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INTRODUCTION Welcome to the Locus Year in Reviews supplement! In 2012, Locus maga- zine published over 450 reviews of SF, , horror, and young-adult fic- tion works. It was a great year for , fantasy, and especially YA, and we’ve put together a strong list of titles to recommend. How this works: Each year in the February issue, Locus publishes a survey of the past year, including our acclaimed Recommended Reading List, con- taining over 150 recommended genre titles; the Magazine Summary and the Book Summary, with publishing information and statistics; and year- end round-ups by most of our reviewers. This digital supplement is a com- pilation of titles from our Recommended Reading List – SF, fantasy, young- adult books, first , collections, and anthologies – and their respective Locus reviews. The list is set as the Table of Contents; click on the titles to see their full-length reviews or their descriptions from the magazine (mostly from our monthly New & Notable blurbs and year-end essay descriptions). About the list: Our Recommended Reading List is a consensus by the Locus reviewing staff, outside reviewers, other professionals, other lists, etc. First and Young Adult are their own categories, and thus are not broken out into SF or fantasy. Horror titles are folded into fantasy this year (when there are sufficient recommended titles it will have its own category), and we don’t list horror without supernatural elements. The title link in the header for each review will take you out to a purchase location. And now, on to the Year in Reviews.... –Liza Groen Trombi

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2 2012 Recommended Reading List

Click on title to see review. SCIENCE FICTION The Hydrogen Sonata, Iain M. Banks ( US; Orbit UK) Bowl of Heaven, & (Tor) Any Day Now, (Overlook; Duckworth ’13) Blueprints of the Afterlife, Ryan Boudinot (Black Cat) [No Locus Review] Arctic Rising, Tobias S. Buckell (Tor) Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen) Intruder, C.J. Cherryh (DAW) Caliban’s War, James S.A. Corey (Orbit US; Orbit UK) The Rapture of the Nerds, & (Tor) The Eternal Flame, (Night Shade; Gollancz) Angelmaker, Nick Harkaway (Heinemann; Knopf) Empty Space, M. John Harrison (Gollancz; Night Shade ’13) Rapture, Kameron Hurley (Night Shade) Intrusion, Ken MacLeod (Orbit UK) [No Locus Review] In the Mouth of the Whale, Paul McAuley (Gollancz) Fate of Worlds, Larry Niven & Edward M. Lerner (Tor) The Fractal Prince, Hannu Rajaniemi (Gollancz; Tor) Blue Remembered , (Gollancz; ) Jack Glass, Adam Roberts (Gollancz) 2312, (Orbit US; Orbit UK) Turing & Burroughs, (Transreal) , (Tor; Gollancz) Ashes of Candesce, Karl Schroeder (Tor) Lost Everything, (Tor) Slow Apocalypse, (Ace) The Fourth Wall, (Orbit US; Orbit UK) The Last Policeman, Ben Winters (Quirk)

FANTASY Whispers Under Ground, Ben Aaronovitch (Del Rey; Gollancz) Red Country, (Gollancz; Orbit US) The King’s Blood, (Orbit US; Orbit UK) The Troupe, Robert Jackson Bennett (Orbit US; Orbit UK) Queen’s Hunt, Beth Bernobich (Tor) The Ruined City, Paula Brandon (Spectra) The Steel Seraglio, Mike Carey, Linda Carey, & Louise Carey (ChiZine;

3 Gollancz ’13 as The City of Silk and Steel) Boneland, (Fourth Estate) The Killing , N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK) Some Kind of , (Gollancz; Doubleday) , Caitlín R. Kiernan (Roc) Glamour in Glass, (Tor) And Blue Skies from Pain, Stina Leicht (Night Shade) Bullettime, (ChiZine) Sharps, K.J. Parker (Orbit US; Orbit UK) Hide Me Among the , Tim (Morrow; Corvus) The Mirage, (HarperCollins) The Apocalypse Codex, Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit UK) Crandolin, Anna Tambour (Chomu) Worldsoul, Liz Williams (Prime)

YOUNG ADULT The Drowned Cities, (Little, Brown; Atom) Black Heart, Holly Black (McElderry; Gollancz) Zeuglodon, James P. Blaylock (Subterranean) The Diviners, Libba Bray (Little, Brown; Atom) The Crown of Embers, Rae Carson (Greenwillow; Gollancz) Bitterblue, Kristin Cashore (Dial; Gollancz) Pirate Cinema, Cory Doctorow (Tor Teen) Radiant Days, (Viking) A Face Like Glass, Frances Hardinge (Macmillan) The Chaos, (McElderry) Sea Hearts, (Allen & Unwin; Fickling UK; Knopf as The Brides of Rollrock Island) Team Human, Justine Larbalestier & Sarah Rees Brennan (Harper Teen; Allen & Unwin) [No Locus Review] Every Day, David Levithan (Knopf) Son, Lois Lowry (Houghton Mifflin) Be My Enemy, Ian McDonald (Pyr; Jo Fletcher ’13) , Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan) The Broken Lands, Kate Milford (Clarion) Dodger, (Harper; Doubleday UK) Apollo’s Outcasts, (Pyr) The Boys, Maggie Stiefvater (Scholastic Press; Scholastic UK) Days of Blood and Starlight, Laini Taylor (Little, Brown; Hodder & Stoughton) The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There, 4 Catherynne M. Valente (Feiwel and Friends; Much-in-Little ’13)

FIRST NOVELS Throne of the Moon, Saladin Ahmed (DAW; Gollancz ’13) Goblin Secrets, William Alexander (McElderry) vN, Madeline Ashby (Angry Robot US; Angry Robot UK) Shadow and Bone, Leigh Bardugo (Indigo as The Gathering Dark; Holt) Charlotte Markham and the House of Darkling, Michael Boccacino (Morrow; ) Blackwood, Gwenda Bond (Strange Chemistry US; Strange Chemistry UK) Wide Open, Deborah Coates (Tor) Sanctum, Sarah Fine (Amazon Children’s Publishing) Bad Glass, Richard E. Gropp (Del Rey) Seraphina, Rachel Hartman (; Doubleday UK) The Snow Child, Eowyn Ivey (Reagan Arthur; Headline Review) Rituals, Roz Kaveney (Plus One) The Games, Ted Kosmatka (Del Rey; Titan) The Man From Primrose Lane, James Renner (Crichton; Corsair ’13) , G. Willow Wilson (Grove; Corvus)

COLLECTIONS The Best of , Kage Baker (Subterranean) Other Seasons: The Best of Neal Barrett Jr., Neal Barrett Jr. (Subterranean) Last and First Contacts, (NewCon) [No Locus Review] Birds and Birthdays, Christopher Barzak (Aqueduct) , (Prime) The Door Gunner and Other Perilous Flights of Fancy, Michael Bishop (Subterranean) The Woman Who Married a Cloud, (Subterranean) Earth and : Tales of Elemental Creatures, (Big Mouth House) The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories, (PS) Windeye, (Coffee House) Crackpot Palace, (Morrow) Angels and You Dogs, Kathleen Ann Goonan (PS) Errantry, Elizabeth Hand (Small Beer) Midnight and Moonshine, Lisa L. Hannett & (Ticonderoga) The Janus Tree and Other Stories, Glen Hirshberg (Subterranean) Permeable Borders, (Fairwood) 5 Wool Omnibus, Hugh Howey (self published) At the Mouth of the River of Bees, (Small Beer) Confessions of Five-Chambered Heart, Caitlín R. Kiernan (Subterranean) , (Small Beer) Cracklescape, Margo Lanagan (Twelfth Planet) The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories Volume One: Where on Earth and Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands, Ursula K. Le Guin (Small Beer) Wonders of the Invisible World, Patricia A. McKillip (Tachyon) The At the Edge of Waking, Holly Phillips (Prime) Ancient, Ancient, (Aqueduct) Remember Why You Fear Me, (ChiZine) Store of the Worlds, Robert Sheckley (New York Review) The Dragon Griaule, (Subterranean) The Collected Stories of , Volume 7: We Are for the Dark, Robert Silverberg (Subterranean) Jagannath, Karin Tidbeck (Cheeky Frawg) Eater-of-Bone and Other , Robert Reed (PS) Moscow But Dreaming, (Prime) Dream Castles: The Early , Volume Two, Jack Vance (Subterranean) Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille, James Van Pelt (Fairwood) Sorry Please Thank You, Charles Yu (Pantheon)

ANTHOLOGIES ORIGINAL After, & eds., ed. () Rip-Off!, , ed. (Audible.com) AfroSF: Science Fiction by African Writers, Ivor W. Hartman, ed. (StoryTime) The Future Is Japanese, Nick Mamatas & Masumi , eds. (Haikasoru) Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic, Eduardo Jimenez Mayo & Chris N. Brown, eds. (Small Beer) Breaking the Bow: Stories Inspired by the Ramayana, Anil Menon & Vandana Singh, eds. (Zubaan) [No Locus Review] Ishtar, Amanda Pillar & K.V. Taylor, eds. (Gilgamesh) Edge of Infinity, , ed. (Solaris US; Solaris UK) Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Random House) 6 L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume XXVIII, K.D. Wentworth, ed. (Galaxy) Solaris Rising 1.5, Ian Whates, ed. (Solaris) REPRINT/BESTS Epic: Legends of Fantasy, , ed. (Tachyon) The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Four, Ellen Datlow, ed. (Night Shade) The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed. (St. Martin’s Griffin; Robinson as The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25) Rock On: The Greatest Hits of Science Fiction & Fantasy, Paula Guran, ed. (Prime) The Year’s Best & Horror: 2012 Edition, Paula Guran, ed. (Prime) Year’s Best SF 17, David G. Hartwell & , eds. (Harper Voyager) The Sword & Sorcery Anthology, David G. Hartwell & , eds. (Tachyon) The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2012, Rich Horton, ed. (Prime) The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror: Volume 23, , ed. (Robinson; Running Press) Digital Rapture: The Singularity Anthology, & , eds. (Tachyon) Beyond Binary, Brit Mandelo, ed. (Lethe) The Century’s Best : Volume One and Volume Two, , ed. (Cemetery Dance) The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Six, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Night Shade) III: Steampunk Revolution, Ann VanderMeer, ed. (Tachyon) Robots: The Recent A.I., Rich Horton & , eds. (Prime)

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7 Science Fiction

The Hydrogen Sonata, Iain M. Banks (Orbit 978-0-316-21237-3, $25.99, 518pp, tp) October 2012. At a quarter-century old, in publishing terms, Iain M. Banks’s Culture has now survived and thrived for 10,000 years, less as an Imperium than as a somewhat ramshackle assemblage of minds (and far more powerful Minds) with a shared interest in exploring, observing, and occasionally tinkering with other galactic civilizations. Look to Windward (2000) dealt with an intervention that went particularly wrong, recalling events in our world. The Hydrogen Sonata draws its own interfering group from a civi- lization that vanished before the Culture took its wobbling first steps onto the galactic scene. Can such ancient business possibly matter now? It does, because of its lasting effect on the Gzilt, ‘‘cousins’’ whose refusal to adopt the Culture’s more liberal mindset based much of its smug rejec- tion of ‘‘lesser’’ beings on the religion that formed around a Book of Truth – a work whose prophecies have proved to be remarkably accurate, though we learn that the book is only posing as the Word of God. Somebody thinks the Book’s real origin should be confessed, at a crucial time for the Gzilt: a civilization that feels mature enough to leave behind ordinary life and enter the Sublime, a state that might be described as one step beyond Singular- ity. A Culture ship Mind calls that arcane dimension an ‘‘almost tangible, entirely believable, mathematically verifiable nirvana just a few right-angle turns away from dear boring old reality.’’ It adds, ‘‘The Sublime was where you went when you felt you had no more to contribute to the life of the great galactic meta-civilization’’ (and vice-versa). Way back in Chapter One, the bullheaded ferocity of a Gzilt combat ship foiled what might have been the first attempt to reveal the truth about their Book. Now a couple of other forces, acting on little more than rumor, are determined to probe beneath millennia of myth and get to the bottom of the matter. Both look for help from an elusive individual who may be as old as the Culture itself – or even older: In one of his multitude of guises, this man has been T.C. Vilabier, composer of the ‘‘26th String-Specific Sonata For an Instrument Yet to Be Invented’’, AKA ‘‘The Hydrogen Sonata’’. While Gzilt society is organized on military lines – everyone serves, in some capacity, like a less blue-blooded version of Bujold’s Vor – not every- one follows a monolithic code of conduct, and there’s even some room for artistic expression, as well as individual bodily modification. These small freedoms have allowed Lieutenant Vyr Cossant to leave active duty and acquire an extra pair of arms, primarily in order to tackle works like ‘‘The Hydrogen Sonata’’ on the formidable instrument developed to play it in 8 the centuries since Vilabier wrote it. Young as she is, Vyr’s met him (just decades, not centuries, ago). When the army abruptly calls her back to service, that meeting is to blame: they order her to find the unimaginably ancient composer, wherever he may have got to, and probe his memories. The Culture wants to find him too, awakening their own investigator from centuries as a Mind in Storage; they bring Scoliera Tefwe back to physical existence in hope that this former ‘‘friend and lover’’ can track her old companion. Neither quester will have it easy, following the latest clue to some new planet, ship, or Orbital, where yet another draws them on, often into danger. Lt. Cossant suffers the most attacks, indignities and brushes with death in her augmented but still mortal form, while Tef- we’s adventures seem more exotic as she follows the musician into bizarre realms of sound. Other plot tracks provide glimpses of persistent enemies, both humanoid and alien, intent on thwarting them in pursuit of their own nefarious schemes. And, in the intervals between these episodes, we see communications between a growing consortium of ship Minds, with their peculiar monikers, fascination with matters of history, philosophy, and morality, and foul mouths (no one here seems shy about using the F- word, and other terms far more organic than the beings who utter them). In The Hydrogen Sonata, Banks conjures fast-paced scenes of action in a wide variety of settings, from such apparently academic topics as the effect of a religion upon centuries of believers, and a moral dilemma which hides its real behind a bland appellation: ‘‘The Simming Problem.’’ Even 25 years on, when his ship Minds have lost some of their strangeness and become more like familiar friends, this approach still works – and leaves room for him to explore a whole host of arts, ideas, and avatars on every scale, wherever he chooses to go next. –Faren Miller (Reviewed in Nov 2012) Return to Science Fiction list.

Bowl of Heaven, Gregory Benford & Larry Niven (Tor 978-0-7653-2841-0, $25.99, 412 pp, hc) October 2012. A collaboration between Gregory Benford & Larry Niven is one of those dream-team arrangements that publishers and readers, um, dream about. But as anyone who has watched a supergroup rock concert during pledge knows, such dreams are not fulfilled. So it was with some satisfaction that I found Benford & Niven’s together-again-for-the-first-time extravagan- za* does indeed offer the kinds of synergies one would expect from these two. (And no pledge breaks!) [*I’m not counting Benford’s visit to Niven’s Man- Kzin Wars playground as a full collaboration. My column, my rules.] 9 Bowl of Heaven is the first half of a hefty two-decker novel of explora- tion, alien encounter, and Holy-Cow-Will-Ya-Lookitthat! engineering. (Vol- ume Two, Shipstar, is promised on the last page.) The exploratory ramscoop starship SunSeeker is en route to a promisingly Earthlike world called Glory when it encounters something not only unexpected but barely believable: a bowl (‘‘wok-shaped mirrored shell’’ is the first description) broader than the orbit of with a hole in its center through which a small sun pours a jet of plasma. Even though it is not nailed down tight until page 71 (with a nice graphic, too), it is not a spoiler to reveal that this really big Big Smart Object (as Benford is calling it in interviews) proves to be not only a habitat but a vehicle, apparently also heading for the Glory system. Circumstances (to say nothing of curiosity) dictate that SunSeeker take a closer look and land an exploratory team of ten, led by senior biologist Cliff Kammath and scientist-pilot Beth Marble, but when the Bowl’s proprietors show up, half the party (including Beth) is captured by the giant-bird-like Folk, while Cliff and the other half escape. The escapees find themselves in a landscape of nearly-unimaginable vastness under a sun that never sets, where they en- counter a range of creatures as strange as the Bowl itself. Beth’s team, on the other hand, are studied by Memor, a senior Astronomer of the Folk, and the human captives study Memor right back – until they too escape and make their own set of discoveries. So this volume is mostly adventure-as-exposition, setting up questions to be answered and conflicts to be complicated and presumably resolved in the second half of the story. Details of the nature and operation of the physical setting – a world which is also an artifact which is also a vessel – unfold via the travels of the two groups of prisoners/escapees, while questions about the Bowl’s social/political and operational arrangements are revealed at a slower rate. The Folk are at the top of a hierarchy, organized into something be- tween guilds and castes, perhaps reinforced by or breed- ing. Alien species encountered along the Bowl’s route may be ‘‘adopted’’ and adapted to fit into the artificial world’s carefully-balanced systems. Teas- ing fragments of the deep history of the Bowl and its voyage emerge from Memor’s interactions with her own kind and her reflections on the humans, and there are clearly some Big Secrets waiting to be sprung in the second half. Part of the fun of a collaboration of this kind is trying to figure which bits ‘‘belong’’ to which writer. The Bowl itself is clearly an elaboration of Ring- world – a 2.0 design with major enhancements. (There’s even a homage to ’s planetary maps.) But I was more taken by the alien personality designs. Each writer has produced a healthy catalogue of non-human men- talities and societies: Niven’s Known Space hosts a wonderful menagerie of evolution-shaped personality types, while Benford’s vision tends toward 10 the Stapledonian – the anthology intelligences of Beyond the Fall of Night (1990), the machine species of the Galactic Center sequence or the sentient black hole of Eater (2000). This story depends as much on mental as on giant-physical architectures, and here I get a Benfordian flavor. The Folk long ago re-engineered themselves to have voluntary access to their Underminds – the vast preconscious repository, data-mixer, insight-generator, and behavior-driver – a trait they see as one of their great strengths. Memor notes that, despite their technological achievement, these new primates lack any di- rect insight into their own ‘‘deep desires,’’ and that ‘‘to understand themselves is impossible for them, unless they can see their inner, unconscious minds.’’ Elsewhere she notes that humans have ‘‘a perceptual limited by the curve of primitive worlds’’ and that they live in ‘‘the mire of cyclic mechan- ics... the tick of some planetary clock’’ that makes for an even more restricted ‘‘innate mind-time scale’’:

The [human] creature had a summing time of a few of its own eye- blinks, a trifling interval. It used that scale to integrate information. That meant it could not delegate to its lesser parts the boring business of keeping itself alive.... This small, intense being was forced to worry about its housekeeping, such as digestion, excretion, even the intake and outblow of oxygen. Could it be so pointlessly busy? Difficult to know, but depressing to contemplate.

Despite her acute analytical modeling of the evolutionarily-determined human condition, though, Memor clearly doesn’t get humans, and as the two groups of escapees manage to evade capture and make all kinds of mischief, she finds her status, and maybe even her life, on the line. It’s been more than 40 years since Ringworld and nearly that long since the Galactic Center Saga knocked our socks off, and I wonder how much it takes these days to render us barefoot and gaping at the scale and scope of an imaginary world. There’s been plenty of competition from the likes of Iain M. Banks, Robert Reed, Alastair Reynolds, Neal Asher, , and other practitioners of the widescreen and/or Stapledonian epic. But Benford & Niven have given themselves the space (conceptual and page-count) to spread out. Bowl of Heaven has room to accommodate both the thrill-ride and head-scratching sides of its sub-tradition, and I think when the second half appears, this new effort by two of the Old Masters will hold its own just fine. –Russell Letson (Reviewed in Aug 2012) Return to Science Fiction list. 11 Any Day Now, Terry Bisson (Overlook 978-1-59020-709-3, $24.95, 288pp, hc) March 2012. Too often it seems like alternate histories are written with chainsaws, rip- ping apart some particular moment in history and then rearranging the chunks into an adventure narrative that, as often as not, doesn’t really need the historical shell game in the first place. The best ones, like Keith Rob- erts’s Pavane or Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle – or, more re- cently, ’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union – can be marvels of modulation and nuance, taking us into a world that is somehow both continuous and discontinuous with the old, an alternate world whose his- tory, given the same initial conditions, seems almost as reasonable as our own. Terry Bisson’s Any Day Now, which I believe belongs in the company of those novels mentioned above and which is his finest novel to date, takes risks that even some of those earlier masterpieces didn’t attempt, and brings it off brilliantly. One of the main such risks involves the novel’s form. Any Day Now be- gins as a partly autobiographical coming-of-age tale, complete with Ste- phen Dedalus-like impressionistic flashes of Clay Bauer’s early childhood in Owensboro, Kentucky, leading through his discovery of SF, poetry, and jazz – and eventually to classic ’60s-era rebellion after he drops out of an elite middle-class college (which looks a lot like Grinnell) and makes his way to New York to join the burgeoning Beat scene. This is very accomplished and deeply textured mainstream writing, filled with Bisson’s sharply attuned dia- logue, and it’s essential for the novel to work, though it might initially try the patience of SF readers waiting for some sort of Big Blow. That will come, but Bisson introduces his alternative history with such elegant subtlety that you need to pay attention: characters mention that Arthur C. Clarke and Miles Davis have died – decades earlier than in our own history – and an ominous interpolated narrative voice reminds us repeatedly that ‘‘In this universe the night was falling....’’ things grow increasingly off-kilter: Israel’s ‘‘eight-day war’’ is a disaster for them, Pete Best is still playing with the Beatles, Mi- chael Collins instead of Neil Armstrong takes the first step on the Moon. But Clay’s bohemian life in New York largely sticks to the familiar portents of the ’60s – he befriends a gay man who gets caught in the Stonewall riot, romances a Barnard student radical whose father has political connections, and even has brief encounters with Allen Ginsberg and Andy Warhol. At times, the relatively innocent Clay may stumble a little too conveniently and coincidentally into the historical currents that shaped the era; at other times he seems buffeted by these forces in a way that recalls nothing so much as the Invisible Man of a few decades earlier – Ralph Ellison’s, not Wells’s. Clay’s journey from Kentucky to New York, and eventually to a commune 12 in New Mexico centered around a Fulleresque geodesic dome, provides such a convincing and unsentimental portrait of the ’60s counterculture that Bis- son’s second risk involves keeping those mainstream readers aboard when things go radically off the rails. Historical figures continue to play important roles – Robert Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Martin Luther King, even Alex- ander Haig – but by now it’s pretty clear that night has fallen in that earlier universe, and we’ve moved into a measurably more SFnal one. What is re- markable is that this increasingly apocalyptic world is not so much a reversal of prior history – the usual strategy of alternate histories – as a continuation of it by other means. More than half the novel takes place after Clay arrives at the commune – invited there by Roads, a well-off doctor’s son whom Clay had first met in high school (and who claims his name was given to him by Kerouac; the murky edge between the Beat movement and later ’60s culture is depicted exceptionally well). The others who have drifted there, called the Rockers because of an enormous rock near the dome, are a colorful assembly of rec- ognizable ’60s drop-outs – a refugee from Hollywood, a law school gradu- ate, an art dealer, a Bible school dropout turned peyote freak – but each find their motives for being there tested as their communal life grows darker, shifting from the relatively innocent concerns of grocery or gas money to is- sues of security and survival, a utopian experiment turned into a survivors’ redoubt. A major concern becomes insulating the dome for the winter, and as Clay and the others find patchwork solutions to the problem – first with a donated supply of Styrofoam planks, later with a quest to find glue strong enough to keep the Styrofoam in place – it’s as though they’re looking for ways to mend not only their increasingly desperate community, but the so- cial contract itself. That anxiety may be one of the real legacies the ’60s left us with, and in a way Bisson’s novel is less an than a kind of shadow history, explored in a way that only SF can explore it. On his website, Bisson modestly says the novel is ‘‘not exactly science fiction; and not exactly not.’’ In fact, it’s both – and neither aspect would be nearly as compelling without the other. What it is, I think it’s fair to say, is the major work of one of our most talented and underappreciated writers, in or out of the SF fold. –Gary K. Wolfe (Reviewed in Apr 2012) Return to Science Fiction list.

Arctic Rising, Tobias S. Buckell (Tor) February 2012. The author of the far-future Xenowealth series switches his focus to the near-future of Earth in this SF thriller set after the Arctic ice cap has al- most entirely melted. United Nations Polar Guard airship pilot Anika Dun- 13 can runs afoul of a military-industrial-complex conspiracy to stop the Gaia Corporation, an organization devoted to ‘‘’’ the Earth to save the planet from ecological catastrophe. –Locus (Mentioned in Apr 2012) Return to Science Fiction list.

Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen 978-145-163845- 5, $25.00, 422pp, hc) November 2012. Cover by David Seeley. Both Lois McMaster Bujold and Iain M. Banks made their striking debuts on the SF scene midway through my first decade as a Locus reviewer (in 1986 and 1987, respectively). They’re still at it, with new entries in long-running series: her continues with Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, while his Culture books celebrate their 25th anniversary with The Hydro- gen Sonata. By this point, another generation of writers is exploring the vast galactic reaches opened by wormhole/FTL travel – or what’s left of them in this era of robotic planetary explorers and scaled-down hopes for human ventures beyond our own . While I won’t try to comment on current SF, the latest trends in , etc., Bujold’s galactic imperial background and Banks’s more Stapledonian expanses of space and time retain their ap- peal, with significant help from quirky wits that revel in eccentric characters: human, , alien, and manufactured. Miles Vorkosigan, the offbeat young whose into adulthood took place over a number of adventures, is no longer central in Captain Vor- patril’s Alliance, but the title character turns out to be his cousin, Ivan Xav: a member of the Barrayaran ruling class, which strongly resembles 19th- century Britain’s aristocratic warriors and public servants, in an Empire ex- panded to interplanetary scale, facing enemies with their own place in the ‘‘wormhole nexus’’ and its history of colonizations after the human diaspora from Old Earth. Though he’s son to the formidable Lady Alys, Ivan plays a middling role away from : ‘‘Aide-de-camp, secretary, personal assistant, general dogsbody’’ to Admiral Desplains on the planet Komarr, with an occasional (reluctant) sideline doing tasks for other Vor in his extended family. This book opens when a ‘‘side-friend’’ who poses as a dissolute toff while working as a government spy asks Ivan to meet a girl, a person of interest who seems to have come to Komarr as some kind of political refugee, potentially the target of off-planet thugs. After the inevitable awkward meeting, which leads to his getting tasered and bound to a chair, he finds himself increasingly en- tangled in the lives of the attractive Tej and her posthuman companion, the 14 blue-skinned dancer currently known as Rish. Over the course of the series, Bujold has put together a background that easily mingles elements of imperial adventure with comedies from the fad- ing days of empire (this book even cites a type of servant known as Jeeves), along with scientific advances from centuries still to come. Some of its charm derives from the various ways she finds to introduce us into the rarefied cir- cles of interplanetary bigwigs – an upper crust complete with familiar noble titles, ornate mansions and rituals all their own – via unassuming characters with little tolerance for pomp and circumstance, although their lives seem rather active for the calm mundanes they purport to be. Spoiler Alert: Though the major plot turn here is indirectly mentioned in the title, and dates back to works far older than the age of Shakespeare, you should skip the next paragraph if you prefer to know no more. The ‘‘alliance’’ turns out to be Ivan’s getting hitched to Tej in a supposed marriage of convenience designed to get her away from her enemies and into the protective zone of his family and friends. He may remain absurdly blind to the developing romance with his new bride, but that just adds to readerly amusement, since clueless males are fun as long as they mean well. Tej’s own background comes into play when not all her relatives turn out to have been murdered by political usurpers, and they bring word of a ‘‘lost’’ treasure trove surprisingly near at hand – one more development in an fast- paced narrative that can extend as far as the schemes of warring empires, then shrink back to the private intimacies of lovers no with no mind to the future. –Faren Miller (Reviewed in Nov 2012) Return to Science Fiction list.

Intruder, C.J. Cherryh (DAW, 978-0-7564-0715-5, $29.95, 374 pp, hc) March 2012. Cover by Todd Lockwood. C.J. Cherryh has been developing the Foreigner series for nearly two de- cades now, laying it out in three-book movements that combine stand-alone closure with longer story arcs. Number 13, Intruder, begins the fifth such trio, picking up where last year’s Betrayer left off. I hereby warn readers that this is not the place to enter the series if you want to fully enjoy its consider- able pleasures. Best to start with the initial trio (Foreigner, Invader, and In- heritor), as the barest of antecedent-action and world-building summaries will show; to wit: The series starts out as a First story in which a shipload of humans gets lost in hyperspace and ends up near a planet inhabited by the very-hu- man-seeming atevi, who have a roughly 19th-century technological civiliza- 15 tion and a dominant culture that echoes both feudal Japan and Renaissance Italy in its combination of elegance, formality, and violence. Unable to get home (or even determine where in the galaxy they might be), the humans are accepted as guests – and discover that, despite their very human physical appearance (well, ten-foot-tall, ebony-skinned, golden-eyed human appear- ance), atevi mental and emotional deep structures and thus socio-political instincts emphatically do not match up with human assumptions and expec- tations. Misunderstanding escalates into war, which gets settled only when the parties recognize that if the two species are to share the planet – and if the atevi are to benefit from advanced human technologies without massive, destructive dislocations – they must remain separate. Humans are granted a large, isolated island as their home, and a single human is given the title of paidhi: official translator, diplomatic representative of humankind to the atevi government, and controller of technology transfer. Some two centuries later, the holder of that post is Bren Cameron, and the atevi leader he deals with is the brilliant and progressive Tabini. The first dozen volumes trace Cameron’s growing skill and power in atevi affairs as he navigates various intrigues among both species’ political schemers, oversees the development of an atevi space program, participates in a voyage of interstellar adventure and discovery, and survives a civil war and its aftermath. Thus far I can take you without spoilers. Intruder offers a change of pace from the often violent action of its im- mediate predecessors. It opens with Bren facing ‘‘politics, politics, politics’’ as he prepares to sell a plan that will bring into Tabini’s mainstream gov- ernment a number of elements that have never been part of it. The plan is mostly the work of Tabini’s grandmother, the unstoppable dowager Ilisidi, and it will require not only convincing Tabini, but sweet-talking various conservative factions that are deeply suspicious of any change, particularly if it involves the detested, novelty-pushing, tradition-trampling humans. At the same time, Tabini’s eight-year-old son and heir, Cajeiri, is facing much- circumscribed and boring, boring, boring circumstances, as his parents in- stall him in an apartment in the government complex and expect him to proceed with an education appropriate to his status and species instead of running around exploring things, or consorting with humans, or traveling to the stars, or getting kidnapped, or stumbling into assassinations and coup attempts, which is what he has been doing up to this point. It is Cajeiri who is the chief delight and enlightenment-source of this vol- ume. Seventeen years ago, I wrote of Inheritor, ‘‘I kept thinking that much of the mystery of atevi psychology (particularly their affectional lives) would be reduced if one knew more of their domestic arrangements: mating, child- bearing and -rearing, gender roles, and so on.’’ Since the boy’s introduc- 16 tion (in Defender and Explorer), Cherryh has been able to address some of those matters. Cajeiri has also become the series’ second viewpoint char- acter (starting with Deliverer), the only ateva whose thoughts we can see directly. He is not quite representative, though – he is not only a precocious, canny, and just a bit manipulative child, but one whose unusual upbringing and transcultural experiences among humans make him into a kind of atevi mirror of Bren. And now that atevi side is emerging as he gathers his own set of associates into his man’chi (the fundamental force of affiliation and loyal- ty in atevi society): his bodyguards, his small domestic staff, and even a pet. His relationships to his father and mother (he is child and heir, emotionally and politically important), great-grandmother Ilisidi, his unborn sister, and even his new tutor, Dasi (the first whose conversation he has enjoyed) reveal much about atevi family and social dynamics.

After the first tutoring session, He had almost been tempted to tell Dasi how much he liked maps. But he had stopped short of that, because whatever true thing one told somebody else, that person could use it for power, and would, and he trusted nobody who came into the apartment trying to teach him things. He had had far too many experiences and far too many people trying to threaten him into good behavior. Those were easy to spot.... The ones that came in trying to win him over because they wanted to get his favor in the future or his father’s favor now – those were a little harder to spot, because they were really good at being polite. And he really, truly hoped that Dasi-nadi was not one of those. He would be truly disappointed if he were.

For his part, Bren is juggling the pieces of the new set of associations need- ed to make Ilisidi’s grand scheme possible: variously-interested guilds, clans that have been hereditary rivals or enemies, subcultures and ethnic groups that have traditionally been treated as outsiders by sophisticated atevi soci- ety. His work is done via ‘‘letters and committee meetings,’’ formal dinners and receptions, and cultural back-channels – for example, by arranging for the gift of prized porcelains from a former opponent to an arch-conserva- tive lord. This is the elaborate dance of the Japanese/Italian-Renaissance end of atevi politics, diplomacy over tea or by flower arrangement or bread-and- butter note, and it has Bren in almost as much of a sweat as the ambush- and-assassination mode might. And then there’s always the chance that the modes can merge, in which case the question of whether ‘‘bulletproof and pale silk was the latest fashion’’ isn’t as silly as it sounds. The Cajeiri and Bren threads finally converge in a strange and wonderful 17 collision of conventional intrigue, a lost pet, and a stormy family confronta- tion, resulting in a realignment of forces and allies on several fronts. It is one of the marvels of this series that after a dozen volumes, Cherryh can keep pulling such rabbits (or their atevi equivalents) out of the hat. (Do atevi wear hats? Lace and ribbons and bulletproof vests, yes, but hats? Should I put that on my questions-to-be-answered list?) And this is only the first part of the triad. What’s going to happen when Cajeiri hits atevi-style puberty? –Russell Letson (Reviewed in May 2012) Return to Science Fiction list.

Caliban’s War, James S.A. Corey (Orbit 978-0-316-12906-0, $15.99, 597pp, tp) June 2012. Cover by Daniel Dociucome. I quite enjoyed the Alfred-Bester-meets-Neal-Asher mix of last year’s Le- viathan Wakes, by the pseudonymous collaboration calling itself James S.A. Corey (and wearing the separate bodies of Daniel Abraham & Ty Franck). I seem not to have been alone in this opinion, since the novel is currently on the Hugo ballot. Now comes its sequel/middle-volume-fol- low-up: Caliban’s War, subtitled Book Two of the Expanse, offers a remix of basic ingredients (plus some new additives) that is even better than the first volume’s. Those basics include a settled and industrialized solar sys- tem with its political-economic-cultural tensions being cranked up to the breaking point by the discovery and loosing of the ‘‘protomolecule’’ – an ancient, alien, biotransforming technology that may have been designed as a weapon. The first infestation – and the entire asteroid that held it – has crashed onto , but we have clearly not seen the last of it. We also re- visit some of the mean-corridors material that was so strong in Wakes, but just as important this time (and nearly as mean) are the cor- ridors of power in the UN and the military-industrial complex, and the battles fought there can be just as deadly – though the physical casualties pile up in other locations. Where the earlier book divided its plot threads and viewpoint characters in two, this one doubles down and spreads out to show us the action – and the world – through the eyes of four interestingly different characters. Returning is the inflexibly honorable-and-honest former naval officer Jim Holden, who, with some surviving colleagues from the original cast, is op- erating the missile frigate Rocinante, liberated from the Martian Navy and now under contract to the new Outer Planets Alliance government works to suppress piracy. As in , Holden and his crew are drawn into the story by a search for a missing daughter, this time a child who has become entangled in the machinations and destruction surrounding 18 the escape of a second wave of protomolecule-generated monstrosities, and thus in the covert power-struggle that threatens to drag Earth and into all-out war. The girl’s father, Praxidike Meng (Prax for short) is the driving viewpoint character: a milquetoasty botanist who is transformed by his need to find out what happened to his daughter during the disaster that is gradually destroying the infrastructure of the Ganymede settlement. Prax’s relent- less, obsessive search echoes in intensity, if not violence, Detective Miller’s quest for the missing heiress in Leviathan Wakes. On the other hand, vio- lence of the controlled and professional variety is precisely the vocation of Martian Marine Gunnery Sergeant Bobbie Draper, the sole survivor of the incident that triggered the Ganymede disaster. She has seen, very close up, one lethal, superpotent product of the protomolecule, and she’s itching (in a controlled and professional way) to pay back whoever turned it loose. The fourth viewpoint is Chrisjen Avasarala, a hard-nosed, gray-haired, sa- ri-clad, potty-mouthed granny whose three-or-four-levels-down title (as- sistant to the undersecretary of executive administration) conceals her real political power and influence in Earth’s UN governing structure. Her job is to keep the superpowers, Earth and Mars, from tearing apart the solar system, and that means finding out exactly who has been messing around with the protomolecule technology and generally stirring up strife. As in any good Magnificent Seven-style adventure, we first spend some time with the individual actors who will constitute the ragtag team of he- roes, and their converging plot threads also deliver necessary expository material and fatten up the setting. Prax’s frantic (but compulsively sys- tematic) search for his child in the chaos of the disintegrating Ganymede colony establishes the complexity and fragility of its infrastructure. Ava- sarala’s round of official meetings and back-channel maneuvering outlines the theoretical and real lines of power and authority in the UN system – and shows that the political balance among Earth, Mars, and the Outer Planets is as delicate as Ganymede’s life-support systems. Bobbie’s experi- ence with the process of debriefing after the Ganymede incident reveals the sharp (if politically unformed) mind that operates the powered armor. And the crew of the Rocinante get to show off their various competencies in space warfare, bureaucracy-wrangling, and general trouble shooting be- fore taking in Prax and taking on the task of finding Mei – and whoever is experimenting with the ancient alien technology that might be planning to eat the entire solar system. SF is strongly about details of How – how things work, how phenomena are structured, how they are understood – and what I am struck by here is the way that gets applied to internal states, for example, how it feels to 19 be obsessed and starving (Prax) or dumped into a new and alien social/ authority structure (Bobbie). From this angle, Corey is channeling C.J. Cherryh as much as . But there’s still plenty of action, so one’s Minimum Daily Requirement of combat (space-navy, station-corridor, Jovian-moon-surface, hand-to-hand, and bureaucratic-backstabbing) will be more than satisfied. And through it all, whatever it is that the proto- molecule is designed to do is getting done on and around Venus, generally just outside of camera-shot, but reported on periodically to remind us that the fights we are watching are not really the main event but preliminary bouts and that the fat alien lady has yet to sing. That, one supposes, is what will be presented in the third act, a teaser from which is appended at the end of this volume. But there’s no need to wait for Act III, or even to read Act I first – Caliban’s War is sufficiently self-contained and satisfactorily resolved to be read on its own. And it’s too much fun to be kept waiting on the shelf. –Russell Letson (Reviewed in Jun 2012) Return to Science Fiction list.

The Rapture of the Nerds, Cory Doctorow & Charles Stross (Tor 978-0- 7653-2910-3, $24.99, 349pp, hc) September 20102. I no sooner finish Gregory Benford & Larry Niven’s Bowl of Heaven than I run smack into another pairing of marquee names that sounds like a mar- keting rep’s idea of heaven. Actually, Cory Doctorow & Charles Stross came up with the project that evolved into The Rapture of the Nerds all on their own. About a decade ago, the pair started batting around a Stross story frag- ment which grew into two novellas, ‘‘Jury Service’’ and ‘‘Appeals Court’’, and now that material has been reworked and expanded into exactly the kind of high-octane carnival ride that one might expect from two of the field’s wilder boys: a shambling, picaresque, kitchen-sinkian travelogue through a decidedly un-tidy posthuman future. The title represents a now-familiar ironic rebranding of the Vingean Sin- gularity via a phrase popularized (though not invented) by Ken MacLeod in The Cassini Division. Combine a conventionally worked-out take on post- or trans-humanity with a somewhat skeptical vision of the post-cy- berpunk generation and a generally bolshy, disrespectful attitude, and you get this mad confection. The story-line is studded with ideas explored by everybody from Wells and Stapledon to MacLeod, Vinge, and Egan, and there are echoes of as various as the Robert Silverberg of Son of Man (or the David Lindsay of A Voyage to Arcturus) and the Douglas Adams of the Hitchhiker’s Guide series. In fact, much of the book’s genome consists 20 of homages, in-jokes (rooted in every computer magazine ever printed or Usenet techie thread ever keyboarded), and satirical skewerings of targets of opportunity of all kinds: Left Behinders, Randian Objectivists, bureaucrats, technophobes, technophiles, reality television celebrities.... Both these writers are given to fireworks displays of imaginative and lin- guistic invention, and locking them in a virtual room together seems to have disabled their individual internal governors and generated a top-this-one- smartass feedback loop. The result reminded me at times of George Mac- Donald Fraser’s The Pyrates, in which the admirable writerly chops that gave life and voice to Harry Flashman were allowed to run amok in a kind of self-referential comic-satiric goof that has more to do with old movies and English pantomime than nautical history. I never could get more than a few chapters into that book, so I was relieved to find that underneath Rap- ture’s in-jokes (science-fictional, pop-cultural, comic-infernal, computer- nerdical, etc.) there is a layer of engagement with some of the Big Ideas that power this branch of the genre. The narrative starts its winding way when philosophical technophobe Huw Jones wakes up severely hungover in a bathtub (not his own) adorned with a biohazard tattoo of dubious provenance and significance. The next day he gets an actual, physical letter calling him to jury service – not to decide on the guilt or innocence of some alleged lawbreaker, but to evaluate one of the many technological pigs-in-pokes with which elements of the uploaded and ascended part of (former) humankind spam the meatfolk down at the bottom of the gravity well. Tech-evaluation court isn’t as satisfying as Huw had expected – it doubles as a reality show with a maniac hanging judge in charge – and then the reason for the biohazard tattoo manifests itself as some kind of alien diplomatic translator, and things get really interesting. For the first two-thirds of the book, Huw is almost entirely acted-upon, with no more control over what happens to him than a kitten in a clothes drier. (Fortunately he is far less fragile, if not nearly as cute.) In the company of (at various times) an advisory AI djinni residing in a tatty teapot, a horny dope-smoking international backpacker, and a party acquaintance whose gender shifts around unpredictably, he zeppelins from to a People’s Marriott in Tripoli, parachutes into the gasoline mangrove swamps of the Christian States of America (peopled by reactionaries still annoyed that they were left behind by a Rapture they have redefined in interestingly pathologi- cal ways), gains an audience with one of the bodies occupied by the Bishop of the First Church of the Teledildonic (‘‘like an explosion in a gourmet brothel’s cloning vats’’), faces the Glory City Inquisition and is sentenced to execution by ant-swarm, and for a Big Finish is shanghaied off to the com- putational cloud for an encounter with the faux infinite. (Hint: That’s a hint 21 about the aforementioned layer of engagement.) While ascended humankind might sometimes attain godlike wisdom, it also has dragged along copies or emulations of all of its old foolery, and the arrival of the Singularity has proved to be less a visit from the gods and more like having the carney come to town (shades, in different ways, of both Stross’s Singularity Sky and Doctorow’s ‘‘Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow’’), along with the usual gang of thimble-riggers, pickpockets, pests, con artists, and aluminum siding salesmen. Nor is a solar system transformed into a cloud of computational substrates entirely heavenly or even orderly. Aside from the inscrutable entities responsible for the various unasked-for inno- vations – ’’pranks, poison, or care packages’’ – that need to be screened by the technology juries, there are other familiar failings – Like pre-singularity porn-monkeys, the cloud’s inhabitants are implausibly reluctant to hit the Delete key. Earlier versions of personalities, long-abandoned playpen reali- ties... experimental religions and randomly evolved entertainments pile up in the quantum dust at the edge of the cloud....It’s beautiful, fractally self- similar rubbish, but junk is junk. Huw gets an Egan-ish taste of the apparently endless possibilities available to the ascended and is forced to (literally) face an unsuspected side of him- self, but when it’s time for the job for which that alien diplomatic translator was designed, the big trapdoor opens under his feet, horizons are expanded, values are transvalued, and encounters occur which must remain behind the Spoiler Curtain. Despite the book’s slightly frantic, joke-a-minute comedy-club edginess, there is plenty of genuine grown-up (okay, mostly grown-up) SF ingenuity on display. But don’t feel obliged to take notes (only reviewers have to do that) or dig out that kind of serious layer I mentioned above – there’s no exam at the end, and a good joke (or 20 or 200) is its own justification. I laughed, I groaned, I googled stuff. Then I laughed again. –Russell Letson (Reviewed in Sep 2012) The Rapture of the Nerds [Second Review] If nothing else, Cory Doctorow & Charles Stross had a hell of a lot of fun writing The Rapture of the Nerds. Their manic joy capers all over the page, as each tries to one-up the other with sheer flights of imagination. That alone might be worth the price of admission, depending on your level of interest in watching two writers at the tops of their respective games expertly swing from trapeze to trapeze and back again, all the while dropping nods to writers who have come before, such as Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. In their world, the Singularity has happened. Some humans quit their Earthly bodies and joined the cloud, whose nano-particles float in the at- 22 mosphere, but most are perfectly content to muddle along planetside, just like they always have. Welchman Huw is called up on Tech Jury Service, a panel that is convened to decide what technology is safe for humans to operate without destroying all life as they know it. Long story short, Huw’s trip is more fraught that an- ticipated. He winds up infected with a virus, crashing into South Carolina’s gasoline mangrove swamps (in a scene that screams out for a whale and a potted plant), running into the First Church of Teledildonics – and then things get really weird. Which is to be expected, really. Even Huw knows that. ‘‘Future shock in- deed – try living in the fucking singularity, and having your world inverted six times before breakfast,’’ he says. All of the technological whimsy that makes Rapture fun is also what makes it feel hollow. By the last third, when things really get trippy, it’s hard to care what happens to Huw and the world he (well, she, by this point) has been drafted to save. When there seem to be no rules or consequences, the whole story lacks weight. You know Huw won’t fail because Stross and Doc- torow will always come up with a whiz-bang idea that inverts everything you thought you knew – which fits well with what the Singularity might feel like but doesn’t make for a satisfying story. –Adrienne Martini (Reviewed in Oct 2012) Return to Science Fiction list.

The Eternal Flame, Greg Egan (Night Shade) August 2012. The Eternal Flame by Greg Egan, the second volume of his Orthogonal trilogy... shows significant improvements in his characterization and soci- etal speculation as well as the vast amounts of world-building based on his work in mathematical physics. However, I am afraid that the latter appears to be preventing people from appreciating the former, which is a shame. –Karen Burnham (Mentioned in Feb 2013) Return to Science Fiction list.

Angelmaker, Nick Harkaway (Heinemann 978-0434020942, 12.99, 576pp, hc) February 2012. (Vintage 978-0-307-74362-6, $15.95, 484pp, tp) October 2012. For several years now, the various intersections of genre and mainstream fiction have grown so much more complex that by now it’s almost possible to classify the various strategies which writers have developed for dancing around the edges of genre fantastika without quite falling in. There are, most 23 visibly, the champions: those who unapologetically celebrate the pleasures of genre even though their own work only occasionally touches upon it, such as Michael Chabon, , and Junot Díaz. There are the passive-aggressives like Margaret Atwood, who sometimes explain that they weren’t writing science fiction at all, unless they were, in which case they didn’t mean to. There are the vacationers who, having established a solid reputation in one genre (like mysteries), decide to take a weekend off to have a whirl at something like SF, such as P.D. James or Walter Mosley. There are the clueless scions like Philip Roth, who seemed to think he was invent- ing a new genre with The Plot Against America, or John Updike, who just seemed to be having a fit with Toward the End of Time. There are the stealth novelists like Carolyn See or Barbara Kingsolver, who quietly introduce SF elements into their novels without anyone much noticing (most recently in Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior). And there are the Teflon divers, who plunge fully loaded into genre waters and come up with little of it sticking to them, earning plaudits from the mainstream press while gaining only notional at- tention from the genre readership. These might include Richard Powers, Ca- leb Carr, and – case in point – Nick Harkaway. A few years ago, Harkaway’s The Gone-Away World presented us with one of the most inventive post-apocalyptic narratives in recent fiction, and one of the shaggiest. It garnered nominations for BSFA and Locus Awards, but other than that seemed to have created few ripples, possibly because of its endless digressions, convoluted plot, and huge cast of sometimes overbaked characters. With Angelmaker, Harkaway has reined in some of his excesses, though he still can’t resist character names like Spork, Titwhistle, and Cum- merbund, and there are still flashes of the ADHD plotting that made The Gone-Away World as exhausting as it was exhilarating. Fortunately, Angel- maker is mostly exhilarating, with moments of sheer brilliance and other moments of sheer taffy. It’s another big, ridiculous, overeager, cantankerous novel, not too weighted down by its philosophical maguffin (in The Gone- Away World it was a bomb that drained meaning from the world; here it’s a device which causes people to see the truth, with possible catastrophic con- sequences), and set in a world which is recognizably our own, with two main timelines that actually make sense as they converge. Again, it features some likable protagonists (and one terrific one), and this time adds a supervillain whose ancestry stretches all the way back past James Bond to Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu. The contemporary plot centers on Joe Spork, the son of a notorious mob- ster who is trying to make a quiet life for himself repairing antique clocks and watches in the tradition of his grandfather. When a couple of unusual clockwork mechanisms are brought to him – one, a sort of combination 24 book and computing device from a shady former associate of his dad’s, the other a mysterious box from a 90-year-old lady named Edie Banister – he quickly finds himself drawing the attention not only of shadowy govern- ment agencies, but of a monastic band of clandestine figures who claim to be adhering to the ideals of John Ruskin, of a legendary figure called The Recorded Man, and even of a vicious serial murderer currently terrorizing . The secondary timeline, which takes us back to 1939, involves the earlier career of Edie Banister, who had been a formidable secret agent and associ- ate of Joe’s grandfather, a brilliant French woman mathematician named Frankie Fossoyeur – the mind behind the various clockwork mechanisms which eventually comprise a kind of doomsday device called the Apprehen- sion Engine (the Angelmaker of the title) – and a criminal mastermind named Shen Shen Tsien, or the Opium Khan. Invoking everything from to Ada Lovelace (whose namesake is a kind of super-steam- punk stealth train that also serves as an advanced computing laboratory), these sequences recall nothing so much as the cryptohistorical of Edward Whittemore, or even a kind of loony parody of the sort of convo- luted backstory that Harkaway’s own dad occasionally gave his characters. What really holds the novel together, past and present, is the remarkable figure of Edie, easily Harkaway’s best character. In one of its best scenes, fea- turing no tech gimmickry at all, the 90-year-old Edie simply outthinks three beefy goons sent to kill her. In fact, for all its bells and whistles, which include a plague of mechanical doomsday bees, Angelmaker’s most lasting charms are in its characters, who owe more to Wodehouse than Le Carré. As with The Gone-Away World, the novel is a bit longer than it needs to be, and Harkaway sometimes gets characters so far out on a limb that the reader has to sit still while he reels them back in (there’s a lengthy abduction-and-torture sequence that adds little but unpleasantness), but between the indomitable Edie, Joe’s all-pur- pose deus ex machina fixer Mercer Cradle, and Cradle’s spectacularly strong- willed daughter Polly (who becomes Joe’s lover and who is so organized she times her lovemaking with the vibrations of a passing train), it’s a quite agreeable, often hilarious, and altogether charming mess. –Gary K. Wolfe (Reviewed in Jan 2013) Return to Science Fiction list.

Empty Space: A Haunting, M. John Harrison (Gollancz 978-0-575-09631-8, £12.99, 304pp. tp) July 2012. (Night Shade 978-1597804615, $14.99, 280pp, tp) March 2013. 25 No other author I can think of can write with such elegant precision about indeterminacy, or with such purposefulness about purposelessness, as M. John Harrison. Throughout his new novel Empty Space: A Haunting – the third volume in his Kefahuchi Tract sequence that began with in 2002 and continued with in 2006 – we’re reminded that characters ‘‘had no idea where the first jump would take them,’’ that ‘‘she had remem- bered everything but it meant nothing,’’ that though ‘‘the entire human race soon knew how to find its way around, it still had no idea where it was.’’ And this is true not only of the characters living in the far-future city of Saudade, the rather seedy noir setting that we first encountered in Nova Swing. After all, they’ve got an excuse of sorts: a portion of the mys- terious Kefahuchi Tract, that unruly abscess in space-time in which almost anything can happen and causality is little more than a suggestion (and which we first encountered in Light) has gone to ground nearby, resulting in a flurry of tourism, crime, and smuggling, often involving inexplicable artifacts from the ‘‘zone.’’ But Harrison’s near-future characters, haunted by the dead and by each other, don’t fare much better despite living in a far more recognizable setting. Almost no one in a Harrison novel knows where they’re supposed to be, and a good many can’t even figure out where they are. And many, both present and future, are puzzled by a tantalizing disem- bodied voice announcing, ‘‘My name is Pearlant and I come from the fu- ture.’’ It’s only one of a number of classic narrative hooks that keep drawing you into the complexities of Empty Space, but it may be the most effective. While Nova Swing seemed to have little in common with Light, other than the same general timeline and the Kefahuchi Tract, Empty Space ac- tually serves as a sequel to both, and brings the trilogy to a surprisingly satisfying conclusion, knitting together the near-future timeline of Light, the large-scale space opera of that novel’s far-future settings, and the more noirish and claustrophobic mysteries of Nova Swing. The near-future nar- rative, set in a diminished suburban some years after a worldwide economic collapse, centers around three women: Anna Waterman, the widow of the serial killer-physicist Michael Kearney from Light; Marnie, her grown daughter from a second marriage; and Helen Alpert, Anna’s therapist, who had also been involved with Kearney. The Saudade narra- tive begins with a pair of mysterious deaths involving contraband deal- ers whose bodies are found floating in mid-air, gradually losing definition, after they try to load coffin-like artifacts called ‘‘mortsafes’’ aboard the haulage freighter Nova Swing. The case falls into the hands of a heavily augmented kick-ass woman police investigator known only as ‘‘the assis- tant’’ – the same assistant we met in Nova Swing, aiding the Einstein-like legendary investigator Aschemann – who remains unnamed, although she 26 tries out dozens of possible names during the course of the narrative. Part of the sheer verbal charm of Harrison’s style is his obvious glee in concoct- ing myriad, often hilarious, and allusive names, not only for the assistant (The Pantopon Rose, Lauren Bacall), but for spaceships (where he gives Iain M. Banks a good run with names like Huge Savings or Fat Mickey from ), planets (L’Avventura, Motel VI), and even orbits (Park & Ride). There are several other point-of-view characters in the Saudade chapters, from Fat Antoyne and Liv Hula of Nova Swing, to a ghostly, sometimes- material presence named R.I. Gaines to a rather sad clone ‘‘mona’’ named Irene. But in an important sense, all the characters, near- and far-future, occupy a trademark kind of Harrison space, sometimes almost defiantly re- minding us that the real cultural matrix here is our own. The characters in Saudade City may live in the 25th century, but they still drink Black Heart rum, drive Cadillacs, listen to Vicente Hernandez and Rokit Dub, and wear Aertex shirts; the assistant’s main recreation is an immersive 1950s soap opera involving a housewife named Joan; Irene at one point models herself on a Cecil Beaton photo of Marilyn Monroe. For all the grand space oper- atic inventions – an unimaginably ancient alien artifact called The Aleph (which seems, impossibly, to be asking for the assistant), planets whose ru- ins have been worn to geological nubs, an interplanetary war that breaks out with former allies called the Nastic – the single most beautiful chapter in this beautifully written novel simply describes the lonely, slightly be- fuddled Anna, who, having just confessed to her cat James that all she wants is ‘‘a night of beautiful dreams in which someone really wanted me,’’ goes for a late-night swim in a nearby river. It ends with a vision of her summer house burning with almost cartoonish non-consuming flames, and with her desperate suspicion that her dead husband Michael is somehow pres- ent. It’s a passage that serves, in Harrison’s astonishing oeuvre, almost like Joyce’s Gabriel Conroy watching the snow fall at the end of ‘‘The Dead’’ or Ursula Brangwen’s vision at the end of Lawrence’s The Rainbow. We’ve seldom seen SF that can achieve the sort of sheer lyrical grace of Harrison’s prose at its best – let alone SF that also cheerfully takes an epigraph from A.E. van Vogt, that relishes its moments of grotesque, percussive violence, and that at times is extremely funny. Readers with little patience for lan- guage probably aren’t spending a lot of time with Harrison anyway, and even admirers might not want to take this on without some familiarity with Light and Nova Swing, but Empty Space is far more substantial than the latter, and much the equal of the former. –Gary K. Wolfe (Reviewed in Oct 2012) Return to Science Fiction list. 27 Rapture, Kameron Hurley (Night Shade) November 2012. Kameron Hurley’s Rapture concludes the sequence begun by God’s War: ageing and the passage of time are very much more present here than in the earlier books. –Graham Sleight (Mentioned in Feb 2013) Return to Science Fiction list.

In the Mouth of the Whale, Paul McAuley (Gollancz 978-0575100749, £18.99, 384pp, hc) January 2012. One of the most rewarding series of the past decade, on the other hand, was Paul McAuley’s Quiet War sequence of stories and novels, which culmi- nated with last year’s The Gardens of . His new novel In the Mouth of the Whale isn’t exactly a part of that series, which dealt with a conflict between outer solar system colonies and repressive Earth governments, but it isn’t exactly unconnected either; even though one of the narrative lines concerns a character cryptically referred to as The Child. We’re told early on that The Child’s mother is named Hong-Owen, a name which sharp readers will remember from the earlier series (and which pretty quickly provides a strong clue as to who the mysterious Child really is). But In the Mouth of the Whale is set some 1,500 years after the Quiet War and moves out of the solar system entirely, to an archipelago of worldlets and habitats around a gas giant called Cthuga in orbit around Fomalhaut. I’d noted in the earlier series that McAuley seemed enamored with describing spectacular land- scapes based on the latest astronomical findings of the outer solar system, and here he seems to be as rigorous as astronomy permits in moving his action to an extrasolar planet; his Cthuga is clearly a version of the gas gi- ant Fomalhaut-b discovered by the Hubble telescope back in 2008, though the name seems to come from an elder god invented by August Derleth for Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, which supposedly resides in or near Fomalhaut (whose own name, translated from the , also seems to provide the title of the novel, although there is also a giant orbiting manufactory called the Whale which provides the setting for much of the action). McAuley is close enough to the school of hard SF to treat his worldbuilding as something of an aesthetic in its own right; even an obscure imaginary worldlet like the one he calls Ull, which barely gets a walk-on in the plot, gets its own history (‘‘A roughly spherical ball of water, meth- ane, and ammonia ices wrapped around a silicate core, marked everywhere with impact craters, and rifts and wrinkle ridges caused by the slow contrac- tion of its outer layers as it cooled,’’ etc.). He may not have NASA photos to go on here, but he clearly loves imagining how worlds are made and later 28 transformed by human action, and there are pages upon pages devoted to this sort of thing as his protagonists move from one world or habitat to the next in the context of a complex ongoing war for the resources of the mys- terious giant planet Cthuga. Those protagonists themselves can be rather dauntingly defamiliarized in the opening chapters. It seems that a posthu- man civilization called the Quick had colonized the Fomalhaut system some time ago, but were subdued and enslaved when the relatively unmodified humans, calling themselves the True, arrived later. But a third group, the Ghosts – who apparently call themselves that because they believe they are living in the wrong history – are also interested in Cthuga because they be- lieve some vast intelligence called the Mind inhabits its depths. As the story begins, the mysterious unseen Ghosts are at war with the True, who in turn use the Quick as slaves and conscripts. The narrative is mostly divided into three viewpoints: that mysterious Child, who seems to be living in a near-future Amazon basin with her physi- cian mother and the mother’s rather smarmy plantation-director suitor; the Quick slave Ori, who works her way up from jockeying robots on the surface of the giant Whale to eventually joining the war as a drone pilot; and a dis- graced True librarian named Isak, whose clan’s mission is to help restore the long-lost Library of the Homesun, a once-vast database which now survives largely in various corrupted fragments (which are described in nicely neo- medieval terms like hells, demons, and kobolds; Isak’s particular speciality, with his Quick assistant who calls himself the Horse, is ‘‘harrowing’’ these hells). Isak’s narrative, the only one in first person, gets underway when he is hired by the powerful Yathi Singleton to track down her son Yakob, a public safety officer who had disappeared after discovering a minor hell. Needless to say, none of these plot lines are as simple as they first seem, and needless to say they’re going to have to converge sooner or later. McAuley skillfully keeps the various threads in dialogue with one another – the coming of age story of the Child (the least defamiliarized of the subplots, with its recogniz- able near future Brazil), the detective story of Isak’s increasingly hazardous investigations, and – perhaps the most viscerally powerful of all the subplots – the brutality and indignity visited upon Ori and the other Quick by the True and later by the Ghosts. More than the Quiet War stories, In the Mouth of the Whale seems to il- lustrate some of the ideas and aesthetics that McAuley and others were call- ing ‘‘radical hard SF’’ more than two decades ago, with versions of humanity and posthumanity battling it out in a spectacular series of extrasolar settings that are as astronomically precise (and at times numbingly detailed) as he can make them. With its initially disorienting language, its fascination with invented planetology, and its complex of elaborate backstories, the novel 29 isn’t as immediately inviting as many of McAuley’s earlier works – I suppose that’s the radical part – but by the time we work out the operatic dramas of hidden identities, rivalries, betrayals, heroic sacrifices, misplaced loyalties, and mad plans, it’s not all that much more radical than, say, Dumas, and in the end it delivers many of the same rewards. –Gary K. Wolfe (Reviewed in Dec 2011) Return to Science Fiction list.

Fate of Worlds, Larry Niven & Edward M. Lerner (Tor 978-0-7653-3100-7, $25.99, 317pp, hc) August 2012. Cover by Stephan Martiniére. The collective voice of Larry Niven & Edward M. Lerner has become a fa- miliar one, thanks to the series of novels that began with Fleet of Worlds and continued through Juggler of Worlds, Destroyer of Worlds, and Betrayer of Worlds. This sequence has served as both prequel and sequel to Niven’s solo Ringworld series: the Fleet novels begin two hundred years before the events of Ringworld and eventually surround that book and its immediate Nivenian sequels with deep back-story and behind-the-scenes action that also encompass large chunks of the entire Known Space and even the multi-collaborative Man-Kzin Wars -offs. I had thought that the fourth volume, Betrayer, was the Fleet-sequence wrap-up (though with a few loose ends), but now we have Fate of Worlds, a fifth and (according to the jacket copy) final entry in this collaborative meta-series. Niven never does tie up every loose end, though, so we’ll see about that. And for readers who have yet to start the series, or who have read only the first volume or two, the paragraphs that follow will try not to give away too much, but if you have enjoyed the way Niven (with or without collabo- rators) has built and rebuilt and spackled and repainted and redecorated Known Space in, say, Crashlander, you really should go read the first four Fleet books now, for their expanded description of the society and character of the Puppeteers and the presentation of new alien viewpoint characters from among the aquatic Gw’oth and the ferocious Pak – as well as for the usual ingenious intrigues and space operatics. But even for those who have read the earlier books – how to review the finale of a series that, like The Cassandra Project, is built around puzzles and secrets? Much of the story depends on characters and whole species being kept in ignorance of or being deceived about important facts, and some of these secrets are withheld from the reader as well. But other secrets are only being kept from characters inside the story, and these can be dis- cussed in front of the Spoiler Curtain: the deceptions and manipulations the Puppeteers (who prefer to call themselves Citizens) have practiced on 30 other species, notably obstreperous folk like humans and kzinti; the shame- ful nature of the Puppeteers’ deception and domination of a client popu- lation of human ‘‘Colonists,’’ now free and in charge of their own mobile planet, New Terra; or the fact that the Puppeteer government is ruled not by the Hindmost and his cabinet but by an alien Gw’oth collective intelligence acting through a computer-generated Puppeteer persona, a reversal of the situation the Citizens have imposed on other species. This volume’s plotline jumps back and forth in time, setting up its rather spread-out present action and explaining even more pieces of back-story. Much of the activity arises from the aftermath of the Fringe War, a low- grade multispecies conflict for control of the Ringworld and its technolo- gies. That conflict evaporated when the Ringworld vanished at the end of Betrayer of Worlds, which means the freed-up armadas can turn their at- tention to the Puppeteers’ Fleet and get some payback for past offenses. On New Terra, professionally and personally paranoid security operative Sig- mund Ausfaller is in retirement and disfavor with an isolationist regime that would just as soon not have any contact with or knowledge of the main body of humankind. On Hearth, the current Hindmost is caught between the maneuverings of his sociopathic rival, Achilles, and the orders of his secret alien masters, while Achilles promotes enhancements to the powers of Proteus, the Gw’oth’s unique , as part of his plan to regain leadership. Even readers who have kept up with the series will need a program to fol- low the players – and one is thoughtfully supplied at the front of the book, along with brief timeline and a graphic mapping the major areas of action. It’s a story full of flashbacks, explanations, connections and reconnections, and general cleaning-up on the way to hash-settling and happy endings, but it also has some very nice features all its own, particularly the sections dedicated to the Gw’oth multiplex mind and the evolution and ambitions of Proteus. By the last page, large portions of the story have literally flown off in all directions, and that situation leaves open some interesting possibilities. So, as I said, we’ll see. –Russell Letson (Reviewed in Dec 2012) Return to Science Fiction list.

