Interzone #213, December 2007

Chris Roberson’s “Metal Dragon Year” is an alternate history story in which China dominates not only Eurasia and Africa, but colonized the Americas. (Only the “Mexic Dominion” lies outside the control of the “Dragon Throne,” which leaves the two fighting a skirmish war.) It has also industrialized to the point of launching its first space shot, a project being overseen by “Master Foreman” Yusuf Ounaminou, an aerospace engineer hailing from the empire’s North African territories.

The core of the drama is Ounaminou’s struggle to keep China’s first manned orbital flight on schedule after a deadly accident destroys the first craft. Though the author’s compelling premise and graceful writing sustained my interest, the development of the plot is uneven, perhaps moving too slowly for most of the narrative and then rushing in the last two pages. Additionally, the precise details of the conclusion achieve a poetic symmetry at the expense of plausibility.

Nonetheless, Roberson deserves credit for making the final twist both logical and unexpected, and despite these flaws I enjoyed the story overall. It also left me interested in seeing more of this world, which the author further explores in a cycle of forthcoming novels about this “Celestial Empire.”

(Notably, “Metal Dragon Year” is only one of two pieces in issue #213 of Interzone positing an alternate history in which imperial China colonizes North America, dominates a technologically modern but culturally traditional world, and even contends with an independent Mexico over their common border. The other is Aliette de Bodard’s “The Lost Xuyan Bride,” reviewed below.)

The second story in the issue, Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “Molly and the Red Hat,” goes in an entirely different direction. It is about the quest of a little girl to get back a beloved red hat that her mother threw out when she outgrew it. Fantastic and allegorical, it is a modern-day fairy tale informed by a very adult insight and wit, and I found it charming throughout.

In John Phillip Olsen’s “The Men in the Attic,” a restaurant owner named Kyle helps the underground in an unnamed country and an unnamed time hide dissidents from a formally democratic but increasingly totalitarian government. What makes this story different is the way he does it—by storing the dissidents’ minds in his own head. (Those dissidents, notably, are not armed rebels, but a novelist and a journalist who simply fell afoul of the authorities.) The challenges Kyle faces in managing that situation offer a new twist to the familiar science fiction theme of life under a dictatorship. “Attic” is also quite successful in its imaginative demonstration of how close the danger of one lurks beneath the bland surface of life—which, despite the flashy trappings of Huxley, Orwell, and others, is exactly the point.

In Jason Stoddard’s “The Best of Your Life,” Frank Deppo is looking to change his life from cyberpunk to cyberprep. After a decade’s indentured servitude in the neofeudal corporate world of the mid-twenty-first century, it’s time for him to claim his prize—the “best of his life” in a planned community in “San Fernando Valley, Inc.,” designed from the template of American suburbs from a hundred years earlier by a professional “Lifestylist” from the VerV company. (There are actually Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best posters on the walls of the corporate offices.)

The critique of Americans’ flight to suburbia is an old and much-maligned genre, but the issue is kept a current one by the concept’s endless mutations—gated communities, “ex-urbs.” “Life,” which leans toward comedy rather than drama, also offers plenty of twists on that theme. Stoddard quite entertainingly speculates about how new technologies will refine it—and this ultimate commodification of it makes this lifestyle all the more troubling. Additionally, in contrast with most such stories, where the real repulsiveness of the place only becomes apparent after one has actually moved in, the charm of the idea begins to pall on the first page, and it all goes downhill from there.

“Odin’s Spear” by Steve Bein centers on Rono Niyongabo and Namsing Lopje Sherpa, two mountain climbers on the Jovian moon Callisto. Entirely bypassed by humans as they settled the cosmos because of its lack of interesting resources, Rono and Namsing are its sole (temporary) inhabitants for only one reason, the ascent of a giant ice mountain named Gungnir, taller and more formidable than any on Earth.

After three years here, however, damage to Rono’s suit prevents his making the climb, and the report of a meteor impact with the moon before a new suit can arrive forces them to contemplate Namsing’s making the dangerous ascent alone or not at all. That decision, and the final twist in the story inseparable from it, is the core of the human drama. The sheer investment of the two characters in making this climb comes through, but between the initial settlement of the issue and the twist at the end, the story shifts modes, focusing instead on the physical challenge. This shift makes the story a bit uneven, but fortunately, the story is effective in that mode as well, the heavy astronomical and mountaineering detail helping to create a sense of this unique environment’s harshness, isolation, and beauty.

The final story in this issue is Aliette de Bodard’s “The Lost Xuyan Bride.” Like Roberson’s “Metal Dragon Year,” “Bride” assumes an alternate timeline which leaves China’s culture dominant in the world, but de Bodard’s story is less tied up with Big Moments in History. Its focus is instead on a “Mr. Brooks,” an expatriate American private detective from Virginia living in “Xuya,” an ethnic Chinese nation west of the Rocky Mountains which, like the United States, won its independence from its mother country. (One point Lou Dobbs might appreciate—here Americans are generally trying to sneak illegally into Mexico.)

Like many another hard-boiled P.I.’s tale, “Bride” begins when a wealthy woman walks into the protagonist’s office, offering him money he can’t afford to turn down to track down a missing person—in this case, her daughter, He Zhen. Rather than simply exploiting this world as a novel background, the author makes good use of the cultures merging in this region in spinning out the plot, which makes it all the more alive. Consequently, the blending of familiar tropes from noir and alternate history gives the tale a fresh feel, with even the familiar Southern California setting made new by this radically different cultural context.

[Disclosure notice: The Fix is brought to you by TTA Press, publisher of Interzone.]