Book Report #51 - Year's Best SF 16 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer

Taking on the science fiction short stories of 2010 was surely a monumental task.  The fact that the editors can do it over again each year is commendable.

I first approached the book in the wrong way; I wanted it to give me the sense of wonder that the cover evoked.  Exploration, the unknown, technology - the future.

What I got was a mixed bag of Steam Punk, Post-Apocalyptic, Alternative Reality, Slip Stream along with some more traditional Science Fiction.

The book is more a reflection of what was being published in 2010 not a collection of straight ahead SF which caused my disappointment with the book as a whole.

Out of the 21 stories I liked about 16 of them, 76%, not bad really, but from that group only three of them could be said to be set off-world.  That's only 14% of the total stories.

What happened?  Where has science fiction gone?  Well, like just about any kind of entertainment SF is a reflection of the times they were written in.  Back in the 40's, 50's and 60's it was all about the space race.  But ever since Gene Cernan left the moon in 1972 humanity has never left low earth orbit.  A generation of thinkers, scientists, engineers and writers have no experience with space flight and exploration.

These days SF is slipping into the past with Steam Punk or delving into the world of computers, virtual reality, augmented reality and consciousness uploading.  The last story in the book has a line that perfectly describes SF today:

"For a long time, for many people and certainly for me, the past had taken the future's place, as any hope or sense of forward progress had dried up and disappeared.  But now, as I aged, more and more of the past had taken over the present also, because the past was all we had. "

From Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance by Paul Park

Like Park suggests I many have to mine the past to enjoy fiction of the future.  It's to the musty back issues of SF magazines and collections of reprint classic SF fiction for me.

Sigh.

Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance by Paul Park

Oh my God!  I hated, hated, hated this story.

This was 67 pages of utter Literary Fiction, self-indulgent, nonsensical drivel.

I wanted to throw the book across the room but kept reading it because the editors promised an SF story in the end.

Yuck!

Skip it. 

Eight Miles by Sean McMullen

This was an interesting Steam Punk story set in the mid 1800's.  Told from the point of view of a man who owns a hot air balloon who is approached by a wealthy gentleman who pays for his services to conduct some high-altitude experiments.

The subject of the experiments is Angelica who is described as a werefox, having many of the characteristics of a fox most notably being covered in fur.  Through repeated attempts to go higher we discover that the wealthy gent has discovered that Angelica becomes more alert the thinner and colder the air gets as the balloon gains altitude.

Steam punk is always fun when it's done right and keeps to the engineering knowledge of the time.  This story was fun.

Sean McMullen

The author's website is HERE

His bibliography is HERE

The story was originally published in Analog September 2010.

Jackie's-Boy by Steven Popkes

This is another post-apocalypse story where we follow Michael Ripley, 11 years old, into the St. Louis zoo where he discovers and befriends an Indian elephant named Jackie.  The zoo still has power and is being cared for by a robotic keeper named Ralph.

Early on in the story we learn that Jackie can speak and she can read.  She gets Michael to find everything written down in the labs and brings them to her to read.  She is on a mission to learn something but is unwilling to let Michael in on it.

She learns of an elephant sanctuary in Tennessee and decides she want to find the herd that must be there.  Together they travel south along the Mississippi to the Ohio river, avoiding dangers and looking for a way across into Tennessee.  All the bridges have been destroyed.

The dangers increase when they make their way across the Ohio river and find their way to their destination.

I had a bit of fun reading this by following their route using Google Maps.  You certainly got the sense of how large and imposing the rivers are and how big the bridges are, or were, in the case of the story.

In the end I enjoyed the story.  The talking elephant part was an easy thing to suspend my disbelief.

Steven Popkes

The authors website is HERE

His bibliography is HERE

The story was originally published in Asimov's April-May 2010 issue.

The Cassandra Project by Jack McDevitt

Being an Apollo buff I loved this story about Jerry Carter, a PR man for NASA who is working on the Minerva program which is a shared US/Soviet mission to return to the moon.

Before the historic launch the Russians release some pictures, from the far side of the moon from 1967.  In those pictures a structure is found on the surface and a tabloid runs them and causes a sensation.  Pictures from NASA circa 1968 show no such structure.  The incident is laughed off and explained as a technical error.

Jerry is intrigued by this and decides to look into it a bit further, what he discovers is very interesting.

I always love big government stories like this one, where there incredible discoveries just waiting in a box in an archive somewhere in a little used facility.  Cover-ups are fun especially when a decision must be made to keep it secret or to let it out.

The story was first published in the first issue of Lightspeed Magazine, an electronic magazine who's content is available free from the website our you can subscribe and receive it monthly as a digital issue.

Jack McDevitt's website is HERE

His bibliography is HERE

Read the story online HERE

Check out Lightspeed Magazine HERE

Jack McDevitt

The Good Hand by Robert Reed

Here was an interesting story, an alternative history tale, where the USA and only the USA has The Bomb. How would have US foreign policy been different if that was the case?

We follow Kyle Betters, a sales rep for a US company, on a business trip to France. There he discovers that folks in other parts of the world don't really love Americans, or America to be more accurate.

The US has even more influence in world affairs than they do now and have an acute need to control just about anything that could jeopardise "American interests." We are treated to one such event, the bombing of the French space program facilities in Northern Africa. This sweeps Kyle into a situation he cannot control.

I usually stay away from alternative history stories mostly because Eric Flint seems to be the go-to guy of this genre and his covers really turn me off. Firstly, I'm not well versed in the history of the 1600's, so stories set in and around that time have no effect on me. I've seen one cover in particular where there is a bunch of present day red neck yahoos driving through a battlefield in a big red pickup truck. The cover alone was enough to tell me that a story like that is not for me.

