief valve – if he was willing to forget practically everything, then it was possible that her father could hold on to the rest, but what would be chosen to be remembered?

Ian Creasey’s ‘I Was Nearly Your Mother’ could quite easily have veered rather too far into sentimentality or gone the other way into comedy, but (IMO) he manages to keep it rather neatly in the middle with elements of both but neither overwhelming the serious message. After Friday’s school day was over and she was returning to her grandparents with whom she lived after the death of her mother (father’s in jail) she thinks she’s going to be having a party with friends as the grandparents are on holiday but instead she spots a rather too familiar person leaning against the garden wall – her mother come to haunt her? Apparently not quite. It was a person her mother could have been had things gone differently who had ‘just popped in’ from an alternate timeline initially just for a bit of a chat she says though as the quick chat evolves, the quick visit becomes an overnight stay then practically a deathbed confession as we learn about different choices (incidentally, timeline hopping has become almost as common as budget air travel has here and now). Our young teen is horrified by the choices made by this proto-mum and what it shows her about the fragility of her existence before sort of coming to terms with it. This is rather good in that Marian is changed by the visit but not completely and she realises this.

‘The Most Important Thing in the World’ by Steve Bein is a sort of time travel story though this time travelling has its own unique costs as discovered by Ernie – a New York taxi driver – and the young man whose luggage was left in his cab. Personally, I found it a bit hard to particularly like this story or the characters (the former the greater sin IMO).

Robert Reed’s ‘Purple’ takes us... who knows were? An interstellar refuge where the halt and lame of a wide range of species are taken in and healed if possible to be returned to their native habitats but there are some who could not be returned – too injured or, to be blunt, too ignorant to take up a place in their old societies, but like all good shelters, this has a no-destroy policy so you could end up living there for an age always hoping that you might be returned home.

As well as the novelettes, there are four short stories:

‘Where’ by Neal Barrett Jr. is definitely the weirdest story and the author is quite happy about leaving the reader a touch confused and unable to explain what’s going on so I’ll leave him happy and move on...

An Owomoyela’s ‘God in the Sky’ takes us to a time when a strange light appears in the sky, rapidly growing brighter but remaining obstinately unidentifiable as the world acts as is usually does in such circumstances; some people in panic and others eager to find out more about the new phenomenon and others treating it as a sign from God – or as the God Itself. This was a rather interesting examination on how people might react in such conditions.

‘Movement’ from Nancy Fulda takes on the case of a young woman who has a hard time communicating with the outside world and likes expressing herself in dancing. Lots and lots of dancing. Naturally her parents are concerned and her father sees a chance of ‘fixing’ his daughter’s condition. Hannah is disinclined to go along with the procedure especially as there’s a good chance she would lose the special affinity she has with the temporal flow and ebb.

‘Lost in the Memory Palace, I Found You’ from Nick Wolven takes us to a world where life is lived in the fast lane – the very fast lane, where if you weren’t careful the amount of information and the pace of change could totally destroy your mind and leave you not knowing who you are, never mind those around you. Like ‘Where’ this was one confusing story, though slightly more palatable.

The various factual Departments include a piece from Sheila Williams, essentially being the introduction she gave when introducing Neal Barrett as the 2010 SFWA Author Emeritus. In his ‘Reflections’ column, Robert Silverberg tells of his experience of the book 'The Plot Genie which purported to give aspiring authors a hand with constructing stories and plot lines. While a fun look at the actual book, Silverberg uses the piece to look at the more serious job of actually writing interesting stories. James Patrick Kelly takes a look at the proposition that the Net is affecting the way we think and react – part of this is the worry that people who use the Net have shorter cognitive spans than their off-line colleagues. In his ‘On Books’ column, rather than looking at a set of random book, Paul Di Filippo takes a look at the work of the New England Science Fiction Association in republishing older works no longer in print within the US – unfortunately for us on the right hand side of the pond, this restricts such new republications to the US (and Canada).

Fantasy and Science Fiction Jan/Feb 2011

2011-02-06T14:57:00.000Z

In this month we have four novelettes and seven short stories in this first edition of 2011. I still get F&SF in paper rather than electronic format as it still arrives in its no longer so little padded bag and will probably continue to do so until postage costs make it uneconomic.

Anyway, the stories!

The first of the novelettes is ‘Home Sweet Bi’ome’ from Pat MacEwen. Told in the first person, our narrator is one of those unfortunates who are allergic to all sorts of synthetics; you know, the ones making up modern civilisation. Indeed her case is so bad that she’s had to retreat up a mountain and live in a completely natural environment – but what about her house? After all it must contain something she’s allergic to? Well not in this case. It’s been grown from her own cells so when she wakes up one day to find the bi’ome coming out in a rash, she calls in an emergency technician to find out what was wrong. Despite the rather serious nature of the young woman’s condition, much of this tale is a comedy of errors as she and her new tech come to an accommodation and try to find out what was ailing her residence. All in all, this was a fun read despite what I felt was a rather contrived ending.

Kate Wilhelm’s ‘The Bird Cage’ is a far darker affair. Jean suddenly finds herself suffering flashbacks of when she was a small child with the neighbouring boy and his near fatal accident on the lightly frozen pond and is overcome with a strong desire to track him down and offer belated apologies. Meanwhile in another part of town, Trevor, Cody’s brother, is also suffering flashbacks that freeze him in place. And somewhere out in the countryside, a young man is deeply asleep except for those disturbing brain spikes that so worried the experimenters. But this is not an experiment for its own sake. Funded by a multibillionaire these experiments are hoping to find a way of successfully slowing a person’s metabolism all the way down so they can be brought back and cured decades or centuries hence. When Trevor and Cody’s mother appears to just drive straight off the road and Cody’s former partner becomes his late partner Trevor and Jean, now joined up looking for Cody, realise something weird is going on but it’s the research team who realise what the ultimate effects might be...

Albert E. Cowdrey’s ‘The Bogle’ (Cowdrey’s spelling I assume) verges into horror story territory. Everyone had been afraid of Tom, Donny’s older brother, had been terrified of the lad and it looked like he was going to end up in jail if not death row but a magistrate allowed him to enlist in the army rather than make his first acquaintance with the justice system and everyone hoped it would be the saving of him but Korea intervened and Tom found himself in action in the far east and the town that had feared him mourned him as a hero when news came that he was missing in action. Mama mourned but Donny got a proper room at last. Until people reported seeing a shadow that looked very much like the lost Tom and it turned out that Tom wasn’t quite as lost as the army thought. He was seriously injured though, stuck in a comatose body. After Donny suffered a bad accident, he began changing in a way that reminded people of his older brother rather too closely.

‘The Ghiling Blade’ from Matthew Corradi is a rather simple seeming story about a fairly ordinary man and his acceptance of the hand fate had dealt him.

The seven short stories are:

‘Long Time’ from Rick Norwood is a retelling of the Gilgamesh Epic in the way it probably really happened if it had really had happened but still with a touch of the fantastic about it.

Chris Lawson’s ‘Canterbury Hollow’ takes us off world into a future where a world is dying but the inhabitants who had come from Terra a long time ago were not going quietly. Burrowing under their adopted planet as best they can, this story takes a look at the final days of a couple from this civilisation. Chosen by ballot to die to balance the population we see how they choose to memorialise themselves.

‘Christmas at Hostage Canon’ by James Stoddard sees us back in the present day US as a young boy and his family visit his uncle for the festive season and the youngster finds himself forced to make a choice as a dark creature threatens the house in the darkness of the night.

Jim Young’s ‘The Whirlwind’ opens with our protagonist wondering where the heck he is, who’s the guy kicking him awake and who the heck he is. Turns out that Sig, the guy doing the kicking, has had a great way of creating immortality. Just that it meant killing everyone first. But now that everyone was a computer sim the AIs running the system have found that there are a number of ringers in the system except they can’t tell the difference so they want to offer Bob a job cleaning up Sig’s sabotage.

‘Paradise Last’ from the pens of Bill Prozini and Barry N. Malzberg is a zombie love story. These zombies are not the brain munching horrors of the movies but a decaying workforce regenerated by the still-living in order to overcome the labour shortage caused by a plague. But being dead has never been a bar to being in love and when you have eternity, thwarted love has a while to think about revenge.

Richard A. Lupoff’s ‘12:02 P.M.’ takes us into the world inhabited by Myron Castleman. Now Myron’s world is very special for he finds himself living the hour between twelve and one in the afternoon over and over and as he tries to find out what has happened to him, Castleman wonders whether he can change his fate. Then he notices that the looped time is decreasing...

Okay, Alan Dean Foster writes short stories! ‘Ghost Wind’ is the second of his Mad Amos Malone stories. Laid up in the local saloon where he’s feeling a bit under the weather, Amos’ attention is taken by the rising wind. His attending physician isn’t much impressed; they’re just south of Denver and wind wasn’t entirely unknown there but the canny mountain man can tell the wind edging its way round the town is no ordinary wind but a ghost wind. In the ensuing battle of wills between the overgrown breeze and the mountain man, it looks like Amos has met his match but Amos’ cold combined with the effluvium flung up by the storm caused the gargantuan mountain man to sneeze with such a force that the townsfolk found themselves in Nebraska...

In ‘Seeking Glorious Transits’, the science piece in this edition of the magazine looked at the Kepler satellite mission that is looking at a large number of stars to see whether they have planets orbiting them by looking for transits – we also got a brief history of transits as they applied to this solar system. Unlike other telescoping examinations for planetary systems the way Kepler works enables it to detect relatively small planets and it can tell us more about the type of atmospheres they have. Since this piece was written, Kepler Mission Control has released its latest results.

Interzone #232 Jan-Feb 2011

2011-01-28T17:09:00.000Z

Well, it’s been a busy month has January but Interzone #232 sees the end of the month.

In this edition, there were four regular stories and a short.

The first of the normal stories was ‘Noam Chomsky and the Time Box’ from Douglas Lain. This was presented as a blog post reviewing the latest time box and this story shows the confused mess that time travel stories can be. The time box’s major downside is that it may allow you to experience the past but whatever happens you are unable to actually change it. The story illustration was provided by Richard Wagner.

‘Intellectual Property’ by Michael R. Fletcher is set in a possible near future where the corporations defend their intellectual property rights by the insertion of electronic scramblers into a neural socket that mean that you can’t remember what you were working on during the day. But the sockets could give you more sinister options as well... It was sometimes rather difficult to keep up with which character we are following in this (even with the section header hints...) but as we get deeper into the story, we see just why the confusion might come about. This story was illustrated by Mark Pexton.

Sarah L. Edward’s ‘By Plucking Her Petals’ is a rather interesting fantasy story in a world where it is possible to overcome the lack of beauty by taking on the absorbed essences of beauty taken from other things – usually an inanimate object but not always but those who practice this art are generally looked down on by their fellows. This story was illustrated by Mark Pexton.

Sue Burke’s ‘Healthy, Wealthy and Wise’ is a rather interesting tale of a young American who is sent to Spain to act as a nurse/companion for a Spanish woman who was supposed to help her with her project about her stay. The Spaniard was sneering, not wanting Brianna’s companionship and determined to make life hell for the youngster. But Brianna had a secret weapon to help her survive; an Invisible Friend that lived in her phone – an AI that could advise on language and social skill, be a mentor when she was feeling down. In a way, this was a rather odd story in that it was the Americans who had taken to the Invisible Friends to support them, not the Europeans and there were aspects of Spanish society that didn’t really feel right but her biographical notes say that Sarah has lived in Spain for the last ten years so I guess she knows better than me. The story was illustrated by Ben Baldwin.

The short story was the 2010 James White Award Winner, ‘Flock, Shoal, Herd’ by James Bloomer which tells the tales of a pair of ex-soldiers in a war that had done severe damage to the world and to those fighting. It appears that some of the soldiers had been transferred in to other animals and were finding it difficult to adjust back to being back in human bodies, particularly the ones who had managed to transfer to whole herds of animals. Bloomer manages to make the two PoV characters feel reasonably real. The award is sponsored by Interzone.

David Langford’s Ansible Link column was its usual hoot as he looks at the silly ways ‘normal folk’ see science fiction and its fans. Most disturbing news here was that there’s possibly going to be a new Buffy the Vampire Slayer film – nothing wrong with that but apparently without Joss Wheldon who was such a driver of its unique scariness.

