Asimov’s, October/November 2008

There are a lot of cops and spies and soldiers in the October/November 2008 double issue of Asimov’s, appearing in five out of eight stories. There’s either a haze of Clancyesque glamour or gritty tragedy about all of them, and their stories are always some flavor of mystery, although there aren’t any tidy Holmesian post-mortems here.

I haven’t delved into alternate history much, so I’m not entirely sure what to make of Ian R. MacLeod’s “The English Mutiny,” which describes an English Sepoy revolt in a 19th-century Britain under Mughal rule. The narrator, once a friend of Johnny Sponson, the movement’s leader, relates his triumphs, eccentricities, and predictably (in a historical way, not a poorly written way) tragic end. There’s more going on here than just diverting (well-researched) speculation—several thought-provoking elements bear notice. In some ways, this story seems partially to be an exploration of the animus probably present in places like, say, Manchester, apropos the transformation of Britain and its former “possessions” due to old trends in globalization and immigration. But much more importantly, it quite literally brings home to the English (less so Britons as a whole, I think) the destruction wrought in so many places, especially what is now India and Pakistan, by the rule of a distant, powerful, and selfish empire. Perhaps the ghosts of more recently committed ravages haunt MacLeod’s ruined Whitehall, too. I think this story is intended to make the reader uncomfortable and muddled: awkward as it may be in some small particulars (the rumored asteroid strike comes to mind), it certainly succeeds. From what little experience I’ve had with the genre (mostly other Asimov’s stories and Jo Walton’s novels Farthing and Ha’penny), I think that may be what better historical fiction is supposed to do—to unsettle, in every sense of the word.

Peter Higgins’s less unsettling but equally haunting “Listening for Submarines” refleshes the skeleton of an old tale structure by succeeding on atmosphere: faint music, cold rain, loneliness, gloomy skies, military discipline, distant sounds, desire, the surging sea. Christopher is a lieutenant in the British army during the waning years of the Cold War who loves music and listens to undersea traffic for a living; he happens to be renting a cottage that has one other occupant, a strange girl with whom he is painfully fascinated. Selkie story meets mythos yarn, or sirens keen to draw their sisters to Dagon. Reality and fantasy merge as naturally as raindrops fusing on a window, thanks to Higgins’s evocative description, the dark ambience of his setting, and his tantalizingly inconclusive ending. The only weakness is the Casablanca-like voiceover at the end: who is speaking? And why do they have to resort to such an artificial sum-up? We know that Christopher wants Sara, and that he will never “have” her, from the first paragraph. That tone break is Higgins’s only glaring misstep, however. This is a story that mostly keeps its mysteries, and it will take me a while to forget the hydrophones buried listening beneath fathoms of dark water.

Daniel Porter is an emotionally crippled, recently divorced cop, slowly sliding into alcoholism as he surveys the ruin of his life. After he withdraws to his apartment, weeks inside turn into months. His body begins to deteriorate and his sanity gets…spongy. It appears that aliens (introduced offhandedly early in the story) may be preying on humans who are socially isolated. Jack Skillingstead’s intense handling of several tired tropes bundled together in “Cat in the Rain” ultimately feels like something I’ve seen before, but novel moments and emotional realism redeem it somewhat. It is a bit frustrating that this protagonist closely resembles the one I encountered in the last Skillingstead story I reviewed, “What You Are About To See” (Asimov’s, August 2008). The conceit that Porter may or may not be losing touch with reality is familiar and a little tiresome, except for the emotional resonance of Skillingstead’s abduction-suicide premise, which in some ways is an echo of the old Mad Tom songs and folktales in which elves or demons prey on the unwary and the despairing.

Two stories of intrigue in this issue feel similar to one another: both center on a mysterious individual who is the key to the central truth of the narrative, and the agents investigating these incidents also have secrets of their own. Both writers disclose their worlds’ secrets coyly, slowly, peeling away false realities like onionskin, uncasing facts like Russian dolls. The difference is that one is set in a future that illustratively resembles the past as much as it does the present, and the other is set in a future which resembles nothing so much as a role-playing game, where the most advanced “technology” is psionic and semi-magical, in a way that seems a (intriguing) distortion of Clark’s Law.

In “Defending Elysium” by Brandon Sanderson, Bell telephone (simply referred to as the PC or “the Phone Company”) has been the first human organization to make contact with aliens. Jason Write, one of their preeminent agents, happens to be on assignment in Evensong, a space colony, when he hears that an alien ambassador has been killed. His curiosity piqued, he goes to investigate. Most intriguing here (besides the technology levels and motivations of the aliens we encounter) is Jason’s Sense, and how he uses it. Although this is an SF setting, the way psionics are handled here and the nature of the secrets we discover over the course of the narrative makes it as much like fantasy as anything else, in a way that resembles Star Wars (no knights though; just James Bond and friends; or perhaps the lovechild of James Bond and Doctor Who).

