Asimov's Science Fiction - June 2014 (25 page)

An interesting argument, although I doubt anybody in SFWA would seriously contend that our jerry-built awards process has the exclusive ability to recognize the best science fiction. I do, however, applaud Kincaid's prescription for fixing broken awards: "I suspect that any award that attempts to cover the whole field and be all things to all people is already doomed to irrelevance. I think the awards that are likely to continue to engage our interest are those that are able to react quickly to the changing character of the genre, and particularly those that have a focus we can recognise and share."

exit

So yes, I have my own Nebula history. As a ten time loser, I once was a top contender for most nominations without a win. On a memorable (to me, at least) night in May of 2007, I broke the jinx and took home Best Novella, my one and only Nebula. That same night, my friend Jack McDevitt, who then had eleven losses without seeing the Lucite, won Best Novel. Since then we both have gone back to our losing ways. Jack has lost five times since, while I have lost just three.

But as I look back over my career as a contender, do I think my winner was somehow more special than all my other nominees? I do not! And was it really an honor to be nominated for each and every one? You bet!

The July 2014 issue brings the multiple Hugo-Award-winning
Allen M. Steele
back to our pages with a mysterious novella concerning the enigmatic "Legion of Tomorrow." Although at first glance this puzzling organization seems to simply represent science fiction's rich past, it soon becomes clear that their plans for the future may offer humanity's best shot at an adventuresome new day.

While Allen's story starts us on our journey toward tomorrow,
Alexander Jablokov
gets us all the way there with an anecdote about an academic working long after our own time who learns more about himself than the past in "The Instructive Tale of the Archeologist and His Wife"; "The Woman from the Ocean" is a distant traveler who returns from a generations-spanning space voyage to find a much altered humanity in
Karl Bunker's
new story; new author
Evan Fuller
brings us back to the near future for a look at corporate politics in "Five Six Seven";
Sandra McDonald
returns to our own time for a heartbreaking tale about a young woman with an unusual talent and those around her who become a part of the "Story of Our Lives";
M. Bennardo
muses on "How Do I Get to Last Summer From Here?"; and then we'll hop back to a future where the players may remind us of today—but life as we know it is almost unrecognizable—and accept our invitation to
Robert Reed's
terrifying "Blood Wedding."

Robert Silverberg's
Reflections asks the stunning question—"Was Jules Verne a Science Fiction Writer?";
Norman Spinrad's
On Books analyzes "Retro Versus Visionary"
;
plus we'll have an array of poetry and other features you're sure to enjoy. Look for our July issue on sale at newsstands on May 6, 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
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Google Play, and Kobo's digital newsstand!

new stories by
James Gunn, Nancy Kress, Tochi Onyebuchi, Jeremiah Tolbert, Jay O'Connell, James Patrick Kelly, Doug C. Souza, Tom Purdom, Tim McDaniel, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Jason Sanford, Susan Palwick, Nick Wolven,
and many others!

NEPTUNE'S BROOD

By Charles Stross

Ace, $25.95 (hc)

ISBN: 978-0-425-25677-0

Stross's latest is a space opera, set in the same universe as
Saturn's Children,
but many years after that novel. The human race is essentially extinct, though a few specimens survive—the results of a program to revive the species. The majority of the inhabitants of the universe are essentially "metahuman" robots, with numerous enhancements from the human model that many of them are designed to resemble.

The narrator, Krina Alizond 114, is a metahuman banker—or rather, as we learn, a banking historian who specializes in the study of scams. That's familiar ground for Stross, in whose work economics often appears as the main "scientific" element. Here, the major theme is how an interstellar colonization effort is financed, and what happens to money when it needs to be transferred between trading partners who may be hundreds of years apart, and whose projects may take a thousand years to turn a profit. That's a key issue, because Stross assumes a universe in which FTL travel remains a pipe dream; the only way to reach distant stars is via slow ships with crews whose life expectancy is measured in centuries.

Krina is on a mission, the full nature of which we learn only gradually. At the beginning, she is on a frontier planet looking for a way to get to another planet to see one of her sisters, with whom she is planning to work on a project somehow related to her studies. She encounters various kinds of red tape, resulting in her missing the launch window. She ends up having to sign on as a crew member in order to reach her destination planet. The only berth available is on an even slower than usual ship run by an oddball religious order that wants to bring the original human race back, in the flesh. Meanwhile, just as she is about to leave, we learn that someone is following her—and that they are willing to kill anyone who gets in their way.

More complications ensue; the religious ship Krina has taken passage on has lost much of its crew in an accident, and she ends up doing most of the menial work aboard ship. But before they've gotten very far, they encounter pirates—pirates of a sort that makes sense in the economic climate of interstellar travel as envisioned by Stross: insurance investigators, sniffing out fraud. Meanwhile, Krina's stalker has gotten aboard the ship. But the resolution of that subplot is postponed as the pirates take Krina aboard their ship, coincidentally headed for her destination—or so it seems.

The plot complications keep mounting, with Stross's theme of future economics always near the center of the machinations. There's a fair amount of comedy along the way, notably lampoons of religion, hereditary aristocracies, military space opera, and various Internet scams. There's enough action to keep you turning pages, and enough intellectual nourishment to make you stop and absorb what's really going on every so often.

Every time you think Stross has found his true mode of writing, he comes up with something to make you reconsider. This may bother editors who want a predicable product every time out of the gate, but for this reader, at least, it's the best possible reason to pick up a new title just because the name on the cover is Charles Stross.

IN THE COMPANY OF THIEVES

By Kage Baker

Tachyon, $15.95 (tp)

ISBN: 978-1-61696-129-9

This posthumous short story collection is a reminder what a fine writer Baker was, and how much the field lost with her death.

