Asimov’s, August 2008

Asimov’s is full of struggles for survival this August. On the literal side, an alcoholic scientist tries to stave off suicide; a preacher shields his flock in a post-apocalyptic landscape; two siblings live day-to-day in a near-future Nigeria; and an injured alien wrestles with the fabric of causality. The issue’s other denizens—young roboticists guiding their fragile scout through distant frozen seas, a harassed old man trying to follow his daily routine, and an odd creature dreaming of a life outside the bars of his cage—don’t just strive for breathing licenses, but for the things that make the lives they’ve got worth having.

Feynman’s famous, simple, and puzzling double-slit experiment turns Ted Kosmatka’s “Divining Light” in an unexpected direction. The first few pages feel more like a snippet of Raymond Chandler than an entree to the story of an emotionally unstable physicist for whom quantum mechanics has functioned rather like the face of Cthulhu. The novelette gets off to a slow start, and although vivid descriptions buoy it along, it feels thin, privileging style over substance, the ending strangely tacked on (if intriguing). It also doesn’t help that Satish, Eric’s friend and later research partner, reads like a caricature: his opaque, profound pronouncements, hyperbolically humble origins, simple life and morals, and his sidekick status are, taken together, rather troublesome. Joy, on the other hand, who has even less room to spread out than Satish, doesn’t feel quite so false, although I can’t say why. Overall, an interesting piece, but a flawed one.

Father Mac, on the other hand, is solid enough to leave thumb marks all over his pages. Mary Jo and Leah are as coherent and vivid as their lonely supervisor. Although the themes and plot (big man defends town from unwashed marauders) and even some of the characters of “Radio Station St. Jack” have been done over in a million ways in a million westerns before, Neal Barrett, Jr., has the touch, and not just for an opening hook, either; high marks on the world-building too. Postmodern Saint John (as much in the sense of apocalyptic as fragmented) reads shattered but coherent. The names of the shops are late 20th century; the habits and preferences of the outlaws a mix of Gunsmoke and globalism; the town’s cuisine a blend of Old South and postwar deprivation; and Mac’s patter, along with the music the radio station plays, is reminiscent of the American South in the 1920s or ’30s (think O Brother, Where Art Thou?). This is a mature voice, able to conjure a nervous sixteen-year-old nun or a filthy pirate with ease in just a few sentences. However odd his setting, his characters and their motivations read real.

“Lagos” is my favorite piece in this issue, an engrossing and unusual cyberpunk yarn. In some ways it reminds me of Cory Doctorow’s story “Anda’s Game,” particularly because of the way both stories explore the ties between one way of living and another, as well as the real life consequences of events in the virtual world, but it also resembles some of the novels in William Gibson’s Sprawl cycle, especially Count Zero. Matthew Johnson skillfully imbues his near-future Nigeria with reality; futuristic, telepresently controlled devices and an extensive use of touch screens coexist with more familiar modern institutions like cube-farms, firewalls, and tech offshoring, which have not yet made inroads in equatorial Africa. Both contrast starkly with another established modern reality: the daily struggle for life in a drastically unequal society bolstered by complex systems of patronage (including that of the World Bank) where a lack of regulation and public infrastructure dictate the basic realities of life (shift housing, sleeping alleys, and unsafe borehole water sold for a profit come to mind). Johnson blends these contradictory yet complimentary worlds by engaging the conceptual spaces between them…just as Safrat does in his story. So too, he blends cyberpunk concepts and terms with those from Yoruba religion. Oddly enough, his characters feel real even though we never learn very much about them; in particular, Safrat’s calm tenacity and the strength of the bond between her and her brother, Paul, make them easy to care about. This is exactly the sort of carefully set, tonally unified, globally aware, and downright unique story I’d like to see more often.

It would be a shame to give away the twist of Robert Reed’s “Old Man Waiting”; it’s the best part of it, if in some ways a little predictable, a little sad. The narrator is banally loathsome, if neither terribly imaginative nor intelligent in the experiments he hamhandedly tries out on his subjects. The concept flies better than its execution for most of the story, I find, until the coup de grace.

“Lucy” by J. Chris Rock hangs together but only just; it sprawls a bit, busting at the seams with a portrait of a neighborhood, the history of Brad and Elgin and their project, and brief moments chronicling a tiny robot’s struggles on the icy surface of Titan. The girl may inspire the name of the dog, the dog in turn Elgin’s christening of the robot, but the connection between the three of them is far more tenuous as the signal link between Titan and Earth. Perhaps the only lasting mark this disunified whole leaves is the poignancy of the robot’s isolation as it outlasts the misery of the dog and the adolescence of the girl for hundreds or thousands of years.

Like Eric in “Divining Light,” Brian in “What You Are About To See” has seen his life turned inside out. A weird tentacular alien functions as the ghost of his Christmas past, as it were. The link Jack Skillingstead forges between the darkness and ruin of Brian’s professional life and the wreckage of his marriage feels a little trite, although it certainly contributes to the power of the story. I’ll give him kudos, however, for maintaining a coherent and readable narrative thread despite the chaos his characters wreak on cosmic timeflow and probability. It’s also surprising that Brian becomes as sympathetic as he does, given how unappealing he is in the first half of the story, although I’d still call him selfish.

Carol Emshwiller’s “Wilmer or Wesley” is memorable because it is maddening. Her refusal (for is it deliberate?) to provide a rationale for the protagonist’s captivity nips at me ceaselessly, but whatever the absurdity of his fate, W’s little world is solid to the touch. More than any description of his history, his surroundings, or the motivations of his captors, his simple voice is what makes the story work:

If there are more of my kind, where are they? I suppose incarcerated in other parks. And where is this “north quadrant of the Midwest”? Would I be free if I found that place? She has said she will bring me a mate when I’m older. From where? She even asked me what my preference was. So there must be others in other zoos and every town has a zoo.

The difference between his plain (not always grammatical) style of speech and the clinical, authoritative tone of Roberta Haskell, the scientist studying him, is striking in this regard, and Emshwiller wisely juxtaposes them early in the story. Her opening is also well chosen, resembling the fragmented experience of abduction W must have had. More than any later section, the first two pages are reminiscent of the life stories of many captive gorillas used for research, and, unavoidably, innumerable sf stories and novels about primates in science labs come to mind as well. But it also seems to reference ugly chapters in history when colonialist scientists or sideshow keepers in the U.S. and Europe put human beings on display and under the microscope, denying them basic dignities. In that light, a paragraph early on where W describes something of his appearance and wonders why he is captive, and the easy anonymity he manages with a simple disguise in his escape, are a little puzzling, but still I presume the echoes are intentional; either way, its an interesting and thought-provoking piece.