The Fractal Prince, Hannu Rajaniemi (Tor 978-0765329509, $25.99, 320pp, hc) November 2012. A couple of years ago Hannu Rajaniemi made one of the most spectacu- lar first-novel debuts in recent memory with , which employed a powerfully seductive – if not entirely new – narrative strategy 31 of linking a wildly inventive and disorienting post-singularity future with a comparatively straightforward adventure plot, partly derived from the de- cidedly more linear mysteries of Maurice Leblanc. It was a clever strategy: for all the high-tech estrangement and tantalizing neologisms about spim- escapes and gogols, we eventually took some comfort in settling into a tale that, in the end, was about a boy detective versus a master thief. It placed in the Locus and Campbell awards and should have done better, but was pos- sibly a victim of having been published in different years in the US and the UK. But of course, that wasn’t quite the end of the tale, and it wasn’t just about the detective pursuing the thief. There was a lot more to Rajaniemi’s future than The Quantum Thief really needed or could sustain, and now with The Fractal Prince – the second novel in a projected trilogy – we begin to learn that a great deal more is at stake. Middle novels in series are always problematic; we’re learning whether the series is going to be one large con- tinuous novelistic arc, a series of more or less discrete episodes strung like beads along a loosely-unified tale, separate novels arranged along a com- mon time frame, or even independent novels united by little more than themes or common characters. The Fractal Prince seems to fall somewhere between the first and second of these, following up on some trails laid out in The Quantum Thief while introducing a new set of characters and a much stronger political theme. It also returns to the technique of linking Rajaniemi’s enthusiasm for his invented terminology – hardly any sentence consists only of words you already know – with a more familiar literary model. In this case that model seems to be the Thousand and One Nights, which hardly provides the same sort of simple narrative lifeline as a Lupin- style mystery. But storytelling is an important aspect of what Rajaniemi is up to here; he offers all sorts of tales within tales, often with their own titles, and he reminds us more than once that we are, or become, the stories we tell about ourselves. The idea of combining a sort of postmodern take on an ancient story cycle with Rajaniemi’s radically post-Strossian future is both ambitious on his part and challenging for the reader, and the results are a little mixed. The Fractal Prince follows two story lines. In one, the thief Jean le Flam- beur – or some iteration of him – is still aboard the Perhonen, the spaceship with the rather sardonic AI owned by the formidable Mieli, who rescued him from prison in the first novel. They are on their way to Earth on a mis- sion from Mieli’s unnamed employer, but first Jean must figure out how to open a trick box (a sort Yosegi puzzle by way of Schrödinger) that may provide clues for their quest. In the other, we are introduced to Tawaddud, a rebellious young woman in the city of Sirr, whose family assigns her, for 32 purely political reasons, the unwelcome task of serving as companion to a wealthy visiting gogol merchant named Abu Nuwas (gogols are essentially uploaded minds used as slaves). Sirr needs his vote on accords to be worked out with the ruling collective the Sorbornost, which had done some serious damage years earlier during an event called the Cry of Wrath. Of course nei- ther Jean’s nor Tawaddud’s missions are quite what they expect them to be, nor are many characters necessarily who they seem. Tawaddud finds herself being asked to investigate the mysterious deaths of three council members – about the only nod here to the mystery plot of the first novel – and as various instabilities mount up to suggest a possible revolution against the Sobornost, she has to deal with the fearsome Sumanguru, a kind of mar- shal sent from the Sobornost to clean up the town. Jean, for his part, has a hard time remaining roguish as he undergoes a series of trials – the ship at- tacked by lethal swarms of diamond-like weapons, the need to find a ‘‘zoku router’’ which will help them survive the next attack by ‘‘hunters,’’ even getting caught and tied up like a pulp hero by a virtual tiger after he makes his way to an environment called the Realm. He’s like Indiana Jones, if Jones were some sort of unholy brainchild concocted by Roger Penrose and Erwin Schrödinger after an evening of drinking. Most of this does get braided together as the stories converge in ingenious ways (though there are a few bait hooks left out for volume three) and with impressively large stakes, but it’s that very ingenuity that creates a kind of narrative dissonance that was largely absent in all but the opening chap- ters of The Quantum Thief. Any writer with a capacity for invention as fecund as Rajaniemi’s is at risk for a certain degree of self-indulgence, and there is a sense that Rajaniemi simply has more stories to tell than he can pack comfortably in the framework of what is largely, at base, a space opera crossed with a political melodrama. We often begin to get our bearings in one situation only to be whiplashed off to another story altogether. Some of these tales are spectacularly well done as adventure set pieces, such as the attack by those diamond-needles, while others are genuinely moving, such as when Tawaddud shows Abu the poverty-stricken parts of Sirr and her own vocation as a healer of ‘‘wildcode’’ infections, or when we learn the full backstory of Mieli and her lost lover Sydän. Rajaniemi can and does write beautifully about characters trapped in their own stories, but there are mo- ments when we wish he would give them – and us – a bit more breathing space. –Gary K. Wolfe (Reviewed in Nov 2012) Return to Science Fiction list.

33 Blue Remembered Earth, Alastair Reynolds (Gollancz 978-0575088276, £18.99, 752pp, hc) January 2012. (Ace 978-0441020713, $26.95, 512pp, hc) June 2012. Is it time to be talking about the neo-New Space Opera, or possibly the post-neo-New Space Opera, or even the Phase Space Space Opera (in the sense of all possible states of a system being represented at once)? It’s been more than five years since Hartwell and Cramer’s massive and argumenta- tive Space Opera Renaissance anthology, and more than eight since Locus’s much-discussed ‘‘New Space Opera’’ special issue, and even then people were dating the movement to as far back as M. John Harrison’s 1975 The Centauri Device or Iain M. Banks’s 1987 Consider Phlebas. So the original movement, depending on who you listen to, might be anywhere from two to four decades old, but I guess the reason we can keep calling it ‘‘new’’ is that it seems to keep mutating like a virus in a medical potboiler, infecting even remote areas like ’s weighty , which somehow seg- ues from an austere reconsideration of the history of Western philosophy into slam-bang space battle acrobatics, or Hannu Rajaniemi’s post-Dickian, post-Eganian The Quantum­ Thief, which seamlessly fits a wisecracking spaceship and pyrotechnic space battle into its information-drenched fu- ture. Both Alastair Reynolds’s Blue Remembered Earth and Paul McAuley’s In the Mouth of the Whale provide continuing evidence, in quite different ways, that the old New Space Opera is alive and well. One of the characteristics of what I’m going to continue calling the phase space opera, until you stop me, is that it doesn’t necessarily ironize the adventure templates of the classic space adventure in New Space Opera mode, but may unapologetically celebrate them. At least one key scene in Reynolds’s Blue Remembered Earth virtually cries out for a pulp Wesso illustration, with a caption something like ‘‘Trapped on a runaway space- ship, traveling faster than any human being ever had!’’ Before we even get to that, we’ve encountered buried secrets on a remote part of the moon, ter- rifying encounters with monster machines on Mars, and daredevil efforts to sneak aboard an abandoned space station that may harbor still more secrets. And yet Reynolds casts all this in the context of elements that are decidedly more New Space Opera-ish, with morally ambiguous heroes and villains, political and economic struggles, and a post-Westernized version of the 22nd century, which seems oddly optimistic in comparison with his other grim futures. By 2160 or so, the world has survived a series of catastrophes and upheav- als, including earthquakes and floods which have redrawn entire coastlines (and presumably lend the series its title, Poseidon’s Children). Although Reynolds mostly refrains from infodumps about global warming, he offers 34 a number of clever details – such as characters drinking an Icelandic merlot – that tell us all we need to know about Earth’s altered climate. Africa has become a center of technological development, and one of the most power- ful families in Africa is the Akinya clan, whose matriarch Eunice, a legend- ary space explorer and entrepreneur, has just died as the novel opens. Two of her grandchildren, Sunny and Geoffrey, are renegades from the family business, Sunny eking out a living as an artist on the moon, and Geoffrey consumed by his research with a tribe of elephants in the Amboseli Basin, with whom he is striving to develop a neural link that will enable him to see through their consciousness. After Eunice’s death, two rather officious cousins named Hector and Lucas, now managers of the family business, send Geoffrey to the moon to discover the contents of a safe-deposit box Eunice had left there. This not only serves to reunite Geoffrey and Sunny, who had been close companions as children, but leads to the discovery of a sequence of enigmatic clues left behind by Eunice, clearly designed as a kind of test to prevent her great secret from falling into the wrong hands. Aided by the old family retainer Memphis, Sunny’s rather pallid boyfriend Jitendra, Geoffrey’s more colorful adventurer ex-girlfriend Jumai, and a virtual ‘‘construct’’ of Eunice herself, which Sunny has cobbled together from existing documents and records (but which of course can’t reveal any secrets that weren’t available in those sources), they set off on a quest to discover Eunice’s secret, leading them to desolate corners of the moon, to , to a wild region of Mars given over to self-evolving machines, and even to a suboceanic city back on Earth. Along the way, they form an uneasy alliance with the cult-like Panspermian Initiative, which hopes to colonize even extrasolar planets and whose charismatic founder, a former friend of Eunice, seems to have turned herself into a whale (vaguely remi- niscent of ’s Guild Navigators). Despite a plot hook that could as easily power a YA franchise (a dying matriarch leaves behind a series of mysterious clues, each of which leads toward more portentous implications), Reynolds both develops a richly de- tailed portrait of a resurgent, postapocalyptic Earth society and economy, and leaves himself plenty of room to expand his narrative space exponen- tially (mostly through the discovery, thanks to an enormous, solar system- wide telescope, of a giant artifact on an extrasolar planet that is clearly the work of an intelligent civilization). And despite the moral complexities he raises, both with his characters and with such movements as the Pan- spermians (are we supposed to view them as crackpots or visionaries?), it may be that odd sense of optimism, together with a pair of villains who are more annoying than genuinely threatening and a pair of likeable, reluctant protagonists called upon for heroic acts, that echo some of the values and 35 rewards of the old, classic space opera form. By the end, when the plot accelerates from its initial methodical pace of investigation into flat-out, cliffhanging adventure, we realize that we’ve read a fairly long novel that seems like a pretty short one (I read this on a Kindle, and was surprised to learn the actual page count later). If Reynolds can keep this up – and there’s enough planted here for future volumes to already suggest that he can – he might have one of the most enjoyable series of the still-young decade.

–Gary K. Wolfe (Reviewed in Dec 2011) Blue Remembered Earth [Second Review] If I were doing an Altmanesque pitch for a film version of Alastair Reyn- olds’ Blue Remembered Earth to a studio head unhip to SF, I might say, ‘‘It’s like Dallas in space – but get this: with a mostly black cast!’’ That, however, would elevate the family-saga/soap-opera aspect – and even the ascendance- of-Africa background – of this complex and thoughtful novel far above its function as an enabling device – a setup that gives its protagonists an excuse to go chasing across the settled mid-22nd-century solar system on a kind of treasure (or maybe scavenger) hunt entangled with family secrets. Those secrets could have ripples far beyond the family in question, since the Akinya clan has been a significant force in the exploration and exploi- tation of the solar system for three generations and runs a considerable commercial empire, extending from the home compound on the African plains out to the Kuiper belt. When word comes that founder and matriarch Eunice Akinya has finally died up on the private orbital habitat where she has lived in isolation for decades, her grandson Geoffrey is assigned a chore by his captain-of-industry cousins Hector and Lucas: to check out Eunice’s safe-deposit box in a bank on the Moon so they can be sure that the con- tents will not somehow embarrass or compromise the business or sully the Akinya name by revealing Eunice’s involvement in some unsavory adventure or deal. Geoffrey is a family rebel (as is his sister Sunday), completely unin- terested in business or off-planet travel – he would rather be out in the bush with the elephant herd whose behavior and mentality are the subjects of his research. But his cousins use their purse-string control to arm-twist him into running their errand, and what he finds on the Moon is not an answer but a riddle whose answer is a clue to another riddle, which leads to another, and so on, until we have followed the clues across much of the inhabited solar system. Fortunately, Geoffrey does not have to do all this alone. Sister Sunday has removed herself to the Moon’s Descrutinised Zone, where she can pursue an artistic career far from the boring demands of family affairs and free from 36 the omnipresent surveillance and behavior-monitoring that is the basis for civilized life everywhere else. When Geoffrey shows Sunday what was in the safe-deposit box, they determine to tease out the elements of Eunice’s puzzle without any interference from the cousins. And they have a unique resource for the project: a ‘‘construct’’ of Eunice that Sunday has built, a collection of data and programs designed to simulate the original’s behaviors and at- titudes. This pseudo-Eunice AI personality has no knowledge of the puzzles, but she can offer background information – as well as an annoyingly accu- rate reproduction of her original’s prickly social behavior – and she becomes one of the book’s most appealing characters. Geoffrey and Sunday’s investigations, separately and together, reconstruct Eunice’s career (which also means a big piece of the exploration of the solar system) while showing off some of the technological and social wonders of 22nd-century civilization: the Moon’s quasi-anarchic Descruti- nised Zone, where social freedom is so valued that even a little criminality is considered a price worth paying – or a trait worth preserving; the undersea realm of Tiamaatt, with its variously adapted merfolk; the Martian Evolvar- ium, where robotic machines carry on a Hobbesian struggle for survival so that humans can skim off the useful innovations; and everywhere the Pan- spermian project to spread organic life across the galaxy. This is part of what gives the book an almost Victorian-novel feel: the leisurely and near-encyclopedic way the treasure-hunt adventure reveals not only this future’s sprawling physical and social environment but the philo- sophical issues faced by it. The civilized worlds are largely peaceful thanks to the Mandatory Enhancements (‘‘when the neuropractors have knifed vil- lainy out of our heads’’) and the nearly-omnipresent Mechanism of the Sur- veilled World, a network that uses ‘‘mass observation, ubiquitous tagging, and targeted neural intervention’’ to suppress violence and crime. As sinister as this panopticon state might sound, it is part of the response to the chaotic, destructive century that just preceded Eunice’s early life: ‘‘the turmoil of cli- mate change, the Resource and Relocation Wars, the metaphorical and lit- eral floods and storms’’ of the latter half of our own century. But prosperity, peace, and long life are not enough for some, and in addition to the support- ers of the Panspermian project, there are others who hunt for posthuman possibilities, and we see examples of what the most adventurous and least sessile might get up to in order to stave off the boredom of very long lives. Much of Reynolds’ other work – the Revelation Space sequence, House of Suns – offers future environments with titanic physical and temporal scales and casts of characters whose humanity can be far from ours. For all of the nifty technology and exotic extensions of human abilities it depicts, though, Blue Remembered Earth is set on our side of that kind of discontinuity: the 37 species has come through a crisis that has forced it to solve a set of terrible problems, but the full implications of the instrumentalities that provided the solutions have yet to work themselves out. It is, the Eunice construct explains, ‘‘a modal shift to something other. Complexity squared, or cubed. Where will we be in a thousand years, or six thousand?’’ It’s an interesting juncture at which to set a story, perhaps a kind of non-mystical Childhood’s End point, or a few close-up moments in what could be a Stapledonian hyper-wide-screen whole-species-as-characters epic. I make those compari- sons deliberately – Reynolds is working some of the same territory and is earning a spot on the shelves next to those masters. –Russell Letson (Reviewed in Sep 2012) Return to Science Fiction list.

Jack Glass, Adam Roberts (Gollancz 978-0-575-12762-3, £14.99 374pp, hc) July 2012. At its best, Adam Roberts’s fiction combines a scholar’s deep understand- ing of SF with a fan’s enthusiasm and a sense of playfulness that arises from the interaction between the two. He’s not by any means the first to do this sort of thing; Robert B. Parker parlayed his critical insights on Hammett, Chandler, and Ross MacDonald into the Spenser novels, and ’s history of science fiction revealed a good deal about how his fiction very consciously manipulated some of the familiar tropes of the field. Roberts has also written a mostly solid history of science fiction, so we might take the subtitle of Jack Glass: A Golden Age Story as a pointed allusion to a particular period in SF history, and in fact it is – though his definition of the Golden Age in the Palgrave History of Science Fiction covers the period 1940-1960, thus cleverly sidestepping recent debates about whether the true Golden Age was the ’40s or the ’50s. In fact, despite its space opera trap- pings, the novel has much more of the flavor of the ’50s, and in particular of Alfred Bester. But ‘‘Golden Age’’ is meant also to evoke the heyday of classic murder mysteries, and we’re given to understand up front that it consists of three classic crime scenarios – the prison escape, the country-house murder, and the locked-room mystery – all linked together by criminal and murderer Jack Glass. Near the beginning of Part II, Roberts offers a sly allusion to sources – and to a couple of his SF contemporaries – when his teenage girl detective mentions not only Poe, but ‘‘The woman from the Christ family, whatever, and Dickson-Carr, and Queen Ellery, and Jay Creek, and Rajah Nimmi’’. In the opening section, which is nearly a stand-alone compared to the more closely linked second and third sections, we meet ‘‘Jac’’ as one of 38 a group of seven prisoners serving a brutal 11-year sentence in a hollowed- out asteroid, which they must excavate not only to find needed water but to expand living spaces, thus turning it into a marketable commodity for the corporation that has contracted to manage their incarceration. It’s an open- ing that clearly evokes The Stars My Destination, though Jac is far more educated and ingenious than Gully Foyle, and Roberts reaches even further back toward Bester’s own source in a few particulars: the asteroid serves neatly as both Dumas’s Chateau d’If (from The Count of Monte Cristo) and Bester’s Gouffre Martel, and Jac’s gruesome means of escape recalls that of Edmund Dantes hiding in a body bag. The visceral brutality of this opening section hardly suggests the antic flavor of the rest of the novel, and with its Shawshankian portrayal of Jac as a soft-spoken prisoner inexplicably form- ing and polishing a piece of glass – you just know he’s got a plan – it’s also the most predictable. The novel really takes form and becomes a good deal more fun in the second section, when we are introduced to the privileged sisters Diana and Eva Argent and Diana’s loyal servant Iago, in a solar system dominated by Florentine-like power families, with most of the population, the ‘‘sumpol- loi,’’ living in slum-like ‘‘shanty bubbles’’ (Roberts has an unfortunate affin- ity for palate-freezing neologisms like ‘‘Worldtual’’ and ‘‘plasmaser’’). Eva is a scholar working on her seventh doctorate studying ‘‘champagne su- pernovae’’ (a real astronomical phenomenon), while Diana plays at being a brilliant solver of murder mysteries, one of which lands in her lap when a servant is murdered under inexplicable circumstances. Diana is ingratiating enough as a girl detective, though her dialogue is a grating combination of ’70s Valley Girl and Nancy Drew, even after her character develops some real gravitas as her social consciousness gets raised. (The so-far unnamed narra- tor also speaks like this in these sections.) We eventually learn that the chief maguffin of the novel is a kind of FTL device, which may or may not exist and may or may not be in the possession of Jack Glass (another echo of Gully Foyle, with his super-explosive PyrE), and we meet some impressively creepy villains, chief among whom is the chilling Ms Joad, who becomes Jack’s nemesis. By now the novel has moved into full pursuit-and-capture space opera mode, and it’s a hoot. Roberts seems clearly more comfortable ringing tricksterish changes on Golden Age SF tropes than on classic murder mysteries (the solution to the murder in the middle section is somewhat lame, though the final murder ingeniously takes advantage of a hard-SF conceit), and Jack himself never fully comes into focus in his transformation from vengeful ex-con to self-appointed sav- ior of humanity to a final wimp-out, but by now we’re having so much fun that it hardly matters. Like Jack himself, Jack Glass finally saves itself by 39 reining in its more ponderous ambitions, and thus gives us an almost nos- talgic glimpse of the sort of SF we once read just for fun. –Gary K. Wolfe (Reviewed in Dec 2012) Return to Science Fiction list.

2312, Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit 978-0316098120, $25.99, 576pp, hc) May 2012. For much of its history, SF has liked to portray itself (in caps) as The Lit- erature of Ideas (sometimes I’ve heard claims that it’s the only literature of ideas, but that’s just too silly to pursue). But, through time and convention, it doesn’t take long for these ideas to get concretized into specific concepts, and not much longer for these concepts to get reduced to effects. For ex- ample, space travel has been a central idea of SF from almost the beginning, but pretty soon that got transformed into the concept of the spaceship, in all its myriad varieties, and then that got reduced to pulp illustrations of flam- ing spaceliners or looming images of improbably large CGI battle cruisers. Or think of the idea of a machine civilization, which Gregory Benford and others have meditated on intelligently at length, and pretty soon you’ve got Transformers stomping down Avenue. Somewhere there’s an idea beneath all that, but it begins to seem picky to even ask about it. Kim Stanley Robinson, though, wants you to love ideas. He wants to give you ideas for breakfast, and talk about them until dinner. He wants to make you engage with the fundamental imaginative choreography of SF in ways that you may not have since you began reading it. He’s not at all averse to the cool effects – his ambitious new novel 2312 is full of them, from windsurf- ing the rings of to listening to Beethoven on Mercury – but he never lets you stray too far from the fiercely intellectual superstructure of his tale, which flings about provocative notions on everything from artificial intel- ligence to gender assignments to terraforming, often exploring these in Dos Passos-like multimedia interchapters that have nothing to do with advanc- ing the plot and may frustrate some readers who’ve never heard of or read Robinson’s earlier (which doesn’t quite use the Dos Passos collage format, but pauses plenty of times for lengthy consideration of its underlying political, scientific, and ethical ideas). It’s this intellectual passion which makes Robinson, despite his recent forays into Washington science policy or the historical Galileo, one of our purest SF writers, as well as one of the most talented. 2312 isn’t a direct sequel to the Mars trilogy, even though it’s set about a century after that trilogy ends and carries over many of its concepts, such as the (yes, Robinson used the term before Stross), the notion 40 of hollowed-out asteroids as habitats or spaceships, and, most significantly, of the establishment of the moving rail-city on Mercury. That, in fact, is one of the central settings of 2312, which opens with the death of Alex, the ‘‘Lion of Mercury,’’ a near-legendary figure in solar system colo- nization. Robinson’s protagonist, Swan Er Hong, is Alex’s granddaughter, a risk-taking landscape and performance artist who has made a respectable living as a designer of terraria – those hollowed-out asteroids. Alex has left behind three envelopes, one for Swan, one for her partner, and one which she asked Swan to personally deliver to a scientist and collaborator named Wang, all the way out on Io. That mysterious third envelope, along with an apparent meteor strike that nearly destroys Terminator (and begins to look more and more like an attack) serves as the rather slight plot-fulcrum for more than the first two-thirds of the novel, and it initiates the ‘‘Grand Tour’’ narrative that takes Swan throughout Robinson’s marvelously imagined in- habited solar system – from Mercury to Io to Saturn and to a largely Chinese Venus in the midst of terraforming, to a frazzled Earth (trying to recover from the environmental catastrophes that we saw the beginning of in Robinson’s Washington trilogy), even to the Vulcanoids, asteroids inside the orbit of Mercury, and even they are inhabited. Plenitude rules, and even though there’s some discussion of the ethics of this system-wide eminent domain, the novel revels in the traditional Big SF Idea that the solar system is ours for the taking. 2312 pays homage to SF in other ways as well; there are allusions to , the whorl, sundivers, The Zanzibar Cat, brightside crossings (presumably from Alan E. Nourse’s classic story), and, in the most clever in-joke for SF readers, a note that ‘‘cultures deemphasizing gender are sometimes referred to as ursuline cultures, origin of term unknown, perhaps referring to the dif- ficulty there can be in determining the gender of bears.’’ But Robinson has some fun with other sorts of allusions as well – Swan’s mercurial personality (after all, she’s from Mercury) is contrasted with that of her eventual lover Wahram, whose dour, saturnine attitude reflects his origins in the Saturn system, and of a treacherous character on Venus, Lakshmi, who is ‘‘said to be hermaphroditic, and went through lovers like a black widow.’’ This question of malleable, self-assigned genders is a major continuing theme in the novel – Swan herself has fathered one child and given birth to another – and at one point we’re given a whole catalog of possible gender, crèche, and marriage variations, although Swan is consistently referred to as ‘‘she’’ and Wahram as ‘‘he’’, and that’s essentially the way their budding romance plays out. But both Swan and Wahram are engaging, conflicted, and complex char- acters, and the little inspector Jean Genette, sent from an outer solar system alliance to investigate Alex’s death and later the Terminator catastrophe, is 41 only slightly less so. (The secondary character Kiran, who as a favor for res- cuing Swan is given an opportunity to work on Venus, seems a bit less com- pelling to me, as does his espionage subplot.) For all its inventive spectacle (space-traveling terraria with special-interest themes like absolute darkness, or sex, or the return of animals to earth in giant floating bubbles after they’d been rescued from extinction in the terraria), the appeal of the novel as a novel rests with these characters, and with Robinson’s rather bold experi- ments in form. In place of Dos Passos’s potted mini-biographies and news- clips, he offers interchapters that are sometimes just lists, sometimes frag- mentary extracts from unnamed reference sources, sometimes mini-essays, sometimes near stream-of- consciousness ‘‘quantum walks.’’ Robinson has long been a defender of the infodump (and has objected to that demeaning, writing-workshop term), but here he nearly raises it to an art form. And, in the end, he succeeds. 2312 is as flat-out a celebration of the possi- bilities of SF as I’ve seen in years, not only in terms of classic space adventure (there are grim setpieces in the tunnels of Mercury and in open space, after the on a doomed spaceship need to abandon it only in spacesuits, waiting for rescue), but in terms of gender evolution, quantum comput- ing and artificial intelligence (Swan’s portable quantum computer Pauline is nearly as engaging as the human protagonists, and her fellow ‘‘qubes’’ play a significant role as the final chapters generate real suspense), and ecological catastrophe (Earth is so ruined that it ironically becomes the only planet not suitable for terraforming). Robinson takes on so much information here, and so many techniques, that the novel sometimes seems on the verge of flying apart from its own imaginative momentum, but it’s something of a wonder to watch Robinson pull in all the kites in the end. Readers who want only the clean narrative arc of the planet-saving space opera that anchors the narrative might find a good two-thirds of the novel a distraction, but for the rest of us it’s a catalog of wonders. –Gary K. Wolfe (Reviewed in May 2012) Return to Science Fiction list.

Turing & Burroughs, Rudy Rucker (Transreal 978-0-9858272-3-6, $16.00, 248pp, tp) September 2012. Cover by Rudy Rucker. [Order from Transreal Books; .] Turing & Burroughs, Rudy Rucker’s ‘‘Beatnik SF Novel,’’ deftly com- bines historic characters and wild flights of imagination, in a spin-off of our world’s history, 1954-55. Though I hadn’t quite reached grade school back then, I recognize (and dig!) its portrayal of mid-century America as a far from monolithic nation that extends beyond the suburbs where Boom- 42 ers grew, to the hipster realm of Beats and the avant-garde, to the avid ob- sessions of young drivers besotted with their two-tone cars, gritty roadside ‘‘trailer trash’’ just managing to get by – all of it further weirded out by ele- ments from period Sci-Fi, and the paranoid schemes of governments gear- ing up for the Cold War via spycraft and the latest things in weaponry. That’s governments, plural. The book opens in Manchester, England, as scientist Alan Turing narrowly escapes assassination by minions of his old employ- ers, now that he’s no longer ‘‘the brains of the British cryptography team at Bletchley Park, cracking the Nazi Enigma code and shortening the war by several years – little thanks that he’d ever gotten for that.’’ Embittered, pre- occupied with his own strange new biological experiments, then forced into hiding, Turing finds temporary refuge in Tangiers, Algeria. Here the plot really thickens. Beat writer William (Bill) Burroughs is avoiding a genuine US murder rap via self-exile to Tangiers. Though he claimed the shooting death of his wife was just a tragic mistake, Burroughs already hated the closeted life of America’s gay males and wanted out before he had to flee. Through some chapters in the form of letters sent to friends Stateside, we see a mind quite different from chatty, very British Turing, though both men are homosexu- als (and way outside the norm in other ways). Bill tells fellow ‘‘queer’’ and Beatnik poet Alan Ginsberg, ‘‘I’ve settled back into Tangier, they got every- thing I want.... The local worthies presented me with a key to the city – a nicely broken-in kief pipe stamped with arabesques.’’ Life seems good, in a haze of hash. But when Turing shows up under an assumed identity, and becomes a new lover equally hot on sex and mad sci- ence, things really get weird. His new advance in biomorphism still needs some tinkering – the first facial disguise, using cells from the man who died in his stead back in Britain, starts to rot in near-tropical heat. But once he gets the hang of things, this bold experimenter flings himself into the shape- shifting, limited telepathy and apparently vast potential for further human advancement of the process that he calls skugging (after one mode of trans- formation: man into giant slug). Willy-nilly, Burroughs gets skugged as well – hard to avoid around the man who dreamed it up and first underwent the change. Although the lovers part for a time, Burroughs staying put while Turing hares off to America in pursuit of his own wild plans, both must contend with pesky government agents drawn by rumors and some unexpected side- effects of skugging. Forced back into flight from agents greedy for his knowl- edge, Alan travels our country’s byways with an AWOL sailor. Along the way, he learns about its many idioms and cultures – including sci-fi, as everyone from pulp writers and directors to more serious speculators and gurus en- 43 visioned it at the midpoint of the 20th century. For most of this journey, he regards his discovery as the best way for humans to evolve. Skugging rules! Or does it? Turing & Burroughs can be enjoyed as a mad romp, and celebration of gay sex, that brings together and transforms two characters from history in outrageous ways. Yet these men helped shape our world even without the fictional embellishments. Both were linked to ideas and hardware that would eventually spawn the Web, as well as new developments in science fiction. (Bill’s family made the calculating machine that went by their name, and one of his own most cherished notions involved something he called the Interzone.) And in the context of the book, skugging raises questions of its own, drawing so much interest from the military that its inventor starts to question his own enthusiasm. In less than 250 pages – room enough for a host of voices – Rudy Rucker has produced an SFnal tour de force. –Faren Miller (Reviewed in Jan 2013) Return to Science Fiction list.

Redshirts, John Scalzi (Tor 978-0-7653-1699-8 $24.99, 304pp, hc) June 2012. Redshirts starts out as a joke. It’s a novel based around a flimsy prem- ise: what if the ‘‘redshirts’’ on a space ship became aware of their status as expendables? At best, once you start noodling around with it, the result wouldn’t stand up to much scrutiny, because there is only so far you can push the idea without it falling apart. Once the redshirts figure out their col- lective fates, there’s not a whole lot that they can do about it, right? That’s where John Scalzi starts. Redshirts focuses on Ensign Andrew Dahl, a xenobiologist about to be stationed on the Universal Union’s flagship In- trepid. Dahl and the other newbies he hooks up with quickly figure out that being on an away team is an express pass to the morgue. Plans are hatched in order to right this wrong. Jenkins, a former redshirt turned recluse (who re- sembles Real Genius’s Lazlo Hollyfeld), offers tidbits of insight. A trip to the past is arranged. Scalzian humor (including a bowel-tastic bit about carnitas that serves to keep one character out of a scene) is invoked. End of story. But that’s not where Scalzi finishes. Redshirts gets all metafictional, too, but subtly, while it ponders the meaning of existence. These moments only come through in split seconds between the madcap action. Like this ex- change which makes you realize that there is more going on here than you’d thought: ‘‘Of course, none of it even begins to make sense if you think about it,’’ Hester said. 44 ‘‘It never has,’’ Dahl said. The characters talk about the Narrative that drives their fates; it becomes easy to read this as a commentary about religious-based narratives that may drive reader’s fates as well. Then there are the codas, which are three short stories at the end of the main narrative that play with our perception of how stories and creators intersect, especially once you remember that what you are reading is also a story created by a writer. Without these hints at larger ideas, Redshirts would be a pleasant diver- sion. With them, it becomes something more interesting to dive into and engage with. –Adrienne Martini (Reviewed in Jun 2012) Return to Science Fiction list.

Ashes of Candesce, Karl Schroeder (Tor, 978-0-7653-2492-4, $27.99, 381pp, hc). February 2012. Cover by Stephan Martiniere. Karl Schroeder can’t seem to stay away from Virga, the splendid Big Smart Object setting that started off as an excuse to write about flying zero-gee pirates, floating wooden cities, and revenge. But he also managed to pursue several of his more abstract interests, viz., the nature of nature, the nature of technologies, the technologies of nature, the varieties of post- human experience, and the possibility of rational social organization. It’s as though every Nifty Idea generated a plot-twist, which spun off an even Niftier Idea, which opened even more story options, which invited further elaboration – well, you get the idea. Or the Ideas. Ashes of Candesce follows Sun of Suns, Queen of Candesce, Pirate Sun, and The Sunless Countries as the fifth and closing (says the author, though I’m taking no bets) volume of adventures set in and around Virga, a 5,000-mile-diameter balloon of air, water, ice, artificial suns, floating cit- ies, and exotic critters, located somewhere out around Vega in the far, far future. I should warn those who are not caught up with the series that this review includes possible unavoidable spoilers about the nature of Virga and its neighborhood: the earlier books gradually revealed that outside Virga’s skin, something called Artificial Nature is the dominant force in the in- habited galaxy, and that AN wants to absorb Virga. That means getting control of Virga’s central sun, Candesce, which generates a field that sup- presses the technologies that sustain AN and other advanced post-human systems. Nor is Virga’s bubble-habitat environment unique – it is coupled to a neighboring bubble, Aethyr, where some of the series’ characters found themselves stranded at the end of The Sunless Countries. That’s where the main action picks up, with former (one might say es- 45 caped) university historian Leal Maspeth and some fellow survivors trudg- ing across the frozen inner skin of Aethyr, looking for a way out while dodging icefalls and the unwanted ‘‘assistance’’ of a creature that looks like a dead friend but probably isn’t, at least not entirely. Leal and her com- panions take shelter with a group from outside Aethyr and Virga, refu- gees from the attentions of Artificial Nature who call themselves the Re- naissance. This group is camped out in Brink, an otherwise uninhabited ‘‘metropoloid,’’ while working on some mysterious project that requires the various technologies that Candesce suppresses but that operate in Aethyr. The project is mysterious because we see it mostly through the eyes of Kier Chen, who initially presents as a child but, as is gradually revealed, has a stranger status and condition. Kier wants to escape from his nannies and is secretly building – or, to be precise, growing – the devices needed to do so. But why he wants to run away is something that unfolds only later, inside Virga. Meanwhile, Antea Argyre, dismissed from the secretive and half-myth- ical Virga Home Guard, is looking for Leal and, by extension, for answers to various questions that had led Leal off into the dark and cold places at Virga’s skin. Elsewhere, governments and diplomats gather and discuss the recent upheavals, fleets assemble and jet off to undisclosed destina- tions, and the movers and shakers from earlier books – admirable Admi- ral Chaison Fanning, his wily and wildly adventurous wife Venera, and -turned-sun-lighter Hayden Griffin – are right in the middle of it all, along with some new and dangerous operators. Artificial Nature has sent in agents and gained allies, and some Virgans are engaging in coun- ter-maneuvers aimed at advancing their own ambitions, so there’s enough double-dealing to make it a challenge to keep track of all the players even with a program. Because schemes and puzzles have been staples of these books from the start, one expects to encounter hidden agendas, mixed motives, secret his- tories, confused or conflicting loyalties, concealed plans, and unmaskings. But alongside the engagingly busy cut-and-thrust of the intrigue plot runs an equally intriguing component of the book – the play of ideas and science- fictional inventions that make this more than a cunningly engineered thrill ride – and a deeper kind of fun starts when those plot secrets and revela- tions connect with that layer. The biggest, baddest ideas revolve around Ar- tificial Nature and the post-human and post-post-human conditions, no- tions that Schroeder has been playing with since Ventus. The Renaissance refugees represent one level of post-human existence, with their extensively re-engineered bodies and minds and their semi-autonomous technologies. Even Kier, who lacks full adult status, has a sensorium extended by swarms 46 of remote ‘‘dragonflies’’ and a mentality enhanced by the ‘‘collection of processors, communication systems, and interfaces’’ called scry. Thus he experiences a kind of amputation when he gets to Virga and no longer has scry or his fireflies – but he also discovers new orders of experience. The world that Kier’s people left was even more thoroughly and elabo- rately enhanced, to the point that even plants might have a socio-techno- logical complex to protect them:

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

Don’t even ask what happens if you piss off the oak trees. This blurring of the boundaries between the made and the grown, the sentient and the non- sentient, the virtual and the real, and eventually life and non-life is part of the problem represented by Artificial Nature, which might be seen as The Rapture of the Nerds run amok. All this clearly places Schroeder’s work in discussion with that of Greg Egan, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Ken MacLeod, Charles Stross, and Vernor Vinge, . And like most of these writers, Schroeder is also in- terested in systems of governance and political organization. We don’t see the focus on revolution or the ‘‘rights currency’’ that figured in earlier vol- umes, but there are observations on various related matters. On the ques- tion of moving people to action, Chaison Fanning explains that the big problem is velleity: ‘‘having a vague desire to do something, but not enough will to actually do it.’’ And because ‘‘you can’t worry people into acting,’’ he proposes as a ‘‘first tool... outrage and excitement.’’ He must have been watching the 2012 election cycle. The book is studded with similar observa- tions and explanations, as when Antea Argyre explains, ‘‘Tyranny is shaped by the command-and-control mechanisms that are available – and not by the specific class that tries to use those means. So, in Virga, we are doomed to live lives straitjacketed by bureaucratic governance.’’ But this is still a grand flying-pirate-ship-chases-and-escapes-and-meet- ings-with-monsters adventure, and it ends not with a debate or a seminar but with a gigantic zero-gee battle around Candesce, a climactic unmask- ing and showdown, just desserts, and other satisfying stuff. In a recent (as I write this) Locus Roundtable post, Karen Burnham posed the question of the appeal of SF and fantasy – ‘‘Why do you enjoy this crazy brand of litera- 47 ture?’’ I responded with several paragraphs of babble, but I think I could have just offered this series as my answer. –Russell Letson (Reviewed in Apr 2012) Return to Science Fiction list.

Lost Everything, Brian Francis Slattery (Tor 978-0-7653-2912-7, $14.99, 304pp, tp) April 2012. Like John Shirley’s Everything Is Broken (reviewed two issues ago), Brian Francis Slattery’s Lost Everything deals with a future America in extreme disrepair, threatened by both political unrest and climate change on a mon- strous scale. But where Shirley combines irony with swift action on the far northern coast of , Slattery brings a more elegiac, rueful tone to his tale of a nation that’s already in ruins when conflict rises in the South, and a much greater disaster approaches the East Coast from the west. ‘‘The war was about everything, it was everything, and the question of where it came from was meaningless. There was only the question of how to live through it.’’ With government reduced to ‘‘men in frayed suits, arguing in buildings where the power kept going out,’’ population centers large and small devolving back into junkyards on the edge of wilderness, the citizens of what used to be America set off – down crumbling roads, on swiftly rising rivers – in hope of finding some refuge from decay, war and the approach of a vast storm (the Big One) rumored to be apocalypse: Earth’s final ven- geance on that breed of sinning fools, mankind. Lost Everything alternates between The River, The House, and occasional shorter intervals on The Highway, the first two strongly linked by the view- points of a traveling brother and his angry yet settled sister, while the last features a demoralized band of soldiers. Mostly told in the third person, it can fall into a more intimate first-person whose speculative audience might come from later days (if anyone still remains). While none of this seems to offer much hope of swift recovery for a frac- tured nation, River’s account of the quixotic journey upstream of a boat on the Susquehanna – among its passengers are the old friends Reverend Bauxite and Sunny Jim – can resemble a postmodern, darker variation on past literary tales of travelers like Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Jim’s wife, a de- termined rebel, may have been killed in action, while his son should still be at the House, under his sister’s care. Jim’s ambitions seem to go no further than finding the boy. That should be enough, though moments of despair along the way can send him into a panic: ‘‘It was all loosening, coming apart, the people around him and the windows and the walls, dissolving into a thrashing darkness that rushed toward and over him. He could not find his 48 hands, his arms, his legs.’’ Moving between flashbacks, dreams and glimpses of current action, among a varied cast, Lost Everything turns the horrors of national and cul- tural collapse into something far more intimate, lacking easy definitions and beyond the scope of most dystopian SF. –Faren Miller (Reviewed in Apr 2012) Return to Science Fiction list.

Slow Apocalypse, John Varley (Ace 978-0-441-01775-7, $27.50, 438 pp, hc) September 2012. The imagined disaster and its immediate aftermath – as distinct from the other, longer-view branch of what is usually called the ‘‘post-apocalypse’’ subgenre – is a perennial in SF as well as in various areas of the mainstream that are unacknowledged parts of our turf. The precise nature of the cause of the collapse might be minutely researched and believable, or arbitrary and borderline-plausible, or outright fantasy (zombies, anyone?), or cagily undefined (viz., The Road), but what remains constant is the knocking away of this or that (or every) technological and logistical prop of civilization in order to see what falls down, what it squashes, and who (or what) crawls out of the rubble. To pull back before moving forward, I have been reading these books for almost as long as I have been reading at all, and like many of my generation, I find that a large chunk of my imagination was formed by the nightmare scenarios of post-atomic-war or collapse-of-society novels: George R. Stew- art’s Earth Abides, John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, and The Death of Grass. I recall being particularly impressed by Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon, with its focus on social cohesion (and a curtain line that has stayed with me for fifty years), and decades later by Dean Ing’s Pulling Through (1983), which was half detailed survival tale and half hands-on how-to manual on the necessary materials and procedures. (Interestingly enough, Pat Frank also produced non-fiction about how to survive an atomic war.) Which brings us to John Varley’s Slow Apocalypse, which combines the three crucial elements of the immediate-aftermath subgenre: what-might- happen, how-to-survive-it, and what-we-become-in-the-face-of-it. While the first two elements generally provide what might be called content and procedural interest – the traditional bedrock of the hard-SF (and techno- thriller and minimally-fantastic) tradition – this story moves and is moving in that third dimension, which is also the strong suit of the best of its prede- cessor examples. This is not the first time that Varley has worked the disaster tradition – half of Red Lightning (Reviewed in April 2006) portrays the af- 49 termath of a tsunami that rolls across Florida, and some of its core elements are similar to those of the current book: a careful depiction of the wreckage and a trek through it by a well-equipped mixed-family group that includes young people who must prove their mettle. Slow Apocalypse can be seen as a considerable expansion of that basic survival story, starting before the disaster and filled out in considerable detail on both the material and social levels. Sitcom writer Dave Marshall, needing to change professional tracks, is researching material for a possible disaster movie. When the ex-military guy who has been feeding him ideas is gaudily assassinated right in the heart of Hollywood, it’s clear that the late colonel wasn’t just making stuff up about the creation and release of an oil-eating bacterium. Dave is smart enough to work out the implications of a world without petroleum and pragmatic enough to start preparing for a worst-case scenario. So he stockpiles gas, food, and materials (and even buys some guns and ammo), warns his closest friends (who were also his writing staff) that bad days are coming, and prepares to hunker down until things get straightened out. But even Dave could not have anticipated the entire cascade of effects that follow when the world’s oil wells and storage facilities – including those in the Los Angeles basin – swell and explode. Some of the events in the chain are entirely natural, while others are social and logistical, following from government secrecy and a lack of resources available to respond to the pil- ing-on of earthquake, flood, fire, and hunger. As the title signals, we get a gradual buildup to the gaudier parts, and one suspects that the target audi- ence includes not only old science-fictional hands but general-fiction readers who might need to be walked through the implications of the disappearance of oil. In fact, once that single, initial, science-fictional enabling device has been deployed, all the other effects unfold with completely realistic cause- and-effect process that owe much to the rigor of science-fictional thinking but would not strike a secular audience as wild and wooly or skiffy-esque. The entire posse of apocalyptic horsemen (not to be confused with Dave’s daughter, who keeps a horse) shows up on cue, with considerable help from a non-scriptural but scientifically-justifiable earthquake and an absolutely predictable (if unprecedentedly thorough) southern California wildfire. Dave’s Hollywood Hills neighbors at first pull together and form a mutual- defense and -support group allied to similar groups in the area. But it’s one thing to pull your neighbors out of the wreckage of their homes or to drive off roving gangs of motorcycle thugs, and quite another to face the possi- bility that your family will starve, and the desperation that prospect gener- ates begins to erode the little community. The noose of the story tightens relentlessly, limiting options, presenting situations in which all the choices 50 are bad, or at least distasteful or humanity-diminishing. When a gardener who once worked in the neighborhood shows up with his thirsty, hungry wife and kids, Dave ignores the mini-militia’s security precautions – ‘‘No one was to be allowed to approach the barricade... and no one on the inside was to cross in the other direction’’ – and offers the family some of the com- munity’s water and a can of pop: He was choked up. He didn’t like himself very much at that moment, and he hated what had happened to him. What had happened to them all. What was still happening, with no end in sight. One of the group, recognizing something like what Nancy Kress called the ‘‘’’ dilemma, gives the family some of her own food and then declares, ‘‘I’m through with this shit. I can’t take it any more.... I’m out of here’’ and leaves, ‘‘with her back straight and her rifle resting on her shoul- der.’’ And that is just a small hint of what is coming – it gets much, much worse. As social bonds weaken to the breaking point and one-damn-thing-after- another rolls over Dave’s preparations and defenses, it becomes clear that hunkering down isn’t going to work. The last part of the novel details how Dave’s family, with two others, make their way out of the devastation that was Los Angeles, hoping that somewhere there is stability and safety. Their trek allows the camera to pull back and reveal the full extent of the disaster and the many ways there are to die. Like Pat Frank’s novel, this one is as much about the resilience of our so- cial bonds as the fragility of our physical infrastructure. But that fragility, and the devastation that follows when systems fail and nature gets her in- nings, remain in the foreground. This book, like John Barnes’s rather more science-fictional Directive 51 sequence, had me looking at my home and my town and recognizing how delicately balanced the systems are that support our comfort and safety, and wondering about the robustness of the human machineries that might or might not kick in to counter both the blind vio- lence of nature and the demonic side of humanity. Varley’s early fiction went way out there, pushing at the limits of the most exotic and fantastic pos- sibilities the species might encounter. Trust me that when the imagination that devised both ‘‘The Phantom of Kansas’’ and ‘‘ [ ]’’ digs into some of the genre’s oldest perennial questions (What will we do when the lights go out and things fall apart?), the results are just as gripping, terrify- ing, and convincing. –Russell Letson (Reviewed in Oct 2012) Return to Science Fiction list.

51 The Fourth Wall, Walter Jon Williams (Orbit 978-0316133395, $13.99, 416pp, tp) February 2012. Walter Jon Williams keeps on mix-and-matching genre elements and com- ing up with satisfying concoctions. In This Is Not a Game and Deep State, he combined near-future SF and international-intrigue materials in a now- familiar techno-thriller way. In The Fourth Wall, a sequel to that pair, he adds to the recipe one of my personal favorite guilty-pleasure ingredients: the show-biz mystery novel. The Fourth Wall uses some characters, technologies, and back-story from its predecessors, but its first chapters are pure Hollywood comic novel, with a flawed-but-knowing, down-at-the-heels insider introducing us to the sleaze and desperation beneath the glitz and glamor, someone who understands the way of his world:

I think about Gene Hackman’s character in Night Moves, the baffled, affable detective so completely unsuited to grope his way through the Hollywood labyrinth, through all the players who so completely fucked him over. I’m not like that, I decide. I grew up here. I know exactly who’s going to screw me over and when. My chief hope is that, if I just hang on long enough, I can get in a position to screw them all right back.

The speaker is Sean Makin, who should be sitting pretty after spending his childhood years on a successful sitcom, except that his parents looted his trust fund and decamped, leaving him nearly broke and all but washed up at 18. After a string of unsuccessful comeback projects (including the title-not-lead character in the languishing-in-litigation slasher movie Mister Baby Head), he is reduced to appearances on the pseudo-reality Celebrity Pitfighter show, in which he must duke it out with other has-beens under circumstances de- signed to extract the maximum of grotesquery and humiliation from the situation, for example, by filling the ring shin-deep in cottage cheese, which results in Sean getting not only pummeled into semi-consciousness by his hopped-up opponent but half drowned in gorp as well. We get much of the official version of Sean’s career arc from his blog posts (each of which is accompanied by a thread of snotty reader comments), while from the off-the-record first-person narrative we gradually learn of the real disaster of his youth: his role in the death of a friend and colleague, a secret he would particularly not want revealed to the friend’s bereaved husband, whose brilliant directorial career declined terribly thereafter. All of this over- ture-and-back-story gradually comes into play when Sean gets hired onto 52 the latest project run by online entertainment producer (and This Is Not a Game and Deep State protagonist) Dagmar Shaw. Dagmar is interested in Sean for the central character in Escape to Earth, a serialized, subscription- based, international, multi-platform, branching-plotline, quasi-participatory adventure narrative about an alien from an alternate universe. One reason Sean is being considered is because of his unusual appearance: as he grew up, he proved to have pedomorphosis, and as a result he is now six-foot-two with a ‘‘really, really huge head’’ and looks ‘‘like a sinister bobblehead doll leering unexpectedly at you from the dashboard of someone’s car.’’ But, hey, it’s not just a part, it’s the lead. A number of other cast members from Deep State return, but as crucial as Dagmar and her crew are to the creation and unwinding of the central plot, this really remains Sean’s story, not only because he becomes a key player in the project (which neither he nor the reader entirely understands until the end of the book) but because he believes that the deadly events that start to plague the production are tied to his long-kept secret. The director Dagmar hires is that same bereaved husband out of Sean’s guilty past, and other pro- fessional friends and colleagues from his working days become part of the project. When a mystery SUV almost runs him down – twice – Sean chooses not to tell Dagmar of the incidents, lest she bounce him from the picture. Then one of the production staff is killed by a hit-and-run, and it is the be- ginning of a series of deaths that have Sean wondering whether there is a serial killer in the woodwork. He can’t figure whether it’s something to do with his personal dirty secret, or the production itself, or something that has followed Dagmar from one of her earlier problems (which even Sean has heard a little about). What makes the book more fun than the usual mystery or techno-thriller is how the rest of Sean’s comic-novel of a life keeps rolling around and crashing into the Escape to Earth project. He still has to honor his contract with Celeb- rity Pitfighter, which means training for and fighting those bouts – and figur- ing how to fix them so that he doesn’t get injured or (worse) marked in ways that makeup can’t disguise. He has to deal with his mother, who sends ditzy e-mails from the ashram to which she donated $850,000 of Sean’s trust fund money. And then there’s the production itself. Because Sean genuinely loves acting, knows his craft quite thoroughly, and has an encyclopedic knowledge of film history and production, he makes an ideal guide to the culture and the processes (political, artistic, and technical) that make the magic happen. Sean’s personal/professional world isn’t fundamentally science-fictional, but it’s as exotic and wonderful and textured and operationally detailed as any nifty-skiffy creation. Not that Williams altogether leaves out the tech stuff, which has that week-after-next, we’re-almost-there feeling you get from 53 recent novels. (In fact, there’s what I take to be an homage to Spook Country in the first chapter.) But what drives the foreground action is less the techno part of the thriller than the tangle of damaged relation- ships, mixed motives, wounded egos, hidden agendas, and raw ambition that make up the pocket universe of show business. And through it all strangely shines Sean’s genuine love and understanding of the only profession he has ever known. I’m recommending this one to my niece the actor. I don’t know what she’ll make of the technologies, but she will recognize the rest of it im- mediately. –Russell Letson (Reviewed in Mar 2012) Return to Science Fiction list.

The Last Policeman, Ben H. Winters (Quirk Books 978-1-59474-576-8, $14.95, 288pp, pb) May 2012. Asteroid 2011GV(1) will obliterate life on Earth as it is currently known in less than seven at the start of Ben H. Winters’ The Last Policeman. But the book really isn’t about that, except when it is, when the pre-apocalyp- tic landscape intersects with the main character. Instead, Winters’s focus on Detective Hank Palace, a young cop in Concord NH’s police department. Palace is investigating the death of a local insurance adjuster, who appears to have hung himself in a McDonalds’ bathroom. He’s roundly mocked for his concern, since suicides are now so prevalent that a hanging causes no more alarm than a thunderstorm – and this looks like a run of the mill death. But Palace has a hunch; the lean-but-not-bare story takes off from there. Winters, also known for Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and Bed- bugs, makes these characters and this world feel real, both in terms of craft and imagination. There’s a sense of both resignation and urgency to Palace, as well as an ineffable depth. What feels like a routine who-done-it turns into a powerful meditation on inescapable doom – and what one might do with the time that’s left, without ever forgetting to keep one eye on the mystery of the dead guy in the bathroom. The Last Policeman initially feels like it could be a slight bit of fun – but Winters has also made it resonant and powerful. –Adrienne Martini (Reviewed in Oct 2012) Return to Science Fiction list.

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54 Fantasy

Whispers Under Ground, Ben Aaronovitch (Del Rey 978-0-345-52461-4, $7.99, 306pp, pb) August 2012. Cover by Stephen Walter. Whispers Under Ground is the third of Ben Aaronovitch’s series featur- ing and narrated by Peter Grant, a young black policeman who works for the Metropolitan Police’s division specializing in crimes that involve the oc- cult – a profession his expatriate West African mum translates into the more high-falutin’ concept ‘‘witchfinder.’’ Starting with rumors of a ghost in the old train tracks beneath the bleak school (‘‘obviously designed by a keen admirer of Albert Speer’’) where he and other family members had been obliged to study as kids, the action moves into the current London Underground transit system, where a young American art student has been murdered by a strange weapon that still bears a strong whiff of magic. And then the whiffs grow nastier, down in the city sewers. In the well-imagined background to these books, things occult got a boost from Isaac Newton but gradually went into a decline with the rise of mod- ern sciences. Nonetheless, and despite more direct damage during WWII, they persist on a scale that ranges from the stray magic user, with all sorts of ethnic baggage in this polyglot city, to elementals like the spirit of the Thames and her daughter streams (still relative youngsters, better adapted to a busy 21st century). Regardless of its metaphoric links to realms like Hades, the Underground has received surprisingly little attention during the city’s years of postwar regrowth. Even Nightingale, Peter’s unnaturally long-lived boss, has little to say about it. So Peter and a small band of colleagues spend a lot of time searching for clues up top – every chapter is a local place name – until their investigation of a single murder opens into something more like a secret history. This isn’t your great-grandmother’s awful secrets of the depths. Peter talks and thinks like a modern 20-something, cheerfully profane and prone to ob- servations like this explanation of why ‘‘magic is worse even than quantum physics.... Because, while both spit in the eye of common sense, I’ve never yet had a Higgs bosun turn up and try to have a conversation with me.’’ But that’s not the worst of it. While all sorts of odd things may talk or whisper, Peter’s greatest source of aggravation turns out to be a female agent from the FBI. –Faren Miller (Reviewed in Oct 2012) Return to Fantasy list. 55 Red Country, Joe Abercrombie (Gollancz 978-0575095823, £16.99, 464pp, pb) October 2012. (Orbit US 978-0-316-18721-3, $25.99, 640pp, tp) No- vember 2012. Joe Abercrombie and Anna Tambour’s first novels appeared less than a de- cade ago: his The Blade Itself in 2006, her Spotted Lily the year before that. Blade opened the First Law trilogy (a blunt, irreverent take on three-volume fantasies, finished in 2008 and followed by two standalone quasi-sequels), while she remained in the realm of the small presses, with short fiction and at last another novel. These writers continue to rebel against fantasy clichés and subvert the norms of genre, albeit in very different ways. When Red Country begins, it seems squarely set in the Wild West, a land of -diggers mad to make their fortunes, hardscrabble settlers, dangerous natives, and rough bands of mercenaries who look a lot like villains. Off- hand remarks about the Union could be timely references to the army run by Grant, battling Lee’s Confederates.... Well, no. This Union is the govern- ment first introduced in The Blade Itself, a system with a Crown and roving Inquisitors sent out to track a different kind of rebels. Red Country takes the action to the untamed frontiers, a far country where elements of our Wild West mutate and run amok, with swords and spears instead of rifles – though the (non-redskin) natives known as Ghosts still ruthlessly employ their bows and arrows. Even the violent act that sets the plot in motion fits the setting, as heroine Shy South comes back from stocking up at the nearest settlement to find her house and barn burnt to the ground, her workman hanged from a tree, and her two young siblings miss- ing. Only lumbering old surrogate stepfather Lamb remains to her, but how much use could he be to a woman bent on crime-solving, swiftly followed by revenge? More than she might expect, but that’s a plot twist that unfolds only gradually (even if an offhand mention of one missing part of him may make readers of the First Law books prick up their ears and wonder, ‘‘Could it be...?’’). Shy’s quest takes her and Lamb into the company of a self-proclaimed Fellowship, a band of mercenary swordsmen much too sleazy to be associ- ated with a magic Ring or any kind of standard epic concerns. Whatever business they’re about, their next goal is the town of Crease. That place first appears in the wry comment, ‘‘Picture hell on the cheap. Then add more whores.’’ The subsequent description mixes irony, filth, and feelings without constraint, as Abercrombie does so well: The greatest settlement of the new frontier, that ’s para- dise, the Fellowship’s long-anticipated destination, was wedged into a twisting valley, steep sides dotted with the wasted stumps of felled pines. It was a place of wild abandon, wild hope, wild despair, every- 56 thing at extremes and nothing in moderation, dreams trodden into the muck and new ones sucked from bottles to be vomited up and trodden down in turn. A place where the strange was commonplace and the ordinary bizarre, and death might be along tomorrow so you’d best have all your fun today. Lest anyone still think we’re somewhere near Dodge City, he follows this with a memorable glimpse of the town’s vast, apparently inhuman ruins, though he doesn’t linger on their past grandeur. Shacks have sprouted up among the columns, and when Shy wonders what the place used to be, Lamb says, ‘‘Cleaner, at a guess.’’ While the trilogy that introduced the Union had wizards, its sparse ref- erences to magic made the thing seem like a dying art – or perhaps some ancient tech, its rules and logic long forgotten. That attitude continues here. One tribe of Ghosts are known as Dragon People; when we finally find out why, the answer won’t call up any visions of a hero with a spear, determined to skewer reptilian Evil in its lair. None of this book’s characters fit neatly into moral categories. One pro- tagonist, who turns out not to be an outright villain, is first seen through the eyes of a jaundiced outsider who calls him ‘‘a man so slimy he could have found employment as axle grease.’’ As for our heroine, the only thing particularly shy about her is her name. She’s an antidote/antithesis to ’s sheltered princesses and fairy queens, and swears like a trooper (or one of Crease’s whores). Shy South is a woman of the frontier, born and raised to make her way through all its dangers, even in changing times. If true grit can impel a person toward something like a happy ending, in a land of violence and sorrows, this gal will find a way. –Faren Miller (Reviewed in Nov 2012) Red Country [Second Review] It’s commonplace to say that what’s changed most in fantasy over the last few decades is diction, but it’s still a shock to run into a book like Joe Aber- crombie’s Red Country. It’s not just that the characters say ‘‘fuck’’ a lot – they do, and, unlike some fantasy authors, Abercrombie doesn’t get diminishing returns from that. It’s that the language is part and parcel of these characters’ lives, which are very far from those of princes and princesses. Red Country is set in the same First Law world as Abercrombie’s other books, and shares a few characters in common – notably Nicomo Cosca, a mercenary from Best Served Cold. It works as a stand-alone novel, though, and doesn’t particularly require the reader to have read the other books. If Red Country has an obvious ancestor, it’s the Western. It starts in a gold-rush 57 town where atrocities have been – and continue to be – committed in the name of money. As Cosca argues, what’s at stake here is the future:

And the future does not belong to the Old Empire – their time is a thousand years past. Nor does it belong to the Ghosts, savages that they are. Nor does it belong to the fugitives, adventurers, and oppor- tunist scum who have put the first grasping roots into its virgin soil. No, the future belongs to the Union. We must seize it.

It doesn’t take much to see how this maps onto the patterns of the Western – the Ghosts, for instance, being the Native Americans whose land is in the process of being stolen. For much of the book, the treatment of the Ghosts isn’t much different from that in a John Wayne western: they are an almost el- emental force, almost universally thought of as ‘‘savage.’’ We do get occasional glimpses of their perspective, though, for instance when Shy and other char- acters enter a Ghost camp and feel the ferocity of their anger at the loss of their world. More of this would have been welcome, but most of the book is told from the perspective of those who think they’re creating a new frontier. The frontier attitude is embedded in many of the characters’ lives. Soon enough we get a line like this, ‘‘They rode in silence for a moment, just the two of them and the sky, so big and deep there might be nothing holding you to the ground any more and you’d just fall into it and never stop.’’ If that’s not asking to be filmed by John Ford, I don’t know what is. The first main characters we meet are a young woman named Shy and her stepfather Lamb. Within a few pages, they’re presented with an atrocity affect- ing them and their family: their path through the book follows from this as they try to track down the culprits. In subsequent chapters, we’re introduced to Cosca and members of his entourage. Most memorable among these are Temple – a lawyer who allows Abercrombie to get several lawyer jokes in – and Sworbreck, an author intent on chronicling Cosca’s exploits. With less formal diction, I’d suggest, two other characteristics have crept into fantasy fiction. The first – and Abercrombie’s work is a very clear exam- ple – is a much smaller presence for magical or fantastical elements. There is, for instance, a dragon sitting on a hoard of treasure in this book, but it’s a rather unusual dragon. The second characteristic is an assumption that you can’t tell a story – you can’t show off your world – from just one point of view. So in cutting away from Shy’s story to Cosca’s, Abercrombie is doing nothing more than the norm. (Of course, there’s a precedent for this in Tolkien, with the switching between Frodo’s thread and the Aragorn/Gondor one. But that, I’d argue, was the exception rather than the rule in fantasy up to that point.) In any case, Red Country is a reasonably brief novel, and one that doesn’t 58 lose focus from an excess of viewpoints. Abercrombie remains extremely good at action sequences: there is, for instance, a superbly gripping Ghost attack on a group of wagons towards the end of the book’s second part. Here, he manages to capture the dazing effect of violence happening too fast and in too many places to be perceived by any one person. You just see the after- effects, like ‘‘a pony stuck with arrows totter[ing] sideways past.’’ The ‘‘Red Country’’ of the title ends up being the land itself, the linkage between blood and gold becoming more explicit as the book goes on. In the end, there’s a half-resolution, with the law as much as violence playing a cru- cial role. (And if we’re talking about westerns, that inevitably evokes The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and its depiction of how law might come about in a frontier place.) The book isn’t perfect, and the dialogue sometimes tends more to screenplay-ese than what real humans might say (‘‘So what are you going to do?’’ ‘‘Wait. Think. Prepare.’’ Lamb swallowed the last measure and bared his teeth at the glass. ‘‘Then get bloody.’’), but it’s a book that remains pointed, driven, and sharp. –Graham Sleight (Reviewed in Nov 2012) Return to Fantasy list.

