Eclipse One: New Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Jonathan Strahan

Eclipse One: New Science Fiction and Fantasy is the inaugural volume in Jonathan Strahan’s new annual original speculative fiction anthology. Strahan’s introduction is enthusiastic and even inspiring; he tells us of how the SF/F short story is flourishing and describes the huge quantity of wonderful, imaginative work coming from writers new and old. Eclipse One certainly manages to showcase some of that talent, and even if not every story is a hit, many and most are quite good, sometimes in surprising ways. There’s quite a variety of themes, settings, and characters, and I think the volume offers a welcome peek of neat directions modern SF/F writing might be able to explore and expand into.

Opening the anthology is Andy Duncan’s “Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse,” which addresses the subject of faith with a rare deftness. When a farmgirl attributes to a frizzled chicken the aspect of Jesus Christ, Father Leggett finds himself at a loss to explain her error—to the girl, and to himself. There is something immensely compelling about this near-sacrilegious belief—in Leggett’s eyes and, to the author’s great credit, in the eyes of the reader as well. Thus, “Unique Chicken” portrays an experience of faith—along with the related experiences of uncertainty, of wonder, of day-to-day coping, and others.

This story strikes home where most fall flat. The characters are warm, human, and comfortable. The pace is steady, not biting off more than it can chew nor wallowing in static introspection. Perhaps the only real flaw is the homage “Unique Chicken” pays to the real-life events it was based upon, or perhaps draped upon; there are references to details of the original episode—and it is even made into a sort of punch line—but the connection doesn’t seem to add anything here, and referring to it serves only to distract. Still, the distraction is minor; all in all, “Unique Chicken” is highly recommended, and this reviewer wishes it luck on the Nebula ballot.

Garth Nix offers us a madcap romp in the disconcertingly titled “Bad Luck, Trouble, Death, and Vampire Sex.” It opens with Gardner accidentally killing his grandmother through outstanding clumsiness and misfortune. As said grandmother is the Witch Queen, ruling over magical realms and creatures sprawling every which way from our own, Gardner is now in quite a bit of trouble. What follows are his desperate attempts at damage control, with the even more desperate hope of surviving the process.

“Bad Luck…” probably won’t work for a lot of readers. It’s ridiculous, riddled with clichés and plot twists that feel like the author is making them up on the spot. The story’s saving grace is that this is all done knowingly; “Bad Luck…” isn’t meant to be taken seriously, and everything is told with a wink. And what it lacks in gravity, it makes up in sheer frenetic energy—jumping hither and fro in an insane whirlwind that doesn’t make too much sense but can sure be a lot of fun. To a large degree, it feels like Nix has given us an adventure story full of “[Plot Twist Goes Here]” and “[Insert Daring Escape]” signs all over the place—not terribly satisfying, but still exciting and funny in a weird kind of way.

What I found particularly interesting in “Bad Luck…” was how it seemed to eschew standard exposition and foreshadowing, and instead just let huge story elements pop up midway. This works, in part, because of the “anything goes” magical setting, in part due to the familiarity of each of the elements—the reader doesn’t need much of an explanation to understand each new twist or to fit it into the story—and largely because of how lightly the story takes itself.

“The Last and Only, or, Mr. Moscowitz Becomes French” serves as a happy reminder that this reviewer ought to get his hands on more of Peter S. Beagle’s writing. Wry, clever, and incessantly amusing, it begins with a premise more absurdist than fantastical:

Once upon a time, there lived in California a Frenchman named George Moscowitz. His name is of no importance—there are old families in France named Wilson and Holmes, and the first president of the Third Republic was named MacMahon—but what was interesting about Mr. Moscowitz was that he had not always been French. Nor was he entirely French at the time we meet him, but he was becoming perceptibly more so every day. His wife, whose name was Miriam, drew his silhouette on a child’s blackboard and filled him in from the feet up with tricolor chalk, adding a little more color daily. She was at mid-thigh when we begin our story.

The many twists and turns lie in the chain of reactions and counter reactions set off by Moscowitz’s transformation among the people and nations he touches. Many of these are turnarounds scarcely less drastic than Mr. Moscowitz turning French, except that they are human reactions which occur naturally, convincingly, almost unavoidably. Finally, the story builds up to a conclusion which is at once mythical and personal, retaining all the while its dry humor and deadpan tone. A pure pleasure to read.