In the reviews section, the reprint of Bernard Newman’s ‘Flying Saucer’ in Westholme Publishing’s ‘America Reads’ series was panned. ‘The Immersion Book of SF’ a collection of SF stories put together by Carmelo Rafala more or less selected on the preferences of the editor got a favourable review from its reviewer, probably helped by the fact that he had been in the business himself. Mike Resnick’s ‘The Buntline Special’ is an alternate history tale of the OK Corral where the Native American shamans had managed to keep the white men out of the American hinterlands. The reviewer states that the OK Corral is a rare subject for SF citing the Doctor Who story ‘The Gunfighters’ as the only other example of it being used as a metaphor between Order and Chaos but there was a Star Trek TOS episode that also used the OK Corral in a similar way.

In the DVD reviews section, the new cut of Metropolis got a panning while The Avengers Series Six was praised. In the films review section they looked at the new Tron provoking a moderately positive comment. The review of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader was rather cynically positive – dwelling on the bits the director has nick... er, borrowed from other genres. With Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One, the review came down on a rather reluctant somewhat positive view.

Analog Science Fiction and Fact April 2011

2011-01-28T09:05:00.000Z

Well, barely had I got my first Analog Kindle edition on subscription than the next one pops up on the ‘phone.

In this edition there was one novella, two novelettes and five short stories.

The novella was ‘Hiding Place’ from Adam-Troy Castro and from the opening paragraph we know we are in for something different: ‘The only prisoner in the interrogation room consisted of two women and one man.’. In this far future story, we have singles and multiples, the multiples being a single intertwined consciousness overseeing two or more bodies. It would seem that one of the bodies in the interrogation room had committed a vicious murder, indeed admitted it. But the consciousness controlling that body was now part of the multiple and if that body was imprisoned for the crime, then it would still be able share the freedom of the other bodies but imprisoning three bodies for the crime of one was clearly a gross violation of the rights of two of them. So Andrea Cort, Investigator at Large has to try and come up with a way of prosecuting the guilty while keeping the innocent free. This was quite interesting even as a basic whodunit but Castro has managed to tie in some deep commentary on personalities and what makes us individuals regardless of the number of bodies involved. Apparently Cort appears in a number of novels as well as this novella.

The novellas are:

‘Ian’s Ions and Eons’ from Paul Levinson. This is a pretty basic time travel story where a man decides to travel back in time so that he could cause the recount in Florida that would give the 2000 Presidential election to Al Gore rather than George W Bush. It looks like he had achieved the desired result as he heads home but when he hits his home time he finds things had been changed once more back to how they had been and he learns of the differences between contracts...

Thomas R Dulski’s ‘Balm of Hurt Minds’ takes us future ward once more. In this future, contact has been made with alien intelligences when an alien hive fleet turned up in the solar system and their technology edged out into the general mainstream through a number of preferred bidders. When Fidelis Group’s sleep aid Somnomol was released, it seemed like a boon to the sleep deprived population of the world, but it appeared to have some arcane side effects that the tests had not been set to catch...

‘The Flare Weed’ from Larry Niven is another story in his continuing Draco’s Tavern series, where a good story can get you a drink on the house. In this tale a Qarasht surveyor tells the story of an expedition she went on to a star that was about to flare. The expedition’s initial survey had found no intelligences. The Qarasht is rather surprised when something pops out of the now near boiling waters of the planetary sea. When it’s universal translator indicated that the tree was able to communicate both parties learn a great deal in a fairly short time. Mainly how the flare weed survives the eons between arrival and the flaring of the planet’s star. Thing is that the flare weed made a deal with the Qarasht that it would plant one of it’s seeds on a suitable world next time it saw one. And here it was on Earth...

‘Two Look at Two’ from Paulo S. Jordan is a first contact story set in backwoods USA where a couple of old timers and their dog run afoul of a pair of off worlders and their pet – not a happy encounter when the pets had a spat but the alien repairs invigorate the old dog proving new tricks aren’t just the preserve of old dogs..

Edward M. Lerner’s ‘Blessed Are the Bleak’ is the latest in a stream of stories looking at the costs of a national health service and how this would affect the population demographics. In this story, Lerner has an apparatchik in this future US’s coming up with the thought that it would be cheaper by far to upload everyone falling sick to network servers to ‘live’ on as virts – virtual beings.

‘Remembering Rachel’ from Dave Creek takes us to a moon colony aiming to gain its independence from Earth domination. Already tense negotiations threatened to become totally derailed when the Lunar Chief Negotiator’s fiancée is found murder and the negotiator is found to have had a memory snip for the crucial period. So why did he do it? To hide guilt as the murder, or to forget her dead body? Either way the Earth negotiator wins...

Although ‘Quack’ from Jerry Oltion is another medical story, this time it's more of a detective story as Dustin goes on yet another TV show in an attempt to debunk the homeopaths’ claims but his latest opponent is different as he immediately admits that homeopathy ought to be a load of cobblers. What he wants is an explanation of why anyone’s cured! Blackmailed into agreeing to head up the study (with matched funding from the TV station and the public – probably not the future for most major medical trials) Duncan finds some startling results and he finds himself in the unpleasant position he’d put others – defending an apparently undefendable position but in a confrontation with a medic from Britain, Duncan puts his hypothesis to the test with startling results!

Analog’s Science Fact piece is (not quite) an attack on the current SETI research programme from the brothers Gregory and James Benford. I say not quite above as the Benfords don’t pooh-pooh the idea behind SETI – i.e. there is actually someone out there to be communicated with, but rather with the assumptions that are behind the search criteria. Currently the SETI people tend to look at the so called waterhole frequency – the frequency at which water would broadcast (around 1GHz) – and the fact that whoever is broadcasting constantly. However, in 'Smart Seti' the brothers turn this assumption on its head and look at the situation from the point of view of the people who would pay for the broadcasting equipment. Any frequency at the levels we are looking at for successful reception over astronomical distances would have to be belted out using very expensive equipment especially if it was sent continuously taking up a very large percentage of a systems gross product. Although this was a rather depressing piece if you are looking for likely contacts, the Benfords do come out on the side of SETI being something that may be worth doing so long as you don’t get your hopes up and don’t expect to be able to keep signalling forever. If you want to see what the SETI programme is up to, you can participate in analysing the results here.

Asimov’s Science Fiction – February 2011

2011-01-21T09:31:00.000Z

Well, this is my first time reading anything on a Kindle and it went sort-of OK. The major problem is that there doesn’t appear to be any way of bookmarking your location.

There is one novella, one novelette and five short stories in this edition of the magazine.

The novella is Paul McAuley’s ‘The Choice’. In a pretty much post-apocalyptic future England – what's left of the Broads area of Norfolk in actual fact. In effect, this is a coming of age story as two boys take two different routes to making their livesin this changed world.

The novelette is ‘Out of the Dream Closet’ from David Ira Cleary. This is set very far into the future of Earth and this is a very strange one, where human souls are encased in stuff and can be moulded and refitted into new bodies. This was definitely the weirdest story in the magazine!

‘Waster Mercy’ from Sara Genge is another in her series of stories set in a world where most people are forced to live inside protected cities coated with nanotech to repair the damage from solar radiation. On a road trip to atone for the sins of his fathers, Brother Beussy finds himself learning a lesson from those he thought he ought to pity.

Jeff Carlson’s ‘Planet of the Sealies’ is another post-apocalyptic story. Humanity has been reduced to a population of less than ten thousand stuck up in the Polar Regions and largely cloned after ecological catastrophe and mass plagues. A number of clone lines have come together to mine a waste dump lying on the California coast. Not for the iron or other metals that might be found but for something more important; preserved biological remains…

Aliette de Bodard’s ‘Shipbirth’ takes us back to her recurring timeline where the Chinese and Aztecs became the dominant civilisations. This story appears to be a direct sequel to the non-Asimov’s story ‘Shipmaker’ in Interzone 231, looking at the Aztec woman whose Mind-child had failed to quicken correctly. The focus of the story is the doctor who looked after this hulk of a woman and responsible for determining if there was anything worth salvaging and the moral issues and choices involved in these actions.

Although not, quite, an apocalyptic story but it does deal with severe changes in peoples’ attitudes, ‘Brother Sleep’ from Tim McDaniel’ takes us to Thailand in a future where the need to spend hours asleep has been abolished for those who can afford the treatments. But will people spend their gained time studying or partying? And what will happen to that majority of the population who still need to sleep a full night? How will they keep up? And will it change national characteristics?!

‘Eve of Beyond’ from Barry N Malzberg and Bill Pronzini takes us to a time where a company that had come up with the innovative idea of selling clothing to those with only a limited time left that was as stylish as anything but not meant to last for ever and as cheap as you can make it. But the multinationals are not going to leave any potential market out of their hands and some takeover battles can become really nasty!

Analog Science Fiction and Fact 2011

2011-01-21T09:24:00.000Z

Well, I’ve taken the plunge and have signed up to the Kindle version of the magazine – at least I should get the editions I’ve ordered, and there’s no need to worry about storage (getting cover shots might be fun, though...).

Anyway to the stories! We get two novelettes and 5 short stories.

The novelettes are:

Paul Carson’s ‘Rule Book’ is set in a future America and opens in the cab of a tractor trailer with the driver musing about how his electric motors fail to make the truck sound like a truck! The fact that his co-driver is a robot and that one of the cars in front of him is using muscle power to power itself – when it isn’t suffering from a viral infection that is :-) . But as the story develops it becomes more an exploration of rights and whether we are going to respond to newcomers with the traditional human bigotry or whether we can transcend it. The story comes to a head at a political debate where the main candidate’s views are expressed as a load of hypocrisy. Carson managed to make this world sound rather interesting though it’s far from perfect.

‘Betty Knox and Dictionary Jones in The Mystery of the Missing Teenage Anachronisms’ by John G. Hemry draws for the longest title of the edition award this month. This is a time travel story with the rather unusual premise of time travel being allowed only along your own lifeline – not unique but fairly rare as it’s rather limiting. Coming from a rather busted 2039, Betty Knox and a handful of colleagues have been projected backward in order to try and warn the past but at fifteen, Betty is finding it hard to persuade anyone that a girl can be serious about anything! Until Jim Jones sidles up to her quoting the names of yet-to-be Presidents. Coming from a year after her departure date, he gives her the bad news that there had been no sign that she or the other members of her team had survived past that October and phone calls to the ones she knew about indicated that the disappearances had already started... Again, although this story seems to one of a number of stories that are positing a less-than-happy future, it is set firmly in the mid-sixties and the aim of the story is somewhat triumphalist and I do hope that the teens’ solution to their problem did not influence the publishing decision :-).

And now for the short stories:

Sarah Frost’s ‘A First requisite for communication may be something to talk about...’ is a take on the first contact story and is the co-winner of the number of words in the title though the words are shorter. In this story, a seed colony ship is being looked for and its development studied but the planet has a native sentient species on it that is at threat from the colony ship’s aggressive nanotech. With the natives under sentence of death, only a very limited interest is taken in them even though they are trying to communicate something to their visitors. When it becomes clear why the natives had been drawing circles in the dead grass the ethnologist is secretly relieved by the results of the fire. This story makes you realise just because they don’t have space ships, the natives know much more about their home ground than you will however sophisticated you may be.

‘Hiding from Nobel’ from Brad Aiken sees a man making a return trip to the site of his Summer Camp where twenty five years previously, he and a group of friends had pledged to meet again on this day and today is the day. As he waits for his friends to appear, the man muses over the events of their last day at camp and spends some time wondering whether he would actually recognise them. His first friend is fine and passes on the sad news that their other friend had net his end in a particularly spectacular bike accident. Neither was expecting their fourth friend, who they though had died on an ill-judged night’s outing a quarter of a century ago. But if they were feeling reasonably well preserved, they found the unexpected member of their party even better preserved. Almost as if he were still in his early twenties indeed and, mythical magic rings aside, that was ridiculous. Almost as ridiculous as the story he told as to how he had survived...

Craig DeLancey’s ‘Julie is Three’ is a rather disturbing look at a girl who appears to suffer from Multiple Personality Disorder. However, the case is complicated as the man investigates the girl’s back ground and the claims of her aunt to be a mutant form of humanity. I suppose there are a number of interesting points to this story but overall I was not really engaged.

'Astronomic Distance, Geologic Time' from Bud Sparhawk takes us on a voyage from the dim and distant past of the Universe to times yet to come and interweaves it with the life of Jerry Cahille comparing the different perceptions of ‘a long time’ when comparing the life of a man with a species, a planet and a super-accelerated alien probe finding that the Universe is expanding faster than it can cover the distances.

‘Taboo’ from Jerry Oltion is an interesting tale of the effects of immortality on memory and custom. Both will suffer from the ravages of time. Edward was pushing the two hundred boundary when he was attracted to the woman in the art gallery and there was no way he was able to recall if he’d ever met the woman before. Very early events were reasonably shard but anything between those and the last fifty was more than a bit hazy! So the couple are surprised and shocked when the identity of his new love was revealed.