The King’s Blood, Daniel Abraham (Orbit US 978-0-316-08077-4, $15.99, 508pp, tp) May 2012. The King’s Blood by Daniel Abraham extends the tale of ‘‘The Dagger and the Coin’’, which began last year with The Dragon’s Path. It’s set in a world of many ‘‘races’’ – sentient (mostly humanoid) species crafted by the drag- ons who once ruled it all, only to vanish and leave everything in the hands of their former servants – a scenario that seems perfectly designed for epic. While Abraham does not distort it to the point of comedy, he never really lets the old tropes have free reign. Take the idea of hero. When the great imperial city of Camnipol celebrates Geder Palliako as its savior (after the action in Book 1 where he foiled a for- eign conspiracy with help from a revived cult and its peculiar magics), Kitap the apostate immediately cuts through all the pomp. A former priest of that very cult, now a seasoned wanderer and actor in street theater whose origins have been reduced to a lingering taint in the blood, Master Kit sees Geder clearly: a pallid, round-faced young man with slicked-back hair, dressed in a leather cloak that’s too big for him and standing ‘‘under the great red banner [of the goddess] like a new actor freshly on a stage.’’ Still, he’s troubled by thoughts of what might come of this political miscasting. Kit opts for action and sets off ‘‘to kill a goddess.’’ After this bold pronouncement, he vanishes until much later in the book. 59 The focus shifts to one of the Free Cities west of Antea and a young wom- an who may be the series’ most delightfully unlikely recurring character. Cithrin bel Sarcour feels her adopted role as ‘‘voice and agent of the Medean Bank in Porte Oliva’’ slipping away from her with the arrival of a brusque female notary, called in to supervise because Cithrin is still technically too young to run a bank. It won’t be easy to fight back. Unlike this personal crisis, age becomes a matter of general concern back in the capital city when the old king dies and leaves a prince who’s much too young to run a country. Since Geder Palliako has already been named Baron and Ebbingbaugh and Protector of the Prince, even the heads of aristocratic families view him as a logical choice for regent (with no apostate around to set them right). But before the regency descends on Geder like another ill- fitting cloak, one scene shows him at home, puzzling over an old text in his personal study – ‘‘a disaster of papers, scrolls, notebooks, and wax tablets’’ – on a baronial estate still new to him. Change a few letters in the name and elevate the station, and this could al- most be Gerek from the previous book. The crucial difference came in Book One with this awkward scholar’s first taste of power, through the magics of his little band of priests. And not much time will pass until the new regent dares to dream again. He sees no reason to work in secret. A national savior should gain even more acclaim if he can restore his weakened empire to something like its former size! (Here too, the priests can help.) But the new plan immediately alarms the most conservative among the city’s nobles: Dawson Kalliam, Baron of Osterling Fells. Spurred by his own ideals, which equate Good with resistance to change, this baron plots rebel- lion. While Dawson simply hoped to restore order, his actions lead to chaos. Even as loyalists and rebels still clash, the regent sets off in a panicky flight, along with his prince. They get aid from an unexpected source: Cithrin bel Sarcour, serving a kind of exile here. To pass time in their new hideout (which she bluntly calls ‘‘a ruin that stinks of cat piss’’) Citrin and Geder start talking about their dreams. She confesses, ‘‘When I was a girl, I dreamed about riding dragons, [spinning] elaborate stories about how it would obey me and let me do whatever I want- ed. And then....’’ Urged to go on, she reveals that the mighty beast was really money: ‘‘Coin and contract and lending at interest were what let me fly. Who would have thought that was what I meant by dreaming of dragons?’’ Geder thinks he understands her, that they’re two of a kind: ‘‘Dragons or coins or riding off with an army at your back and a crown on your head. It’s all the same. It’s power. You wanted power.’’ But we know better. In the muddle of human kingdoms which their reptilian masters left behind, the regent’s dreams look more like hubris born out of desperation. By contrast, 60 Cithrin and other relatively modest characters (including Dawson’s level- headed wife) would never imagine themselves as figures in an epic. That attitude may prove to be the secret of survival. –Faren Miller (Reviewed in Jun 2012) Return to Fantasy list.

The Troupe, Robert Jackson Bennett (Orbit 978-0-316-18752-7, $13.99, 512pp, tp) February 2012. While all three of Robert Jackson Bennett’s books (Mr Shivers, The Com- pany Man, The Troupe) take place in ostensibly different worlds, they all share the same scent of a dark, Depression-era-ish night where malevolent forces wander the world. There’s a consistency to his settings, one that feels like film noir mixed with hobos. This is not a bad thing, mind. The Company Man has been nominated for both the Philip K. Dick Award and an Edgar Award. What Bennett does, he does well. The Troupe is his ode to vaudeville. A band of performers, led by Silenus and his mute brother Stanley, travel the midwestern states with their four- act show. First up is Kingsley and his three creepy puppets, then the su- pernaturally augmented strong woman, then a dance number by a Persian princess and, last, a song that leaves the audience unable to remember the first three acts. Except for George, a young piano player for a theater on the circuit who is seduced by Silenus’s song. He joins that troupe and discovers, as one expects he would, that all is not what it seems. There are wolves. There is a magic door. The world itself is shrinking. And interesting things happen. All in all, Bennett tells his tale well, even if the middle feels a bit baggy. He pays off the determined reader at the end, when the larger forces behind the plot become clear. Bennett is telling us a story about grief and letting go that is lightly draped with the trappings of vaudeville, and Bennett’s imagina- tion. The last third of The Troupe also feels like recent . Both juggle multiple story lines with clarity and ease, and both tend to inhabit the same places from book to book, even if unintentionally. Even with the name stripped off, you know when you are in a world King has created because he creates those spaces so well. Twenty years from now, the same might be said for Bennett, and that could only be a good path to follow. –Adrienne Martini (Reviewed in Apr 2012) Return to Fantasy list. 61 Queen’s Hunt, Beth Bernobich (Tor 978-0-7653-2218-0, $24.99, 332pp, hc) July 2012. Fantasy needn’t be set in the present day, or in some clear variant on the real world, to intrigue and ultimately satisfy modern readers averse to ev- erything that can be summed up (and put down) in a few words, like ‘‘epic’’ or ‘‘medievalesque.’’ This column deals with three books, each the second in a series, which find ways bring new life to old tropes. Beth Bernobich and Daniel Abraham subvert the epic format (maps at the front, monarchs in the title, large ensemble casts) directly, while Carolyn Ives Gilman works on a smaller scale but with a subtlety that left me scrambling to figure out just what she was doing. Queen’s Hunt, Bernobich’s follow-up to her first ‘‘River of ’’ novel Passion Play, dismisses any sense of dèja vu roused by the blurb’s references to quests, kingdoms, magical jewels, and the fate of nations by plunging straight into the intimate chaos of one mind, where uncertain memories, doubts, and suppressed secrets tend to overwhelm plans of action. It begins with Gerek Hessler, an awkward scholar (with a tendency to stut- ter) who follows his dead cousin to the great city of Tiralien as a kind of self- appointed investigator. Why did the man really die? His prime suspect is a secretive mage-king. Despite fragmented recollections of past lives that once brought him here, in a world of continual rebirths, Gerek must begin where the cousin left off – he gets a job in one baronial household. Unbeknownst to him, his new employer is also trying to find out just what the king is doing. Though a strange form of sacrifice (all close councillors must be gelded) had gained him a place in the court’s inner circles, Lord Kostenmark has fallen out of favor with a monarch who has reigned for cen- turies due to his magics, yet remains something of an enigma. Forced to rely on rumor, Kostenmark becomes alarmed by talk of war with neighboring kingdoms. The mage-king is overtly ruthless – perhaps mad by now – and the baron fears the worst. So he begins to plot. I didn’t have a chance to read the opening volume, but Passion Play has been described as a sophisticated love story. Presumably this featured Kostenmark (despite the condition that has given him a ‘‘womanish’’ voice) and the sequel’s next viewpoint character, Ilse Zhalina. She joined in his schemes when they faked a stormy separation, removing the dangerous taint of association with an outcast lord and getting her into a position where she can hear the very latest gossip from members of the court, as steward – not courtesan – in one of the city’s many sanctioned ‘‘pleasure houses.’’ Ilse’s free time goes to private study of magic and its special language, ‘‘old Erythan- dran’’ (which sounds a lot like German). While she gathers disturbing info about clashes between warriors and the 62 king’s mystery fleet, the most significant discoveries start cropping up when Ilse meets a foreign queen who came to the city (in a humble guise) as part of her own quest to reconstitute the supernatural entity split long ago into three distinct jewels. This threatens to stray into territory best left to Tolkien or Wagner. But Queen’s Hunt never stays there for long. Rather than penetrate the mage-king’s webs of secrecy and reveal the oc- cult forces behind his Navy, it returns to Gerek – now feverishly trying to hire and stock a mundane ship (with crew) on Kostenmark’s orders. Forget the sleuthing! He’s drowning in paperwork and still learning to cope with the local commerce. It takes real effort just to learn the most efficient ways to buy water casks and salt pork, while working under a strict . By focusing on mundane details, showing magic through the struggles of people who will never have the luxury of wizardly tutors, and most of all by getting so close to her characters that the usual distinctions between degrees of power (earthly or magical) break down, Bernobich turns the quest saga into a crazy-quilt of intimate portraits – the perfect antidote to those bom- bastic info-dumps some publishers still tout as the latest thing in fantasy. –Faren Miller (Reviewed in Jun 2012) Return to Fantasy list.

The Ruined City, Paula Brandon (Spectra 978-0-553-58382-3, $18.00, 374pp, tp) March 2012. For a that’s been dubbed ‘‘the cruelest,’’ in a year where political bile and world violence seem to dominate the news, this column deals with a subject on many people’s minds: . In all of these books, families, cities, and nations must try to cope with loss in times of growing unrest, and with the threat of worse to come – downbeat material. But the current ten- dency toward mix-and-match genres, unconventional settings, and widely varied temporal references keeps them from becoming indistinguishable chronicles of doom. From fantasy adventure in imaginary worlds, to a di- vided Ireland where ’70s punk rock and rebellion coexist with ancient mag- ics, to one America brought to its knees by an array of disasters which could be the vengeance of cruel gods (or an angry Earth), and another plagued by killings that are tangled up in something stranger than wayward , they explore a wide range of moods and styles where shared themes find very different forms of expression. In The Traitor’s Daughter, (Reviewed in issue #610, Paula Brandon (AKA Paula Volsky) began a trilogy whose magic differs sharply from fantasy norms in both its source and its escalating instability. In a realm where the most human characters may ply uncanny talents, many of these aristocrats 63 and rebels seem torn from a tale of old Italy, a dark satire with undertones of romance. But a conquered population of sentient amphibians (the Sishmin- dris), and one being like an ornery robot, add further complications. Just the title of sequel The Ruined City suggests a worsening crisis, and times are tough on many levels. The Magnifico Aureste Belandor, ‘‘traitor’’ of the first book – a sneering aristocrat whose status depends on his people’s foreign conquerors (though the two peoples don’t seem all that different) – has survived an attack by enemies of his family with his arrogance intact, de- spite a badly damaged mansion. When his crippled brother Innesq, the Be- landors’ most talented , is summoned to a convocation with hopes to avert complete metaphysical disaster, Aureste insists on going along. De- spite his own lack of abilities, and the presence of other mages from a family that (rightly) views him as their arch foe, he plans to take charge of the op- eration. The emotional atmosphere swiftly chills to ‘‘rigidly correct formali- ties’’ between all but the most open-minded travelers. As they head toward the supernatural crisis point in a near-wasteland some ’ travel from both families’ home city of Vitrisi, a suitably pompous kinsman becomes the overseer of Belandor House. This Nalio can’t envision more than trifling difficulties in the days ahead, but on her return from the dangerous adventures of the previous volume, Aureste’s daughter Jianna is less sanguine. Life ‘‘would resume its accustomed aspect – at least, so far as possible within a largely ruined mansion, overlooking a restive, fearful, an- gry, smoke-palled, plague-ridden, corpse-trodden city.’’ When she first heard of Vitrisi’s problems, they sounded like absurd exag- gerations. Angry Sishmindris deserting their human masters? Disease vic- tims who don’t stay entirely dead, rising even from the pyre? Nonsense! Yet it all turns out to be true. Since Belandor House would like nothing better than to pack Jianna off to another ghastly marriage, she can’t stay where the family might find her. And so, as some viewpoint characters continue their trek into the wilds, she and others must wander through the growing chaos of the ruined city. None of the major figures in Brandon’s restless cast are left to drift en- tirely at random, like flotsam on an existential . Forceful personalities and equally strong plotlines spur most of them to action of some kind. In Vitrisi, Jianna will need every bit of her inherited aristocratic will power for her attempt to understand the desperate situation and find ways to combat it. While she tries to thwart her city’s foes, another pretty young woman could be the avatar of those enemies (though even fellow rebels get nervous around Celisse). Cold and fanatical, set on vengeance, this Rione girl is quite unlike her brother Falaste, the healer-mage whom Jianna came to love dur- ing her time in the rebel enclave. He’s here as well, tearing through the city 64 in hope of finding Celisse before she commits an atrocity that could seal the city’s doom – or could if this weren’t the middle of a trilogy. True resolution won’t arrive until Book 3, The Wanderers. –Faren Miller (Reviewed in Apr 2012) Return to Fantasy list.

The Steel Seraglio, Mike Carey, Linda Carey & Louise Carey (Chizine 978-1- 926851-53-2, $15.95, 428pp, tp) April 2012. Cover by Erik Mohr. [Order from .] Credentials for The Steel Seraglio’s authors Linda, Louise & Mike Carey – North Londoners who live together in a ‘‘crowded house with two other writer/artists, a cat, and several stick insects’’ – include a graphic novel that Louise co-wrote with Mike, TV writing for an animated German series by Linda, and work on both games and comics by Mike; illustrator Nimit Mala- via has done work for , among others. All this seems to suggest that it will be some kind of media stew, designed for modern readers and not much to my liking. (Back-cover comments like The Guardian’s ‘‘Fast, fun and furious’’ don’t help.) But Seraglio turns out to be more like a postmodern Arabian Nights, with a narrative where old fables – plus miscellania like the transcript of a meeting, and a recipe – appear in an array of viewpoints and voices that swiftly deviate from the familiar ‘‘Once upon a time.’’ Most of this material can be found in one specific old volume, lost for centuries and described by the rediscoverer as ‘‘Small, thick and undistinguished-looking,’’ and written in several hands. But it also takes on the identity of first narrator Rem the librarian, whose visions of the future include both truth and fiction from much later times, while her tone varies between introspective, lyrical, and thoroughly down-to-earth. All of Rem’s voices appear in her first remarks, just three short paragraphs:

The truth opens gradually, like a flower. Or else it falls on you all at once, like a bag of spanners. The city of women was both greater and less than you imagine. I am a book, in which the future is written. I am a woman whom you might pass in the street without noticing, and never again be able to call to mind.

Viewpoint characters come from a cast that includes refugees from a sul- tan’s seraglio, which once had 365 concubines (women who fled when grim fundamentalist zealots took over their city); a much smaller band of illiterate male camel thieves they encountered in the desert; and a dyslexic female as- 65 sassin with ‘‘lethal’’ hands. Before these odd associates establish a new home, Zuleika the assassin provides necessary leadership, the dead sultan’s advisor Garsoon adds her own canny advice, and camel-thief Anwar Das thwarts their enemies with his delicious mix of lying and seduction. Rem is here as well, busy teaching thieves to read, looking into the future, and drawing on its fiction to entertain a rapt audience: ‘‘She told the women, the children and the men of bright cities, filled with huge beetles with metal carapaces. She told them about far off lands where the deserts were made of ice, and argosies that sailed the skies as now they did the sea.’’ (One story baf- fled her listeners more than most, leading a boy to ask her ‘‘What’s a whale?’’ and one mother to comment in disgust, ‘‘How stupid to hate an animal! Star- buck should have told [the man with one leg] it was nonsense!’’) These characters and several others all feature in the main plot, whose focus is Bessa the City of Women, its rise and fall. But Rem provides a greater over- view; near the beginning she admits, ‘‘One day we’ll be gone, and the sands will close over us.’’ Aside from history and politics, ‘‘nothing else is going to change very much’’ – with one significant exception: ‘‘Magic just stops work- ing somewhere along the way, more or less overnight. Quantum physics steps into the gap, strutting like a rooster.’’ In Book the Second, Rem offers further comments that involve the reader in her sense of change: Yes, the calendar was different in those days. So was the span of human life. Upheavals in the way we perceive the universal dance upset, too, our perspec- tive upon our own lives. ... When I speak to you, my voice is distorted by our mutual incomprehension, our irreconcilable alternity. Despite that gap between us, The Steel Seraglio brings its alternate world of struggle, politics and magic very much to life, transcending the more la- bored construct of symbol and metaphor in a fairy tale or fable retold only to make some kind of point. –Faren Miller (Reviewed in Jul 2012) Return to Fantasy list..

Boneland, Alan Garner (Fourth Estate) September 2012. 2012 World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award winner Alan Garner’s Boneland is a return to children’s characters Colin and Susan, made famous 50 years earlier in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) and The Moon of Gomrath (1963), now grown up in this concluding adult sequel –Locus (Mentioned in Feb 2013) Return to Fantasy list. 66 The Killing Moon, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit 978-0-316-18728-2, $14.99, 422pp, tp) May 2012. Cover by Marc Yankus. N.K. Jemisin follows the Inheritance Trilogy with the Dreamblood, a duology whose two substantial volumes came out just a month apart. Once again, the predominant cultures and worldview aren’t Caucasian; ’s standard Western-medieval elements are reduced to a few ragged northern barbarians. An intriguing combination of ancient Egyptian god- dess-worship and something more like Jungian psychology dominates most aspects of life and death in the great city-state of Gujaareh in Book One, The Killing Moon. Before going to Gujaareh as a designated representative of Kisua (a ‘‘moth- erland’’ city-state that finds little to admire in its offspring’s development during their centuries apart), the young woman Sunandi learned about magic as part of her apprenticeship. From the perspective of an outsider who’s not too mired in prejudice, she provides a good introduction to a bi- zarrely sophisticated system. Some examples: [T]hough the Hananjan priests served as gatekeepers for the magic, they were not its source. The people of Gujaareh made the magic, in wild bursts of imagination and emotion called dreams; the Hananjans simply harvested that wildness and refined it into a purer, usable form. And so Gujaareen citi- zens brought their nightmares and nonsense dreams to the temples, where the priests called Sharers used them to shrink tumors or speed the healing of wounds. When more drastic measures are required, for things like regrowing limbs or manipulation on the genetic level, a specialized group of Sisters (some of them male) ‘‘coax forth the most carnal dreams,’’ for the good of all. The Hananjan themselves divide this dream-material into an alchemical quartet of aspects, separate ‘‘humors’’ culled by Gatherers: dreambile (from nightmares), dreamblood (released by the soul in the moment of death), dreamichor (from ordinary ‘‘nonsense’’ dreams), and dreamseed (from erot- ic dreams). When confined to medicinal purposes, all of this offbeat stuff seems admirably useful. But powers as great as these could also work for less benign intents. Some now-forbidden tomes that dealt with the darker side of magic have fallen into the hands of Gujaareh’s current political leader, its massively ambitious, ruthless Prince. Before the Prince’s experiments can turn a peaceful city into a war ma- chine with a deathless leader, it is plagued by a creature who seems to have come out of myth (or nightmare): the Reaper. While the mages known as Gatherers are bound to collect the dreamblood of the sick, people in the last stages of old age and some condemned prisoners, in the service of their god- dess, the Reaper is an Abomination which could strike anyone at any time, 67 like some kind of cosmic serial killer. Still worse, it seems to be working on insider knowledge from someone in their own temple community. After one harvesting goes wrong, the esteemed Gatherer Ehiru finds his most heartfelt beliefs starting to crumble. The Killing Moon vividly chroni- cles the changing mind-sets brought on by desperate times in Gujaareh and beyond, ranging from daily life to an afterlife of dreams, and the murky, dif- ficult realm between them. –Faren Miller (Reviewed in Sep 2012) Return to Fantasy list.

Some Kind of Fairy Tale, Graham Joyce (Doubleday 978-0-385-53578-6, $24.95, 306pp, hc) July 2012. In a note at the end of his haunting, brilliant new novel Some Kind of Fairy Tale, Graham Joyce explains his chapter epigraphs – from sources as diverse as Shakespeare, Marina Warner, , G.K. Chesterton, Bruno Bettel- heim, Albert Einstein, Joseph Campbell, Ursula K. Le Guin, Angela Carter, Yeats, and Auden – as an homage to ‘‘those writers – living and dead – whose works champions the fusion of Realism and the Fantastic.’’ It’s a rich and daunting tradition, but a good case could be made that Joyce himself is cur- rently Britain’s most accomplished heir to it. Returning to the luminous Mid- lands settings of earlier novels like The Limits of Enchantment, Some Kind of Fairytale will likely invite comparisons to everyone from Carter to (there’s a distinctly enchanted wood), but you have to reach a bit further to appreciate the subtlety and complexity of Joyce at the top of his form, which he clearly is here. comes to mind, for example, with the various ways in which Joyce manipulates multiple points of view and nar- rator reliability – he (or his unnamed narrator) tells us on the very first page that ‘‘everything depends on who is telling the story’’ and that ‘‘there are con- siderable parts I’ve had to imagine’’ of what follows. In short, Joyce is a master at writing stories that know they are stories, and before we’re done we’ll have seen chapters narrated from three or four different first-person viewpoints, other chapters not in first person but limited to a character’s viewpoint, other third person chapters in which characters tell their tales to other characters, and a few chapters (from the point of view of an eccentric but not foolish psychologist) that seem to wryly comment on the various ways that readers might approach the central tale, from those seeking literary sources to those who simply want to keep herding the story back into the box of psychological realism. That central story turns out to be a familiar and almost classic tale. Mary and Dell Martin, a comfortable middle-aged couple – though with unspeci- 68 fied tensions that are always the signal in Joyce of a tale yet to be told – have settled down to Christmas dinner when someone knocks at the door. To their astonishment, it’s their daughter Tara, who had disappeared as a teenager in the adjoining Charnwood Forest some 20 years earlier, and who was long presumed dead. Though bedraggled and adamant about wearing sunglasses even indoors, she seems hardly to have aged at all. Soon Tara’s brother Peter – now 40 and married with teenage children – is summoned, and quickly grows skeptical of Tara’s inconsistent tale of having wandered the world for two decades. When Tara reluctantly reveals her bizarre explanation of where she actually was and why she hasn’t aged, it sets up the novel’s central mys- tery, and links the novel to a long tradition of folklore and fantasy, dating back to legends of Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer and to literary fantasies at least as far back as Ludwig Tieck’s ‘‘The Elves’’. For the most part these traditional tales have focused on the adventures of the protagonist in a magical place, often with a time dilation aspect (the girl who spends a night with the elves in Tieck’s tale returns the next morning to find that seven years have passed, for example). But while Tara’s tale may involve magic, it has a decidedly unromantic edge, and one that may even come to threaten characters back home in Leicestershire. Chief among these is Richie, Tara’s former boyfriend, a talented but desultory musician who had been widely suspected of her murder. As his tale unfolds, so do those of Peter, his wife Genevieve, their children Josie and Jack (whose problem involving an elderly neighbor lady’s cat provides a clever thematic echo of the change- ling theme), the neighbor lady herself, and the aforementioned psychologist (wonderfully named Vivian Underwood), hired to discover the psychological roots of Tara’s fantastic tale. Here is where Joyce really excels in revealing the interpenetration of the realistic and the fantastic: he offers as much attention and insight to the tales of those left behind as to the tale of the fantastical adventure itself, revealing a hidden magic in those mundane lives that, in the end, enables us to care as much about a missing cat as about the wonders of Elfland. Fantasy, he seems to insist in echoing that long tradition, is real, but, for the most part, it’s elsewhere, and the rest of us have to muddle through with what magic we can make of our own lives and relationships. Few writ- ers today can match Joyce in evoking the beauty of that delicate balance, in conveying the fantasy of ordinary life or the ordinariness of the fantastic. The Limits of Enchantment, though apparently not widely read, remains among my favorites of Joyce’s novels, and Some Kind of Fairytale works the same sort of magic and in many ways is even more accomplished. This time, people, pay attention. –Gary K. Wolfe (Reviewed in Jul 2012) 69 Some Kind of Fairy Tale [Second Review] Despite the SFnal bits, and a narrator who bears some resemblance to Moorcock’s wild juvenile Elric, the Thorns books also display strong connec- tions to fairy tales. (For one thing, thorns could just as well be briars – and ‘‘Briar Rose’’ is better known as ‘‘Cinderella’’.) That brings me to Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce. While it took its rightful place at the top of Gary Wolfe’s July reviews, I’d like to add some further comments, for it’s an extraordinary work. Joyce has deconstructed the primal tale of getting lost in an enchanted wood and emerging, apparently not all that long afterward, to find that the ordinary world has leaped several decades further on. He subjects it to modern scien- tific analysis and psychological probes. If this is really Tara, the teenager who vanished 20 years ago, how can she still be so young? What contortions has her mind gone through, during her time away from home? Other British writers have explored human encounters with lingering, ar- chetypal wildness – Robert Holdstock in and Angela Carter in The Company of Wolves. But Graham Joyce strays particularly far from standard narrative technique, and makes it work! His family, distressed by the loss of a daughter and still reeling from the impact even now, consists of in- dividuals with their own outlooks and emotional dilemmas. The policemen, scientists and thinkers are equally real, not just a bunch of concepts given voices. Whether or not they manage to be open-minded about this business, it matters to each of them. The way the girl Tara gets drawn into this book’s Faerie, and what she finds there, also has a rough modern edge quite distinct from the Romantics’ lyri- cal retellings or Aryan/Wagnerians’ sinister devotion to the Brothers Grimm. Tara could have been stolen away by a rapist and felt the post-traumatic stress that plagues her now, even if she can look back to scenes a lot more mind- blowing than some dank suburban flat where the villain does his dirty work. The experience profoundly changed her – not always for the worse, though it has left her uncertain about both worlds. Ambivalence takes special forms in Faerie, like an array of bugs that shift configuration and assume the guise of flowers. Some Kind of Fairy Tale finds room for ambivalence in all of its forms: mundane, horrific, comic and di- vinely lovely. Note on sources: along with Gary’s review, I found useful commentary in an article on the Grimms and a host of retellers, compilers and scholars of fairy- tales, ‘‘Once Upon a Time’’ by Joan Acocella, (The New Yorker, July 23, 2012). –Faren Miller (Reviewed in Sep 2012) Return to Fantasy list. 70 The Drowning Girl, Caitlín R. Kiernan (Roc 978-0-451-46416-3, $16.00, 338pp, tp) March 2012. There are least a few passages in her new novel The Drowning Girl: A Memoir in which Caitlín R. Kiernan seems determined to reinvent the terms of Gothic fiction from the ground up, and she comes amazingly close to succeeding. Her protagonist Imp (short for India Morgan Phelps) is a nar- rator so unreliable she doesn’t even trust her own accounts – she tells us up front that she’s schizophrenic, that ‘‘My family’s lunacy lines up tidy as box- cars,’’ and that she’s only escaped hospitalization herself through a medley of medications. She sometimes refers to herself in third person, and whenever she goes off her meds it’s a signal that we’re in for one of those remarkably visceral and visionary passages that may get us closer to the core truth of the novel than anything in Imp’s acutely self-conscious attempts to make a narrative out of what’s happening to her (she also keeps reminding us of the crucial distinction between truth and fact). But instead of the fevered Gothic you-will-think-me-mad-but-I-swear-it’s-true voice which we’ve heard from Poe to de Maupassant to Lovecraft, Imp’s voice is disarmingly engaging, sometimes remarkably sensual, and always self-questioning. She’s a remark- able character – probably Kiernan’s best – whose truth we want to believe in even as we question her facts. ‘‘My stories shape-shift like mermaids and werewolves,’’ she tells us, and she’s right. As in much of Kiernan’s fiction, art plays a significant role in The Drown- ing Girl. Imp is herself an artist and occasional writer (we get a couple of interpolated examples of her stories), and since childhood she’s been obsessed with a painting called ‘‘The Drowning Girl’’ by a minor 19th- century artist named Saltonstall. The painting – which doesn’t de- pict a drowning girl at all, but one simply wading into the water – seems to her to offer a window into a hidden world, and she tries to learn everything she can about its origins. Not long after Imp meets Abalyn, a transsexual video game reviewer who becomes her new lover, the two of them visit a gallery show of a recently deceased painter named Albert Perrault (who we’ve encountered before in Kiernan’s fiction), whose work disturbs her in a different way, suggesting a kind of Angela Carter-ish revisioning of ‘‘Little Red Riding Hood’’, which Imp hated as a child. Still later, lines from Lewis Carroll’s ‘‘The Lobster Quadrille’’ are used as an absolutely chilling omen of Imp’s spiraling breakdown. The proximate cause of that crisis happens one evening when Imp finds and brings home a pale, soaked, and naked woman wandering along the highway near the Blackstone River, and who seems to know Imp and even Abalyn. She says her name is Eva Canning, but vanishes later that night. Imp begins having a series of nightmares, is convinced she sees Eva Can- 71 ning on the street one day, and grows so erratic that Abalyn breaks up with her. Always the obsessive researcher, Imp begins to find or draw connections that involve not only Eva Canning, Perrault, and Saltonstall, but even the Japanese ‘‘suicide forest’’ Aokigahara, accounts of the last wild wolf killed in Massachusetts, ‘‘Little Red Riding Hood’’, and a California suicide cult which Kiernan readers will recognize from her story ‘‘Houses Under the Sea’’. What these connections are, how real they are, and how they unpack ever deeper layers of Imp’s psychology and spirituality, is something best left for readers to discover, rather stunningly, for themselves. But Eva Canning herself is one of the most compelling ghost-story figures I’ve seen since ’s Eva Gallo in Ghost Story, with whom she shares some characteristics, and The Drowning Girl (which is dedicated to Straub) is one of the most complexly moving and richly layered tales I’ve read since that classic work. It’s fitting that what is easily Kiernan’s best novel to date should earn a place in that company. –Gary K. Wolfe (Reviewed in Mar 2012) Return to Fantasy list.

Glamour in Glass, Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor 978-0-7653-2557-0, $24.99, 332pp, hc) April 2012. Mary Robinette Kowal made her debut in 2010 with Shades of Milk and Honey, portraying magic (‘‘glamour’’) as something like another in the quiet arsenal of ‘‘womanly arts’’ of the Regency era, with a tone closer to the quiet comedy of a novel than to the bold span of epic. Glamour is not entirely the domain of women: over the course of the book, plain young Jane Ellsworth learns from the male glamourist known as Mr. Vincent, and proceeds to win his heart. But a vocabulary involving ‘‘threads,’’ ‘‘folds’’ and ‘‘ether’’ makes it resemble a weird combination of tapestry and alchemy – far from the grand manipulations of aspiring Merlins or Dark Lords. Sequel Glamour in Glass shows how both needs and uses change in war time, even among the arts, turning the abilities of its heroine and hero (now Mr. and Mrs. Vincent) to the purposes of the British Crown. What should have been their romantic honeymoon in Europe goes wrong almost from the start. After Napoleon’s abdication, the political situation remains un- settled; all too soon he’s on the march again, at the head of rebel armies. The threatened government arrests Vincent as a spy – which he may be, though not of any familiar type. In her attempts to save him, Jane must learn first- hand how pregnancy affects the workings of glamour. Though the unmistakably plain Jane on the first book’s cover, from a his- toric painting, has been replaced by a more ingenuous photomontage (com- 72 plete with bubbles), our heroine still has a scientist’s grim determination to find out just what makes glamour function, or not function. The question becomes urgent now that she is with child, a state where all her talents must wait on hold until the child is born ... or must they? In her world as in ours, technological experiment, is on the rise; perhaps she can create some gizmo that will save the day. But the process won’t be easy, and a lot can still go wrong. While Europe seethes, the Vincents’ perilous adventures come to an end that seems right, if not ideal for all involved. Like Novik, Kowal ignores the bounds – in this case, those of romantic fantasy and the comedy of manners. –Faren Miller (Reviewed in May 2012) Return to Fantasy list.

And Blue Skies from Pain, Stina Leicht (Night Shade 978-1-59780-347-2, $14.99, 384pp, tp) March 2012. Cover by Min Yum. Back in the realm of sequels to novels from 2011, Stina Leicht’s And Blue Skies from Pain shows that the promising, unconventional mix of rebellion, punk rock, and Faerie in her debut Of Blood and Honey was no fluke. In the divided Ireland of the 1970s, the clash between Catholics and Prot- estants has escalated through three increasingly violent decades, as politics and anger supplant all moral codes regarding man’s humanity to man. For Leicht, that brutal mindset extends to magic – to differing degrees, since only a special branch of Catholics seems fully aware of supernatural opponents (referred to interchangeably as ‘‘demons’’ or ‘‘fallen angels’’) and dedicates itself to launching surprise attacks on them, leaving others to strike back at mortal foes like the IRA in full view of the media. The new book opens with a flashback to the assault by soldiers of this Mili- tis Dei where Probationary Guardian Joseph Murray first encountered or- phan Liam Kelly among a group of hapless kids in the hands of some genu- inely nasty demons. Yet this won’t be a simple clash of good vs. evil, an act of rescue, for these supposed children’s oddly glowing eyes reveal that they’re no better than their captors, according to church doctrine. Filled with unac- countable pity, Joseph lets one of them escape. Past trauma, and the scruffy upbringing of a Catholic boy in bloodsoaked Northern Ireland, made Liam into the embittered young widower, criminal with some jail time, and IRA hanger-on of the first book, which only added to his mixture of rage and confusion by revealing his supernatural heritage: half-Fey. What could such a crazy thing mean in these modern times? He learned a little bit about it then, as did Joseph – now Father Murray – when they came back into contact. But that was just a start, for both of them. 73 While the siblings in Duncan’s quasi-English fantasy face great difficulties after the family ties seem broken, they live in a world where the rebel under- ground includes deep ties with magic. There’s no equivalent support group for Liam. Although some Irish still know about the Fey, they’re not driven by a sense of ‘‘old religion,’’ let alone steeped in the academe of the supernatural. Instead of skilled mages, Ireland has a handful of sensitives who can perceive the presence of pookas, devils, or ghosts (those former humans), rarely with full knowledge of the being that had sex with them or haunts them. Nonetheless, the restless spirit and shifting dangers of the 20th century stir inquiring minds like Joseph’s. He’ll overlook the human-pooka halfbreed’s consistently foul mouth and criminal past, if Liam’s blundering attempts to learn more about himself can help illuminate the nondemonic nature of Fae – perhaps even a potential value for their longtime foes in Militis Dei. And Liam Kelly gets caught up in Father Murray’s unlikely (but so modern) quest for a detente between the Church and one special kind of Fallen. Rootless, insecure, open to strange minds that rarely seem to wish him well, Liam begins to lose any sense of distinction between the latest criminal ven- tures that catch him up, the pain of memory, the pull of temptation, the very nature of a body that’s not always human and can find itself in worlds he doesn’t know. Will all of this lead to madness, or transformation? Fans of the old version, who sprinkles every sentence with ‘‘fucking’’ this or that, needn’t worry that he’ll change too much. Whatever happens, this lad’s no angel. But he could face even greater challenges with some aplomb, if Stina Leicht extends his tale. I’d love to see more. –Faren Miller (Reviewed in Apr 2012) Return to Fantasy list.

Bullettime, Nick Mamatas (ChiZine) August 2012. I’ve loved Nick Mamatas’s uncompromising, spiky, and often blackly funny fiction for years, but Bullettime is his best work yet. The book had a bumpy road to publication – turns out it’s hard to find a publisher willing to print a book with a school shooter for a protagonist, especially when such events happen in real life with distressing regularity – but this story of a young man who encounters the goddess of discord and watches his life fall apart in various different timelines was worth waiting for. It’s the very definition of thought-provoking. (Full disclosure: I gave Mamatas feedback on an early draft, and am thus mentioned in the acknowledgments.) – (Reviewed in Feb 2013 Return to Fantasy list. 74 Sharps, K.J. Parker (Orbit 978-9-316-17775-7, $15.99, 454pp, tp) July 2012. Though I didn’t have a chance to read K.J. Parker’s The Hammer last year, Sharps is another standalone, so there’s no catching up involved. This book centers around swordplay as more than just a sport or the province of duel- ists; here it’s a tool employed by a ruling faction in Scheria for dealing with its restless neighbor Permia, the land across the border (and a surviving de- militarized zone), conquered just a generation ago through a general’s ruth- less act of mass destruction. Instead of war, there will be a contest between teams from each nation – what could be more civil? But nothing in this stew of politics, religions, and messy finances will prove to be civil or straightfor- ward, including the assembly of Scheria’s team. Blackmail, bribery, and a chance to escape criminal prosecution all play a part in gathering this motley crew of reluctant champions and merely good-ish players (included for some purpose not yet disclosed). Even their implements turn out to be wrong: not the protected foils they expected, with buttons on the tip of each blade, but the title’s ‘‘sharps,’’ capable of killing an opponent. Before Team Scheria makes it across the border, these weapons have already helped save them from an unexpected attack – lucky mistake from the armourers? Optimists might think so, while cynics will form their own opinion. Without chapters or larger divisions – just viewpoint shifts as the group comes together, travels, confronts both unexpected perils and official op- ponents, copes with further dangers, etc. – Sharps never allows the reader to settle into the comforts of narrative and character types found in more traditional fantasy. These people play against type, enough to make getting to know them a surprisingly tentative process. The team member with the closest link to power, Addo (son of General Carnufex, wryly nicknamed The Irrigator for the decisive way he drowned a Permian city to end the war), de- scribes himself as ‘‘the civilian of the family,’’ unable to discuss the strategy of old battles with any of the military mavens he encounters. Neither he nor anyone else here, not even the book’s handful of true believers, uses much Fantasy Archaic in their talk. Parker has a sly tendency to strip away glamor from both people and plac- es. At a Permian military station, its palatial baths lined with marble and graced by an ‘‘impossibly high’’ ceiling with a painted fresco of some ancient sea battle, not all is luxury: the room ‘‘was stone cold and smelt very slightly of rotten eggs.’’ And Captain Baudia, the ‘‘exquisite young Imperial’’ who runs the station (his red boots sporting silver hooks in the shape of eagle’s heads, his uniform’s hood lined with tiger fur) ‘‘would have been extremely good-looking if his nose hadn’t been cut off flush with his face.’’ This author can still appreciate the finer things. One scene, which intro- 75 duces a former chamber of the Fire Priests (turned over to a guild after the Disestablishment) as ‘‘almost unbearably beautiful,’’ goes on to justify that description with an eloquence and immediacy such that the old splendor can still touch the heart. Such moments tend to be rare, though, in a sce- nario where finances are screwed on both sides of the DMZ and politics have reached a crisis-point where apparent efforts toward treaty and accommo- dation could turn back into war – if they haven’t already. The situation’s murky even for the Scherian team, with its secrets and dis- guises. While a swordswoman playing the part of male won’t fool us for long, the rumored traitor is only revealed much later, along with moti- vations. That turns out to be one of the few slow processes in a narrative which develops into a ripping good yarn, full of big events both at home and abroad. Murder! Marriage! Further mayhem! A final glimpse of a time decades ahead provides some closure, where understated wit mingles with life-and-death surprise. This is another splendid offering from K.J. Parker, the (pseudonymous) British fantasist who seems incapable of writing in anything but top form. –Faren Miller (Reviewed in Jul 2012) Return to Fantasy list.

Hide Me Among the Graves, (William Morrow 978-0-06- 123154-4, $25.99, 512pp, hc) March 2012. It’s been more than two decades since Tim Powers’s The Stress of Her Regard appeared in 1989, and, rather appallingly, it was out of print for several of those years until Tachyon issued a new edition a few years ago. It’s always been among my favorite Powers novels, partly because it’s a sheer wallow for English lit majors, with the Romantic poets who lurked in the background for much of getting full turns on- stage, and it left a lot of us wondering what Powers – who set The Anubis Gates near the beginning of the 19th century and The Stress of Her Re- gard in 1816 and later – might make of the rest of that fantasy gold of a century. Instead, throughout the 1990s, he gave us generally reward- ing detours to Las Vegas and California in the Fault Lines series of novels (, Expiration Date, and Earthquake Weather), even venturing into John le Carré cold war territory with , which remains one of his strongest novels in purely literary terms. Meanwhile, for an entire generation of readers, the whole Victorian era got transformed into a kind of theme park for steampunk, a mode which Powers, along with his pals and K.W. Jeter, arguably invented way back in the ’80s. As for the new novel, Hide Me Among the Graves, Powers gave us a hint of 76 what he was up to with ‘‘A Time to Cast Away Stones’’, which appeared in his Tachyon collection The Bible Repairman and Other Stories last year and which serves as a convenient link between The Stress of Her Regard and this one. That story, set in 1824, featured Edward Trelawney, who had known Keats and Shelley during their struggles with lamia and nephelim, who himself had suffered a near-fatal bullet wound during the Greek war of independence, and who managed to make it out of Greece with, among other things, Shelley’s jawbone. The jawbone, the bullet wound, and Tre- lawney himself all play central roles in Hide Me Among the Graves, and Trelawney emerges in both the novel and the story as one of Powers’s most complex creations – vain, foolishly ambitious, and heroic all at once – but he’s not really at the center of the tale. Instead, the tale focuses on two sets of characters, one historical, one fictional. Powers seems to view history in much the same way a hungry cat views a disabled mouse, so it’s no real surprise that his historical figures turn out to be the Rossetti siblings – Christina, Dante Gabriel, William, and Maria – who were haunted enough on their own terms even with- out the aid of vampires and predatory spirits. For one thing, their uncle was John Polidori, the friend and physician of Byron’s who was present at the famous 1816 storytelling session that gave birth to Frankenstein and Polidori’s own The Vampyre, and who also figured in The Stress of Her Regard. He’s long deceased as the novel opens in 1862 (after an important set-up prologue in 1845), but as we soon learn, not quite deceased enough: a well-meaning ritual by the teenage Christina has given him entrée into the psychic life of the family (these things, like many vampires, have to be invited in), and he returns in force years later, now allied with ancient ma- lignant forces dating back to Roman Britain. Dante Gabriel, for his part, is obsessed with guilt over the death of his model-turned-wife-turned lauda- num addict Elizabeth Siddal, leaving an original manuscript of his poems in her coffin, only to have it later exhumed ostensibly to retrieve the poems (this is a part that Powers didn’t even have to make up, though of course in his version retrieving the poems is only a ruse). Parallel to the story of the Rossettis is the tale of the fictional John Craw- ford, a veterinary surgeon whose name might ring a bell to those who remember Michael Crawford, the protagonist of The Stress of Her Re- gard (John recalls his parents telling him they were related to ‘‘a species of vampire’’). Grieving over the death of his wife and sons years earlier, Crawford is sought out by Adelaide McKee, a former prostitute whom Crawford had previously encountered under very weird circumstances on Waterloo Bridge, and who tells him they now share a daughter – and one 77 who is in mortal peril at that. It’s not long before we realize that the same supernatural forces plaguing the Rossettis are threatening their daughter, and eventually they all join forces in a series of increasingly and wildly spooky adventures involving vast caverns beneath London, revenants of various types, and even the occasional demon – all the while aided by the wonderfully ambiguous and problematical figure of the aging Trelawny, who plays something of a Van Helsing role for much of the narrative. Sub- terranean London has nearly become a genre unto itself in the past several years, but here it gets the full Powers treatment, and it’s like discovering it for the first time. Meticulous as always in his research, Powers also draws an engaging portrait of London itself, with its dire poverty contrasted with the newly finished Thames embankment, an emblem of a landscape in- creasingly transformed by Victorian engineering and optimism. But Hide Me Among the Graves is not merely a sequel to The Stress of Her Regard, and that novel is no way a prerequisite to enjoying it. In the decades since Stress appeared – with novels such as Last Call or Declare – Powers has notably refined his novelistic skills. His set pieces are no less spectacular and his plotting no less kinetic, but the prose is more measured and less overripe than in those earlier works, the characters more complex and conflicted, the action more tightly focused (nearly all of it takes place in London over a 15-year period, rather than wandering all over Europe). Especially notable are Christina, torn between the devoutness of her sister Maria and the aestheticism of Dante and his Pre-Raphaelite friends (who barely put in an appearance at all); Adelaide, easily the coolest kick-ass character here; and the magnificently self-absorbed yet ambivalently he- roic Trelawny. Only the youthful Swinburne, who plays a crucial role late in the novel, comes off as a bit of a caricature, a foppish Victorian Carrot Top who never has a clue as to what he’s gotten into. And, in a subtle touch of embedded lit-crit, the same eldritch forces that threaten the Rossettis (and even London itself) also serve as muses: when they’re around, Chris- tina and Dante and Swinburne produce their finest poetry and art; when they’re not, the work turns mediocre. Those same nephelim seem to do wonders for Powers as well; this is his best novel in years, and the Rosset- tis seem a better match for his morally complex art than even the earlier Romantics. Of course, if it is the nephelim behind what Powers is up to, we might be well advised to avoid him at conventions, or at least not invite him up to our rooms. –Gary K. Wolfe (Reviewed in Feb 2012) Return to Fantasy list.

78 The Mirage, Matt Ruff (Harper 978-0-06-197622-3, $25.99, 432pp, hc) Feb- ruary 2012. You never know what to expect from Matt Ruff. His books run the gamut from contemporary fantasy to gonzo SF to mainstream psychological litera- ture, but they all share a biting sense of humor, an abiding humanity, and certain recurring themes – notably the fact that good intentions do not as- sure good outcomes. The Mirage shares all those qualities, but as always, Ruff leads us into new territory as well. The essential premise of The Mirage is this: what if funda- mentalist Christian terrorists from a backwater holdfast in North America attacked the enlightened and wealthy United Arab States, hijacking com- mercial planes and crashing them into the Tigris and Euphrates World Trade Towers in Baghdad? The date of that attack, November 9, 2001 – commonly shorthanded to 11/9 – would go down in infamy, and lead to an invasion of the Christian States of America and a long, messy occupation. The Mirage is set in the year 2009 in this mirror universe, with the citizens of the UAS weary of their overseas entanglements, and the government growing ever more ferocious in its attempts to crack down on terrorists and American insurgents. This is no simple inversion of our own Eastern and Western civilizations, though – the UAS isn’t merely the with camels instead of hors- es. In the UAS, men can have multiple wives, equal rights for women is a touchy issue, laws against homosexual activity are rigorously enforced, the government is firmly Islamic, and there’s a reason Israel is located in central Europe. (Such details are partly gleaned from entries in this world’s version of Wikipedia, The Library of Alexandria, which are sprinkled between chap- ters to provide background details and shed new light on what came before). In the UAS, Bin Laden is a fanatical conservative senator, running a secret branch of the intelligence services as a private army – a group called Al Qaeda. Saddam Hussein is a ‘‘labor leader’’ and big man in the community, but is widely known as a mobster and crime boss with delusions of gran- deur. Countless famous historical and contemporary figures have their roles altered in radical but logical ways. But Ruff is mainly interested in the lives of ordinary people, and how the terrorist attacks and aftermath have changed them. Our main protagonist, Mustafa, was a Halal Enforcement agent, trying to stop alcohol and other forbidden contraband from entering the UAS, but after the 11/9 attacks and some personal tragedies he becomes an agent of Arab Homeland Security. Under interrogation, a thwarted Christian suicide bomber tells him an out- landish story: the world they live in is a lie – a mirage – and in the real world, America is a superpower, and the ‘‘United Arab States’’ are a collection of 79 squabbling Middle Eastern countries, some bombed into rubble. In the pris- oner’s apartment, Homeland Security finds the front page of a nonexistent newspaper called dated September 12, 2001, which supports the bomber’s story. This is our first hint that Ruff is doing more than just dabbling in the counterfactual waters of alternate history – he’s up to something deeper and stranger. Other artifacts from the alleged ‘‘real’’ world, where America is a dominant superpower, begin to appear, and while they’re obviously fakes, the ques- tion is, why would anyone go to such lengths to create such an elaborate yet ridiculous hoax? And why are Senator Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda thugs so murderously determined to suppress stories about ‘‘the mirage’’? Mus- tafa and his fellow agents – including a closeted-by-necessity gay man and a woman who has to be twice as tough as the men around her – travel to oc- cupied America to track down the source of the mirage rumors. Ruff’s answers to these mysteries – which grow more profound and meta- physical as the book continues – are inventive and satisfying, and the ex- planations are all rooted in the culture and mythology of the Middle East. Mustafa’s reaction to what he learns leads to some spectacular set pieces and major upheavals.... but don’t expect a return to our own reality’s flawed but cozily familiar status quo. Ruff’s fondness for Philip K. Dick is well-established – his 2010 novel Bad Monkeys had a protagonist named Jane Charlotte, after Dick’s twin sister who died in infancy – and that author’s influence here is unmistakable, too. Dick wrote The Man in the High Castle, after all, a novel set in a world where the Axis powers won WWII, and where the nature of reality, and of history itself, are ultimately called into question. In The Mirage, Matt Ruff has written a Man in the High Castle for the age of global terror. –Tim Pratt (Reviewed in Feb 2012) Return to Fantasy list.

The Apocalypse Codex, Charles Stross (Ace 978-1-937007-46-1, $25.95, 326 pp, hc) July 2012. Charles Stross’s Laundry stories offer a curious and not always comfort- able kind of entertainment: intrigue-adventure thrills, clever fiddling with a mixed bag of genre conventions, and a genuinely horrific vein of horror. The series takes the central vision of Stross’s protonovel, the thoroughly science- fictional Scratch Monkey, and translates it into Lovecraftian-fantasy terms (which is perhaps SF in gothic drag anyway) with an overlay of post-Le Carré spy-bureaucracy satire. It’s tempting to take this literary tossed salad not very seriously, to identify the homages and inversions and parodies as 80 they fly by, to laugh at the cross-genre in-jokes, and to hold the scary stuff at arm’s length because, after all, adventures need dangers to advance the plot. But that would underestimate both Stross’s writerly chops and the thread of serious nightmare-confrontation that powers these grim little comedies. The Apocalypse Codex is a direct sequel to The Fuller Memorandum, picking up on the career of computational demonologist and reluctant field agent Bob Howard after the period of rehabilitation required as a result of his recent exertions among the minions of the Elder Things that are al- ways hoping to break into our world and eat some souls. Bob’s part in this adventure begins with his being handed off from his usual boss and men- tor, the creepy and dangerous Angleton, and into the care of the properly bureaucratic Gerald Lockhart, of the sub-department interestingly named Externalities, who informs him that his next assignment will improve his ‘‘management experience,’’ particularly with regard to, among other things, ‘‘external contractors.’’ Bob had no idea that external contracting was even possible in the Laundry’s areas of operation, but he finds himself teamed with an independent sorceress and her mil-spec hard-guy associate on an almost-off-the-books operation of some political delicacy, with orders to ‘‘monitor and report on [their] officially unauthorized and unsanctioned activities.’’ Persephone Hazard and Johnny McTavish both have interestingly painful personal histories that provide them with the skill-sets and moti- vation for the kind of work they do, a sample of which is provided in the book’s Topkapi-with-hellhounds opening sequence. Bob’s new mission does demand a degree of organizational and political finesse, since it involves an approach to the Prime Minister by an American televangelist whose smell disturbs various folk whose job it is to sniff out demonic influences. Rev. Schiller is slick, charming, extremely rich and suc- cessful, and way too persuasive to not have something more than ordinary human charisma and hustle on his side. So Persephone and Johnny, with Bob as nominal observer and actual backup, are off to the States to penetrate the Golden Promise Ministries’ Colorado compound and determine exactly which deity is the actual object of worship there. Of course, it isn’t the one the punters think it is, nor is the collection limited to the currency dropped on the plate as it passes around in mid-service. To the organizational and Brit-culture comedy that is a Laundry tale hall- mark Stross has added some America-specific satirical material, rooted in a marked disdain for what Johnny calls ‘‘godheads’’ in general and Ameri- can superchurch political evangelism in particular. (I am reminded of the emphatic scorn aimed at Bush-era politics toward the end of the Merchant Princes sequence.) As Persephone reads the research file on the ‘‘interlock- ing machinery of religious lobbying and fund-raising groups’’ connected to 81 Golden Promise, she notes that they were all merging into a whirling tattered spiderweb of Christian Dominionist pressure groups and fund-raising or- ganizations. Deeper connections to shadowy, ultra-conservative billionaire sponsors were hinted at but coyly elided – nobody wanted to speak truth to the power to launch a million libel lawsuits. And what’s behind that spiderweb of nastiness are layers of even nastier delusion, brutality, and exploitation, all leading to a place that Bob has visit- ed before and really doesn’t want to see again. On the way there, we encoun- ter the now-expected perils and threats: demonic possession, alien brain parasites, human sacrifice, mass psychosis, curses and geases and glamours, oh my. And Bob also has to worry about tracking his expenses, because this is, after all, on Her Majesty’s dime. But wait, there’s more! And I don’t mean Johnny’s magic knives. Since part of this series’ genome is the Cold War espionage-intrigue thriller, a prudent reader should be prepared for deception, misdirection, backstabbing, front- stabbing, and betrayal by allies. Things Are Never What They Seem, even when you’d think that they couldn’t seem any worse. By the end, we have glimpsed more of the Laundry’s trapdoor-riddled organizational chart; know a bit more about the series’ horror-hanging-over-the-mantelpiece, CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN; and have seen Bob through a debriefing that points to a new level of responsibilities and a shift to ‘‘the other career lad- der.’’ I’d tell you what that is, but then I’d have to shoot myself. And then I’d never get to read the next installment, which I look forward to with a com- bination of dread and delight. –Russell Letson (Reviewed in Aug 2012) Return to Fantasy list.

Crandolin, Anna Tambour (Chômu Press 978-1-907681-19-6, $17.00/£12.50, 366pp, tp) November 2012. [Order from Chômu Press, 70 Hill St., Richmond, Surrey TW9 1TW, England; ]. Reading Anna Tambour’s Crandolin after those other three books feels a bit like entering a hall of mirrors and echoes, where elements of fiction (and not just fantasy) fragment and keep taking on new patterns. Initially bewildering, it turns out to be both funny and compelling, and strangely wise about its worlds. The key event comes when Nick Kippax, oenologist, wine columnist, and scholar of the most arcane olde cookbooks, finds an exotic stain on page 67 of one such tome. While other patrons of the library read on oblivious, he samples just a taste of the blot: crandolin! What happens next won’t be dis- closed for many chapters – though most chapters here are about the length 82 of a vignette, with titles whose mad variety could rival the names of Banks’s ship Minds. Eventually we learn that, from the mortal perspective, Nick has vanished, leaving his clothes behind. Other characters begin to show up, several of them in olden times that resemble a twisted take on The Arabian Nights, with its own special mon- sters instead of djinns. In Nick’s own not-quite-modern times, we meet an odd little ensemble of humans on a train in Gorbachev’s USSR, and they are eventually joined by two figures more like avatars: a Medusa-haired Muse and an aging male whose title (The Omniscient) no longer really suits his fading memory. Both of these figures work as sources of inspiration for or- dinary writers, though from radically different perspectives – hers drawn from the ‘‘romances’’ of the imagination, his strictly based on fact. Amid all this, Nick might as well be dead, and yet he’s almost everywhere... just beyond perception or comprehension. Part of him inhabits a disfiguring new mark on a woman’s face, among the people on the train, another bit of his scattered mind (still oddly capable of thought) has drifted into a bit of fluff in the nest of a monstrous desert bird, and more of it into two honey- pots. A traveling musician’s beloved bladder-pipe also bears the distinctive stain. Genres seem to shift and merge, refusing to keep to their bounds even when some of the pieces start to drift back together. The arguments and gradually improving relationship of the avatars made me think of Bujold’s lovers, while some of the desert wanderings recalled Banks’s visit to an arid Orbital (though that planetoid was much more obsessively maintained). As the assorted Nicks fumble toward shared self-awareness, the Omni- scient is struck by revelation about the branching nature of reality on a uni- versal scale. When the old pundit starts to talk about his latest notion, the Muse expects only boredom: she ‘‘folded her hands in her lap, composed her face, and prepared to count unicorns in an attempt to stay awake.’’ And yet his rather academic comments draw her in, the reader with her because they could explain the book’s peculiar structure, the plight of the Nicks, and ultimately some mysteries of modern physics. (That last part still bothers the Muse. Though she’s been listening more avidly than planned, she can’t escape a lingering sense of outrage: ‘‘But, to believe in physicists!’’) Although some characters get roughed up over the course of their unwant- ed adventures, while Nick faces the threat of losing his mind(s), the book never loses its antic side. From this perspective, it’s a mad romp through his- tory and fiction, pausing at some stations in the realm of ideas, never quite losing its links to old tropes and tales like the Princess in the Tower, even as it pursues other plotlines, like a quest for the materials for a ruler’s mighty moustache – only the hair of virgins will do. 83 It can seem like a fun ride or a maze, yet Crandolin is never just a joke. When Tambour finally invokes one storyteller’s sense of ‘‘fear and joy,’’ it’s genuine; we can share in the feeling, at the end of a long, strange trip. –Faren Miller (Reviewed in Nov 2012) Return to Fantasy list.

Worldsoul, Liz Williams (Prime 978-1-60701–295-5 $14.95, 312pp, tp) July 2012. Cover by Oliver Wetter. [Order from Prime Books, PO Box 83464, Gaithersburg MD 20883; .] While text printed on paper seems increasingly irrelevant in a logged-on world, some writers celebrate the book and its chief caretakers, librarians, in fantastic but respectful form. A librarian figured prominently in The Steel Seraglio (reviewed last month), and the blurb for Worldsoul (first in a new trilogy by Liz Williams) casts the role in even stronger terms by ask- ing, ‘‘What if being a librarian was the most dangerous job in the world?’’ That last word should probably be plural, since the city of Worldsoul sits at the nexus between Earth and a kind of multiverse – more conceptual than strictly planetary, linked by something other than FTL travel – known as the Liminality. Imagination is essential here; ‘‘Stories don’t always reflect the world; they make it, too.’’ Earthlings might never have achieved full access to such a place without the intervention of powerful aliens, the Skein, whose feats include a theft/ rescue shown in the Prologue, where the Library of Alexandria is saved from destruction by a ‘‘pale-haired woman’’ who essentially beams it up to World- soul to examine at her leisure. But now the Skein are gone, leaving behind a jumble of ‘‘storylines,’’ where gods and mythagos participate or meddle, the magics stored in scrolls or tomes have become increasingly unstable, and occultists must try to cope with demons, angels, and lesser spirits. When some of the works in her charge get uppity, librarian Mercy Fane can have her pick of empowered weapons. The guns still bear a freight of earthly history: ‘‘street kills, Northern Ireland... Nicaragua, Los Angeles;’’ the ‘‘legend’’ of one musket ‘‘[speaks] of blood and bayou.’’ She doubts her abil- ity to handle the musket safely and goes instead for an Old Irish rapier, from a broch ‘‘haunted by the ghosts of the warrior dead.’’ Surely it can help her, in the endless corridors where things whisper unseen? Unfortunately, no. A deadly being escapes from a tome in Section C, and remains on the lam. Mercy goes to another viewpoint character, the young female alchemist known simply as Shadow, whose district of the Worldsoul seems forged at least in part from the myths and culture of the Middle East, its sorcery ‘‘learned in the Great Desert, conjurations stolen from the back alleys of 84 Cairo and the cedar groves outside Baalbec.’’ Mercy already has something like a magical familiar from that realm, a ka (tiny sphinx figure), but only alchemists – and even heavier hitters like the mages – seem capable of giving her the help she needs. Despite a veil imbued with useful magics, Shadow turns out to have prob- lems of her own, including recent possession by an ifrit. Other plotlines and ‘‘Interludes’’ reveal further opponents, human and otherwise, who see an unrest verging on apocalypse as their path toward power over Worldsoul and the Liminality as a whole. Williams’s mixture of unearthly elements, which range from the Arabian Nights to Celtic, Nordic and beyond, with hints of earthly history (like those guns in the library’s Armory), manages to bring a sense of uncertainty, even irreverence, to what could be a chronicle of dire events. While only her vil- lains may truly revel in a multiverse that seems to be coming unglued, the reader can also take pleasure from surreal weirdness described in prose with no unnecessary flourishes. If an old god has ‘‘a sour smell,’’ this book in- forms us straightaway! –Faren Miller (Reviewed in Aug 2012) Return to Fantasy list.

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85 Young Adult

The Drowned Cities, Paolo Bacigalupi (Little, Brown 978-0-316-05624-3, $17.99, 440pp, hc) May 2012. Paolo Bacigalupi, on the other hand, is comparatively restrained in terms of SFnal invention in his second YA novel, The Drowned Cities, set in the same cataclysmic future as his 2010 Ship Breaker. It’s not a direct sequel, and the only character held over is the genetically engineered ‘‘half-man’’ su- perwarrior Tool, a giant ‘‘DNA cocktail of killing – tiger and dog and hyena, and Fates knew what else.’’ Tool, who has accidentally been bred with more intelligence and independence than other half-men, disappeared after help- ing out the young protagonists, and as this novel begins he’s nearly dead, im- prisoned by a brutal militia calling itself the United Patriotic Front. The UPF is one of several freelance armies vying for control of the flooded southern and southeastern regions of the former, post-petroleum US (others have names like the Army of God or the Freedom Militia). Earlier efforts, mostly by the Chinese, to help develop solar and wind technologies for the region, were sabotaged by these same domestic terrorist groups. Throughout the novel, Tool’s contempt for these self-destructive power struggles among hu- mans is palpable, and so is Bacigalupi’s. There’s surprisingly little direct ref- erence to the shortsightedness of the ‘‘Accelerated Age’’ that led to this mess, although there are occasional mentions of more civilized areas like Boston arcologies, Orleans, or Beijing supertowers. Bacigalupi, in this rather brutal tale, is clearly focused on the dehumanizing effects of collapse more than on its economic causes. Tool, fleeing the militia which had captured him, makes his way toward Banyan City, where a young woman named Mahlia – who has already lost a hand to the Army of God – works as an assistant to an idealistic doctor. When the injured Tool captures her friend Mouse and holds him hostage until Mahlia can return with antibiotics, they form a rather odd alliance. After Mahlia tricks the militia into being attacked by fearsome ‘‘coywolv’’ (a hybrid of coyotes and wolves), she, the doctor, and Mouse also become fugitives, and much of what follows is a headlong adventure of pursuit, cap- ture, and escape, set almost entirely in the brilliantly realized and convincing swamplike setting that most of the region has become. The Drowned Cities themselves – where Mahlia herself came from – finally show up rather late in the novel, and it’s not much of a challenge to recognize a few familiar landmarks. As with Ship Breaker, Bacigalupi draws us into his action sequences with brusque efficiency, and there are some spectacular displays of Tool’s destruc- tive capacity and of the unmitigated sadism of some of the military leaders. 86 But whereas Ship Breaker focused more on the haplessness, shortsighted- ness, and greed of many of its characters, The Drowned Cities takes a much darker view of human nature – though not one we haven’t seen before in his adult fiction. The cost of environmental collapse is not merely social and economic, and the post-collapse world is not merely a new frontier which provides an arena for heroic action, though Mahlia is perhaps as heroic a figure as Bacigalupi is likely to invent. Instead, it’s a world in which we all become survivalists, and in which the rhetoric of the various quasi-military warlords sometimes sounds disarmingly like something you might hear on the Fox network (or even during a primary campaign?). Mahlia recalls her father once saying of his wife’s people, ‘‘If you had any sense, you’d spend less time shooting at one another and calling each other traitors, and more time building seawalls.’’ Or, in Tool’s more blunt assessment of the Drowned Cities survivors, ‘‘They didn’t plan. They fought all the time, and blamed each other for being poor and broken, instead of standing tall. Drowned Cit- ies people were less than animals, really, because they had reason, but didn’t use it.’’ Point taken, with hammer. –Gary K. Wolfe (Reviewed in Jun 2012) The Drowned Cities [Second Review] Paolo Bacigalupi’s first foray into YA fiction was the Printz Award-winning Ship Breaker, a dystopian adventure story focused tightly on one boy, Nailer Lopez, as his brutal life on a copper scavenging crew is disrupted by an en- counter with a shipwrecked girl from the upper echelons of a broken society. In a world where the distance between the rich and their fast clipper ships and the poor and their hard-scrabble existence couldn’t be in sharper con- trast, Ship Breaker never shied away from exploring the dark edge of what people are capable of. But the result was ultimately hopeful. Now Bacigalupi returns with The Drowned Cities, a companion to the earlier book that seems in many ways an argument with its predecessor. Is redemption truly possible? Is there always a means of escape that involves survival? Do people really make self-sacrificing choices when the pay-off is likely death? Should they? One thing is clear, if the gods the Deepwater Christians or Rust Saint worshippers pray to are real, they aren’t the sort to intervene. The Drowned Cities offers changes in geography and scope as well. While the story is tightly focused on the intersection of several characters engaged in or on the fringes of the never-ending war that consumes what used to be Washington DC, Bacigalupi has broadened the perspective by including mul- tiple viewpoints. The only shared character with Ship Breaker is the bioen- gineered warrior, half-man Tool, who it would have been a great disappoint- ment not to meet again. Seeing Tool through his own eyes is a much different 87 prospect than viewing him through the eyes of others. When the novel opens, he is a captive, surrounded by United Patriot Front soldiers who believe he’s been gravely injured in forced fighting. Tool makes a thrilling escape and flees into the swamp, pursued by the UPF. Being in Tool’s head, we learn more about his capabilities and the utter, earned contempt he feels for the humans who believe his programming should make him a loyal dog. Meanwhile, the story’s other primary character, Mahlia, is assisting her pro- tector, Doctor Mahfouz, with a childbirth that isn’t going well, in a village near the Drowned Cities of the title. Mahlia is a ‘‘war maggot,’’ branded as bad luck, a castoff. She’s also missing a hand, having lost it to Army of God soldier boys. She would have lost the other one too, if a young boy called Mouse hadn’t intervened and created a distraction that saved her. Related not by blood but by loyalty, the depth of Mahlia and Mouse’s bond comes through immediately in their casual yet sharp conversations. But Mahlia still can’t understand why Mouse would have put himself in danger to save her. That she remains so curi- ous about it foreshadows the decisions she’ll have to make. When Mahlia and Mouse happen on Tool, he takes Mouse hostage. Mahlia plans to trade medicine for Mouse’s life, but when she runs back through the jungle to Banyan Town it’s smack into the UPF soldiers hunting the ‘‘dog- face.’’ Realizing she must proceed with caution, Mahlia must help the injured men who’d clearly just as soon rape and kill her – aside from Sergeant Ocho. Ocho would probably be better off if he were as dead inside as most of the other soldiers seem to have been made by the things they’ve done. Ultimately, Mahlia must decide how loyal she really is to her found brother. What lengths will she go to in order to save Mouse? And will she be too late? The Drowned Cities is a darker novel than Ship Breaker, both on the sur- face and beneath it. The losses are greater this time around, the questions about human nature – about what it means to be human – harder to answer. The portrayal of the senseless, endless war and its atrocities feels clear-eyed, unvarnished, true. But while there may be less consolation in the seeming conclusions, this further excavation of the nature of redemption is not unre- lentingly bleak. This world may not reward noble actions and impulses, but sometimes, maybe, people who indulge in them might live.

