Asimov's Science Fiction (24 page)

First comes our plane, Mundanus, familiar enough. But Mundanus interpenetrates with the Nether, a realm full of Fairy Lords and Fae, with its own elaborate social structures and rituals. The action inhabits mainly the city of Bath and its "reflection" in Nether, Aquae Sulis, with some doings in mundane Manchester and London.

Primary to our tale is the character of Catherine Rhoeas-Papaver. Cathy comes from a prestigious Nether family, but has rebelled. She went missing over a year before our tale begins, and has been living, magically cloaked from apprehension, in Mundanus, enjoying her freedom. But she is tracked down and brought back to Aquae Sulis, for an arranged dynastic marriage with William Reticulata-Iris, a self-confident and somewhat preening lad her age.

Meanwhile, Max, an Arbiter or law-enforcement agent from Nether, has stumbled on a power-grab among the competitive ruling families that threatens not only his life but also the very basis of Nether society. Of course, he's got to pursue his investigations while his soul is encased in a stone gargoyle brought to life. And did I mention that the scary Fairy Lord named Poppy, patron of the Rhoeas-Papaver clan, has maliciously granted Cathy three dangerous wishes? Or that Sam, a mundane fellow, has witnessed some crucial shenanigans of the Nether crowd, and been magicked out of his wits?

Newman keeps all her balls aloft with grace and precision. She shows flair for droll dialogue, in almost the manner-punk fashion, and all her characters jump off the page. Will, for one, emerges as not the total jerk he at first appeared. Moreover, Newman takes various potent tropes from fairy tales and tinkers with them to make them fresh. For instance, here's the curse on Cathy that protects her virginity. "'If I tried to take my clothes off near a man, with the intention of... being close to him [ellipsis sic], they would put themselves back on again. I couldn't even unbutton my shirt or take off my shoe if that was what I was planning to do.'"

Both on its own merits, and as a comic counterweight to Marie Brennan's darker Onyx Court series, this kickoff to the Split Worlds cosmos is well worth being ensorcelled by.

At Subterranean Press, publisher and editor Bill Schafer continues to act as a brilliant curator of massive short-story collections, at a time when most other publishers regard such offerings as box-office poison. Subterranean's devotion to this essential category of genre book stands as a bulwark against neglect of the short fiction format.

Here's a look at three of the newest.

Fittingly enough, a scathing, searing, self-aware and yet somehow at-peace confessional essay opens up Lucius Shepard's
Five Autobiographies and a Fiction
(hardcover, $45.00, 368 pages, ISBN 978-1-59606-555-0). From this hypnotically honest introduction, we learn how the bulk of these tales intersect with Shepard's actual history, in ways burnished and warped by his craft and aesthetics. All the stories here—novellas, mostly— have seen print previously, but in such a variegated array of magazines and anthologies that it is unlikely any one reader, even big Shepard fans, will have encountered all of them before.

"Ditch Witch" follows the entanglement of two drifters, down-and-out types named Michael and Carole. He's fleeing a bad gigolo lifestyle, and she's a young aimless hitchhiker—or so it seems at first. But one night spent at a weird motel, and their lives will never be the same, as they enter uncanny territory. Shepard's unsparing Ellisonian gutter-crawling among the damaged and damned has never been sharper.

"The Flock" anatomizes small-town high school existence with dread and precision, while threading fresh-feeling supernaturalism amidst the mundane. This kind of intricate balancing act—between closely observed and sharply rendered quotidian life and surreal horrors—is the essence of the Shepard brand of storytelling. This time around, two pals, Andy and Doyle, exist in a kind of aimless foundering while playing desultory football. But the doings of some very strange birds will justify Andy's observation that "weirdness is a vein that cuts all through the world."

Cliff Coria is a washed-up B-movie actor reduced to selling used cars for a living in Daytona Beach. His fascination with a weird motel (a motif of Shepard's for sure) turns into a deadly dance with the occult. Paralleling one of his old movies, Cliff 's one-way descent into madness is marked by Shepard's typical milestones of humiliation, confusion, and vain attempts at remorse and reform.

In "Dog-eared Paperback of My Life," enigmatic signs of his own doppelganger propel a fantasy writer into a nebulous quest in Southeast Asia that culminates in a kind of fatalistic Tiptree transcendence. The opener and premise of this one somehow made me realize just what an affinity Shepard—generally dubbed an SF or fantasy writer—has with Lovecraft and other more sophisticated horror writers such as Robert Aickman and Thomas Ligotti.

Shepard comes the closest he ever will to the whimsicality of Lafferty or Blaylock, and the New Weird of Miéville in "Halloween Town," where the strange, chasm-ensconced burg is as big a character as the oddbals that inhabit it. And finally, "Rose Street Attractors" is a pitch-perfect steampunk tale about mechanically mediated ghosts.

This new collection finds Shepard still at the apex of his powers, and bodes well for more work down whatever of his parallel lifelines he pursues.

John Varley's latest novel,
Slow Apocalypse,
a harrowing odyssey across our collapsing civilization, shows this writer at the top of his game as he approaches his fortieth anniversary ("Picnic on Nearside," 1974, marked his debut). And to accompany that volume we get
Goodbye, Robinson Crusoe and Other Stories
(hardcover, $45.00, 344 pages, ISBN 978-1-59606-528-4), a reminder of the short-form medium in which this writer first dazzled the field with his inventive, Heinlein-rich milieus; his captivating characters; and his easy-going vernacular prose. The book features eleven stories not otherwise available under Varley covers, from the years 1975 through 1986, and they are arranged in a kind of Grand Tour of the Solar System. Entertaining prefaces also entice.