The stories are related to Baker's "Company" series, a time-travel scenario in which the agents of rich collectors from the future come back in time to obtain valuable items, whether works of art, original manuscripts, or pop culture ephemera. Time travel is one-way only, so the agents are given immortality and an array of what amount to super-powers to allow them to obtain and protect the items they collect. They are also, as the book's title suggests, quite willing to work on the shady side of the law.

Given the time travel theme at the core of the series, it's more or less natural that the stories are set in several different places and historic eras. Baker was especially fond of steampunkish Victoriana, and one of the best pieces here, "The Women of Nell Gwynn's," is a fine example of that mode. Nell Gwynn's is a brothel in Victorian London, catering to the most respectable segment of society. The story begins as the tale of Lady Beatrice, the daughter of an Indian officer who is captured by Afghan tribesmen in the disastrous British retreat from Kabul in 1842. Escaping, she returns to England, only to find herself an outcast due to her "unchaperoned" captivity.

With no other options, she turns to prostitution—and is discovered by the proprietor of Nell Gwynn's, Mrs. Corvey, who convinces her to join the brothel. As she soon discovers, her new employer is actually a front operation for the Company, using access to the highest levels of government to obtain secrets—and favors. The entire setup is thoroughly delicious, and Baker makes the most of its humorous potential.

Two stories are set in 1940's Hollywood, featuring the odd couple of Lewis and Joseph. The one works as a private investigator for the studios, keeping the stars out of trouble; the other specializes in obtaining rare manuscripts, copying them so no one will know they're missing. Both are immortal cyborgs, working for the company. Baker drops in loads of Hollywood in-jokes, and in "The Rude Mechanicals," shows us a wonderful production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" by a megalomaniac German director. The byplay between the rough-and-tumble Joseph and the fastidious Lewis is the stuff of great sitcoms.

Other stories are a good bit darker in mood and tone. "Mother Aegypt" is set in a medieval central Europe, with a maladroit con man named Golesco as protagonist. Fleeing outraged victims, he hooks up by chance with the title figure, Madam Amaunet, a thin black woman who tells fortunes and claims to be from Egypt. Thinking to advance his own fortunes, he tags along with her and her servant, a tiny man named Emil. The story plays out as a kind of twisted comedy, with a wrenching revelation at the end.

The first story in the volume may actually be the most poignant. One of the immortals is set to record in his memory the landscapes of San Francisco, starting in the late nineteenth century. He becomes attached to a rich man's private park, as does a mortal woman he first meets as a young girl. As time goes on, they are the only two who remember it— but while he is immortal, with a perfect memory, her mind begins to fade, along with her physical health. The conclusion, touching and tragic at once, shows Baker's emotional range.

Prefaces by Baker's sister, Kathleen Bartholomew, give insight into the stories. Bartholomew completed the final story from Baker's notes, and it is successful enough that one can hope there will be more to come.

THE VILLAGE SANG TO THE

SEA: A Memoir of Magic

By Bruce McAllister Aeon, $14.95 (tp)

ISBN: 978-0-9534784-9-1

This charming book links several short stories set in the same small Italian town in the 1950s.

The protagonist is a young American boy, Brad Lattimer, whose father is a naval officer stationed in Italy during the Cold War. Rather than send their son to the American school on the naval base, his parents decide to give him a more authentic experience of the country by living in a village and sending him to school with Italian boys. The experience is, in many ways, more "authentic" than they bargained for.

While there is an autobiographical element to the stories—McAllister did spend his early teen years in Italy, and there are some other parallels between his own life and the narrator's—the fantastic element clearly sets these apart from the strictly realistic. That becomes evident in the very first story, in which the broad shape of Brad's life in the small village is set out. The village has a kind of magic about it, and Brad seems destined to chronicle it.

In the second story, "Poison," that promise begins to play out. Brad's pet cat dies—poisoned, the other boys tell him, by one of the witches who live on the outskirts of town. Enraged, he goes to confront the witch—and comes back with an unexpected lesson in life, plus an unexpected replacement for the lost pet. In the next story, "The Bleeding Child," he travels to a shunned village a short distance away and finds a monstrous hidden society maintained by a kind of ritual magic. He ultimately leaves without comprehending what he has seen, though it resonates deeply. Still another mystery is at the heart of "Mary," in which Brad and a group of other Navy brats visit a supposedly abandoned hospital and discover the hidden lives of its inhabitants.

Further stories and short vignettes in the interstices between them fill in the picture of life in a small Italian town half a century ago; the reader gets a crash course in the culture shock of a transplanted American trying to understand not only a foreign country but the mysteries of the adult world and of a society ravaged by World War II only a few years before. Add to that a strong element of magic and the combination is compelling.

McAllister mixes in the stories of the Shelleys and Lord Byron—the two poets and the woman who wrote
Frankenstein
—who lived in the town more than a century before the events of his book, and whose spirits continually call out to young Brad. Their stories, with certain other elements of the setting, repeat like leitmotifs in each of the tales, giving them a sort of poetic unity over and above their shared setting.

These stories, poised at the intersection of the poetic, the weird, and the nostalgic, probably aren't to everyone's taste. But if you're in the mood for something outside the usual modes of fantasy—something Gene Wolfe might have written if he'd spent his teen years in Italy—I highly recommend them.

CHILDREN OF FIRE

By Drew Karpyshyn

Del Rey, $26.00 (hc)

ISBN: 978-0-345-45223-6

Karpyshyn, who has written a string of media and gaming tie-ins, turns his hand to epic fantasy in this sweeping tale. While the prose style will not make anyone forget Tolkein or Wolfe, the author has obviously learned the fine points of story-telling.