–Gwenda Bond (Reviewed in Jul 2012) Return to Young Adult list.

Black Heart, Holly Black (Margaret K. McElderry 978-1442403468, $17.99, 304pp, hc) April 2012. Abandon hope of avoiding spoilers, all ye who read on. To talk about the 88 third and concluding volume in Holly Black’s slick, dark, and gorgeous Curse Workers series, it’s impossible to avoid discussing the developments of the first two installments – and these are definitely books in which the twists and turns of the plot are ones that should be experienced firsthand. The series is set in a world where magic is illegal and worked by touch – those who can do it have different types of powers, emotion workers versus physical workers, for instance – meaning gloves are worn by everyone to guard against being worked. There is a complex underground of workers who violate these laws, complete with con artist families like protagonist Cassel Sharpe’s and worker crime syndicates styled on the mob, like the one run by his sometime-girlfriend Lila Zacharov’s father. At the beginning of the series opener White Cat, Cassel is trying to be normal at a private school called Wallingford, where he runs a little low-key bookmaking racket, nothing more; unlike the rest of his family, he’s not a worker. But Cassel is having nightmares about a white cat, and wakes up on the roof of his dorm. As the story unfolds, he’s drawn back into his fam- ily – particularly by his brothers, Philip and Barron, both criminals – and discovers secrets about his own past. Barron has erased Cassel’s memories of the many killings they’ve had him do over the years, because it turns out Cassel is the rarest kind of worker there is: a transformation worker. He had even turned the girl he’d been in love with since childhood, Lila, into a cat. By the end of the book, Lila is once again a girl, and Cassel discovers his ultimate con artist mother has worked her to love him. In the next volume, Red Glove, Cassel struggles with his feelings for Lila, all the more painful because he can’t respond to her interest, knowing it isn’t real. Black effort- lessly ups the stakes throughout, putting Cassel between two bad options: the Feds and the Zacharov family. His mother has insinuated herself into the entourage of a powerful anti-worker politician, Governor Patton, who wants mandatory testing to ID workers. The end is bleak: Lila professes to despise Cassel, his brother Philip is dead, he’s turned Barron into a Fed, and promised he’ll work with them and sign up officially after graduation. Caught up? Not for long. Black Heart, the most accomplished in an in- credibly accomplished series, continues to raise the stakes even higher. The book begins with Cassel and Barron on a practice stake-out watching Cas- sel’s favorite target: Lila. He’s pining for her, though he knows she recently received her official induction into the crime family. They follow a worker they witness her visiting and Cassel chases him down after he does what he was hired to: an assassination. The worker sees Cassel, which means some- one might put together that he’s working for the Feds – if that someone is Lila’s dad, it will mean certain death. Cassel’s mother has been MIA, having to go on the lam after being busted working Governor Patton; the story is 89 all over the news. So when she turns up in Zacharov’s lair, asking for Cas- sel’s help, he’s in an even more difficult position. In Cassel’s distinctive first- person voice, we feel his options running down, and we hope he can see some way out of all this that we can’t. These books have never shied from darkness, and even the title intimates that this final one will be no different. That creates a tangible sense of dread throughout, a worry that the ending may truly prove black at heart. Here Black fully explores the themes and questions that have underpinned the entire series. These books are about Cassel’s nature, about his capabili- ties, and about what he can escape and what he can’t... or doesn’t want to. It is a specific story in a highly imaginative world that still manages to be com- pletely universal to the questions faced by its intended young audience – and by everyone, at one point or another. Who are we, really? What do we owe our families versus ourselves? Are we worthy of love? And does that mean we get to have it? Black builds to an unexpected, beautifully developed climax that answers these questions for Cassel, or at least suggests the answers to them. As in the previous novels, Black toys with the reader, but to complain would be a sin. The truth is, Black Heart is essentially a perfect book. –Gwenda Bond (Reviewed in Jun 2012)

Return to Young Adult list.

Zeuglodon, James P. Blaylock (Subterranean 978-1-59606-454-6, $35.00, 218pp, hc) September 2012. Cover by Jon Foster. [Order from , P.O. Box 190106, Burton MI 48519; .] In Zeuglodon, James P. Blaylock provides a treat for readers both young and old, setting elements of classic SF, fantasy, and YA (the acknowledge- ments mention such titles as Journey to the Center of the Earth, Pellucidar, and Huckleberry Finn, plus ‘‘the seafaring novels of Howard Pease) in the world of his early work The Digging Leviathan. Originally conceived as ‘‘a sort of illustration for the students in my Origins and Sources of Fiction class at the Orange County High School for the Arts,’’ it took on a life of its own, subtitled: ‘‘The True Adventures of Kathleen Perkins, Cryptozoologist’’. When Kathleen’s begins with one special day, a foggy spring morning at Lighthouse Beach (Northern California), she proves to be a ‘‘perfect little tomboy,’’ middle child of three preteen cousins, and the only girl. All of them like to interrupt bouts of home-schooling by their Uncle Hedge with travels along the shoreline, scavenging, and spinning tales – un- less the mermaid young Brendan claims he saw is real. But what seems to be an almost perfect childhood comes under threat by a ‘‘troublesome do- 90 gooder,’’ one Ms. Henrietta Peckworthy. Nosy Ms. Peckworthy would take great delight in calling up Social Ser- vices, so she could proclaim Hedge an unfit guardian and send them back to their obnoxious Aunt Ricketts in Los Angeles. The very mention of that place gives Kathleen the creeps: ‘‘If she had said that the world was going to explode at the end of the week it wouldn’t have been nearly so bad.’’ (North- ern Californians may sympathize – particularly Boomers raised to mistrust the horrors of L.A., much as their New England counterparts view .) As self-proclaimed members of The Guild of St. George, the cousins share a fascination with Earth’s ancient past, both known and crypto. Kathleen’s own specialty has not led her to discard all skepticism about mermaids, monsters, or yetis, but she keeps an open mind. Did horrific, vast sea crea- ture the Zeuglodon really die out millions of years ago, in the Cretaceous? ‘‘I have my suspicions about that. We have the bones of one in the Secret Museum.’’ Zeuglodon is also their nickname for Uncle’s Cadillac Coupe de Ville, with its ‘‘tremendous long fins in the back’’ and whitewall tires. The flamboyant old car can still travel beyond earthly roadways, as we find in the course of an adventure which develops gradually, starting with glimpses of a dark stranger whom they call the Creeper and a theft at the Museum (the journals of Basil Peach, Guild explorer and an old friend of Hedge’s), but jumps to far lands and ultimately a much stranger zone. Kath- leen’s mother had been searching for the lost portal to a legendary realm at the center of the Earth when her submersible vanished years ago in the Sar- gasso Sea; now, perhaps, they’ll find clues to her fate... or something better still? Along the way, they’ll also learn enough to worry what might happen to the world if a certain Sleeper wakes. On a much smaller scale, Blaylock clearly enjoys portraying the life of kids unchecked by most adult rules, like a scene at Hedge’s house where everyone eats ‘‘cold spaghetti and meat sauce sandwiches’’ on bread lavishly spread with butter – for breakfast! The sense of antic pleasure never entirely fades, even within Savage Pelucidar (their ultimate destination). It may also help you shrug off a sense of blatant Message, when one passage in the next-to- last chapter starts with the question, ‘‘What does that go to show you?’’ Zeuglodon’s final section, ‘‘Catching Everything Up’’, leaves off moralizing in favor of swift glimpses of an aftermath still open to further adventures in realms of imagination, where anything may happen, and the narrator isn’t driven by a need to teach the humble reader. –Faren Miller (Reviewed in Aug 2012) Return to Young Adult list. 91 The Diviners, Libba Bray (Little, Brown 978-0-316-12611-3, $19.99, 382pp, hc) September 2012. Libba Bray’s work can’t be neatly labeled. Yes, she mostly writes for the YA audience, which isn’t limited, of course, to young adults. But once you get outside of that category, it’s tough to say what a Libba Bray book is. Her Gemma Doyle trilogy is mostly . The Printz-winning Go- ing Bovine is a gonzo meditation on death. Beauty Queens is a satire of North American beauty myths, sort of. And, now, The Diviners, which is the first book in what will be a trilogy, is a trip to New York City in the roaring ’20s, where there are dark dealings afoot. What Bray does so well in her most recent books is balance between mad- cap adventure and resonant tragedy. Here, adventure takes the form of Evie, a young girl from Ohio who is sent to New York City to live with her Uncle Will until the gossip about her back in the Buckeye state dies down. Evie is a flapper, a modern gal who has bobbed her hair and can quip with the best of ’em. She falls into a mystery involving dead bodies, a pickpocket, and a creepy house. What unspools is plotted with no slack. The Diviners is a text- book case of how to organize this sort of supernatural mystery. Yet Bray never sacrifices story, character, and history for the plot. There is so much meat here that it’s hard to know where to take the first few bites. For example, she seamlessly merges an informational nugget about the late 1880s Chinese exclusion act without ever breaking the scene’s momentum. A later nugget works in New York State’s Burned-Over District while com- menting on how religions are born, a comment that echoes with contempo- rary readers as well as in the text: ‘‘How do you invent a religion?’’ Evie asked. Will looked over the top of his spectacles. ‘‘You say, ‘God told me the following,’ and then wait for people to sign up.’’ The Diviners, above all else, is a page-turner, one that is simultaneously self-contained and an excellent launching point for what is to come. And it is wholly a Libba Bray book, whatever that may mean. –Adrienne Martini (Reviewed in Oct 2012) The Diviners [Second Review] It might seem from afar that Libba Bray is returning to her fictional roots with The Diviners. Her first three books, which made up the Gemma Doyle trilogy, were historical fantasy, after all. Set in a Victorian-era girls’ school, those novels managed to explore women’s place in society while also pro- viding plenty of supernatural intrigue. She followed up those books with a radical departure, Going Bovine, the contemporary tale of a young man afflicted with Mad Cow disease, which won the Printz Award. And then 92 came Beauty Queens, an acid and yet ultimately heartfelt exploration of the dangers inherent in unrealistic beauty standards and their related ste- reotypes, by way of plane-wrecked teen beauty queens trying to survive a not-so-deserted island. Now The Diviners finds Bray kicking up her heels and providing the passwords to more than a few speakeasies in a 1920s New York where evil is on the prowl. But while she may be returning to historical fiction, Bray is in no danger of repeating herself. The first of a planned quartet and clocking in at nearly 600 pages, The Diviners is an inviting beginning to what is clearly a larger story. While much of the novel is concerned with introducing its cast of heroes, readers need not fear the slack of a set-up volume: there’s a chilling murderer on the loose. But first, a little more about the cast, because what a cast it is. Evan- geline ‘‘Evie’’ O’Neill is our primary focus, and we meet her still at home in Zenith OH, where she’s landed herself in hot water at a party – Evie has the ability to hold an object and see its owner’s secrets. Too bad in this case that she reveals a rich boy got a chambermaid pregnant. Exiled to New York as punishment, Evie couldn’t be happier. But while she wants desperately to be in the limelight, the flapper-styled life of every party, she also nurses the wound of her brother’s death on a far battlefield and a host of regrets for the way her actions sometimes hurt those around her. In lesser hands, Evie might be an unlikable character – and other members of our cast sometimes see her as selfish – but Bray allows us to understand her in a way that makes her anything but. Evie is staying with her Uncle Will, who runs the Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult, better known as ‘‘the Museum of the Creepy Crawlies.’’ Her serious uncle doesn’t really know what to make of Evie, nor does his assistant Jericho Jones, equally serious (a Nietzsche read- er), but a tall and handsome boy. Evie’s no-longer-long-distance best friend Mabel Rose, the shyer daughter of political organizers, has an even more se- rious crush on Jericho. Add to this mix several dashing characters who may also have secret powers – Memphis Campbell, a gorgeous Harlem bookie who used to be a healer; charming con artist Sam Lloyd; and Theta Knight, a Ziegfeld girl on the upswing. In flawlessly executed omniscient point of view, Bray introduces this bus- tling cast, as well as the victims of a man whistling an eerie children’s song about Naughty John, an infamous serial killer long-since dead. As tidbits are dropped about the return of ‘‘Diviners,’’ the Creepy Crawlies crew – a bona fide Scooby Gang – begin to assist in the investigation of the gruesome occult-tinged murders. Bray’s descriptive powers shine throughout, and her ability to balance the emotional life and subplots of so many characters with the larger story she’s developing feels effortless. The roaring 1920s are also a 93 character here, in all their political and social complexity, and one lovingly developed. The slang may strike some readers as a bit thick at first, but it doesn’t take long for following the patois to become second nature. With The Diviners, Bray moves into new ground with more thrills and chills than any she’s previously covered. There is, of course, a real and op- eratic darkness descending over the lively tail-end of the ’20s, and we can’t help be keenly aware of the Great Depression on the horizon. That makes the supernatural threat the characters are focused on all the more resonant. There is darkness coming, and we know it’s unavoidable. Bray’s finest and most assured work yet, The Diviners is an undeniable standout of the year. The next installment can’t get here soon enough.

–Gwenda Bond (Reviewed in Dec 2012) Return to Young Adult list.

The Crown of Embers, Rae Carson (Greenwillow 978-0062026514, $17.99, 416pp, hc) September 2012. In the follow-up to her first novel, William C. Morris Debut Award finalist The Girl of Fire and Thorns, Rae Carson again resists the familiar, telling a story fully in service to her singular heroine, the Godstone-bearing Elisa. Now a queen, it turns out Elisa’s rise to power has not gone easily. With a restless people still dealing with the aftermath of the violent attack on the city at the conclusion of that first novel, Elisa acutely feels the need to solidify her authority. Popular among the people, she sets out for celebra- tion – which is promptly interrupted by an animagus who burns himself up inside the city walls. Not long after, Elisa herself is attacked within her own palace and seriously injured, and it becomes quickly clear that her victory will be short-lived if she can’t find those who plot against her before it is too late. As she recovers, she explores the hidden catacombs beneath the palace and finds a tucked away part of her city, the unexpected home of a former Invier- no ambassador hiding there, Storm, and sees him for what he is: a valuable source of intelligence. It is his revelation of a legendary place, the zafira – her Godstone warms at the very word – that gives Elisa a new option. If she can find it, she will have more than enough power to defend her people. Trust- ing the head of the royal guard, Hector – and falling in love with him even though she knows her match must be part of her duty as queen and not made for emotion – she embarks with him and a few other trusted allies to find the zafira. The journey takes her into yet more dangerous territory and life- threatening circumstances, testing her in the way any quest for power must. 94 The novel ably explores the nature of leadership, of the responsibilities inher- ent in it, and of what makes one a good leader, rather than just a strong one. With The Crown of Embers, Carson has delivered a sequel just as grip- ping as its predecessor, and one which pulls off the hard task of making as satisfying an adventure of Elisa’s emotional journey as of the external one. With an ending that will have fans clamoring for the final installment, this is one second book that avoids any hint of the dreaded sophomore slump. –Gwenda Bond (Reviewed in Jan 2013) Return to Young Adult list.

Bitterblue, Kristin Cashore (Dial 978-0-803-73473-9, $19.99, 576pp, hc) May 2012. Kristin Cashore has quickly established one of the most devoted followings of any author in the YA field, thanks in part to her skill at choosing when to heed the conventions of epic fantasy and when to upend them. She emerged on the scene in 2008 with a revelation of a first novel, Graceling, an unabash- edly feminist tale set in a land divided into seven kingdoms, where some peo- ple are born with different-colored eyes, indicating they are ‘‘Graced’’ with extraordinary skills that range from the harmless to the deadly. Heroine Kat- sa is a reluctant assassin for the king, due to her Grace of killing. She meets and falls in love with a Graced fighter, Po, and both the romance and the resolution to the larger story proved satisfying and atypical. Cashore followed up in 2009 with a companion prequel, Fire, set earlier in a different part of the same world, sharing only a younger version of the villain from Gracel- ing. Rather than Graces, the Dells of Fire feature brightly colored, irresist- ibly beautiful monsters – most are animals, but occasionally there are human monsters, as with the title character, a gifted mind-reader. These rich novels each stand alone, though they can certainly be read alongside each other, and knowledge of the one enhances the reading of the other. Now Cashore returns with Bitterblue, her first direct sequel and most ambitious novel yet. In Graceling, Katsa and Po rescued a young girl named Bitterblue from her father, King Leck of Monsea, a fearsomely corrupt expert at mind control who built a beautiful but terrible kingdom through a regime of terror. His ex- periments on animals – torture, more aptly put – and cruelty to those around him were all the more monstrous for his ability to erase people’s memories and make them believe whatever he wanted. Those efforts had also given the outside world the impression that Monsea was a peaceful paradise. At the end of Graceling, Bitterblue has become ruler of Monsea, despite her young age. Bitterblue revisits the queen at 18, ruling her lands from Bitterblue City, which is still haunted by ominous of her father’s reign. 95 Frustrated by her distance from the city she rules and bored by days spent on busywork, Bitterblue begins sneaking out at night disguised as a boy. She visits the city’s story rooms and listens, enchanted, to tales that hold some semblance of truth; stories of Leck, stories of Katsa and Po (heroes of the people, now), stories about her own life. She meets two young men – Saf, a beautiful, adoptive-Leonid boy with a penchant for stealing things that have already been stolen, who claims not to know his own Grace, and Teddy, a non-Graced but thoroughly nice print shop proprietor. It’s Bitterblue’s as- sociation with Saf and Teddy – as well as attacks on them for underground activities – that, coupled with the memory gaps and strange behavior of the people in her castle, convince her she must uncover the truth about what Leck did. As Bitterblue digs deeper and deeper into the mysteries of the past, despite threats to her safety, she also engages in a personal battle to under- stand what it means to be a queen – and what it means to be herself as queen – in a land where many are deeply in denial and everyone is in desperate need of healing. The result is a gripping novel that features a fully realized world populated by damaged, complex, fascinating characters, and some of the most breathtaking ‘‘action’’ sequences in recent memory, many of the most exciting involving the simple act of reading. I worry that some of Cashore’s fans may be dissatisfied that the roman- tic plot is not as central as in her previous books, though I hope that’s not the case. There is still ample intrigue of the heart, not just on Bitterblue’s part, but also between established couple Po and Katsa as they continue their decidedly unique relationship. The bottom line is: Bitterblue’s story – emo- tional and otherwise – is remarkable. This is a story that feels classic and new. While the wait for this novel was longer than many readers wanted, the time was well spent by the author. This subversive, political coming of age story is Cashore’s masterwork to date. –Gwenda Bond (Reviewed in May 2012) Return to Young Adult list.

Pirate Cinema, Cory Doctorow (Tor Teen) October 2012. Doctorow again speaks out for freedom of information, this time in an entertaining, often gritty tale of a teen who runs away to the London under- ground to follow his illegal passion for making movies from sampled down- loads.

–Locus (Reviewed in Nov 2012 Return to Young Adult list. 96 Radiant Days, Elizabeth Hand (Viking 978-0670011353, $17.99, 272pp, hc) April 2012. Few things hold as much appeal for the artsy teenager as stories of rabble- rousing, society-defying artists in times past. And yet, this is relatively un- explored ground in YA fiction – with a few notable exceptions, such as Sim- mone Howell’s Notes from the Teenage Underground and Nikki Grimes’ Bronx Masquerade. In fact, I could think of no immediate examples that in- corporate fantasy elements into their tales of young artists finding their way (though I’m sure there must be a few). Now with Radiant Days, Elizabeth Hand has written a beautiful, strange novel of the fantastic, which shows us two artists emerging from their own very specific – and yet also unexpect- edly overlapping – times. In 1978, Merle Tappitt has just fled an abusive, poverty-ridden backwater childhood for DC and the more bohemian poverty of being broke at art school. Taken under the wing of an older married woman Clea, who begins to educate Merle in the ways of the world and the body, while encouraging her art and playing model, Merle is beginning to find her voice as an artist... which, of course, gets her kicked out. Art school is too rigid for the art she’s drawn to create. On a trip to New York, Merle shoves away Clea’s attempts to sell her work to a famous art doyenne, and becomes entranced by the pos- sibilities of graffiti after seeing SAMO’s tags all over town. But Merle doesn’t believe in the “Same Old Shit” point-of-view; the tag she adopts is Radiant Days, an eye and a sun. In 1870, sixteen-year-old Arthur Rimbaud traverses France, wanting to escape the clutches of his controlling mother. Attempting to travel to Paris without having paid the full fare, he ends up in prison – for a relatively brief, but eye-opening stay – and then travels the countryside and visits other towns. All the while he’s deciding what he makes of the world and describing it in brilliant bursts of sharp-edged yet gorgeous poetry. For a good while, we experience Merle and Arthur’s lives progressing in alternating segments, with no hint of when and how they will overlap. But when a gifted musician who is also a tramp appears alongside bodies of water, time begins to seem more fluid. A river just like the rivers in the text. And when both our young artists seek refuge in a lockhouse, traces of art on the walls or making art on the walls, Merle and Arthur’s lives cross, bringing him into Merle’s 1978. Hand is not interested in the expected, and these two spend a life-changing and yet brief time together. There are mysterious carp lost, but not quite, and an instrument that looks like bone, a tramp who may be something far older than he seems. It’s difficult to capture how perfectly attuned to this story of art and artists the prose Hand uses to render it is. But by capturing vivid texture and detail, 97 we feel the world as close around Merle and Arthur as they do – and with an artist’s vantage. “But I now began to see how surreal a stoplight was, strobing from amber to red to green. Plastic bottles, the acid-green wrapper from a bag of potato chips, a broken syringe – all these things are strange and even beautiful, if you look at them long enough.” At one point, Merle has a real- ization: “Magic is something you make. And if you don’t make something and leave it behind, it’s not just that it’s gone. You’re gone.” This is a story about the connection and influence artists and their work can have, a real and personal and lasting one. And so the story of these two very specific young people becomes universal, exciting, and meaningful. Give this book to the rebellious, young artists you know, because it could have a profound effect. If Hand’s novel thumbs its nose at many of the usual conventions observed in YA – the pace is deliberate, the prose layered, the fantasy entering the story later rather than sooner, and a sense of adult per- spective at the end (along with a last perfect twist) – it also captures perfectly that YA sense of individuals becoming who they truly are through the cru- cible of story. Which is not to say that only teens should check out this book. Hand has written a rare and beautiful novel that feels like it’s for people in- terested in the process and impact of art, not just for any one certain group of them. –Gwenda Bond (Reviewed in Mar 2013 Return to Young Adult list.

A Face Like Glass, Frances Hardinge (Macmillan 978-0-230-74879-8, £12.99, 490pp, hc) May 2012. Cover by Sam Hadley. Both Frances Hardinge’s A Face Like Glass and Catherynne M. Valente’s The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There are young adult novels. It’s a genre that positively encourages wild leaps of imagina- tion and glorious absurdities; as standard fantasy, neither book could exist. But although each takes a girl-child to a wacky underworld, they manage to enchant in different ways. In Hardinge’s long, richly imagined tale, young heroine Neverfell is a mostly amnesiac anomaly in Caverna. Everyone else in this vast, dark city – from artisans who spin mind-bending magics out of things like cheese and wine to courtiers engaged in endless scheming – ‘‘speaks’’ a language of Faces, trained from the moment a child begins to understand. ‘‘Most Cavernians spent their lives making do with the Faces they had learned in infancy’’ (just a crude ABC for the lowliest in this society of castes and cliques), ‘‘but the affluent elite sometimes hired Facesmiths, specialist Face- designers, to teach them new expressions.’’ For this upper crust, ‘‘a new, 98 beautiful or interesting Face could cause more of a stir than a string of black pearls or a daring hat.’’ While Neverfell gradually learns about one strange food-alchemy, after Cheesemaster Grandible informally adopts her, she’s shockingly unable to adapt in other ways. And so he hides her, masked and illegal in his lair. Though she doesn’t really learn what’s ‘‘wrong’’ with her until after she escapes those redolent/stinking tunnels, we can guess much sooner from a glimpse of her earliest memories and needs: ‘‘a desperation for light and air. Not greenish trap-lantern light or the dull red drowsing of embers, but a chilly, searing immensity staring down at her from above.... Air that jostled and roared.’’ Hardinge has a remarkable ability to give a sense of history and – for the locals, anyway – ordinary life to the craziest situations. But Neverfell, the outsider who’s been abandoned here, still sees things from the other side, each new adventure vividly surreal. When she begins to talk about it all, while something draws her up the social ladder to ever-higher circles, people listen. By the time she meets the almighty Grand Steward, who has long ruled Caverna despite his strange affliction of divided souls, Neverfell can’t help but notice her words’ effect:

She was the window on to the world. Through her and with her he saw cobbled fords through underground streams, ossuary doorways decorated with a thousand human bones, ladies pausing to have stone dust brushed out of their coats. She knew that she was making the golds bright, the shadows black, the reds vivid, and she could feel his gaze like a draught.

(A cold draught, since he could doom her by raising an eyebrow.) Outside of YA, prose this fine might almost seem too good: never a word too many, each simile exact. But regardless of the wry political savvy lurk- ing in the background, A Face Like Glass is not intended for aging cynics. Hardinge’s fantasy finds ways to make us all young again, open to every wonder. –Faren Miller (Reviewed in Feb 2013) Return to Young Adult list.

The Chaos, Nalo Hopkinson (Margaret L. McElderry Books 978- 1416954880, $16.99, 242pp, hc) April 2012. Over the past several years, young-adult fiction has become such a ubiq- uitous part of SF and fantasy that there’s hardly any point in separating it 99 from the mainstream of the genre, but in a way this isn’t a new develop- ment at all, and probably isn’t driven entirely by the vague hope of post- Potter, post-Hunger Games riches. In fact, it’s a little like coming home. Back in the Victorian period, when adult fiction was almost straitjacketed into a prescribed form of domestic realism, the ‘‘children’s’’ market pro- duced an impressive flood of classic fantasy stories, and the authors knew it. George MacDonald, for example, was widely respected as an author of now-forgotten Scottish regional novels, but what we read today are his fan- tasies, mostly originally for children. A half-century later, C.S. Lewis could write serious, moralistic adult fantasies like Till We Have Faces, but how many current readers have heard of that compared to Narnia? And still more recently, Paolo Bacigalupi snagged just about every award the SF field had to offer with , but it was his YA Shipbreaker that got him on the National Book Award ballot. YA fiction, it seems, is a way of avoiding not only the constraints imposed by a formula-driven adult commercial market, but of avoiding the stigma of genre at the same time. How many people outside our own community even think of The Hunger Games as SF? So it wouldn’t be surprising if some authors were to find this freedom imaginatively liberating, and that certainly seems to be the case with Nalo Hopkinson. The Chaos, her first YA novel, begins modestly, with a familiar tale of a girl transferring to a new school in and trying to fit in. Only a couple of fantastic elements are introduced in these early chapters, and they’re fairly restrained and possibly even hallucinatory: Scotch, the protagonist, has visions of disembodied horses’ heads dancing around in mid-air, and she suffers from an unexplained skin condition in which black, tarry patches appear and grow despite the various doctors she consults and ointments she tries. Hopkinson has always been skilled at portraying out- siders sympathetically but without sentiment, and what we learn of Scotch (much of it initially presented through the rather contrived if efficient de- vice of having her answer questionnaires for class) suggests she desperately wants a new life at the new school, but is sometimes her own worst enemy. She’s the most talented member of the school dance team, but frequently misses practice and messes up her timing on a key routine for an upcoming competition. She’s resentful that her parents actually sent her brother to jail on a drug charge, but she’s the one who ratted him out in the first place. She’s dumped an attractive boyfriend who still cares about her, and worries that she might be going nuts. That last concern becomes moot about a third of the way in, when the novel shifts gears so abruptly that some readers might risk whiplash. Scotch accompanies her brother to an open-mike poetry reading at a downtown 100 bar (where he flops completely, in an excruciatingly well-written scene), and notices that the Horseless Head Men appear to be everywhere. An iri- descent bubble appears near the stage, growing rapidly, and for once it’s something that everyone else can see as well. Scotch dares her brother to touch it, but when he does both he and the bubble disappear. Soon af- ter, Scotch herself is down the rabbit hole – except that it appears to be a kind of subway train with living intestinal walls, and she’s surrounded by people with bandicoot heads, arms made of smoke, and jointed metal legs. A friend she had met in the bar has turned into a purple triangle with an elephant’s trunk, and Scotch herself has 11 legs that look ‘‘like half-melted black rubber.’’ And this only scratches the surface of the manic transforma- tions that will come to be known as The Chaos. A suddenly rises from Lake and begins to erupt. Sasquatch wanders through the streets, as does the chicken-footed walking house Izbouchka from the Baba Yaga legends. Scotch’s brother seems to be trapped, disembodied, in the mobile phone network. There is a long tradition of fantasy stories in which agents of a collec- tive unconscious, or mythagos (to borrow Robert Holdstock’s useful term) erupt into the world to create chaos, and Hopkinson seems to be having a lot of fun seeing how many different cultural traditions she can draw on (after all, if Toronto is such a diverse community, its mythic substrata might as well draw from all the different elements of the population). So, along with Sasquatch and figures from the Russian Baba Yaga tales, Hopkinson draws on Jamaican legends (the ‘‘rolling calf,’’ a kind of duppy), Algonquin my- thology (the volcano is named Animikia), Anansi and Brer Rabbit folklore, and quite a few images, such as a lavender hippopotamus wearing a party hat, that are just wildly surreal in a sort of Beanie Baby way. And, we are given to understand, The Chaos isn’t simply a local Toronto phenomenon, but is world-wide – and it can lead to real-world fatalities. What keeps this all from spinning completely out of control is Hopkinson’s clear focus on the anxieties and emerging courage of Scotch, who finds herself tested in ways that are partly familiar from any number of fantasy or YA fictions, but who proves to be a compelling anchor for a tale in which, for a while at least, it seems that literally anything can happen. Hopkinson’s joy of inven- tion is palpable, and despite its darker edges, it’s that joy in the possibilities of the imagination that I hope comes through to younger readers. Come to think of it, we could all use a dose of it. –Gary K. Wolfe (Reviewed in Jun 2012) Return to Young Adult list.

101 Sea Hearts, Margo Lanagan (Allen & Unwin 978-1-742-37505-2, A$19.99, 360pp, tp), February 2012. As The Brides of Rollrock Island (David Fick- ling 978-0857560339, £12.99, 320pp, hc) February 2012. (Knopf Books for Young Readers 978-0-375-86919-8, $17.99, 320pp, hc) September 2012. When Margo Lanagan’s novella ‘‘Sea-Hearts’’ received the in 2010, it was already widely known that a full-length novel was in the works, and it didn’t seem at all unreasonable when a few people I spoke to expressed excitement leavened by apprehension, as is often the case when a well-formed tale is revealed to be part of a larger whole. Was More Than Human better than ‘‘Baby Is Three’’, or better than the short story of the same title? In a sense it’s a pointless question, since nov- els tend to get read by far wider audiences than novellas, and ‘‘Sea-Hearts’’ originally appeared in an Australian anthology by Keith Stevenson that was virtually unavailable in the US. But the novel Sea Hearts (note the subtle difference in the title) is getting wide distribution as a YA title (like her ear- lier World Fantasy-winning Tender Morsels), although the American and UK editions are unfortunately retitled The Brides of Rollrock Island, which sounds like a rock musical Olivia Newton-John might have starred in 40 years ago. No matter; it’s a gorgeous piece of work, perhaps less startling and visceral than Tender Morsels, but in many ways a richer and more complex novel, and it ain’t going to be a musical anytime soon (though it might make a terrific opera). Sea Hearts is a selkie novel, as distinguished from the spate of mermaid novels we’ve seen in the past couple of years, but as a Lanagan novel it’s dis- tinguished in several other ways as well. In place of the vaguely European, folkloristic setting of Tender Morsels, it takes place mostly on Rollrock Is- land, a hardscrabble fishing community suggestive of the North Sea cultures that gave rise to the selkie legends in the first place. Daniel Mallett, the boy who narrated the novella, turns out to be only one of six narrators, who col- lectively recount something like three generations of life on Rollrock, cen- tered on a tragic period during which the men of the island, aided by the witch Misskaella Prout, almost universally take the hypnotically beautiful seal-maids as their wives, in some cases sending their human wives (or ‘‘red women’’) packing off to the mainland town of Cordlin, often with families in tow. The sea-wives themselves are trapped in human form by having the sealskins from which they emerged locked away from them. The result is a disturbing, guilt-ridden, all-male society (it turns out that girl-children born to the seal-women can’t survive in the human world, so there are only boys), at times resembling a darker Gothic version of The Stepford Wives, with the seal-women themselves taking such a strangely passive role that they kept reminding me of Paul Delvaux’s famous surrealist painting ‘‘Village of the 102 Mermaids’’, with its line of otherworldly women sitting with proper gowns and folded hands while their sisters sport in the distant sea. (It’s significant that we never get the point of view of any of the seal-women, who remain as much a mystery to the human characters as to us. But then, I suppose, seals don’t generally narrate.) Although Daniel is the only character who narrates two sections, the cen- tral unifying figure in the novel is the witch Misskaella, viewed by all the oth- er characters as a fearsome, embittered old woman made wealthy by the fees she exacts from the men for finding them seal-wives. Her own tragic history forms the second section and sets up the terms for the entire novel. (Ironi- cally, she also gets the most purely romantic idyll, in her youthful encounter with a male selkie.) Misskaella’s tale is followed by that of Bet Winch, whose mother unsuccessfully challenges Misskaella when she sees her own son tak- ing a sea-wife, and later decides to leave with her family. Next is the tale of Daniel’s father Dominic Mallett, who had moved to the mainland after his own father died, but finds himself trapped by his own desires on a return visit. The last three sections are narrated by Daniel, who grows more and more troubled by the plight of the ‘‘mams’’; by Lori Severner, Bet’s daughter, whom Daniel had met as a child (the only human girl he’d seen to that time) and who now moves into her old family house on Rollrock; and by Trudella Callisher, a mainland girl recruited to serve as Misskaella’s apprentice. This odd but compelling narrative structure, with each successive tale opening up and commenting on earlier ones, gives an almost panoramic sense of passing generations for what is not a very long novel (the effect is something like that of Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, with its seven sto- ries of different characters in different generations illuminating each other until the whole becomes a coherent narrative). Given Lanagan’s distinctive language-bending style, it’s something of a challenge for her to differentiate the six narrative voices, though we quickly come to realize that, while they mostly share the island’s dialect, each tone is quite specific to the character – Daniel’s growing indignation at the plight of his and the other ‘‘mams,’’ his father’s weak efforts at self-rationalization, Misskaella’s bitter loneliness that leads her to seize what power she can from a community that both despises and needs her. Along the way, Lanagan develops, without benefit of an ex- ternal narrator or sidebar lectures, some sharp insights into female passivity and victimization (at least on the part of the seal-women), male fecklessness and almost helpless self-absorption (early on, some of them pack their sea- wives away in cabinets the way an alcoholic hides his booze), the complex relationships of parents and children, and the fragile negotiations between community and nature. Except for a few comments from distrustful main- landers, we learn about Rollrock entirely from within, and for a while we 103 seem to live there. It’s not always a pleasant vacation, but it’s a deeply illu- minating one, and Sea Hearts may eventually be seen as some sort of mas- terpiece. –Gary K. Wolfe (Reviewed in Jan 2012) Return to Young Adult list.

Every Day, David Levithan (Knopf Books for Young Readers 978- 0307931887, $16.99, 336pp, hc) September 2012. David Levithan is best known as the author (and co-author) of several sharp contemporary novels. His work has openly and refreshingly tackled politics – most notably in Wide Awake – but is also often about exploring the human heart and its politics. He wrestles with the ways we connect to the people around us and to the world around us. There is always smart dia- logue, humor, and a quirky precision to his storytelling. His work to date has sometimes – and sometimes not – included elements of both science fiction and fantasy. Every Day brings together all these elements from his previous novels and melds them into his most accomplished – and most fantastical – work yet. The premise is deceptively simple. A has spent his life waking up in a dif- ferent body every day, the body being whatever age A currently is. During the course of this novel, A inhabits the bodies of 16-year-olds. As A informs us at the beginning of the novel, ‘‘Every day I am someone else. I am myself – I know I am myself – but I am also someone else. It has always been like this.’’ The rules are established firmly and never violated. A’s time in each body never exceeds a day (and never repeats) and at midnight, the clock resets. If A has the misfortune to be awake when that happens, the pain of being ripped from one body and thrust into another is great, so A tries to be asleep when it happens. A can ‘‘access’’ facts about the person’s life from his or her brain, usually enough to navigate the day without causing problems (foreign languages can pose a challenge), but not their emotions. A has developed a strategy of trying to walk lightly through these lives, trying not to mess things up, to not deviate from the normal parameters of the people’s lives. That is, until the day the novel begins, when A wakes up in the body of 16-year-old Justin. A has an instinctive dislike of Justin that only deepens when he encounters Justin’s girlfriend, Rhiannon. A watches her fold in on herself, flinching from the casualness of Justin’s treatment. A does some- thing he never does; he wants Rhiannon to feel seen, to give her a good day. And so they go to the beach, and, over the course of the day, A falls in love with her. But, of course, it can’t work, can it? A manages to stay away for a brief time, but can’t get Rhiannon out of mind, even though she’s out of 104 sight. And because A is in roughly the same area – maybe four hours from her one day, or 15 minutes the next; A only travels great distances if the body of the day does – the pull to see her again is strong, too strong to resist. A, who has accepted the nature of existence with no permanent attachments, no permanent external self, begins to want more – A wants a life with Rhian- non. While the feeling is not exactly and immediately mutual, once A crosses the great divide of explaining things – something A has never done before – there is a connection that neither of them can deny. But is it possible for a relationship to overcome such a barrier? Can you truly love someone who inhabits a different body every day? You’ll have noticed the repetition of A and avoidance of gender pronouns here. While the novel’s flap copy tosses in one ‘‘he,’’ Levithan makes a strong case in the novel that A cannot be so easily assigned a gender. A is a person, but that person identifies as neither male nor female. A has been attracted to members of both sexes (to the person, not the body). Over the course of the novel, A inhabits a wide range of people, lives that have something to say about gender, about class, about depression and addiction, about obesity and beauty. But, through it all, the most profound exploration is of self, be- cause A is undeniably a person too. Amid questions of what love truly is and what self and personality truly are, are deep excavations of what love can cure or excuse and what it can’t. As the novel develops an antagonist who would be too spoilery to discuss in detail, tantalizing possibilities that would be the route taken by a lesser novel come into play, but Levithan thankfully avoids turning A’s story into one about discovering exactly why his existence is the way it is. The circumstances of our lives are happenstance in many ways, but it’s the choices we make – how we understand and connect with those around us and the world, how we choose to live – that makes the difference, that makes our lives matter. Levithan resists the easy, the overly comforting, and in doing so manages a breathtaking and honest exploration of what love means. –Gwenda Bond (Reviewed in Nov 2012) Return to Young Adult list.

Son, Lois Lowry (Houghton Mifflin 978-0-547-88720-3, $17.99, 393pp, hc) October 2010. Cover by Charles Brock. The final book in the Giver quartet weaves together elements of all the loosely related books in this YA fantasy series. Much of it runs parallel to the dystopian The Giver, the Newbery-winning first book in the series, re- turning to the closely regulated community in which it all started. There, Claire is told at 12 that she will be a Birthmother, one of the young women 105 chosen to bear Product - babies - to be farmed out to other members of the community. But her first delivery goes wrong; her child has to be cut out, and Claire is assigned to work in a fish hatchery. She’s not supposed to know anything about the child, but accidentally learns it lived, and was a boy. She manages to get to know the child without anyone realizing their relation- ship. Readers of The Giver will of course realize the boy is Gabe, rescued from the community by the boy Jonas. This novel instead follows Claire, who finds her own way to escape the community in the uproar, but spends years learning about life outside before finally being reunited with her son, who will have to face an old evil to save her. Lowry’s work is more allegori- cal than standard genre fare, but remains powerful as it wraps up several threads from this celebrated series. –Carolyn Cushman (Reviewed in Feb 2013) Return to Young Adult list.

Be My Enemy, Ian McDonald (Pyr 978-1-61614-678-8, $16.95, 268pp, tp) September 2012. Last year, Ian McDonald’s Planesrunner inaugurated his first series of YA novels, set largely aboard the giant, alternate-world airship Everness, and I thought it one of the high points of the SF novel year, YA or not. Partly this was because of the palpable sense of fun McDonald was hav- ing in recombining the various tropes of YA fiction with classic SF tropes, most notably his variation on the Moorcockian multiverse (the hero is even named after Hugh Everett by his scientist father). The novel featured like- able and engaging leads in Everett Singh and Sen Sixsmyth, the rebellious girl pilot of the Everness, as well as a relentless villain named Charlotte Villiers, a convincing maguffin (building on his father’s mathematics, the brilliant Everett has designed a computer program, called the Infundibu- lum, which provides an index to the entire ‘‘Panoply of Worlds’’), a set-up of near-infinite possibilities as Everett travels from one world to the next in search of his kidnapped father, and an ingenious setting of an alternate, steampunk-like England where Everett joins the crew of the Everness (ex- cept technically this is a steamless-punk world, since it never experienced a steam age but moved directly from coal power to electricity). The novel ended on a classic cliffhanger as the Everness barely eluded Charlotte Vil- liers’s minions by jumping to another world, which seemed to be nothing but ice. Be My Enemy, the second entry in the series, picks up directly from there, but not before McDonald throws us another curve. The novel opens exactly as Planesrunner had, in a rainy shopping mall a few days before 106 Christmas, but instead of watching his father be kidnapped in a large black car, Everett himself is hit by the car, and we learn that his father had died three months earlier. This is not quite the same Everett we met before (to avoid confusion, McDonald refers to him as Everett M), and his universe is not the same universe. In this world decades earlier, an alien civilization called the Thryn Sentience had made contact with Earth, and helped hu- mans develop the Heisenberg Gate, the device that permits instantaneous transport between the different versions of Earth. It turns out that Everett’s original world from Planesrunner is the only one of all the worlds where humans (namely Everett and his dad) figured out the technology without alien assistance, and the only one to develop the potentially all-powerful tool called the Infundibulum. Now, Everett M is enlisted by Charlotte Vil- liers to track down Everett and steal the device. Introducing a game-changing new element such as the Thryn in the sec- ond volume of a series is a good way to keep the stakes high and the adven- ture moving, although the latter is not a problem for McDonald, who has gotten so enamored of melodramatic close calls that even the captain of the Everness seems to notice, asking Everett at one point, ‘‘Do you think we could manage it this time without a last minute, cliff-hanger, hairs-breadth escape, Mr Singh?’’ And indeed the opening chapters of Be My Enemy are overdependent on such contrivances, as well as on some secondary char- acter crew members defined almost entirely by their quirks, such as the Bible-quoting Sharkey or the Scots engineer Mchynlyth, a virtual parody of ’s Scottie (‘‘‘I dinnae have the power, and even if I did, the impeller pods are frozen solid’’’). It’s clear that McDonald is having some fun with this, and later on when he gives us a line like ‘‘You’re all alone in the face of a perfect storm of lethal rogue nanotechnology and your only ally is a shapeshifting alien battle robot,’’ you can practically see him grinning as he writes it. Yet the novel does finally settle down into a genu- inely suspenseful narrative, darker than anything yet seen in the series, as the Everness faces its most serious threat after Everett insists they visit the interdicted Earth 1, which is so overrun by an all-consuming intelligent nanotech – a smart grey goo, but black – that only a few isolated redoubts of human survivors remain. The images of a deserted London shadowed by a giant black spire in which the faces of the absorbed victims can be seen (a little like Jonathan Lethem’s ‘‘The Hardened Criminals’’) are bleak and terrifying, if something of a gimme in SF terms, and they lend this part of the novel a kind of horror-story gravitas that is compelling in its own right. As for those raised stakes, we’ll have to wait and see where this new plot involving the Thryn – and their ominous but unnamed opponents – will take us. So far, though, McDonald has used the many-worlds trope in a far 107 more interesting way than most writers, and his invention shows no signs of flagging. –Gary K. Wolfe (Reviewed in Aug 2012) Return to Young Adult list.

Railsea, China Miéville (Del Rey 978-0-345-52452-2, $18.00, 430pp, hc) May 2012. I’ve never entirely understood the appeal of moles as lovable critters in children’s literature from Kenneth Grahame to Alison Uttley to Russell Ho- ban, so it almost comes as a vindication to see one presented as a monstrous, almost archetypal autochthon in China Miéville’s second young adult novel Railsea, which echoes bits of all these earlier writers along with everything from Robert Louis Stevenson to the movie Tremors to the Strugatsky broth- ers to, most obviously, Herman Melville. It’s been widely reported for some time that Railsea was going to be Miéville’s take on Moby-Dick, and indeed the giant mole (or moldywarpe, an older term) in question is the obsession or ‘‘philosophy’’ of the vengeful Captain Naphi, who lost her arm to it years earlier (and has had it replaced with a high-tech prosthesis which, among other hints, nudges the story toward SF rather than fantasy). Called Mocker Jack, the giant mole’s name even scans like Moby Dick. But Naphi is not a ship’s captain, and herein lies the most unique aspect of Miéville’s tale: she commands a molehunting train in a world in which the ‘‘sea’’ consists of densely-packed railroads, the treacherous earth beneath churns with all sorts of burrowing creatures, and islands and continents are outcroppings which rise above the worldwide sea of train tracks. The trains which traverse these endless tracks consist largely of military or salvage operations – there are many hints of ancient or alien technology buried out in the landscape – and ‘‘molers,’’ such as the Medes, which the protagonist Sham finds himself signed onto as a physician’s assistant. Sham, orphaned when his father disappeared on the railsea and his moth- er abandoned him from grief, makes for an appealing hero, but the novel, at least during its first half, never quite falls into the familiar tropes of modern YA fiction, though it certainly harks back to the glory days of boys’ adven- ture tales. There’s not much in the way of a love interest, and not much yawpingly sensitive coming-of-age stuff, but it’s not long before its central template shifts from Moby-Dick to Treasure Island, with pirates, kidnap- pings, treasure maps, pursuits, and ancient secrets. To be sure, there’s a fair amount of Melvillian high-seas adventure (though even in the spectacular opening scene I couldn’t help but think that Melville’s whale-hunting had been transformed into a high-stakes game of Whack-A-Mole), but the plot 108 really gets going when, in a long-abandoned wrecked train, Sham comes across a series of pictures, some of which portray an apparently impossible landscape with only a single rail. Returning to shore to help an injured crew- man, Sham finds himself in a series of cities (no Miéville novel is going pass up a shot at urban noir), including his hometown of Streggye and the leg- endary center of the world, Manihiki City. Sham learns that the photos he has found are of intense interest to a variety of disparate characters, from a brother and sister seeking their lost parents to a band of pirates seeking lost treasure. Soon a number of trains are converging on a discovery that will completely change Sham’s understanding of the world he lives in. And that world is peppered with hints of a larger, untold story: ‘‘angels’’ appear, which we quickly recognize as helicopters; bits of abandoned alien technology surface as in the Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic; the unnamed but waggish narrator mentions ancient eras like the Heavy Metal Age, the Plastozoic, and the Computational Era; at one point we’re directly told that the planet was once a kind of way-station for ‘‘vehicles en route from one impossibly far place to another, with trash to dump.’’ We are never given a direct explanation of how or why the railsea was constructed, or by whom, but by the end Sham has taken on aspects not only of Melville’s Ishmael and Stevenson’s Jim Hawkins (he even has a loyal daybat in place of a parrot), but of that long tradition of SF and fantasy characters who suspect a world beyond the one they know, from William Morris’s Ralph to Heinlein’s Hugh Hoyland. The tale is told in an arch and sometimes quite funny voice, full of ampersands and invented words (the different ‘‘clatternames’’ for the sounds trains make on the tracks are amusingly onomatopoeic), and the overall tone, despite some occasional real horror, is essentially playful – it’s Miéville having some good fun, and taking us along for an exhilarating ride. –Gary K. Wolfe (Reviewed in May 2012) Railsea [Second Review] Though set on land, China Miéville’s Railsea draws on some notable mar- itime adventures. It begins as a twisted YA retelling of Moby-Dick, where the ‘‘sea’’ consists of train tracks that have come to dominate a ruined fu- ture Earth, then veers toward pirate adventures like Treasure Island. Gary K. Wolfe covered all this and more in his May review, but a work so rich, strange, and audacious leaves room for further comment. Rather than directly echo the 19th-century prose of his classic sources, Miéville creates a language to match his special setting. Here’s the young orphaned protagonist’s first view of the railsea: Sham was awed at the light. He looked up into the two or miles of good air, through it into the ugly moiling border of bad cloud that 109 marked the upsky. Bushes stubby & black as iron tore past, & bits of real iron jagging from buried antique times did too. Atangle across the whole vista, to & past the horizon in all directions, were endless, countless rails. There’s something deliberately ungainly (if not quite steampunk) about the SF, as in this brief description of the mechanical arm sported by Captain Naphi, Miéville’s female version of Melville’s Captain Ahab: ‘‘Lights winked & exhaust settled in her bulky, composite left arm. Its metal & ivory clicked & twitched.’’ The mix of human and alien artifacts retrieved by ‘‘salvors’’ to sell in their market stalls resembles an updated version of Dickens’s Curiosity Shop. In one ‘‘cubbyhole full of thoroughly discomfiting strangeness,’’ Sham discovers old tools of the miners’ trade: ‘‘lodestones, gauges, many-lensed telegoggles, shovels, corkscrew drill-boots, air pumps & masks for total earth-submer- sion.’’ Illustrations (by the author) of this world’s outsize mutant creatures add a further touch of the bizarre. Readers, young or old, who want more than a rousing tale can savor ‘‘meta’’ passages reflecting on literature and genre. In one of these, Sham imagines a verbal contest between captains where a creature like Mocker-Jack (gigantic ‘‘moldywarpe’’ and rough equivalent of the whale Moby Dick) is deliberately scorned: ‘‘’Call that a philosophy?’ they perhaps sneered behind each other’s backs. ‘That prairie dog you’re after? Oh my days! What is that supposed to signify?’ One-upmanship, one-upcaptainship, of the themes some quarries have come to signify.’’ In further thoughts about Symbolic Prey, he recalls school books and lec- tures where ‘‘captains held ruminatively forth about the bloodworm, the mole rat, the termite queen or angry rex rabbit or ... the rampaging great moldywarpe of the railsea’’ – which ‘‘become for them a principle of know- ing or unknowing, humility, enlightenment, obsession, modernity, nostalgia or something.’’ Railsea combines a post-apocalyptic scenario with elements from earlier adventures set on the high seas. (When it addresses the life of a railsea cast- away, real or imagined, the parallels to Robinson Crusoe are unmistakable.) And those ‘‘meta’’ moments never elevate the tone too far above the rough and tumble of YA – check out the groan-worthy pun on ‘‘littoral,’’ early in Chapter Five!

–Faren Miller (Reviewed in Jul 2012) Return to Young Adult list.

110 The Broken Lands, Kate Milford (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Clarion) September 2012. Milford returns to the steampunk/historical setting of The with this prequel volume set in 1877, with two teens banding together to stop from destroying New York City. Includes illustrations by Andrea Offermann. –Locus (Reviewed in Sep 2012 Return to Young Adult list.

Dodger, Terry Pratchett (Doubleday Children’s 978-0385619271, £18.99, 368pp, hc) September 2012. Cover by Paul Kidby. (Harper 978-0-06-200949- 4, $17.99, 360pp, tp) October 2012. Terry Pratchett’s Dodger updates a scenario that could have come from heroic fantasy – the rescue of a sorely threatened, golden-haired maiden who happens to be a foreign princess, by a young Galahad – into a far less glamorous era and milieu: London early in the reign of Queen Victoria. Unlike the fantastical modern version of Ben Aaronovich’s Whispers Un- derground, this London is an unholy mess, both above ground and below. After a hard rain, even the distinction between levels essentially vanishes, as overflowing drains disgorge all the ‘‘muck, slime and filth, the dead dogs, the dead rats, cats and worse,’’ into a city that no amount of rain could possibly wash clean. Though we may cringe, the title character likes it just fine. Dodger seems born to thrive here, through a combination of petty thievery and ‘‘toshing’’: scavenging the muck for lost coins and the like. For him, ‘‘toshing was living, toshing was coming alive,’’ much better than some dull workaday existence. But as the book begins, an unthinking act of chivalry introduces an escalat- ing sequence of changes into his world. Hearing a girl scream as she tries to get away from two sinister men who have held her captive in a coach, Dodger intervenes, an unlikely savior in the form of ‘‘a struggling and skinny young man who moved with the speed of a snake.’’ When a pair of male Londoners happen upon this scene, he’s ready to tackle them as well, until they manage to convince him that they’re harm- less. Viewing the girl and her defender, one of them tries to praise him as a hero, provoking a baffled response: ‘‘What’s it to you, anyway? And who the hell is this Galahad cove?’’ The men turn out to be Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew as they were – or might have been – before they wrote the works that became prime sourc- es of inspiration for this book, Dickens’s novels, and Mayhew’s disturbing sociological investigation London Labour and the London Poor. (Though 111 Pratchett never seems to use the word, we know what that later Dickens called his Dodger: Artful.) Here, in the grand tradition of genre fiction giv- ing major roles to big names from the past, they aid and abet the reluctant hero in a lively tale of suspense with all manner of plots and subplots that involve other well-known figures along with new inventions. Dodger ponders his situation, while lying on the brink of sleep: How long ago was it that he had heard a scream and jumped out of a foaming sewer... how many days was it? Three days! It was as if the world was moving too fast, laughing at Dodger to keep up with it. Well, he would chase the world and take what came and deal with it.... Seem to be a hero, seem to be a clever young man, seem to be trustworthy. That seemed to fool everybody, and the most disconcerting thing was it was doing the same to him, forcing him on like some hidden engine. I should note that this reads more like a summary of feelings than a typi- cal expression from a lad so thoroughly steeped in the crude slang of his day (well researched by the author, and used with evident enjoyment). Despite a plot with elements of outright horror, and a subtext of poverty and in the vast morass of London at a time when the notion of gov- ernment aid would have been more unthinkable than journeys to the moon, at heart this is the story of a princess and a tosher, not a grim modern medi- tation on hard times. –Faren Miller (Reviewed in Dec 2012) Return to Young Adult list.

Apollo’s Outcasts, Allen Steele (Pyr 978-1-61614-686-3, $16.95, 312pp, tp) November 2012. Cover by Paul Young. Though it is not so identified on the review copy I received, I take Allen Steele’s Apollo’s Outcasts to be a YA novel, and a particularly Heinleinian one at that. It even has an opening line – ‘‘On my sixteenth birthday, I went to the Moon’’ – that had me thinking immediately of the curtain-raiser of one of the Old Man’s best ‘‘juveniles:’’ ‘‘You see, I had this space suit’’ (Have Space Suit – Will Travel). But where Heinlein’s protagonist’s route to the moon and beyond starts gradually, with a jingle-writing contest, Steele’s Jamey Barlowe and his older sisters, self-involved Melissa and responsible, hard-nosed Jan, are dumped right into an unexpected adventure. They are political refugees, bundled off in the middle of the night and taken to a lunar shuttle with a bunch of other kids, one jump ahead of federal forces in the service of a shady new President whose first official act is to round up her opponents, among whom are the kids’ parents. And if this weren’t enough upset in a teenager’s life, Jan volunteers to give up her place to make room for a last- 112 minute addition to the cargo of kids, a mysterious girl who arrives with an escort of Men in Black. Jamey is actually returning to his birthplace, the Apollo settlement, though he hasn’t seen the Moon since his family’s return to Earth after the death of his mother. He suffers from Lunar Birth Deficiency Syndrome and can- not walk in terrestrial gravity without crutches or his semi-intelligent ‘‘mo- bil,’’ more-than-wheelchair. This makes for two parallel thematic-narrative tracks: the large matter of how to deal with the new President’s attempt to get control of the multinationally-administered Apollo facility, which mines the helium-3 that fuels America’s fusion power plants; and the close-up personal story of how Jamey comes into his own when he is able to literally stand on his own two feet. This personal track divides as well. Some of it deals with the expected newbie-on-the-Moon challenges of living in a fragile, pressurized environment, adapting to the pragmatic egalitarianism of Apollo’s social sys- tem, and so on, spiced by familiar kid stuff about best friends, attractive girls, bullies, and other sources of adolescent angst. But Jamey’s particular story has to do with how he embraces his newfound physical freedom, to the point where he joins the most demanding of Apollo’s work groups, Lunar Search and Rescue, aka the Rangers. The learning curves in both personal tracks are not completely smooth, but Jamey, like his genre cousins in the old Heinlein juveniles, is fundamentally well-balanced, thoughtful, and determined enough that he does not have to Learn Better about much. Eventually, of course, this only moderately bumpy road to competent adulthood intersects with the outside world as the new American administration issues a series of increasingly bellicose demands and threats. In the face of a possible invasion, the Rangers become a defense force, and Jamey and his young friends find that they have a new and more demanding kind of growing-up to do. This is not Steele’s first YA rodeo – A King of Infinite Space (Reviewed in December 1997) is a variation on Heinlein’s The Man Who Learned Better pattern. But Jamey’s story seems to me even more classically Heinleinian than King, from the family dynamics (highly competent, principled, and well- prepared dad; prematurely grown-up, self-sacrificing older sister Jan; snotty- sister-who-learns-better Melissa) to Jamey’s never-in-doubt overcoming of his handicap and fulfillment of his parents’ values when the chips are down. And the background to all this is a carefully worked out and clearly described lunar industrial settlement, a less wild-and-wooly descendant of the world of Steele’s earliest working-stiffs-in-orbit Near Space stories. The Apollo col- ony is permanent, with a population that is on the Moon for keeps and an evolving culture suited to its demanding and dangerous environment. It’s a safer and saner place than some of the dark places that Steele has imagined 113 (rogue politicians and hard-vacuum combat notwithstanding), and it is a fitting setting for this kind of bildungsroman – a world worthy of the adult that Jamey is becoming. I have no idea how actual young adults might react to such an old-fashioned story, but this rather jaded grandpa-ager found it well-crafted and engaging in way that has nothing to do with nostalgia for the time when Heinlein (and and ‘‘Paul French’’ and the Win- ston logo) ruled the kids’-SF section of the library shelves. –Russell Letson (Reviewed in Dec 2012) Return to Young Adult list.

The Raven Boys, Maggie Stiefvater (Scholastic 978-0-545-42492-9, $18.99, 416pp, hc) September 2012. Maggie Stiefvater is turning out to be the best kind of unpredictable. With a voice that comes through no matter what she’s writing, Stiefvater has of- fered readers lyrical modern faerie novels with Ballad and Lament, bestsell- ing and beloved paranormal romance with the Shiver series, and thrilling fantasy with Printz Honor book The Scorpio Races. Now she kicks off a new fantasy quartet with The Raven Boys, a novel that proves to be her best and most ambitious work to date. A prologue introduces us to one of the main characters who isn’t a ‘‘raven boy’’: sixteen-year-old Blue Sargent, a smart, self-styled misfit who lives with a houseful of psychics in small-town Henrietta VA. Notably, Blue isn’t a psy- chic, but she does amplify the powers of others. And there’s something else notable about her, revealed in the very first line: ‘‘Blue Sargent had forgotten how many times she’d been told that she would kill her true love.’’ Every psy- chic who’s gotten a chance – which is a lot of them, giving her family – has told her that if she ever kisses her true love, he’ll die. The specificity is unusu- al; the Sargent women’s predictions are usually ‘‘unspecific, but undeniably true.’’ But it’s not the only specific she’s been given – her mother’s half-sister Neeve has shown up in town recently and told Blue that this is the year she’s going to fall in love. Accompanying Neeve to the old churchyard on St. Mark’s Eve to see the parade of those walking the Corpse Road, meaning they’ll die that year, Blue – who can’t see spirits – sees a spirit. The boy, wearing a sweater from the town’s exclusive private school Anglionby Academy, a raven-breasted sweater, gives his name as only Gansey. Her distress only grows when Neeve explains that the only reasons a ‘‘non-seer’’ like Blue would have encountered the boy Gansey is because she either kills him or is his true love. And if there’s one thing Blue has sworn never to be interested in, it’s the rich, entitled raven boys of Henrietta. 114 But if Blue saw Gansey, he didn’t see her. As we learn when his vintage Ca- maro breaks down the next day, he was parked at another church, trying to record spiritual activity. Playing back the digital recording, he has heard his own voice, speaking faintly, saying his name – something he has no memory of doing. Gansey – more properly Richard ‘‘Dick’’ Campbell Gansey, III, from an old money family – summons two of his fellow raven boys to a roadside rescue: Ronan Lynch, a surly wealthy boy bent on self-destruction since his fa- ther’s death, and Adam Parrish, a sharp local scholarship student with trouble at home. The friendship between the boys, and Gansey’s role as their leader, becomes quickly clear. They – and their other friend, the quiet, shadowy Noah – have all been drawn into the quest that lured Gansey to town in the first place. Henrietta is on a ley line, and Gansey is looking for the sleeping Welsh king Glendower, whom he believes rests nearby. As the story goes, Glendower will grant a wish to the one who wakes him. Gansey’s devotion to being that person is an obsession that runs his deep as his clear feeling for his friends. Despite her long-held distrust of all raven boys, Blue inevitably becomes a part of Gansey’s search – she and her family are the only ones who know he may be marked for death and soon, after all. She can’t stand by and do noth- ing. Her nature won’t allow it. And as her ties to the boys grow stronger, her presence finally allows them to make progress in their search – but they are not the only ones searching, and the dangers of the ley line are not the only dangers, as Blue well knows. Attracted to Adam, the most like her, she can’t help but be drawn to Gansey’s charismatic presence as well, especially when she’s able to see past its facade. But he can’t be her true love, can he? And she can’t be the one who kills him? To reveal too much about this remarkable novel would be a crime. Its secrets should be uncovered by turning the pages. The Raven Boys explores issues of class deeply and straightforwardly, fea- tures some of the most hair-raising scenes of magic and potent mythology in recent memory, and creates characters so vibrant and complex they might walk right off the page. The novel is also decidedly, wonderfully odd. It feels completely relevant and modern, but unlike anything else currently haunt- ing the bestseller list. The only novel I can compare it to this year (a strong year for YA overall) is a vastly different one – Libba Bray’s masterful historical novel The Diviners. It’s notable that both novels employ an omniscient voice that never feels old-fashioned, intrusive, or distancing, and which becomes an inextricable part of the pleasure and power of the story being told. With its blend of the mythic and the modern, The Raven Boys is undoubtedly one of the year’s finest novels –Gwenda Bond (Reviewed in Jan 2013) Return to Young Adult list. 115 Days of Blood and Starlight, Laini Taylor (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers 978-0316133975, $18.99, 528pp, hc) November 2012. Daughter of Smoke and Bone, the opening installment of Laini Taylor’s YA trilogy of the same name, was a marvel of a novel, given power through a hybrid of smart construction and riveting emotion. It introduced us to blue- haired Karou, a young art student living in , secretly raised by mon- sters known as chimaera. Karou traveled the globe collecting human teeth for her fearsome, beloved father figure Brimstone. For what purpose, she did not know. But as that novel unfolded, winged beings were spotted around the world – burning doors with black handprints, doors that Karou had for- merly used as portals. A warning: abandon this review here, all who don’t want to be irretrievably spoiled for that novel or the newest. When Karou encounters Akiva, a seraph with fiery eyes who is closing the doors, she is strongly drawn to him, and finally discovers the long-hidden secrets of her past. Brimstone’s use for the teeth she has collected is to resurrect soldiers for a war between the seraph and the chimaera, raging in the world of Eretz. He makes new bodies through magic, using teeth, and in fact he harvested Karou’s soul long ago, when she was Madrigal, a chimaera slain for falling in love with the enemy: Akiva. As Daughter of Smoke and Bone ends, Karou’s family is dead, her people a victim of all-but-genocide at Akiva’s angry hand on his master and father Joram’s behalf. This was obviously not the usual star-crossed love story, and as the follow- up Days of Blood and Starlight opens, it has become a star-crossed war sto- ry. Akiva searches the burned-out chimaera lands of Eretz, where he finds a thurible – a container used to store souls – in the caves of Karou’s people, with a paper affixed that says her name, he believes she is dead. Filled with sorrow and regret, Akiva travels back to his regiment and his half-brother and -sister. Jocular but dangerous Hazael and fierce and fearsome Liraz made their disapproval of Akiva’s chosen course clear in the previous novel, finally discovering what had changed him: his love for what appeared to be a human girl, but, of course, wasn’t. He fully expects they will kill him or shun him, and they are angry. As with everything in Taylor’s impeccably crafted world, the reality is far more complex than that. In getting to know Hazael and Liraz, we also come to know Akiva much more fully, and to understand the terrible hierarchy of the seraph, and how much blood stains their beautiful wings. Akiva is not the only one searching for Karou. Her human best friend Zuzana refuses to give up, watching for her return with her boyfriend Mik. Thoroughly and charmingly playful Zuzana and Mik finally get a lead when news networks report on a girl stealing teeth from the world’s museums. Karou is alive, of course, and holed up in an abandoned desert hideaway 116 with... Thiago, the warrior prince who killed her when she was Madri- gal, and what chimaera soldiers are left. She’s become the new Brimstone, though not at his skill level, resurrecting bodies for the small resistance movement going out on sorties against the seraph through a nearby portal. Thiago oozes a suspect kindness one moment and a bloodlust and calcula- tion the next. We cannot help but fear for Karou’s life here, with no allies. And Karou is wracked with guilt over her role in destroying her people, filled with disgust for herself and her feelings for Akiva, and trying to make things right in the only way she sees. The destructive war of Eretz may have already created a situation where no happiness can be possible. But once these two, an angel and a devil, had a dream for a different world. As the war escalates, both Karou and Akiva will have to decide how much further they are willing to go and whether they have already passed the point of redemption. Here, Taylor explores every haunting echo of the first novel’s revelations. The supporting cast continues to shine, and Ziri, the last of Madrigal’s fel- low Kirin, is a compelling addition. As we move toward the crisis point of the trilogy’s end, it is the depth of Karou and Akiva’s history that makes this installment even more powerful than the first. Taylor never misses an op- portunity to wrest maximum emotion from events, sometimes by shifting the order in which they are revealed to us. The reader feels swallowed in the terrible choices of the past and the present, just as the characters are. And yet we are still left with hope, despite impossible odds. With gorgeous prose and a refusal to flinch from difficult consequences, Taylor is crafting a tril- ogy that seems destined to become a YA classic. –Gwenda Bond (Reviewed in Feb 2013) Return to Young Adult list.

