2018 Hugo possibilities

War Is Hell

~ stevejwright ~ Leave a comment

The Hugo nominations deadline is three days away – I’ve filled up my ballot for the 2018 awards, but still have some gaps for the 1943 Retro Hugos, and I’m terribly afraid they’re going to stay gappy.

It’s almost as if, I dunno, people were being distracted, somehow.  As if something was happening, somewhere in the world, that took attention and resources away from SF.  Can’t imagine what it might have been, can you?

So, yeah.  With a whole lot of SF writers being of military age, and vanishing into the armed forces or into other, more recondite branches of the war effort, there’s significantly less stuff to choose from in 1942 than there was in 1940.  So much less, in fact, that there are some areas I’m forced to leave entirely fallow.

There are, at least, five decent novel contenders – I think.  Although Darkness and the Light is very minor Olaf Stapledon… and a little of the Bloomsbury Group goes a long way, with me, so I can’t work up any overwhelming fits of enthusiasm over Vita Sackville-West’s Grand Canyon (anyone saying “I bet Virginia Woolf could though” will be asked to leave unless they can prove they’re Frankie Howerd)… and Marjorie Bowen is always readable, but she put The Spectral Bride out with a variant title and a pen name, so I wonder how much confidence she had in it herself… and Austin Tappan Wright’s Islandia is very big and travelogue-y…. At least there’s “Doc” Smith.  Second Stage Lensmen stands out as a peak of space-operatic quality in a frankly pretty iffy year.

With the novella category, at least there’s one I can definitely recommend, namely Robert A. Heinlein’s “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathon Hoag”, and one that appeals to my own odd tastes, Anthony Boucher’s “The Compleat Werewolf” (I’m a sucker for werewolf stories [and werewolf-adjacent stories], always have been.)  The rest of the ballot is bulked out with “Devil’s Planet” (early Manly Wade Wellman, and obviously not what he’s best remembered for), van Vogt’s “Asylum”, and Cleve Cartmill’s terribly topical (at the time) “They Forgot to ‘Remember Pearl Harbor'”.  Can’t think of any Cartmill fans these days, but I have a feeling he was a bigger noise in the 1940s (among other things, he is the guy who later got interviewed by the government when his speculation about atomic bombs sounded a bit too much like the real thing.)

Novelette length – I resisted the temptation to pad the whole thing with bits of Foundation trilogy, but Asimov’s “Bridle and Saddle” seems pretty representative of the ideas of the trilogy as a whole, so in it goes.  I’m personally more enthused about George O. Smith’s first “Venus Equilateral” story, “QRM – Interplanetary”, a happy tale of gadgeteers triumphant, even though the gadgets involved are practically Neolithic by today’s standards.  Other entrants: more van Vogt in the form of “The Second Solution” (because where would we be if our plots had to make sense?), some Leigh Brackett in “The Sorcerer of Rhiannon” and Fredric Brown with “The Star Mouse”.

Brown crops up again at short story length with “Etaoin Shrdlu” (which brought an immediate smile of recognition to my face – that may be a good sign, because normally I have to stop and think for a minute before I can place a name).  So does Heinlein with “My Object All Sublime” and Asimov with a minor robot story, “Robot AL-76 Goes Astray”.  Asimov’s robots would be much more efficient if they would devote less processing power to finding edge cases in the Three Laws, and more towards doing their ****ing jobs, you know… but I digress.  Possibly the strongest contender here might be “The Twonky” by Lewis Padgett (secretly the husband-and-wife partnership of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore.  Except we all know this by now, so I guess it’s not exactly secret.)  I filled out this section with a bit of a wild card, “The Other Side of the Sun”, one of Lord Dunsany’s tales.  (I will write “Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett” if I have to, you democrats you.)

Then there’s the contentious “Best Series” slot – well, it has to be “Lensmen”, doesn’t it?  Especially as, despite all the bits of “Foundation” floating around, they don’t actually add up to enough wordcount to qualify…. Nicholas Whyte helpfully collected together some scraps of other series that might be viable, and you can actually find four others if you’ve a mind to.  My money is on “Lensmen”, though, if the powers that be decide this category is even viable.

My invention started flagging a bit when it came to “Best Related Work”… I looked up Nonfiction and Essays on ISFDB, but very little seemed familiar, and little of what was familiar seemed worth while.  I have vague memories of Willy Ley’s science essays from when I was younger and even less sensible; I have no idea, now, where I came across them, but “Saturn – World of Rings” from the “Landscapes of Other Worlds” series seemed to ring (as it were) a bell; I do remember Derleth and Wandrei’s intro to Out of Space and Time (“Clark Ashton Smith: Master of Fantasy”), so in it goes.  Then – well, the rules say that a related work, if fictional, must be noteworthy primarily for aspects other than the fictional text… so, Rocket to the Morgue, which is a detective story and not SF, is noteworthy for sending up the SF fandom culture of its day… so I’m putting it in here.  And then I stalled.  I have nothing else.  I suppose I could fill the remaining two slots with more Willy Ley pop-science, but it seems an inelegant solution.