Just as the reality of Robert Reed’s “Old Man Waiting” (Asimov’s, August 2008) evolved as the reader moved through the story toward the last-minute twist, so too “Truth” takes most of its motion from disclosure, although at times the intricate twists and turns of fake outs and minor revelations feels more like a drawn-out striptease than a plot. Like Sanderson’s piece, this is a glamorous spy story, one where the characters have remarkable abilities, although in this case those skills are intellectual, emotional, and strategic rather than physical or psionic. There isn’t much combat happening onscreen (plenty of it off screen) except for the symbolic, chess-like duel between our protagonist and her opponent, Ramiro. Although it’s thick with references to the “War on Terror” and the apparatus thereof, and some of its point is the danger of embarking on that sort of war, literal or figurative, this piece feels nostalgic, with references to Moscow and the appearance of an underground military facility. Perhaps this is merely an artifact of the parallels Reed draws between the “Cold War” and his series of hot flashes…for most of the time his world is very American, very unbalanced politically speaking (China is crippled by a civil war). Then again, the sophistication of the “bad guys,” as I will call them, reads more like a Gorkyesque top-down conspiracy than a grassroots insurgency. Interesting, nostalgic, occasionally slow and briefly didactic, but nonetheless engrossing.

I haven’t seen Cocoon or anything else most folks would probably compare Nancy Kress’s “The Erdmann Nexus” to, so bear with my cultural illiteracy. Although I haven’t seen this specific plot before, it feels familiar and a bit predictable (I can’t reveal quite why without spoilers, so bear with me). That said, I didn’t particularly care because the characterization was so strong. I don’t usually get attached to characters in novellas the way Kress managed to get my empathy engaged here; there usually isn’t enough room. But what she tells us about Henry and Carrie and some of the other central characters makes them solid and interesting, and the interactions between her dramatis personae are ultimately what make the story. In a way, and not just because it is a mystery, it feels like The Westing Game, with each character or group of characters getting their own moment in the spotlight, each vignette fitting into the whole neatly.

Sarah Genge’s haunting description, psychological complexity, and careful evocation of real world parallels make “Prayers for an Egg” a standout story this month. Lasa is a household servant in a stratified society who feels honored to have been chosen as jaja-maid by her mistress, Jandala. But even as Jandala and the new master publicly demonstrate their “proper” disdain for the servants they believe to be biologically as well as mentally inferior, privately tradition demands that the newlyweds share some of their most intimate moments with them. Perhaps the masters’ culturally unacceptable desires are innate, perhaps they stem from that intimacy, or more likely they are an amalgam of these and the sort of attraction those in power can have to those they control, where the expression of that attraction is an abusive act of ownership. Another story by Genge, a memorable politico-romance entitled “Family Values,” appeared on Escape Pod a few weeks ago, and her most recent offering is just as original and well-crafted. In both stories, she somehow manages to ease her reader into understanding an alien culture without explicit exposition. Our understanding leaks in around the edges of the narrating character’s consciousness, her culture’s stated assumptions (which mostly feel quite organic, as opposed to contrived), allowing us to fill in the ghosts of both her deeper, unaccepted thoughts, and those which shaped her culture’s taboos. This is engrossing, thought-provoking SF in the tradition of Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin, and on its own well worth the cover price of this issue.

Leslie What’s short “Money is No Object” explores the costs of inheritance and the burdens of a strange sort of wealth in an intriguing yet somewhat simplistic way. The mechanics of the central object’s operation are an interesting twist on the old self-replenishing objects of faery, like the table that lays itself, and the effort of withdrawing resources bill by bill also evokes something of a workaday effort, or the presumed difficulty of managing inherited financial assets, but somehow it reads rather thin. After all, those who possess vast financial resources can hire people to manage their money…Interesting, well-turned, but ultimately unsatisfying.

In the near-future of “Dhuluma No More,” climatech allows the rich in the industrialized north to make money while ameliorating the effects of global warming on their own countries and outsourcing the hazards of their techniques to poorer and less influential nations. Citizens from drought-struck regions mine the world’s remaining icebergs for water as toner stacks belch “hypoallergenic” particulates into the air. Illingsford is a documentary filmmaker and former photojournalist covering “floecombers” aboard a ship captained by a man whose face he once made famous. Both stories I previously reviewed by Gord Sellar were well-crafted and memorable standouts: “Pahwahke” in the January 2008 issue of Fantasy Magazine and “Lester Young and the Jupiter Moons’ Blues,” also in Asimov’s back in July; the same hard work shows here, but it’s clear Sellar hasn’t quite left himself enough elbow room. The science, details, and characterization ring true, as do the wry asides, and the action sequences are gripping. But his ending feels rushed, and besides, the characterizations of Ngunu and Illingsford are pretty flat. Ngunu himself seems limited to his history—I wonder whether he has kids, or a wife, or any family left back home, although it seems likely that he does not. To some extent he has his own personality, but in some other ways he’s a crucible for the suffering of an entire continent, and collapses under the weight. Perhaps this would have worked better as a novella, where its pacing would have remained consistent, and the complex ideas he’s addressing would have enough room to breathe.