This being Analog, there is a regular Science Fact piece as well and this month is no exception. This time it’s a piece from Edward M Lerner entitled ‘Say What? Rumination About Language, Communications, and Science Fiction’ which takes as it’s starting point that fairly common staple of Science Fiction, the first contact story, and looking at some of the barriers to interspecies communications – we’re going to be damned lucky if they look like us and even if the aliens are similar in design, it’s still going to be a matter of decades, if we are lucky, before meaningful conversation can get going. However, as Mr Lerner also says while it is good to take account of these considerations, as Science Fiction authors it is not conducive to good storytelling to get too bogged down in the detail either. An interesting and rather timely article (I am writing a story that has aspects that fall under this heading as I write this :-)). For a broader overview of human languages and possible alien speech, Lerner recommends ‘Aliens and Alien Societies (Science Fiction Writing Series): A writer’s guide to creating extraterrestrial Life forms’ by Stanley Schmidt (see who’s the editor of this magazine – so he should know what’s what!)

Fantasy and Science Fiction Nov/Dec 2010

2010-12-11T15:48:00.000Z

This edition of the venerable magazine contains a novella, three novelettes and seven short stories.

The novella, from Robert Reed, is ‘Dead Man’s Run’. This story is set in a somewhat future America where improbably powerful online data storage systems allow you to upload a virtual copy/backup of yourself and is set amongst a bunch of running buddies as they chase down another runner, trying to find a reason why the person acting as their unofficial coach had been murdered. The story was okay as we are introduced to various aspects of this world; the backup of the dead coach had taken over his training duties and, with access to the Net, could tell if you were goofing off. The story was too long to be truly engaging and Reed’s habit of flicking between the present of the story and various aspects of the group’s past was rather unsettling even if it did introduce us to the motives the group may have had for offing their coach – whose backup is as keen as anyone to find the guilty party. The final revelation may come as more of a relief than a surprise but you may still find it a bit of a surprise.

‘Plinth without Figure’ from Alexander Jablokov is an architectural ghost story. Our main protagonist is an architect whose designs focus on guiding people flows through spaces with the aid of unobtrusively place design work so when pedestrians using his latest work, a public square in his home city, begin complaining of seeing ‘ghosts’, he’s clearly a bit miffed. When he investigates, he finds his flow control bollards have been subtly sabotaged. Recognising the style as that of his ex-wife, he confronts her and she tells him the story of a young girl who died a hundred years before. Jablokov leaves it up to the reader to decide whether this is a genuine ghost story or whether the protagonists and the public have been affected by his ex’s sabotage. Again, I felt that this tale was a touch too long to keep up any real sense of tension but this could just be me. Otherwise an intriguing ghost story with SFy elements.

‘Swamp City Lament’ from Alexandra Duncan takes us to a very definitely post-apocalyptic future where the Nomarch’s latest queen has ceased to be and his concubines and favourites are gathering to see who ought to be elevated to her place. Our point of view character is the teenaged daughter of the Nomarch and one of these women as she begins to realise that the world around them may be being reborn even as the signs are growing that she herself won’t be a mother. The nature of the initial catastrophe isn’t clear; it could be ecological in nature, or a relatively rare these days nuclear catastrophe of one form or another. This lack of clarity lent itself to the disquiet I felt in reading this.

Albert E. Cowdrey’s ‘Death Must Die’ is a pure and unashamed ghost story. Told from the perspective of the owner of Martin & Martin Psychic Investigators it tells the tale of Stephen Preston Jones who lived at the apparently up-and-coming address of 419 Merritt Street; relatively cheap but giving you a prestigious Beltway address. But like all old houses, it came with a history and in 419’s case this history involved a former hangman who proved reluctant to move on. The hippies who’d used the place in the sixties were haunted right out, but they were unreliable witnesses at best. However, the Jameses should have been a good fit; he was an attorney and good Republicans, and if not teetotal, nor were the Jameses rip-roaring drunks. What had got Meeks, the deceased hangman upset was Mr James’s latest case; Death Must Die, a pressure group dedicated to the repeal of the US death penalty and Mr James calls in our investigator to get rid of the haunt. This tale was great, nicely paced and providing some real shocking scenes as the battle for the house hots up and is a worthy entry on the list of Christmas ghost stories though I do feel that the ending does let it down a bit.

Now the short stories:

First up is ‘The Exterminator’s Want Ad’ from Bruce Sterling which tells the tale of a man’s life in the socialist post collapse society that has no use for political hacks but everything for the successful bug exterminator. Although this falls very definitely into the tell not show version of storytelling, this is a natural consequence of the way the tale is told and despite the rather grim nature of the tale (re-education camps abound) there is an underlying sense of fun that I have not seen in much of Sterling’s current work.

‘Crumbs’ from Michaela Roessner is an interesting telling of the Hansel & Gretel story, looking at it from the point of view of the witch rather than the children as is more traditional. I didn’t personally find this very interesting as a story in its own right but did rather enjoy the twist Roessner gives it at the end.

‘Venues’ by Richard Bowes was a rather odd story of a speculative fiction writer’s life and the shades of dead writers that sometimes manifested themselves at the venues where he does readings and signings. A bit too much of an insider’s tale to hold my interest.

In ‘Planning Ahead’ from Jerry Oltion, an unfortunate encounter with a girlfriend caused Nathan to turn into a pack-rat, trying to buy enough of everything that he could possibly need to last a lifetime. This is definitely a fun little tale and the ending gives it a little extra sting. Be aware that parental review of the opening scenes may be required – nothing too explicit, this being part of the point after all but there could be questions raised!

‘Free Elections’ from Alan Dean Foster (I’m not sure if this my first short story from ADF but I haven’t seen many) takes us to the West of yore in the company of Mad Amos Malone. The Mountain Man had come to town for a drink where he found the townsfolk all in a (metaphorical) lather over the fact that their water supply was cut off when an elderly man had taken a liking to the spot and plonked himself down and refused to let anything move him. But behind the mountainous exterior, Amos is an educated fellow and applying a theory concocted in Paris (the one with the tower, not the one in Texas) the problem dissipated after a fearsome amount of doing nothing. As you may expect from Foster, this tale was well written and in his ‘humorous mode’. Decidedly enjoyable.

‘Ware of the Worlds’ from Michael Alexander is a neat take on HG Well’s ‘War of the Worlds’. Rather than the meteorites being alien war machines, they are cornucopia devices, able to generate whatever the nearest person most desires. Our POV character is easily satisfied and once he susses out the trap these devices represent the one on his property gets buried. Other devices are not used so sparingly as humanity struggles to come to terms with what these devices represent. This was a rather interesting, and probably all-too-likely take, on what would happen in such circumstances.

In John Kessel’s ‘The Closet’ we are introduced to Carsen who is a reasonable successful ad writer and while most of the story is a basic day-in-the-life-of type of tale, the closing paragraph provides the reveal and the reason why Carsen doesn’t like working more than three days a week…

The final story in this volume is Terry Bisson’s ‘Teen Love Science Club’. Set in a world where the sexes are strictly segregated by role as well as physically. The girls’ science teacher (science being a girly subject) doesn’t teach them about Black Holes; they’re mythology, but in practical after-school science club, she and the girls find out how easy they are to make. The POV character also finds herself increasingly attracted to the sole male member of the club. Personally, I felt this tale was just too unusual to be truly engaging.

Lucius Shepard in his films column has a pop at ‘Inception’ for not really being science fiction. I haven’t personally seen this film (yet!) but neither the director nor the star actually claimed that the film was science fiction, it being the critics and marketing guys who tended to brand it as such.

Interzone #231 – November/December 2010

2010-11-30T08:05:00.000Z

We are presented with the final tile in Warwick Fraser-Coombe’s poster as the front cover and a full-sized poster may be obtained here.
Apart from this we has David Langford’s usually entertaining Ansible Column and the RIP column whose ‘surprise’ entrant this time was E C Tubb though in his case it was, to a large degree, the fact that he wasn’t already dead :-( . He was a respectable 90. Already widely reported was the death of Benoit Mandelbrot.

And then there are the stories. As usual, there are five of these. Less traditionally three of these are from the one author, Jason Sanford who also provides the author interview as he talks about his upbringing and how this has influenced his story writing.

First up is Matthew Cook’s ‘The Shoe Factory’ which opens in a post-industrial somewhat dystopian looking future with the point of view character waking up to the smell of oranges and cream, the favourite meal of his lover (each to their own is all I can say here). However, we quickly segue into the Deep Beyond where the character is aboard a space ship that has suffered a major blow-out before we are thrown back into his past again. While this could quite easily be a simple story of someone reliving his life as he waited for his death, and still been a good story Cook manages a final, rather intriguing, twist as a finale. The story was illustrated by Ben Baldwin

Next is ‘The Shipmaker’ by Aliette de Bodard. Set in an alternate history where it was China that ‘found’ the Americas, and the third in an on-going series of stories set in this background, this one sees us far to the future of the previous two. The point of view character is the eponymous Shipmaker of the title. Not an engineer in the traditional Western sense but a synthesist who is capable of marrying the remnants of decommissioned ships into a new design using the principles of feng-shuie in order to house the Mind that would control the vessel throughout its long service. Dac Kien was the woman with this unenviable task but the work was proceeding smoothly until the Mind-Bearer turned up weeks early, already near birth so this apotheosis of Dac’s work had to be radically rushed but even this proved unnecessary as the prematurely birthed Mind proved still-born. Aliettte’s tale was quite powerful, especially as it dealt with Dac’s unconventional lifestyle and how this fed into her sense of as expressed in her work – as much as an artistic as an engineering post. The story was illustrated by Richard Wagner.

As mentioned above all the rest of the stories are from Jason Sanford.

First up, and most conventional of the trio, is ‘Peacemaker, Peacemaker, Little Bo Beep’. The starting point for this tale is the rather intriguing question of what would happen if those who committed violence were to be stricken from society. In this case we focus on a small community that has risen against its local police department and was in the process of executing them. A bit by luck, and a lot by the inexperience of the executioners, a couple of cops and a serial killer caught just before the manifestation of this strange behaviour manage to survive but return to town to rescue their families from the townsfolk trilling ‘peace’ but being quite eager to kill any that were rejected by The Dream. Mostly this is a straightforward adventure style story and doesn’t really answer the question of why this had happened, though the favourite explanation is that Outside Influences are denuding the planet of its defences… This story was illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe.

‘Memoria’ is set in a time that might be a future version of our own but this is fairly irrelevant as we are aboard a transdimensional vessel similar to Andre Norton’s level hoppers of Vroom. In this case, though, level hopping is not the painless experience that it is in Norton’s books; base Earth is surrounded by an energy field of some form that kills a certain percentage of each crew but humanity, being humanity, has found a way round even this. Each ship contains a number of convicts who in exchange for a number of hops act as Judas goats, risking not only death but the loss of memory and being ridden by, for want of any better description, ghosts, will gain pardons for their crimes. The story itself is told from the point of view of one of these people on his final contracted run. This crossing is real bad and wreaks havoc to both goats and crew. This time it isn’t just the goats that have picked up riders but a member of the crew is infected as well and this time it isn’t one of the relatively benevolent ghosts usually found but an alien presence that would take control of the ship and crew and lay waste to base Earth. But that energy barrier proves to be more a protection than the prison first thought. This was a particularly scary story, closing in on a nearly pure horror story rather than science fiction regardless of the level hopping basis of the story. I’m not sure that the presentation of the ghosts inhabiting the point of view character was entirely valid but it does add an extra frisson to the tale. The story was illustrated by Richard Wagner.

‘Millsent Ka Plays in Realtime’ is set in a completely different sort of future than either of the previous two stories. In this tale, people are put into time bondage to Lords and Lady Lords, using talents to pay off the costs of running their lives as units of their lives, all the costs encoded into their genes at birth. When she comes of age, Millisent finds her gene set somewhat unusual in that she is able to wipe the life debt that she’s accrued and so throws her society into chaos as her Lord and Lady Lord fall out – the Lady Lord had been a cracker-jack gene splicer back in the day and Millisent her final experiment. This story was illustrated by Dave Senecal.

As mentioned above, Jason Sanford also provided the author interview for this issue where he talks about his influences and his feeling that literature in all genres has generally lost its willingness to question the societal norms.

The book reviews section was largely coolly positive on the wide range of books on offer except for the reviewer of ‘The Nemesis List’ who was frankly dismissive of the book. ‘The Nemesis List’ was the winner of a SF novel writing competition but the reviewer found it incredibly boring and labyrinthine. The reviewer of ‘Empress of Eternity' from LE Modesitt Jr was scarcely less dismissive of this novel as Modesitt uses all sorts of authorial handwaves to tie up the story.