“Best Graphic Story” is another iffy one, though I did manage to fill it.  Probably.  The comics debut of “Captain Midnight” is, well, possibly a little obscure… as is the Canadian superheroine “Nelvana of the Northern Lights”… and, well, I’m not sure how much the Charles Addams cartoons in Drawn and Quartered actually constitute a continuous narrative, but what the heck, I like Addams and I’ve got a slot to fill.  Then there’s the one where I might be rules-lawyering like crazy – the cover date on “All-Star Comics #8” is December 1941/January 1942, and that might be enough to make it eligible, even though it actually hit the news stands a couple of months earlier.  It contains a story called “Introducing Wonder Woman”, as if you didn’t know.  At least there is Flash Gordon to fall back on – the “Jungles of Mongo” sequence all actually appeared in 1942, and is top-quality stuff, no rubbish, as you’d expect from Alex Raymond.

I just gave up on Dramatic Presentation, both Long and Short.  Seriously.  There don’t seem to have been any eligible films for Long Form (the longest one I could find was 88 minutes, just two minutes too short), and in any case the genre films appear mostly to have been horror B-movies whose only merits were that they paid Bela Lugosi’s rent.  There don’t seem to have been any good serials, even.  There will be stuff in the radio archives, I know – “The Shadow” was still knowing in 1942, I’m well aware of that – but since radio shows excited absolutely no interest among the current crop of voters last time, I’m not going to trawl through them again this year.  Lax of me?  Possibly.

Long Form Editor is another one where I have nothing to go on… Short Form, of course, is just a matter of identifying who was in charge of various magazines: John W. Campbell is still in it, of course, and Raymond Palmer over at Amazing… Dorothy McIlwraith was still womanfully wrestling with the declining “Weird Tales”… I filled out the remaining slots with editors of mags where some of my short story and novelette choices had appeared: Oscar Friend and Malcolm Reiss, if you’re remotely interested.

Professional Artist?  That Addams collection makes Charles Addams a viable candidate… otherwise, it was just a matter of looking at magazine covers and deciding which ones were most striking.  Hannes Bok and Margaret Brundage seemed like obvious choices; Robert Fuqua and G.M. Rae, perhaps, less obvious.  We’ll see where, if anywhere, this category goes.

Best Semiprozine?  I have no idea.  As far as I know, all the main skiffy mags were offshoots of professional outfits and hence not eligible.  So I left this one blank.  Best Fancast went the same way, for reasons which must be fairly obvious.

The fan stuff… well, what do I know about the relics of fandom from a generation before I was even born?  Doesn’t stop me having opinions, mind…. For Fan Writer, I have put in Morojo (Myrtle Douglas, who I think got neglected in the last Retros), Donald Wollheim, Damon Knight, Russ Chauvenet, and Ted Carnell, who was keeping the British end up in Futurian War Digest.  FWD naturally also features in my Best Fanzine ballot, as do Wollheim’s Phantagraph, Bob Tucker’s Le Zombie, Harry Warner’s Spaceways and Art Widner’s Fanfare.  (You can actually find these things online, you know.  The scanned-in pages are even legible.  Even if Wollheim’s passionate denunciation of Fascism did make his typing go all wonky.)  Fan Artist?  Mostly a case of picking cover illos off those fanzines, making due allowances for the failures of reproduction (ancient duplicated sheets converted into PDFs….)  One rather striking cover, from Voice of the Imagi-Nation 25, turned out to be by Ray Harryhausen, best known for other things entirely.  (The others?  Arthur Williams for an FWD cover, Harry Jenkins Jr and Roy Hunt for Spaceways 24 and Fanfare 9 respectively; Bernard Webber did a cover and some interior cartoons in Space Tales 4 which made me crack a smile, at least.  It must be admitted that the art – and the reproduction methods – are pretty basic, by modern standards.  Heck, by modern standards, very little of this would get a look in.)

So those are my thoughts on the 1943 Retro Hugos, and very inadequate and muddled thoughts they are too.  Never mind.  We shall see what the administrators make of it all.  I don’t envy them.

