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

Jonathan Strahan’s introduction does a good job of setting the right expectations for Eclipse Two, quite different in flavor from the first volume in the series. How so? “I deliberately nudged this Eclipse installment towards science fiction,” he explains, “dropping some of the balance that had characterized Eclipse One.” This leads to less variety in setting, but not so in theme or depth. SF fans can rejoice, for there really is a lot of SF in these pages. Fans of good stories can rejoice also. What Rudy Rucker has termed SF’s “power chords” are here generously played (can one ever get enough of killer robots?), as well as a few other minor chords and riffs. These songs and their arrangements are well worth your time.

The protagonist of Karl Schroeder’s “The Hero” is perhaps the best type of hero, namely the unlikely one. The story opens with Jessie coughing up blood right before a perilous air mission to plunge inside a size-defying “bug” into which it is rumored a treasure ship has crashed. Jessie’s stakes in this strike are far greater than any of the other crewmembers of the Mistelle are aware of, and what he discovers inside the bug may provide the start to a far more epic odyssey. “The Hero” is told sharply and takes place in Schroeder’s Virga Universe (though no knowledge of Virga is required to enjoy it). The action sequences are effectively staged, and the emotional resonance of the character’s decisions, and his determination, unfold with an increasing, almost concentric sense of scope that mirrors the structure of Candesce itself, with its artificial suns and spheres. The descriptions, in particular, of the light and heat phenomena inside this artificial world, are lyrical, and the world’s mythology is well thought out and built into this tale. The climax wisely avoids melodrama.

“Turing’s Apples” by Stephen Baxter contains some intriguing notions, as vast in scale and implication as one might expect from this author, and the scene transitions are also strong, but ultimately the story disappointed me. Narrator Jack recounts the discovery by his brother, Wilson, of an extraterrestrial signal (the Clarke Institute is a nice touch), and the profound impact this has not only on humanity, but on Wilson himself. In a recent online discussion of Baxter’s novel, Flood, Adam Roberts summarizes one of the “core criticisms of Baxter” as “brilliant ideas and sense-of-wonder, etc., but 2D characterisation.” This story suffers for it, because it places so much weight on the emotional investment of the reader with the two brothers. I found the ending to be over-the-top and perfunctory, as though something dramatic had to happen to the characters because the story’s opening promised it, but not because it intrinsically made sense. This is a shame. I was instantly captivated by the opening and immensely enjoyed the clever use of science (such as entropy orders as markers of civilization, for instance). Despite some over-exposition in the dialogue (“I prompted, ‘Gigabytes?’ ‘Gigabytes. By comparison the whole Encyclopaedia Britannica is just one gigabyte….’”), I was intellectually thrilled for most of the ride, but the story’s conclusion had me thinking more of Granny Smith than Golden Delicious.

Ken Scholes accomplishes a lot in “Invisible Empire of Ascending Light,” one of my favorite entries. Scholes posits a fascinating theological framework, a system whereby workers of the Mission evaluate potential self-declared messiahs who formally Announce themselves. Consideration follows, with possible Declaration beyond. Such is the situation for one Tana Berrique, who interviews recently Announced H’ru. What results is both mind-stretching and totally logical. Scholes succeeds in telling a complex, profoundly emotional story whilst also inventing a rich culture in a fundamentally idea-propelled plot. This, along with the tales by Schroeder and Reynolds, excels in creating sense of wonder, and there is admirable elegance to its central conceit. Delving into metaphysical matters, as it does, in the way only SF can, it is perhaps the most luminous of all the stories in Eclipse Two.

“Michael Laurits is: Drowning” by Paul Cornell is an ingenious take on the unforeseen possibilities of social networking. The title cleverly provides an accurate summation: Professor Lauritis suffers an accident, catching on a weighted line while attaching scientific equipment to whale sharks in Japan’s Inland Sea. Being connected to “Lief” at the time enables a strange and complex situation. Cornell’s narrative is mock journalistic, and the implicit stylistic transparency and flat delivery of events as factual does much to keep one engaged. It also brings the absurdity of the proceedings to the forefront and cleverly bolsters the humor. Readers of this tale should be updating their status message to “Entertained.”

Margo Lanagan’s “Night of the Firstlings” is an immediate, visceral, well-written story of a family’s encounter with illness amidst an alleged Dukka festival, and the powerful forces and disease which unfold. The setting is technologically scarce and populated with supernatural and seemingly medieval or even more ancient elements—a prophet, prayer, Protection, a Gypsy, the tempest of nature, familial bonds. Lanagan excels in creating an unsettling atmosphere that comes alive and never stops to explain the details of the why and wherefore, allowing us to experience events directly through her sharply drawn characters instead. As in other recent Lanagan tales, this one benefits from use of the first person, since it increases the subjectivity and amplifies the aforementioned effects. Curiously, I found this story to be a more successful fantasy than Richard Parks’s, though Strahan implicitly suggests it is SF by not mentioning it with the other fantasy titles.