Our Grand Tour starts logically around the Sun, with "The Funhouse Effect." A Carrollian cruise to the Sun's corona proves to be both more and less than it confusingly appears. Mercury is our next stop, with "Retrograde Summer," a tale about sibling misunderstandings where we begin to see some of Varley's patented innovations in gender-swapping, social mores, and bioengineering. To my ear, echoes of Sturgeon fill "In the Bowl." Maybe it's just the nature of the precocious Venusian girl named Ember and her relationship with an amateur prospector named Kiku that summon up such resonance. In the matter of "Blue Champagne," I find Varley quivering to the strains of prime Zelazny, with his focus on a glamorous yet crippled media vampire of sorts, the Golden Gypsy, and her relationship with a beachbum-type fellow named Q.M. Of course, these comparisons do nothing to obscure Varley's unmistakable voice and tone in all instances.

"Bagatelle" concerns lunar cop Anna-Louise Bach and her spontaneous and possibly fatal assignment to defuse a talking nuclear bomb, with the help of a quirky visiting expert in such matters. Varley does not receive enough credit, I believe, for pioneering the posthumanist mode of SF. But a reading of "Equinoctial," whose vastly modified protagonist dwells in the rings of Saturn, sustained by a symbiotic spacesuit, will certainly conjure up comparisons to Sterling's
Schismatrix.

The title story, set in "an environment bubble below the surface of Pluto," finds Piri, a "boy" in his second childhood, modified for an amphibious lifestyle, being forcibly recalled to a past existence. Varley's depiction of this "steel beach" habitat is magnificent and awe-inspiring. "Lollipop and the Tar Baby" concerns a sentient black hole and the woman named Xanthia who wants to capture it. "The Black Hole Passes" focuses on two folks pulling data from the fabled Ophiuchi Hotline. And a pair of minor but enjoyable non-Grand Tour tales—"The Unprocessed Word" and "The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged)"—round out what will surely become an essential addition to any bookshelf.

Editors Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan have again provided a feast with
Magic Highways: The Early Jack Vance, Volume Three
(hardcover, $45.00, 336 pages, ISBN 978-1-59606-560-4). This time around, there are sixteen stories— including Vance's second, often overlooked sale—bridging the years 1946 through 1956, and each one bears that special Vance stamp of joyous and exotic adventures told in sparkling prose.

Some highlights:

The very first story, "Phalid's Fate," is admirably selected to convey immediately the pleasures of Vance's writing. Waging war with mysterious aliens, humans have transplanted the brain of a volunteer into the body of a Phalid prisoner, and sent the agent undercover to the Phalid home planet. Vance builds up the agent's poignant dilemma with swift strokes; creates a weird alien culture and biology; and factors in an improbable but touching love story as well. All within the space of just under thirty pages.

"Dead Ahead" goes the full-bore Poul Anderson route with an attempted circumnavigation of the entire universe. In "The Ten Books," a husband-and-wife interstellar prospecting team stumbles on a lost utopia that offers immense ethical challenges to the whole species, and to the discoverers individually. For a long time the "Jack Vance" byline was mistakenly believed to be a penname for Henry Kuttner, and so it's ironic that "The Uninhibited Robot" reads a bit like one of Kuttner's Gallagher tales, concerning a network of matter transmitters stymied by an off-kilter computer brain.

Vance's ability to conjure up villains nearly as colorful as his heroes is in evidence with "Sabotage on Sulfur Planet." The freebooter Captain Plum, a regular Bluto of a starship captain, has discovered the first planet with sentient aliens on it, but kept the coordinates secret to ensure easy plunder. It's up to rookie agent Robert Smith of Star Control—after an unfortunate start to his career—to infiltrate Plum's crew, endure some major mistreatment, and stop the exploitation. Much like Heinlein's "Goldfish Bowl," "The House Lords" is a chilling speculation about mankind as property.

Vance, of course, had a second, smaller, but not inconsequential career as a writer of mystery novels, and so it's no surprise that much of his SF also centered around crimes and criminals. One of his best early investigators was the dapper, unflappable, and elderly fellow called Magnus Ridolph. Vance's ability to make a white-haired old man into a believable crimestopper (who mostly uses wits, but also not a little physical activity) is testament to the writer's determination to revel in the outré. A suite of seven Ridolph stories (not the entirety of his saga, since some have appeared in earlier volumes in this series) adds zest to the latter half of
Magic Highways.
Perhaps the best is "The King of Thieves," in which Ridolph emerges as top dog on a planet of kleptomaniacs, and gets some personal revenge as well.

All writers are unique, insofar as all human beings are quintessentially themselves. But there are some writers who are more unique than others, if you will allow the solecism, and Jack Vance is SF's prime example of such a talent.

It hardly seems possible that we could be up to the January issue already, but that's what the calendar says—and that means that once again it's time for our Readers' Award poll, which is now in its twenty-eighth year.

Please vote.
Most of you know the drill by now. For those of you who are new to this, we should explain a few things.

We consider this to be our yearly chance to hear from
you,
the readers of the magazine. That's the whole point behind this particular award. What were
your
favorite stories from
Asimov's Science Fiction
last year? This is your chance to let us know what novella, novelette, short story, poem, and cover, you liked best in the year 2013. Just take a moment to look over the Index of the stories published in last year's issues of
Asimov's
(pp.107-109) to refresh your memory, and then list below, in the order of your preference, your three favorites in each category. By the way, we love to get comments about the stories and the magazine, so please free to include them with your ballot.
Please note: unless you request otherwise, comments will be considered for publication with attribution in the editorial that accompanies the announcement of the Readers' Award Results.

Some cautions: Only material from 2013-dated issues of
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No matter what category
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