The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There, Cathe- rynne M. Valente (Feiwell and Friends 978-0-312-64962-3, $16.99, 258pp, tp) November 2012. Cover by Ana Juan. Catherynne M. Valente’s The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There (sequel to The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, Valente’s first turn from adult fantasy to works for younger readers) openly proclaims its nature as a zanier kind of YA. There’s a massive Dramatis Personae with such characters as The Duke of Teatime and his wife The Vicereine of Coffee, an info-spouting crea- ture called A-Through-L, assorted trolls, goblins, and plant-men, and the heroine’s Watchful Dress (‘‘a Useful Tool’’). Every chapter heading features a quirky illustration plus an offbeat résumé of what’s to come. Publisher 117 Feiwel and Friends (an imprint of Macmillan) says the target audience is children ages 10 to 14, whose fancies have been tickled ever since writers discovered Wonderland and Oz. And yet, in these continuing adventures of ‘‘a girl named September,’’ Valente still finds room for fine lyrical writing and psychological insights – providing nuance and subtle truths as well as fun.

The odd plague that has struck Fairyland, sending September to investi- gate in the realm below, targets ‘‘shadows,’’ vital essences with many dimen- sions: ‘‘[S]ometimes people keep parts of themselves hidden and secret, sometimes wicked and unkind parts, but often brave or wild or colorful parts, cunning or powerful or even marvelous, beautiful parts, just locked away at the bottom of their hearts... left in the dark to grow strange mush- rooms....’’ Deprived of these, the citizens of Fairyland might as well be dead. Even when its most offbeat inhabitants are targeted, a sense of danger mingles with peculiar beauty. Here’s part of a vegetable being’s encounter with the mostly invisible enemy who could spell his doom: The onion-man saw what had come for him. He danced anyway. Up went his arms, out went his graceful long bony legs, bending at the knee, pointing at the toe. He made a ballet dancer’s leap, and then spread his skeleton’s arms wide, nodding his onion-skull from side to side. The truck stopped. The dark door of the cab opened, and the red cap floated out, its twin feathers like knives stuck into the scarlet felt. The onion-man kept dancing, his steps growing more frantic, his leaps higher and more desperate. After his unexpected rescue, the pockets of September’s Useful coat open: ‘‘Three little lavender and yellow onions rolled to the dancer.’’ Absurd and charming, a family reunites. –Faren Miller (Reviewed in Feb 2013) Return to Young Adult list.

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118 First Novels

Throne of the Crescent Moon, Saladin Ahmed (DAW 978-0-7564-0711-7, $24.95, 274pp, hc) February 2012. Cover by Chan. Saladin Ahmed’s first novel Throne of the Crescent Moon is set in and around Dhamsawaat, a bustling city at the center of a khalifate that could al- most be a precursor to Carriger’s Alexandria. Although it opens with a scene of horror – an anonymous guardsman’s torture by servants of the sorcerous ‘‘gaunt man’’ – in the main narrative the tone shifts, to the blend of weari- ness and gladness of a man who’s over 60 and contemplating retirement from a very active profession. Doctor Adoulla Mahkslood, ‘‘the last real ghul hunter in the great city of Dhamsawaat,’’ has spent decades as kind of supernatural detective, seeking out and destroying monsters that could have come straight from The Arabi- an Nights. His work has often taken him abroad, along with a pair of magic- using friends; that man and wife have already given up the life of adventure and settled quietly in the city. Despite his less-settled temperament, Adoulla does look forward to dining out on the great tales from his past (and this big man loves to dine). The kingdoms of the Crescent Moon, with their khalifs, pashas and sulta- ans, belong to a fantastic world where the enemy was never crusading West- erners; instead, past mages and their troops faced ‘‘vast armies of abomina- tion,’’ the mindless servants of a fallen angel whose powers can be traced back even further, to the dark magics of an age of pharaohs. But centuries have passed, under the moral guidance of a religion like moderate Islam (without a Prophet), and monsters have retreated to the point where the business of ghul hunting seems obsolete. Evil has not been truly vanquished, of course. It shows up in the cruelty and decadence of rulers like Dhamsawaat’s khalif, whose subjects are begin- ning to get restless. They’ve found a champion in the man who calls himself the Falcon Prince and resembles a cross between Robin Hood and Super- man, wielding magic for what seem like idealistic ends. And older magics are creeping back, complete with murderous ghuls. One killing, of a former lover’s niece, draws Adoulla back into the fray. The mystery swiftly grows and develops a host of complications, until he fears that his nightmares of city streets running with blood could come true. Not everything is grim. Adoulla can still swear like the street urchin he once was, then put aside irritation and plunge back into life’s pleasures. He and other characters his age are wryly amused by youngsters like his appren- tice Raseed (from a straightlaced sect of warriors) and Zamia, the nomad girl/were-lioness who joins them on a quest for vengeance after ghuls wipe 119 out her tribe, when they struggle with personal moral codes that would for- bid their romance. By contrast, there’s an enduring tenderness between his old married friends and allies the female alchemist and male healer – both are magic users – though healing spells take far more of a toll on the aging body. The book’s cover depicts Adoulla, Raseed, and Zamia as something like a looming Moses (complete with book), an armed boy, and a riot grrl – well, she does growl a lot – facing inhuman foes. One arrogant enemy dismisses them as ‘‘the fat man, the clean one, the kitten.’’ But this trio displays more than a combination of guile and determination. In the swashbuckling cli- max at the khalif’s ornate palace, with the fate of a throne, a city, maybe a world, at stake, each finds a way to fight beyond mortal limits – and make us care. Though born in Detroit, Saladin Ahmed seems thoroughly at home with his Middle-Eastern heritage, its cultures, and myths. Throne of the Crescent Moon opens a trilogy where the familiar tropes of European-centered epic fantasy needn’t play any part. –Faren Miller (Reviewed in Mar 2012) Return to First Novel list.

Goblin Secrets, William Alexander (Margaret K. McElderry 978-1442427266, $16.99, 240pp, hc) March 2012. William Alexander’s fine middle-grade debut Goblin Secrets is centered on dreamy, trapped Rownie, the youngest of the so-called ‘‘Grubs,’’ children kept underfoot and under thumb – and often dispatched on errands, sa- vory and un-savory alike, in the river city of Zombay – by the witch Graba. Graba is a clear riff on Baba Yaga, but is her own creature as well, a fearsome grandmother (both no one’s and everyone’s) who moves her house at will with gearwork chicken legs; she’s also known as the mistress of Zombay’s Southside. Her strays – the Grubs – fear her wrath and scrounge for scraps of food, but cannot escape her without danger. If they do, she can pursue them with pigeons that she uses as eyes – just as she sometimes uses the Grubs themselves. Except for Rownie, that is. She can’t inhabit Rownie in the same way. That fact is just part of what makes it clear from the begin- ning that Rownie is special. The other indicators are how Graba treats him, and also the hints we catch about his missing older brother, Rowan, whose absence is beautifully established as a hole in all the worlds Rownie moves through in the novel. So when Rownie is sent on an errand and discovers a flier for a theater performance by a traveling troupe of actors, who also happen to be goblins 120 (sometimes referred to as Tamlin or the Changed), he doesn’t get the oil for Graba’s legs he was sent for, but instead uses two coppers to pay for the show. The theater is a forbidden pleasure, and possibly something more powerful than that, in Zombay, where no one is allowed to wear a mask or pretend to be other than they are. It is this first decision that Rownie makes to pursue what he wants rather than to do Graba’s bidding which sets his story into motion. He is invited into the performance to play a giant, and ultimately ends up fleeing Graba and seeking sanctuary with the goblin players. He seems both fearful that he’ll be Changed, remembering Graba’s cautions about goblin food, and, other times, that he won’t and will end up back with Graba. The goblins are a delight – full of wit and mischief and art, they are all exquisitely drawn characters. When it turns out they are seeking Rowan as well, because he alone may be able to wear the mask that will protect the city, Rownie finally begins to hope he will see his brother again. As the story goes on, Rownie gets ever closer to Rowan, and the transformative nature of wearing masks becomes clearer, he begins to come into his own, becoming more than just a boy with only ‘‘my brother’s name, made small.’’ The story builds to a fitting, if melancholy, conclusion. It would be a crime not to mention the quality of the world-building in general and Zombay in particular. The rules of Alexander’s world are es- tablished by action and observation, rather than direct explanation, and demand close reading at times to puzzle out. But his city on a river is well and tantalizingly drawn. The wide, regular streets of Northside are in sharp contrast to the crooked, chaotic lay-out of Southside, with the Fiddleway Bridge connecting the two over the Great Zombay River. With its myste- rious Mayor and his prohibitions against acting and masks, the (mostly) abandoned Southside rail station, and a clockwork police force known as the Guard, the mash-up of witchwork and gearwork is a memorable one. The politics of this strange sprawling city are explored in bits and bites, and are not entirely clear by story’s end. Likewise, there are secrets left to be re- vealed about the nature of goblins and their craft. This hesitance to make the mysterious entirely known seems in keeping with the novel’s thematic material, and the ever-shifting personas the goblins can take on and off with their masks, though not without risk. The mythic resonance in Alexander’s storytelling, coupled with his smart, graceful writing, make this novel feel both pleasantly old and thoroughly new. –Gwenda Bond (Reviewed in Jun 2012) Return to First Novel list.

121 vN: The First Machine Dynasty, Madeline Ashby (Angry Robot 978-0- 85766-262-0, $12.99, 416pp, tp) July 2012. vN: The First Machine Dynasty by Madeline Ashby is a simple coming of age story with a high body count. Amy, an indulged and loved kindergartner from a mixed family, is also a von Neumann machine, AKA, a self-replicating robot designed by the well- intentioned New Eden corporation to care for all those humans it fears will be left behind after the Rapture. Because von Neumann read his Asimov, these robots are all shipped with a failsafe, which makes them collapse both physically and mentally if they witness a human getting hurt. At her kindergarten graduation, Amy witnesses the murder of one of her human classmates by her vN grandmother Portia. Amy’s response isn’t to self-implode; instead, she literally eats Portia. And Portia is a meal who doesn’t digest well. She takes up residence in Amy’s brain, making barbed comments and, when needed, kicking ass. What follows is a chase through a possible post-robotic future America, one where Seattle has sunk into the ocean and sea monsters troll the Pacific. Like any good story about growing up, however, it’s more about Amy com- ing to terms with the world as she breaks with the comfort and safety of her childhood home. While also, natch, pounding the stuffing out of bounty hunters and others who would do her harm. The world that Ashby has created is an interesting one, as is her construc- tion of this tightly plotted story. Her real skill is in capturing those ineffable, emotional moments when Amy juggles her longing for her parents and her newfound freedoms. Her journey feels true, despite the SFnal bits about self-replicating robots. –Adrienne Martini (Reviewed in Aug 2012) Return to First Novel list.

Shadow and Bone, Leigh Bardugo (Holt 978-0-805-09459-6, $17.99, 368pp, hc) June 2012. High fantasy never left the young adult and children’s field, with such prominent authors as Tamora Pierce and Megan Whalen Turner at its fore- front. But in recent years, they have been joined by a number of exciting new authors like Rae Carson, Kristin Cashore, and Malinda Lo, who are chroni- cling a diverse range of kingdoms, creating fresh mythologies, and bringing memorable characters to life. And now we can add Leigh Bardugo to that list. In Bardugo’s accomplished, Tsarist -flavored debut Smoke and Bone, the kingdom of Ravka is one in which war is simply a fact of life, its 122 Border Wars a constant and seemingly immutable part of the landscape. To be an orphan in such a place isn’t unusual. But young members of the First Army Alina Starkov and her childhood best friend Mal Oretsev have an un- usually strong bond even for orphans who grew up together. But they are no longer children, and stand on the cusp of traveling with their fellow soldiers into ‘‘the Fold,’’ also known as the unsea, a black seam cutting the inland country off from the coastal port cities. A cartographer, Alina’s uneasiness about the mission they are about to embark on is palpable as the novel be- gins. Mal, a tracker and fierce fighter, pulls her out of the road before the coach of the Darkling, the most powerful of the Second Army’s wealthy and magic-using Grisha, can run her down. Mal assures Alina that everything will be fine, that they’ll be together. While their closeness is undeniable, Mal clearly doesn’t understand the full nature of Alina’s love for him – he doesn’t know that she is in love with him. Their journey across the Fold proves as dangerous as feared. When flesh- eating volcra attack in the darkness, Alina is saved by Mal only to find her life will be forfeit to the monsters anyway – and his will be lost, too. But a mysterious light drives away the creatures, and Alina passes out. When she wakes up, Alina’s treated as a criminal. Marched to the Darkling’s tent, she discovers that, according to the witnesses present, the light came from her. Disbelieving, she denies it. All children are tested for Grisha power, after all, and she doesn’t have any. But the quartz-eyed Darkling is able to summon her power forth. It seems scruffy, skinny orphan Alina may be a rare type of Grisha, a sun summoner, the only person that could do away with the Fold and the evil in its shadows forever – and therefore a powerful weapon whom Ravka’s foes will stop at nothing to destroy. Dispatched in the Darkling’s own coach with a full Grisha escort, Alina can’t even say goodbye to Mal. Plagued by assassins en route, once Alina reaches the Darkling’s palace and the lush court of the King in Os Alta, her old life begins to feel distant. While she yearns for Mal, writing him con- stantly, she settles into an entirely new world, one where there’s no sign of the poverty and scarcity of the world outside the capitol. She also begins to explore her power – one which she can’t summon, but which can be called forth from her – and learn more about the different types of Grisha: the Cor- poralki (order of the living and the dead), the Etherealki (order of summon- ers), and Materialki (order of fabrikators). She develops a friendship with Genya, a servant to the queen, and is increasingly drawn to the handsome, mysterious, frighteningly powerful Darkling. But her own power remains elusive, a promise instead of a presence. With such high political stakes, mo- tivations begin to become as dark as creatures from the Fold. Alina can’t be sure whom to trust. 123 The novel has a classic feel, created by its instantly iconic characters and imaginative world-building. Bardugo goes well beneath those surface plea- sures, to excavate deeper layers of class differences in the society, as well as the themes of freedom and slavery – both possible with the Grisha magic and the Darkling’s mastery of it. Ravka is a world with plenty of territory left to explore, and despite a truly satisfying conclusion that feels like a conclu- sion (a welcome trait for the first of a trilogy), readers will be eager to meet these characters again in the sequels that lie ahead. With this enchanting de- but, Bardugo has established herself as a riveting new voice in high fantasy. –Gwenda Bond (Reviewed in Jan 2013) Return to First Novel list.

Charlotte Markham and the House of Darkling, Michael Boccacino (Morrow 978-0-06-212261-2, $14.99, 293pp, tp) August 2012. Gothic romance mixes with weird fantasy in this strikingly strange first novel about a governess who stumbles with her charges into another world. The widow Charlotte Markham works as governess at Everton, the country house of widower Henry Darrow and his two sons. The novel opens more like a mystery, with the grisly death of Nanny Plum, and the inept attempts at investigation by the small town constable, but things quickly veer into the supernatural when Charlotte and the boys walk into a mist and find themselves in another place, where the boys’ dead mother lives in a manor with some exceedingly strange inhabitants. It’s possible to leave, but the boys insist on returning to their mother again and again – and Charlotte fears sinister plots may trap them all in this strange world. Though there are similarities to tales of faerie encounters, things get more and more gro- tesque and otherworldly (with some fascinating set pieces), while Charlotte struggles to make sense of only vaguely understood rules and conflicts that she must deal with if she is to save her charges and herself. –Carolyn Cushman (Reviewed in Jan 2013) Return to First Novel list.

Blackwood, Gwenda Bond (Strange Chemistry 978-1-908844-07-1, $9.99, 326pp, tp) September 2012. Early American history (or is it legend?), alchemy, and a long-standing family curse reach a crisis point around a pair of modern teens in Black- wood, the excellent debut of Locus contributing editor Gwenda Bond. Though the publisher is British, Bond is thoroughly American; as the bio notes, she lives in a century-old house in Lexington KY, with her husband 124 (author Christopher Rowe) and several pets. She’s well-equipped to specu- late about matters on Roanoke Island, site of the Lost Colony where 114 settlers vanished in Elizabethan times. Roanoke is now a tourist destination off the coast of North Carolina, yet it retains some insular qualities. All of the full-time residents know Mi- randa Blackwood’s family lies under some kind of curse, dating from the island’s early days. That image of a snake on the face of her drunken father is no tattoo (and it will pass to her after his death), and both of them seem doomed never to leave Roanoke – not alive, at any rate. Phillips Rawling, son of the local police chief, has left, though it took des- perate measures for him to reach a ‘‘year-round boarding school’’ which specializes in delinquent youths. Before the escape, he was continually haunted by voices in his head: ‘‘During the worst moments, it was like every person who’d ever lived and died on the island – and it had been occupied for a very long time – shouted at him,’’ producing ‘‘chaos he couldn’t begin to control.’’ Silence is sweet relief. And yet a new disaster draws him back; when another 114 islanders abruptly disappear, someone with his ‘‘gift’’ just might find clues to where they went. But he doesn’t really come at his father’s call. After four years away, when he sees on TV, telling a vacuous reporter, ‘‘Leave me the frak alone,’’ he knows he must return. Despite their family links to Roanoke’s early days, a gift/curse that makes both of them feel like a misfits, Miranda and Phillips are both 17, accus- tomed to the world of earbuds, iPods, remotes, and babbling anchorwom- en like her would-be interviewer. When the strange disappearance – fol- lowed by an equally inexplicable ‘‘return’’ – of the latest missing persons turns out to be linked with a scheming sorcerer from many centuries ago, he gripes, ‘‘Evil dead guys having secret plans for girls you really liked and wanted to live sucked.’’ And evil isn’t what it used to be. Despite growing up on the wrong side of the tracks, ‘‘bad girl’’ Miranda tends to obey the rules (as long as she’s in her right mind). When another teenager, the gawky son of a preacher- man, proclaims, ‘‘Dad talks to angels,’’she shows her knowledge of scrip- ture: ‘‘Satan was an angel.’’ But Phillips will have none of it, responding, ‘‘This isn’t something any god would be involved in. Or any fallen angel. The devil is just the kind of word my gran would use.’’ He prefers to view their prime adversary, returned from the dead, as more of a mad scientist whose dreams of progress led him so far astray that he’s become a force of destruction. Offbeat and imaginative, Blackwood mingles past and present, dark forces with a hint of pulp SF, along with many kinds of drama – from Shakespearean revenge to an amphitheater show where the island’s legend 125 is just an entertainment for passing tourists. Whether viewed as young adult, genre mix, or a first novel, it belongs with the year’s best. –Faren Miller (Reviewed in Aug 2012) Return to First Novel list.

Wide Open, Deborah Coates (Tor 978-0-7653-2898-4, $24.99, 303pp, hc) March 2012. Sergeant Hallie Michaels goes home to South Dakota after her sister’s sud- den death in this sharp-edged contemporary fantasy mystery. Hallie doesn’t believe her sister’s death was suicide – if only because she can see her sis- ter’s unhappy ghost. Unfortunately, Hallie’s ability to see ghosts is recent, the result of a near-death experience in Afghanistan, and she can’t talk to the ghosts or really even communicate much with them. So she starts re- tracing her sister’s last steps, trying to find out what really happened, and finds she’s angered someone, or something, really powerful. Hallie’s obvi- ously not a SF or fantasy fan – Buffy and her slayerettes would have figured out what’s going on almost immediately, as will most readers, but watching Hallie stumble through her investigation becomes involving as she tries to adjust from the change between Afghanistan and home, and the girl she was and the woman she’s become. It’s nice to see a small-town mystery where the folks aren’t a bunch of quirky eccentrics, just regular hardworking folk in a remote farming community. At its best, the tale is quietly effective; the pacing’s a bit slow, and the supernatural aspects don’t always mesh well with the mystery format, but overall this is a strong first novel, and an interesting start to a new series. –Carolyn Cushman (Reviewed in Jun 2012) Return to First Novel list.

Sanctum, Sarah Fine (Amazon 978-1-6121-8442-5, $17.99, 417pp, hc) Oc- tober 2012. Suicides get the hell they want – sort of – in this powerful young-adult fantasy. Abused foster child Lela Santos once tried to kill herself and ever since has had dreams of a hellish city where suicides end up. She’s starting to turn her life around with the help of a new home and best friend Nadia, but then Nadia kills herself, and Lela has visions of Nadia in that city. Lela stumbles on a way to follow, determined to rescue her friend, but finding her in a city full of the terminally depressed and desperate, all locked in their own pain, isn’t going to be easy. Then Lela gets caught by a dangerous and frighteningly attractive city guard with ideas of his own for her. Lela’s 126 tough, almost improbably so, but it’s fascinating watching her force her way through this weird version of hell on a mission that seems doomed from the outset. An intriguing young-adult novel, the first in a series, and a very impressive first novel. –Carolyn Cushman (Reviewed in Feb 2013) Return to First Novel list.

Bad Glass, Richard E. Gropp (Del Rey 978-0-345-53393-7, $15.00, 417pp, tp) October 2012. Richard E. Gropp won the Del Rey Suvudu Writing Contest with first nov- el, Bad Glass, which explores a strangely plagued Spokane WA (in a time not too far from the present) through the first-person viewpoint and some of the work of lead character Dean Walker, who sneaks into a mostly evacuated city under military guard and lockdown, in hope of making his name as a photojournalist. He begins with descriptions of two photos, boxed and featuring ordinary typewriter text rather than the fancier Apollo type of the main narrative. The first of them – ‘‘the photograph you know’’ from its online appearance in a forum about Spokane – features a corpse in a grim concrete room, a dead soldier whose violated body sprouts a surreal appendage, an image summed up as ‘‘insanity, printed and framed. Pure insanity.’’ Some added comments, after the description, serve as an intro revealing that Dean has many more, ‘‘Countless inexplicable images locked up on my hard drive.’’ The next example, taken on a road outside the city, shows a living soldier (complete with a ‘‘pink bunny sticker’’ on the butt of his assault rifle) stand- ing in front of a defaced sign that once said ‘‘ENTERING SPOKANE.’’ The juxtaposition of bizarre magic with quirky humanity in these pictures turns out to typify Dean’s (and the author’s) eye for detail, not just confined to the supernatural. This keen awareness extends to Gropp’s sense of character, in portraits of the little groups of locals who didn’t flee when the strangeness began or as it continued to escalate. Though the first man Dean encounters, after several hours on streets that had started to seem totally deserted, is a self-serving creep, Wendell (AKA Weasel) isn’t lying when he describes the current ver- sion of city life: ‘‘There are vicious animals in the park, so you don’t go there after dark. There’s a warehouse on the east side – it’s been on fire for three months straight. So you stay the hell away. And if you see people in the street, people who shouldn’t be there, people whose feet don’t move when they walk....’’ Rather than say more, he shrugs, almost blasé about it all – but he does tell the newcomer: ‘‘And if you came here looking for reasons, you’re 127 just wasting your time.’’ In the course of Dean’s adventures, he’ll hear plenty of weird theories, but even their looniest advocates still tend to have some seeds of doubt. What may be the best advice he gets simply sidesteps explanations. Before finding the confused outsider a place to stay, the genuinely benign (and attractive) woman Taylor tells him, ‘‘There’s a lot to see here. I don’t know hat pictures and stories have made it out to the real world, but we’ve certainly got a lot to photograph.’’ She adds, ‘‘Not quite sure it’s smart to seek it out, but it’s certainly there.’’ Against the promptings of his own better judgment, even when the strangeness escalates to a murderous degree, Dean stays on to witness and portray it. I was going to say ‘‘document,’’ but that term might seem naive to the embittered older photographer who gives the book its title, as he tells our hero ‘‘you lie with pictures just like you lie with words. You can’t help it, you can’t control it.... All of that stuff turns dark. Through bad glass, it gets tainted.’’ Emotion, memories, or madness – any of them can destroy the purity of the image, and Dean comes to know them all. It’s ironic that, as a kind of coda to this tale, we get a stark governmental list of the contents of a black footlocker: photos, manuscripts, notebook entries, videos, computer, mem- ory card, etc. – everything that helped turn the chapter introductions into something like a chilling collage, reduced here to mere objects. One further list deals with the major characters, referenced as a numerical sequence of ‘‘cases,’’ with notes on their presumed fates (some still live, though the ma- jority are MISSING or DECEASED). What happened in, and to, the city of Spokane? Not even Uncle Sam’s in- vestigators may ever really know. –Faren Miller (Reviewed in Dec 2012) Return to First Novel list.

Seraphina, Rachel Hartman (Random House 978-0-375-86656-2, $17.99, 464pp, hc) May 2012. Cover by Andrew Davidson. Hartman’s first novel returns to the world of her mini-comic Amy Un- bounded, the kingdom of Goredd, where shapeshifting dragons are only allowed in their human form, and any kind of romance between humans and dragons is strictly forbidden. But Seraphina is the result of one such relationship, and she’s had to hide her few scaly patches of skin and visions all her life. Her dragon mother died in childbirth and her father tried to keep her mostly hidden, but Seraphina has a great musical talent that will not be denied. That talent takes her to the palace, where she is assistant to 128 the court composer, deeply involved in plans for the celebration for the 40th anniversary of the treaty between Goredd and the dragons – a treaty certain factions are trying to destroy. It’s a fascinating tale of prejudice and caring, with Seraphina one of those damaged but determined characters you can’t help but root for. –Carolyn Cushman (Reviewed in Nov 2012) Return to First Novel list.

The Snow Child, Eowyn Ivey (Little, Brown/Reagan Arthur 978-0-316- 17567-8, $24.99, 390pp, hc) February 2012. Cover by Alessandro Gottardo. Eowyn Ivey’s debut The Snow Child combines a plot inspired by a fairy tale with the format of a novel that’s almost mainstream. It’s set in Alaska back in the 1920s, the ‘‘homestead era’’ when people came to rugged country from out of state, lured by the promise of cheap, abundant farmland. The daughter of two poets, raised in Alaska and still living there, Ivey viv- idly invokes life on the edge of wilderness, where each fierce winter bears the threat of ruin for anyone who arrives unprepared. Middle-aged married couple Jack and Mable seem like prime candidates for disaster, fleeing the memory of a stillborn child back in Pennsylvania for a (cathartic?) new life Up North, but they manage to survive by dint of hard work, determination, and a touch of something less mundane. The epigraph for Part One comes from Arthur Ransome’s story ‘‘Little Daughter of the Snow’’, one of the book’s sources of inspiration: retold fairy- tales involving children made of snow and brought to life by magic. It ends, ‘‘‘Husband,’ said the old woman, ‘there’s no knowing what may be. Let us go into the yard and make a little snow girl.’’’ In a year when storms come late to the region where their homestead lies, between Wolverine River and the minuscule town of Alpine, Mable says much the same thing to Jack. Beginning with small graduated balls of snow, they produce something more than just a crude figure. When he steps back from his efforts, ‘‘Sculpted in the white snow were perfect, lovely eyes, a nose, and small white lips. She even thought she could see cheekbones and a little chin.’’ Mabel adds the final touches: berry juice on those lips, a scarf and mittens knitted from red wool. When Jack wakes up the next morning, their creation has been reduced to ‘‘a small broken heap of snow’’ and the knitted things are gone, but he sees flashes of red on ‘‘a little figure’’ dashing toward the forest – just a young thief, or the snow child come to life? The less fantastic explanation begins to seem probable after he meets the girl who now wears the scarf and mittens. She says she came here with her father, who had plans to mine for gold. People in Alpine remember the min- 129 er/trapper they called Swede, and his later disappearance. This could be a daughter that managed to survive after he died. And yet there’s something genuinely odd about the girl who calls herself Faina (giving no other name). In Alaska’s harsh winters, where normal settlers can only shiver, hunker down and hope to make it through the almost-sunless months, she thrives. At this daunting time of year, her close links to wilderness come to the fore – almost as though the land seeks to preserve a child born of itself and brought to life through the magic of a human desperation which turns to hope, then love. Love in a variety of guises haunts The Snow Child. Its aging couple have not lost all physical desire for each other. There’s lingering fondness, as well as mourning, when they remember the child they lost (along with the pos- sibility of further children) before they came here. And while Faina proves elusive even after growing to adulthood, she made enough connections that her strange blend of humanity and wildness will live on after she is gone. –Faren Miller (Reviewed in Jul 2012) Return to First Novel list.

Rituals: A Novel of the Fantastic: Rhapsody of Blood, Volume One, Roz Ka- veney (Plus One Press 978-0-9844362-7-9, $18.95, 320pp, tp) August 2012. Now here’s a novel which I initially set aside with some trepidation be- cause it seemed loaded with the sort of features that so much fantasy does so badly. It promises there will be three more volumes, and this leads to one of those complicated titles that you never know how to punctuate: Rituals: A Novel of the Fantastic: Rhapsody of Blood, Volume One. It has not one but two kick-ass heroines, and draws much of the rest of its cast from a farrago of world mythology and pop culture that would do proud. It has battles between elves and vampires, for heaven’s sake. And some seri- ously misogynistic birds. And King Kong. But it also comes to us as the first novel from Roz Kaveney, one of the more formidable intellects in British pop culture and SF criticism for the past few decades. There is reason to sus- pect that Kaveney might know how to juggle all these materials with some sophistication and wit, and it turns out she does. While the novel covers some familiar bases of both mythological and , it’s also in- formed in sly ways by Kaveney’s shrewd understanding of the true subtexts of comics, Buffy, superheroes, and various SF films, and its real engine is a passionate commitment to human rights and something approaching rage at the myriad ways in which those rights can be trampled. It’s also quite funny in bits. The two plot lines involve Mara the Huntress, an apparently immortal crusader against those who attain godhood through 130 ‘‘rituals of blood’’ – effectively, mass murder – who is telling her story to Aleister Crowley, of all people; and Emma Jones, whom we first meet as an out-of-place undergraduate with a witty and sophisticated room- mate/lover named Caroline. Mara and Emma’s paths cross briefly early in the novel, when at an academic cocktail party a mid-level Tory minister suddenly turns into a slavering, vulpine monster, beheading and devouring Caroline before being dispatched by Mara, who pops up out of nowhere. Caroline soon reappears as a talkative and sarcastic ghost, and much of the pleasure of these chapters derives from the snarky Nick-and-Nora ban- ter between her and Emma, who over the next 15 years becomes her own vanquisher of evil spirits – following the directions of Caroline’s unnamed Employer – though she needs to disguise her talents by consulting on feng shui and ley lines, which she views as thoroughly fraudulent (even though it eventually leads her to a bestselling book). Some of her work involves resurrecting ancient gods, such as a museum-loving faun and an ancient crocodile-god named Sobekh. Some involves dealing with incompetent gods like Jehovah, who has a problem in keeping his angels from freelancing for the other side. The contemporary chapters, set largely in London and Los Angeles, cover some of the same comic/horror/mythical territory as China Miéville’s , and there’s more than a hint of Buffy in Emma’s character and responsibilities. The chapters concerning Mara, and narrated by her, are considerably more portentous in tone, as perhaps befits a tale that touches upon everything from the fall of Atlantis to the , the Black Death, and Cortez’s slaughter of the Aztecs, often in scenes of startling brutality. But the tone here is a bit more wobbly. Sometimes Mara expresses a humanizing wit, like complain- ing of missing coffee in the centuries before it was invented; sometimes her paragraphs are so short and synoptic they sound like graphic novel caption boxes (‘‘I was washing almost dead beggars in Sienna and Paris and Ham- burg and Cracow’’), and sometimes she’s given to self-consciously sonorous pronouncements like ‘‘I am Mara the Huntress, and I hunt alone.’’ She may be the archetype of all warrior goddesses and the universal avenger of the weak against the strong, but she can sound like a pain, and it comes as some- thing of a relief when a contemporary goddess taking the form of Patti La Belle (don’t ask, but Gloria Gaynor’s here too) dismisses her as ‘‘Little Miss Psycho Bitch from the Dawn of Time.’’ Still, it’s Mara’s harrowing parade through the atrocities of human history that lends the novel its ballast and its real anger, and in a long section that could be a standalone novella, she fi- nally tells of her origins and – in the purest sustained fantasy sequence in the book – confronts a terrifying enemy, the Lord of Birds, who is not so readily dispatched and whose crimes against women are particularly shocking. The 131 novel has an odd, almost symphonic structure, beginning with three shorter chapters that serve as a kind of overture for the much longer movements that follow, and despite the ragged bits there’s enough elegance to this archi- tecture, enough sheer energy in the action sequences, and enough dark pas- sion in the whole novel that we want to know what further volumes might reveal. Kaveney seems to be doing some things with mythology that no one else has quite done, and that could be very promising. –Gary K. Wolfe (Reviewed in Nov 2012) Return to First Novel list.

The Games, Ted Kosmatka (Del Rey 978-0-345-52661-8, $25.00, 362pp, hc) March 2012. Ted Kosmatka has been one of the most intriguing short fiction writers to emerge in the last few years, garnering something like a half-dozen Year’s Best selections and a Nebula nomination on the basis of scarcely more than a dozen widely varied stories, though he often returns to themes of genet- ics and genetic engineering (one of the most impressive, ‘‘The Prophet of Flores’’, imagined a creation-science based scientific community trying to grapple with the real-world discovery of those hobbit-like hominids on the Indonesian island of Flores). When any such hot new writer turns in their first novel it’s worth our attention, especially if that writer is as eclectic as Kosmatkas, and one of the questions that inevitably comes to mind is whether those attractive idiosyncrasies will shape the novel, or whether the writer, most likely having been told by practically everyone that a novel is a far more commercial than a short story, will opt for the more formulaic kind of accessibility that at least gets you in the waiting room for bestsellerdom. In the case of Kosmatka’s first novel, The Games, it’s a little of both. Even the title suggests that Kosmatka has an ear to the market. The games in question are near-future Olympic games, which have been pumped up by the addition of deadly contests between ‘‘gladiators,’’ who aren’t, as you might suspect, supersteroidal monster athletes, but real monsters: the com- petition is really between each country’s team of genetic engineers, who de- sign ever more fearsome battle-creatures with the only restriction being that no human DNA can be incorporated into the design. The notion of increas- ingly violent and politicized Olympic contests – or sports in general for that matter – isn’t new in SF; almost three decades ago Asimov, Greenberg, and Waugh put together an entire anthology titled Science Fictional Olympics, and even before that we had William Harrison’s ‘‘Rollerball’’ and the movie, and the ultraviolent version of football in Killerbowl by Gary K. Wolf (not 132 related, for the last time!). But those at least focused on human competitors, and were essentially high-tech adaptations of familiar sports plots such as the aging champion. The Games barely pays a nod to the human competi- tion at all, and the actual account of the Olympic monster mash is so brief and marginal to the overall plot that the title would seem almost misleading, were it not for the almost inescapable suspicion that, with the novel being released the same month as the movie The Hunger Games, there’s a bit of opportunity-snagging involved. Even the promotional copy blares ‘‘Jurassic Park meets The Hunger Games’’, a claim that manages to completely mis- represent both of those novels as well as Kosmatka’s – a rare feat for any ad copywriter. None of this is Kosmatka’s fault, of course, since what he’s written is an honest, fast-moving, and reasonably suspenseful Frankenstein tale that comes fully prepped for its own movie. As the annual genetic-engineering media spectacle grows ever more extreme, the US Olympic Commission has farmed out the development of its gladiator to a private corporation, which in turn has given the design of the beast over to a massive supercomputer which communicates only with its own designer, a cripplingly maladjusted (and massively overweight) near-autistic savant named Evan Chandler, who has developed a rather pathetic father-son relationship with the computer’s nascent AI, which he calls ‘‘Pea.’’ This is a bit less subtle than normal suspen- sion of disbelief; it’s willfully ignoring neon signs flashing BAD IDEA all over the first half of the plot – a mentally unbalanced isolate designing an equally mentally unbalanced AI which in turn designs a monster which the US Government is cheerfully willing to set loose in an arena packed with spectators, even though it has no idea what it actually is. The monster it- self is pretty spectacular – a winged monstrosity something like one of A.E. Van Vogt’s black destroyers before Giger got hold of them – but Kosmatka pays little attention to outlining the decadent, almost dystopian culture that would even tolerate such events (there’s a protest movement, but it serves little role other than as snack food). Instead, we have a distressingly familiar build-up of tension between the clueless venal corporate overlord (he might as well be the mayor of Amity Island) and the dedicated genetic scientist who, with his newfound girlfriend (an exobiologist hired for the project to try to determine the nature of the monster) fighting to prevent the inevi- table disaster, which involves familiar images from steel containment doors being beaten open from the inside to spectators tossed about like popcorn, and a world-threatening apocalypse in the offing. Kosmatka shows that he can write an effective thriller leavened with some knowledgeable genetic engineering and AI theory, but the qualities that have made him such a distinctive story writer tend to lie around the margins 133 of this by-the-numbers plot: in the sad scenes between the reclusive Evan Chandler and his immature AI, in the portrayal of the decent but haunted genetic scientist Silas Williams, even in such touches as a funeral scene fol- lowing the death of the monster’s first victim (how many victims in disaster thrillers ever get funerals?), and in a rather unexpectedly moving conclu- sion. This may not be the novel that Kosmatka’s short fiction would lead us to expect, but who’s to blame him for taking the Michael Crichton route, especially since he almost certainly handles the material in a more sophisti- cated and less silly way that Crichton himself would have? The Games may not be as original as we know Kosmatka can be, and it may not even be about the Games of its title, but it’s an efficient thriller that does what it sets out to do, and promises a good deal more in the future. –Gary K. Wolfe (Reviewed in Feb 2012) Return to First Novel list.

The Man from Primrose Lane, James Renner (Farrar, Straus & Giroux/ Sarah Crichton Books 978-0-374-20095-4, $26.00, 370pp, hc) March 2012. The Man from Primrose Lane, a first novel by James Renner, deals with recent and contemporary kidnappings, rapes and murders in West Akron OH, a widowed writer’s investigation of the death of its strange title charac- ter (AKA ‘‘the man with a thousand mittens’’) and whoever has been target- ing underage girls, before the perspective abruptly widens beyond mystery. Like the writer’s son, a young boy fascinated by ‘‘the Rube’’ – a weird Rube Goldberg device he’s set up in his bedroom, whose bits include a traveling ballbearing, a broom handle, strings, a pulley, one Tinkertoy, and a stereo rigged to play his father’s Jethro Tull album Aqualung – this book revels in its complicated structure of flashbacks, clues, mental turmoil, and some- what Tullish intimations of a world that’s not our own. On the most basic level, the temporal center is 2012, with looks back down the years and decades of a few lives, and the theme is crime: one old man’s peculiar murder, somehow linked to previous atrocities targeting red-haired girls (their emblem is in the cover art, a broken doll). It is four years after Sackett the policeman found the body of that strange old man who, as a kid, he’d glimpsed now and then in the same neighborhood of West Akron. It was a gruesome crime, marked by the disappearance of fingers cut from both hands, and Sackett has become obsessed enough to consult David Nell: a non-fiction writer about serial killers, father of the boy with the Rube, and a man who still deeply mourns his troubled wife. Part One mingles Sackett and Nell’s research with the tale of that wife, ‘‘Elizabeth’’. Part Two, ‘‘Bruno’’, looks more deeply into the actions and per- 134 sonality of a character who may link all the deaths, reading like an especially twisted form of detective fiction. But Part Three, ‘‘Me’’, is the real labyrinth: self-reflection over the course of temporal loops which can only be SF. Before things get SFnal, The Man from Primrose Lane already shows an extreme literary ambition in the complex temporal structure that helps bare the minds of its major characters, whether innocent, angst-ridden or to- tally unhinged. But James Renner aims beyond all this to more PhilDickian realms of paradox where a familiar part of America interacts with Other. Some elements may upset squeamish readers (I include myself here), yet this is more than a new fiction writer juggling with time, persona, and possibili- ties as a form of self-assertion. Renner moves beyond the mundane because he sees things that way. –Faren Miller (Reviewed in Apr 2012) Return to First Novel list.

Alif the Unseen, G. Willow Wilson (Grove 978-0-8021-2020-5, $25.00, 431pp, hc) June 2012. Previously best known for her memoir, The Butterfly Mosque, and her work in comics, including the too-short-lived monthly Vertigo title Air, G. Willow Wilson now turns her attention to the novel. And what a first novel Alif the Unseen is. An outgrowth of research she did during work on her memoir that led to her discovery of the burgeoning digital underground and its political impact, Alif is a novel that fantasy readers won’t want to miss. The publisher has evoked , Philip Pullman, and Neal Ste- phenson for comparisons, and Wilson does indeed have the same sense of myth and magic, accomplished prose and heady ideas, engaging characters and gripping story that characterizes their work. Set in an unnamed Middle Eastern country with a severe security crack- down – particularly on and the like – the novel first introduces us to Alif, which is, of course, a handle taken from the first letter of the Arabic al- phabet. Alif’s first love, his first real romance outside ones and zeroes, flames out in a spectacular revelation that Intisar – his intended, a bride from a family with old wealth – is going to marry another. Spurned, Alif decides to grant Intisar her wish never to see him or even his name again. He invents a program that can identify her with pinpoint accuracy from even a sentence, a program that might be magic itself, and that will cloak him from her as if he’d never existed... but it doesn’t keep the security state from detecting his presence. And it turns out Intisar is to marry The Hand himself, the head of the crackdown efforts. When next-door neighbor Dina brings him a gift from Intisar – a strange 135 and mysterious old book – and the two are forced onto the run together, things get strange and mythic indeed. A fusion of the Arab Spring with djinn lore and a thoroughly modern thriller plot, Wilson’s novel just might be the debut of the year. Highly recommended to all fantasy readers. –Gwenda Bond (Reviewed in Oct 2012) Return to First Novel list.

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136 Collections

The Best of Kage Baker, Kage Baker (Subterranean 978-1-59606-442-3, $40, 496, hc) April 2012. [Order from Subterranean Press, PO Box 190106, Bur- ton MI 48519; .] The Best of Kage Baker makes me mad – not in a ‘‘reading this was a waste of time’’ way but in a ‘‘she had so many stories left’’ way. My anger is purely selfish. While the bulk of the stories collected here have turned up in other pub- lications and online, it is lovely to have these 20 tales under one cover, even though most have been anthologized before. Best contains a slice or two from each of Baker’s worlds. The Company is well represented, as is her House of the Stag universe, her take on a future Mars and the proto-Company world of Nell Gwynne. Plus, there are stories that are outliers, like ‘‘Plotters and Shooters’’, which is about adolescent power dynamics and meteors. The last few stories, ‘‘The Ruby Incomparable,’’ ‘‘Bad Machine,’’ and the heartbreak- ing ‘‘The Carpet Beds of Sutro Park’’ show the writer that Baker was becom- ing, one full of both melancholy and wit. One could quibble about these particular 20 stories representing the best of what Baker had to offer – but that is the sort of argument that revolves around almost any best of anthology for any writer. What would have been helpful to have, however, is a more informative table of contents, one that gives the reader a sense of when and where the bulk of the stories were pub- lished, if only to provide a better outline of how Baker was developing as a writer. Still, The Best of Kage Baker is nice to have, even if it also limns what could have been. –Adrienne Martini (Reviewed in Feb 2012) The Best of Kage Baker [Second Review] There’s no way I can be even remotely objective about the collection The Best of Kage Baker. Back when I was the editor of Asimov’s in 1997, I bought Kage Baker’s very first story, ‘‘Noble Mold’’, and subsequently bought more than 35 other stories from her for the magazine, as well as reprinting lots of her stuff in my Best of the Year anthology series; even after I left Asimov’s, I continued to buy stories from her for anthologies such as Wizards and The Dragon Book. So it’s safe to say that I’m a Baker partisan, and you can discount my opinion here if you wish, but for me this is one of the best collections of the year, and will almost certainly end up in my top five. The selection is not the same as the one I would have made, and there are a few minor Baker stories here, but the overall quality is quite high, and even 137 the minor stories are absorbing; she was perhaps the best natural storyteller to enter the field since . Baker almost never wrote a story that wasn’t at the very least worth reading. For my money, the best stories here are the novellas – Baker was at her best at novella length – ‘‘Son, Observe the Time’’ and ‘‘Welcome to Olympos, Mr. Hearst’’, but there are other good Baker stories here, such as the aforementioned ‘‘Noble Mold’’, ‘‘Bad Machine’’, ‘‘The Catch’’, ‘‘Are You Afflicted With Dragons?’’, ‘‘The Ruby Incomparable’’, ‘‘Maelstrom’’, and others. If you haven’t read Baker, you don’t know what you’re missing, and this is a good place to start.

–Gardner Dozois (Reviewed in Apr 2012) Return to Collection list.

Other Seasons: The Best of Neal Barrett Jr.(Subterranean) September 2012. Back in the mid-’80s, when I was editing Asimov’s magazine, I pulled an unagented manuscript by a writer whose name I didn’t recognize out of the slush pile. It was a sloppy, badly typed manuscript, usually an indicator that the story is the work of a novice, but there was something compelling about the voice it was written in, and I continued to read until I hit a scene where, in describing the wonders of New York City, the narration casually mentions in passing ‘‘a boy tying celery to a cat,’’ and I realized that I was no longer sure whether the author was a brilliant satirist or totally insane, and went off to seek a second opinion. Of course, it turned out that that author, Neal Bar- rett, Jr., was a brilliant satirist, perhaps the best in SF, and was also a veteran author who made his first sale way back in 1960 and who had written west- erns, mysteries, thrillers, and historical fiction in addition to a number of SF novels; that story containing the no-doubt rather annoyed cat with celery tied to it was ‘‘Perpetuity Blues’’, which still strikes me as one of the funniest (and weirdest) SF stories ever written, rivaling some of the best work of that other great SF humorist, R.A. Lafferty. Although he’d been writing for de- cades before then, Barrett really began to generate a buzz in the late ’80s with the sudden massed appearance of a number of mad, highly energetic stories in markets such as Asimov’s and Omni, so that the affect was almost that of a major new writer appearing in our midst. Most of the best of those stories are collected in the well-named Other Seasons: The Best of Neal Barrett Jr., which will certainly make my shortlist of the best collections of the year. Like Andy Duncan, who we were talking about here last month, like R.A. Lafferty, like , like How- ard Waldrop, Barrett is one of the great eccentrics, those absolutely unique writers whose work doesn’t really fit well into the mainline of development 138 for either science fiction or fantasy, but which frequently and freely mingles elements of both, as well as generous handfuls of other genres – western, mystery, horror, whatever’s to hand in the writer’s kitchen that day. Barrett is probably best-known for developing what I think of as the Gonzo Apoca- lypse story – stories set in a grim post-Apocalyptic landscape that at the same time contains a large number of wildly improbable, madly surreal, and often very funny elements – in stories such as ‘‘Ginny Sweethips’ Flying Circus’’ (which centers around a robot hooker and a seven-foot-tall mutated pos- sum with a machine gun) and ‘‘Radio Station St. Jack’’, and in novels such as Through Darkest America – but, like Andy Duncan, he actually has a much wider range stylistically than that, as testified to here by poignant and autum- nal stories such as ‘‘Sallie C.’’ and ‘‘Winter on the Belle Fourche’’, which are also early examples of the Alternate History form before that subgenre really got rolling. But many of his stories are just flat-out weird, like the indescrib- able ‘‘Stairs’’, which can make a good claim to the title of strangest science fiction story ever written – although the aforementioned ‘‘Perpetuity Blues’’, ‘‘Highbrow’’ (which features the generations-long building of a mountain- high statue of Richard Nixon), ‘‘Cush’’, and ‘‘The Last Cardinal Bird in Ten- nessee’’ could certainly give it a run for its money. Barrett’s work won’t be to everyone’s taste, but if you like vivid, unique, quirky, strong-flavored stuff that’s unlike anything that anybody has ever written before or ever will write again, then this collection belongs in your library. –Gardner Dozois (Reviewed in Jul. 2012) Return to Collection list.

Birds and Birthdays, Christopher Barzak (Aqueduct) August 2012. This slim collection from an author gathering considerable critical atten- tion presents three stories (one original) inspired by, and an essay about, three female Surrealists and their works. –Locus (Reviewed in Oct 2012 Return to Collection list.

Shoggoths in Bloom, Elizabeth Bear (Prime) October 2012. Elizabeth Bear is one of the most accomplished of the field’s new (or new- er, anyway, since she’s been publishing since about 2003) writers. Her latest collection, Shoggoths in Bloom, is her best yet, containing her Hugo and Memorial Award-winning story ‘‘’’, her clever homage to Asimov’s robot stories, ‘‘Dolly’’, ‘‘Gods of the Forge’’, ‘‘The Some- 139 thing-Dreaming Game’’, and her intricate novella of a future India, ‘‘In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns’’, as well as an original story, the somber and moving ‘‘The Death of Terrestrial Radio’’. This is a mixed SF/ fantasy collection, and, for me, the SF generally works better than the fantasy, but also collected here is her Hugo-winning ‘‘Shoggoths in Bloom’’, which is great fun for any fan of H.P. Lovecraft’s work, and other good fantasy stories such as ‘‘Orm the Beautiful’’, ‘‘Love Among the Talus’’, and ‘‘The Horrid Glory of Its Wings’’. –Gardner Dozois (Reviewed in Feb 2013) Return to Collection list.

The Door Gunner and Other Perilous Flights of Fantasy, Michael Bishop (Subterranean Press 978-1-59696-374-7, $45.00, 528 pp, hc) December 2011. [Order from Subterranean Press, PO Box 190106, Burton MI 48519; .] The Door Gunner and Other Perilous Flights of Fantasy is a welcome ca- reer retrospective of selected stories by Michael Bishop, assembled by the au- and his editor, Michael H. Hutchins. It’s a generous collection, containing 25 stories and spanning almost 40 years, from Bishop’s first pro sale – ‘‘Piñon Falls’’, to Galaxy in 1970 – to a 2009 collaboration with Steven Utley, ‘‘The City Quiet as Death’’, which appeared on Tor.com, a platform that would have seemed the stuff of SF itself from the perspective of the young author of ‘‘Pi- ñon Falls’’. Bishop provides pleasantly chatty, modest, and informative notes to each story, situating them in his personal and professional history, which, as most readers will know, includes the senseless murder of his son, Jamie, in the Virginia Tech massacre. Bishop’s attempts, artistic and otherwise, to grapple with this tragic loss are present in these pages (‘‘The Pile’’, for example, which won the , is based on notes for a horror story Jamie had planned to write), and the openness and dignity with which Bishop writes of this and other personal matters is genuinely moving and inspiring. Between the stories and the notes, Bishop has crafted something as winningly autobio- graphical in its way as Rucker’s more overt effort. Bishop’s work combines superb imaginative flights with glittering, well- wrought prose (as in the remarkable ‘‘Blooded on Arachne’’, whose exotic alien setting is both mirrored in and evoked through language of raw po- etic inventiveness), an intense anthropological curiosity applied equally to the alien and the human, and a moral dimension that reflects a humanely Christian religious sensibility not only open to doubt but eager to evoke and confront it. Very occasionally this latter quality dips into the didactic and al- legorical, as in the novella ‘‘Apartheid, Superstrings, and Mordecai Thubana’’, 140 a righteous Dickensian foray, awkwardly rigged on a pseudo-scientific scaf- folding, whose thoughtlessly privileged and racist white male main character receives enlightenment and redemption of a sort thanks to the generous mar- tyrdom of obliging black men whose wisdom and nobility has only been en- hanced by brutal oppression. But, on the whole, Bishop’s fiction fights clear of this tendency, as, for example, in the -winning ‘‘The Quick- ening’’, a beautifully spare Borgesian/Ballardian fable in which the Tower of Babel scenario is reenacted in modern times, and in the searing ‘‘A Gift from the Grey Landers’’, one of the most original depictions of a nuclear holo- caust ever written, presented entirely through the point of view of an abused, psychologically disturbed boy... or is it? What I especially admire in Bishop’s writing – and it’s fully on display in the stories collected here, including those I consider on the whole to be failures, like the aforementioned ‘‘Apartheid’’ – is a strong empathic gift that enables – one might almost say compels – him to find his way imaginatively into characters who appear at first to be remote from everyday human experience, whether by circumstance, psychology, or biology. Other stand-outs are the dazzlingly constructed ‘‘Dog’s Lives’’ and its the- matic companion, even more audaciously structured, ‘‘Life Regarded as a Jigsaw Puzzle of Highly Lustrous Cats’’. ‘‘The Road Leads Back’’ is a beau- tiful homage to Flannery O’Connor reminiscent of Andy Duncan’s shrewd alternate, or rather secret, histories. And stories like ‘‘Help Me, Rondo’’ and ‘‘The Angst, I Kid You Not, of God’’ showcase the strong element of humor in Bishop’s work – humor that has its own barbed moral component, as in the work of acknowledged influences and Barry Malzberg. What makes The Door Gunner an absolute must-have for Bishop fans is the fact that he has not just personally selected these stories – eight of which are collected for the first time – but significantly revised them, pruning what, from his present vantage point, he considers excess verbiage. For example, the original version of ‘‘Within the Walls of Tyre’’, a kind of anti-It’s a Wonderful Life, clocked in at 10,500 words; here it is a leaner, meaner 9,285. The result, as editor Hutchins puts it in his introduction, ‘‘constitutes a master class in writ- ing’’ that showcases, in Bishop’s words, ‘‘the definitive text of every featured story.’’ My one regret, if that’s the right word, is that space considerations prevented the inclusion of many fine novella-length works such as ‘‘Her Ha- biline Husband’’, ‘‘Blue Kansas Sky’’, and ‘‘The Gospel According to Gamaliel Crucis’’. Perhaps Subterranean or some other press could be persuaded to collect these in a future publication, The Novellas of Michael Bishop. –Paul Witcover (Reviewed in Jan 2012) Return to Collection list. 141 The Woman Who Married a Cloud: The Collected Short Stories of Jona- than Carroll, Jonathan Carroll (Subterranean 978-1-59606-494-2, $45.00, 578pp, hc) July 2012. [Order from PO Box 190106, Burton MI 48519; .] Like Graham Joyce, Jonathan Carroll is a writer who, by common knowl- edge, ‘‘defies classification,’’ which by now has become a sort of classifica- tion all by itself; why else would we keep inventing terms for it? But it’s not as though readers didn’t make heroic earlier efforts to find easier labels for both Joyce and Carroll, mostly as horror writers. Joyce’s earlier novels like Dreamside and The Tooth Fairy sometimes were reviewed as horror, and in Carroll’s case The Land of Laughs made it onto Stephen Jones and Kim Newman’s ‘‘best 100 horror books’’ list, while his story collection The Panic Hand won a Stoker. Both writers have won World Fantasy Awards, which with its broad remit seems a bit closer to the mark, but the main point is that neither writer seems to start out with any particular notion of genre in mind at all, but rather with a singular angle of vision. For the last few years, Carroll has been a regular contributor to Bradford Morrow’s journal Conjunctions, which seems a reasonable home – neither a genre venue nor one which turns its nose up at genre material. In ‘‘Nothing to Declare’’, one of the more re- cent tales in Carroll’s generous career-overview collection The Woman Who Married a Cloud, a waitress begins a tentative romance with a customer by noting, ‘‘It happens so rarely that you meet someone who perceives life from a unique perspective and in sharing it, expands your vision,’’ and that, ‘‘No matter what they talked about, he almost always came at it from a different angle.’’ She might as well be reading the book she’s in. More than half the stories in The Woman Who Married a Cloud, the ear- liest from 1982, were included in Carroll’s now out-of-print 1995 collection The Panic Hand, which gives some sense of how relatively sparse Carroll’s short fiction output is – a little over 50 stories in 30 years, of which 37 are collected here. Most of us, I would imagine, know Carroll mostly through his novels, which often begin with likeable but flawed characters in believ- able domestic settings and unexpectedly spiral outward into broadly philo- sophical considerations of epistemology and ethics, while casually introduc- ing fantasy elements such as ghosts, time travelers, aliens, or talking dogs – but which somehow never quite turn the novels into anything resembling genre fantasy, a label to which Carroll has frequently objected. Never very long, the novels are nevertheless boxes full of twisty surprises, and some- thing of that effect is retained here in the two long novellas ‘‘Black Cocktail’’ and ‘‘The Heidelberg Cylinder’’, which together make up nearly a fifth of this large collection. Each would be a good introduction to the character-based narratives and unexpected reversals of his novels, while retaining the focus 142 of his best short fiction. ‘‘Black Cocktail’’ is narrated by the host of a radio talk show ‘‘which welcomes full-blown kooks,’’ and whose lover has died in a catastrophic Los Angeles earthquake (referred to in a few other stories as well). He meets a successful haberdasher named Michael Billa and, while they don’t become lovers, she is fascinated by his stories of childhood, espe- cially one involving a near-psycho kid named Clinton, who was Michael’s protector in high school. When Clinton reappears – still apparently 15 years old – the narrator’s life begins to take a series of classically Carrollesque turns. His house and motorcycle are vandalized, neither Clinton nor Mi- chael are who they at first appear to be, and the whole tale begins to turn on such appealing pop-metaphysical notions as the ‘‘Essential Time’’ – ‘‘when you are more you than at any other time of your life’’ – and the ancient con- ceit that each human has only one part of a five-part soul and can only reach fulfillment by finding the other literal ‘‘soulmates.’’ Carroll’s theology always seems a bit woolly to me, but he presents it with such grace, and embeds it so naturally in his plots, that it becomes almost charming – in much the same way that Charles Williams’s peculative theology can be more appealing than C.S. Lewis’s more doctrinaire bludgeoning. In a sense, he does for adults what his namesake Lewis Carroll does for children. Hell, for example, plays a key role in ‘‘The Heidelberg Cylinder’’, but it sounds like a pretty pleasant place whose main problem is overpopulation, which leads to various denizens of Hell being relocated randomly into peo- ple’s houses, and who are allowed to reconfigure the houses after their fa- vorite movies. The narrator’s first clue is when he notices that several of his neighbors’ belongings have been unceremoniously dumped into the streets, and he’s soon visited by two rather comical figures who claim to represent a brotherhood called the Heidelberg Cylinder, named after a mysterious de- vice which has been behind every important modern invention from the cotton gin to the computer. By the time we get to a sentence like ‘‘I don’t like being told what to do; especially not by dead people who live on movie sets with burning dogs,’’ we know we’re in a Carroll story, and one that’s as delightfully insane as it is indescribable. Part of Carroll’s signature effect derives from the mundane, almost old- fashioned way in which he frames his tales; the understated ironic voice (of- ten first-person, sometimes with a female narrator or a gay narrator as in ‘‘Black Cocktail’’) sounds more like John Collier or the early John Cheever than a contemporary slipstream fantasist. There’s almost never a clue in the traditionally ingratiating openings that the story is going to fly off the rails of realism, and sometimes it doesn’t – it just gets really odd. ‘‘Mr. Fiddle- head’’ begins with ‘‘On my fortieth birthday, Lenna Rhodes invited me over for lunch,’’ but turns out to concern an imaginary childhood friend who be- 143 comes a real part of an adult’s life. The wonderfully titled ‘‘Elizabeth Thug’’, on the other hand, begins with a similarly mundane image of a woman en- tering a tattoo parlor to get a tattoo that she hopes will make her distinctive, but never turns into fantasy at all. Sometimes these quiet, domestic tales pivot on an episode of sadness or grief – a dead wife (‘‘Vedran’’), a pair of beloved dogs (‘‘Second Snow’’), a dead child (‘‘Florian’’), a dead father (‘‘Crimes of the Face’’), or going blind (‘‘A Wheel in the Desert, the Moon On Some Swings’’). The choreography of sadness is something Carroll does as well as anyone. At times, the stories which do introduce fantasy verge on a kind of slick sophistication that suggests a Twilight Zone episode, as when a character wakes up to find himself back in prep school (‘‘Postgraduate’’), or former residents of a up asking to see it for old times’ sake and end up somehow transforming it back into the world of their memories; sometimes they seem too conveniently moralistic, as when the protagonist of ‘‘Alone Alarm’’ is kidnapped by figures who turn out to be versions of himself at different stages of life. But more often than not, Carroll’s stories achieve a strangeness and power all their own, and of a sort that beggars any sort of précis. Let me instead suggest that, in addition to the stories I’ve already mentioned, you read, and read carefully, tales like ‘‘Friend’s Best Man’’, ‘‘The Sadness of Detail’’, ‘‘The Panic Hand’’, ‘‘The Stolen Church’’, or ‘‘The Woman Who Married a Cloud’’ (one of two stories might as well be original here, since they appear also in 2012 periodicals – though for most of us, nearly all the stories here will be accessible for the first time). There are dogs and children and lost lovers populating these tales, to be sure, and there are fair doses of grief and sentiment in some of them, but mostly there are the lin- eaments of a vision so distinctive, and so morally grounded, that it hardly bears comparison with anything else in modern fiction at all. –Gary K. Wolfe (Reviewed in Jul 2012) Return to Collection list.