Random Nominating Thoughts

~ stevejwright ~ 11 Comments
  • As a Trekkie of 38 years’ standing (it took until 1970 to arrive in the UK), I’m finding I can’t not nominate an episode of Star Trek: Discovery even though my better self knows it’s not really good enough.  Oh dear.
  • If Camestros Felapton were to win Best Fan Writer, would it be possible to get Toby Meadows to present the award?  And if that happened, would Dave Freer then admit he was wrong?
  • Probably going to put Rocket to the Morgue in Best Related for the Retros.  It is not SF, but it is clearly related to SF.  This argument may or may not hold water when it comes to the crunch.  Never mind.
  • Britain’s attempt to keep the fandom flag flying during wartime, Futurian War Digest, is getting a nom from me.  Again.
  • Chris Foss did a book cover in 2017.  Chris Foss, who should have got an award of some kind years ago.  Basically, half the FX scenes in Babylon 5 could have been succinctly described as “and then a Chris Foss cover painting comes to life”.  He’s on my ballot, that’s for damn sure.
  • Discussion over whether last year’s Best Series nominees are eligible again this year.  To be on the safe side, I’m digging out five different ones.  Probably for the best.
  • I have no idea what makes something YA or not.  I will just use my best judgement and hope not to traumatise too many children.
  • In view of recent discussions about Forrest J. Ackerman, I’m feeling a lot less conflicted about leaving him off the ballot.  (You can’t even call them revelations, really, because everybody [who was anybody] knew about them.  He even got convicted for them, one time.  But, hey, good ol’ Uncle 4E, what a card, huh? – I’m nominating Myrtle “Morojo” Douglas anywhere Ackerman might otherwise be applicable.)
  • Tor continues to dominate in the Novella length.  Lots of continuing series in that category – stuff from Nnedi Okorafor, Lois McMaster Bujold, Paul Cornell – but also plenty of fresh stuff.  Hugo nominations wikia says someone called Lee Harris is overall responsible for the novella line.  All righty then.
  • Not many Brits visible at the usual sources…. Interzone continues to be Interzone, and Tade Thompson’s novella “The Murders of Molly Southbourne” is well worth a look.  Thompson deserves some attention if you ask me.
  • The war was biting at potential 1940s nominees by this point, but there’s still a lot of good stuff around.  C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner seemed to be having a good year.  I must get in quick and nominate some Kuttner stories, or everyone else will grab the good ones and I’ll have nothing but gingerbread left left left a wife and seventeen children in starving condition with nothing but gingerbread left left LEFT
  • I can find five good series for last year, but I’m going to put “The Vagrant” first.  Vote Goat.

Nominations time

~ stevejwright ~ 7 Comments

Received my email today from WorldCon 76, telling me Hugo nominations are open and giving me a link to nominate with.  Apparently, some people are being told their names are #REF! #REF!, but I’m not, I’m just me, and now I’m thinking about what to nominate.

I will probably be thinking about this for quite some time, but I might as well mention some of the stuff that’s already got a firm lock on my nominations slots.

First off, as previously mentioned, Jeannette Ng’s throbbing gothic first novel Under the Pendulum Sun, while not perfect, is quite impressive enough to get her my vote for the Campbell – she has some short story credits for 2016, but I can’t find anything else, so she’s eligible.  And, IMO, deserves it.

Two completed trilogies this year, Robert Jackson Bennett’s “Divine Cities” trilogy (concluding with City of Miracles) and Peter Newman’s “The Vagrant” trilogy (concluding with The Seven).  Bennett’s saga of lurid political machinations, high adventure, and the reconstruction of society after the deaths of its gods… has a lot going for it, I think, and has regrettably been overlooked in the Hugos.  The final chapter, starring the inimitable Sigrud and a villain who, although it isn’t safe to speak his name, is no cheap Voldemort Nokov (I’m here all week folks), is well worth reading.  As is The Seven, the conclusion to a more than slightly subversive science-fantasy trilogy – a sort of Warhammer setting for grown-ups, if you like.  With the shape-changing body horror of the invading infernals on one side, and the steely determination of the angelic Seven on the other, Newman’s characters find themselves looking at their situation and saying, “err, right, guys… you know the whole endless genocidal war without pity or remorse or quarter thing?  That one you’ve got planned?  Could we sort of not do that, please?”  It’s more fun than it ought to be, and more humane than you’d think it could be.  Vote for the goat, folks, vote for the goat.

Oh, yeah, there was another trilogy that got finished in 2017, wasn’t there?  And it was called “The Broken Earth” and it was by N.K. Jemisin and the final volume was The Stone Sky, and do I need to pass any further comment?  On what might well be the most significant fantasy trilogy of the decade?  No, I suspect I do not.

A few other things have already sprung to my mind.  There was something of a flap about Rocket Stack Rank, a few months back, with people accusing Greg Hullender of using it as a bully pulpit to push retrograde opinions… I raised my eyebrows at this, because I disagree with Greg Hullender about virtually every rating he posts anyway, so it’s hard for me to see his opinions as unduly influential, given that I just ignore them all anyway.  Regardless, Greg and Eric Wong do a hell of a lot of work collating other reviews (and even just listing so much short fiction is a full time job in itself), so RSR continues to be an invaluable fannish resource, and it continues to get a nom from me.  Mention of this leads me to a short story Greg disliked, Andy Dudak’s “Cryptic Female Choice” in Interzone 271, which I liked rather a lot, so it’s going on my noms ballot.  Of course, Andy Cox is still editing Interzone, and Dave Senecal’s covers for 2017’s issues have been interesting (even if not entirely to my taste), so there’s a couple more nominations right there.