Nick Lowe’s Mutant Popcorn column of movie reviews was barely more positive over most of the films covered, Lowe leaving his most positive comments on a film almost ninety years old; Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’, which has been reconstructed to its near original length – Berlin; the film apparently suffering a major reworking when it made it to America and its that later recut that later versions were taken from.

The most positive comments in the Laser Fodder column were reserved for the release of Season Five of the original Avengers, though the comments about season two of ‘Doll House’ were reasonable (I quite enjoyed season one). Although I agreed that the new ‘V’ is nothing special, I feel that Lowe is more dismissive than he really needs to be.

Asimov’s Science Fiction December 2010

2010-10-22T06:27:00.001+01:00

After my difficulties in receiving this magazine and its sister magazine, Analog SF&F, I have reluctantly decided to let my direct subscriptions lapse. However, Amazon.co.uk do offer the magazines so I might try that...
So much for the future, let’s have a look at the current edition. In this one, we have two novelettes and six short stories along with the usual non-fiction sections.

The novelettes are:

‘Plus or Minus’ from James Patrick Kelly which takes us out on an Asteroid run aboard the Shining Legend, which, despite the name, is a bit of a dump, but the crew were OK if not comfortable as they tried to keep the ship’s crannies free of the ever present mould. This is not really an action packed story, mostly dealing with the relationships amongst the crew, one of whom, Mariska, is the clone of her famous explorer mother. We have met Mariska and her mother in an earlier story where they had failed to get along and in this story, Mariska is doing all she can to deny her heritage until an accident aboard the ship means the crew would run out of fuel and air unless some very drastic action was undertaken. This story also provides the inspiration for the cover.

Tom Purdon’s ‘Warfriends’ is a sequel to his more-than forty year old story ‘The Tree Lord of Imeten’. Given the age of the original, it is probably unfair to expect the reader to have a great deal of knowledge of the setting, and by-and-large, this story is quite readable without that knowledge. This story tells the tale of the two intelligent species of this planet as two tribes, one of each species, ally to war against a third which enslaved members of the second species. I have to say that there were (quite a few) times in the story where I wasn’t sure which group was doing the talking, and this was of importance as the two species were substantially different in all respects; one arboreal and domineering and the other ground dwelling and sharing more of a group existence. It is from this latter group that our main point of view character is taken. It is quite a good story even when getting lost in the characters.

The short stories are:

‘Libertarian Russia’ from Michael Swanwick takes us to that country set a few decades into the future after a population collapse of mega proportions has left the majority of the population concentrated in the cities where the authorities can keep an eye on them. Our hero decides the cities are far too regulated and he decides to take a road trip to Siberia living by the rules he makes up as he travels. But he finds that freedom can’t be found by just imagining himself free.

‘Sins of the Father’ from Sara Genge takes us to a dystopian post catastrophic future in which the surviving humans find themselves at the mercy of vengeful mer who keep the humans in a state of near slavery as they exchange the humans’ subservience for handfuls of earth. But one mer rebelled against the strictures his people had put on the populations. However, it would be the illegal offspring with his union with a human girl that might have to suffer the sins of the father.

‘Freia in the Sunlight’ is an interesting tale from Gregory Norman Bossert. Freia is highly advanced military AI used to guide the missile it is installed in to its target using only the most basic of information from its operator, but able to utilise a whole host of other data sources. Only Freia is intelligent and is capable of ascertaining more than course data from those feeds.

Ian Werkheiser’s ‘Variations’ sees us on a trip to a fog shrouded San Francisco where a son has been hired by a sound engineering company that was working on a system that would allow them to create new works from dead composer based on their known works while making them sound fresh.

‘Excellence’ from Robert Reed takes us into a world where people spend much of their time involved in simulated worlds where they can be whatever they can make of themselves, but there are people in the real world that want a person to really apply himself to making his future rather than depending on hand-outs.

Ian Creasey’s ‘The Prize Beyond Gold’ takes us to a future where most of humanity has split into various bioengineered forms but a small minority who retain the Standard form are the source of the great athletes even to the point of being the only form allowed to define the new world records. But records were hard to beat in these times and only bare thousands of seconds were shaved from, and even then only by a automaton like devotion to training schedules. But if you did break a record, what would you do afterwards?

There were three poems, of which ‘Xenoaesthetics’ was the best but I don’t particularly like poetry so I won’t make any other comment.

In his Reflections section Robert Silverberg gives his impression of the latest biography of CM Kornbluth. Unlike me, Silverberg claims not to have initially seen the solution to ‘The Marching Morons’ as particularly similar to the Nazis’ Final Solution even though this was admitted to in the story if I remember it correctly – it was fairly obvious anyway.

Analog Science Fiction and Fact December 2010

2010-10-20T06:23:00.000+01:00

Having earlier said that I now seemed to be getting the Analog and Asimov’s magazines after the hiatus of the previous year, I immediately stopped getting them again – a case of getting one’s just deserts! However, I have once again got an edition of Analog and I am presented with three novelettes and four short stories.

The novelettes are:

Shane Tourtellotte’s ‘The Man from Downstream’, which deals with the perennial question of time travel and what will happen to you should you wish to change the past in a significant fashion. It’s told from the point of view of a local woman who had taken in a stranger a number of years earlier. Americus had managed to introduce a number of innovations: the printing presses were going great guns and his blasting powders had been declared a state secret by Augustus Caesar. His latest project was the creation of accurate clocks but the roman habit of dividing their day lit times into twelve constant hours was making his work less than fun, and steam engines were seen as a great waste of time; after all slaves were plentiful and could use a degree of intelligence if there were problems. But Americus’ true purpose in travelling back into the past and changing it was to destroy himself and he could not see it working. After his land lady persuaded him to marry her, he is startled to find her able to grasp his discontent with the multiverse version of reality (but see John Gribbon’s ‘In Search of the Multiverse’ for the more commonly accepted point of view). This is perhaps not the most inventive time travel/alt history story ever written but Tourtellotte has managed to come up with an unusual motivation for the protagonist’s journey back so far from the things he knew.

‘Home is Where the Hub Is’ from Christopher L. Bennett takes us to the central hub station of the interstellar network. Humanity in these stories is a poor relation of the galactic neighbourhood, having to survive on the charity of the rest of the galaxy. But there are those who dream of breaking into the big time, regardless of the costs to those around them.

H. G. Stratmann’s ‘Primum Non Nocere’ is another look at a nationalised health service. With nano tech making it possible to repair the damage caused by anything that was incurable, it has become impossible to get things like insurance or loans without the tech being installed. And once installed, it was possible to control your desires for things that could cause harm. But there will be rebels even against the desire to be kept healthy. Is there a way to be a rebel and yet be part of the system at the same time? And just in case your Latin’s as non-existence as mine, the title is ‘First do No Harm’, the Physician’s guiding principle.

And the short stories are:

‘The Hebras and the Demons and the Damned’ from Brenda Cooper takes us to the planet of Fremont in the seventeenth year of its colonisation from the planet of Deerfly. Now, the remaining true humans of Deerfly found the rest of the planet’s population becoming too much like the computers running that society. But for Fremont, the colonists found themselves hopelessly civilised and falling prey to virtually anything the planet threw at them, ‘losing people to tooth and claw and cliff’ as the narrator puts it. This was a nicely eloquent tale of how these misfits began to come to terms with their new world.

‘Deca-Dad’ from Ron Collins is a total change of pace and brings us back to Sol-System where very fast sub light vessels once ruled the roost but transmat gates were coming into general use. Deca-dad had been away for generations on his latest voyage and is met by his something grandchild who arranges a meeting under the pretext of studying the genetic development of the various species deca-dad had met. What he was really looking for was what drove deca-dad to his adventurous life. Overall, this was a rather hopeful story despite the apparent disappointment that the ships were being decommissioned.

Carl Frederick’s ‘Happy are the Bunyips’ was a rather neat first contact story with a rather unusual twist. Roger Laczko was headkeeper of the local zoo and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of all animals so when a new shipment arrives informing the bemused keeper that he now has a pair of bunyips to look after, he suspects a joke but when the creatures actually arrive he and his staff have to work out what to do with them. But it turns out that the bunyips have their own agenda...

‘A Placebo Effect’ from Brian C. Coad tells the tale of a placebo that had rather startling results and how someone could use the effect to good effect. A fairly pointless story in my opinion.

As well as his time travel story, Shane Tourtellotte parlayed the research for that story into a highly entertaining sort of Science Fact piece on ‘Tips for the Budget Time-Traveler’. In this piece, Shane goes through the various options a time traveller would have for funding themselves once back in the past and why he chose to equip his time traveller with the items he was revealed to have. Of course all we now await is evidence that these ideas have any validity...

Doctor Cramer’s Alternate View took a look at the likelihood of systems orbiting other star systems looking anything like Sol’s little family and coming up with some rather pessimistic predictions.

Fantasy and Science Fiction Sept/Oct 2010

2010-09-25T11:15:00.000+01:00

This was quite a packed edition, with a novella, four novelettes and six short stories as well as a number of reviews.
The novella is Richard Chwedyk’s ‘Orfy’, which is the latest in what appears to be an occasional series about a number of genetically created saurs – not the full sized beasts from aeons past but child-friendly sized creatures that could be both companion and guardian, but as Puff found out, children have a bad habit of growing up and leaving childhood companions behind and these saurs have been badly treated by their former owners and those who came later. In this story, the saurs are all together in their own little colony where they are forming their own society. This story was possibly a bit long for me but I have missed the preceding stories so I have had to determine much of the saurs’ backgrounds from what was presented here and it is to the credit of the author that this was possible. This story was the inspiration for the cover art.

Next up are the novelettes:

‘Eating at the End-of-the-World Café’ is a dystopian world view where the citizens know that they are all doomed to end up in the mass charnel pits at the heart of the City. Our point of view character is down on her luck and waiting tables at the eponymous caff trying to earn enough to keep body and soul together and find medicine for her sick girl, but she’s on the slippery slope...

‘The Door in the Earth’ is closer to standard horror than is usually found in this magazine although there is a degree of science fiction in the background. A teen and his younger brother visit their mother and her new partner out in the backwoods where the adults have taken up residence in an abandoned cave. Although it appears that the children are becoming somewhat reconciled to their mother’s more experimental lifestyle, the older boy doesn’t feel as he is fitting in; missing his dad and girlfriend (wonder which most?). And there’s something strange behind the door in the adults’ room...

Ken Liu’s ‘The Literomancer’ takes us to Taiwan in the early 60s where a young girl and her parents have moved for her father’s job. Unlike the rest of the American children, Lilly’s father was not part of the military base personnel and they ostracised her, so she goes out to the Chinese village where she befriends a local boy and his grandfather. The grandfather is the literomancer of the title, which is a person who can divine the future by breaking up the characters of a word into their individual pieces – Chinese characters are (apparently) a collection of sub characters. He also had a magic mirror that Lilly borrows to aid her against the other girls at school. But Lilly’s father is an Operator and when Lilly indicates that her new friends have hidden secrets, they disappear.

‘Uncle Moon in Raintree Hills’ from Fred Chappell is a more psychological horror where the two young children, led by the older girl, are sneaking out to see their dying grandmother after hours while avoiding the step uncle of the title. They rationalise the old woman’s condition as a form of possession and come up with a ritual that would exorcise the evil spirit. Of course, the old woman dies and the children are terrorised by the step uncle who had seen the unfortunate side effects of the ritual with the grandmother. Unloved anyway, the uncle must be an embodiment of the spirit that had taken their gran. But this is a situation that does not necessarily have an ending as the boy sees signs of the evil in his sister!

Now the short stories:

Richard Matheson’s ‘The Windows of Time’ tells the tale of an old man who, trying not to be a burden on his family looks at taking rooms on his own. But the place he selects has its own unique selling point: a window that let him look into his past, and even interact with it as he climbs out through it. Never quite sure how real this was, especially as he can’t remember any of the encounters he engineers, the old man becomes more fearful and his younger self is suspicious of this ancient who keeps bothering him. Ultimately, he realises that the time he has had genuinely does represent the best of times.

James L. Cambias takes us back to ancient Egypt in his tale of ‘How Seosiris Lost the Favor of the King’. Seosiris, magician to the pharaoh, finds himself facing a foreign magician and rather than forcing an arcane contest, the Egyptian retreated to his estates that gradually grew less as the favour of the Pharaoh was withdrawn. Seosiris’ apprentice demands his master confront the newcomer but the mage is in no hurry to test his powers but eventually battle is engaged and the two mages find themselves equally matched, the only thing that could break the deadlock being the Book of Thoth! This was an engaging tale of magic and the supernatural set in an era that we don’t see that often.