The classic situation of an “Elevator” frozen in place, its cast of characters trapped, allows Nancy Kress to build a lot of character on a relatively sparse stage. (From the point of view of construction, I can imagine this is a story that Isaac Asimov might have enjoyed). As tensions rise, the protagonist, Ian, remains more levelheaded than those around him, though he suffers his own fair share of internal woes. When everyday reality, along with the elevator, resumes its movement, he is left to wonder what really happened, and whether the predictions of one of his fellow passengers bear any deeper significance. The resulting insight into his own life is moving, but somewhat underwhelming as the story’s conclusion. The intimate feel of this story works well, and Kress’s storytelling is highly polished, but on the whole this piece was less inventive than most of the other entries in Eclipse Two.

Daryl Gregory’s “The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm” refers to a fictional book about the titular Lord Grimm, tyrant and ruler of the nation Trovenia, which at the story’s outset is being invaded by a foreign power for the 22nd time. This is a very ambitious, finely written story, and it superbly illustrates war’s rending effects without ever becoming preachy, while also making astute political and social observations. I did find the shift in tone from what felt like a more comical, lighthearted opening sequence to the grittier, more desperate survival attempts that followed a little abrupt. Perhaps the most interesting effect to emerge for me was the profound transformation that popular culture can have on how we perceive the world, and even escape from it. A phrase as innocent as “The sky was full of flying men” can be simultaneously charming, disquieting, and menacing. There is a pervasive, darkly humorous edge to the storytelling that prevents it from becoming self-important. More chapters, please.

And now for something quite extraordinary. If you’re looking for a single reason to purchase Eclipse Two then you may be out of luck, because Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation” is at least three of them. It is without a doubt one of the finest and freshest breaths of story I’ve ever come across. It is immediately compelling, a superlative example of a story that pulls on a seemingly mundane observational thread, and reasonably proceeds from it to unwrap the entire fabric of existence. Though time will be the ultimate judge, I have no reservation in calling it a masterpiece. The story is narrated in the first person by a character who appears to make a crucial discovery about air. What he is able to deduce from his initial and further experiments comprises the narrative’s unforgettable journey into expanding consciousness. The story’s execution, on the whole minimalist in approach, is flawless. It unfolds in gradual revelation, and every component fits as perfectly as those described in the character’s empirical forays into literal self-reflexivity. Of course, it also functions superbly on a metaphorical level and pays tribute to classic SF stories dealing with entropy and thermodynamics. The intellectual thrill of reading it might be compared to directly experiencing William Blake’s “world in a grain of sand” and “eternity in an hour,” except in this case contained in a few molecules of air.

In “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” David Moles nanodumps steroids—or maybe AI bombs—into Cory Doctorow’s already cyber-wackiness-fortified soup. I really admire this story’s cleverness, and the perceptual reversals, but I found it just a little more exhausting than entertaining. I think this stems from my sense of never feeling like I could get under the character’s skin, and that the story’s repository of techno-ideas and extrapolations was something to be admired from a distance rather than fully understood or experienced. Perhaps that’s ironic for such a sophisticated exercise in VR-building. But then again, it was the only story in the collection to feature mathematical notation, and for some readers that may be reward—or punishment—enough.

Joseph is preparing for his bar mitzvah, receiving lessons from the kindly Rabbi Tuvim, who owns curious collections of objects as diverse as a box of keys (no locks) and shelves of old magazines. But, as it turns out, “The Rabbi’s Hobby,” at first little more than a pleasant distraction, will have far-reaching consequences for Joseph’s rite of passage into manhood. Peter S. Beagle crafts here a powerful, memorable tale focusing on how human emotion may give rise to that which logically appears impossible. There is much to recommend in this piece: the loving attention paid to period detail (it unfolds in the 1950s), the rising tension expertly built through small discoveries and forged connections, the metaphorical levels to Joseph’s passage into adulthood, incredibly engaging characters, and a beautiful, meditative sense of forces unseen and unusual beauties discovered.

“The Seventh Expression of the Robot General” may be a well-guarded secret, “a blend of the look of a hungry child, the gaze of an angry bull, and the stern countenance of God,” but to fully understand the pivotal role it plays in the Harvang war and in the General’s own life story one should read Jeffrey Ford’s violent, larger-than-life, tragicomic account of it. Ford pushes and twists this material as far as it will go. Employing a similar technique to Paul Cornell, the outrageous and comic-book nature of the proceedings is delivered in a deadpan tone that mimics objectivity. Though not as emotionally arresting or as intimately bleak as a lot of Ford’s recent stories (collected in The Drowned Life) this is just as dark. At times the humor came across as somewhat uninspired to me, though on the whole, it was a funny read. I missed some of the wild inventiveness I’ve come to appreciate in Ford’s work. Then again, perhaps the depersonalized, somewhat mechanical feel to this story wasn’t entirely accidental.