Then there’s the non-written categories – Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) could get interesting; I don’t think there are any individual episodes of Star Trek: Discovery which need trouble the judges, but there were a couple of stand-out episodes of Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams, and of course the good Doctor has been busy this year, so….

In fact, I suspect I’m not going to have a lot of trouble filling up that nominations form – well, apart from the new Young Adult category, maybe (I may be childish, but it’s a long while since I could pass for a Young Adult.)  However, I’m sure it deserves more thought, and maybe more reading, than I’ve yet given it.  So I will stop now, I think.

(Technically, I suppose I’m eligible as a fan writer myself.  Seems weirdly presumptuous.  Anyway, I don’t know what particular pieces might merit it – my secret vice of Star Trek Online fanfic, or my openly displayed poor judgement in tackling A Throne of Bones?  Both of those seem to deserve a poke in the eye more than an actual award.  Never mind.)

Hang a Lampshade on it: Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng

~ stevejwright ~ 5 Comments

So let’s talk about a good book, instead, now – Jeannette Ng’s debut novel Under the Pendulum Sun.  Ng is a new writer, with only a couple of 2016 short stories listed in ISFDB apart from this one… which would make her eligible for the 2018 Campbell Award, and, after reading this one, I would say she deserves some serious consideration, there.

Catherine Helstone comes to the old rambling house called Gethsemane in search of her brother Laon, a missionary.  The unusual thing is, Laon is a missionary to the faerie land of Arcadia, and that’s where Gethsemane is, under the pendulum sun of the title – the sun is literally a lantern swinging from a chain across the sky.  It’s not by any means the strangest thing in Arcadia.  Gethsemane is a house full of shadows and secrets, staffed by the elusive Salamander, by Ariel Davenport, a changeling raised as a human, and by Benjamin Goodfellow, a gnome who is the only faerie ever to be converted to Christianity.  But where is Catherine’s brother?  And what happened to his predecessor, Jacob Roche?  Searching for answers, Catherine only finds more questions.  Roche was attempting a translation of the Bible into an unknown language, and this raises questions in Catherine’s mind, about just who and what the fae actually are, and what it might mean to try to convert them.  Then Laon returns to Gethsemane, with Mab, the Queen of the Faeries, close behind him.  Mab has her own games to play with the missionaries, and the inhabitants of the house.  There are revelations in store about Catherine herself, and the questions she asks about the fae and her faith have no easy answers….

It’s a vividly imagined setting, with a haunting atmosphere – one which owes a lot, let it be said, to the Brontë sisters and the nineteenth-century Gothic movement in general; as I commented to one guy on File 770, you won’t find a height in this one that isn’t wuthering.  Of course, this means that it’s fully in tune, heart and soul, with its chosen period – Catherine, especially, is pure Victorian heroine, or at least starts out that way.  Once the fae start playing their clever games, and Catherine starts digging into the Reverend Roche’s notes, things take some unexpected twists.  I’m trying to avoid any obvious spoilers, here, but Catherine and Laon, who’ve come to Arcadia to teach the Word of God, wind up learning rather more than they teach – and learning it the hard way.  They have their weaknesses, and Mab knows very well how to exploit them.

So, the book simply oozes atmosphere, and it’s got a twisty-turny sort of plot, ending in an open-ended resolution which is… more intellectual, I think, than anything else, as Catherine and Laon come to a better understanding of just what it is they’re doing.  Despite the magic and the heaving bosoms – there’s about five hundred horsepower of sexual tension driving this thing, though I’d best not say between whom – this is, at its core, a very thoughtful sort of a book; it’s based on the question of what the fae actually are, and how this can be reconciled with the heroine’s world view.

It gets a lot of respect from me for being serious and thoughtful about religion.  Catherine and Laon are both there to preach the word of God, but central to their story is the question of how something like Arcadia even fits in with their vision of God’s creation.  What does it mean to convert a faerie?  Is that even possible, if they don’t have souls?  What, in this world, is a soul, anyway?  Between Catherine’s digging into Roche’s writings, and the innocent but awkward questions asked by Benjamin (explaining the dicey bits to a new convert is always one of the difficult things), the book manages to ask some very serious questions about religion in general and Christianity in particular – and lets you think about them, instead of presenting any glib solutions of its own.  As a religious believer myself (yes, there are actual Christians in the Church of England, surprising as it may seem), I’ve got a lot of time for any book that poses serious questions – most of us who have faith have asked ourselves some pretty serious questions about it, at one time or another.  This book’s questions are deep and thoughtful and fully in keeping with the period and the setting.  I don’t insist, by the way, on authors answering their questions my particular way – I’ve got more time for, say, Philip Pullman (who puts a contrary case intelligently and articulately) than I have for the “Narnia” books (which strike me as very much C.S. Lewis’s apologetics dumbed down for the kiddies).  Catherine and Laon’s exploration of their faith turns into a chastening experience for both of them.  And, in its own quiet way, a hell of a ride for the reader.