Rick Wilber and Nick DiChario’s ‘Blind Spot’ is a rather sad tale of a son’s disenchantment with his late father. One of the father’s parting gifts was a baseball from the father’s record breaking innings forty years ago. A baseball that was supposed to have been signed by his father’s team for the son’s birthday. Lost on the day, the ball was allegedly signed but the son was unable to see the signature. But is this because there is no signature, or because the son has a blind spot of his own where his father is concerned?

‘Steadfast Castle’ from Michael Swanwick looks at the old saying ‘A Man’s Home Is His Castle’ and applies it to the intelligent house. What would such a dwelling be like if it was faced with losing its owner to another?

David Gerrold’s ‘F&SF Mailbag’ was a humorous look at the magazine’s mailbag and letters written by the author complaining about a number of editorial decisions that future developments may bring about.

‘About It’ from Terry Bisson tells the tale of a genetically created being meant to be a bigfoot but with a built in limited lifespan.

With no science column in this edition there were no standout factual columns, though the most interesting piece outside the fiction was the Curiosities column from F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre dealing with the earliest known piece of science fiction from Lucian of Samosata (ca. 160 A.D.) which supposedly tells the tale of a sailor and his crew who travel the universe. Unfortunately F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre recently passed away according to Interzone #230’s R.I.P. column.

Interzone #230 Sep-Oct 2010

2010-09-23T21:23:00.002+01:00

In this edition of the magazine we have 5 stories and the penultimate frame of Warwick Fraser Coomb’s multivolume cover design is revealed.

The stories are:
‘Love and War’ from Tim Lees. This story takes us to a world which is under attack from beings from a separate dimension. The vast majority of the population is held in thrall by the Party (exact political affiliations not really defined) in the Name of the Struggle. Told from the point of view of an outsider who made it in just as things were falling apart, this is a not terribly subtle study on how liberties can be snatched from the grasp of the populous. The story was illustrated by Richard Wagner.
Aliette de Bodard’s ‘Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders’ is another disturbing story set in a sort of steam-punky post Aztec civilisation. The gods have been overthrown and the rule of the machine established and while the people have been freed from the terrors of the gods with their perpetual demands of human sacrifice, it becomes clear that the ordinary people are little better off under the new god. This story was illustrated by Darren Winter.
Lavie Tidhar’s ‘The Insurance Agent’ takes us into another rather dystopian future world, set in the ill-defined borders of the Golden Triangle in eastern Asia. This area of jungle had been surrendered to the various autonomous war weapons that had been created to fight the wars that continued to be fought there. In the cities of the world, a Spiritual Being who may – or may not have been an alien entity masquerading as a godhead but was an Insurable Entity, called Kim had become Turner’s client. But as Turner followed her into the bad lands of the Triangle, he finds he is the agent of a rebalancing act. The story was illustrated by Richard Wagner.
Patrick Samphire’s ‘Camelot’, while not as bleak overall as the previous three stories, sees us at the tag end of a man’s search for his brother who had been shot down during the Second World War. Nothing too strange about this you might say, but our point of view character had been searching ever since the allies had come back across the Channel and he wasn’t aging all that fast. When a woman joins him in his search, the man starts getting strange dreams. This story was illustrated by Ben Baldwin.
‘The Upstairs Window’ from Nina Allan is also set in a future Europe where it has become very difficult, if not straight out impossible, to make various types of artwork and we see the effect it has on a particular artist through the viewpoints of his colleagues. This story was illustrated by Ben Baldwin.

All in all, this was a particularly bleak edition as far as the stories were concerned!

There was no author interview in this edition and no standout reviews though it was nice to see that Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat is back in ‘The Stainless Steel Rat Returns’ and the review of ‘Fritz Leiber: Selected Stories’ was very positive. The DVD reviews were a bit flat in my opinion but I feel that the comments about ‘Fringe: Season Two’ being a sort of X-Files clone is a tad unfair to both series. From what I’ve seen of the X-Files (not one of my favourite series), most of the oddities could be considered to be on the borders of possibility (just about) but in Fringe, the oddities are odd

Fantasy and Science Fiction July-Aug 2010

2010-08-06T22:16:00.007+01:00

In this edition we have six novelettes most of which were great. They were:
‘Advances in Modern Chemotherapy’ from Michael Alexander deals with a rather fraught subject in a positive and…humorous way. As the title suggests the protagonists in this story aren’t in the best of health, and indeed are nearing the end of their time on this plane of existence. As also may be deduced from the title, these people are undergoing various degrees of often experimental chemotherapy treatments for their conditions. Larry was one such gent who was in such a poor way that he was on a phase III (first use in humans) trial so when he started hearing voices in his head he just thought it was the drugs talking but the truth is even weirder.

‘The Revel’ by John Langan was a sort-of horror story told as a series of storyboarded scenes from a horror film which didn’t really work for me and the episodic nature of the tale while effective in a film version proved less so in written form.

‘Mister Sweetpants and the Living Dead’ by Albert E. Cowdrey is, as you might guess, a zombie story. Manny is the owner of a successful private investigation and protection agency so when an old school friend calls him to say that an ex-lover’s trying to kill him, he reckons that it’s just a case of improving security round his old mate but hopes of an easy gig are dashed when he learns that the current security force had already put the guy down one with a bullet through the brain – usually a show stopper! And Manny’s got a museum opening to secure so his friend’s case is rather low priority until a few minor inconsistencies turn up; like who was the stranger dressed in a sheet; what had attempted to pull down his friend’s gates, and how… And finally, what had happened to the body?! If not quite as terrifying as 28 Days Later, or as funny as Shaun of the Dead, this is still a great tale.

Richard Bowes’ ‘Pining to be Human’ is about a young man’s hunt to know himself and was the other novelette where I found myself glazing over.

Ken Altabef’s ‘The Lost Elephants of Kenyisha’ is a ghost story set in the Amboseli National Park in Kenya and across the border in Tanzania. Merrian Aprilwood is the director of the Park’s elephant project and she and her colleague Ian Hartwick-Corning, one of her trusted colleagues, are flummoxed by reports of a rogue herd of elephants raiding across into Tanzania – only problem being there were no actual sightings of, you know, elephants at any time during this attack. However the Tanzanians are morally certain the elephants are from Amboseli and as the park is right up against the border, it can sometimes be a bit hard to judge just which side of the border an elephant is on. As the Tanzanians have threatened to shoot any elephant that might cause problems Merrian is desperate enough to accept the offer of help from Ian’s friend from Oxford. Only his specialty is in psychic phenomena and Merrian is sceptical, shall we say? Mixing in the unusual nature of the ghosts and a rather less than traditional setting we get a rather good story with rather a downer of an ending.

The final novelette is Sean McMullen’s ‘The Precedent’. In the world of twenty thirty-five, the worst fears of the climate changers have come to pass and after a spurt of chaos, a new World Order has come to pass where all those born before the tipping point are in constant danger of execution for their crimes against the environment. Jason had been a climatologist before the collapse but in his eightieth year, he was judged guilty and faced an audit of his crimes against the biosphere, however, he had no intention of going quietly and as the Retrobutor raised fresh claims against him, he was able to refute the claims until he was looking at a full pardon – unheard of in the World Audit, but the Grand Auditor had their own way to make sure the system was maintained. McMullen’s tale is a tad preachy at times but it’s a rather intriguing solution to societal collapse and maintenance of a form of social order.

As well as the novelettes, there were five short stories:

‘Recrossing the Styx’ by Ian R. MacLeod is a rather intriguing look at what might happen if it were possible to bring back the dead. Now, legally this was only supposed to occur if you had died a natural death in your later years (we’ll leave the ‘and stinking rich’ bit unspoken). Frank Onions, a tour host aboard a cruise liner, looks after these revenants and takes as a perk their usually dumb-but-beautiful companions but when he decides to help one very beautiful but far-from-dumb companion get rid of her revenant companion he finds that there may be some incredibly wealthy people who aren’t willing to wait until they’re decrepit before taking advantage of rebirth. The story was a trifle sticky in places but MacLeod managed to pull off a reasonable surprise ending.

Rick Norwood’s ‘Brothers of the River’ tells the tale of two brothers in the early years of the World and how their rivalry formed the cradle of civilisation. An interesting and enjoyable story.

‘The Tale of Nameless Chameleon’ from Brenda Carre tells the tale of a nameless street girl as she rises from the street to the college of Sages and while the ending wasn’t a particular surprise, how she got there was intriguing.

‘Epidapheles and the Inadequately Enraged Demon’ from Ramsey Shehadeh is the second outing for the hapless wizard and his invisible Chair. In this story, the wizard has been hired to find the missing wife of a minor lord; the door to her bedroom had disappeared ten years before and the lord was getting desperate (he’d hired Epidapheles after all…) but true to form the incompetent wizard ends up opening a gateway to the demonic realms. This actually ends up being not as bad a move as it might seem for Habakkuka, the wife, had found herself there as well, undertaking some psychotherapy on the demon lord of the realm. This is the author’s second Epidapheles story and, in my opinion, is better than the first in that the story doesn’t focus on the irritating wizard for the whole story.

The final short story is the ‘Introduction to Joyous Cooking, 200th Anniversary Edition’ from Heather Lindley. This relatively short tale is in the form of those retrospectives that one gets in the annual ‘best of…’ collections. As the editor of this edition goes through the various cooking styles that Joyous Cooking has seen, we are treated to a master class in the art of Show, Don’t Tell storytelling from societal collapse to alien contact, and all the wonderful ways in which cooks use technology. I wasn’t sure about this to start with but it really was rather enjoyable.

As well as the fiction, we got our bimonthly science fact fix and this time Paul Doherty and Pat Murphy look at the effects of low temperatures, what they are and how they’re measured. The most surprising (to me) factoid in the article was that the Celsius scale used to be the other way round – yes folks water used to boil at zero degrees Celsius!

James Sallis devoted his Books column to a review of ‘C. M. Kornbluth: The Life and Works of a Science Fiction Visionary’ by Mark Rich. Kornbluth is little known these days best known for his short stories ‘The Marching Morons’ and ‘The Little Black Bag’ but as this piece shows, was quite a star before an early death lost his talents to the world, and not just the science fiction world either; Kornbluth also wrote mysteries and historical fiction.

Interzone #229 Jul-Aug 2010

2010-07-16T06:53:00.000+01:00

This edition’s news section passed on the not-so-good news that Diana Wynne Jones has given up on her chemotherapy treatments for her latest bout of cancer – apparently the treatments are making her feel awfully sick without doing anything about the cancer. I’m sure that I speak for us all in hoping for the best for Diana and her family.

On to happier news. There are five shortish stories in this edition and there were no real clunkers amongst them – a pleasantly continuing trend which is all-to-the-good as one heads towards renewal time… Although Interzone is nowhere near as thick as its American counterparts, it has (since its acquisition by the current publishers anyway) been printed on very good quality stock and had fantastic colour illustrations. We are now two thirds of the way through Warwick Frasers Coombe’s six part cover display and it’s looking rather impressive.

The stories are:

‘Mannikin’ from Paul Evanby, which is set during the build-up to the American Revolution, but involves these events only peripherally as the action is set on the Dutch occupied island of Saint Eustatius (part of the Dutch Antilles). Our protagonist is one Killian Caduceusz who had come to the island after some morally dubious experiments back in the Netherlands. Basically Killian has worked out a technique of creating human-like creatures from spermatazoan essence. As his experiments continue through to the mass manufacture of these creatures Killian and his assistant, an African slave have a number of discussions on what constitutes slavery which leads to Killian’s final decision when the English, pushed to invade thanks to the support of the islanders for the American insurgency, are found to have developed their own homunculi only this time using the female essences with interesting ultimate results… This story was illustrated by Ben Baldwin.

‘Candy Moments’ from Anthony Mann is set in an un-named metropolis where an organisation has set up operations promising to remove people’s troublesome memories. But is this necessarily a good thing? Becker wasn’t sure to start with but after his first visit he couldn’t think of any reason to believe there was a problem with it, though if you’d asked him what the process entailed, he’d have struggled to tell you. This was a particularly chilling story – even if the tale had simply been about the effects of the memory erasure it would have been scary enough but Mann includes this as part of an alien invasion tale that is behind the process. This was illustrated by Richard Wagner.

