Asimov’s, September 2008

This month, Asimov’s serves up eight stories whose pleasantly varied characters find hope or beauty in the midst of adversity. Whether the strange triumphs of September’s protagonists are due to luck, strength of will, animal cunning, desperation, or the assistance of a kindred spirit, they’re never saccharine, and sometimes surprising, whether they’re set in interstellar space, suburbia, 18th-century England, a hospital, alien salt marshes, or the seamy side of Bangkok.

A solitary biologist sweats alone through a monochromatic Silurian landscape in Steven Utley’s “Slug Hell,” but where his compatriots see only monotonous ugliness, he sees beautifully colorful prokaryotic bacteria, placoderms, and scorpions, a “wonderful mosaic of white, gray, black, tan.” There isn’t much in the way of a plot here, no particular character arc, just a slow reveal on the quiet life of a quiet man slogging fascinated through something very like ancient Earth. Insofar as this is a landscape painting, it succeeds, although for a character study it doesn’t yield much, and there’s a mildly melodramatic reference near the end which feels tacked on. But in the end, its very unremarkableness is what makes it a memorable story, which leads me to wonder if he’s been reading Henry David Thoreau or John Muir.

In Will McIntosh’s “Midnight Blue,” life takes on the character of a collectible card game in which luck and money determine who gets access to powerful magic spheres. Jeff is a poor kid who’s never gotten to own one or absorb its spell, and then one day…in that regard, the plot is rather predictable, but the notion of such spheres is intriguing. Some aspects of it do display a clear kinship with Harry Potter, and a few over-described or artificial-feeling phrases turn up. But ultimately, the maintenance of mystery as to the provenance of this magic, consistency of tone, vaguely 1970s comic-book setting, and a tremendously satisfying ending make this a story I can see rereading, particularly on the days one might be wishing for a hot pink Flyer of one’s own.

Aging asteroid miners temporarily transformed into scaly neutered monsters by radiation-resistance drugs and de jure indentured to the corporation that ruined them dream of being human again “In the Age of the Quiet Sun” by William Barton. Jenny, Zed, and their wetware computer Ylva make a marvelous discovery, but what’s ultimately interesting to me about this story isn’t that discovery, the details of these characters’ pasts, or even their struggle for survival in hostile environments. The shonen two-lonely-chicks-one-lonely-guy sexual tension is tiresome, Zed (the main character) comes off rather arrogant, and the handling of radiation sickness and the asteroid oil angle are unconvincing. But the emotional realism threaded throughout rings true in the bonds between characters, painful charge of some of their memories, and their empathy with the fate of a fellow space voyager they encounter.

On the other hand, storytelling is Stephen Baxter’s strong suit in “The Ice War.” A trickster scholar evades both potential fathers-in-law and rampaging ice monsters, meets intellectual luminaries of his day, and while being marginally helpful, generally leaves them to their doom. Han Solo, Enlightenment style. As usual, the celebrities on the scene are particularly enjoyable, in this case hypothesizing about the life processes, origins, and general disposition of weird frozen jellyfish from the back of beyond. But Hobbes, our narrator, is rather a delight himself for all his self-interest. The aliens themselves are also fascinating, if reminiscent of so many spawning horrors we have seen before.

But speaking of prior horrors, I don’t think any of them have given us a word for a person who will be a ghost but isn’t yet. This is Susanna’s problem in “Cut Loose the Bonds of Flesh and Bone,” by Ian Creasey. Here, a journalist struggles simultaneously with grief from the death of her mother and fear of her mother’s plan to continue her control of her daughter’s life from beyond the grave. This is an intriguing handling of the consequences of neural upload. This may be an old trope, but the individual-level emotional realities Creasey addresses within the context of this technology give the story as much of its interest and power as his treatment of social context and technical processes.

So too, gene-twanking and enhanced athletes are a familiar SF concept, but Derek Zumsteg’s tonally consistent and compelling “Usurpers” approaches it in a new and interesting way. He has produced a simple, readable, and interesting exploration of the ways in which current socioeconomic trends are often reinforced by technological developments, carrying the inequalities of the present into the future. My only quibble (and it is minor) is that King’s triumph could be seen to deproblematize the system which plagues him, exploited with a piece of the bootstrap rhetoric which has proven troublesome in certain political contexts.

King’s competition at least seems feasible; the dénouement of Robert R. Chase’s “Soldier of the Singularity” less so. A robot visits a psychiatrist, presumably because it has been deprogrammed and assigned to assist him with patient treatment. It claims to have human memories…. But the robot, the tech, the reason for the war it was fighting doesn’t really matter; just as “Cut Loose the Bonds of Flesh and Bone” is about more than neural upload (although the tech works in a logical fashion overall), so this piece, though sheathed in technology, is about human psychology more than technology. In fact this piece is more like Ursula K. Le Guin’s social science variety of hard SF than one might expect a story about artificial intelligences to be.

Another far-fetched but emotionally well-tuned and oddly powerful story is Mary Rosenblum’s “Horse Racing.” Unlike “Soldier of the Singularity,” the setting seems more plausible, but the premise feels similarly unlikely. That said, it doesn’t matter all that much. What’s interesting is the morally ambivalent, two-sided nature of what Amit shows his guest, Rosenblum’s handling of their personalities and reactions, the familiar world she sketches around them, and the ways in which she reflects on the ownership undercurrent in any unequal social transaction, even a benevolent one. If I had a favorite piece in the September issue, this would be it.