I don’t think it’s a perfect book, by any means – it has a few rough edges, and some pointless gimmicky bits (I may need to sit down and draw some diagrams to figure out how that pendulum sun actually works, for instance).  And, let’s be honest, not everyone is interested in Victorian Christian apologetics.  But it’s still one heck of a good read, and even if you’re not into theology, you might want to give this one a go.  It may surprise you.

Love and Death: The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin

~ stevejwright ~ 2 Comments

Essun is fleeing the ruins of the Castrima community, part of a horde of refugees heading for an uncertain and temporary safety in a devastated world.  Her daughter Nassun, meanwhile, is fleeing too, accompanied by the faithful Guardian Schaffa, but watched and tempted by the stone eaters.  Both of them have an ultimate goal in mind: Corepoint, and the controls for the Obelisk Gate.  Both of them now know the truth about magic, about the reason for the Earth’s deadly hostility, and about the terrible history of use and abuse that underlies their whole culture.

When the long-lost Moon returns, either one of them could use the powers at Corepoint to change the world.   Essun still hopes for peace, for the healing of the ravaged continent and the ending of the destructive Fifth Seasons.  But Nassun is coming to the conclusion that the only way to end the cycles of abuse and oppression is to end everything: to finish the job Alabaster started, and end all life by crashing the Moon into the Earth.

So I compared The Fifth Season to an intricate dance, as its complex triple-stranded narrative wove about itself… and the sequel The Obelisk Gate to a dance of the seven veils, as secrets were revealed and the situation became clearer… now, in the conclusion of the trilogy, Jemisin drops her remaining veils, and the dance becomes a straightforward race to the finish line, with death and hope neck and neck in a final confrontation.  The concluding chapters are, well, pretty tense – not to mention emotionally intense, as mother and daughter meet for the very last time.  Jemisin’s strong characterization means that these are real people, people we know, as we watch them suffer and hope and love and die.

It’s a strong and satisfying conclusion to a breathtakingly impressive trilogy.  It’s also, oddly enough, a book which harks back, very strongly, to some of the core tropes of SF.  It just happens that Forbidden Planet came up on the telly today, and naturally I watched it – and was struck by the parallels between Corepoint and the ancient city of the Krell, and by the similarities between the Krell and Jemisin’s extinct civilization of Syl Anagist.  Both of them built a device which would give them limitless power; both of them fell through dark forces within themselves that they failed to recognize.  The rotten core of arrogance and abuse in Syl Anagist’s “Plutonic Engine” project is what dooms them to destruction….  The eminent writer and critic Brian Aldiss once said that a basic preoccupation of SF was “Nemesis clobbering Hubris”; Jemisin’s flashback chapters show Nemesis quietly waiting her chance, slapping her lead-weighted sap into the palm of her hand as Hubris blunders onwards.

So it’s in the classic tradition of SFF works (I won’t get into any arguments about SF and fantasy; OK, the power of the Earth and the obelisks is explicitly described as “magic”, but it might easily be Sufficiently Advanced instead, and the people of Syl Anagist certainly treat it like it’s technology.)  But, with its emphasis on prejudice and justice, it’s also a very timely book for the modern world we live in… and, with its message of love as the only answer to death, it’s also a book that’s tied up with the timeless constants of the human condition.  And, like its two predecessors, this one is elegantly and intelligently written.  (In particular, that second-person narrative – so often just a gimmick – is, in the end, fully justified and completely explained, which is no mean feat in itself.)

I’m not sure it’s completely faultless – no novel is.  (There’s a plot thread or two I’d have liked to see more explicitly tied up… but this may reflect only my own obsession with neatness.)  What I am sure of is that this is a fine conclusion to a remarkable trilogy, and N.K. Jemisin is to be congratulated.  And fêted.  (And then persuaded to sit down and write another one.)

Into the Zone: Interzone 271

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I do too read short fiction.  And even the mags it gets published in.  The UK’s long-running SF magazine is a reliable source of short fiction, and articles and reviews besides.

So.  The latest issue, number 271, with the “profiles seen through multi-coloured electronic fog” covers favoured by this year’s cover artist Dave Senecal.  Not my favourite art, but effective enough.  You wouldn’t mistake it for Reader’s Digest.