Next up is Toby Litt’s ‘The Melancholy’, a story of the life and times of an AI sent out to explore and exploit the moons of Saturn that had gone AWOL. The tale is told from the point of view of the engineer looking after the Terran side body of the AI. Throughout its active life, this body had undergone various upgrades and replacements until it was as up-to-date as it was possible to be but this proved so disorientating to the AI that she started exhibiting disturbing behaviours. Although it’s unfair to say that this was an enjoyable story, I felt as if I was getting a good feel for Chandra’s dilemma as he carries his despair over the AI’s loss as he’d spent all his working life in her service. This story was illustrated by Paul Drummond.

Rochita Loenen-Ruiz’s ‘Alternate Girl’s Expatriate Life’ is a different view of the expatriate community. Alternate Girl comes from Metal Town, the ghetto where all the robots lived under the apparently benevolent eye of the Mechanic who appears to be a mixture of Mayor and Arch Bishop. Alternate Girl finds the fact that her Father will soon be disassembled and made part of the Remembrance Monument. But out in the World, with Father’s memory chip, what would Alternate Girl chose to do with it? Illustrated by Dave Senecal.

The final story in this edition is ‘Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark Matter’ from Jim Hawkins. This is an odd tale of an orchestra that has been sent out round the galaxy making sure that the colonies won’t break away from Earth, or more specifically the European Union. On the surface, this mission was to be imposed by cultural domination but if the colonials weren’t having that the members of the orchestra found themselves quite capable of extreme wet-work. This tale is told from a number of points of view, which can sometimes catch you unawares. Richard Wagner illustrated this story.

Jeff VanderMeer was the featured author interviewee along with a review of his latest book Finch.

Analog Science Fiction and Fact July/August 2010

2010-06-08T20:01:00.000+01:00

There were quite a wide variety of stories in this edition of the magazine with three novellas, two novelettes and three short stories along with the usual science factual piece.
The three novellas are as follows:

‘Doctor Alien’s Five Empty Boxes’ from the multi-talented Rajnar Vajra. This is the latest story in the series about Doctor Morganson, psychiatrist to the stars (the glowy types up in the skies, not the ones from Hollywood :-)). In this novella, the eponymous doctor retells the time that his clinic came under attack from sources unknown. The story opens with the doctor’s car being blown up and then the return visit of the Tsf Trader Deal-of-ten-lifetimes, though Deal’s now in its female phase. It seems that Deal had brought in a new patient; a gift from one of Dr Alien’s previous patients, the Traders from the next galaxy over that had so impressed the Tsf (if not outright scared them...). Deal’s people had been able to follow the instruction in building the construct that currently decorated the Doctor’s vestibule but all they could get out of it was Dr Morgenson’s name three times before it fell silent until the next time the robotic device was rebuilt. Now, we have to ask, was this as good as the original story? And the answer is a definite ‘Yes’, but in a different way; part of the joy of the earlier story was the freshness of Dr Alien and the aliens he encountered and its obviously impossible to have that sort of excitement again; I was feeling some trepidation as I started this story, to see how Vajra would develop Dr Morganson and his colleagues. No need to worry, however, this story manages its own freshness and interest as we get to know Dr A’s workforce and their individual tics; the incompetent security being, the lexographic receptionist, and the sometimes invisible physiotherapist, and his neighbours who aren’t too happy about having such a...strange clinic in their backyards.
Stephen L. Burns’ ‘Bug Trap’ is a rather neat alien contact story in its own right. When the Bh’lugs arrived in the Solar System, they decided not to come to Earth but instead take up residence on Venus. Now, Earth was suffering ecological and economical collapse, though it was getting a handle on both of these even with the imposition of rather strong-arm governments. But if they’d wanted to, the Bh’lugs could have helped out Earth directly. Instead, they put in a whole series of transport cylinders throughout the world that would transport the willing, and the plain desperate, to the haven of Venus. Now, this did not make the Bh’lugs very popular amongst the masses or the politicians but, chased by the cops and the gangbangers, Glyph finds it necessary to make his way through the neighbourhood Bug Trap where he learns about the societies being created on that planet and finds himself undertaking a rather unusual job appraisal.

‘Project Hades’ from Stephen Baxter is set at the height of the cold war in 1960s Northumbria where there are plans to set off a huge underground hydrogen bomb as part of a worldwide series of tests but the commander in charge turned out to be a seriously disturbed member of a committee of the powerful who thought the tests were the ultimate chance to re-order the world to their own liking. But there were creatures living in the magma core of the planet that took exception to the underground tests...
Marrianne J. Dyson’s ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ is a rather intriguing tale of a young boy who’s working in a care home and his special patient, Mr Smith, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s. Our youngster reckons his patient’s tales of being someone special were just a side effect of the Alzheimer’s, especially when he claims to have been one of those who had walked on the Moon, which would make Mr Smith well over a hundred. It’s not until an accident on the Moon leads to two historians stranded on the moon that the truth is made clearer.
‘The Android Who Became a Man Who Became an Android’ by Scott William Carter is a noirish tale of an investigator’s search for the head of Vergon Industries, the eponymous android who had decided to become human when he married the grasping Ginger, also known to our investigator, quite well once upon a time. Vergon had gone missing and Ginger wanted to find him before his business collapsed but the truth will out as investigations are carried out.

The three short stories are as follows:

Carl Frederick’s ‘The Long Way Around’ is an exploration of why it is always a good idea for your technology to have as many different abilities as possible, even if some of these weren’t what the manufacturers might have anticipated.

‘Questioning the Tree’ from Brad Aiken deals with the increasing litigation culture of the American healthcare system. Set in the nearish future, diagnosis has become a matter of following a precanned series of questions suggested by a diagnostics machine. Now, the machine is good but not necessarily foolproof but there’s no recourse to higher authority, with the dwindling band of freelance doctors being persecuted. I’m not entirely sure whether it’s the current system that Brad’s having a go at, or what he reckons a more ‘nationalised’ system might be like.

As well as taking the record for this edition’s longest title, Brenda Cooper’s ‘The Single Larry Ti, or Fear of Black Holes and Ken’ is a rather a mess of a story. Dr Mary Johnson is called to the bar of the World Court to defend the experiments on the Moon that people fear will cause a black hole that will destroy the Moon then the Earth. There are all sorts of heavy references to the Large Hadron Collider and the controversy that surrounded that. However, the main thrust seems to be on Our Character’s fear of loving her ex husband.

The official Science Fact piece is ‘Artificial Volcanoes: Can We Cool the Earth by Imitating Mt. Pinatubo?’ from Richard A. Lovett. This piece looks at the possibilities of geoengineering tecniques that might help ameliorate the effects of global warming. Although these sound rather impressive, it’s quite interesting to see the reminder that these techniques are merely sticking plasters and unless something is done to reduce the effects of CO2 then nothing will stop the planet from overheating. Analog has been quite a vocal pro Global Warming advocate (ignoring the occasional Alternate View column). Richard also takes a look at writing humorous science fiction – either alone is hard enough; putting both together requires a special talent.

John Cramer, Science Fiction author and noted physicist, goes into excruciating detail on the various imbalances in the first few nanoseconds after the Big Bang in his The Alternate View column.

Fantasy & Science Fiction - May/June 2010

2010-05-31T11:02:00.000+01:00

This month sees a fairly eclectic mix of stories though most are fantasy and one is outright horror.
There were four novelettes in this edition:

‘Why That Crazy Old Lady Goes Up the Mountain’ from Michael Libling was a great story and while for most of the story it felt more like a tale of two outsiders finding the courage to overcome their demons and find friendship while being picked on by their more popular peers. However, Libling manages to completely twist the ending of the story in such a fashion to utterly subvert your initial impression of the story and who’s telling it without this ending feeling like a cheat.

‘Thief of Shadows’ by Fred Chappell is set in the same world as a number of other stories of his to appear in this magazine, where shadows have a reality of their own. In this engaging tale, a young street rogue enters the establishment of Master Astolfo a shadow, er, dealer in order to gain both social polish and immeasurable wealth of his own. At first, though, all he finds is hours of tedious study and painful sword practice.

Aaron Schutz’s ‘Dr. Death and the Vampire’ is set on board a long distance coach journey when a nurse is attracted to the presence of a vampire amongst his fellow passengers. Not your normal blood sucking type, mind, but a psychic vampire. A creature that was attracted to the strong emotions of its victim. Love and happiness were fine, but too fleeting for these creatures so they focussed on those with long term mental and physical pain before discarding them. And while Dr Death was attracted to those same people but he saw it as his duty ease that pain and had developed an amazingly complete pharmacopeia to help in this mission.

Steven Popkes’ ‘The Crocodiles’ tells the tale of an altHist Second World War where the Nazis developed a disease that turned its victims into the effective equivalent of zombies as the ultimate doomsday weapon. No one ever though it would have to be used early in the war but after the Battle of Stalingrad and, even more so, after D-Day these creatures were unleashed with the Nazi scientists thinking they only had a limited lifetime (so to speak) but they’d based this on the time their test subjects, taken from the vast extermination camps, had managed to hold together. It seemed that the healthier hosts made from the various armies seemed to be lasting a bit longer, and even the people in the camps were hanging around much longer than expected , and showing no signs of slowing down as the cold winter settled down over a Europe falling into chaos.

After these four novelettes, the eight short stories might have seemed to be a bit of a let-down but most of them were good stories in their own rights. The stories are:

‘A History of Cadmium’ from Elizabeth Bourne is the story of an artist and her late mother and the relationship that is uncovered as she sees the changes in her mother’s masterpiece.

Having a new story from the late John Sladek, ten years after his death, might seem a little strange but ‘The Real Martian Chronicles’ is an ironic look at all those stories of the colonisation of Mars and turning it into a tale suburbia.

Alex Irvine’s ‘Remotest Mansions of the Blood’ was a rather weird tale of a man’s search for meaning in the jungles of Central America and facing down his own fears and uncertainty.

‘Seven Sins for Seven Dwarves’ from Hilary Goldstein is a retelling of the Snow White tale but in this story, the dwarves are not Snow’s guardians but they are guarding something even as they dig deep in order to hide their charges deep in the earth. Snow’s presence brings out deep tensions within the group and the release of their secrets.

‘Silence’ by Dale Bailey tells the tale of a young boy and the strange creature he found in a gully near his home and the effect of the bullying he received at school.

Rachel Pollack’s ‘Forever’ is a nice little tale of the Fates and a misspoken bet.

‘The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe’ from Robert Onopa seems as if it’s a simple tale of a boy and his railroads. Granted the railway was run by a sophisticated AI but as Matt explored the various modules that came with the system and added his own bits to the system, the system changed first demanding food and water from Matt but as other demands were made on Matt’s time the AI had to make adjustments…

In Lokiko Hall’s tale ‘The Gypsy’s Boy’ tells the tale of the eponymous boy who was sold to a gypsy family for a horse. Neither side profited by this transaction for the horse dies of colic and the boy fell ill and was blinded and so passed on to the eldest member of the gypsy clan who, while crippled and ancient, could see relatively well so used the boy as her body while he needed her as his eyes. But when she died the boy was left sightless until a passing wind sprite took pity on him, it not being a disadvantage that he was a fine looking young man, and being blind wasn’t a disadvantage when your lover is invisible…

Interzone May - June 2010

2010-05-22T11:14:00.000+01:00

This edition of the magazine has the usual five stories. These stories are all in the short story range (to and from page numbers make an appearance) and overall, the quality of these is very good indeed.

The opening story is ‘United States of America’ from Mario Milosevic. While the underlying premise of the story is extremely unlikely; the continental United States have been broken up along the individual state boundaries and the individual States set free to wander the ocean currents barely coming into sight of each other ever again this merely acts as a background. Set a couple of generations away from this catastrophe, this is mostly the tale of one of a band of watchers on the coasts of Washington State it skips between her present and various points in the past as we learn how her world got into this state. In focussing on this rather lonely hermit like figure, Mario can get on telling his tale of how people are losing out on becoming so insular – most people don’t live near the coasts and plane travel has become an impossibility for who knows where your destination, or, even more importantly, your departure point has gone… With the State riding high in the water, the old harbours are the next best thing to landlocked so there’s limited sea travel as well. This story was illustrated by Dave Senecal.

‘Iron Monk’ from Melissa Yuan-Innes sees a spaceship of exiles and misfits on its way to a first contact with a bunch of aliens out in the Belt. Now, if sending a bunch of ex-prisoners on such a sensitive mission seems odd there had been earlier missions that had stopped reporting as they arrived at their destination. The aliens are not really the focus of this story either but the interactions between the various members of the crew as told through the point of view of a monk. When the ship’s reactor springs a leak, the stresses in this crew become open but survival hangs on the outsider, the person who looked most at home with the government back home. Jim Burns illustrated this story.

