Asimov's Science Fiction: February 2014 (24 page)

2012 Nebula and World-Fantasy Award nominee
Cat Rambo
returns to our pages with a brutal tale about a woman whose life is coming undone amid "All the Pretty Little Mermaids"; in
Peter Wood's
first story for
Asimov's,
an inventor stops for a moment out of time to watch the first crewed Marslanding on TV and have a "Drink in a Small Town";
Jay O'Connell
takes a look at rough justice in "Solomon's Little Sister";
Dominica Phetteplace's
malfunctioning "Through Portal" produces terrifying consequences; new
Asimov's
author
Sean Monaghan
reveals the desperate measures a brother will take to give his troubled sister "Walking Gear"; another new
Asimov's
author,
Genevieve Williams,
sets a commanding pace in her tale of "The Redemption of Kip Banjeree, and the Hugo-and Nebulaaward-winning
Asimov's
stalwart
James Patrick Kelly
composes a modern "Declaration."

Robert Silverberg's
Reflections demonstrates why the passion and violence aroused by some of today's teams and sporting events tend to pale when compared to Byzantium's sixth century "Blues and Greens";
James Patrick Kelly's
On the Net gives us the "Good (and Bad) News from Outer Space"; plus we'll have
Paul DiFilippo's
On Books and an array of poetry that you're sure to enjoy! Look for our March issue on sale at newsstands on January 21, 2014. Or subscribe to
Asimov's
(in paper format or in downloadable varieties) by visiting us online at
www.asimovs.com
.
We're also available individually or by subscription on
Amazon.com's
Kindle and Kindle Fire,
BarnesandNoble.com's
Nook,
ebookstore.sony.com's
eReader,
Zinio.com,
and from
magzter.com/magazines!

new stories by
Nancy Kress, Robert Reed, Lavie Tidhar, Michael Swanwick, Matthew Johnson, Sandra McDonald, Ian Creasey, Joe M. McDermott, Sylvain Jouty, William Preston, James Van Pelt, Will McIntosh,
and many others!

Peter Heck

GHOST SPIN

Spectra, $16.00 (tp)

ISBN: 978-0-553-38694

This concluding volume of Moriarty's "Spin" trilogy blends space opera with cyberpunk elements (the other volumes are
Spin State
and
Spin Control
). The trilogy portrays a future where a significant fraction of the population is most accurately described as "cyborgs." One of them is Catherine Li, who in the previous books solved a series of murders— which of course have much wider implications—while teamed with a powerful AI known as Cohen. Actually, "teamed" is too neutral a term—the two are effectively married.

This third book starts with a bang, as Cohen, on a mysterious mission to a gritty industrial world, New Allegheny, blows his own brains out one step ahead of being taken prisoner by the local authorities. But there's a catch—he's leaving behind fragments of his identity that are going to cause more trouble than he himself could have caused had he been left alone. When Li takes off to discover what really happened, the trouble gets worse.

There are complications, of course, many growing out of their previous careers. For one, Li is considered a war criminal in some circles. For another, the stations that make FTL travel possible are starting to break down. Li is forced to risk being "scattershot" to the colony where Cohen died—transformed to data and sent out for anyone to pick up—and, as it happens, several people do so. One copy ends up at New Allegheny, where she gets involved with a policeman investigating a string of murders that appear related to Cohen's death. Another is revived aboard a spaceship that is taken by pirates led by a former naval officer, William Llwelleyn—who, as it turns out, has got a version of Cohen in his head, having acquired him as a navigation AI. And not surprisingly, both of them end up trying to recreate the Cohen they knew from the fragments they find.

With numerous copies of the two main characters in play at once, the plot takes on an unusual degree of complexity, aided by the fact that Moriarty is interested in pushing the shaky boundaries between the computer-assisted human and the emergent AI. To raise the stakes even more, Cohen isn't the only computer intelligence in play here. Llwelleyn is haunted by Ada, the half-mad AI running the naval vessel that he formerly commanded—and that is now hunting him across the spaceways, under the command of his former first officer. But an even bigger AI awaits them all, a massive alien "data-trap" that seems to exist in more than one universe—and that may hold the key to Cohen's ultimate design.