Inside…. Editor Roy Gray has been to see the SF exhibition at the Barbican Centre, which sounds like fun; I have lots of fond memories of the Barbican Centre (there was a time in my life when I visited it often enough that I knew my way around; if you know the Barbican, you realize what this means.)  Jonathan McCalmont’s regular “Future Interrupted” column is given over to a review of China Miéville’s history of the Bolshevik Revolution, October – I haven’t read this one, but it certainly looks interesting, and McCalmont doesn’t say anything to put me off it.  “Complex, intricate, but never anything less than spellbinding” – I think he liked it.  Nina Allan’s “Time Pieces” column talks about the difference between “the conversation” and “the discourse” in criticism of SF, does some general deploring of aesthetic standards (rather familiar to those of us who’ve read her Shadow Clarke* jury stuff), and praises Broken River by J. Robert Lennon in terms which make it sound distinctly worthwhile.  (Despite the Sharkes’ rather mystifying collective blind spot over A Closed and Common Orbit – it is deceptively light in tone, and critics of that calibre shouldn’t have been deceived – they are people with well-informed, well-thought-out and well-expressed opinions; they deserve to be listened to, though not necessarily agreed with.)  Dave Langford’s “Ansible Link” continues to give the summary of SF news that we get from Ansible itself**.

Skipping to the back of the mag, we find the book reviews, in the “Book Zone” section.  They’re thorough; Interzone doesn’t waste time with brief summaries followed by a star rating.  Two reviews are accompanied by extended author interviews; Maureen Kincaid Speller interviews Nina Allan about The Rift (and other matters), and Peter Tennant interviews Emily B. Cataneo about her collection Speaking to Skull Kings and Other Stories – which last sounds like it’s right up my particular street.  We also get film reviews, in Nick Lowe’s long-running “Mutant Popcorn” section; Lowe is a canny observer and a witty critic, and is sometimes more entertaining than the movies themselves.

Now.  On to the fiction.

Julie C. Day’s “The Rocket Farmer” follows the fortunes of Sarnai and her grumpy teenage daughter Sophie, who are heirs to an ancient Mongolian tradition of growing, well, rockets.  Sarnai and her father haven’t been producing good crops lately – a lot of failed Atlas and Delta launchers still standing on pads in the secret rocket fields of Florida – but Sophie is young, with new ideas and new visions, and she might be the one to make one of her grandpa’s rockets fly further than ever before.

It’s a weirdly cute idea, and the story has strong character voices and a pleasantly aspirational feel to it.  I won’t deny, though, that I had many questions, mostly along the lines of “yes, but how is this supposed to work?”  Fun idea, enjoyable story, but I didn’t quite buy the world-building on the setting.

Tim Casson’s “Gods in the Blood (of Those who Rise)” is the rather grim tale of Everett, a judgemental schoolteacher who bemoans the state of the current generation and blames it all on bad genes being allowed to thrive.  However, some of the kids he’s deploring come from the Genomic Innovation Facility, and Everett comes to realize that they have strengths he hadn’t expected.  Rather than innovating, the Facility has rediscovered something from the earliest ages of humanity, from a time when some people walked among the rest like gods.  And not, necessarily, kindly gods.

It’s a neat enough little tale, with an interesting central idea.  You may gather that Everett is not a particularly likeable character, which turns out to be just as well – his final fate is, deliberately, left to the reader to envisage, but let’s just say that this reader wouldn’t be in any hurry to sell him life insurance.   Of course, the danger of having an unlikeable protagonist is that it might turn the reader off the story – Casson does the best he can to make Everett a sympathetic character, though I feel he’s dealt himself rather a poor hand in that regard.

Michael Reid’s “If Your Powers Fail You in a City under Tin” is a superhero story in an interesting setting; an extra-dimensional God Beast has torn a hole in reality over the city of Duolonduo, and people gain random superpowers from its presence; the abilities fade slowly as they move away from it, but last long enough that many of them hire out their abilities as mercenaries across the world.  Protagonist Jun is not one of them; his ability, as a “portalist”, is to open teleportation doorways from place to place, but, since his first attempt at this resulted in his mother’s death, he’s understandably reluctant to use the ability further.  When his partner goes missing on an operation in Africa, though, he has to steel himself, put his doubts behind him, and go to the rescue.

It’s a straightforward and engaging feel-good sort of story with a wealth of setting detail.  It’s very consciously diverse – Jun is Asian, his partner is a black man, he seeks help from a Middle Eastern woman with hydromantic powers – and it’s strong on the geopolitical detail, the uses of superpowers in a range of disasters and insurgencies and brushfire wars.  A lot of work has gone into the setting, and I wonder if Reid is planning to visit this world again.