Richard Parks’s “Skin Deep” seems only to travel precisely that far, specially by comparison with the stories that surround it. It starts off well enough: “The hardest part of Ceren’s day was simply deciding what skin to put on in the morning.” The following paragraphs reveal that these skins allow Ceren to literally become someone else, with that being’s associated knowledge and skills: Oaf, Tinker, Soldier, etc. There is a shelf that holds a skin Ceren has never worn—is she ready for what she will learn once she does? These initial scenes also depict a low-tech environment, and the combination of ideas and setting could have made for an arresting, emotive story. Alas, I feel that the story’s execution is not up to its ideas or to the character’s journey. My opinion: the foreshadowing reveals too much too soon, making the ending non-climactic, the characters are not depicted uniquely enough for us to care about them, and the prose is repetitive (for example, “Ceren still felt as if she was just borrowing the lot” and then “Yet she still felt like a usurper”). This inelegance in the narrative proved distracting. In one page we learn that “Ceren sighed. She wasn’t happy about other people being so close.” Four pages later, “She sighed and then went to clean her razor in the cold stream.” Two pages after: “The strange girl’s reflection sighed” and a page after that “Still, too close, to all of them.” Later, “The Soldier kept low and moved quickly,” and then “Ceren and the Soldier […] slipped away quickly into the trees,” and in the very next page, “The Soldier moved quickly and quietly” and two pages later again “Ceren […] then quickly turned back toward her own home.” If one can overlook these craft issues, the story may be appealing on a basic level. As written, however, I have to disagree with Strahan’s assessment in the introduction that it is “strong.” Earlier in the same introduction, when discussing what he seeks out in stories, Strahan writes that “It’s also not a matter of structure or technical approach.” In this case for me, as a reader, it was.

Tony Daniel’s “Ex Cathedra” is huge in its ideas, far larger than any cathedral you could ever imagine, and is told in amphetamine prose. It is so jam-packed with far-out concepts that keeping track of all of them is almost dizzying, though the attempt (and the pile-on effect) are exhilarating. The first-person narrator works for a company constructing the eponymous Cathedral; there are problems with his wife, Rebecca, as well as another woman, and his children have been stolen. These elements might seem like the ingredients for a present-day melodrama, but Daniel’s direction takes things very far from there, into twisting, uncertain grounds, and far beyond. The pace of the story accelerates noticeably, as is evidenced by the length of paragraphs and sentences. Past the midway mark, it began to feel too breathless, with machine-gun blasts of revelation spat out in one-sentence and then one-word paragraphs. If I’d had the opportunity to stop during the final scenes, I might have mused that the story felt choppy—but I didn’t have the chance to stop, sucked in by cliffhanger after cliffhanger right up until the last few words. Upon reflection, I’m not convinced how well this aggressive approach works for Daniel’s purposes and how many of the pieces fit smoothly together, but I can’t deny that it makes “Ex Cathedra” uninterruptible.

Strahan notes that Terry Dowling’s “Truth Window: A Tale of the Bedlam Rose” is the author’s “first new Wormwood story in seventeen years.” I’ve never read a Wormwood story, and I’m not sure why Dowling paused seventeen years between this and the previous entry; but I do feel that, unlike Schroeder’s series-related piece, it may benefit from previous acquaintance with the material. To be fair, the story starts with a useful infodump. The story proper begins with Raine Halva Belicrue’s research into a question (“What do you know of the Lady Mondegreen?”) that leads into linguistic and xeno-cultural territory, with several twists and asides along the way. I didn’t come away from “Truth Window” with the sense that it was as “complete” as Strahan claims, but for other readers this may not be an issue. There were some amusing elements, and the concept of being “fiercely localized,” for instance, repeated several times, was intriguing. I’m just not sure I was able to fully appreciate the significance of what I read.

“Fury” by Alastair Reynolds unabashedly makes use of Golden Age SF ideas and scenarios, albeit sufficiently updated so they don’t feel archaic. Mercurio is the Emperor’s personal bodyguard and has shared a long, personal history of protection and service with him. An act of sabotage inside the Emperor’s private koi ponds sets Mercurio on a path of sleuthing that takes him on a fascinating journey into the very origins of the Radiant Commonwealth. Reynolds’s prose is confident, assured, and the combination of mystery and classic SF elements is adeptly handled. The story never strays into nostalgia and is virtuous enough in its assembly to make us forget its heavy borrowings; the ending is also suitably subtle. It is an excellent lead-out to the anthology—furiously fun.

I would be surprised if several of these stories weren’t up for major awards next year and included in the Year’s Best lists of recommended reading. Quite rightly, they deserve to be. And as for the few misses and disappointments? It may simply be a case of being eclipsed by their stellar companions.

Publisher: Night Shade Books (November 2008)
Price: $10.17
Trade paperback: 256 pages
ISBN: 1597801364