Moriarty is having fun with big ideas— such as Universal Turing Machines and the point at which AIs become "people"— which were among the main pleasures of space opera, even in the days of Doc Smith and his compatriots. The genre is even brainier these days. There are points at which the novel's physics or astronomy seems to be made up out of whole cloth—but nobody, maybe not even the scientists working on it, really understands this stuff. So it's not surprising she resorts to some smoke and mirrors to explain her version of FTL travel; everybody else in the field has to do pretty much the same, given that the smart money still says you can't get anywhere faster than the speed of light. She also shades into mystical territory as she nears the end, pretty much a time-honored response to the deeper waters of quantum physics and cosmology, from Smith to Arthur C. Clarke and beyond.

But she more than compensates with the ability to turn a smart phrase, and a canny perception for human relationships—often weak points in space opera. The entire trilogy is well worth picking up, if you enjoy big-screen adventures with well-drawn characters and mind-stretching ideas.

THE BEST OF CONNIE WILLIS

Award Winning Stories

By Connie Willis

Del Rey, $27 (hc)

ISBN: 978-0-345-5406405

During the first Nebula Awards ceremony I attended, someone at my table looked at the list of finalists, which had a Connie Willis story in all three short fiction categories. They said, "It's a good thing she doesn't write novels, or she'd win that one, too." They were just a tad premature; when she got around to publishing novels, she quickly added a few more awards to her trophy shelf.

So the subtitle here is no exaggeration; every one of these stories won a Hugo, a Nebula, or both. And, as readers of
Asimov's
know, Willis covers the emotional gamut from wildly funny to deeply poignant, all the while keeping an eye on important social issues, particularly those related to gender expectations. An introduction tells about her own discovery of the genre, tipping her hat tothe wonderful writers who brought her into the field—and taught her, by their example, how to write it.

"A Letter from the Clearys" starts in a matter-of-fact way with a girl, Lynn, and her dog Stitch doing errands in town. Details slowly accumulate to give the picture of a world not quite as mundane as the opening scene suggested. The family is doing a sort of subsistence farming, without much luck, and the girl's father is worried about her leaving tracks as she returns from town. Willis deploys more details and the reader slowly comes to see the pattern they describe—which becomes clearer as Lynn reads the letter, which she's found in the post office, to her family, and even clearer in their reactions to it. The story is as good an example as you could want of Willis's trademark ability to use the trappings of everyday life as we know it to create a far stranger—and in this case, much more chilling—reality.

With "At the Rialto," Willis takes a radical change of direction—a screwball comedy set at a quantum physics conference in Hollywood. The semi-random conversations of the characters—especially the airhead hotel desk clerk, Tiffany—seem to be entangled in the same quantum uncertainties that the scientists are studying. Willis plays cleverly with the trope. Her protagonist—Ruth Baringer, one of the physicists—lapses into physics metaphors to explain mishaps with luggage. She spends much of the story trying to dodge a fellow physicist, David, who wants to see the Hollywood sights instead of the conference events, and who insists that the sights are actually good examples of quantum theory. Logic gets left behind early, and the story wends its way to—what else?—a happy ending.

Those are just two of the choice items on display here. There's "Fire Watch," a time travel story partially set during the London Blitz, which served as the seed for three of Willis's later novels. There's "Death on the Nile," which comes as close to horror as Willis gets—with allusions to Agatha Christie along the way to the final descent into the dark. "All Seated on the Ground" is a Christmas story, with aliens. "Even the Queen" is a story about a future in which some of what are politely called "female problems" have been solved—but not everybody's happy about that.