Earth and Air: Tales of Elemental Creatures, Peter Dickinson (Big Mouth House 978-1-618730-5-89, $16.95, 196pp, hc; - 3-81, $14.95, tp) September 2012. Cover by Jackie Morris. [Order from Big Mouth House, 150 Pleasant Street #306, Easthampton MA 01027; ]. ‘‘Tales of Elemental Creatures’’ began two decades ago as a shared project by Peter Dickinson and his wife Robin McKinley, after they decided to write collections ‘‘about the mythical beings who inhabit the four natural elements, earth, air, fire and water.’’ The tendency of stories to expand into novels (par- ticularly for her), the lengthening gaps between volumes, and more personal 144 considerations about time – he passed the age of 80 four years ago – led him to get her leave to finish on his own. The result, Earth and Air, features half a dozen stories which rarely conform to familiar elemental tropes. The modern heroine of ‘‘Troll Blood’’ is a seventh child with the dark, al- most simian, ‘‘changeling’’ appearance that shows up every now and then in her family of Nordic blonds. She has never liked the folktale that comes with it, least of all the blandly Christian ending (probably tacked on in the late 1900s), and when she reaches college she delves into the study of Old Norse, almost as though seeking the legendary roots of whatever made her what she is: sturdy, fond of water, but highly sensitive to sun. In the old tales, trolls tended to inhabit caves at the bottom of lakes, and pull down victims into their rocky lairs. (The one in Stray Souls still likes to lurk around bridges.) Her academic studies suddenly become vitally important when an enormous hand rises from the waters, to snatch the man she loves. Has she learned enough from the old verses to find a way to save him? ‘‘Ridiki’’ applies one particular Greek myth of death and the Underworld, which lingers in the heritage of modern islanders in that part of the world, to the relationship between a man and his beloved pet. (The dedication, ‘‘For Hazel,’’ suggests its personal importance to the writer.) After the dog of the title dies, the grieving owner embarks on his own quest into the stony depths, with unexpected results – not quite tragedy or triumph. ‘‘Wizand’’ is the first of several stories linking human viewpoint characters to creatures with truly bizarre reproductive processes. That’s one of the rea- sons why the blurb on my advance copy, where Philip Pullman calls Dick- inson ‘‘One of the real masters of children’s literature,’’ seems aimed at the wrong audience. Although the creature known as wizand passes from the possession of a crone (after England’s last witch-burning?) and regains con- sciousness in modern times in the form of a broomstick assembled by a child, this is no harmless toy. Its need to understand the new era encompasses both mind and body; even before puberty, she finds a kind of ecstasy in flying na- ked on this strange mount. ‘‘Talaria’’ brings an escaping Roman slave into violent contact with a more classical hybrid beast, in the deserts beyond Timbuktu, and erodes his edu- cated skepticism about such creatures – particularly when that contact sets off escalating changes in himself. Such a departure from the rational can only be the work of Mercury, that winged trickster god! Many centuries later, won- derfully named Victorian explorer Sir Pauncefoot Smethers finds evidence of the ex-slave’s new belief carved in an arid cliff face far off the beaten track. Set ‘‘a dozen or so centuries ago, when there was still a Christian Emperor in Byzantium,’’ on a small island where we first see young hero Yanni in the act of vomiting after cruel bullies got him drunk, ‘‘Scops’’ is named after the 145 small owl whose uncanny aid helps save him. While it’s a charming bird, whose gift of flight comes with amazing night vision, this long work (al- most a novella) pays more attention to the dream-haunted darkness within the human mind, where fancies and religions breed, decay, and linger on as ghosts. Classicists should have no trouble recalling a goddess linked with owls. Though there’s not a lot left of her in the version that eventually meets Yanni, her lack of grand illusions about faiths, both old and new, may rescue him from the clutches of a revived Bull-man (seen on the book’s cover) and his ecstatic worshippers. Combining science fiction with a twisted form of animal fable, madcap genetics, and something like a murder mystery, ‘‘The Fifth Element’’ takes place on a barren alien world whose ‘‘elementals’’ seem to consist of a small group of space travelers – all but the lone human in the crew. With the group ‘‘mascot’’ recently dead, he falls under suspicion. But in a situation where logic seems to have come unglued, something like Lewis Carroll on a really bad trip, the human’s mind ‘‘kept slithering off into irrelevancies.’’ Perhaps some future Sherlock could make sense of it all, but it left me too baffled to offer a critique. The prevailing spirit of Earth and Air seems to be Mercury, the sardonic trickster. Read it with your mind open, senses alert... and prepare for a mar- velously bumpy ride. –Faren Miller (Reviewed in Oct 2012)

Earth and Air: Tales of Elemental Creatures [Second Review] Last month I mentioned Peter Dickinson’s ‘‘Troll Bridge’’, which appeared in F&SF and also appears in his new collection Earth and Air, subtitled ‘‘Tales of Elemental Creatures’’. The stories are all quite enjoyable. I particu- larly enjoyed ‘‘Ridiki’’, a version of the Eurydice story substituting a boy’s beloved dog Ridiki for Eurydice, and ‘‘Wizand’’, which cleverly portrays the unusual lifecycle of the wizand, which confers power on witches, including, in this story, a 20th-century girl named Sophie. Most intriguing, perhaps, is the final story, ‘‘The Fifth Element’’, which doesn’t as obviously deal with an ‘‘elemental creature’’ as the other stories. Instead, it’s an odd science fic- tion horror story, that reminded me of Philip K. Dick’s first published story, ‘‘Beyond Lies the Wub’’, and Robert Sheckley’s ‘‘Specialist’’, in telling of the multispecies crew of a sort of tramp starship, and what happens when their ‘‘ship’s Cat’’ dies. –Rich Horton (Reviewed in Oct 2012) Return to Collection list. 146 The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories, Andy Duncan (PS Publishing) February 2012. Andy Duncan is one of those writers whose work doesn’t quite fit into the main line of development for either SF or fantasy, existing a bit off to the side in a unique world of its own, along with the work of other great eccen- trics such as R.A. Lafferty, Avram Davidson, Terry Bisson, and the man with whom Duncan is most often compared, . Like Lafferty and Waldrop, Duncan is often most comfortable when working in the rich tradi- tion of the American folk tale, crafting shrewd and funny stories of the in- tersection between the modern world and folk traditions and superstitions, particularly those of Appalachia and the American South, but, as his new collection The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories proves, like them, he also has other strings to his bow, and a surprising depth of range as a stylist. The bulk of the stories here (‘‘The Pottawatomie Giant’’, ‘‘The Big Rock Candy Mountain’’, ‘‘Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse’’, ‘‘Daddy Mention and the Monday Skull’’, ‘‘A Diorama of the Infernal Regions, or The Devil’s Ninth Question’’, ‘‘The Dragaman’s Bride’’) fit into the tall tale category mentioned above well enough, although even the funniest of them are shot through with moments of surprising poignancy and even melancholy, but the best story here is the lyrical and autumnal ‘‘The Chief Designer’’, which is set far from the rural South in the Cold War Soviet Union, just as ‘‘Zora and the ’’ is set in Haiti, and ‘‘The Night Cache’’ in the urban environs of Hagerstown MD. Most of the stories here could be categorized as fantasy of one sort or another – a case could be made for considering ‘‘The Chief De- signer’’ and ‘‘Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse’’ to be mainstream, although both appeared in genre markets – but the collection’s one original story (and it’s a good one), ‘‘Close Encounters’’, is instead SF (sort of), and a treat for anyone who grew up in the flying-saucer-mad days of the ’50s and stayed up late, eyes wide, reading battered old paperback copies of Donald E. Keyhoe’s The Flying Saucers Are Real. Whichever critical pigeonhole you try to push Andy Duncan into, he re- mains one of the best and most original writers in the business, and The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories will certainly make it on to my shortlist of the year’s best collections. –Gardner Dozois (Reviewed in Jun 2012) The Pottawatomie Giant [Second Review] I must mention Andy Duncan’s new collection, The Pottawatomie Gi- ant. It’s mostly reprints, and these are, as you might expect, excellent: stories like his wonderful secret history of the Soviet space program, ‘‘The Chief Designer’’, and his delightful pair of stories about Pearleen Sunday and her 147 encounters with the Devil and a dragon of sorts (‘‘A Diorama of the Infer- nal Regions; or, The Devil’s Ninth Question’’ and ‘‘The Dragaman’s Bride’’). There is one new story, and it’s a fine one: ‘‘Close Encounters’’, in which a UFO contactee, years after his fame, is lured by a reporter into joining a latter day attempt to contact the aliens – with strange, sad, results, and ac- companied by moving recollections of his previous ‘‘contact’’ and its results.

–Rich Horton (Reviewed in Aug 2012) Return to Collection list.

Windeye, Brian Evenson (Coffee House 978-1-56689-298-8, $16.00, 176pp, tp) June 2012. [Order from Coffee House Press, #110, 79 13th Avenue North- east, Minneapolis MN 55413; .] The most unusual story in Windeye, Brian Evenson’s outstanding new collection of short fiction, is devoid of the reality slips and nods to the su- pernormal that distinguish the other 24 stories in the book. In fact, it doesn’t even read like fiction. In ‘‘Bon Scott: The Choir Years’’, Evenson, addressing the reader as himself, relates how in 1997, while living in Utah and research- ing an article that he was writing on the Australian hard rock band AC/DC, he uncovered evidence that Bon Scott, the band’s lead singer, had made sev- eral trips to Salt Lake City to practice with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. His last trip occurred only months before Scott died in 1979, after a night of excessive drinking. The incongruity of someone with Scott’s reputation for wildness cozying up to the Mormons – and the discovery that Scott was bap- tized into the Mormon faith, posthumously, on the day of his death – leads Evenson to speculate whether Scott’s death wasn’t engineered, by himself or others, as a ‘‘Blood Atonement’’ for sins so great ‘‘that the blood of Christ cannot sufficiently cleanse.’’ This story may be complete bunk, but if so it is magnificently well-written bunk. Evenson supports his startling ‘‘revelation’’ with records, interviews, and even lyrics purportedly written by Scott that Christianize lyrics of AC/ DC songs. He also makes the most of the Mormon faith’s insularity, pre- senting the evidence he uncovers as exactly the sort of data a button-down church would want to keep sub rosa (and that those of us not of the faith would love to learn that the Church is keeping secret). Interestingly, this very factually related narrative has several features that resonate perfectly with concerns touched on in the stories that are more obviously fiction – not the least of them being a glimpse of a secondary world whose discovery casts doubts on the certainties of our own, and a story that ends with more ques- tions than answers. 148 Secondary realities, and the metaphysical problems they pose to those who stumble upon them, are what Evenson’s tales are all about. In ‘‘Baby or Doll’’, the protagonist revisits an emotionally troubling experience that he has been wrestling with throughout the story, and sees ‘‘the briefest glimpse, as if a hole had opened up to reveal yet an additional world – something.’’ This describes the discomposing experiences characters have in most of the other stories, where the sense of that additional world’s existence causes them to doubt their sanity and the security of the reality they have believed in up to that point. The catalyst is usually an emotionally jarring experience, often the loss of someone intimate – a sibling, a child, a parent. In the title tale, a young brother and sister discover from an inspection of their house that it has one more window on its exterior than they can account for from inside. When the sister reaches out to touch that window, she disappears – and when the boy tell his mother what happened, she shocks him with the revelation that he never had a sister. Has the boy just imagined his sister? Has he been jolted into a secondary world where he never had a sister? Is there a reality in which he himself does not exist? Evenson leaves these ques- tions tantalizingly unanswered, well aware of how disturbing the uncertain- ties they raise are. In ‘‘The Drownable Species’’, he inverts this process with the same results. A young man, both of whose parents have died mysterious deaths by drowning, is contacted by an older brother whom he never knew he had. Efforts to meet with this brother lead to a series of missteps that re- sult in the brother’s drowning death, and accusations from the investigating authorities not only that the young man does not have a brother, but that the family whose tragedies he is remembering may not be his. Sometimes, in these stories, the agent that initiates the reality shift is the loss or addition of a body part that fundamentally alters a character’s sense of personal identity. In ‘‘The Other Ear’’, a soldier awakens in a field hospital to find that an ear sheared in battle has been reattached to his head. The problem is, he remembers having lost his ear long before the battle others found the detached ear at. Naturally, the soldier begins hearing a voice that is not his own talking to him through that ear. The narrator of ‘‘The Ab- sent Eye’’ recalls how, despite losing an eye in childhood, he could still see through it – and what he sees is a race of shadowy beings, invisible to people with ordinary sight, who attach themselves to those people. Sometimes, the reality jolt occurs through less dramatic means. In the book’s most poignant tale, ‘‘Discrepancy’’, a woman discovers an gradually lengthening time delay between when people speak to her, and when she hears their voice. Increas- ingly detached and alienated from her world as the time delay grows longer, she is left with the terrifying thought that ‘‘Everything would eventually ar- rive, but it would be a long time, if ever, before anything would arrive again 149 when it was actually needed.’’ Characters in these stories frequently describe the off-kilterness of their reality shifts in terms of a kind of lucid dreaming. In ‘‘Baby Doll’’, this is described as ‘‘that curious gray zone of being both asleep and awake, when consciousness had begun to loosen its grip on his body in such a way that he remained unsure of where reality stopped and dream began.’’ Thus, even though the external trappings of these stories vary from horror, to fanta- sy, science fiction, and , their events and characters all seem gauzy and indeterminate, as though they might disappear in the of an eye. One senses that Evenson drafted these stories as fuller narratives, then stripped away their surest details until only the most fragile threads were tying their events together, and anchoring them to anything fixed. The result is fiction that, for all its seeming insubstantiality, is weighty, solid, and provocative. –Stefan Dziemianowicz (Reviewed in Sep 2012) Return to Collection list.

Crackpot Palace, Jeffrey Ford (Morrow 978-0-06-212259-9, $14.99, 338pp, tp) August 2012. In his brief afterword to ‘‘Relic’’, possibly the most brilliant of the 20 sto- ries collected in his Crackpot Palace, Jeffrey Ford notes that the book ‘‘has many secret passageways that connect its rooms, so that two tales told in different styles and seeming to have different concerns might actually be secretly linked through image or idea.’’ While this sounds a bit like a friendly gauntlet thrown down to readers trained in the corridor-like fictions of, say, Gene Wolfe, it’s also a fair clue as to how to approach Ford, an author whose fiction ranges from the dreamlike and mythical to the almost directly auto- biographical, and who treats genre materials as though they were pizza top- pings rather than rules of engagement – or, perhaps more aptly, like musical lines around which to improvise. It may be no coincidence that he mentions the great tenor sax improviser Lester Young as ‘‘perhaps my favorite musi- cian of all time.’’ ‘‘The Relic’’ itself is essentially a set of linked tales or im- provisations revolving around a remote church, whose only claim to fame is an obscure saint’s relic – a mummified foot – along with the priest whose mission is to protect it, the Sister who assists him, a visiting divinity student, and a few later visitors, each with their own tales. But the priest isn’t really a priest, the Sister (apparently) isn’t really a nun, and the student isn’t really a student; their conflicting and overlapping tales, none fully reliable, begin to describe the shape of another story altogether, somewhat as the painter Arcimboldo (another artist Ford cites, in his note to ‘‘The Coral Heart’’) as- 150 sembled his fish and fruit and veggies into human visages. Ford is, in brief, a master trickster, and part of the fun of reading his most characteristic tales consists of waiting for the moment when the narrative goes off the rails entirely, or discovering that we were on different rails all along. The lead story, ‘‘Polka Dots and Moonbeams’’ (a title taken from the old Burke-Van Heusen standard) begins as a jazz-inflected 1950s roadhouse- hipster tale, but soon introduces oddities like drinks called gin wrinkles, an ominous character offering a mysterious hypodermic needle as payment for a murder, and – most significantly, it turns out – references to driving out into the desert ‘‘to watch the stars fall.’’ The story develops its own internal logic, but not the one we were expecting. Similarly, ‘’86 Deathdick Road’’ begins with the narrator and his wife, as something of a lark, traveling to a country house to meet ‘‘the smartest man in the world,’’ who offers to an- swer any question for $50. It sounds like the setup for a John Collier story, and in some ways it is: as soon as the narrator steps out back for a smoke, he finds himself involved with attack owls, an old woman’s endless anecdotes, and a sudden blizzard – not to mention the treachery of the smartest man himself. The ending may not be as satisfactory as many of Ford’s, but it does gather in the strings. The narrator’s wife’s name in ‘’86 Deathdick Road’’ is Lynn – the same as Ford’s – and the name serves as a marker for a number of stories, usually set in , that are consistently among Ford’s most compelling – those which, for lack of a better term, fantasticate the mundane. ‘‘Down Atsion Road’’, another tale with a road in the title (roads recur a lot in Ford’s sto- ries), invokes New Jersey legends in the tale of a reclusive folk artist, while ‘‘The Double of My Double Is Not My Double’’ (doppelgängers are another recurrent theme) begins with Lynn checking out sales in a suburban mall when the narrator encounters his double, who complains of being torment- ed by his double, an evil shapeshifter who is not the narrator himself, as we might expect, but another, more ominous projection of his psyche. It’s one of the lighter pieces in the book, but plays with the notions of projection and identity almost as shrewdly as Ford’s classic Kafka tale ‘‘Bright Morn- ing’’. ‘‘Every Richie There Is’’ concerns an annoying and long-winded neigh- bor dying of cancer (another character who tells rambling tales), while ‘‘The War Between Heaven and Hell Wallpaper’’ describes a series of dreams, one depicting the psychomachia of the title, the other sounding a lot like a fa- mous Caspar David Friedrich painting, as well as the narrator’s discussions with his wife Lynn about their possible sources. ‘‘Glass Eels’’, another New Jersey tale, recounts an incident from the illicit trade in these eels (some- times called elvers). Sometimes Ford seems to want to explore more purely within genre forms, 151 and the results, while sometimes less innovative, are no less fine examples of craft, and often pretty playful. ‘‘Sit the Dead’’ again begins with a convinc- ing domestic setting, but segues into a rather spectacular vampire tale, while ‘‘The Hag’s Peak Affair’’ is a ready-made SF horror movie, complete with secret government installations, a deserted village, and a grotesque, if tragic, monster. ‘‘Daddy Longlegs of the Evening’’ is something of a hoot, as if John Cheever had been a writer back in the ’40s and invented Spider- Man to boot. ‘‘Dr. Lash Remembers’’ is a steampunk tale actually involving steam, and a hideous plague that erases ‘‘the boundary between imagina- tion and memory,’’ a boundary that fascinates Ford in all sorts of ways. Ford moves more purely toward SF with ‘‘After Moreau’’, a pointed take on the Wells novel narrated by Hippopotamus Man (who ‘‘can say without ques- tion that Moreau was a total asshole’’), and ‘‘The Seventh Expression of the Robot General’’ (the title refers to facial expressions), a strong antiwar fable that recalls the surreal SF war stories of David Bunch. ‘‘The Dream of Rea- son’’ nearly moves into territory, with its imaginary science in an imaginary cosmology (gases like ‘‘carkonium’’ and ‘‘tarsus margolium’’), but features a scientist following a version of the scientific method experiments within this context. Like some of Chiang’s more intellectual stories, it’s an impressively ingenious performance more than a deeply human tale. There’s a similarly impressive cosmology in ‘‘Daltharee’’, which conflates several SF notions in the idea of microscopic cities-in-bottles – Sturgeon, Ray Cummings, even Superman (which Ford acknowledges in his note) – but also recalls elements of Ford’s own ‘‘Annals of Eelin-Ok’’, and turns out to be surprisingly touching, even if (as Ford cheerfully admits) it doesn’t quite add up. By the time we get to ‘‘Ganesha’’ and ‘‘Weiroot’’, we’re back in the mythological territory that Ford has sometimes explored (Hindu my- thology in the former case, the Greek underworld in the latter), and ‘‘The Coral Heart’’, with its magical sword that turns victims to coral, is perhaps the most straightforward fantasy in the collection – it’s the sort of lush, horror-tinged fantasy reminiscent of Clark Ashton Smith when he was in control of his language. Finally, one of the most haunting tales in the book is essentially a ghost story, set in the Depression-era Susquehanna Valley. A young coroner is faced with the mystery of a beautiful young woman found floating in a creek, whose body shows no signs of decay (sounding much like Millais’s Ophelia), and whose face seems identical to a portrait from four decades earlier. While the story revolves around the coroner and his uneasy relationship with the detective on the case, it vividly evokes its time and place, and maintains an elegant, precise balance between the fantastic and the real. In fact, one sentence might be a textbook example of such balance: before beginning his examination, the young coroner ‘‘turned to her and 152 saw her smile.’’ Reading that last word as a verb rather than a noun changes the scene utterly, and is perhaps, at the level of simple grammar, a hint of the sort of verbal magic that Ford works throughout these tales. Crackpot Palace is the work of a writer who knows where to look for that magic, and who is firmly at the forefront of those writers, emerging mostly during the last couple of decades, who seem utterly comfortable with inventing their own genres as they go along. –Gary K. Wolfe (Reviewed in Sep 2012) Return to Collection list.

Angels and You Dogs, Kathleen Ann Goonan (PS Publishing 978-1-848633- 31-5, £19.99, 342pp, hc) May 2012. [Order from PS Publishing, Grosvenor House, 1 New Road, Hornsea, East Yorkshire HU18 1PG England; .] Kathleen Ann Goonan is widely and deservedly celebrated for ambitious, large-scale works such as the Nanotech quartet, which began with Queen City Jazz in 1994 and the In War Times/This Shared Dream duology, which just concluded last year. The former was a stunning phantasmagoria of American culture set in a world utterly transformed by nanotech, while the latter undertook to imagine possible alternatives to the entire last half of the 20th century, in a manner passionately involved with the classic SF question of the fixability of the world. It’s likely that these series have overshadowed her short fiction – which seems to get translated into other languages more than most, even though it shows up sparsely on awards ballots – or it could be that there hasn’t been all that much short fiction to begin with. Goonan’s website lists only 28 stories and novellas since 1991, and half of them are in- cluded in Angels and You Dogs, her first collection. It’s a solid and impres- sive collection, but it might also suggest a third reason that Goonan’s name isn’t the first that comes to mind when thinking of recent SF short fiction: she makes almost no effort to do trademark stuff, or to write up every nifty saleable idea that comes along. There are plenty of nifty ideas here, and some profound ones, but none of the stories rest upon them, and some of the best make fairly little use of SF apparatus at all. There are, to be sure, some familiar notions here from her more famous work, and a continuing fascination with the whole nanotech business. The Flower Cities from the nanotech quartet show up again in ‘‘The Bridge’’, a private eye story set in that world, and in ‘‘The Day the Dam Broke’’, in which a doctor ventures out of the Los Angeles dome to minister to the benighted victims of the nanoplague in Columbus OH. There’s a sense in the latter story that Goonan really wants to fit James Thurber (who came 153 from Columbus) into that panoply of American icons from the Quartet, but she doesn’t actually do as much with that as she might. Instead, both stories work by taking advantage of two of Goonan’s genuine strengths as a writer: her acute sense of place, and her skilled manipulation of voice. The Colum- bus of ‘‘The Day the Dam Broke’’ is a diminished but recognizable version of the real city, but what gives the story its resonance is the voice of the 94-year- old narrator, now a wilderness recluse, remembering events from decades earlier. And Mike Jones, the detective narrator of ‘‘The Bridge’’, hired to dis- cover if his client’s mother and sister have been ‘‘disassembled’’ by the father after having been digitally reconstituted following a fatal accident, strikes exactly the necessary Philip Marlowe tone between cynicism and idealism. But it’s really the nano-contaminated DC area that’s the star of the tale, as it is in ‘‘Electric Rains’’, a sad but haunting tale of a woman trying to dispose of her grandmother’s body in a Washington where even the rain is deadly. Goonan moves a bit into Bradbury land with ‘‘Solitaire’’, about a lonely boy in a small Ohio town in the 1950s who meets a strange kid who may not be what he seems. Middle America, from Memphis to rural Arkansas, is also the road-trip setting of ‘‘Brides of Elvis’’, which can’t quite decide whether to be a parody of the Elvis cult or an exploration of the identity issues of a young mutant woman who works in a high-tech Graceland where Elvis’s body is preserved like Lenin’s. ‘‘Sunflowers’’, whose protagonist has lost his wife and daughter to nanotech terrorism (a recurring theme, also central to ‘‘Electric Rains’’) is largely an evocation of an unromantic Amsterdam, ending up at the Van Gogh museum. Similarly, ‘‘Klein Time’’ is largely a mainstream story of an American engineer trying to reclaim her ancestral property in Prague, overlaid with visitors from another reality (‘‘Kleinside’’) occupying ‘‘hosts’’ such as the engineer herself. But perhaps the most evocative setting in the book is the Key West of ‘‘Sundiver Day’’, where a 16-year-old girl wanders hidden waterways while she secretly plans to clone her missing-in-action older brother, using material from a fertility lab where she works. The title character of that story, Sundiver Day, is also one of the most ingratiating narrative voices, and experimenting with voices is another of Goonan’s characteristic strategies in her short fiction, even when they some- time lead to digressions in the plots. About half the stories are in first person, but no two characters sound much alike, from the down-at-the-heels pri- vate eye of ‘‘The Bridge’’ to the cranky nonagenarian of ‘‘The Day the Dam Broke’’. Goonan even tries the viewpoint of an enhanced dog used to store memories – and an entire human personality – in ‘‘Memory Dog’’. And in ‘‘Wanting to Talk to You’’, the unfortunately somewhat whiny voice of the narrator, an alienated researcher feeling displaced in Tokyo after losing her lover into a kind of digital ‘‘hyperspace,’’ is nearly the entirety of the story. 154 The frazzled narrator of the title story ‘‘Angels and You Dogs’’ is a gay man trying to cope with an annoying new tenant after his partner leaves him, and his nuanced voice is so intriguing that you hardly notice that the story itself is, at best, what I think of as a trapdoor genre story – something that reads as mainstream, but with one or two lines that permit a fantastic reading. Much the same might be said of one of the most emotionally powerful tales, ‘‘The String’’, whose protagonist’s obsession with a tangled bit of kite string mirrors his daughter’s intractable and incurable cystic fibrosis. Another of the best tales, ‘‘Susannah’s Snowbears’’, is narrated by a mother who, with her husband, has tried to protect their daughter from a dystopian future by raising her in a remote cabin in the Canadian Rockies, where they encounter strange superintelligent light beings which the daughter calls ‘‘snowbears.’’ Like the best of Goonan’s fiction, it returns to her signature concerns of memory, the nature of consciousness, and our capacity for screwing things up with the best intentions, and, like the best of her fiction, it approaches these issues by means of characters who are as messy as we are. It’s really those messy characters that make Angels and You Dogs one of the most important story collections of the year. –Gary K. Wolfe (Reviewed in Oct 2012) Return to Collection list.

Errantry: Strange Stories, Elizabeth Hand (Small Beer 978-1-618-73030-5, $16.00, 292pp, tp) November 2012. Either of the novellas that make up the first two-fifths of Elizabeth Hand’s collection Errantry would easily be worth the price of the book. ‘‘The Maid- en Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon’’ managed the neat trick of being the best story in Gaiman & Sarrantonio’s all-star collection Stories a couple of years ago, and only gains added resonance through rereading. Hand worked for a while at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, and that experience, along with her interest in outsider art, yields what is almost certainly the best novella ever written about ‘‘crypto-aviation,’’ that oddball fringe history having to do with early efforts at heavier-than-air flight. The story involves a quirky museum employee whose specialty is making models based on wacky old ideas from the museum’s ‘‘nut files.’’ Learning that the even quirkier for- mer curator who had hired him is dying of cancer, he hatches a scheme to fake evidence of one of her pet theories – that an eccentric inventor had actually flown a bizarre aircraft briefly in 1901, prior to the Wright Brothers, and that the flight had been captured on a now-lost film – by recreating the film using his model. It never quite verges into fantasy or SF (though there are bits to permit such a reading), but the story ends up feeling a little like 155 both, and it’s this negotiation between modes that has become increasingly one of Hand’s trademarks in the past few years. ‘‘Near Zennor’’ is a more conventional horror story, apparently inspired by the case of William Mayne, the distinguished British children’s writer whose career was marred by his conviction on several charges of child abuse. A widower finds among his late wife’s papers a series of letters she had written as a teenager to Mayne-like writer named Bennington. He visits her child- hood friend in England and learns of an odd experience they had in Corn- wall with another girlfriend – who later disappeared – and of their visit with Bennington at his nearby home. For motives never made explicit, he decides to retrace their steps, leading to a chilling, -like experi- ence of his own. Something of the same flavor of a rarely glimpsed hidden world is also at the center of ‘‘Hungerford Bridge’’, in which a dandy-ish old friend of the narrator insists on taking him to a remote part of London’s Embankment to share with him a vision of a fabulous animal which – the friend insists – can be seen only by a rare few, and only twice in a lifetime. It’s a fairly slight story, little more than a sketch, but it’s a neat embodiment of the ache to see things beyond that is nearly palpable in Hand’s fiction, and that, along with her consistently luminous prose, links her to an earlier tradition of Machen-like immanence. Of course, it’s tricky to look for influences in Hand’s work, given the eclec- ticism of her various cultural milieux, which often seem to have as much to do with painting and music as literature. She’s written earlier stories and novels that are informed by everything from Victorian painting to Warhol to the Ramones, and there are a couple of stories here that are at least as eclectic in their allusions. Two of them seem to carry deliberate echoes of rock songs. ‘‘The Return of the Fire Witch’’, which originally appeared in the Jack Vance tribute anthology Songs of the Dying Earth, seems to com- bine a far-future science fantasy setting with imagery from King Crimson, thus giving Hand leave to improvise her tonal right into the coloratura range, resulting in something that echoes the more baroque stylings of Clark Ashton Smith, but with a decidedly more feminist edge. ‘‘Summerteeth’’ is a ruminative sketch of an artists’ colony whose title may be drawn from the Wilco song. ‘‘Errantry’’, which returns to Hand’s familiar setting of Kamen- sic Village with its population of former high school prodigies turned failed rock musicians and desultory artists, concerns a group of such friends who decide to investigate a local recluse known as the Folding Man, from the origami-like folded paper figures he leaves around town, but much of its key imagery derives from a 15th-century Uccello painting (which also provides the book’s gorgeous cover). When Hand does turn to more familiar genre materials, or at least to plots 156 made a bit more predictable by their use of genre materials, it tends to be with stories of transformation or metamorphosis. ‘‘The Far Shore’’ concerns a washed-up ballet dancer who agrees to be the winter caretaker of a remote summer camp he knew well as a child (the echo of The Shining is directly acknowledged), and who finds a strange, half-frozen naked boy in the snow who seems to come from nowhere but has a strange affinity for the flocks of birds migrating through the area. The title character of ‘‘Uncle Lou’’ is an eccentric, colorful, and mysterious travel writer who lives near Hampstead Heath, but his real secret is revealed only to a favorite niece when she accom- panies him on a visit to a local zoo. ‘‘Winter’s Wife’’ alludes to the Icelandic legend of the Huldufólk, as a popular carpenter and dowser in a coastal village returns from Iceland with a strange new wife, but by the end it shifts into a satisfying, if slightly familiar, tale of an environmental preda- tor’s poetic justice. Even when Hand’s characters turn out to play familiar roles, though, they are never simply tools of her plots (which in some cases are pretty hard to find, anyway), and her narrators are never merely record- ers of events. Almost all of her characters are trying, sometimes desperately, to make, or maintain, or rediscover connections of some sort, and there’s a quiet heroism in that, so that even when this frazzled nobility doesn’t always make it to the surface of the plot, the characters continue to haunt us. –Gary K. Wolfe (Reviewed in Dec 2012) Return to Collection list.

Midnight and Moonshine, Lisa L. Hannett & Angela Slatter (Ticonderoga 978-1-921857-30-0, A$13.99, 319pp, tp) November 2012. Cover by Kathleen Jennings. [Order from , PO Box 29, Greenwood WA, ; ]. Midnight and Moonshine by Lisa L. Hannett and Angela Slatter sprang from a single co-written story about witches and flappers in an alter- nate-’20s Charleston VA, ‘‘Prohibition Blues’’. It appeared in Damnation and Dames, a 2012 anthology, but left the authors haunted by characters and concepts much too big for one tale. They ended up writing another dozen stories (which all debut here), that move from Old Norse times, where humans encounter wrangling immortals, right up to a present day, where the bounds between gods and men have become oddly fluid. The interactions of a raven-goddess who survived Ragnarok with mem- bers of the hordes of Fae and mortals, as their varied lifespans intersect with hers, could have inspired a series of epic tomes. Fortunately, Hannett and Slatter preferred to keep things relatively short and free from the con- fines of any one genre. Aside from the connections between characters 157 and generations, these are tales of many kinds, each playing off its header: bits of old sagas, doggerel, songs, as well as fictional diaries and excerpts from the works of obscure scholars. When these elements come together in ‘‘Prohibition Blues’’, some Nordic names persist among Southerners whose roots go back to France or Africa – each with their own gods, man- ners of wizardry, and connections to shape-shifting Fae. Cultures meld in a rich gumbo where and Legba are one and the same. And there’s more to come. Another kind of combination gives this book its unique tone: however grand the fantasy, passionate the romance, or regally exotic these Fae, their stories inevitably take on some of the gritty frankness, spilled blood, and shit of ordinary human life. After enough of these random encounters, even the most arrogant deity can’t help but change. –Faren Miller (Reviewed in Feb 2013) Return to Collection list.

The Janus Tree and Other Stories, Glen Hirshberg (Subterranean) January 2012. The acclaimed author of unsettling literary horror returns with a new col- lection of 11 stories, including the Shirley Jackson Award-winning title work and five ‘‘Tales from the Rolling Dark’’ originally written for Hirshberg’s Rolling Darkness Revue reading tours and chapbook series. –Locus (Mentioned in Mar 2012) Return to Collection list.

Permeable Borders, Nina Kiriki Hoffman (Fairwood 978-1-933846-32-3, $16.99, 282pp, tp) July 2012. [Order from Fairwood Press, 21528 104th St. Court E, Bonney Lake WA 98391; .] Many of the works in Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s excellent collection Perme- able Borders bring witchcraft and other magics firmly into the modern world, with or without family ties – though even her most rootless wan- derers tend to have (or seek) a sense of connection. Divided by category, it opens with the two works of ‘‘Finding Home’’, ‘‘Key Signatures’’ plus ‘‘The Weight of Wishes’’, and ends with a single entry for ‘‘Home’’, ‘‘Gone to Heav- en Shouting’’. The first and last of these stories both involve patterns that lurk as a kind of private language in tunes passed down by common players like fiddlers or the makeshift band at a grange dance. Language, kinship... magic. After Hoffman spins her own sly variations on old materials with the amphibians and reptiles, plantwives, grans and 158 princes in three ‘‘Fairy Tales’’, she really gets down to business with the com- plex linkages in ‘‘Finding Each Other’’. The last five stories of the seven here all feature two female magic-users, alone or together. Matt Black, a 20-some- thing homeless girl, makes an intriguing entrance in ‘‘Home for Christmas’’, in two-way conversation with a man’s missing wallet – thanks to a strange talent which leads her to find him, and find out more about him from the objects in his house. In ‘‘Anger Management’’, Matt encounters young witch Terry, who shows up in later tales with her own brash take on spellcasting. Two of the three works in section ‘‘Permeable Borders’’ also share one character, Julia: college student and ‘‘counselor to the dead.’’ As for those borders, they might lead to a future and past somehow tied up in knots, or to the urgent needs of one innocent caught up when life runs into an afterlife entirely different from the ‘‘Heaven’’ of ‘‘Home’’. –Faren Miller (Reviewed in Aug 2012) Return to Collection list.

Wool Omnibus, Hugh Howey (self-published) Hugh Howey self-published Wool Omnibus, a collection of SFnal and dystopic linked stories; after their great critical and commercial success as short digital works, the title has since been picked up by Simon & Schuster. –Locus (Mentioned in Feb 2013) Return to Collection list.

At the Mouth of the River of Bees, Kij Johnson (Small Beer 978-1-93152- 080-5, $16.00, 304pp, tp) August 2012. [Order from Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., #306, Easthampton MA 01027; .] One of the more interesting developments in the ever-inventive, ever- trendy world of interdisciplinary academic studies over the past several years has been the growth of something called animal studies, which, as you might suspect, is no longer simply the province of zoologists, but seems to be open to almost anyone who wants to jump in the pool. In the literary branch of this field, SF would seem to be fertile ground, and there have al- ready been academic conferences centered on the topic, as well as a couple of provocative books by Sherryl Vint (Animal Alterity) and Bruce Shaw (The Animal Fable in Science Fiction and Fantasy). All this came to mind while reading Kij Johnson’s first major story collection (an earlier e-book, Tales for the Long Rains, appeared in 2001), since two-thirds of the 18 stories in the collection involve animals in some central way – foxes, dogs, monkeys, bees, horses, birds, wolves, and more, if you count the tendrilled alien in 159 ‘‘’’ or the strange critters who inhabit the river of mist in ‘‘The Man Who Bridged the Mist’’. You could probably build a good chunk of an animal- studies classroom course from this book alone. Animals have been a key feature of Johnson’s fiction ever since she re- ceived the Crawford Award for The Fox Woman more than a decade ago, a novel expanded from her Sturgeon Award-winning ‘‘Fox Magic’’, which is included here. A lyrical and deeply romantic tale drawn from the kitsune folklore of Japan, this tale of a fox who falls in love with a man and inhabits both the fox and human worlds (where time passes at different rates) also reveals two of Johnson’s other recurring preoccupations, Japanese and Chi- nese culture and what can best be described as the various mannerisms of storytelling. The former is represented not only by Johnson’s novel Fudoki, but by the related story ‘‘The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles’’, a mini- quest epic about a small cat, rendered homeless by an earthquake and fire, who treks the entire length of Japan in search of the home of the Cat From The North. Johnson’s customarily elegant style and matter-of-fact narration keep the story from ever coming close to the Hello Kitty Frodo tale its title would seem to imply. ‘‘Chenting, in the Land of the Dead’’ is a rather slight tale about a dying scholar offered a governorship in the land of the dead, where he awaits his beloved concubine only to suffer the sort of ironic twist which we used to see more from Somerset Maugham than from O. Henry. ‘‘The Empress Jingu Fishes’’, however, is a more complex tale that begins to reveal Johnson’s aforementioned fascination with narrative mannerisms, in this case the manipulation of narrative time. As the empress fishes for trout, she comes to realize that in this moment she is ‘‘divorced from past and future’’, and the events of her life unfold outward in both directions (‘‘eight years ago,’’ ‘‘five months from now,’’ etc.). It’s a sort of trick, but one that works well to reveal the living-in-the-moment sensibility of the character. That story is also a good example, but not the best example here, of the sort of narrative playfulness and sophistication that has brought Johnson such an impressive string of best-of-the-year selections, awards, and nomi- nations over the past few years. Sometimes, as with ‘‘Names for Water’’, she takes an inconsequential tale of a student receiving anonymous phone calls which consist only of a sound of rushing water, then lends it some conse- quence by (as with the Empress Jingu) simply vaulting it into the future, a technique repeated in the ending of ‘‘The Bitey Cat’’, about a three-year- old’s aggressive pet cat. Both these stories, like many of Johnson’s, are told in present tense, which can make the various time shifts both more emotion- ally charged and, at times, manipulative. She makes her best use of it in ‘‘26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss’’, which also plays with late-modernist techniques by breaking the story up into Donald Barthelme-like numbered sections. 160 For this much-reprinted World Fantasy winning tale of a woman who buys a disappearing-monkey act, the rather waggish form brilliantly enhances the story’s content. Sometimes Johnson tinkers with what appears to be children’s-book nar- rations (there’s some of this in ‘‘The Bitey Cat’’ and ‘‘The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles’’), but can use it in the service of an unsettling horror story like ‘‘’’, which reads like the sort of thing that might have happened if Little Golden Books had inadvertently sent a contract to Chuck Palahniuk. Sometimes she plays with folktale protocols, not only in her Japanese stories, but in ‘‘The Evolution of Trickster Tales Among the Dogs of North Park’’, with its surprisingly credible versions of the sly tales that emerge after dogs (and other animals) suddenly gain the power of speech. She uses the form, if not the affect, of erotica in ‘‘Spar’’, in which a woman trapped in a space lifeboat with a wriggly alien spends virtually the entire tale penetrating and being penetrated by it. One of my favorite examples of this sort of narrative playfulness is a story that previously appeared only on Johnson’s website, the full title of which is ‘‘My Wife Being Reincarnated as a Solitaire – Exposition on the flaws in my spouse’s character – The nature of the bird – The pos- sible causes – Her final disposition’’. This parody of 18th-century chapter titles is matched, Laurence Sterne punctuation and all, by the arch voice of a clueless narrator, a shrewd but randy vicar, and a wife transformed into an ugly bird. It’s the funniest story here. But by far the most experimental is ‘‘Story Kit’’, which can best be described as a story about trying to construct a story about Dido, of Aeneid fame, interspersed with fragments of writing- workshop advice on the types of conflict or ’s six story types. It’s more curious than engaging, though. The mention of Damon Knight is also a reminder that Johnson knows her way around the more traditional materials of SF as well, and ‘‘The Horse Raiders’’ and ‘‘Dia Chjermin’s Tale’’ are skillful examples using far-future planetary settings. But by far the most effective of Johnson’s tales are those that occupy a kind of liminal space between SF and fantasy. Two of the best here are ‘‘At the Mouth of the River of Bees’’ and ‘‘The Man Who Bridged the Mist’’. The first is about a woman from Seattle who feels compelled to drive eastward with her aging dog after receiving a bee sting and finds her way blocked in Montana by a vast stream of migrating bees. The remote set- ting would seem to be a good set-up for an SF horror tale, but as the woman determines to trace the river to its mouth, it shifts increasingly into mythic mode, with the dog (another animal, of course) assuming an increasing- ly important role in what turns, finally, into a love story. ‘‘The Man Who Bridged the Mist’’ is more directly and more conventionally a love story, though with a spectacular setting, which could be either a fantasy world or 161 another planet (it’s easily readable as SF), and with a degree of engineering detail about bridge building that would satisfy a Heinlein reader. A mysteri- ous river of mist, sometimes with caustic properties and with odd creatures inhabiting it, divides the kingdom, and when a bridge builder arrives at a frontier-like settlement called Nearside, his project threatens the livelihood of the woman who operates the local ferry. It’s not surprising that it won the Nebula Award and garnered Hugo, Campbell, and Locus nominations, since it’s a stunning example of what Johnson does best – using the materials of SF, fantasy, myth, and even romance not as genres to inhabit, but as tools for building or, you could say, as a kind of story kit. –Gary K. Wolfe (Reviewed in Aug 2012) Return to Collection list.

Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart, Caitlín R. Kiernan (Subterra- nean) August 2012. Caitlín R. Kiernan’s Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart, subtitled ‘‘25 tales of weird romance,’’ explores monsters and monstrous feelings, dangerous games of seduction and revenge, rituals, and sacrifices both will- ing and unwilling, all with Kiernan’s characteristic deft touch. –Locus (Mentioned in Feb 2013) Return to Collection list.

Fountain of Age: Stories, Nancy Kress (Small Beer 978-1931520454, $16.00, 390pp, tp) April 2012. [Order from Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., #306, Easthampton MA 01027; .] Nancy Kress likes domes. Last month we looked at her novel After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, in which a handful of human survivors are kept alive by aliens in a huge, egg-shaped enclosure after the rest of the population is wiped out, and domes play significant roles in nearly half the nine stories in her new collection from Small Beer, Fountain of Age. The image isn’t original to her, of course, and it may well be that to get all sorts of SF narratives going, there is nothing like a dome: domes that keep visit- ing aliens in and humans out or vice versa, domes that contain hazards or protect us from hazards, domes that represent little controlled experiments in social behavior or models for biospheres, domes that are just there to be mysteriously symbolic. One of the classic early domes in SF was in Stur- geon’s ‘‘Microcosmic God’’, and now even Stephen King has a dome. You can’t blame Kress for making use of it; it’s one of the unacknowledged icons of the genre. 162 But what this implies about Kress’s precision-crafted stories is more to the point. On a recent podcast, Barry Malzberg mentioned her as a contempo- rary writer who well exemplifies the virtues of the sort of mature SF that first really came of age in the 1950s, and Kress for the most part makes use of fairly conventional tropes such as alien visitors, various sorts of apoca- lypse, genetic and biological experiments, the promise of immortality, ro- bots, strange children, etc. What makes her fiction distinctive, apart from the elegance of her craft and the clarity of her prose, is the manner in which she recombines these elements into complex structures that reveal their hid- den dimensions, and invariably concern their impact on fully realized char- acters. She’s as good as anyone at imaginary gardens with real toads, only we’re the toads. The three best stories in Fountain of Age are good examples. The Nebula-winning novella ‘‘Fountain of Age’’, in simple outline, is another story about the discovery of an immortality treatment with an unantici- pated downside. In Kress’s hands, it becomes a multilayered tale, structured around multiple time frames, in which the narrator, an aging Jewish finan- cier who is now now living in a retirement home but has done prison time for fraud, remembers a youthful encounter with a beautiful Persian pros- titute, Daria, whom he met first in Cyprus and then again years later, after she had married a wealthy British magnate. By then she was suffering from a rather unique brain tumor, with properties that, if transplanted into oth- ers, would generate stem cells that could prevent further aging. It’s a solid and original variation on a SF theme, but what earned the story its Nebula are its sharp insights into the narrator’s relationship with Daria, his son and grandchildren, his wife, and a brilliant Rom who had been his partner. The settings are equally detailed, with orbital clinics and – of course – protective domes over major cities. The Hugo-winning ‘‘The Erdmann Nexus’’ also features an aging protago- nist in a retirement home (old people and children show up in about equal measure in Kress’s stories), in this case a brilliant physicist, Henry Erdmann, who begins to have strange mental flashes from other people’s lives, which we realize have something to do with an approaching alien spaceship. The idea again turns out to be a familiar one, at least as old as Sturgeon’s More Than Human, about the possibility of an emergent group consciousness. Kress dresses it up with some convincing updated neuroscience, but again the story lives in Henry’s relationships with his fellow residents and par- ticularly with a caregiver who suffers abuse at the hands of her policeman husband. ‘‘First Rites’’ deals with children unwittingly used as genetic exper- iments, but its multiple points of view (the Chinese child who is the experi- mental subject, his mother, her American cousin) and multiple time frames again give the story a humanistic depth that in other hands might have led 163 to a full novel. Children as experiments are also the subject of ‘‘Safeguard’’, which borrows a bit from the ‘‘Rappacini’s Daughter’’ school of poisonous-people tales. Here the lethal children are kept in – what else? – a protective dome, until an earthquake permits them to escape and, for the first time, discover the outside world. The children tend to fall into familiar types – the risk-taker, the crybaby, etc. – but the devotion showed toward them by their caretaker is quite moving. It should be apparent by now that caretakers of one sort or another often show up in Kress’s stories, and indeed one of Kress’s favorite themes concerns individuals faced with unwanted and unexpected respon- sibilities. ‘‘Laws of Survival’’, one of a handful of post-catastrophe tales, is set in a grim, desperate world in which wars and environmental disasters have destroyed most cities and people scrabble for survival, a situation compli- cated by aliens who have arrived and set up enigmatic, impenetrable domes. It opens with the narrator discovering a newborn puppy – which she plans to eat – but it turns out the aliens are interested in the puppy as well. Soon she finds herself inside the dome, filled with dogs which she must train to obedi- ence at the risk of her own death. In ‘‘The Kindness of Strangers’’, aliens have simply caused the major cities of the Earth to disappear without a trace, and now have gathered another group of hardscrabble survivors inside an invis- ible dome. No one will interact with the despised aliens – who appear as tall Nordic blondes – until the protagonist finds herself responsible for saving an injured child. The ending of the story may sledgehammer its point a bit, and the aliens may appear a bit off-the-shelf, but the protagonist’s troubled relationship with a man she’d been having an affair with lend the tale a di- mension of psychological power. ‘‘By Fools Like Me’’ features another aging protagonist, a grandmother, and another post-‘‘Crash’’ world, which has reverted to a kind of fundamen- talist, book-burning anti-intellectualism of the sort that was long-familiar in postnuclear novels like ’s The Long Tomorrow or Walter Miller’s . Here Kress doesn’t really do much with the idea – a cache of books is discovered, and you can almost guess the rest – and the story has to rest on the elegiac voice of the narrator and her rela- tionship with a granddaughter who will never know the world the narrator knew. The remaining two stories, ‘‘Images of Anna’’ and ‘‘End Game’’, are both stronger, but in different ways, and in ways different from anything else in the book. ‘‘End Game’’ is essentially a horror story, though its SF premise is another neurology-discovery-that-backfires tale. It details the narrator’s diffident friendship with a seventh-grade classmate and chess partner who goes on to become a brilliant neurologist obsessed with discovering the se- cret of perfect concentration, first with a young woman chess player and 164 later in ways that may threaten the whole world; it’s last line is what really turns it into classic horror. ‘‘Images of Anna’’ is the only real fantasy story in the book, and one of the most original in concept. Its initial puzzle is wonderfully Kafkaesque: a photographer hired to take glamor photos of a plain, middle-aged woman for her Internet boyfriend discovers that the developed pictures all contain images of other people, and none of Anna herself. As he investigates the mystery, and Anna, the tale – the shortest one here – takes on an aura of the sort of existential mystery that we might expect from Paul Auster or Jeffrey Ford. It seems to come from an entirely different place than the rest of the collection, and reminds us that Kress is not only a skilled and often brilliant carpenter of SF materials, but a dreamer as well. –Gary K. Wolfe (Reviewed in May 2012) Return to Collection list.

Cracklescape, Margo Lanagan (Twelfth Planet 978-0-98721-624-3, A$18.00, 106pp, tp) August 2012. Cover by Amanda Rainey. [Order from Twelfth Planet Press, PO Box 3027, Yokine WA 6060, Australia; .] Margo Lanagan is another writer whose short fiction has stealthily resisted classification, unless you consider ‘‘Margo Lanagan stories’’ as a kind of clas- sification by itself, which seems pretty reasonable given her unique combi- nation of rich, imagistic language, often rough-hewn but determined char- acters, and vaguely dreamlike folkloristic settings. But her new collection Cracklescape, from Australia’s adventurous (dare I say ‘‘scrappy’’?) Twelfth Planet Press may come as something of a revelation even to devoted Lana- gan readers. It includes only four stories (together with an appreciative, brief introduction by ), but the settings are recognizably contemporary or near-contemporary Australia, and the tales themselves allude to familiar forms such as the ghost story, the childhood-escape tale, the succubus tale, even the contemporary middle-aged marriage drama, all filtered through the characteristic Lanagan lens, which illuminates and distorts at the same time. The characters are as determined as ever, but mostly they’re deter- mined to escape – from unhappy marriages, from family tragedy, from guilt, simply from the routines of childhood. The most conventional tale is ‘‘The Duchess Dresser’’, which is essentially a haunted-furniture tale set in an apartment on a busy urban street. The dresser, rescued from a pile of junk on the street, first manifests its odd- ness by buzzing and shaking in ways that can’t be explained by the city’s ‘‘roaring and banging’’ street noises. Then the owner, a self-absorbed young 165 man named Tan who has just broken off with his girlfriend, has a recurrent dream of being nearly choked to death by masses of hair belonging to an unknown woman, and eventually begins to feel the presence of the woman, clearly from an earlier era. He suspects this may all have something to do with whatever is in the locked middle drawer of the dresser, and of course it does. The ending is hardly a shocker, but is elegant enough to do honor to the tradition of M.R. James or the classic English ghost story. In ‘‘Islands of the Sun’’, a boy named Elric encounters fairy-like golden be- ings – ‘‘they had face-like things, and nearly-bodies’’ – who claim to come from the isles of the title and invite Elric and his friends, a group reminis- cent of the children in Lanagan’s earlier ‘‘The Point of Roses’’, to fly away with them. Elric’s mother Jenny, who alternates with Elric as narrator, grows suspicious of her son’s plans, and decides to follow them, again with con- sequences which are elegant if not particularly surprising. ‘‘Bajazzle’’ is per- haps the bitterest tale here, or at least the one with the bitterest protagonist, a horny middle-aged husband who resents his wife’s sagging body in terms that are nothing short of cruel, like one of Kit Reed’s loathesome male nar- rators: ‘‘It seemed like a horrible joke on him, that she felt good enough about herself now to get on top of him, just as she lost the whole reason he wanted her up there.’’ When he arrives at their vacation cottage, which turns out to be something of a ruin, he finds both his desire and his resent- ment made palpable in an encounter of the sort we’ve seen before in horror fiction, but seldom with the disturbing insights into sexuality that make it seem more a manifestation of his own measly character than a supernatural force which victimizes him. By far the most masterful tale here, however, is ‘‘Significant Dust’’, whose enigmatic title, taken from an actual UFO report, has a fair amount to do with how we read the story, which is presented in 25 almost formal, beauti- fully orchestrated sections. The central character, Vanessa, is working in a remote roadhouse restaurant to escape, and perhaps seek a sort of redemp- tion, from the memory of a tragic accident involving her sister, for which Vanessa was clearly at fault. She has gathered a loose alliance of friends, but still spends many evenings running alone through the wilderness, and the oppressiveness of her memories is made vivid by alternate sections in which the accident and its aftermath are presented in excruciating, almost slow-motion detail. But odd things begin happening at the roadhouse: a filthy, foul-smelling, and apparently disoriented stranger wanders in trailing clouds of black dust. Told that the date is January 1982, he muses that 1982 was the year his son was born. Some days later, the local cop comes in with a tale of a car abandoned on the highway with no trace of its driver; when the car is hauled in it is covered with what appears to be the same black dust, and 166 a ring of such dust appears outside the diner. Vanessa herself notices strange lights playing on the wall of her room at night, different from the lights of passing vehicles and much closer, and she associates this with an unidenti- fied ‘‘thing,’’ which may have settled on the roof of the building (puffs of dust show up under the door as well). If the other tales in the volume visit familiar (or at least recognizable) tropes, ‘‘Significant Dust’’ conveys a kind of immanence and mystery that’s powerful even by Lanagan standards, and that introduces us to one of her most unforgettable characters. There will no doubt be readers who wonder what if anything fantasticates the tale, but Lanagan’s brilliant ending seems to ask us what kind of fantastika we want it to be, and perhaps what Vanessa needs it to be. The consensus of most read- ers is that Lanagan’s already-classic ‘‘’’ is her finest tale, but she may well surpass it here. –Gary K. Wolfe (Reviewed in Aug 2012) Return to Collection list.

The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories Volume One: Where On Earth, Ursula K. Le Guin (Small Beer 978-1-618-73034-3, $24.00, iv + 246pp, hc) November 2012. [Order from Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., #306, East- hampton MA 01027; .]

The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories Volume Two: Outer Space, In- ner Lands, Ursula K. Le Guin (Small Beer 978-1-618-73035-0, $24.00, iv + 286pp, hc) November 2012. The most significant word in the title of Ursula K. Le Guin’s monumental two-volume short fiction retrospective from Small Beer Press is the least as- suming one: ‘‘selected.’’ Le Guin, whose deservedly legendary 50-year career includes (according to the ISFDB) more than 130 stories, has chosen only 38 of them, which means that a lot gets left out, and Le Guin does not have a track record of writing many stories that deserve to get left out of anything. So she, and possibly her editors & , have refrained from the more familiar and more commercial rubric ‘‘best of’’ in favor of the more austere ‘‘selected,’’ which leads to the obvious question: selected how and for what purpose? Le Guin provides some perfectly rational answers in the introduction to the first volume – no novellas because of the stories they would bump (hence classics such as ‘‘The World for World is Forest’’ and ‘‘Vaster Than Empires and More Slow’’ are missing), few stories linked closely to novels or story-suites (though we get a glimpse of in ‘‘The Rule of Names’’), and some stories that Le Guin wanted ‘‘to bring back into the light.’’ She complains at the beginning of her introduction that she 167 ‘‘begged people’’ to suggest stories and ‘‘nobody would’’ (though she admits that Grant & Link encouraged the inclusion of at least one). Well, asking your neighbors to name your favorite children for you won’t work, either, and for a good reason: they’re way more curious about what you think than about what they think. And learning how Le Guin views her own fiction may not be the major revelation of this collection – that lies in revisiting the stories themselves – but it’s still fascinating, because it suggests that the long and almost irresistible habit of deifying Le Guin in the realm of SF and fantasy just might, paradoxically, be another way of underestimating her achievement. Let me explain. The earliest of the stories collected here dates from 1964, the latest from 2005 (although the stories are not arranged in chronological order, another wise decision on Le Guin’s part). The science fiction stories appear pretty much exclusively in Volume Two, while there are some non-SF stories there and some literary fantasies in Volume One. Not too surpris- ingly, the SF tales, especially the earlier ones, tend to come from venues like Amazing, Fantastic, Omni, New Dimensions, F&SF, and Asimov’s, while the less genre-like tales appeared in places like The Little Magazine and TriQuar- terly. But the magazine that originally published more of these stories than any other is The New Yorker, the source of five stories, all dating from the 1980s (the same decade that magazine published its only Gene Wolfe story, and decades before its famous bet-hedging ‘‘science fiction’’ issue). Now The New Yorker may not be the imprimatur of canonization that it acts like it is – it’s certainly published its share of writers you’ve never heard of again – but it may have some capacity to shift the terms of discussion of a writer’s work, and the fact that Le Guin was nearly a regular there for a while (there were actually ten stories between 1979 and 1990) is suggestive. I’m not refer- ring to the old ‘‘escaping the ghetto’’ canard, as though genre were a matter of bad urban planning, but to the question of how we might most fruitfully read her work in toto, which these volumes invite us to do. Sometime in the 1980s, I think, Le Guin, without ceasing to be one of the great SF writers, became one of the great American writers. And her chosen pattern of organization for this collection, deliberately or not, reflects this by inviting us to look at her work more holistically than we are accustomed to. Any SF reader like myself will be delighted to see such ac- knowledged classics as ‘‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’’, or ‘‘’’, or ‘‘Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight’’, but many may be surprised at the Orsinian or Oregonian tales (three from Searoad) that make up much of the first volume. Revisiting these tales for the first time in years, and some for the first time entirely, I was struck by two that aren’t necessarily among those I’d have 168 named if you’d asked me a month ago to name favorite Le Guin tales. One, ‘‘’’, is pure Hainish SF, while the other, ‘‘Half Past Four’’, is not SF by any stretch. Yet each is radical in its own way, and maybe the space that can encompass these very different tales is the sort of space we ought to be talking about when we talk about Le Guin. ‘‘Half Past Four’’ is a kind of repertory fiction, in which four characters with the same names and roughly the same power relationships to each other are re-imagined in eight different stories, so that a sweet retarded stepson in one tale become a computer science student in another and a gay lover (of the stepfather from the earlier story) in another. It’s hardly a conventional story, and Le Guin’s abiding fascination with the fluid structures of family relationships is as evi- dent here as it is in ‘‘The Matter of Seggri’’, a brilliant thought experiment on gender roles set on a planet in which female births vastly outnumber males, resulting in a society in which, as one narrator observes, the men have all the privilege and the women have all the power. The males are pampered and treasured, but at eleven they are yanked from their families and sent to live in a kind of nightmare theme park of violent sports and free sex (in fact, the women pay them), while the women maintain the society and ex- clusively receive higher education. Like many of Le Guin’s Hainish tales, it’s told through a series of observational reports and narratives over a lengthy time span, including a short story by one of the natives. (Another of the techniques which Le Guin pioneered is the use of multiple narrative voices, and in so thoroughly nailing the tone of anthropological field reports that it’s nearly become a convention in SF.) So the most useful space in which to consider Le Guin’s fiction isn’t quite the fantastic, and isn’t quite not. Early in her career, she tells us, she felt torn between the dictates of modernist realism and the ‘‘limitless realms of the imagination.’’ Her imaginary middle-European country of Orsinia (the name echoes her own) proved to be a useful mediation, and perhaps inci- dentally helped pioneer a tradition of setting-based fantasy without super- natural figures or events (now fairly common in writers as diverse as K.J. Parker and ). The first Orsinian tale here, ‘‘Brothers and Sis- ters’’, describes the plight of a number of young people seeking to find lives for themselves in a small village whose only options seem to be dangerous quarry work or unproductive farming. It introduces us to the Fabbre fam- ily, members of whom reappear in ‘‘A Week in the Country’’ (the best of the early Orsinian tales here) and ‘‘Unlocking the Air’’, in which the isolation of village life is replaced by the problems of survival under a repressive politi- cal regime. By the time we get to ‘‘Unlocking the Air’’, published more than a decade after the other Orsinian tales, the country has become a convenient backdrop for a story more concerned with Le Guin’s developing passion for 169 investigating the nature of storytelling, with individual sections proclaiming themselves to be ‘‘a story,’’ a ‘‘history,’’ ‘‘a fairy tale,’’ or even ‘‘a stone.’’ The other setting most prominent in the first volume is Oregon, especially the rather bedraggled beach town of Klatsand from Searoad, which is as close as we get in Le Guin to a Sherwood Anderson-style portrait of a com- munity through sketches of its inhabitants. The best of these is ‘‘Hand, Cup, Shell’’, in which an eager graduate assistant is dispatched to interview the ag- ing widow of a famous educational theorist. The characters in the story are virtually all women, who come to realize how they have defined themselves and their perspectives through men, from the graduate student’s supervisor to the famous educationist himself. It’s one of the more understated but insightful expressions of the sophisticated feminism that marks so much of Le Guin’s fiction. But there are times when the Klatsand stories strain at the strictures of realism: in ‘‘Texts’’, a seasonal visitor begins to decipher messag- es, sometimes impenetrable, in everything from the line of seafoam on the beach to a lace tablecloth. Those constraints of realism are torn a little fur- ther in ‘‘Ether, OR’’, in which the town is again viewed through almost natu- ralistic sketches of its residents, but the town itself has a disarming habit of wandering all over the state. There’s a touch of the waggish humor here that we would also see in such stories as ‘‘The Flyers of Gy’’ or ‘‘The Silence of the Asonu’’ from Changing Planes. In general, Le Guin hasn’t gotten enough recognition for wit or humor, but it’s laced through these stories from the Barthelme-like high-rise climbing satire of ‘‘The Ascent of the North Face’’ to the meatheaded tourist who doesn’t realize what he’s seeing in Australia in ‘‘The First Contact with the Gorgonids’’. Another favorite Le Guin technique, which also helps define that odd space which encompasses both the fantastic and the mundane, is what we might call the fantasy of perspective. As I said, she’s a pioneer in bringing the rhetoric of the anthropological field report into SF, and then shrewdly contrasting it with other narrative forms as in ‘‘The Matter of Seggri’’. But sometimes the shift in perspective is nearly the whole story. ‘‘Direction of the Road’’ may take place in Le Guin’s Oregon, but it’s an Oregon defamiliarized by being shown to us from the fully worked-out viewpoint of a tree. ‘‘Maz- es’’, one of the most predictable of these tales, is basically a rat-in-a-maze tale from the intelligent rat’s viewpoint, while ‘‘The Wife’s Story’’, though more finely nuanced, does something similar with the werewolf tale. ‘‘The Author of the Acacia Seeds’’ takes this a step further by offering glimpses into the world of ‘‘therolinguistics,’’ or decodings of animal communication patterns, which not only offers us radically different perceptions of our own world, but which is already a classic in the emerging field of animal studies in SF. Le Guin also uses this technique to cast a slant angle on familiar tales 170 from Genesis (‘‘She Unnames Them’’) to Sleeping Beauty (‘‘The Poacher’’). Point of view is crucial to many of these tales, even to one of my favorite SF pieces here, ‘‘The Shobies’ Story’’, in which an interplanetary crew un- dertakes the first experiment in instantaneous interstellar transportation, or ‘‘transilience,’’ and find that they aren’t all quite having the same experience. After a while, though, the experience of reading any retrospective as excel- lent as the Selected Stories reduces you, if not to babbling, to just delight- ing in some of your favorites (‘‘Sur’’ is one of mine, among her shrewdest feminist satires and a fine adventure tale to boot), discovering some new treasures, and recognizing that a few old favorites might not stand up as well as you’d expected. There are dozens of essays to be written about Le Guin’s achievements in these stories, and dozens that have already been written, though none that quite encompass what we see here. Le Guin space isn’t a region of SF or fantasy, though both SF and fantasy are a region of Le Guin space, and it’s a space that encompasses us all. –Gary K. Wolfe (Reviewed in Dec 2012) Return to Collection list.