I’m wondering the same thing, only more so, when I come to Eliot Fintushel’s “Chubba Luna”, a breezily cynical little story with a lot of unexplored background detail.  In the future, “eugenic matchmaking” pairs everyone off with a perfect partner – their basherte, a Yiddish word meaning “soulmate”.  The system doesn’t work perfectly, though – some bashertes wind up with incompatible life goals regardless.  In particular, narrator Sweeney has the hots for his local barkeep, and she reciprocates the feeling, which is bad news for their respective bashertes….

There is a lot of background in this one, and it isn’t all explored – there are “Venusian overlords” imposing this system, and a concept of “non-punitive justice” which sounds interesting, and is actually important to Sweeney and Barkeep’s, errm, solution to their romantic problem.  But this background stuff isn’t developed, and that might be a shame.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there were further stories in this setting, or if this story turned up again as part of a fix-up along the lines of Central Station.  I do think, though, that all this stuff – the non-punitive justice and the Venusians and the cerebral implants and the asteroid mines – makes this story feel, well, conceptually over-populated – gives it a rather too-polished SFnal gloss, if you like.

Chris Barnham’s “When I Close My Eyes” can be read, I think, in two ways.  Astronaut Darlington is exploring a cave on Titan when he’s trapped by a rock fall; he’s haunted by visions of his wife, who died in a car crash shortly before the Titan mission.  Now, those visions seem to be guiding him out of his desperate situation.

It’s all suitably tense stuff, as Darlington is confronted by the grim realities of survival in an implacably hostile environment.  It can, as I said, be read in two ways.  If you are a sentimental sort of person, you can imagine that his wife’s ghost is really there and will lead him safely back to base.  If you are not a sentimental person, you will think back to the very first line of the story and, well, probably decide otherwise.  Since this is, mainly,  a pretty solid hard-SF type story, I have to say that I, personally, wouldn’t put any money on the ghost.  But Barnham leaves the ending open, even if the beginning’s, well, unpromising.

Finally, my favourite in this issue, Andy Dudak’s “Cryptic Female Choice”, told from the point of view of Nena, a woman who is in a sort of trance, choosing the genes that will go towards making up her daughter.  A rogue genetic engineer has created a system for storing genetic information from sperm indefinitely inside the womb, with a corresponding system inside the brain for understanding and choosing the genome for her offspring.  Nena, in a sort of reverie, is thinking over her four past lovers, and picking out which traits from each one will be passed on to her daughter.

If you’re thinking “wow, this would give women a whole new level of reproductive choice and freedom”, well, yes, it would.  If you are also thinking “wow, that would not play well among some demographics”, well, yes, Andy Dudak is ahead of you there, too.  Which is why Nena is undergoing this reverie while on a hastily-organized refugee transport away from some fearsomely nasty fascist types.  Still, Nena remains optimistic, in spite of everything – as does the story itself.  It’s very much an SF story, this one – it doesn’t just have the set dressing (cerebral implants and so on), it has one impossible idea, and shows how that would change the world.  This is definitely my favourite in this issue… and might well be worth remembering when the next nominations round begins, too.

So that’s issue 271 of Interzone, then.  Much to interest, much to divert, a certain amount to disagree with.  Personally, I’d be glad enough to see it hang on for another 271 issues.

*If you don’t know what this is, go here and find out.  If you don’t care what this is, don’t.

**As with the previous footnote, here’s Ansible if you want to know.

Goat Song: The “Vagrant” trilogy, by Peter Newman

~ stevejwright ~ 1 Comment

The Empire of the Winged Eye has been ready for a thousand years.  Under the guidance of the immortal Seven, they have prepared for the Breach to open, and for the infernals to burst out into our world.  When the Breach finally opens, Gamma of the Seven sets out with her sky palace and her sword, at the head of the Seraph Knights, to do battle….

… and loses.

Eight years later, a lone straggler from the Seraph Knights is making his way slowly across a radically changed world.  He carries Gamma’s sword, and an infant child….

Oh, and the child needs milk, so he has a goat on a string, too.

It’s when the goat makes its appearance that you realize this science-fantasy trilogy (comprising The Vagrant, The Malice and The Seven) is a bit more grounded and down-to-earth than you might expect from something that looks, initially, like it’s Lone Wolf and Cub meets Warhammer 40K.  The unnamed knight – the Vagrant – is a silent protagonist who’s a dab hand with that magic sword, but it’s less about slaying his way across a post-apocalyptic landscape than negotiating his way.  And, as the trilogy progresses and his adoptive daughter grows up to become a power in her own right, the power of heroism and magic swords and stuff might be all very well – and they get their moments to shine – but what carries the day is intelligent compromise.  Sometimes well-intentioned, sometimes very shabby compromises… sometimes well-intentioned compromises that turn shabby… but, in this rapidly changing world, it pays to be adaptable.