I doubt coincidence played much part in placing Maureen F. McHugh’s “The Lost Boy: A Reporter At Large” directly after Beagle’s story. Like “Mr. Moscowitz Becomes French,” this piece deals with a sudden and drastic transformation of a person’s identity and personality, and many similar themes are addressed. “The Lost Boy” carries itself with far more gravity than Beagle’s wry story does, and perhaps addresses these themes more directly.

Here, the device is a psychological disorder called dissociative fugue, a condition where a person suddenly adopts a new identity, forgetting his old one entirely. Simon Weiss, a refugee from dirty bomb explosions in Baltimore, is suddenly confronted with a family he has never seen before; he has forgotten them, along with all other details from his previous life. The story continues along two prongs—describing the attack that devastated Baltimore and following Simon and his family in their cautious reunification. These two threads support and sustain each other: in one direction, the Baltimore attack gives us a taste of pain and trauma which helps us understand more easily how a child might forget his entire life and fabricate a new one. In the other, the experiences of Simon and his family are individual stories that make the tragedy that happens in Baltimore an event of immense scope and scale, more personal and immediate.

While not immediately engrossing, using the detached voice of a newspaper reporter, containing few actual scenes, and being front-loaded with an infodump explaining dissociative fugue, it is quietly powerful, a down-to-earth piece of science fiction and certainly worth the read.

In “The Drowned Life,” Jeffery Ford takes metaphor at face value. Battered by the troubles of the world and by his own financial ruin, Hatch gives up and lets himself go under. “Under” turns out to be Drowned Town—an underwater city of all those who have been driven to despair.

“The Drowned Life” excels at the grotesque. Hatch’s sinking, and all he finds below, is unsettling and horrible. The familiarly depressing is exaggerated and amplified. Every moment along the way, we’re right there along with Hatch; we can understand how overwhelmed and hopeless he feels, we share his gradual understanding of Drowned Town, we are trapped and transfixed and horrified right along with him. The story’s plot is nothing to write home about, but that’s secondary here. Ford has captured and brought to a polish an awful sensation that we are all too familiar with.

“Toother” is the anthology’s supernatural crime thriller, brought to you by Terry Dowling and set in the world of his “Blackwater Days” stories. Dan is on the trail of a killer whose modus operandi involves extracting his victims’ teeth. Assisting Dan on the case is Peter, a psychosleuth whose dreams give him glimpses into the murderer’s thoughts. Every new discovery reveals a new grisly detail about the murders and the torment the victims suffer.

For the most part, “Toother” is an exciting and engrossing read. Each new variation on the tooth-obsessed serial killer is gruesome and unnerving. Sadly, what could have been a pleasing, satisfying tale stumbles at the last hurdle—the ending. Just when we seem to be at the cusp of the story’s climax, when tension is at its highest and the reader awaits the final showdown, the story abruptly ends and winks out of existence.

As frustrating such a conclusion may be in any story, it grates particularly in “Toother” for a number of reasons. Firstly, it leaves almost every question asked throughout the story unanswered. Secondly, it leaves clairvoyant Peter as the sole character who has advanced the plot in any way—and this exposes him as a cheap plot device, railroading the story like a Disneyland ride. And lastly, the story’s earlier success works against it; it engrossed us with a suspenseful manhunt after a compelling psychopath and encouraged our anticipation of coming face-to-face with the murderer. The more effectively it managed this, the more outrageous and cowardly it seems to sidestep the final confrontation.

“Up The Fire Road” by Eileen Gunn starts when Andrea and her deadbeat boyfriend, Christy, get lost on a skiing trip and find themselves accepting the hospitality of a mountain sasquatch named Mickey. Narration alternates between Andrea and Christy, which at first serves to give us different viewpoints on the same events and characters. Soon, though, this device lets us see what neither of our narrators can.

What’s particularly impressive is how Gunn has managed to make even the storytelling device intimately connected to one of the story’s basic themes: how blind people are to each others’ perceptions. This theme repeats in every element of the story, from the opening, where Christy and Andrea detail to the reader their criticism towards each other, to the events of the story, during which their perceptions of each others’ experience grow farther and farther from the truth.

Beyond that, it’s a fun story, and very well-constructed—gripping from the start, interesting the whole way through, with a conclusion that manages to be both twistedly funny and very satisfying.

“In the Forest of the Queen” by Gwyneth Jones seems to follow a classic fantasy structure: ordinary people wander into a fantasy world where they encounter many strange and fantastical things. The ordinary people in this case are Aymon and Viola, investors in forested French real estate. When they venture out to survey the land, the forest feels eerily alive, and soon enough, odd and impossible things begin to happen.

