Asimov’s, January 2009

The January 2009 Asimov’s offerings promise an interesting new year, and it’s a nice change after December’s ho-hum selection. There are three memorable pieces here and a few others that, although not as outstanding, are quite a fun ride.

I’ve never read something by Will McIntosh I didn’t like; sometimes I don’t get his work, certainly, for example “Three Unlikely Futures” (PostScripts, Vol. 12). But “Midnight Blue” (Asimov’s, September 2008) was both entertaining and thought provoking, and his profound, finely crafted “Friction” (heard over at Escape Pod) is one of my favorite SF stories ever. In “Bridesicle,” he continues to demonstrate his thoughtfulness and ability to craft intellectually and emotionally satisfying narratives. In the world of this story, dead folks who have been cryogenically frozen have to marry a willing sponsor to cross back into the land of the living. Although the science evaporates in a quick bit of hand waving, intellectually, this piece is successful, packing in stealthly prompts to think about immigration, surrogacy, and gay rights, and the love story is also engaging.

Mary Rosenblum’s “Lion Walk” is another interesting piece, although the idea of the middle of the United States becoming a nature preserve for prehistoric genegineered creatures is a little farfetched. The plot is compelling, if predictable in a few ways, but succeeds thanks to Rosenblum’s good character development, excellent worldbuilding, and thought provoking content like local folks’ relationship with the preserve and the back story of the her protagonist, Tahira. There are also some nice projections in this one as to the future trajectory of electronic surveillance and media in our culture.

Most SF and fantasy writers seem to like rogues, loose cannons, kids who like to color outside of the lines. Maybe that’s the reason Robert R. Chase’s portrayal of Gonzales’s attempt to learn a language and a culture that evolved from a biology thoroughly alien to his own is so interesting. The coolest part of this one is the whole doppelgänger thing…and its subtle implications. I admit this is the second piece I’ve read this year with aliens that like jazz, although this set like it for thoroughly different reasons than the other batch. But the Cloudhome’s myths are the best part of “Five Thousand Light Years from Birdland.”

Damien Broderick may just not be a pessimist like me, but I think he made one serious misstep in the otherwise well-done “Uncle Bones.” Like “Bridesicle,” this one deals with dead folks’ attempts to build lives, although in this case they’re hampered by looking and smelling like zombies rather than being trapped in cryogenic storage. Broderick doesn’t pull his punches either, including some truly gross-out moments which ultimately succeed in making his characters sympathetic as well as convincingly constructed. He also managed to slip thought provoking leads about veterans and folks with disabilities in well, even if some of his science is a bit of nanotechnological hand waving. But the ending feels false, unnaturally hopeful, even if it is a comfort in a world that doesn’t follow the rules of sentimentality.

Although I’d swear I’ve seen this plot before in some other incarnation, Nancy Kress’s “Unintended Behavior” is a hoot. The main character is sympathetic, her problem solving satisfying, and her canine sidekick rather novel. It is a pity that her husband the boogeyman has to be so one dimensional, but then, this story isn’t about him, and in the end, the reader doesn’t care, either. Sweet revenge is full of win, and if we liked him more, we couldn’t enjoy his comeuppance as much as we do. Ray Bradbury would smile at this one, while spooning ice cream into a radio (see “The Murderer”), although it’s the man more than the machines which get (and deserve) their just deserts here.

I’ll admit to being rather baffled by “Messiah Excelsa.” E. Salih takes what should (based on a plot outline) be a straightforward and rather unimaginative time-travel story, dresses it up in purple prose, puts together some strangely satisfying place descriptions along with a certain amount of borderline onanistic slavering over exquisitely made violins, and makes something I didn’t get bored reading. Certainly deserves mention in the silk purse from a sow’s ear category. Normally this sort of thing would be unreadable, but one rapidly acclimates, and some of the sheer packed pressure of language at a considerable PSI lets up after the first page or so.

Larry Niven has, of course, done some wonderful work over the course of his career. But “Passing Perry Crater Base, Time Uncertain,” a slender and hopeful paean to human invention, is sorely lacking. It doesn’t help that his almost jingoistic promotion of lunar settlement in this simplistic short-short is both unsatisfying and rather annoying to a reader who thinks we need to deal with our problems on Earth before exporting them to the stars.