In addition to the stories, the volume includes afterwords to each of them, mostly explaining the inspiration for the tales. Also, there are three speeches: her Guest of Honor speech from the 2006 Worldcon; her acceptance speech when she was chosen as Grand Master by SFWA, and an alternate version of that speech, which appears here for the first time. All show her trademark wit and her love for the field and the people in it, and in an important way, they show the personal side of Connie Willis. They're worth the price of the book even if you've long since read all the stories. And if you haven't, you've a real treat waiting for you.

This one is absolutely essential to any collection of modern SF.

THE BREAD WE EAT IN DREAMS

By Catherynne M. Valente

Subterranean, $40 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-59606-582-6

Valente, who has half-seriously described her folklore-heavy fiction as "mythpunk," offers a collection of short fiction and poetry covering a variety of styles and themes. A lot of them have a playful combination of the literal and mythological—introducing the characters of the ancient tales, with all their magical attributes, into the everyday world we inhabit.

Take the opening tale, "The Consultant." It's told in a hardboiled private eye voice straight out of Dashiell Hammett, except the first-person narrator is a woman. In another, unexpected direction, the story takes a sly look at the archetypes and patterns of the folklore it draws on. The scene is perfectly set for what follows.

"White Lines on a Green Field" starts with a high school football hero—except it's Coyote, the antihero/trickster of American Indian myth. The story is full of the ambience of small-town high school life, with its rituals and its cliques, its desperate search for the right dress to wear to homecoming and the climactic tension of the Big Game. With Coyote in charge, everything seems raised to a new magical dimension. But Bunny, the narrator, is the only one of Coyote's girlfriends who doesn't fall for the magic. Yet in the end, she's the only one who doesn't end up disappointed—perhaps because she also partakes of the Indian mythical world in which Coyote exists.

Other stories have a more transparent metaphorical layer; "How to Raise a Minotaur" takes the question of dealing with an intractable child to a more or less logical extreme, and has some fun playing with the literal and figurative results, bouncing myth against the assumptions of modern family life. "In the Future When All's Well" gives a young girl's viewpoint on a world where everyone's turning into vampires. And "The Wolves of Brooklyn" starts with a simple premise— the invasion of the borough by the wild canines—and evolves consequences, not at all the ones you might expect.

Valente's sense of humor shows in these stories, but it dominates the poems. For example, "Mouse Koan" starts with the cosmic egg of the Big Bang universe, noting all the things it includes—such as "the heat death of prime time television." "The Secret of Being a Cowboy" confides, "Most of us are girls," and "We have a dental plan." "What the Dragon Said: A Love Story" starts off with a bar joke.

Several of the stories here were previously published in magazines or online, including "The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland—For a Little While," set in the world of her three "Fairyland" novels, and "Silently—and Very Fast," which was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula. If you're just catching up with Valente, a fair number of her books and stories are available either in paperback or in e-editions—or even free online. But for those already familiar with her work who want a permanent addition to their collections, this deluxe hardcover should be just the right speed.

EIGHT MILLION GODS

By Wen Spencer

Baen, $25.00 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4516-3898-1

Here's a stand-alone novel about Nikki Delany, a young writer with obsessive compulsive disorder, who finds herself in the middle of Japanese mythology come to life.

The novel starts with a policeman banging on her apartment door, accompanied by her mother, who (as it turns out) is convinced she belongs in a mental hospital. Since her mother is a U.S. Senator, the policeman is at first inclined to take her seriously. But with some clever moves, Nikki manages to escape—and heads straight for Japan, where her high school friend, Miriam, starts her on the process of acculturation. Miriam has been in Japan a few months longer, and can give Nikki a few pointers on the society, but basically neither one of them has much chance of fitting in.

That becomes evident when the two women start talking about one of Nikki's novels and draw the attention of the local police, who think the plot wrinkle Nikki's just told Miriam about is an actual murder. She tries to convince them—not helped by the language barrier—that it's all just a story, only to learn there's been a real murder that eerily matches the details of the one she made up. And since she's talked about it all on her blog, some crazy fan could have read it and put the idea into action.