Now, this is largely a matter of taste, but what I felt what was sorely missing was a sense of connection between all the odd phenomena. Each event was weird and mysterious when considered individually, but collectively, they didn’t seem to be building up to anything. Any incident could just as easily have been replaced with some other odd, strange experience without making any real difference to most of the story. The total effect is that this feels more like a picture gallery than a story: “Look at this, look at this! Now look over here. Now, look that way!…”

At the end, the nature of the otherworldly land is revealed, and this does form some sort of connection between the events, which may have pleased me more had it been presented earlier. This late in, though, the connection did little to illuminate what had gone before, serving mostly to answer a question this reviewer had not even thought to ask: what the nature of this strange world might be. As a fantasy reader encountering a fantasy staple, I hadn’t assumed the setting needed an explanation beyond “it’s magic.” And with the events feeling so random and unconnected, I had no idea the setting had a secret nature to be guessed at. By the author concealing from the reader what was going on, it is unfortunate but unsurprising that the reader should feel there is little going on.

Ysabeau S. Wilce conjures up a zombie in the desert in “Quartermaster Returns,” set in her skewed world of Alta Califa. First Lieutenant and Quartermaster Powhatan Rucker, better known as Pow, has been brought back from the dead to take responsibility for the mess he’s made of Fort Gehenna’s funds and supplies. As for Pow himself, he’s mostly and mindlessly concerned with gulping down any liquid he can get his hands on.

It’s a fun story which does precisely what it sets out to do—entertain and engross. Characters and setting are simple, but memorable; plot runs through light-but-substantial twists at a steady clip; the atmosphere of military delinquency is both entertaining and entirely believable. What the story reaches for, and handily achieves, is having as much fun as possible within the playground Wilce has created. Well done.

“Electric Rains” by Kathleen Ann Goonan describes Washington D.C. in the wake of a dirty bomb. Ella is the daughter of the terrorists whose bomb devastated the city, and now her protector, Nana, is gone too. Sadly, the author has chosen the unfortunate device of taking an entire story just to explain the initial setting. The reader must shuffle along after Ella’s wallowing train of thought, waiting for her to recall, detail by detail, what the electric rain is and does, and how things became the way they are.

Most of the story is a mishmash of recollections and flashbacks, mostly of things the deceased Nana said and did, some regarding discoveries Ella has made regarding her parents and their terrorist attack. This reviewer found the former excessively dull and the latter hampered by Ella’s (the author’s) frustrating caginess with information, and by the sense that setting Ella as the terrorists’ daughter was solely to ease the segue into exposition on the terrorist attack. By the time there is anything in the story that actually seems to be of interest, or indeed that seems clear and well understood, the story is unfortunately over.

“She-Creatures” by Margo Lanagan is one of the low notes in Eclipse One. Cottar, a smuggler, has a bad feeling about their next job—which does indeed meet disaster, but rather than the law enforcement he may have expected, he and his partners are waylaid by the titular she-creatures.

The chief problem here is that no element of the story is detailed or interesting enough to hold the reader’s attention. The story fails the basic “So What?” test. The setting is ambiguous and unclear, our best clues coming from the tone of narration and from the odd names. There’s no real character or personality beyond the characters’ function in the plot, save perhaps Cottar’s concern before the job. Plot and events are simple and formulaic. And most of all, the threat of the she-creatures themselves—which seems to be the author’s focus in this piece—is dull and poorly written. It’s a clear case of trying to evoke horror in the reader merely by stating that something is horrible:

But the hats, each matching its owner’s cloth, oh! How could it be, such simple things, no more than tubes going up from the heads—but tall, tall, and cut in two points at the top—could strike such fear into a heart?

The more an author asserts how awful something is, without inspiring actual awe in the reader, the less impressed the reader will be. As the author here makes this assertion rather excessively, and does very little else, this story is less than impressive.

Paul Brandon and Jack Dann bring us “The Transformation of Targ,” in which the Dark Lord Targ is taken to an Evil Consultant to try and get rid of all the kindness and mercy he’s been feeling lately. In other words, this one’s in the good ol’ “Pastiche of Fantasy Clichés” category, and like so many others of its kind, it isn’t nearly as clever or as original as it seems to think it is.

“Now, you wrote in your initial consult application that you”—Hirsch’s voice took on the tone of someone reading—”just don’t seem to have the heart for evil anymore, that it no longer gives you that shivery black thrill that it used to, and that you’d rather go and raise alpacas in Idaho. Is that true, Brian?” Hirsch sounded terribly disappointed.