The protagonists are effectively caught between two sets of inhuman powers.  On the one side, there are the infernals, who operate on naked social-Darwinist principles; the strong dominate the weak, consuming or enslaving them as they see fit.  On the other side, the Seven have been created to fight the infernals, which they do without pity or doubt, and in the process they have turned their nation into the sort of sterile futuristic utopia that only Hugo Gernsback could love.  In between the might-makes-right of one side and the stony self-righteousness of the other… is where the human characters live, and attempt to survive.  And surviving takes, not just ruthlessness, but also intelligent cooperation.  Some of the infernals, it turns out, are aware that they’re in a new world, and are prepared to offer some cooperation of their own… but cooperating with the infernals leads to conflict with the Seven, whose basic attitude is “cleanse with fire and the sword”….

It all plays out, over the course of the three books and more than two decades of in-world time; there is room for all manner of hair’s-breadth escapes and desperate last stands and visceral action sequences – the word “visceral” is used advisedly, there; the nature of the infernals means there’s a lot of body horror on display.  The story manages a qualified happy ending, though there is plenty of change and loss along the way.  I suppose a qualified happy ending is, in fact, the best that we can hope for, because – despite the armies of Frankensteined corpses and the shape-changing demons and the silver angels with the singing swords – this is, at base, a realistic story.  Real prices are paid to reach credibly accessible goals.  And nobody has plot immunity… well, except for the goat.

Peter Newman is the partner of Emma (of Planetfall and After Atlas fame), and plays the butler in the Tea and Jeopardy podcasts.  That must be one very creative household, there. I hope they carry on creating for a good long time.

(A side note – the final volume, The Seven, was published in 2017 and is, therefore, at least eligible for 2018’s Hugos.  I haven’t even begun to make up a list for those, yet, but I’ll be bearing that one in mind.)

Novel: Raven Stratagem by Yoon Ha Lee

~ stevejwright ~ 1 Comment

Shuos Jedao is back, and it is superfluous to say that he’s bad.  Kept in a state of disembodied consciousness and used as a weapon after that unfortunate Hellspin Fortress incident (where he massacred two armies, one of which was unfortunately his own), Jedao, after the events of Ninefox Gambit, has slipped the leash and is back in business using the hijacked body of soldier Kel Cheris.  He may have the body of a weak and feeble woman (or would, if Cheris were noticeably weak and feeble), but he has the heart and stomach of a Machiavellian omnicidal maniac.  Taking command of a Kel armada – the Kels’ implanted “formation instinct” makes disobedience to an officer of Jedao’s seniority almost physically impossible – his first act is to wage a ruthless campaign against the enemy Hafn, but the rulers of the Hexarchate are well aware that this must be only the first step in a plan.  Plans within plans are what the devious Shuos assassins do best – and, indeed, the current Shuos leader, Mikodez, has plans of his own, which may or may not run counter to Jedao’s.

So here we are, with what appears to be the second half of a diptych – or, at least, Raven Stratagem neatly wraps up the storyline begun in Ninefox Gambit; I suppose there’s room for sequels if Yoon Ha Lee wanted to write them, though.  Still, the book concludes with a substantial change to the society of the Hexarchate, and if ever a society needed substantial changing, it’s this one.  The Hexarchate’s “high calendar”, which allows for interstellar travel and much exotic weaponry, is only maintained by continual attention to “remembrances” in which significant dates are marked… and the best way to mark dates, the Hexarchate has found, is with acts of horrendous mass torture and death.  Jedao’s only crime, really, was to include his own side in the mass torture and death bit.  (And no, the invading Hafn, who have their own high calendar and their own techniques, do not constitute an acceptable alternative.)

I’m not sure if this is more accessible than Ninefox Gambit, or if it simply feels that way after the first book did the job of front-loading the weird concepts and social structures involved.  Regardless, this one focuses on the characters and their plotting, with Jedao himself mostly seen from the outside.  There’s a reason for that, which relates to a plot twist I’m not going to spoil, beyond saying that it’s one of those “clue’s in the title” things.  Basically, it comes down to those who want to preserve the structure of the Hexarchate – including the ruling Hexarchs, who now have access to immortality technology that will make sure they keep on ruling – and those who want to change it.  As the body count rises exponentially, and the acts of mass murder and casual genocide mount up, it’s pretty clear that the reader’s sympathies are meant to be on the side of change.

Anyway.  This is a genuinely impressive piece of world-building, and inside this very novel setting there is room for a clever and effective thriller-style plot driven by a wide cast of well-drawn, well-rounded, sympathetic and interesting characters.  Admittedly, it’s unflinchingly gruesome in places, but the violence and the atrocities are never presented as a good thing.  And the final resolution makes sense, both in terms of the setting itself, and for the characters involved in it.  There are deceptions and plots and counter-plots aplenty, and it all comes to a satisfying conclusion.  This one is, very definitely, worth reading.