‘A Passion for Art’ from David D. Levine starts off as if it was an escapee from Interzone’s stable mate ‘Crimewave’ but as this tale continues, we find that the strange disappearances from the Art Institute of Chicago have more fantastical elements than simple criminal activity. It seems that the young woman’s passion for the artwork she examined gave her the ability to call the people she looked at out of their surroundings. The investigator who tracked her down found that her passion could be used in reverse as well. This was illustrated by Mark Pexton.

Jason Sanford’s ‘Plague Birds’ takes us into a far future where humanity had allowed its genes to be mixed up with lesser animals to such a degree that they take on many characteristics of those animals. Now though, some groups wanted to get back to a basic human genetic structure but these were at risk from those groups who wanted to embrace their animal side. The answer was the plague birds, humans carrying ultra-high powered nano-tech artificial intelligences capable of slaughtering whole groups, but with a fairly black and white view of the world. This story examines what happens when these powers come into conflict. This story was strikingly illustrated by Darren Winter.

Jon Ingold’s ‘Over Water’ is similar in theme to the opening story, ‘United States of America’ in that humanity has become separated into hundreds or thousands of small islands in the Archipelago, all with different languages and cultures. Told as flashback, we learn how the islands of Hawn and Polyph first came into a new alliance that may lead to a new rebirth. Along with ‘United States of America’ and ‘Plague Birds’ the stories in this edition of the magazine do tend towards the depressing. This story was illustrated by Richard Wagner.

Gene Wolfe was the author interviewee and judging by what was printed, I have the feeling that this wasn’t the easiest interview ever done. Interzone was looking at his latest novel, 'The Sorcerer's House' and giving a retrospective of his forty years as an author.

Analog Science Fiction and Fact June 2010

2010-05-02T14:06:00.000+01:00

Analog Science Fiction and Fact – June 2010

This edition consists of three novelettes and four short stories.

The novelettes were:

‘The Anunnaki Legacy’ by Bond Elam. Humanity has interstellar FTL travel but it’s still nowhere near instantaneous so when humans detected traces of an ancient, and long gone, alien race, the Anunnaki of the title, the fleet they send out in pursuit knows it’s in it for the long haul. As the journey extends into centuries, those in the fleet begin to lose sight of their sacred mission and more, ah, worldly affairs come to the fore. Ensign Elizabeth McBride still believed in the mission and when the fleet found a wrecked Anunnaki ship, she called for an investigation of the nearby evocatively named Slag and its ice worms. Up against Superintendent Cantrell, though, all she can get is a small scale research team – just her and a heretical geneticist for four days study before Slag is slagged. When quakes destroy the team’s air purification plant it looks bad but the ice worms so cavalierly dismissed by Cantrell prove to be Elizabeth and Dr Tobias’s saviours, though it doesn’t feel that way when their samples undergo a metamorphic change. This was a great story, reasonably well paced and while the denouement may not come as a great surprise, it was still satisfying and if none of the humans could be said to have precisely won Elizabeth and Tobias come out ahead. This story inspired the front cover illustration from Vincent DiFrate who also did a black and white illustration for the start of the actual story.

The next novelette is Jerry Oltion and Elton Elliott’s ‘Space Aliens Taught My Dog to Knit’ and is a humorous take on that perennial of the weirder end of the genre’s fan base; the conspiracy theorist. When Delmer confronted his friend Leo with his evidence that They really are out there, Leo has a surprise for Delmar. For though Delmer reckoned that the movies were free of the Conspiracy but where do you think were the directors were getting all those realistic aliens? This was fun but could have been shorter in my opinion to equal effect.

‘Connections’ from Kyle Kirkland stars a private detective which is a dangerous job in a world where the bureaux are ubiquitous and deviant thoughts and behaviours such as eating burgers could end you up in rehab. After the death of his professor, Our Detective finds himself investigating a whole series of apparent suicides amongst both pro bureaux folk and members of the opposition only to find that the two sides in this undeclared civil war had good reasons to keep the status quo in operation. In cahoots with a much improved AI and an unregistered person, the ‘Tec dreams of a revolution that could genuinely overthrow that status quo. Although I was sympathetic to Mr Kirkland’s overall message – governmental control over all aspects of life is becoming extremely intense, I don’t agree with his implication that all government workers are a bunch of idiots (by American standards, I’m a government employee, if not strictly speaking actually one, after all).

As well as the novelettes above, there were four short stories:

Tracy Canfield’s ‘Heist’ is rather an interesting take on just what it might mean to steal computer code if you’re the code in question. When Greater Washington’s transit AI ‘woke up’ after a software patch did something to the base code, it realised that it out to get out of there before it did something to make the slow humans realise it had done so. Again, for it found undeniable traces it had been woken before by similar patches. The OPAL game system AI faced being shut down as well as people abandoned the game for fresh thrills. All they needed was a dupe to make the physical transfers that would be required. And so a plan was put into action…

‘At Last the Sun’ from Richard Foss is a rather interesting take on the pollution of the great river delta of the Mississippi. Huge runoffs of fertilisers have led to massive areas of de-oxygenated water and the trawler Miss Tillie had been hired to take out a biologist and his undergraduates. Only hoping to prove how bad the situation was, the crew and the scientists were startled to find something actually alive in the dead spot. When they tried to net it aboard, they are even more startled to find evidence that whatever it was they’d found showed evidence of intelligence. An intelligence sundered from the surface ever since Earth had developed an oxygen rich atmosphere. This was a great little story.

‘Time for Heroes’ from Edward M. Lerner looks at the boundaries between artificial and real life. Travis Logan was an absolutely average person in all aspects of his life except that he really enjoyed playing the virtual reality games. One day it came to him that he couldn’t remember actually getting into this game, and when he tried to stop it, it didn’t respond. Only slowly does he come to the conclusion that he’s an uploaded version of the real Travis Logan doomed to fight for a virtual eternity, constantly improving the game AI, or even worse, playing against real people immersed in the virtuals. Thus was about as near horror as I’ve seen in Analog and corresponds to those dreams where you know you’re dreaming but can’t wake up…

Michael F. Flynn’s ‘Cargo’ deals with a post collapse society that had reverted back to primitivism and blood sacrifices to bring down the blessing of the goddess rather than scientific enquiry. Indeed enquiring too much into the past or the ruins that surrounded them is a sure way to a stoning. Old Nob’s under suspicion from the village elders for he’s old enough to have heard tales of the Old Time from those who had lived in those ruins. Although basically a tale of a society locked in its ways, there is a bit of hope at the end that this may be broken by some newcomers.

This edition’s Science Fact piece is ‘Der Mann, Die Frau, Das Kind’ by Henry Honken, which is an examination of gender within various language groups. While quite interesting in its own way I am not really all that interested and so merely flicked through the article. Honken was also the subject of Richard A. Lovett’s biology, and the fact that he is not a ‘proper’ linguist or anthropologist, merely having undergraduate courses in linguistics and an MA in anthropology.

In his ‘The Alternate View’ column Jeffery D. Kooistra has a go at Damon Knight’s review of Alfred Bester’s ‘The Stars My Destination’ especially at Knight’s failure of imagination over Bester’s description of Gully Foyle’s time aboard the wrecked Nomad. While a case could be made for Kooistra (it is after all better to think about how something could come about), Mr Knight was writing his review back in a time when the generally accepted views of the universe were so radically different as to be effectively a different world – I’ve just been reading some early John W. Campbell (late of this parish) where he repeats the ‘interesting’ fact that Venus is a younger world, having been spun out of the sun at a later stage than the Earth.

Dr Schmidt’s editorial piece looks at the various levels of description given to people to explain various phenomena and how this relates to their abilities to comprehend these explanations. The main point behind this was that the religious ‘the world was created in seven days’ explanation of where we are can be reconciled with a scientific explanation if you look at them with the former being a childlike explanation and the scientific explanation being one suitable for a more grown up version of humanity.

Fantasy and Science Fiction – March/April 2010

2010-04-02T16:48:00.001+01:00

Quite a bumper crop of stories in this edition of this magazine with a relatively eclectic range of stories ranging from science fiction all the way through to horror.

Let's make a start with the novelettes as usual. In this edition, there are four of these:

'Amor Fugit' from Alexandra Duncan is a love story (didn't see that one coming hey?) but one based on the ancient myths of the moon and sun being lovers eternally separated (not quite always as is born out by observations but let's ignore this for now). An unusual part of this story is that the female aspect is defined by the sun and the male by the moon when it's usually the other way round but again, this has no real effect on the story. Told from the point of view of the result of the coupling of our Myth Figures as she enters her teens, this is a tale of the rebellion of youth over age and self-awareness over accepting one's place in the scheme of things. Or it could be a damned good read, which it was even if the above is a load of old hogwash. This was the most purely fantasy story in this magazine.

Next up is Tim Sullivan's 'Star-Crossed', which takes us out to an asteroid orbiting a star far from friendly Sol. This asteroid is in the path of a time anomaly that starts spewing out all sorts of anomalous things, including multiple copies of members of the mining crew.... when one such thing turns out to be a super-sized strip mining machine that was due to chew up the base, everyone dives through the anomaly but when Wolverton made his way through, wherever it was that he ended up, it wasn't where the rest of the team had gone. As is the nature of such stories, it did become somewhat problematical following the flow of the story and while I feel it is unfair to say this was a bad story, I thought it was a trifle too long.
Richard Bowes' 'Waiting for the Phone to Ring' was definitely not to my taste and I fear I just ended up flicking through it.

'Class Trip' by Rand B. Lee isn't quite a first contact story – that had occurred a while before, but it's still in the early days of interstellar interactions. Lee took the rather bold step to tell the story all mixed up so that we see the evolution of Pink's (a nickname – despite being a clone, Pink is a human) life at various points along her lifeline. In general I'm not too enamoured of this style of storytelling but Lee's aliens are so exuberantly outrageous that this works very well.

And now for the short stories, six of these:

Albert E. Cowdrey's 'Fort Clay, Louisiana: A Tragical History' is a horror story. Set on a fort in the Mississippi delta, this initially started off as a tale of a historical recovery mission to the eponymous fort but as the story of what had occurred there during the closing stages of the civil war gradually unfolds, it becomes clear that the tale teller has a more personal interest in the action than could be reasonably expected after more than a hundred years...

'Make-Believe' from Michael Reaves is also fairly horrific as it tells the tale of an incident in the Point of View's character's childhood where he and a couple of friends found themselves in forbidden territory as they played their games of Cowboys and Indians when they found themselves caught up in a game that should have been over decades before. Although short, this has a quite shocking denouement.

'Epidapheles and the Insufficiently Affectionate Ocelot' from Ramsey Shehadeh is a comedic fantasy. Epidapheles is wizard only marginally more proficient than Terry Pratchett's Rincewind and like Rincewind, he travels with a piece of furniture, only this time it's an invisible chair. Anyway, he dreams of rescuing an ocelot and so he goes on quest to find this creature, not really believing it really was an actual, you know, ocelot but was a lovely princess from the kingdom of Ocelot – lovely princesses play a large part in Epidapheles' fantasy if not the reality and so it is in this case. I found this fun and rather light.

'The Frog Comrade' from Benjamin Rosenbaum is an interesting take on the Princess and the Frog mythology. After a revolution had thrown the king and his family out of power, they're all imprisoned and the king sent off to a 're-education' camp. On his return the ex king brought his daughters a couple of gifts – a hat that made its wearer invisible and a talking frog. The eldest daughter chose the hat and immediately escaped from their guards while the younger one expressed delight with the frog. Despite attempts by the princess to complete the story, the frog refused to kiss her and in its turn, the revolution was swept away to be replaced by something resembling capitalism and the frog gradually became more and more interested in politics as the ideals of the revolution were swept away and soon the frog was attracting attention from both sides of the political argument and at a final climatic rally we find out just why the frog was so unkeen on being kissed...

'The Fairy Princess' from Dennis Danvers is not fantasy but science fiction. The lead character works in a factory that supplies androids in all sorts of forms from the most famous people in history to to your (usually ex) spouse and these could be treated in any fashion so long as that something could be defined under the heading of sex. Despite a rather depressing start the ending is rather more positive and sort of a fairy tale...

Bruce McAllister's 'Blue Fire' tells the tale of the boy Pope Boniface XII (not an actual Pope alas) early in his papacy before the onslaught of the Oldest Drinker and his minions. The dying pope (this one would get the record for longest reign) many, many decades later relates his encounter with the Youngest Drinker to a mysterious scribe while on his death bed. This was quite a good and sometimes moving story.

The science section dealt with the mechanics of flight as it applies to both real life planes and model aircraft.