This kind of tone and this kind of humor have been used, overused, and abused ad nauseum over decades of cheap parodies. It’s the humor of the self-aware caricature, the wink at genre readers that has been smeared out until it just looks like a closed eye. “The Transformation of Targ” is not so much bad as it is amateurish—firstly in the sense of not being aware how worn-out and exhausted the concept is, and secondly in not knowing better than to stretch a silly idea into a full-length story without bothering to add any other content. The Soft-Hearted Lord of Doom could still be perfectly amusing as a character in a larger story—just look at Terry Pratchett’s work, which takes characters just as simple but puts them into actual situations where A) they have events to respond to and B) they alternate with other characters so that no one shtick becomes too repetitive. But just sitting around saying “Oh, I’m a Soft-Hearted Lord of Doom!” tends to grow stale very, very quickly.

Ellen Klages gives us “Mrs. Zeno’s Paradox,” flash fiction with a punchline. Plot details are either spoilers or uninteresting when taken out of context; I can tell you that it starts with two girlfriends meeting in a cafe, but any more than that might cause a rift in the space-time continuum.

Left to speak in vague generalities, this reviewer found the story’s concept to be amusingly clever, but its execution to be somewhat lacking. The main thrust only begins at its midpoint; the first half establishes setting and tone—certainly crucial to this story, but this division leaves it feeling very unbalanced, and once the story’s focus is brought into play, it takes some time for the reader to notice. The story may have been better served by establishing setting and tone during the buildup of events themselves, thus making the events more colorful, building anticipation and keeping the story tight.

Bruce Sterling’s offering, “The Lustration,” fails to shine. It sets out the idea of an alien world across which sprawls a gargantuan, global computer, made entirely of wood. The protagonist (unnamed, as are all the alien characters in the story) is a programmer, seeking out members of an ancient conspiracy who may know more about an anomaly he has found in the computer system.

Wood-based computation is an interesting notion, but Sterling failed to convince this reviewer that it is in any way plausible. In this system, the equivalent of a binary bit appears to be a wooden ball that probably weighs more than a motherboard. Even the simplest “programs” would require building specialized tracks and apparatus and ridiculously unwieldy input and output interfaces spread out for miles. Yet the story would have us believe in a globally interconnected system performing tasks crucial to everyday life, and even touching upon artificial intelligence. Such a system creates far more disbelief than can be easily suspended, but at no point does the story attempt to ease our bewilderment.

Alack, most of the rest of the story is nearly as clumsy as its immense computer. Most is told, not shown, written as a summary rather than a story. The protagonist seems to have inferred dark secrets from mere unexpected technical difficulties, and furthermore, these unlikely deductions are kept from the reader for no good reason. The conspiracy’s goals are entirely unclear, and the programmer’s final conclusions seem to ignore the very anomaly he set out to explain. In short, “The Lustration” seems poorly written and poorly constructed. It does base itself off two very interesting ideas—a vastly different manner of computation and the concluding insight regarding artificial intelligence—but does not manage to construct a satisfying story around them.

Lucius Shepard introduces us to the fascinating “Larissa Miusov.” We meet Larissa through the eyes of Paul, a yet-to-be-discovered screenwriter trawling for a nibble in Hollywood. He meets Larissa by chance, and her interest in his screenplay gains us the opportunity to peek into Larissa’s life and her past.

The key element to Larissa’s character is that she is alien, other. To portray this, Shepard gives her an edge of impossibility, with strange and unbelievable stories from her past. But he shows her as alienating in more mundane ways as well—her Russian ancestry and culture, her aloof position among L.A.’s rich and famous. In many ways, this story is about Paul trying to at least touch what he knows he cannot grasp. “Larissa Miusov” isn’t terribly strong on plot, and the fantastical element sits mostly on the backburner. Many readers may not enjoy this, but many others certainly will.

Though some stories are stronger than others, Eclipse One proves to be a high quality anthology. It certainly offers wide variety, and I suspect that different readers with different tastes will find no fewer stories to enjoy in the anthology; their picks will simply be slightly different than my own. Here’s hoping for many more volumes.

Ziv’s Final Tally
Stories: 15
Optimistic View of SF/F Short Fiction: Yes
Romantic Attraction: Only two
Annoying Cliché Romantic Attraction: None at all
Unnamed Protagonists: None, thank heavens
Cool Ideas: Many
Poor Stories: Well, a few
Volumes 2 and 3: Already Full

Publisher: Night Shade Books (Oct. 2007)
Price: $10.17
Trade Paperback: 256 pages
ISBN: 1597801178