Wonders of the Invisible World, Patricia A. McKillip (Tachyon 978-1- 61696-087-2, $14.95, 288pp, tp) October 2012. [Order from Tachyon Pub- lications, 1459 18th Street #139, CA 94107; .] Given that she’s been one of our most acclaimed fantasists for nearly four decades and won the World Fantasy Life Achievement Award in 2008, it’s surprising how comparatively little short fiction Patricia McKillip has writ- ten, with only a couple of collections prior to the new Wonders of the Invis- ible World. This isn’t entirely unusual among fantasy writers, of course, and McKillip’s impressively consistent output of novels is a gift in itself, but the 16 stories collected here, together with her Wiscon guest of honor speech and an appreciative introduction by , reveal a breadth and variety which, as de Lint notes, may come as a surprise to those familiar with ‘‘the gentle fantasies with which she’s usually associated.’’ Not that her earlier fantasies have been all that gentle, when we remember such fearsome cre- ations as the Blammor from way back in The Forgotten Beasts of Eld or the Hunter from The Book of Atrix Wolfe. But de Lint is right in observing that her contemporary settings can have a ‘‘bit of a darker edge,’’ and it may come as a further surprise that, in addition to a few tales with contemporary or near-contemporary settings, McKillip opens and closes the collection with a pair of SF stories from a precinct of the fantastic which she rarely visits. In other words, there’s a striking variety of fiction here, and while the collection 171 may be a bit modest to regard as a retrospective, it does include stories from as far back as 1985, and could well serve as a kind of road map of McKillip’s literary imagination. One of the most widely praised aspects of that imagination is McKillip’s lyricism, and when a character in ‘‘Knight of the Well’’ comments that a story – the one he’s in, in fact – ‘‘sounds like a tale that should be set to music,’’ he might well be describing many of McKillip’s own tales. It’s no surprise that the arts play an important role in many of these stories: music in ‘‘Knight of the Well’’ (about a water-worshipping city facing an apparent rebellion by its own water-spirits, resulting in the water supply going haywire in often comical ways); dancing in ‘‘A Gift to Be Simple’’ and (obviously) ‘‘The Twelve Dancing Princesses’’; painting in ‘‘Jack O’Lantern’’ and ‘‘The Kelpie’’. The lat- ter story, featuring an aspiring artist who joins a group of women painters ‘‘who refuse to be convinced of our inferiority’’ but then is coerced into pos- ing for an influential male artist as a condition of hanging a gallery exhibition of the women’s work, is an elegant mix of feminism and lyric fantasy, with its characters drawn as efficiently and insightfully as in a Katherine Mansfield story. Much the same could be said of ‘‘Jack O’Lantern’’, which begins with a family sitting for a bridal portrait and a rebellious 13-year younger sister (who is told by her mother that ‘‘women are not strong’’), and ends with a lesson of a different sort from the will o’ the wisp of the title. In fact, if there’s one thing younger writers might learn from McKillip, it has to do with that stylistic efficiency. McKillip long ago learned that lyricism for its own sake can lead to self-indulgence, and her own prose is as carefully controlled and precise as it is beautiful. She can introduce us to no fewer than five characters in the opening sentence of ‘‘The Kelpie’’, differentiate them clearly in the next page or two, and then shift seamlessly into fantasy mode when she introduces the water sprite of the title and its master, the king of the lake. In the few pages of ‘‘The Fortune-Teller’’, the tone shifts from comi- cal to ruminative, as a young girl thief steals a deck of fortune-telling cards (she hasn’t a clue as to what they mean) from an old woman, then wildly improvises interpretations for her new clients, at least until conscience sets in. When traditional fantasy tropes are introduced, they’re never permitted to take over, but are consistently subordinated to the story McKillip wants to tell. ‘‘Out of the Woods’’ features brief appearances by Merlin and figures from ‘‘Briar Rose’’, but never loses focus on its central concern of a scholar and the local woman who takes employment as a housekeeper; ‘‘Hunter’s Moon’’ is centrally about a girl lost in the woods with her little brother, not the mysteri- ous Hunter who rescues them; ‘‘Naming Day’’ may be set at a school for wiz- ards, but is about learning one’s true identity; ‘‘Byndley’’ may involve a wizard finding his way to the magical hidden town of the title, but it’s more about his 172 guilt than his magic. The title figure of ‘‘The Old Woman and the Storm’’ may be a powerful elemental, but she’s also a lonely old woman needing a story. The stories that may seem most surprising here are those with contempo- rary or SF settings. ‘‘The Doorkeeper of Khaat’’ is set in a city flooded with refugees from a war-plagued country on the other side of the planet; the pro- tagonist is an impoverished poet who lives in the immigrant ghetto but seems indifferent to their plight until a couple of personal issues force his involve- ment. ‘‘Wonders of the Invisible World’’ is far more inventive as SF, involving a time traveler hired to appear before Cotton Mather in the form of an angel, as part of a research project in the ‘‘history of imaginative thought’’. Her frus- tration at Mather’s capacity to see only what he wants to see is echoed upon her return to the future, as she learns that her own world hasn’t quite escaped that curse. ‘‘A Gift to be Simple’’ is only marginally SF, probably set a few years from now, and concerning an aging religious community which has pros- pered by patenting various inventions, but which desperately seeks a child to help sustain the order. Finally, both ‘‘Undine’’ and ‘‘Xmas Cruise’’ reveal a bit more clearly the satirical sensibility that we see in the Cotton Mather story and a few others. In the former, the water spirit Undine sets out to capture her human, but comes ashore in a deeply contaminated area awash in dead fish, and finds her target – but he turns out to be an environmental activist who promptly recruits her for protest marches. ‘‘Xmas Cruise’’ also takes on environmental themes, but in an almost Ballardian way, set aboard a cruise ship whose theme is ‘‘Rediscover Gaia’’ and which consists mostly of endless lectures on nature, while the natural world itself grows more and more re- mote and the ship seems to grow larger and larger; ‘‘all the children of the sea played in the sea while we sailed serenely into the dark’’. Like Cotton Mather, we see what we want to see. As lush and lovely as McKillip’s fantasy worlds may seem, she never lets us quite escape the realities of human nature; for all the kelpies, wizards, and will o’ the wisps that populate these tales, it’s always human nature that we recognize in them. –Gary K. Wolfe (Reviewed in Sep 2012)

Wonders of the Invisible World [Second Review] Aside from one memorable entry from 1985, Wonders of the Invisible World deals with McKillip’s work from the 1990s to the present, in a wide va- riety of settings, subgenres, tones and voices. For readers not all that familiar with her fiction, the beautiful Tom Canty cover illustration, and a contents list full of exotic creatures, woodlands, knights and princesses, may suggest that they’re in for a wealth of exquisitely poetic traditional fantasies – an illusion swiftly dispelled by the title story, where a time-traveling ‘‘angel’’ 173 from some future era visits a young Cotton Mather but can make no real inroads against the dour Puritanism of New England, in a world still going through ‘‘the long, long night of history, when... witches and angels and living dreams trembled just beyond the fire.’’ In novelette ‘‘The Kelpie’’, Pre-Raphaelite painters and poets may conjure far more romanticized visions of Faerie and the past, but that offers little help to one artist’s sister who wants to be a painter in her own right, despite tall odds, and must suffer the attentions of the group’s most odious cad – until he shows up one too many times, sending her into the strange depths of a northern lake where magic shows no mercy to the weak. Just what is she? No shrinking violet. Younger women appear in the modern guise of spotty teens several times, perhaps most notably in ‘‘Oak Hill’’, where a runaway devotee of Bordertown pursues that copyrighted site of magics into a treeless yet cu- riously dangerous modern city – one which stinks and growls like some untamed beast, yet may contain other, older ‘‘living dreams.’’ Reality turns out to be equally protean for the tormented wizard who comes to the wood- land village of ‘‘Byndley’’ in hopes of shedding an extraordinary burden, and the ex-soldier who finds horror in the secret of ‘‘The Twelve Dancing Princesses’’, a dark take on a tale from ‘‘long ago in a foreign country... ’’ right up to its sly version of a happy ending. The longest work, ‘‘Knight of the Well’’, returns to one of McKillip’s fa- vorite themes – the many forms of magic associated with water – via a nerdy young male hero and his seriocomic struggles to fulfil the dictates of both an amiable water-witch and the much younger, more beauteous mag- istrate whom he still loves, although she has been Promised to Another. The tale’s dilemma extends beyond his problems, as the dire effects of ‘‘some- thing wrong in the waterworld’’ seem to echo our own global bouts with nasty weather. But unlike melting icecaps and rising seas, the creatures here might set aside their hostility, if someone can find the right terms of persuasion. For primal visions of the world, and Storm as an entity, nothing can match the power of ‘‘The Old Woman and the Storm’’ from 1985. Rather than taking it as evidence that McKillip has lost some of her own powers over the intervening years, I see this as a special, concentrated, and uniquely vis- ible form of Myth that stands apart from more character-driven fantasies where humans (and other sentients) interact with some part of the Invisible World, in its infinite variety – an area where she continues to excel. –Faren Miller (Reviewed in Oct 2012) Return to Collection list. 174 At the Edge of Waking, Holly Phillips (Prime 978-1-60701-356-3, $15.95, 336pp, tp) September 2012. Cover by Aurélien Police, January traditionally serves as the month for catching up with books that deserve attention but didn’t get covered when they first appeared. The Ruck- er turned out to fall into this category, as does my other choice, Holly Phil- lips’s remarkable second collection, At the Edge of Waking. I tend to let other reviewers deal with this kind of thing, since they have the expertise and I can be stymied by the combination of brevity and wide variety in a comprehensive collection. But Edge features less than a dozen works, most of them long enough to make far more of an impression on me than a five-page “passing fancy.” If I cited much from Peter S. Beagle’s excellent introduction, there might be little left to say, but one parenthetical observation really bears repeating. With regard to a tale that may be set in the Antarctic, he exclaims, ‘‘and, my God, can she do cold!’’ Phillips makes her settings intensely real to all the senses. If it’s well below freezing, you’ll shiver; your fingers may even start to turn blue. A brief pas- sage from one of this book’s longest pieces, ‘‘Proving the Rule’’, shows how this rare ability can triumph over what should be impossible odds: Perhaps where Lucy walked was no-place, no-time, nothing but a memory in the Marshal’s skull. A fading memory, all that was left of the Empire that was. And yet the black mud sucked at her shoes. Puddles bright as mirrors cupped in worn paving stones reflected her face, the edge of a wall. The thrushes singing in the woods that guarded the hilltops sang like the first springtime in the world. Though I’m tempted to offer many more examples of Phillips’s superb prose, in the spirit of her writing, its understated power – never a long, intri- cate phrase when a few words will do – I’ll limit myself to one other descrip- tive passage, from ‘‘Country Mothers’ Sons’’: The clouds blew away before midnight last night, and the moon shone so bright the birds mistook it for day. Down below, far below the height of rooftops on the hill, the harbor looked like a circle of sky, black water and moon sequins embraced by a lunar crescent of headlands. The water trem- bled under the wind that cleansed the air of its night smokes, and the birds confused by the brilliance of the moon lifted their wings, half aloft as the sea air flowed over and around them. I’ll also beg off on a detailed discussion of these stories’ individual themes, or their differing ways of tackling the relationship between our world and imaginary ones. But one previously unpublished work, ‘‘Queen of the But- terflies’’, moves between the tense thoughts of a woman whose boyfriend is being held captive in the foreign land they’d thought to make their own, and 175 meditations on the act of writing – or trying to. Phillips’s later notes admit, ‘‘This must be the single most intimate story I’ve ever written. At the heart of it lies a deep conflict I carry within me, between my very pragmatic and skeptical self... and the self who lives in and by my imagination.’’ When you want the real low-down, go to the source! So I’ll just end by giv- ing this collection my highest possible recommendation as one of the best books from 2012. –Faren Miller (Reviewed in Feb 2013) Return to Collection list.

Ancient, Ancient, Kiini Ibura Salaam (Aqueduct Press 978-1933500966, $18.00, 272pp, tp) May 2012. In her introduction to Kiini Ibura Salaam’s debut collection, Ancient, Ancient, mentions her response to a question about the effect of the Afro-diaspora on genre literature: “Everything is going to get a lot sex- ier.” The very first story in this collection, “Desire”, proves that right out of the gate. A delightful folkloric tale, it tells of a pregnant woman, who thinks more about work than about sex, being infused with the power of a god’s desire. The story is told in alternating sections, with Sené’s sections in nor- mal text and the god Faru’s sections set off in brackets. There’s a lovely sense of two independent tales colliding suddenly then veering off again, leaving each confused in the other’s wake. Sené reconnects with herself and her husband, and Faru ends up restored but slightly humbler. It’s a real charmer of a story to open the collection. The most interesting thing, however, is how different all the stories are from one another. Salaam moves easily between genres, themes, and voices. Her stories work in a variety of different registers. Immediately following the opening fable, there are three linked stories (“Of Wings, Nectar, & Ances- tors”, “MalKai’s Last Seduction”, and “At Life’s Limits”) that take a science fictional tone. Aliens come to Earth in secret to feed off the life energies of certain targets. In the first story, WaLiLa is a fairly young alien on her mis- sion, and her point of view is represented in all lower-case. She doesn’t speak grammatically, and acts intuitively. In the final story she is more aware and accomplished, and her narrative takes on a more authoritative tone with proper capitalization to boot. And while I started to worry for a bit that the stories were privileging heterosexual relationships over other possibilities, “MalKai’s Last Seduction” allayed my fears. One of the only problems that I have with the collection is manifested in “At Life’s Limits”, the final story in that loose trilogy. It feels more like the beginning of a longer story than the end of a cycle, opening out into a new 176 realm of potential without exploring the new territory. A few other stories here struck me as story fragments more than fully fleshed-out tales, includ- ing the title story “Ancient, Ancient”, and “Ferret”, both less than six pages long. Looking at the publication history, these are also two of the earlier stories in the volume, appearing in 2002 and 2003 respectively, while the stories here run from 1996 to 2008 of the ones that aren’t original to the col- lection (ten of the 13 stories have been published elsewhere). In keeping with Shawl’s pronouncement about things getting sexier, Sa- laam also tends towards a very visceral mode of writing, and when her sto- ries turn towards horror they get very nightmarish. “Battle Royale” is a story that skips across different scenarios as a grandfather wants to teach a way- ward grandson a lesson. In each vignette you get a very tactile sense of the feelings and landscapes, whether it is Aztec vs European combat, dying of exposure in a desert, or hanging on as a mutant on a far future space trans- port. The blend of fantasy, history, and SF is very well done. Another story, while more conventional in genre, stood out to me as the best of the collection. “Rosamojo” is a story about incest and child abuse, from the POV of the victim. She is abused by her father but calls upon magical protection in order to prevent a repeat occurrence. However, even though empowered by her magic she is in no way unscarred by the experi- ence, and the consequences last a very long time. It’s one of the most focused stories of the collection, and I found it to be an excellent examination of several dimensions of abuse. Overall I was impressed by the range and command of voice shown throughout the stories here. Whether tackling far future SF, generation star- ships, oracular magical women, child abuse, or hidden aliens, the voice of the narration and the characters always seemed spot on. The stories also hit me on an emotional and visceral level that is impressive. If some of the sto- ries seemed incomplete or fragments of a larger story, that’s easy to forgive. It’s better to wish that a story was longer than thinking that it has overstayed its welcome. –Karen Burnham (Reviewed in Mar 2013 Return to Collection list.

Remember Why You Fear Me, Robert Shearman (Chizine) November 2012. One of our strangest and most eclectic horror writers presents 20 stories, six original, running the gamut from the satirical, to the terrifying, to the surreal, including World Fantasy Award nominee ‘‘Damned If You Don’t’’ and finalists ‘‘George Clooney’s Mustache’’ and 177 ‘‘’’. Shearman’s previous collections have won World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Awards. –Locus (Mentioned in Dec 2012) Return to Collection list.

Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley, Robert Sheckley (New York Review Books 978-1-59017-494-4, $17.95 394pp, tp) April 2012. There can be no doubt that small presses have been doing us a huge service in keeping in print some of the most important short fiction in SF: NES- FA alone has given us invaluable collections of everyone from Cordwainer Smith to C. M. Kornbluth, , , Fredric Brown, Hal Clement, Anthony Boucher, William Tenn, and many others. But keep- ing this short fiction available for aficionados like us is a different matter from bringing it to the attention of the wider literary community, which the best of it deserves. It’s been less than seven years since NESFA Press’s generous collection of Robert Sheckley stories The Masque of Mañana and more than twenty since Pulphouse’s five-volume Collected Fiction, but we have to go all the way back to 1989 to find a collection of his work from anything other than a small press (Holt’s A Feast of Sheckley) – let alone from a press with the upscale literary cachet of New York Review Books, which now collects 26 of Sheckley’s best stories in Store of the Worlds, ed- ited by Jonathan Lethem and Alex Abramovich. Lethem, of course, edited the Library of America’s popular three volumes of Philip K. Dick, and this volume, together with the Library of America’s forthcoming collections of 1950s Vonnegut and 1950s SF novels, could almost give you the impression that 1950s SF is finally in for the rediscovery that so many of us argued fruit- lessly for decades ago. Take that, sixth-grade English teachers of yore! Sheckley is both a surprising and an inevitable choice for this little renais- sance: surprising, because except for a number of stories in Playboy and a couple of rather silly film adaptations, he never really gained any trac- tion outside the SF community, and his novels are generally not nearly as sharply focused as his short stories; inevitable, because that short fiction, which from the beginning seemed to subvert some of the most cherished tropes of SF, can resonate with contemporary readers in a way comparable to Dick and Vonnegut. Colonialist attitudes, often problematic in earlier SF, are repeatedly satirized to devastating effect, most hilariously in ‘‘The Na- tive Problem’’, in which a misanthrope who has settled alone on a tropical planet finds himself unable to convince later settlers that he isn’t an entire tribe of hostile natives. Characteristically in a Sheckley story, the invaders from space are us, as in ‘‘Dawn Invader’’, in which earthlings have learned to 178 conquer alien worlds by taking over the minds of the natives, or ‘‘Shall We Have a Little Talk?’’ in which the trick is to send an advance ‘‘contractor’’ to buy property in an alien society and later ask for help from home as a pretext for invasion or even genocide. Even by today’s standards, Sheckley’s humor can be surprisingly dark: ‘‘Three or four genocides and a man might just get angry enough to switch his vote.’’ Even when our intentions are less dire, first contact seldom works out as planned: in ‘‘All the Things You Are’’ we turn out to be literally toxic to natives of another planet, while in ‘‘The Mon- sters’’ – told entirely from the alien viewpoint – we end up committing mass murder because of an inability to understand the local culture – which itself is problematic because of its custom of killing wives every 25 days (partly because of an eight-to-one female to male birthrate). But Sheckley’s approach to gender issues can be as twisty as his approach to most other issues. ‘‘Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?’’ at first seems to take on the leering tone of a cartoon in Playboy, where it first appeared: an attractive young woman named Melisande becomes the romantic obsession of a smart vacuum cleaner, which offers to massage her in various suggestive ways. But the ending, and especially the final line, almost entirely pulls the rug from those expectations. Melisande is the only female protagonist in a book in which women characters in general are sparse – Sheckley doesn’t spend much effort developing characters at all – and often unfortunately objectified, as in ‘‘Pilgrimage to Earth’’, in which a romance-stricken colonist from a distant world visits the home planet of Earth, ‘‘the only place in the galaxy that still has love’’ – as a saleable commodity – but it also has shooting galleries with live women as targets. In ‘‘The Language of Love’’, a philoso- pher is so frustrated at his inability to express his love for his girlfriend that it sets him on an odyssey to learn a dead alien language which supposedly can express the finest gradations of love, only to learn that too much preci- sion in language can backfire. In fact, if there were a single narrative move that’s characteristic of Sheck- ley’s short fiction, backfiring might be it. He’s a master of the set-up and the reversal. When he grimly takes on war in ‘‘If the Red Slayer’’, a soldier who’s brought back from death for the third time insists on exercising his contractual right to stay dead after the third resurrection. When he takes on racism in ‘‘Holdout’’, a space captain whose crew is happily multiracial (and multi-species) is puzzled when a crew member refuses to serve with another on the basis of sheer prejudice (the kicker, of course, is learning the race of the objectionable crewmate). Anything that looks like a good idea is going to quickly go haywire, whether it’s robot birds to prevent murder in ‘‘The Watchbird’’ or a visitor from another dimension whose sole purpose is to protect from harm the protagonist of ‘‘Protection’’. 179 All but five of the 26 stories here (fewer than half overlap the NESFA col- lection) date from Sheckley’s most productive period in the 1950s, when he seemed to dominate Galaxy, moving its satirical SF toward an even bleaker dimension than that offered by Kornbluth and Pohl. There was an absurdist slant to even some of these early stories (like ‘‘Warm’’, which approaches solipsism in depicting its protagonist’s ever-more abstract perceptions of his world), though he could also produce an efficiently chilling planetary survival tale like ‘‘A Wind is Rising’’. Sometimes the tales get a bit shaggy in , like ‘‘Double Indemnity’’, about time-traveling insurance fraud, and often the characters seem little more than placeholders, but it’s surpris- ing how well many of these tales hold up, and how they seem to anticipate later modes of SF. It may be that by the late ’60s and ’70s (the latest tale here is from 1978), Sheckley had grown a bit tired of working with familiar SF tropes, as his markets shifted more toward F&SF, Playboy, and the occasional original anthology. Tales like ‘‘Cordle to Onion to Carrot’’ and ‘‘Is That What People Do?’’ nearly forgo the familiar machinery altogether. But these sto- ries, like the best of the early ones, wouldn’t seem at all out of place in the genre-bending literary landscape that Sheckley helped pioneer. –Gary K. Wolfe (Reviewed in Apr 2012) Return to Collection list.

The Dragon Griaule, Lucius Shepard (Subterranean) June 2012. This beautiful volume collects six stories written over 25 years, set in the world of one of Shepard’s most memorable creations – the 6,000-foot-long, sleeping dragon Griaule. Includes a new novella, ‘‘The Skull’’, plus story notes by the author. –Locus (Mentioned in Jul 2012) Return to Collection list.

The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 7: We Are for the Dark, Robert Silverberg (Subterranean) October 2012. The latest volume in Subterranean’s comprehensive chronological collec- tion of Silverberg’s short fiction weighs in with ten stories, including the Hu- go-winning ‘‘Enter A Soldier. Later: Enter Another’’, accompanied as usual by Silverberg’s enlightening comments on the art and business of writing. –Locus (Mentioned in Nov. 2012) Return to Collection list.

180 Jagannath, Karin Tidbeck (Cheeky Frawg 978-0-9857904-0-0, $11.99, 160pp, tp) November 2012. [Order from ; .] For the past few years, there have been a number of salutary efforts to bring international SF to the attention of the wider community (by which I mean monolingual English-language readers) – a new translation award, recent Japanese and Latin American anthologies, sterling reviews for An- gelica Gorodischer, , and Hannu Rajaniemi, etc. Now Cheeky Frawg books, the latest imprint by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, is intro- ducing us to the work of Karin Tidbeck, a young Swedish author, who like Rajaniemi also writes in English, and who promises to be one of the most distinctive new voices in short fiction since Margo Lanagan. Her collec- tion Jagannath includes eleven stories, mostly translated from the Swedish (presumably by the author, since no translator is given), seven of which originally appeared in her 2010 collection Vem är Arvid Pekon?, though a few have appeared in English, and one is original to the collection. It’s a slim volume, and some of the stories are only a few pages long, but it’s not quite like anything you’ve seen, even though you may hear vague echoes of everyone from Kafka to Borges to Tove Jansson. The Borges echo is most notable in a story-disguised-as-essay called ‘‘Pyret (Py:Ret)’’, which would hardly be out of place in The Book of Imag- inary Beings. It describes a benign creature called a Pyret, persisting in Swedish folklore from the time of the Icelandic sagas, sometimes mimick- ing other animals. What appear to be genuine scholarly citations lead to an anecdotal account from the 1860s and another from the 1970s, finally to the narrator’s own efforts to investigate the latter, which in turn leads to a surprising epiphany about the nature of her own research. There’s a Kaf- kaesque feel to ‘‘Arvid Pekon’’, in which a bureaucrat working in a govern- ment employment office begins receiving odd calls from a Miss Sycorax, at first wanting to speak to her dead mother, then to the Beetle King. Beetles and cockroaches begin to invade his life, possibly hallucinatorily, until his own reality is called into question. It’s governed by the same sort of horror- story dream logic that haunts Kafka’s characters, and to much the same ef- fect. Another story, with an almost conventional but effective horror twist, is ‘‘Rebecka’’, in which the title character repeatedly attempts suicide, only to be foiled by what she believes to be acts of God, until she comes up with a chilling scheme to ‘‘do something he can’t ignore.’’ But most of Tidbeck’s stories lie firmly in her own territory, a half-myth- ical region most emblematically represented by the strange and brutal world shared by two stories, ‘‘Augusta Prima’’ and ‘‘Aunts’’. The former opens with what appears to be a refined game of croquet, but immediately 181 starts going weird when we learn that the host is Mnemosyne, the pages who serve the drinks are changelings, and the goal seems to be to smash the balls into the faces of the pages. Augusta finds a putrefying corpse in a nearby wood and steals a watch from it, but needs to consult a page to even find out what it is – she and her decadent friends, not quite human, live in a twilight world outside of time, but by discovering time she learns she has fallen into it. Also on this estate is an orangery, which houses the title characters of ‘‘Aunts’’, three enormous women, tended by ‘‘nieces,’’ who ‘‘had one single holy task: to expand.’’ At a certain point, the Aunts split open from sheer enormity, and the nieces scoop out the organs, which will feed the next generation of Aunts, who begin life as fetal creatures clinging to and devouring their dead Aunts’ hearts. It’s a bizarre world, with some of the grotesque ambience of a Heinrich Kley drawing or a John Bauer painting (Bauer is alluded to in another story), that seems to leave room for additional stories – we’re told it’s only one of eight worlds, but ‘‘the most perfect one.’’ But the Aunts aren’t the most remarkable mother figures in the book; in the title story ‘‘Jagannath’’ (a name presumably drawn from the Hindu deity), survivors of an unspecified catastrophe survive by working inside an enormous biomechanical ‘‘great Mother,’’ keeping her organs function- ing as she nurtures and protects them from ‘‘the horrible place’’ outside. Vaguely recalling Kit Reed’s ‘‘Perpetua’’, it’s one of the more recognizably SFnal tales in the book. So, in a way, is ‘‘Beatrice’’, which is Tidbeck’s sur- real take on a steampunk romance, as a physician who has fallen in unre- quited love with an airship meets a printer’s assistant who has fallen in love with a steam engine. Tidbeck has the discipline to follow such absurdist premises with a kind of fierce plot logic that almost makes them seem in- evitable. As should be apparent by now, Tidbeck often uses character names as titles – ‘‘Beatrice’’, ‘‘Augusta Prima’’, ‘‘Rebecka’’ – and this suggests her primary concern with character; even in the briefest and most elliptical of her tales, the motivations that drive her figures through these strange landscapes seem credible. She seems to view families as inherently fantasti- cal, not only with those mythologized mother figures, but with children who might be imaged as tiny, gnarled creatures (‘‘Miss Nyberg and I’’ or ‘‘Cloudberry Jam’’, which opens with the line ‘‘I made you in a tin can’’) or parents who are remote, alienated, and in the case of ‘‘Some Letters for Ove Lindstrom’’, dead (the story is a series of letters to a dead father, which again echoes Kafka). The fullest portrayals of families are ‘‘Brita’s Holiday Village’’, in the form of the diary entries of a writer trying to complete a novel drawing on her family history, and ‘‘Reindeer Mountain’’, the collec- 182 tion’s one original story and possibly its best. Twelve-year-old Cilla and her sister Sara are visiting the family village, where an aging great-uncle is being moved out of a cottage he has lived alone in for decades. Cilla’s discoveries about her family, and her family’s possible involvement with the vittra, elf- like nature spirits of Swedish folklore, sets up a series of mysteries that are both emotionally authentic and genuinely eerie. It’s a gorgeously shaped tale that may not be Tidbeck’s most bizarre, but which demonstrates as well as any how her various oddities are grounded in an absolutely authen- tic sense of place, and a keen understanding of how the heart works, even when it isn’t assisted by shift workers inside the body. –Gary K. Wolfe (Reviewed in Oct 2012) Jagannath [Second Review] There is a new story collection from Karin Tidbeck, a Swedish writer who has made a bit of a splash recently with her first stories in English, most of which have appeared in Ann VanderMeer’s Weird Tales. Now Ann and her husband Jeff have published Jagannath under their Cheeky Frawg imprint. Tidbeck’s stories are varied, original, and very well written. (Tidbeck does her own translations, I believe, and some of the stories appear to have possi- bly been written first in English.) I have already mentioned her very strange ‘‘Augusta Prima’’ in these pages. In this book I also liked ‘‘Beatrice’’, about a man in love with an airship; and ‘‘Reindeer Mountain’’, about a remote village and a family that claims descent from the sidhe-like vittra that live under the nearby mountain. Most striking perhaps is ‘‘Rebecka’’, a horror story set in a future in which God has returned to make everything right, much to the frustration of the title character, who wants to die. The story moves with well-oiled horror logic to its inevitable conclusion.

–Rich Horton (Reviewed in Oct 2012) Return to Collection list.

Eater-of-Bone and Other Novellas, Robert Reed (PS Publishing) April 2012. I remain puzzled as to why Robert Reed isn’t more famous than he is, in spite of the fact that he has consistently produced four or five (at least) of the year’s best stories year after year now for almost 20 years, usually ap- pearing in several of that year’s various Best of the Year anthologies, and sometimes in all of them at the same time. You’d think by now that he’d be a household name, but, although he did win a Hugo a few years back – he’s not. Perhaps it’s because his best work is done in short fiction, not at novel 183 length, and novels are where the real reputation-building is going on these days. Perhaps it’s because his stories are often so different from each other in tone and execution and subject matter and genre that you can’t form a picture of what a ‘‘typical Robert Reed story’’ is going to be like, and that hampers the creation of a brand-identity, and so name recognition (a prob- lem he shares with Walter Jon Williams, and a couple of other good writers). For those of us in the know, however, a new Robert Reed collection is cause for celebration. And that’s especially true of Eater-of-Bone and Other Novellas by Robert Reed, as it contains a major new novella, certainly one of the year’s best to date, the eponymous ‘‘Eater-of-Bone’’. The novella is related to Reed’s long-running series of stories about the Great Ship, a Jupiter-sized spaceship created eons ago by enigmatic aliens that endlessly travels the Gal- axy with its freight of millions of passengers from dozens of races, including humans. In this story, set at a tangent to the main Great Ship sequence, hu- man colonists from the Ship have crashed and been marooned on a planet inhabited by smaller, weaker aliens. Because of their comparatively greater size and strength, and because of the repair nanomechanisms in their blood which make them effectively immortal, or at least very, very hard to kill, the natives see them as monsters, and over hundreds of years, their relationship with the humans has evolved into a state of constant warfare. To the surviv- ing humans, though, the real monsters are other humans, and, trapped in this resource-poor world, they constantly war with each other as well, in competition for what resources there are. This is a complex, chewy, and of- ten emotionally draining story, which begins with as tense and exciting an extended chase scene as I’ve ever read, 14 pages of grueling flight-and-fight, as a lone human woman is battered and injured in the course of her head- long flight, fights her way on against all odds, is mutilated and torn almost to pieces, and finally killed – for the moment. And that’s just the beginning, with another hundred some pages, and many twists, turns, and surprises to go! The collection also contains three other novellas: the complex time-travel story ‘‘Veritas’’, in which an army invades and transforms Ancient Rome as we know it; the intellectual cat-and-mouse game of ‘‘Truth’’, in which an interrogator questioning a prisoner finds truth to be a very difficult thing in- deed to pin down; and Reed’s Hugo-winner, ‘‘A Billion Eves’’, in which young men headed off to create their own pocket universes routinely kidnap young women to take along with them. –Gardner Dozois (Reviewed in Aug 2012) Return to Collection list.

184 Moscow but Dreaming, Ekaterina Sedia (Prime) December 2012. Moscow but Dreaming from Ekaterina Sedia offers resonant, melancholy tales, most rooted in Russian history and folklore. –Locus (Mentioned in Feb 2013) Return to Collection list.

Dream Castles: The Early Jack Vance, Volume Two, Jack Vance, edited by Terry Dowling & Jonathan Strahan (Subterranean Press) March 2012. Dedicated Vanceans Terry Dowling & Jonathan Strahan edit and intro- duce this collection of ten stories by Grand Master Vance, this time dating from 1947-1977. –Locus (Mentioned in May 2012) Return to Collection list.

Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille, James Van Pelt (Fairwood 978-1-933846-34-7, $17.99, 306pp, tp) November 2012. Cover by Elena Viz- erskaya. [Order from Fairwood Press, 21528 104th Street Court East, Bon- ney Lake WA 98391; ]. How could the multiple subjects, settings and genres in James Van Pelt’s fourth collection, Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille, be any- thing more than a mixed bag? A suburban dad whose son dreams of drag- ons, a 30-something virgin in an oddly haunted house, a moon dweller overseeing ‘‘full reality skin shell rentals’’ for tourists curious about old Earth, a questing knight, a sophisticated E.T. whose academic curiosity about us primitive earthlings changes with closer contact.... It’s Van Pelt’s refusal to accept the usual distinctions between normality and strangeness that both gives the book its odd sense of unity – one guid- ing spirit – and the stories a combined power more than the sum of their parts. He conjures magics linking body, mind, and heart – life as we know it – from such simple stuff as a school desk, the images a horny teenager once stuck to his bedroom wall, and One memorabilia in a Denver bar. And his excursions into myth, history, or the far future seem just as lived-in, when nonchalant little details take us there. The title story opens in the midst of action: a pilot from the famed Lafayette Escadrille squadron flies, half-frozen by the ‘‘November air’’ at 14,000 feet. And the air ace won’t dissolve into a wish-fulfillment fancy even when his adventures prove to be the dreams of a quiet drinker, gaz- ing up at the ‘‘completely restored Nieuport’’ hung in an overdecorated bar. ‘‘Night Sweats’’ masterfully weaves its many strands – a grown wom- 185 an’s fear of sex; a WWII-era schoolboy’s collage, with Tokyo Rose su- preme among the vamps; the wild mood swings of the ’40s, home to both Casablanca and the bombing of Hiroshima; the little messes caused by a restless poltergeist – into a moving tale of change. The few pages of ‘‘Just Before Recess’’ make the crazy concept of a schoolboy with ‘‘a sun in his desk’’ seem real enough that readers will both laugh and wince when his teacher decides to pry. Van Pelt himself still teaches high school and college English, as well as writing. Aside from that one hapless victim, some of the other instructors here seem more like wizards. Uncanny power crops up totally without warning in the most recent story, ‘‘Mrs. Hatcher’s Evaluation’’ (Asimov’s 2012), when an evaluator assigned to check out a frumpy woman’s history lectures gets swept up, along with all her students, in an experience that feels more like time travel. Even when a teacher gets dragged back to work by creatures that had been his students, in the brief zombie satire ‘‘Classroom of the Living Dead’’, there’s a kind of odd magic when – at a loss for other options – he starts diagraming sentences on a blackboard and becomes lost in ‘‘the arcane language of grammar.’’ Though their faces stay blank and all he hears are a few groans for ‘‘braaaiiins,’’ no one tries to eat him. He moves beyond despair to conclude: ‘‘Tomorrow I think I’ll teach literature. Some Dickinson, some Poe. Tomorrow I’ll teach the dead and for a moment pre- tend that the world will go on.’’ Whether the horror’s pulpish or tragically real, we can learn from his example. –Faren Miller (Reviewed in Feb 2013) Return to Collection list.

Sorry Please Thank You, Charles Yu (Pantheon Books 978-0-307-90717-2, $24.95, 240pp, hc) July 2012. Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science eloquent- ly cavorted between trippy modernist fiction and trippy genre fiction while scratching the itches of fans of both. Sorry Please Thank You, a collection of his short fiction, does more of the same. These pieces ran in mainstream publications like The Oxford American and Playboy as well as in outlets like Lightspeed – which tells you almost nothing about these 13 stories, only that they fall into the Venn Diagram overlap between those two worlds. Yu’s melancholy whimsy might be what holds the collection together, mov- ing as it does between the opener ‘‘Standard Loneliness Package’’, which is about a Bangalore-based worker who experiences unpleasant emotions for 186 a fee, and closer ‘‘Sorry Please Thank You’’, which is about a suicide, maybe. In between are zombies (‘‘First Person Shooter’’), redshirts (‘‘Yeoman’’), and MORPGs (‘‘Hero Absorbs Major Damage’’). While all are fun to read, some find more satisfying conclusions and more obvious main ideas. The vaguely David Foster Wallace-ian ‘‘Designer Emotion 67’’, for example, never quite comes together, even though the glee in Yu’s voice carries you through to the end. These are polarizing stories, in some ways, and reader responses may be based more on the expectations they bring with them. But if you’re willing to let Yu take you on his rides, you can’t help but marvel at the energy and imagination these stories contain. –Adrienne Martini (Reviewed in Oct 2012) Return to Collection list.

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187 Anthologies

After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and , Ellen Datlow & Ter- ri Windling, eds. (Hyperion 978-1423146193, $16.99, 384pp, hc) October 2012. With the immense popularity of The Hunger Games trilogy becoming even more immense thanks to the well-received first movie adaptation, and a slew of new and continuing series on the shelves, it can’t be denied that dystopia remains a major force in YA. In the introduction to their newest YA anthology, Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow offer some broad definitions of what the dystopian – or ‘‘dyslit,’’ to borrow their term – entails now, and why it holds such appeal for younger readers. The editors also tell us the parameters given the writers here: they were to write about the aftermath of ‘‘A disaster of any kind: political, ecological, technological, sociological....’’ While a collection of stories about what happens after the end of the world might seem to risk a grim sameness despite the leeway, in fact what many of these engaging, multifaceted stories ultimately offer is hope. Young women are at the center of many of these stories, including the opener, ‘‘The Segment’’, yet another well-turned tale from Genevieve Valen- tine. Poppy is an actress with ambitions, working for the agency, trying to angle some face time. When she gets a shot at a part on the evening news – which is staged for the ‘‘Uppers’’ in this future – she jumps at it. As a retired star coaches her for the part, Poppy begins to glimpse the truth behind the smoke and mirrors. N.K. Jemisin’s arresting ‘‘Valedictorian’’ introduces us to another ambitious girl, in this case Zinhle. We meet her at a breakfast table where her parents are suggesting she get pregnant, a smart reversal on pres- ent norms. Zinhle is a straight A student, a hyper-achiever at school, which is dangerous when the worst and the best are sent outside ‘‘the Firewall’’ after graduation, as a tithe to the enemy. Meanwhile, Sarah Rees Brennan’s ‘‘Faint Heart’’ inventively blends a far future setting with a high fantasy narrative where every generation of young men fights to the death for a newly cloned Queen Rosamond. Over the course of the story, Brennan introduces Tor, a devoted knight who has trained his whole life to be Rosamond’s cham- pion, and Yvain, a lowborn thief who despises her as the symbol of all that’s wrong. But by far the most memorable is Rosamond herself, who wishes the trials – and her existence as prize – might be stopped. There are a wide range of troubled futures on display here, and as many approaches to revealing them. In the deadpan fashion no one pulls off like a character, the narrator of ‘‘All I Know of Freedom’’ in- forms us she’s preparing herself to need less; the people who bought her for ‘‘a respectable sum’’ don’t beat her, but she’s beginning to have trouble 188 being invisible. Dryly humorous childlike wisdom mixes with chilling adult realizations: ‘‘Trouble is, now that I’m getting breasts, I can tell that they’re beginning to see me no matter how quiet I keep.’’ The narrator runs away, promptly finds a dog and hooks up with a cult leaving soon for Proxima Centauri. As usual with an Emshwiller story, the result is unpredictable and unforgettable. Jeffrey Ford also provides a darkly humorous piece with ‘‘Blood Drive’’, a future spin on the tall tale where everyone totes guns to the local high school and practices their signature catchphrase. , with ‘‘You Won’t Feel a Thing’’, and Beth Revis, with ‘‘The Other Elder’’, both offer up revealing treats for fans of Shade’s Children and the Across the Universe trilogy, respectively. Other notable entries come from the likes of Katherine Langrish, Susan Beth Pfeffer, , Jane Yolen, Gregory Maguire, Steven Gould, and Carolyn Dunn, in a rare anthology with no real misses among the swings. Speaking of which, ’s ‘‘The Great Game at the End of the World’’ is a fun mash-up of the American pastime with a twisted future filled with ‘‘Creepies’’ and ‘‘Barbies and Kens.’’ Two of the most affecting stories here feature infants in jeopardy, though in vastly different circumstances. Cecil Castellucci’s ‘‘The Marker’’ draws a mostly barren landscape in which genetic testing can render a death verdict. Scenes where main character Geo discovers how hard it is to follow The Way, when it means poisoning a child, are powerful. In Caitlín R. Kiernan’s gripping ‘‘Fake Plastic Trees’’, Cody Hernandez leaves what’s left of Jackson- ville to cross a forbidden bridge in a plastic-coated future where most cities – most of the world – are considered LOST PLACES. She discovers a family with a baby in a car on the far end of the bridge, and, possibly with them, not just horror but hope. Switching to family dynamics of a different kind, Nalo Hopkinson’s ‘‘The Easthound’’ is an affectingly scary story about a race against becoming a monster that may not be possible to win. My personal favorite in this assemblage is zombie queen Carrie Ryan’s ‘‘After the Cure.’’ Ryan constructs a thoroughly convincing aftermath of a society attempting to reconstruct itself after being overrun with vampires (of a sort), created by a diet drug gone wrong. Vail is newly Rehabilitated, but she doesn’t exactly feel cured. Plagued by vivid sense memories, she meets James, who tells her it wasn’t just the infected who did monstrous things. This searing portrait of a girl who sees so clearly that ‘‘in everyone’s eyes, including our own, we’re worthless,’’ is a hauntingly potent story of survival and its true costs. But, while this was my favorite, other readers clearly have a wealth of bleak post- apocalyptic delights to choose from in After. –Gwenda Bond (Reviewed in Dec 2012)

189 After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia [Second Review] Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling’s latest YA anthology is After, stories of apocalypse and dystopia (thus neatly sidestepping questions about those two related but not really identical subgenres – as the editors acknowledge in their introduction). It’s a solid collection, if perhaps never quite brilliant. The best stories include N.K. Jemisin’s ‘‘Valedictorian’’, which looks at a world split between haves and have-nots – but ambiguously, as the have- nots, it appears, have got that way by refusing knowledge. This complicates the position of the brilliant girl at the center of the story. There is also Garth Nix’s heartbreaking ‘‘You Won’t Feel a Thing’’, set in the world of his novel Shade’s Children; and Steven Gould’s ‘‘Rust With Wings’’, an early look at the metal-eating apocalypse he’s been exploring in several recent stories and a novel. –Rich Horton (Reviewed in Jan 2013) Return to Anthologies list.

Rip-Off!, Gardner Dozois, ed. (Audible) December 2012. Gardner Dozois offers a first rate new anthology in audio form: Rip-Off!. The conceit is that each story begins with a famous first line, and goes on from there, presumably riffing on the story it’s ‘‘ripping off.’’ The best two stories open and close the book. ’s ‘‘Fireborn’’ is based on a Carl Sandburg story. It’s pastoral in mood, about Onyx and Jas- per, two ‘‘commoners’’ who encounter a fireborn ‘‘skydancer’’ – a woman who has lived multiple lives, trying to earn ‘‘transit to the Eye of the Moon.’’ The story slowly reveals the nature of the ‘‘fireborn,’’ and the ambitions of Onyx and Jasper, as Jasper is lured to become an apprentice to the skydancer. This is excellent ‘‘posthuman’’ SF, in which the are just as hu- man as the ‘‘commoners.’’ And James Patrick Kelly’s ‘‘Declaration’’ (taking off from the Declaration of Independence) is about a girl who splits time between virtuality (‘‘softtime’’) and ‘‘real’’ life (‘‘hardtime’’), along with her terribly disabled brother. Their online community becomes involved in a push for a Declaration of Independence for those who want to live their lives wholly in ‘‘softtime’’ (instead of mandatory ‘‘hardtime,’’ including interac- tions with other people). The story doesn’t insist on conclusions, but looks at both sides of the argument, with disingenuous as well as sincere POVs given both sides. –Rich Horton (Reviewed in Jan 2013) Return to Anthologies list.

190 AfroSF: Science Fiction by African Writers, Ivor W. Hartmann, ed. (Sto- ryTime Press 978-0-9870089-5-4, e-book) December 2012. AfroSF will serve as an admirable antidote for all those who have to be reminded that Africa is a continent, not a single country. Both the stories and the authors are as diverse as any reader could wish. The anthology leads off with a story by the most prominent SF author gracing the table of con- tents, (Nigerian descent, working in Chicago). Her story ‘‘Moom!’’ is one of the least science fictional stories present, featuring a swordfish attacking an off-shore oil rig and somehow bringing about eco- logical healing. However, it is told in prose as pure as poetry, a lovely short gem. A few stories lean towards the absurd, such as ‘‘Home Affairs’’ by Sarah Lotz (Cape Town, South Africa), which deftly captures the horror of be- ing lost in a bureaucratic system à la the film Brazil. ‘‘Heresy’’ by Mandisi Nkomo (Cape Town) intersperses media commentary with the story of the South African space program breaching a barrier around the solar system and letting some sort of ineffable and possibly religious force in. It put me in mind of Wizard of the Crow by Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o, in terms of the ridiculous nature of certain kinds of government action. Some of the stories venture out into space, as in ‘‘Azania’’ by Nick Wood (Born in Zambia, living in South Africa). It portrays a planetary coloni- zation mission led by an African woman. The writing here is some of the strongest of the anthology, and the character tensions are effectively drawn. However, I was a little taken aback by the lack of regard that the crew had for potential harm to the environment of the new planet, taking the risk of cross-contamination without fully understanding their new surround- ings. It seemed a little bit too much like replicating the mistakes of the past. ‘‘Angel Song’’ by Dave de Burgh (Pretoria, South Africa) is military SF with religious overtones, which falls down only in that it is unclear why the view- point character is singled out in the way that he is. Other stories have their focuses much closer to home, as in ‘‘New Mzansi’’ by Ashley Jacobs (South Africa), a tragic story about the very immediate concern of the AIDS epidemic, although it also features a lot of social media and hip hop. ‘‘The Foreigner’’ by Uko Bendi Udo (living in the US) is a rela- tively straightforward story of immigration and the familial and political consequences of the children of interracial couples. ‘‘Brandy City’’ by Mia Arderne (Cape Town) is a story of slums and wealth, lust and tragedy. Some stories fit neatly into the context of Anglo-centric SF, but with their own spin. ‘‘The Gift of Touch’’ by Chinelo Onwualu (Abuja, Nigeria) could make an interesting episode of the late, lamented SF show Firefly, although perhaps the character arcs wrap up too neatly in the end. ‘‘Closing Time’’ by 191 Liam Kruger (Cape Town) is a story of time travel and self-loathing. ‘‘Mas- querade Stories’’ by Chiagozie Fred Nwonwu (Lagos, Nigeria) is an aliens- masquerading-as-spirits story that is unfortunately ill-served by its frequent point-of-view shifts. ‘‘The Trial’’ by Joan De La Haye (Pretoria) is a dysto- pian future where all must justify their existence or be judicially executed; a mid-list author has trouble arguing her case. Two of my favorites come late in the book. ‘‘Ofe!’’ Rafeet Aliyu (Abuja, Nigeria) is a fun story in which three women end up banding together and using their unique powers to avoid becoming victims of a mad scientist. The closing story is perhaps the strongest in the book. ‘‘Proposition 23’’ by Efe Okogu (Nigeria) has elements from 1984 and Neal Stephenson’s all mashed up into a future dystopia (set two hundred years hence) in Nigeria. It’s told via three perspectives: Lugard is a lawman who is ban- ished from civilized society when he asks the wrong questions; Sayoma is a top-notch programmer and hacker who becomes instrumental in tracking down critical information; and Nakaya is an Osama bin-Laden style terror- ist (responsible for the deaths of thousands in an attack labeled ‘‘7/13’’) and philosophical leader who is fighting against the totalitarian state. I found the world-building more convincing than usual for a dystopia, and while in the hands of a lesser writer I would say that the story ended too early, Okogu completely sold it. I would love to see this story on awards ballots next year. Looking over this broad assortment of stories and authors, it’s clear that this anthology has exactly lived up to its ambition. These are (mostly) highly readable and enjoyable stories that take the raw materials of science fiction and give them a different spin. Two authors that I was previously unfamiliar with, Nick Wood and Efe Okogu, are now on my radar, and for that if noth- ing else, I’m grateful to the editor. Although it is coming out from a small press, it would be lovely if this anthology were to get some of the wider at- tention it deserves. –Karen Burnham (Reviewed in Dec 2012) Return to Anthologies list.

The Future Is Japanese, Nick Mamatas & Masumi Washington, eds. (Hai- kasoru 978-1421542232, $14.99, 350pp, tp) May 2012. Cover by Yuko Shi- mizu. Editor Nick Mamatas says in his introduction to The Future Is Japa- nese: ‘‘Like many people, I’d guessed that Japanese SF was heavy on the , with yakuza heroes and flickering neon everywhere.... I was wrong. Happily, gloriously wrong.’’ There is no neon here and no gang- sters. Instead there is a diverse range of impressionistic and concrete views 192 of Japan, its culture, and potential futures. The Future is Japanese contains a mix of translated Japanese and origi- nal English stories. Those written by non-Japanese authors tend to fore- ground Japan most firmly. Ken opens the volume with ‘‘Mono No Aware’’, about Hiroto, who may be the sole survivor of Japan left after a meteor has obliterated the Earth. He wonders how to preserve his culture and honor his parents when so much has been lost, before finally risking himself for the good of all. The poetry that Hiroto remembers from his father and his genuine desire to do his best for everyone adds up to a very moving story and an excellent beginning to the book. ’s story, ‘‘The Sea of Trees’’, is one of the stand-out stories in the anthology. It features a woman, Nao, who makes a living scavenging from the corpses of those who head to Aokigahara, a forest known as the ‘‘sea of trees,’’ to commit suicide. She is haunted by the onryo (ghost) of a woman she loved when young. Nao guides a young American girl to find her father’s resting place. As they journey into the forest, the ghosts and landscape take a dark turn. The story is beautifully told with satisfying resolutions, all about guilt and regret and sex and forgiveness. I have yet to read a Swirsky story that is less than intensely passionate and immensely successful, and this one is no exception. It may be surprising to encounter ghosts in a volume that seems to promise pure SF, but Catherynne Valente also appears with an allusive story of shared identity across separate fantas- tic realms, ‘‘One Breath, One Stroke’’, and Toh EnJoe’s ‘‘Endoastronomy’’ exists in a liminal space on an Earth far removed from our own, where the characters speculate upon metaphysics, cosmology, and railroads. Sharing Swirsky’s intense passion is ‘‘The Indifference Engine’’ by Proj- ect Itoh. Told in first-person narration, it does a convincing job of getting into the head of a child soldier in Africa deeply scarred by his experiences. The core SFnal conceit, a neurological intervention that prevents the kids from being able to see tribal differences, is absolutely and scarily plausible, as are the unforeseen consequences of such an intervention. Other stories that have core SFnal ideas include Felicity Savage’s ‘‘The Sound of Breaking Up’’, where time travel allows the present to literally steal from the future and one woman attempts to break that cycle. ’s ‘‘Chitai Heiki Koronbin’’ features giant robots fighting monstrous incursions from another dimension – at least that’s what their pilots have been told. tells a story of augmented reality and potential fraud in ‘‘In Plain Sight’’. ‘‘Golden Bread’’ by Issui Ogawa features a young soldier stranded on an ‘‘enemy’’ asteroid who overcomes his indoctrina- tion and becomes part of the community. Ekaterina Sedia has a woman travel to the north of Japan to face some of the consequences of whaling in 193 ‘‘Whale Meat’’. heads to some of Japan’s remote islands to imagine a lawless future of journalists and pirates in ‘‘Goddess of Mercy’’. And in the far future, people who evacuated a ravaged ecosystem by emi- grating far up the highest mountains resist incursions from people of the low lands who want to tell them that things are better now in ‘‘Mountain People, Ocean People’’ by Hideyuki Kikuchi. Possibly the strongest purely SF story, ‘‘Autogenic Dreaming: Interview with the Columns of Clouds’’ by TOBI Hirotaka, closes the book. It in- terrogates the power of words by featuring an author so powerful that he could kill people just by talking to them, resurrected by the many-gener- ations-evolved result of Google’s knowledge integration programs (here lightly fictionalized as the Gödel Entangled Bookshelf). This is perhaps the most surprising and unpredictable story in the collection, one that deeply engages with the future of information, connectivity, and the pow- er of art and language. Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington set out to show us that: ‘‘Japa- nese science fiction is just like Western science fiction, in that it is hard and soft, dark and whimsical, rigorous and fantastical.’’ In this they clearly succeed. The stories here may disappoint those looking for plot-heavy fic- tion; several are impressions or meditations, and others begin as fascinat- ing stories but seem to end just as they’re getting started. However, that is no detriment when one is looking to sample the broad range on offer from a culture other than the Western default. –Karen Burnham (Reviewed in May 2012) The Future Is Japanese [Second Review] Nick Mamatas & Masumi Washington offer The Future Is Japanese, which collects a number of SF stories about, in some sense, a Japanese fu- ture, as well as a few stories by Japanese SF writers. The idea behind this book is perfect. Alas, the results, though generally enjoyable, are rarely wonderful. Of the stories by Japanese writers, the best was ‘‘Autogenic Dreaming: Interview with the Columns of Clouds’’ by TOBI Hirotaka, a long and strange story about a famous novelist who confesses to a long series of murders – and also about an apparently self-organizing AI. It's an odd but intriguing piece. From English-language writers, I liked Bruce Sterling’s ‘‘Goddess of Mercy’’, a characteristically smart and cynical story set on a Japanese island ruled by a Pirate Queen where a woman comes to negotiate for the freedom of a political agitator; and, especially, ‘‘One Breath, One Stroke’’, lovely fantasy from Catherynne M. Valente, about a house half in the real world and half in another place, such that the cal- ligrapher who lives in the human half of the house is a calligraphy brush in 194 the other place. The story follows the lives and loves of the brush’s fellows in the other place, including a skeleton woman and a catfish. Valente at her exquisite best. –Rich Horton (Reviewed in Jun 2012) Return to Anthologies list.

Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic, Eduardo Jiménez Mayo & Chris N. Brown, eds. (Small Beer Press) February 2012. This original anthology of 34 recent stories includes sharp and strange tales of ghosts, mutants, aliens, apocalypse, and monsters from folklore by contemporary Mexican authors who will be completely unknown to most English-speaking readers, many of them translated here for the very first time. Bruce Sterling and the editors provide introductions. –Locus (Mentioned in Mar 2012) Return to Anthologies list.

Ishtar, Amanda Pillar & K.V. Taylor (Gilgamesh) November 2011. Ishtar, edited by Amanda Pillar & K.V. Taylor, is made up of three no- vellas (by , , and Cat Sparks) about the goddess Ishtar. Set in ancient times, modern day, and at the end of time respectively, these tales deftly depict varying aspects of the goddess of love and death, in vastly different writing styles, but coming together in a satis- fying, cohesive work. –Locus (Mentioned in Feb 2013) Return to Anthologies list.

Edge of Infinity, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Solaris) December 2012. Easily the best original science fiction anthology of the year, by a good margin, is Edge of Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan – true, original SF anthologies have been light on the ground this year, but Edge of Infin- ity would be a standout in any year. Unusually, in these days when it seems almost de rigueur for editors to sneak some slipstream or fantasy stories into even ostensibly ‘‘All SF’’ anthologies, everything here actually is pure- quill core SF, some of it hard SF at that, and the literary quality is excellent across the board. There’s nothing that’s bad here, again unlike most anthologies, which makes it difficult to pick favorites, but among the strongest stories are Pat 195 Cadigan’s ‘‘The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi’’, about a worker who was injured in an accident in orbit around Jupiter dealing with the prob- lems and benefits of changing your species, Paul McAuley’s linked quintet of five small stories ‘‘Macy Minnot’s Last Christmas on Dione, Ring Rac- ing, Fiddler’s Green, The Potter’s Garden’’, which provides a picturesque tour of the outer solar system in the aftermath of the Quiet War, ’s ‘‘Bricks, Sticks, Straw’’, in which agents struggle to re- assemble their identities after suffering a solar storm on , Hannu Rajaniemi’s ‘‘Tyche and the Ants’’, which tells a tale of political warfare and cyber attack through the focus of a child’s whimsical fantasy world, and Bruce Sterling’s ‘‘The Peak of Eternal Light’’, a comedy of manners about intricate sexual mores on Mercury that reveals one of Sterling’s in- fluences to be P.G. Wodehouse (something that might come as a surprise to someone who never read earlier stories like his ‘‘The Beautiful and the Sublime’’). In addition, Edge of Infinity contains excellent work by Eliza- beth Bear, James S.A. Corey, Sandra McDonald & Stephen D.Covey, John Barnes, , Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, and An Owomoyela, any of which would have been among the standout stories in any other SF anthology of the year. If you like core SF, this is the anthol- ogy to buy this year. –Gardner Dozois (Reviewed in Dec 2012) Edge of Infinity [Second Review] Strahan gives us a new anthology of stories set in the relatively near future Solar System, Edge of Infinity, which has a plethora of neat pieces. I could cite a number of stories here – Hannu Rajaniemi’s ‘‘Tyche and the Ants’’, about a girl raised in a virtual environment on the Moon, or Elizabeth Bear’s ‘‘The Deeps of the Sky’’, about a native of Jupiter encountering a stricken ship from Earth – to name two, but I had two favorites. ‘‘The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi’’ by Pat Cadigan is set in Jupiter’s orbit among the various workers, most of whom have had themselves altered to forms more useful in space. It concerns the legal travails of an unaltered woman who wants to alter herself after an injury – which of course also reflects the le- gal and political situation of everyone out there. There's also John Barnes’s ‘‘Swift as a Dream and Fleeting as a Sigh’’, about an AI who gets involved (it’s his job) with the relationship issues of a man and a woman – which ends up impacting the relationship of humans and AIs quite profoundly. –Rich Horton (Reviewed in Dec 2012) Return to Anthologies list.

196 Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Random House Children’s Books 978-0-3758-6830-6, $16.99, 432pp, hc) September 2012. From the editorial cauldron of Locus’s own Jonathan Strahan comes a notable new anthology about witches that will be enjoyed by young (and not-so-young) adults, Under My Hat. Collected here are 18 strong stories from a host of favorite authors from the science fiction, fantasy, and YA fields (and sometimes all three), including Holly Black, M. Rickert, Margo Lanagan, Garth Nix, Neil Gaiman, and Jim Butcher, to name a handful. The anthology kicks off with a lively introduction from Strahan that delves into some fascinating history, looking into where the infamous pointy black hat’s association with witchcraft came from, and providing a quick survey of depictions of the witch throughout literary history. It’s a nice basis for the wide-ranging group of stories to follow. The open- ing story by Diana Peterfreund, ‘‘Strays’’, will have animal lovers biting their nails, as a worker in a dog shelter develops a special bond with a dog named Goneril who may not have long to live, if the missing and magi- cal owner can’t be found. Animals and animal magic figure prominently in several other stories – perhaps no surprise, given the tradition of the witch’s familiar, including in ’s ‘‘Felidis’’, a strange tale featur- ing a young man named Radlo dealing with a cat who is a girl and a witch, or a witch who’s also a cat and a girl; Frances Hardinge’s ‘‘Payment Due’’, a sharply pointed story of a girl using her power to take from a bailiff who took some things of value from her family; and Delia Sherman’s ‘‘The Witch in the Woods’’, a haunting and beautiful story of a girl and a deer who is also a man. Some stories delve into the magic by starting in a place that seems like it doesn’t have any, or with characters who desperately want to find it. For instance, Charles De Lint’s ‘‘Barrio Girls’’ introduces us to Ruby and Vida, best friends obsessed with the same series of vampire books. They patrol the empty arroyo at night, looking for ‘‘the magical pearlstone the way Crystal did in the second book,’’ but finding nothing... until they encoun- ter a witch, who kills someone from the neighborhood in front of them. In Holly Black’s excellent contribution, ‘‘Little Gods’’, a girl named Ellery has joined up with a group of pagans; she’s wanted to believe in something spiritual, magical, in more than reality, since she was a little girl in church. But at a Wiccan ceremony that feels thin at first, she may finally discover what real magic is. Also among my favorites here are M. Rickert’s brief yet chilling and perfectly rendered piece, ‘‘Burning Castles’’, in which a girl understands the ways in which her mother is not magical, and has failed her, and the 197 typically odd and gorgeously written contribution from Margo Lanagan, ‘‘Crow and Caper, Caper and Crow’’, where witch Pen travels to perform a blessing on a newborn. Other particularly notable contributions include Neil Gaiman’s sly weird poem, ‘‘Witch Work’’ (a good candidate for a creepy Halloween read aloud), Peter S. Beagle’s inventive take on Sleep- ing Beauty with ‘‘Great-Grandmother in the Cellar’’, and Jane Yolen’s tale inspired by Hans Christian Andersen the man in ‘‘Andersen’s Witch.’’ And with still other fine offerings in the mix from Tim Pratt, Garth Nix, Jim Butcher, , Isobelle Carmody, and Ellen Kushner, there’s not much more to be said other than: If tales of the witchy and weird are of interest, pick up this anthology. Suitable for many age groups, it looks to be one of the year’s strongest. –Gwenda Bond (Reviewed in Oct 2012)

Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron [Second Review] My favorite original fantasy anthology of the year is Jonathan Strahan’s YA anthology about witches, Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron, which means that Strahan has pulled off, in my own estimation, anyway, the dif- ficult task of editing both the best fantasy anthology and the best science fiction anthology (Strahan’s Edge of Infinity, reviewed here last month) of 2012. Not surprisingly, since it’s aimed at a YA audience, Under My Hat is not as substantial and chewy as Edge of Infinity, but it has a very pleas- ing wit and lightness of tone about it (for the most part – there are a few darker stories) that ought to appeal to the adult fantasy-reading audience as well. The best stories here include Peter S. Beagle’s ‘‘Great-Grandmother in the Cellar’’, Margo Lanagan’s ‘‘Crow and Caper, Caper and Crow’’, Ellen Klages’s ‘‘The Education of a Witch’’, Garth Nix’s ‘‘A Handful of Ashes’’, Jane Yolen’s ‘‘Andersen’s Witch’’, and Holly Black’s ‘‘Little Gods’’, although there are also fine stories here by Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman, Jim Butcher, M. Rickert, Patricia A. McKillip, Isobelle Carmody, Tim Pratt, Tanith Lee, Charles de Lint, Frances Hardinge, and Diana Peterfreund, as well as a poem by Neil Gaiman. –Gardner Dozois (Reviewed in Jan 2013) Return to Anthologies list.

L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume XXVIII, K.D. Wen- tworth, ed. (Galaxy) June 2012. The latest volume in this annual series presents 13 original stories by the newest winners of the Writers of the Future contest, as selected by an all-star 198 panel of judges, with illustrations by winners of the Illustrators of the Future competition. Also includes essays on writing and art, plus an introduction by the late editor. –Locus (Mentioned in Jun 2012) Return to Anthologies list.