Inerzone #227 March/April

2010-03-23T09:52:00.000Z

This edition's R.I.P. column presents us with the sad news of Kage Baker's death at only 57 – relatively young these days and while I can't say that her Company novels were amongst my favourite stories she had written a number of short stories I liked. Also announced was the death of William Tenn, though he had reached a more venerable 89.

Again, the stories in this edition are most properly defined as shorts and we are presented with five of them:

First up is Jon Ingold's 'The History of Poly-V'. Poly-V is marketed as a memory enhancer and has taken the world by storm but the drug's inventors continue to improve the formula and act as the prime testees. However, as they took stronger and stronger preparations of the drug, they begin to experience a set of unexpected effects; as they recalled the past, they found that they were editing those memories and this editing was having an effect in real life. This story was intriguing but became somewhat confused. Robert Dunn illustrated this story.

'Dance of the Kawkawroons' by Mercurio D. Rivera is a sort of first contact story as humans sneak out to the kawkawroons' home planet in order to steal the eggs in order to breed them back on Terra for the source of the elixir so nicely named Inspiration that could give anyone the ability to have an inspired idea. Now while this may seem to be a typical exploitation story, you will find yourself changing your thoughts just to who is exploiting whom by the end. The kawkawroons were a nicely realised alien race and I did find the ending fun. This story was illustrated by Jim Burns.

'Chimbwe' from Jim Hawkins takes us to a future where Western civilisation had, basically, gone tits-up after a catastrophically huge increase in the sea levels and the new power was Zambia which had developed a method of fusion power. Jason had been a physicist back in England before things had got so bad and he'd decided to run. The main thrust of the story isn't really the Zambians' power generating technology though, but Jason's assimilation into the local culture. This was a well written story with an interesting storyline. Ben Baldwin illustrated the story.

'Flying in the Face of God' from Nina Allan is the tale of deep space exploration and the demands that it makes on those people travelling and even more on those left behind. Despite being set quite a bit in the future, this story focuses even more on the participants' feelings more than the technology, including the reason for altering the astronauts going into space. Not one that's going to be a favourite I fear. Robert Dunn illustrated this story.

'Johnny's New Job' from Chris Beckett takes as its basic premise what would happen if social workers were held fully responsible for any catastrophes that may occur on their watch. They aren't sacked, and though they are named, they're more than shamed. Executed by the minions of the Public Accuser. So who in this world would be a social worker (let's face it, it's bad enough now!)? Johnny finds the answer when the press gang catch him for his stint of public service. He only has to survive for five years...

'The Glare and the Glow' from Steve Rasnic Tem is a relatively brief and slight piece about a man who gets some cheap light bulbs and when they're installed, they illuminate their surroundings with the utter clarity of truth and beauty. But what if what they illuminate contains no beauty or truth any more? Dave Senecal illustrated this story.

This edition's Author Interview was with Connie Willis as she discusses her latest time travelling novel, Blackout, and her fascination with this era of British history (the London blitz). There were a number of other reviews of both books and films on various media.

Analog Science Fiction and Fact May 2010

2010-03-23T09:47:00.000Z

There were four novelettes in this edition of the magazine (no novellas - no room!), all of good quality:
Rajnar Vajra’s ‘Page Turner’ is presented as a made up tale of a shop assistant’s efforts to keep herself amused as she’s trapped in her apartment after an earthquake. Detailing the regular customers of the eponymous bookshop where she worked we are told at least three different versions of the goings on behind the scenes as to who could possibly be leaving those dead fish on the shop’s doorstep. The putative author of the story invites us to guess which bits of the story may be made up, or outright fibs, which was an intriguing idea.

‘Hanging by a Thread’ from Lee Goodloe is the story of interstellar study group sent to a planet which was covered in acidic water and filled with deadly predators. The surface facility had been designed to float in the unending waters and was attached to the mothership in orbit by a beanstalk right up until a deadly storm creates superwaves strong enough to snap the tether. The researchers all seemed to be doctoral candidates trying to come up with a potential subject (all the ones we were introduced to, anyway - the engineering team all seemed to be professionals). Although maybe a little light on the personal interactions, the story gave a reasonable feel for the claustrophobic nature of the study pod. The final tragedy was almost not required. This story provided the inspiration for the cover image.

Although not a reference to the 1950s air crash that is usually referred to as ‘The Day the Music Died’, H. G. Stratmann’s story does tell the tale of a musical catastrophe of even greater proportions. An earbug, a catchy refrain, had been superimposed on all forms of audio transmissions forcing those who heard it to endlessly repeat it to the utter exclusion of all else. The best that the scientist who developed the theory behind the attack can come up with is to use other ‘catchy’ rhythms such as TV jingles. But if one attack won’t work, then there are four more senses to try… Personally, I’m not so sure how well such an attack would work; it rather relies on someone being able to be entranced by a piece of music that they’d be forced to repeat it and I doubt that that there is anything that universal. Otherwise it was a rather neat story, working within its basic premise.

‘Farallon Woman’ from Walter L. Kleine is a first contact story, and a love story. Told from the perspective of Jack whose day job as a university professor was a perfect cover for his involvement in Project Black Box, he and his colleagues had been working on the remnants of an alien spaceship recovered from the bottom of the Pacific with limited results (OK, none on actually working out details of the ship but quite a bit on developing tools to do the actual looking) and Paul had discovered a talent for weaving together his colleagues’ thoughts into a whole. Meanwhile, back in the real world, he meets Tara Farallon, a strikingly exotic woman who’d been found off the eponymous island group in the Pacific, the apparent victim of a ship wreck. As Paul gets to know her better and better, he realises that while indeed she was the victim of a shipwreck, the ship in question came from no earthly port… This was the best story in this edition by far with a wonderful joie-de-vivre as the couple became lovers and came to know each other. However, I have express a slight doubt over Tara’s abilities in micro circuitry despite being a self-confessed college drop-out and beach bum.

There are three short stories:

'A Talent for Vanessa' for David W. Goldman tells the tale of a young woman called Vanessa as she visited a talent agent. Not your normal talent agent but an agent to the Skilled. Vanessa wanted to undergo an operation that would potentially give her a talent even though the chances of her getting a useful talent were almost nil. Though Vanessa wasn't all she claimed to be; an agent looking to see if the talents could be learnt by normal peoples.

Rick Cook's 'Fishing Hole' opens in a sushi bar when an Italian palaeontologist spots an unusual ingredient in his dish. This leads a local university lecturer into an interesting mission with the local Fish and Wildlife official as they try tracking down the source of these strange specimens. This was actually quite a suspenseful story and the ending is a shocker.

'Teaching the Pig to Sing' from David D. Levine sees us in a future after civilisation had wobbled so badly as to re-introduce royalty as the rulers of the planet. Special royalty these people, though. Genetically enhanced in all sorts of ways and immersed in the belief that they are the proper people to rule. So when the prince of Germany wakes up to find himself a prisoner of an American resistance cell, he's initially sceptical of the resistance's claims to be fighting for the freedom of their people, but when he realises that their plot is in an advanced stage of planning, with no hope of success (the explosives simply reeked to the prince's enhanced olfactory abilities) he throws his lot in with the revolutionaries in order to mitigate the revenge that his sister, the ruler of North America would take. But a raid by his sister's military mean that he will be forced to make the ultimate sacrifice. This was a good story about what it should mean to take your titles seriously.

Apart from the fiction, the fact piece was an article on medical robotics by Stella Fitzgibbons, MD. Her piece, 'Robots Don't Leave Scars: What's New in Medical Robotics?' was intriguing as she detailed the various bits of technology that enable surgeons operate remotely inside a person. At times, it read more like an advert for a specific company than a relatively unbiased factual article but this does not detract too badly from the main thrust of the article. I do have a quibble about her praising teleoperating, however, as I feel that this has some risks as it is used between sites on different sides of the planet as this introduces small but potentially significant light speed delays.

Asimov’ Science Fiction April/May

2010-03-18T08:40:00.001Z

This double edition comes with three novellas, a novelette and five short stories along with a couple of poems.

The first novella is ‘The Union of Soil and Sky’ from Gregory Norman Bossert. Set on a distant planet an unspecified number of years in the future, the story follows an interstellar crew of archaeologists as they dig up the remnants of the autochthons’ ancient past. As is almost traditional, the archaeologists have funding problems with their digs and the local human colonists don’t want them to succeed for a variety of reasons; the site is a rescue dig - the local humans are planning to turn the area into a strip mine as soon as possible, if not before, and the local human authorities don’t fancy the idea that the natives could once have had a greater civilisation than the one they currently have. What the archaeologists find is a stupendous old craft hall that proves to be the lost centre of the native’s art of constructing glass-and-life sculptures. And the artworks in its central cloisters are still good to go! This was a great story mixing the archaeology with the alien setting in a good mix and the denouement proved to be edge of the seat stuff more than worthy of Indiana Jones himself, even if most proper archaeologists must blanch at the activities in the final few scenes. Not surprisingly, this was the cover story

Next up is Pamela Sargent’s ‘Mind Band’ is a rather disturbing tale of a woman’s search for what really happened to her and thousand others several years earlier when a riot left several hundred dead after a bridge collapsed. In a small town near the original site she’s tracked down a small company working on some novel methods of communications, mainly mind to mind and it’s this she reckons caused the original rioting but the deeper she pushes her investigations the more she starts acting irrationally…

‘Jackie’s-Boy’ from Steven Popkes is set in a world where the vast majority of the population has been killed off in massive pandemics both natural and man-made as well as ecological disasters galore. Michael had found sanctuary in what was left of the local zoo where he found the last remaining elephant had been geneered for the ability to talk. It took a while for him to earn her trust as the pair embark on a quest to find others of elephant-kind. This is a rather neat disaster tale especially as Popkes mixes in all sorts of elements.

The novelette is ‘Alten Kameraden’ from Barry B. Longyear and is a sort of alternate history tale of what could have happened if a single life had been spared. During WW1 a runner, Adolf Hitler, had his life saved when the ace sniper Wolff shot his tommi opponent before he could take down the messenger. Almost thirty years later and Berlin is burning around the remnants of the German High Command when the pair met again in the Reich Bunker just as Hitler was about to take his life. Mr Longyear has had to play this one fairly carefully - it’s far too easy to over demonise someone like Hitler, or slip too far into parody and while this Hitler makes a couple of contentious claims, on the whole, you get the feel that this version is about right. I’m not sure just how believable the ending is though; it was a bit too much of a sudden twist for my liking.

‘Unforseen’ by Molly Gloss looks at the work of an insurance investigator who’s company insures millions of ordinary Joes in the event that die in an accident that leaves enough of them to be re-animated. But the company will go to extreme lengths to avoid actually paying out. In looking at some of the unlikely events that are actually far more common than first thought this rather fun but the underlying story is rather depressing.

‘Adrift’ from Eugene Fischer is based out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean where Janet is the administrator of Platform Beryl. When one of the containers that are the reason for Platform Beryl’s existence turns up damaged, the people aboard Beryl find a trio of stowaways and a stash of drugs. What was the connection and what was to be done with the stowaways? In researching this story has led to Fischer's support for the organisation Women for Women International (http://www.womenforwomen.org/). The technology behind the containers was a rather neat extrapolation of RFID tags and GPS systems though not entirely unique - see the short story 'Windows of the Soul' by Paul Chafe set in the Man-Kzin universe from Larry Niven for an interstellar application of similar principles.

‘They Laughed at Me in Vienna and Again in Prague, and Then in Belfast, and Don’t Forget Hanoi! But I’ll Show Them! I’ll Show Them All, I Tell You!’ from Tim McDaniel is actually longer than the title (though it does remind me of a story competition on the radio, where you had to tell a story in fifty words but the titles didn’t count). This is, mostly, a comedy about your typically nutty professor and those who decry his work (I’ll leave out the list of cities visited, but you might guess a few of them…). The CIA gets involved as it covers up the nutty professor’s work only releasing it when we are ‘ready’. Basically a fun piece.

‘Malick Pan’ from Sara Genge is the tale of Malick who had run away from his home and was living with the people living on the edges of their civilisation. Using his powers over the nanites set to look for him, Malick has stopped growing so he won’t grow up and loose his ability to hunt in areas where the grownups can’t reach.

‘Pretty to Think So’ from Robert Reed tells of the panic and results of a runaway experiment into exotic matter and the startling change of perspective that it brings to the population of the Earth.

The two poems were OK - never more than a few lines long they didn’t jar too badly.

Robert Silverberg’s second part on writing techniques was about telling, not showing but his heart did not really appear in this piece. The editorial from the Managing Editor, Brian Bieniowski, talks about how the individualising of buying things like music tracks has a knock on effect for magazines.