Solaris Rising 1.5, Ian Whates, ed. (Solaris) November 2012. Cover by Pye Parr. Solaris Rising 1.5: An Exclusive ebook of New Science Fiction, edited by Ian Whates, is an odd item, an e-book only, original SF anthology designed to act as a ‘‘bridge’’ between 2010’s Solaris Rising and next year’s upcom- ing Solaris Rising 2 anthology; in other words, it’s a teaser or sampler or preview of the kind of fiction you can expect to find in Solaris Rising 2, put out there with the hope that if you like it, you’ll then buy the print anthol- ogy in 2013. Fortunately for this scheme, the overall literary quality here is pretty high. The best story here, by a substantial margin, is Adam Roberts’s ‘‘What Did Tessimond Tell You?’’, in which a scientist attempts to unravel what seems at first like a minor mystery, but one that leads her step by step to a disturbing – in fact, dismaying – realization. Also good is ’s ‘‘Two Sisters in Exile’’, although the plot, featuring a woman reluctantly attending the funeral of a political enemy, with vast political consequences attached, is a bit too similar to the author’s own ‘‘Scattered Along the River of Heaven’’ from the January Clarkesworld. Gareth L. Powell’s ‘‘Another Apocalypse’’ starts out as an exciting chase- and-intrigue story, one that leaves you wondering how in the world the protagonist is going to get out of this mess – but then another storyline altogether smushes into the story and takes it over, and the protagonist of that storyline effortlessly rescues the original protagonist with no effort or ingenuity on his part called for; disappointing, since it starts out very well. ’s ‘‘A New Arrival at the House of Love’’ deals with bored decadent posthumans so removed from you or I that they might as well be gods, and is reminiscent in tone of ’s Dancers at the End of Time trilogy, with its cruel and playfully decadent far-future immortals. But unlike Moorcock, whose novels were written as Victorian pastiches, Cornell’s story is written in a fairly opaque manner that may be difficult for some readers to get into, and may deter some altogether; persistence will reward you with an interesting story, though. Paul Di Filippo’s ‘‘A Palazzo in the Stars’’ is an elegant steampunk retake on H.G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon. Sarah Lotz’s ‘‘Charlotte’’ is a variant of the old story about the lonely old woman whose life is changed for the better by bonding with 199 a dog who ultimately rescues her, except that the dog has been updated to a giant robot spider instead. And ’s ‘‘The Second Civil War’’ isn’t really a story at all, but rather an (interesting) piece of alternate history speculation, as though Resnick is laying out the groundwork for a story he hasn’t actually written yet. As far as I can tell, Solaris Rising 1.5 is available only in a Kindle edition from Amazon. I searched the Solaris website, but could find no informa- tion about it there. –Gardner Dozois (Reviewed in Oct 2012) Return to Anthologies list.

Epic: Legends of Fantasy, John Joseph Adams, ed. (Tachyon) October 2012. Cover by John Coulthart. Another substantial fantasy anthology, this one all reprint, is Epic: Leg- ends of Fantasy, edited by John Joseph Adams. This makes an interesting companion volume to David G. Hartwell & Jacob Weisman’s The Sword & Sorcery Anthology, which I reviewed earlier this year, although Epic is pitched as being an anthology of ‘‘epic fantasy’’ stories rather than as a ‘‘sword & sorcery’’ anthology. It’s sometimes difficult to make a distinction between ‘‘epic fantasy’’ and ‘‘sword & sorcery’’: both are set in invented fan- tasy worlds, both have thieves and sword-wielding adventurers, both take place in worlds in which magic exists and there are sorcerers of greater or lesser potency, both feature fantasy creatures such as dragons and and monsters... and yet, it seems to me as if there is a subtle distinction to be made between the two, although it will need a more astute critic than me to articulate it in a satisfactory way. If that line does exist, it’s subtle enough that it’s easy to make mistakes in classification, and this anthology makes a couple of them: it seems that Michael Moorcock’s Elric story ‘‘While the Gods Laugh’’ can hardly not be a sword & sorcery story, call it what you will instead, considering that Elric’s roots go all the way back to the creation of S&S as an identifiable subgenre and Moorcock himself has long been con- sidered one of its founding fathers. Similarly, Melanie Rawn’s ‘‘Mother of All Russiya’’ is neither epic fantasy nor sword & sorcery, but rather a well- crafted historical fantasy (with a minimal fantasy element at that) set in 10th-century Russia (or a proto-Russia, still in the process of assembling). Quibbles about classification aside, this is a meaty, solid anthology that will be valuable to beginning fantasy readers as a sampler of various fan- tasy styles, enabling them to decide which worlds and authors they like best. Having gotten a taste of that author’s work, they can then go on to seek out more of it – and in most cases here, there’s a lot of similar work to be 200 found, since most of these authors are very prolific. The best story here, and in fact one of the best fantasy novellas of the decade, is clearly George R.R. Martin’s ‘‘The Mystery Knight’’, an enormous novella set in the same general milieu as his bestselling novels. Also excellent are Robin Hobb’s ‘‘Homecoming’’, Patrick Rothfuss’s ‘‘The Road to Levin- shir’’, Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘‘The Word of Unbinding’’, Tad Williams’s ‘‘The Burning Man’’, ’s ‘‘Sandmagic’’, and Paolo Bacigalupi’s ‘‘The Alchemist’’, and the book also features good work by , , Trudi Canavan, Aliette de Bodard, Kate Elliott, N.K. Jemisin, Juliet Marillier, Mary Robinette Kowal, and the aforementioned Michael Moorcock and Melanie Rawn. –Gardner Dozois (Reviewed in Jan 2013) Return to Anthologies list.

The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Four, Ellen Datlow, ed. (Night Shade 978-1-59780-399-1, $15.99, 448pp, tp) May 2012. [Order from Night Shade Books, 1661 Tennessee Street, #3H, San Francisco CA 94107; .] Towards the end of Peter Straub’s magnificently eerie ‘‘The Ballad of Bal- lard and Sandrine’’, the tale that concludes The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Four, there is the following description of a character experienc- ing one of the narrative’s many disorienting dislocations of time and space: ‘‘The fairy tale feeling came over her again, of being held captive in a world without rational rules and orders, subject to deep patterns unknown to or rejected in the daylit world. In a flash of insight it came to her that this fai- rytale world had much in common with her childhood.’’ This is a very il- luminating description of the perspective from which a reader might view the machinations at work in the 18 stories that Ellen Datlow has chosen as the best horror fiction of 2011. Rather than the eruption of the inexplicable into the rationally ordered world that we usually associate with horror, what if horror stemmed from the realization that our belief in a rationally ordered world is naïve and misguided? That we have actually misconstrued order from our superficial grasp of what can and cannot be? Horror fiction with a cosmic scope traditionally navigates along these lines, but Straub phrases the experience in such a way as to suggest that it is applicable to horrors on a smaller, more intimate scale. The horrors in this iteration of The Best Horror of the Year range from small-scale to large, non-supernatural to supernatural, and traditional to non-traditional – which is to say they reflect the same variety and diver- sity that has distinguished Datlow’s previous year’s-best compilations. No 201 trends unify the selections, though some stories do complement one an- other. Stephen King, in ‘‘The Little Green God of Agony’’, pits a skeptical nurse against a faith healer who claims that the terminal pain and disability her patient feels is due to a demonic entity that can be exorcised. Readers will align themselves with the level-headed, tough-talking nurse which is exactly where King wants them to be when the nasty things begin happen- ing. Priya Sharma’s ‘‘The Show’’, another subversion of the skeptical, places a woman with genuine, underestimated psychic powers at the center of one of those hokey paranormal investigation television programs and shows the full extent of what might happen if the house she investigates really were haunted. Two stories explore the theme of artistic works with secret histo- ries. A.C. Wise’s ‘‘Final Girl Theory’’ offers a new angle on the familiar tale of the gruesome horror film whose scenes supposedly were not staged. In Chet Williamson’s stunning ‘‘Final Verse’’, two music enthusiasts travel to Appala- chia in search of the lost lyrics of a bluegrass standard. Excavating the legend behind the song, they uncover a horror whose revelation makes it clear why those lyrics are never sung anymore. Modern expression of ancient backwoods legends are the subject of an- other pair of stories: Laird Barron’s ‘‘Blackwood’s Baby’’, set in the early 20th century and featuring a monstrous incarnation of a family curse, and Brian Hodge ‘‘Roots and All’’, in which an avenging nature entity of folklore as- sumes a completely unexpected contemporary avatar. There are several oth- er memorable evocations of monsters and the monstrous, notably Simon Bestwick’s ‘‘The Moraine’’ (one of two stories by Bestwick that made this volume’s final cut), in which a fog-shrouded landscape is home to a mon- ster that seems all the more sinister for being unsee-able; ’s ‘‘In Paris, in the Mouth of Kronos’’, in which two hard-boiled espionage agents encounter horrors that even their intensive training have not prepared them for; and Glen Hirshberg’s ‘‘You Become the Neighborhood’’, whose monsters capture both the horror and the pathos of the story’s plot. As in all previous year’s-best volumes that she has compiled, Datlow pro- vides an overview of the year in horror that reveals tastes as eclectic as the stories she has chosen. Increasingly, the benefit of her year’s end summaries cannot be overestimated. Over the last two decades horror has become less circumscribed as a genre and more diffuse as a sensibility that percolates through other types of fiction and seeps into many areas obscured to the average reader. Datlow finds horror worth noting in many unlikely places, which makes her summation as indispensable as the stories she selects. –Stefan Dziemianowicz (Reviewed in Jul 2012) Return to Anthologies list. 202 The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-ninth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed. (St. Martin’s Griffin 978-1-250-00355-3, $21.99, 658pp, tp) July 2012. By now it’s been widely noted that the current year’s Hugo and Nebula bal- lots seem to fit pretty snuggly with one another, at least in the short fiction categories; all but one of the Hugo novella nominees are also on the Nebula ballot, and the same is true for novelette (there are only two overlaps for short story, but with the large number of possibilities in that category, even that is noteworthy). Altogether, there are ten stories with both Hugo and Nebula nominations (12 if you include novels), which seems to imply some sort of broad consensus among voters as to the kinds of SF and fantasy they want to see. And consensus, as we’ve all been taught by our high school civics classes and by all the committees we’ve ever been on, is a good thing, right? That may be true of politics and group-ordering in a Chinese restaurant, but it’s no way to determine the value of art. No two readers are reading ex- actly the same thing when they read SF, and no two readers are (or ought to be) choosing their favorites from exactly the same field of candidates. Anyone who has served on an awards jury knows that there will often be a finalist on the ballot that at least one judge simply can’t stand, and a few that don’t make the ballot despite someone’s passionate advocacy. A vital field, which I per- sist in believing SF to be, needs to celebrate diversity rather than unanimity, and that’s one of many very good reasons why we should celebrate the vari- ety of year’s best anthologies, and the different approaches to the field that they represent. Of those ten stories that share Hugo and Nebula nominations, only four show up in Gardner Dozois’s huge The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-ninth Annual Collection, only three in Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year (reviewed here in March), and only two in David Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer’s Year’s Best SF 17. (There are three in Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, which I haven’t seen yet.) This, to me, is excellent news. There may indeed be a handful of stories that very nearly sweep the honors, such as Kij Johnson’s ‘‘The Man Who Bridged the Mist’’ (Hugo, Nebula, Strahan, Dozois, Horton) or Carolyn Ives Gilman’s ‘‘The Ice Owl’’ (Hugo, Nebula, Dozois, Hartwell & Cramer), and these are indeed terrific novellas: the Johnson a finely nuanced sort of engineering ro- mance set on a memorable world laced by rivers of apparently living mist; the Gilman a moving exploration of education, exile, and responsibility told from the point of view of a girl whose beloved tutor may have been com- plicit in a genocide. Both stories deserve all the attention they can get, but to get any sense of the shape of the field in 2011, we need to look beyond the consensual top choices. What we find there – at least in the case of the two 203 volumes under consideration here – are strikingly different views of the field from Dozois and from Hartwell and Cramer. Dozois, who has been doing these annuals for more than 30 years and may be no longer entirely satisfied by just another cool idea, seems to favor com- plexity – or maybe it’s just that, with over 300,000 words to play with, he simply has more room for novellas. He leads off with Paul McAuley’s excel- lent ‘‘The Choice’’, which is an example of exactly the sort of complexity I mean. It begins with a convincing portrait of a somewhat down-at-the-heels future England partially flooded through climate change, turns into a kind of boys’ adventure tale as the protagonist and his pal set out to examine a ‘‘sea- dragon’’ – a mysterious alien ship that has washed ashore nearby – and then unfolds into a rather moving moral parable that shows how the choices they made then affect their lives for years to come. In short, it’s not just one sort of SF story, but combines various modes in inventive ways, a kind of movement that Dozois seems especially fond of. A few stories, like ’s ‘‘The Beancounter’s Cat’’ and ’s ‘‘The Dala Horse’’, begin with the materials of folk or fairy tales (Broderick even directly alludes to C.S. Lewis) and metamorphose into a kind of eschatological space opera in Broderick’s case and a far-future tale of posthumanity in Swanwick’s. Fairy tales of a sort also play a significant role in Catherynne M. Valente’s best SF story to date, ‘‘Silently and Very Fast’’, in which a former house AI, facing new responsibilities, uses them to try to come to grips with the problem of under- standing humans. Peter M. Ball’s manic ‘‘Dying Young’’ somehow manages to be violent West- ern, dragon tale, and far-future SF all at once. Paul Cornell’s ‘‘The Copen- hagen Interpretation’’ is initially a clever espionage tale set in an alternate Victorian England which turns out to be more complex than it at first ap- pears, while Ken MacLeod’s ‘‘The Vorkuta Event’’ begins as a kind of mystery involving the question of why a distinguished zoologist once supported Ly- senkoism and somehow answers that with a vision of Lovecraftian horror. A depleted future Russia is also the setting of Karl Schroeder’s ‘‘Laika’s Ghost’’, but it turns out the resolution of the puzzle is to be found on Mars. This doesn’t mean that Dozois ignores stories that develop a particular SF idea in a more traditional manner, and there are plenty of stories to sug- gest that familiar SF ideas done well can be as stimulating as SF ideas com- plexified. Elizabeth Bear’s ‘‘Dolly’’, about a sex robot who murders its owner, raises pretty much the same ethical questions as an Asimov robot story, and in pretty much the same way. John Barnes’s ‘‘Martian Heart’’ is a sentimental tale about young lovers on Mars, one of whom develops a fatal condition from living in the lower gravity, while ’s ‘‘A Long Way Home’’ takes a simple scenario – an explorer emerges from deep caves on a distant planet to 204 find everyone else on the planet has disappeared – and plays it out over three centuries. Stephen Baxter’s ‘‘The Invasion of Venus’’ begins with the equally familiar scenario of alien approaching Earth, but then adds an old-fashioned Astounding-style twist that cleverly reveals we may have been worrying about the wrong thing all along. Similarly, Tom Purdom – who has been at this even longer than Dozois – manages in ‘‘A Response from EST 17’’ to ring a clever change on the first contact tale by having two rival exploration teams, from different eras, arrive at the same alien planet at the same time. In a kind of inversion of the same idea, Robert Reed’s ‘‘The Ants of Flanders’’ depicts Earth as a battleground between alien superpowers, but develops so many different aspects of his scenario, from the sheer alienness of the aliens to an unexpected but very Reed-like ending, that it makes you realize movies like Transformers are far dumber than you even suspected. Data couriers aren’t that unusual in SF these days, but Pat Cadigan’s ‘‘Cody’’, with its vividly realized seedy roadside setting and sharp insights into her main character, give it a sense of newness. Nor is there anything much new about the apocalypse in Maureen McHugh’s ‘‘After the Apocalypse’’, but the uncompromising way she handles her character relationships suggests that even familiar tropes can be renewed by sheer literary chops. Apart from the different ways that these stories are in dialogue with past SF (the most personal of which is Peter S. Beagle’s affectionate, comical love letter to Avram Davidson in ‘‘The Way It Works Out And All’’), is the de- gree to which several stories seem in dialogue with current geopolitics. Apart from the Russian settings of the MacLeod and Schroeder, there are stories set in Ireland (Michael Swanwick’s overtitled but moving ‘‘For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I’ll Not be Back Again’’ and Michael Flynn’s 13th-century alternate historical ‘‘The Iron Shirts’’), Israel (Lavie Tid- har’s ‘‘The Smell of Orange Groves’’), Australia (Ken McLeod’s other story in the anthology, ‘‘Earth Hour’’), Nigeria (’s ‘‘’’, which says more about science than perhaps any other story here), Corfu (Jim Hawkin’s entertaining corporate-movie satire ‘‘Digital Rites’’), and even North Korea (David Klecha and Tobias Buckell’s ‘‘A Militant Peace’’, which is little more than a speculative blueprint on how a corporate-sponsored invasion of that country might play out). It’s interesting that, despite the occasional wildly imaginative space opera (such as Yoon Ha Lee’s ‘‘Ghost- weight’’) or Cordwainer Smithian romance (such as Chris Lawson’s rather lovely ‘‘Canterbury Hollow’’), the places that SF writers seem to turn to with increasing frequency are those that seem disarmingly familiar. –Gary K. Wolfe (Reviewed in Jun 2012) Return to Anthologies list. 205 Rock On: The Greatest Hits of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Paula Guran, ed. (Prime) October 2012. Cover by Scott Grimando. I tried to sell my own version of the next anthology for over a decade, only to have publisher after publisher turn it down on the grounds that nobody would buy it because ‘‘science fiction fans weren’t interested in rock ’n’ roll, and rock ’n’ roll fans weren’t interested in science fiction’’ – so it’s with a certain amount of jealousy that I congratulate Paula Guran for managing to sell her own version and actually get it into print: Rock On: The Greatest Hits of Science Fiction and Fantasy, a mixed reprint (mostly) and original anthology featuring both SF and fantasy. Some of the best stories here were even slated to appear in my own, un- sold version: Howard Waldrop’s ‘‘Flying Saucer Rock and Roll’’, Michael Swanwick’s ‘‘The Feast of Saint Janis’’, Pat Cadigan’s ‘‘Rock On’’, Nor- man Spinrad’s ‘‘The Big Flash’’, ’s ‘‘Stone’’, Lewis Shin- er’s ‘‘Jeff Beck’’, Lucius Shepard’s ‘‘...How My Heart Breaks When I Sing This Song…’’, Bruce Sterling’s ‘‘We See Things Differently’’ – classics all, and all stories that still hold up well even after the 20 or 30 years or more (the oldest story here is Spinrad’s, from 1969) that have passed since their initial publication. Rock On, however, in addition to the oldies, also con- tains more recent hits by Alastair Reynolds, Elizabeth Bear, Bradley Den- ton, Elizabeth Hand, Marc Laidlaw, Caitlín R. Kiernan, John Shirley, and others, including original stories by Del James and Lawrence C. Connolly. –Gardner Dozois (Reviewed in Jan 2013) Return to Anthologies list.

The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2012 Edition, Paula Guran, ed. (Prime 978-1-60701-345-7, $19.95, 588pp, tp) June 2012. In her Introduction to The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2012 Edition, editor Paula Guran points out that ‘‘there really is no definition of ‘dark fantasy.’’’ She leaves it to the reader to parse the 32 stories she has selected as the top tales of 2011 and decide which one fits which category – or whether distinctions between these two subgenres even exist, or matter. The contents of this volume show a refreshing breadth of themes and approaches in contemporary horror and dark fantasy. Stephen King’s ‘‘The Dune’’, about a man who sees the names of the soon-to-be-departed regularly scrawled in the sand of a dune on a private island, is a textbook example of the horror tale that ends with a perfectly planned, O. Henry twist. Naomi Novik’s ‘‘Lord Dunsany’s Teapot’’ is a lyrical tale that bal- ances elements of light and dark fantasy in its evocation of Dunsany’s own delicate fantasies. ‘‘Objects in Dreams May be Closer than They Appear’’ 206 is a trademark story in which characters discover that roads they never took or opportunities they never exploited have nevertheless spawned realities as real or realer than the worlds they live in. Elizabeth Hand takes a page from in ‘‘Near Zennor’’, a cumulatively creepy account of Cornish legends of fairies and the fates of several youngsters who discover that the supernatural is not just the stuff of fantasy fiction. Glenn Hirshberg’s ‘‘After-Words’’ is an uncategorizable tale of an alternate reality where counter-culture radicals live in abandoned book depositories, plotting deadly subversions with potentially global con- sequences. ’s ‘‘King Death’’, set in medieval Europe at the height of the Black Death, is a superior biter-bit story of an opportunist knight who represents himself as Death Incarnate to a superstitious peasant, only to have the tables turned on him. The scenes of death and devastation that Finch renders so vividly resonate with Maureen McHugh’s semi-science fictional ‘‘After the Apocalypse’’, set in a postapocalyptic world of limited resources and survival by any means. The tone of the stories ranges from the Stephen Graham Jones’s darkly comic ‘‘Rocket Man’’, in which a zombie is pressed into service as a left fielder for a pick-up baseball game, to the hardcore horror or Norman Par- tridge’s ‘‘Vampire Lake’’, a period western with a gunslinging hero whose bloody decimation of a subterranean vampire enclave plays out like a Hammer horror film directed by Sam Peckinpah. Partridge’s tale is one of the book’s notable genre splices. Others include Caitlín R. Kiernan’s ‘‘The Maltese Unicorn’’, a mix of sex and sorcery set in the American crime un- derworld, circa 1935; Joe R. Lansdale’s ‘‘The Bleeding Shadow’’, in which a detective discovers that a blues song is an incantation with the potential to open a portal to a world of extra dimensional horrors; and Jeffrey Ford’s ‘‘The Last Triangle’’, in which a pair of amateur investigators undercover ancient black magic at work in a contemporary urban setting. It’s worth pointing out that Guran’s anthology is one of three anthologies published annually – including Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year and Stephen Jones’s Mammoth Book of Best New Horror – that survey the yield of the horror field. This year, only in one instance did two editors overlap in their selection of a story. The varying contents of the three vol- umes are proof that ‘‘best’’ is a very subjective distinction. The indisput- able quality of the selections in Guran’s anthology, and the anthologies of her two colleagues, is also a reassuring gauge of just how much outstand- ing horror fiction is produced in any given year. –Stefan Dziemianowicz (Reviewed in Nov 2012) Return to Anthologies list. 207 Year’s Best SF 17, David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer, eds. (Harper Voy- ager 978-0062035875, $7.99, 512pp, pb) May 2012. While there are a few stories in Dozois that function largely as thrillers that make few conceptual demands on the reader (‘‘The Boneless One’’, Alec Ne- vala-Lee’s biological suspense tale set on a yacht, is practically movie-ready), I would still be more likely to recommend to a non-SF reader, or some- one just wanting to get into the field, the generally user-friendly contents of Hartwell & Cramer’s Year’s Best SF 17. As the title tells us, they’ve been at this for quite a while, too, and always with a clearly articulated point of view, largely involving the recognition and preservation of the more traditional values of the field. Only four of Hartwell and Cramer’s 23 stories overlap with Dozois’s 35, and only two are Hugo and Nebula nominees (Gilman’s ‘‘The Ice Owl’’ and ’s ‘‘Six Months, Three Days’’). But this doesn’t mean that their selections are necessarily eccentric so much as strategic: the lead story here, probably no accident, is Ken MacLeod’s ‘‘The Best Science Fiction of the Year Three’’, a rather dark satire that begins with an effort to commission an anthology of stories from American writers liv- ing in France in exile from a repressive regime at home and ends with a clever twist on a new technology. A subtext here may be the notion of call- ing a certain kind of SF back from exile – the kind that is readily accessible, idea-driven, and frankly entertaining. The very next story, Elizabeth Bear’s robot-murder tale ‘‘Dolly’’, is an excellent illustration, as is ’s ‘‘Alto- gether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer’’, a post-singularity tale in which humanity has almost entirely loaded itself into virtuality while the physical world reverts to nature; the story is made far less alienating by featuring as protagonist a young girl whose mother had lived the early part of her life in the flesh. In other words, it works well as an entry-level post-singularity tale, and even achieves a sort of warm glow. Several of the stories follow the classic pattern of establishing a single SF premise, rather than a whole complex of them, and following it through to a logical, or logically ironic, conclusion. Genevieve Valentine’s ‘‘The Near- est Thing’’ does this with the idea of ‘‘memorial dolls’’, AI-driven replicants of the recently deceased, while Madeline Ashby’s ‘‘The Education of Junior Number 12’’ is a coming-of-age tale about a newly minted self-replicating humanoid robot; the plot seems mostly to serve the purpose of introducing the vN technology about which Ashby is reportedly working on a novel. Gregory Benford’s ‘‘Mercies’’ is built, skillfully enough but with few surpris- es, from the simple premise of a time traveler who decides to murder famous serial killers before they commit their crimes. Karen Heuler’s ‘‘Thick Water’’ is a lotus-eater tale in which all but one of the members of a planetary expe- dition try eating the viscous native ‘‘thick water’’ of the title, leaving the lone 208 holdout to defend her humanity. Mercurio Rivera’s ‘‘Tethered’’ is an inven- tive if somewhat unpleasant variation on the alien/human friendship theme, with the friendship challenged when the true nature of the aliens becomes apparent. All these are what we might think of as single-novum stories (to adapt Suvin’s term), and all are pretty easy to approach. Similarly, and more than any other year’s best series, Hartwell and Cra- mer habitually keep an eye out for humor, which, as in Hollywood, is often overlooked for awards nominations and anthologies. Pat MacEwan’s ‘‘Home Sweet Bi’Ome’’, probably one of the few SF stories to deal with allergies, con- cerns an entire house grown from the cells of its hypersensitive inhabitant, which seems like a good idea until the house itself comes down with chicken pox. Neil Gaiman’s ‘‘And Weep Like Alexander’’ is an amusing White Hart- style pub tale about an ‘‘uninventor’’ who has already saved the world from jetpacks and flying cars, and realizes he has a new challenge. Nancy Kress’s ‘‘Eliot Wrote’’ concerns a high school student whose father has been insti- tutionalized after seeing the face of on a toaster pastry. Robert Reed’s uncharacteristic and unsubtle political parable ‘‘Our Candidate’’ concerns a retired chemistry professor who becomes a last-ditch gubernatorial candi- date and shocks even his greenest supporters with his relentlessly apocalyp- tic vision of the future – until events begin catching up with him. Interestingly, given their desire to promote unalloyed SF, Hartwell and Cra- mer include a few stories in which the SF content is marginal or barely nec- essary. Judith Moffett’s ‘‘The Middle of Somewhere’’ is a beautifully written tale involving bird cataloguing, improved meteorology, and green lifestyles, but it’s essentially an account of a massive tornado in rural Kentucky. Char- lie Jane Anders’s Hugo and Nebula nominated ‘‘Six Months, Three Days’’ deals with clairvoyance, a theme most SF abandoned to fantasists decades ago, and its entire premise is summed up in the opening sentence: ‘‘The man who can see the future has a date with the woman who can see many possible futures.’’ After that, the story is largely a matter of ingenious trans- positions. Tony Ballantyne’s ‘‘The War Artist’’, set during an indeterminate future European war, could as easily be about World War I in its exploration of how artists can capture what photographs can’t. Still, there are some unusual discoveries here that open up in unexpected ways, like Gwyneth Jones’s sensitive ‘‘The Ki-Anna’’, which begins as a kind of mystery involving the investigation of a sister’s death on an war-torn planet a year earlier and turns into a characteristically complex exploration of sacrifice and responsibility. Bruce Sterling’s ‘‘The Master of the Aviary’’ is a convincing and original portrait of a North American society long after an apocalypse. Nnedi Okorafor’s ‘‘Wahala’’, in which a shuttle carrying Mar- tian colonists lands in the Sahara, brings together a number of her themes 209 – windseekers, shadow speakers, a far-future but electronically connected Africa – in a way that suggests there may be more unity to her earlier work than we’d suspected. Perhaps the most unusual selections, though, are those which experiment with form. Yoon Ha Lee’s ‘‘The Vector Alphabet of Inter- stellar Travel’’ features no characters, no dialogue, and no plot, and reads like a backstory manual for an online game, but it nearly (not quite) achieves the kind of Stapledonian pure-exposition SF that has become a rarity. Finally, Paul Park’s ‘‘Ragnarok’’ is a narrative poem set in a violent future Iceland so diminished that the ancient form of the Icelandic saga seems a most appro- priate angle of approach, and Park shows considerable mastery of the form, complete with kennings and rhythmic alliteration. It’s not the sort of thing most of us would think of in any conventional ‘‘year’s best SF’’ terms, but it’s exactly the sort of quirky but provocative selection that gives Hartwell and Cramer the most distinctively individual feel of any of these annuals. There are quite a few stories here that I’d hesitate to agree are among the year’s best, but there are none that I regret discovering. –Gary K. Wolfe (Reviewed in Jun 2012) Return to Anthologies list.

The Sword & Sorcery Anthology, David G. Hartwell & Jacob Weisman, eds. (Tachyon) June 2012. For those not familiar with sword & sorcery, a good place to start might be The Sword & Sorcery Anthology, edited by David G. Hartwell & Jacob Weisman. This big reprint anthology provides a historical overview of the sword & sorcery subgenre (although I’m mildly disappointed there’s noth- ing by Jack Vance here), from its beginnings in Tales of the 1930s up to the present day, with original stories by Michael Swanwick and Mi- chael Shea. Unsurprsingly, the best stories are the classics: Robert E. How- ard’s ‘‘The Tower of the Elephant’’, C.L Moore’s ‘‘Black God’s Kiss’’, ’s ‘‘The Unholy Grail’’, Poul Anderson’s ‘‘The Tale of Hauk’’, Michael Moorcock’s ‘‘The Caravan of Forgotten Dreams’’, ’s ‘‘The Adven- turess’’. Some of the more recent stories seem solidly on the line of development for the subgenre, such as Glen Cook’s ‘‘Soldier of an Empire Unacquainted with Defeat’’ and ’s ‘‘The Red Guild’’, but as we get nearer the present, many of them get an admixture of slipstream to one extent or another, and I was sorry that the anthology didn’t progress from its histori- cal roots into what has been called ‘‘The New Sword & Sorcery’’ – I would have liked to see stories here from people like Joe Abercrombie, K.J. Parker, Scott Lynch, Steven Erikson, Garth Nix, or James Enge, the heirs of the form. 210 Toward the end of the book we come across George R.R. Martin’s excellent novella ‘‘Path of the Dragon’’, one of those stories that makes categorization difficult; its roots in classical sword & sorcery are obvious, with the influence of Fritz Leiber and Jack Vance particularly clear, and it’s got swords, and sor- cery, but somehow it feels more like epic fantasy or heroic fantasy than sword & sorcery. I’ll leave it to more astute critics than I to parse the difference. –Gardner Dozois (Reviewed in Sep 2012) Return to Anthologies list.

The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2012 Edition, Rich Horton, ed., (Prime) August 2012. Editor (and Locus reviewer) Horton selects 29 of the best SF/fantasy sto- ries of 2011 for the latest installment of his annual anthology, with pieces by Jonathan Carroll, Neil Gaiman, Kij Johnson, Kelly Link, K.J. Parker, Robert Reed, Rachel Swirsky, Catherynne M. Valente, and others. –Locus (Mentioned in Sep 2012) Return to Anthologies list.

The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror: Volume 23, Stephen Jones, ed. (Robinson 978-1-78033-090-7, £7.99, 588pp, tp) October 2012. Reviewers who tackle a year’s-best compilation are always tempted to look for recurring themes and ideas in the stories that suggest trends within a genre. Of course, there’s a fallacy of reasoning in that kind of analysis: stories that seem joined by common threads could just reflect the compiler’s preference for that particular type of tale rather than a genuine zeitgeist. Read in the context of the sources in which they origi- nally appeared, we might never detect the echoes some stories seem to bounce off others. If anything, conscientious editors are more likely to move in the opposite direction, selecting stories that show variety rather than consistency in anything but the quality of their storytelling. Stephen Jones’s Mammoth Book of Best New Horror: Volume 23 is yet another celebration of the diversity of the horror genre. Several of the 26 stories Jones has selected as the best horror tales of 2011 invite com- parison and grouping, but his culling shows nothing that would suggest horror is becoming a one-note type of popular fiction. Two of the selections are by classic writers who died long ago but had collections of previously unpublished short fiction appear in 2011. Joan Aiken’s ‘‘Hair’’ tells of a widowed man’s visit to his dead wife’s family home, where he gets an unsettling glimpse of morbid family pathology. 211 ’s ‘‘They That Have Wings’’, about a supernaturally- endowed family of predatory females, was rejected by the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1950, though it seems very much the sort of story the magazine was publishing back then. is represented (not for the first time) by two excellent stories in which horrors lie in wait for victims who stray into unfamiliar terrains. In ‘‘Passing Through Peacehaven’’, a man gets off at the wrong train station and finds – in more ways than one – that he has reached the end of the line. In ‘‘Holding the Light’’, two boys explore a night- darkened irrigation tunnel and have the misfortune to encounter the in- fluence responsible for stories of its being haunted. Conrad Williams’s ‘‘Wait’’ is also a tale of a subterranean haunt, though in this story the haunt is more a projection of its protagonist’s guilt-ridden conscience. Several of the more ‘‘modern’’ selections explore the alienation and dis- affection of their characters in terms of supernatural experience. In Ali- son Littlewood’s ‘‘About the Dark’’, a teenage girl’s affinity for a creepy cavern with a history of disappearances sets her apart from friends with a more psychologically healthy aversion to it. In Tim Lebbon’s ‘‘Trick of the Light’’, a woman’s exploration of a rental home reflects an inward journey that ends with an encounter of the specter of her estrange- ment from the world her husband and family prefer. Daniel Mills’s well- wrought ‘‘The Photographer’s Tale’’ is a genuinely unsettling story of a portrait photographer who acquires a camera that shows him the skull beneath the skin of his clients, and the kind of spiritual blemishes that he knows he harbors himself. A handful of stories are conscious extensions of the classic tradition. Robert Silverberg’s ‘‘Smithers and the Ghosts of the Thar’’ is a magnificent homage to Rudyard Kipling that reads like Kipling’s ‘‘The Man Who Would Be King’’ crossed with James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. Reggie Oliver’s ‘‘Quieta Non Movere’’ is a pitch-perfect tale of super- natural revenge that begins like an M.R. James ghost story and concludes with an ending redolent of Tales from the Crypt comics. Thana Niveau’s ‘‘White Roses, Bloody Silk’’, reprinted from an anthology of tales in- spired by Hanns Heinz Ewers, has the style of a classic Gothic conte cruel. Joe R. Lansdale’s ‘‘The Crawling Sky’’ laces a traditional period west- ern story with threads of Lovecraftian cosmic horror. Simon Kurt Un- sworth’s atmospheric ‘‘The Ocean Grand, North West Coast’’ is set in modern times, but his account of a historied haunted hotel and the ter- rifying discoveries made by those renovating it reads as though it were written in the golden age of ghost fiction. Jones brackets the fiction selections, as he has in past volumes, with 212 an indispensible summary of horror in various forms of media in the preceding year and a concluding necrology (co-written with Kim New- man). It’s unfortunate that his publishers have asked him to cut back on these non-fiction sections significantly, beginning next year, as these components of the book provide detailed snapshots of the state of the art of horror, and are the archive of today that will serve genre archeologists in the future. –Stefan Dziemianowicz (Reviewed in Nov 2012) Return to Anthologies list.

Digital Rapture: The Singularity Anthology, James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel, eds. (Tachyon) July 2012. The posthuman/singularity story was never quite cohesive enough to function as a subgenre all its own, but there were lots of them throughout the ’90s and the Oughts, including some of the best work of those periods, and the form is still very much an important part of the SF scene today. Digital Rapture: The Singularity Anthology, edited by James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel, is a reprint anthology that does a good job of providing a historical overview of the posthuman/singularity form, taking us from an excerpt from Olaf Staledon’s Odd John in 1935, through perhaps the first modern posthuman story, ’s ‘‘Day Million’’, in 1966, through the cyberpunk days of the ’80s, represented here by Bruce Sterling’s ‘‘Sunk- en Gardens’’, and on through the rich harvest of such stories from the ’90s and Oughts to the present. The best stories here, other than those already mentioned, are probably Charles Stross’s ‘‘Nightfall’’, Greg Egan’s ‘‘Crystal Nights’’, Cory Doctorow & Benjamin Rosenblum’s ‘‘True Names’’, Robert Reed’s ‘‘Coelacanths’’, Jus- tina Robson’s ‘‘Cracklegrackle’’, and Hannu Rajaniemi’s ‘‘The Server and the Dragon’’. The anthology also contains a reprint of Vernor Vinge’s semi- nal essay, ‘‘The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Posthuman Era’’, an immensely influential bit of speculation that set many of the concerns and shaped much of the content of this kind of story, and which popularized the term ‘‘Singularity’’ itself; there are also speculative essays by Ray Kurzweil and J.D. Bernal, and other stories by , Rudy Rucker & , Elizabeth Bear, David D. Levine, and Vinge himself. –Gardner Dozois (Reviewed in Sep 2012) Return to Anthologies list.

213 Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction, Brit Mandelo, ed. (Lethe Press 978-1-59021-005-5, $20.00, 276 pp, tp) May 2012. [Order from Lethe Press, .] Queer voices in SF have been on the rise of late, which is cause to cel- ebrate. In service of this more inclusive turn, editor Brit Mandelo has as- sembled this reprint anthology to showcase stories that feature alternate sexualities, though this isn’t a collection of erotica, and most of the stories aren’t terribly explicit, but when you’re focused on sexuality it’s no sur- prise that sometimes thoroughly described sex is part of the equation, so be prepared to encounter it. The anthology, which features stories dating from 1996 to 2011, starts strongly with ‘‘Sea of Cortez’’ by Sandra McDonald. McDonald has re- cently received a lot of attention for her short fiction, with her collection Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories winning the Lambda Award in 2010. In ‘‘Sea of Cortez’’, she pulls off a very tricky maneuver. The story is historical fiction told in second person POV – we are put in the viewpoint of a man who is transgendered, serving aboard a ship in the Pacific theater in WWII. There’s casual ship-board gay sex, but he barely has words for his own yearnings. He is traumatized by his own identity, repression, and the slog of war, but he has a moment of fulfillment at the climax of the story, when he is at least briefly able to fully inhabit his own life. The story is deeply affecting, and sets the tone for the anthology. The next story is another favorite. In ‘‘Eye of the Storm’’ Kelley Eskridge completely sold me on the viewpoint of a young man, the product of a war rape, who goes out to seek his fortune. He meets up with three young people who need a fourth to form a full quad to apply to be palace guards. For him sex and violence are uncomfortably intertwined, and the story centers on how he learns to be part of this foursome. As we can see, Mandelo throws the ‘‘genderqueer’’ net as wide as pos- sible. The stories range from those where the romantic arrangements are simply background to those where the character’s exploration of sexual identity drives the whole story. In the latter category we have Nalo Hop- kinson’s heroine working hard to be accepted by the men she works with – and when she follows them to a brothel, she gets personal attention from the madam herself. Sarah Kanning’s protagonist is asexual, which makes it especially offensive when she discovers a sexbot in her own image. Keyan Bowes gives us a wealthy mother in India who allows her daughter to keep up with social fashions, including gender fluidity. ‘‘Self-Reflection’’ by Tobi Hill-Meyer makes (very) explicit the old-time SF question: ‘‘What if you could go back in time and meet yourself?’’ Liu Wen Zhuang’s charm- ing elderly heroine simply wakes up one morning with a penis and sets out 214 to explore the world a little differently. It’s probably not surprising, given the tumult of adolescence, that an an- thology on this theme would feature young-adult protagonists, and we find those in Sonya Taaffe’s ‘‘Another Coming’’, Claire Humphrey’s ‘‘Bleaker College Presents an All-Female Production of Waiting for Godot’’, Rich- ard Larson’s ‘‘The Ghost Party’’, and Terra LeMay’s ‘‘Schrodinger’s Pussy’’. Feelings of lust, yearning, insecurity, and no little angst abound in these tales. On the more casual side, Katherine Sparrow has a tale that juxtaposes Internet pirates and sailing pirates, as told by the members of a cheerful threesome. Tansy Rayner Roberts gives us a story of interplanetary in- trigue with a transgender protagonist. Delia Sherman’s story centers on a cocky young protagonist whose faery lover is not quite what she appears at first glance. Keffy Kehrli’s ‘‘Bonehouse’’ features an Evictor who searches for those who try to escape into VR permanently, with a protagonist mo- tivated by the need to pay for gender transition surgery. Two stories here are small parts of larger works and seemed the least ef- fective. Ellen Kushner’s story, set in the Swordspoint universe, seems a bit hollow if you haven’t read the novels, and Catherynne Valente’s excerpt from is unsatisfying. With Beyond Binary, Mandelo gives us a delightful sampling of what’s already out there for alternate sexualities. These themes aren’t new – they’ve always been there – and this volume does an excellent job of show- ing that. These stories speak of finding acceptance, both in yourself and from others, which is perhaps the most important message of all. –Karen Burnham (Reviewed in Jun 2012) Return to Anthologies list.

The Century’s Best Horror Fiction, Volume One: 1901-1950, John Pelan, ed. (Cemetery Dance Publications 978-1-58767-080-0, $75.00, 706pp, hc) July 2011. [Order from Cemetery Dance Publications, 132-B Industry Lane, Unit #7, Forest Hill MD 21050; .]

The Century’s Best Horror Fiction, Volume Two: 1951-2000, John Pelan, ed. (Cemetery Dance Publications 978-1-58767-172-2, $75.00, 868pp, hc) July 2011. The 20th century was the first (so far) to produce abundant horror fic- tion on a regular basis. John Pelan takes full advantage of this largesse for The Century’s Best Horror Fiction, an impressive two-volume doorstop- whopper of an anthology in which he selects one key horror story published 215 for each year stretching from 1901 to 2000. It’s a great idea for an anthol- ogy, even though the scheme creates some problems that call into question the hyperbole of the title. A quick inspection of the contents reveals that no author is represented by more than a single story. That’s fair, of course, though Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, Arthur Machen, H.P. Lovecraft, , Stephen King, and other titans of horror fiction would surely be represented by more than one story in most horror aficionados’ picks of the one hundred best horror stories of the century (or any century). What’s more, some writers are represented by works that are arguably not their strongest – although to have excluded them from the book because their best work was published in the same year that important stories by other authors were published would have been wrong. Clearly, Pelan made an effort to balance selection of outstanding stories with representation of the wide diversity of talents who shaped horror fiction in the 20th century. But these are minor quibbles, the sort that fuel forgettable arguments at convention cocktail parties. The two volumes yield up an embarrassment of riches, and both Pelan and publisher Cemetery Dance are to be credited for not stinting on the lengths of stories chosen. Much of the best horror fiction runs to novella length, and that accounts in part for the Brobding- nagian size of the set. Many of the selections are inarguable classics. Blackwood is represented by ‘‘The Willows’’, his masterpiece about the elemental power of the natu- ral world and the awe and horror it inspires in human observers. Machen is present with ‘‘The White People’’, presented as an innocent child’s diary about her indoctrination into the blackest of sorceries. M.R. James weighs in with his oft-reprinted antiquarian terror tale ‘‘Casting the Runes’’. E.F. Benson, who pushed the boundaries of taste with occasional physical hor- rors in his otherwise traditional weird tales, is represented with one of his more squirm-inducing exercises, ‘‘Caterpillars’’. The classic tales from the first quarter of the century also include W.W. Jacobs’s ‘‘The Monkey’s Paw’’, a story whose universal renown has virtually eclipsed anything else its pro- lific author (best known in his time as a humorist and writer of sea stories) wrote, and Perceval Landon’s ‘‘Thurnley Abbey’’, a ghost story whose cli- max is so over the top for its time that it has entered the pantheon of the classics, even though it is virtually the only weird tale its author ever wrote. Most of the authors from the first quarter century will be familiar to read- ers steeped in horror’s long literary tradition, but Pelan has unearthed a few buried gems by less well-known authors such as H. de Vere Stacpoole, Frederick Stuart Greene, and Ulric Daubeny, whose ‘‘The Sumach’’ is an uncommon variation on the vampire theme written at a time when most vampire fiction was conforming to the ‘‘rules’’ Bram Stoker had laid down 216 in Dracula. The stories chosen from the pulp era are more variable in quality and more of a preference call. No one would dispute that Robert E. Howard’s southern Gothic ‘‘Pigeons from Hell’’ or C.L. Moore’s groundbreaking horror/SF splice ‘‘Shambleau’’ deserve enshrinement as the greatest works their authors produced and among the best horror tales of the century. Henry S. Whitehead’s ‘‘Cassius’’, David H. Keller’s ‘‘The Thing in the Cel- lar’’, Jane Rice’s ‘‘Idol of the Flies’’, and Clark Ashton Smith’s ‘‘The Dark Eidolon’’ are likewise representative. But for 1924, Pelan has selected ‘‘The Loved Dead’’, a tale of necrophilia that H.P. Lovecraft ghost-wrote for C.M. Eddy, and whose lurid excesses were indulged somewhat in jest. Lovecraft himself is represented by his Poesque ‘‘The Outsider’’, certainly a trade- mark tale but not one of the Cthulhu Mythos stories most consider Love- craft’s masterworks. In fact, there is not a single Cthulhu Mythos story in the book, which suggests that Pelan may have considered the Mythos, for all of its importance to 20th-century weird fiction, a stone too trouble- some to turn over when looking for the ‘‘best.’’ By way of reminding read- ers that the American pulp magazines didn’t have a complete lock on the horror market, Pelan has selected fine stories by British writers H. Russell Wakefield, Eleanor Scott, L.A. Lewis, and Rosalie Muspratt. Perhaps more important, he has included John Collier’s ‘‘Evening Primrose’’ and Shirley Jackson’s ‘‘The Lottery’’, stories that show the dark fantastic was flourish- ing in the literary mainstream, and resonating with the work of writers associated with the genre, such as , whose contribution ‘‘The Jar’’ might just as easily have been published in The New Yorker or The Sat- urday Evening Post, rather than Weird Tales. The first volume ends with ’s ‘‘Born of Man and Wom- an’’ from 1950, the start of horror’s informal post-pulp wander in the wil- derness. Short horror fiction was being written in the 1950s and ’60s, but lacking a signature periodical or venue for much of the next two decades it had to be ferreted out of magazines that catered more to SF, fantasy, and mystery tastes. Hence the inclusion of stories by , Rob- ert Sheckley, Clifford Simak, Richard Wilson, and Norman Spinrad – not exactly name-brand writers of horror fiction – along with familiar horror stories by , Charles Birkin, , and Robert A. Arthur. Charles Beaumont is present with ‘‘The Howling Man’’ and with ‘‘Sardonicus’’, and both are writers who contributed to Play- boy (Russell was the magazine’s fiction editor) and other men’s magazines where stylish, boundary-pushing tales of horror found favor and raised the bar for what could be achieved in horror fiction. Pelan is to be praised for combing the pages of Robert W. Lowndes’s Magazine of Horror, for the 217 work of Steffan B. Aletti and Anna Hunger, both of whom placed memo- rable, though largely overlooked, original tales among the mostly reprint contents. One of the oddest picks for this interval is Robert Bloch’s ‘‘That Hellbound Train’’. Although Bloch wrote his share of standard horror tales in the 1950s, this is one of his most benign dark fantasies – but it won the despite not having a speck of SF in it, so maybe it’s impolitic to complain. Pelan’s chronological ordering of the stories allows readers who take them in sequence to track the evolution and development of the 20th-century horror story as it moves from a predominantly British form with roots in the classic literary tradition, to a story type that absorbs the neo-Gothic crudities of the American pulp fiction market and pushes into other genres and territories where its horror becomes muted and transmuted into the merely weird or supernatural. The stories from the last 25 years of the 20th century are all over the map in terms of their themes, approaches, style, and execution. The flowering of horror in the Stephen King era represented by ’s ‘‘Sticks’’ and Ramsey Campbell’s ‘‘Mackintosh Willy’’ culminates in King’s own ‘‘’’, a story that many will re- gard as one of King’s best written, but among his least horrific. ’s ‘‘Autopsy’’ is a still-powerful exercise in pre-splatterpunk grisliness, and Bob Leman’s ‘‘The Pilgrimage of Clifford M.’’, a truly different tale of vampires before they became co-opted as romantic anti-hero figures in the work of countless Anne Rice wannabes. Poppy Z. Brite’s ‘‘Calcutta, Lord of Nerves’’, is one of the best zombie tales written in the aftermath of the zombie’s post-George Romero makeover. Joe R. Lansdale, Caitlín R. Kier- nan, Terry Lamsley, Lucy Taylor, Thomas Ligotti, and Glen Hirshberg close out the century with excellent stories, some of them award-winners, but they virtually invite unfair comparison to stories from the first quarter of the century, and speculation as to whether they will be read and reprinted as avidly with the passing of time and the winnowing process that slims a field, and a writer’s output, down to the essential works. It almost goes without saying that there are some surprising absences from Pelan’s roll call of honor. There are no stories by Joseph Payne Bren- nan, , Charles L. Grant, , or , among the more prominent practicing horror writers. Such omissions are to be expected, of course, when culling an interval as feverishly produc- tive for horror as the 25 years after Stephen King put the genre on the map and the masses of horror scribes crawled out of the woodwork. It’s bet- ter to focus on the stories that are included, and their indisputable merits. The Century’s Best Horror Fiction is literally a monumental achievement. It begs comparison to such hallowed retrospective anthologies as Herbert 218 Wise and Phyllis Fraser’s Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural and Dark Hartwell’s The Dark Descent. Whereas those books drew more from a time interval extending back to the 19th century, Pelan’s is unique in its celebration of a single, discreetly circumscribed century. Anyone who reads these volumes will conclude that the 20th century was quite a century for exceptional horror fiction. –Stefan Dziemianowicz (Reviewed in Jul 2011) Return to Anthologies list.

The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Six, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Night Shade 978-159780-345-8, $19.99, 596pp, tp) March 2012. [Order from Night Shade Books, 1661 Tennessee St. #3H, San Fran- cisco CA 94107; .] Maybe it would be a useful (or at least interesting) exercise to think of the various fantastic genres less as distinct territories, and more like grav- ity wells – the larger the mass, the more likely a genre is to attract orbital objects, and the harder it is for those at the bottom to achieve escape veloc- ity. This is what many SF writers have been complaining about for the last half-century or so: the genre is massive enough to attract the attention of everyone from George Lucas to Margaret Atwood, but if you’re already on the ground – already known as an SF writer – it can be a pretty steep climb out. Admittedly, this is just a way of restating the much-remarked ‘‘ghetto mentality,’’ but it also may have something to do with the way we read fantastic stories in a literary landscape increasingly less defined by conven- tional notions of genre. So, for example, when we look (as we should every year) at Gardner Dozois’s iconic Year’s Best Science Fiction (due this year in July), or at David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer’s Year’s Best SF (due in May), we have a pretty clear gravitational field in view: these are stories that exemplify the editors’ view of what SF was up to, or had turned itself into, during the previous year. Every anthology is a definition. But the gravitational dynamic shifts when we look at combined an- thologies like Rich Horton’s Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy (an- nounced for July) or Jonathan Strahan’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year (out this month). It’s no longer a matter of reading each story in terms of an ongoing refinement of a single genre definition, but rather in terms of an increasingly fluid dialogue among several genres. In Strahan’s annual, we can still tot up the number of ‘‘pure’’ SF or fantasy stories, but it’s beginning to seem increasingly irrelevant, just as it’s increasingly irrele- vant to worry about which stories come from print sources and which from online sources. Even the hardest of his hard-SF stories, Hannu Rajaniemi’s 219 ‘‘The Server and the Dragon’’, begins with the server of the title, born from ‘‘a tiny seed fired from a darkship exploring the Big Empty, expanding the reach of the Network,’’ creating its own baby universe – but soon introduc- es an Other in the form of a dragon, ‘‘a long sinuous creature with mirror scales and eyes of dark emerald.’’ The use of fantasy imagery in the service of conceptually dense hard SF is no accident, any more than is Caitlín R. Kiernan’s invocation of black hole physics in support of a character-driv- en horror/love story in ‘‘Tidal Forces’’, or M. Rickert’s subversive use of the lineaments of the gothic to construct what is surely the most strangely healing tale in the book, ‘‘The Corpse Painter’s Masterpiece’’. In other words, we’re dealing with a considerably deeper gravity well than that of SF, fantasy, or horror alone, and one of the effects is that it draws into orbit stories whose arguably marginal genre content we barely notice. Neil Gaiman, who exuberantly mated with the Cthulhu mythos in ‘‘’’, has the lead story with ‘‘The Case of Death and Honey’’, in which he mates Holmes with... Chinese bee- keeping? It sounds and is odd, but Gaiman’s unusual choice to partly nar- rate in the aging Holmes’s wintry voice lends the tale a moving, elegiac tone. Is it fantasy, or for that matter is K.J. Parker’s ‘‘A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong’’, possibly the most emotionally rich and complex story in the whole anthology? This seems to be set in the mercantile faux-Europe of the author’s Fencer novels, but other than the setting, the only magic derives from the brilliance of its storytelling, describing the intertwined fates of a pathological and murderous musical genius and his ambitious but hapless former teacher. Could any serious reader object to its inclusion both here and in Horton’s forthcoming annual (whose table of contents was released a couple of months ago)? On the other hand, the least satisfying of these liminal, not-quite-fantastic tales, partly because of its being adapted from a novel in progress, is Bruce Sterling’s ‘‘The Onset of a Paranormal Ro- mance’’, two linked vignettes set at a futurist conference in Capri, which only leave us wanting a clearer sense of the characters. Or consider the odd hybrid steampunk, which has straddled SF and fan- tasy ever since K.W. Jeter first suggested the term 25 years ago. Strahan’s two selections from last year’s Kelly Link/Gavin Grant-edited anthology Steampunk! are ‘‘Steam Girl’’ by New Zealand comics writer Dylan Hor- rocks and ‘‘The Last Ride of the Glory Girls’’ by YA novelist Libba Bray. The former is one of the few stories I’ve seen to address contemporary ste- ampunk fanstyles, but is largely a sensitively realized high school outsider romance (though with the neat conceit of a Reality Gun, which I won’t explain), while Bray’s rollicking tale of a band of girl trainrobbers armed with a thoroughly pulpish SF invention is mostly good fun. Both stories 220 also illustrate something that might be a trend, a result of Strahan’s own proclivities, or simply my own prior inattention: the number of stories fea- turing girls in central roles. The Sterling story, already noted, features a 17-year-old Goth little sister as a principal character. Catherynne Valente’s ‘‘White Lines on a Green Field’’, like the Horrocks story, is set in a high school, but this time it’s a trickster tale in which Coyote leads a small-town team to football success while impregnating the entire cheerleading squad and otherwise creating chaos off the field. What keeps the story from being a cartoon (just barely) is the authentic voice of its girl narrator (named, I’m afraid, Bunny). Another high school girl is at the center of ’s ‘‘Younger Women’’, in which her mom, understandably upset at her dating a vam- pire, gets the best line in the whole book; when the vampire admits he was born in 1816, she asks, ‘‘And still haven’t managed to graduate high school?’’ (It’s not just her famous bestseller that makes me wonder if Fowler is as close as our field is going to get to Jane Austen.) It’s from the same YA issue of Subterranean as Kelly Link’s ‘‘Valley of the Girls’’, which is nar- rated by a fairly clueless male, but centrally concerns his twin sister Hero and a futuristic girl-culture in which the wealthy hire public avatars and arrange elaborate Egyptian-style memorial pyramids for themselves; it be- gins as one of the most defamiliarizing tales in the book, but gradually backs into its SF premise until it all makes a Linkian kind of sense. Simi- larly, Michael Swanwick’s ‘‘The Dala Horse’’ is a post-apocalyptic take on Red Riding Hood – another courageous girl – that, with its fairytale tone, only gradually reveals its SF underpinnings, with Swanwick’s characteris- tically elegant genre-mixing. Far more disturbing is the anthology’s best post-apocalyptic tale, Maureen McHugh’s almost generically titled ‘‘After the Apocalypse,’’ concerning a mother and her 8th-grade daughter mak- ing their way as refugees through a ruined landscape. The landscape itself is familiar enough from this persistent tradition, distinguished mostly by McHugh’s acute attention to sensory detail, but the story’s devastating end- ing makes McCarthy’s The Road look almost precious. It’s a little hard to say whether the narrator of Nnedi Okorafor’s ‘‘The Book of (Excerpted from the Great Book)’’ is a girl, since she’s a quick- ened genetic experiment born only two years earlier, but with the maturity of a 40-year-old woman and an accelerated speed-reading education. If, as I suspect, the ‘‘Great Book’’ of the title alludes to the cryptic ‘‘Great Book’’ that provides all that characters in Okorafor's novel ? know of their pre-apocalyptic world, then the story is set in a future some- time before that apocalypse, when children are decanted in sterile high-rise buildings which function effectively as prisons – from which the narrator, 221 in spectacular fashion, plots to escape. It’s one of Okorafor’s most directly science fictional stories, and leads us toward the other SF selections. Paul McAuley’s ‘‘The Choice’’, one of his Jackaroo tales about aliens who offer to help clean up the litterbox we’ve made of the planet, also features youth- ful protagonists, two boys who join a pilgrimage to view a ‘‘sea dragon,’’ a piece of alien technology washed up on a distant beach. What choices they make when they get there – informed by their own family obligations and tensions – open the story up in unexpected and insightful ways. One aspect of the SF here echoes something I’ve commented on earlier – the tendency to focus on the solar system rather than on galactic adventure or what I’ve come to think of as extrasolar utility planets – planets needed for the story’s plot, but that can no longer be credibly placed within the solar system. The only extrasolar planet here is the setting of An Owom- oyela’s ‘‘All that Touches the Air’’, in which the main hazard facing human colonists is a species of local parasite which lives in a nearby ocean and can zombify any humans it infiltrates. The complex moral questions – is it really a parasite or a , and is this its planet or ours? – sometimes echo Octavia Butler’s ‘‘Bloodchild’’, but with an original twist or two of its own. Of the solar system-based stories, two – Ian McDonald’s ‘‘Dig- ging’’ and Ellen Klages’s ‘‘Goodnight, ’’ – are set on Mars, the for- mer dealing with – yes, another young girl – who lives in a colony devoted to a massive excavation project leading eventually to a kind of terraformed habitat, while Klages’s story betrays its innocent-sounding title by present- ing a young mother who faces an excruciating choice after her child is born on Mars; in a way, it’s another variation on Godwin’s ‘‘The Cold Equa- tions’’, but with actual characters. Probably the most conventional SF story is Stephen Baxter’s ‘‘The Invasion of Venus’’, in which a fleet of alien ships apparently heading toward Earth creates near panic, before turning out to have a different destination, with unexpected results (it’s a rare story that comes with its own spoiler built into the title). It’s possible that Kij Johnson’s surprisingly ruminative ‘‘The Man Who Bridged the Mist’’ is set on another world – one split by a mist-filled chasm with scary critters in it – but the low-tech culture it portrays suggests more a story-built fantasy world, with its main claim to SF coming from the meticulous attention it pays to the problems of bridge engineering (the plot essentially focuses on the problematic romance between the title character and a ferry operator whose work he threatens to make obsolete). There are two AI stories, ’s ‘‘Malak’’ and Robert Reed’s ‘‘Woman Leaves Room’’, the former distinguished by having no human characters at all (it concerns a weapons system which begins to develop a logic-based conscience as it tries to parse the value of ‘‘collateral damage’’), 222 and the latter depicting a childlike intelligence which survives decades and eventually millennia into the future, unaware of the growing gaps between its serial activations. Neither is particularly original (the Reed revisits some of the territory of David Marusek’s ‘‘The Wedding Album’’), but each is stylistically effective. The two other clearly SF pieces are Cory Doctorow’s ‘‘The Brave Little Toaster’’ and Geoff Ryman’s ‘‘What We Found’’. Docto- row’s title reflects his recent habit of celebrating earlier SF by repurposing its titles, but the story has less to do with Disch’s famous tale than with the tradition of machines-in-revolt that goes back at least to Fredric Brown’s ‘‘Etaoin Shrdlu’’ and even showed up in a Rod Serling Twilight Zone epi- sode. Ryman’s story is set in a future Nigeria in which the scientist narra- tor’s unsavory family history leads him to conduct research that seems to demonstrate the notion of inherited stress, but when subsequent experi- ments fail to replicate the results, he redeems his reputation by studying the decline effect in experiment replication – the first story I’ve seen to address an issue I’d never even heard of until a New Yorker article just over a year ago. –Gary K. Wolfe (Reviewed in Mar 2012) Return to Anthologies list.

Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution, Ann VanderMeer, ed. (Tachyon) December 2012. Steampunk Revolution is a new anthology from Ann VanderMeer. It fea- tures an array of mostly quite recent stories (including at least three ex- cellent stories from 2012, Nick Mamatas’ ‘‘Arbeitskraft’’, Carrie Vaughn’s ‘‘Harry and Marlowe and the Talisman of the Cult of Egil’’, and Karin Tid- beck’s ‘‘Beatrice’’, each of which I’ve discussed here earlier this year). There are three originals, of which I thought the best was ‘‘A Handful of Rice’’ by Vandana Singh, concerning a man planning to assassinate the King – the ruler of Hindustan and the Harbinger of Peace and Prosper- ity. It’s steampunk because it’s set in an alternate Hindustan, where the King, having driven out the British, has harnessed ‘‘the metallurgic genius of ancient Indians,’’ and it’s Revolution because the King has banned the ancient healing arts, and killed many of their practitioners. The story has bite because the main character, a healer, also knew and loved the King when they were young men together. –Rich Horton (Reviewed in Dec 2012) Return to Anthologies list.

223 Robots: The Recent A.I., Rich Horton & Sean Wallace, eds. (Prime) Febru- ary 2012. Cover by Vladislav Ociacia. Robots: The Recent A.I., edited by Rich Horton & Sean Wallace, is a strong, mixed reprint (mostly) and original anthology of, just as it says, re- cent stories about robots and AI (artificial intelligence, for those of you who haven’t read any science fiction since the ’50s). The one original story is a fine one, ’s ‘‘Under the Eaves’’, a bittersweet romance between a human girl and a ‘‘robotnik,’’ part organic/part mechanical soldiers cre- ated to fight in a recent war and then abandoned to beg on the streets. This is one of a series of stories that Tidhar has been writing in the last couple of years about ‘‘Central Station,’’ an immense spaceport built near present-day Tel Aviv, where spaceships to the Moon, Mars, and the Outer Solar System come and go, and the passengers, some altered in strange ways, mingle in the ancient neighborhoods below with the locals – many of whom are im- migrants themselves from waves of migration decades or centuries past. It’s been clear for a while now that Tidhar was strongly influenced by the late Cordwainer Smith, and that’s nowhere clearer than in these Central Station stories, which layer in references to other locations, characters, and stories from Tidhar’s busy interplanetary future, and often throw in poems and songs as well. The towering, cloud-piercing Central Station itself is clearly a homage to Smith’s own Earthport, from Smith’s Instrumentality stories, with an updated, gritty, multi-cultural ambience all its own. Of the reprint stories in Robots: The Recent A.I., the best are probably Catherynne M. Valente’s ‘‘Silently and Very Fast’’, Elizabeth Bear’s ‘‘Tide- line’’, Cory Doctorow’s ‘‘I, Robot’’, Ian McDonald’s ‘‘The Djinn’s Wife’’, Rachel Swirsky’s ‘‘Eros, Philia, Agape’’, Benjamin Rosenbaum’s ‘‘Droplet’’, and Aliette de Bodard’s ‘‘The Shipmaker’’, but there are also good stories here from Mary Robinette Kowal, James L. Cambias, Robert Reed, Tobias S. Buckell, Ken Liu, and others, all of which makes this one of the strongest reprint SF anthologies of the year. –Gardner Dozois (Reviewed in Jan 2013) Return to Anthologies list.

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Locus Special Supplement: 2012 Recommended Reading List: The Year in Re- views is copyright Locus Publications, 2013.

About Locus: Locus is the news magazine and trade journal for SF and fantasy field. Used by chain SF and fantasy buyers, independent bookstore book buyers, and independent distributors as well as librarians, editors, authors, publishing personnel, and interested readers, the magazine has been covering the SF and fantasy fields for over 40 years, and has won the Hugo Award, science fiction’s premier honor, 30 times. The magazine’s website, www.locusmag. com, contains a sampling of magazine content as well as additional genre news, media reviews, the Roundtable Blog, indexes of reviews and inter- views published, the science fiction awards database, and much, much more. Information about advertising in the magazine can be found at www.lo- cusmag.com/Magazine/RateCard.html or on the website at www.locus- mag.com/Home/LocusOnlineRates.html.

LIZA GROEN TROMBI Editor-in-Chief JONATHAN STRAHAN Reviews Editor GWENDA BOND KAREN BURNHAM CAROLYN CUSHMAN GARDNER DOZOIS STEFAN DZIEMIANOWICZ RICH HORTON RUSSELL LETSON ADRIENNE MARTINI FAREN MILLER TIM PRATT GRAHAM SLEIGHT PAUL WITCOVER GARY K. WOLFE Contributing Editors FRANCESCA MYMAN Cover Design

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