If the past is altered I'd much rather read about how it is effecting the present that I know. Like this story does. It's a bit of a thought experiment using the classics SF question: "what if?" I found myself drawn more to the Geo-political side of the story and could have kept on reading this into a novel length story.

Showing the effects of a large scale event on the life of just one man is a perfect way to illustrate how different the world could have been.

I really liked this one.

Robert Reed

The author's website is HERE

The author's bibliography is HERE

 

Penumbra by Gregory Benford

More flash fiction than short story this little story weighs in at three and a half pages.

If you are interested in astronomy then you may have heard of gamma ray burst. Gamma ray bursts are described as when a large, high-mass star implodes to form a black hole. When this happens huge amounts of gamma ray energy is released.

This kind of discharged has only been observed in other galaxies and it has been speculated that if such an event happened here, in the Milky Way galaxy, it could pose an extinction level calamity on Earth.

This story delves into such an occurrence.

Frankly the story was too short - it could have been expanded a lot and been very entertaining.

I loved the realization of how the characters in this story survived. Nicely thought out.

Gregory Benford

Gregory Benford's website is HERE

Gregory Benford's bibliography is HERE

You can read the story online HERE

First published in the June 10, 2010 issue of Nature

The Hebras and The Demons and the Damned by Brenda Cooper

Even though this is a story about colonists trying to survive on a new planet it really lacked the SFness I like.

To me, there has to be some technology involved otherwise it's just literary fiction hiding on another world.

These colonists are trying to cope with the indigenous wildlife by domesticating a herd of "space-horses" while being aware that they could be attacked by a pack of "space-wolves" at any moment.

This is rally just a western, a ranching story; I'm well aware of the Space Western sub-genre but at least that type of fiction has fun blending the tech with the tumbleweeds.

I was constantly taken out of the story by my thoughts that this could just as easily been set in Africa or Wyoming in the 19th century.

Sure, it all works as SF, but just not for me. I guess I found it too western and not enough space.

Cooper's writing, however, is superb, she kept me engaged enough that I kept reading to the end. I'm not afraid to quit a story if I'm not enjoying it. Cooper had a confident way of telling the story that kept me reading.

To me, the best example of space-western is Firefly.

Would I read more from Cooper? Absolutely, she's that good.

Brenda Cooper

The author's website is HERE.

Brenda Cooper's Bibliography is HERE

First published in Analog December 2010

To Hie From Far Cilenia by Karl Schroeder

What a neat story!  Part thriller, INTERPOL is looking for some missing plutonium, part Matrix, the chase is mostly conducted online.

What was fun was how the author just expanded on current technology.  Today, virtual reality is pretty much a bust but augmented reality is starting to make in-roads into the gaming world and everyday apps. 

Wikipedia describes Augmented Reality like this:

Augmented reality (AR) is a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data. It is related to a more general concept called mediated reality, in which a view of reality is modified (possibly even diminished rather than augmented) by a computer.

Mapping superimposed
onto the real world.

In the story this is accomplished with special glasses and ear buds.  To track down the plutonium a virtual game called Rivet Couture, which is a steam punk world.  Once the glasses are on modern buildings are removed and Victorian buildings take their place, traffic noises are replaced by the sound of horses and wagons.  This is all superimposed on the real world so when a person walks across a real street that street is also "real" in the virtual world only a delivery truck is replaced by a team of horses.

It was all very cool and the characters could, and often did, take off their glasses just to look around and see where they were in the real world.  The beauty of the world was the blending of the real with the virtual and just how authentic each one really was.

It all comes to a thrilling conclusion on the high seas!

Lots of fun.

Karl Schroeder

Schroeder's website is HERE.

Steadfast Castle by Michael Swanwick

What a fun little story!

This is a quick murder mystery set in the not too distant future. It's very easy to imagine a future where a cop is interrogating the AI of the house a suspects lives in.

Very well imagined and fun. Then it turns dark in a hurry.

Loved it.

The author's website is HERE.  But, be warned, it's out of date.

More current information can be found HERE and HERE.

The story was first published in the September-October issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Graffiti in the Library of Babel by David Langford

This was a strange little tale about first contact but with a twist.

In it a coded message is sent through the Total Library project, if you think about what Google wants to do by scanning every book ever published you then get the idea of this fictional library.

An alien intelligence is trying to communicate with Earth by tagging quotes from the library.

It is definitely a new twist on the much loved SF theme.

It certainly leaves you wondering if we are looking in the right way to find evidence of alien intelligence.

Information on David Langford can be found HERE, HERE and HERE

Ansible can be found HERE

At Budokan by Alastair Reynolds

What happens when you cross the band Metallica with robots?  Or giant robots?

What if you could bio-engineer a rock band?

When does it become too much?

Could you lose control?

At first the story is just a fun little thing.  Whimsical and harmless.  But after you read it you start to think in terms of "What if?"  You just know that this kind of thinking is going on right now, maybe in a more mundane setting, but bio-engineering has the powerful ability to scare anybody who wonders what is going on in the worlds' labs.


Information on Alastair Reynolds can be found HERE, HERE and HERE.

Information on Metallica can be found HERE.

All the Love in the World by Cat Sparks

This was an nice departure on the post-apocalypse story.  This one is smack dab in the "post" part of history and centers around a woman who lives in a walled-in suburban street.  All the neighbors work together to keep their community safe and to cope with the end of civilization as best they can.

But it's not as bad as you might think.  What I liked about the story was the lack of pillaging and chaos.  Instead people do what you'd like to think they would - they try and survive by helping each other. What also made the story credible was how no one really knew what had happened.  There was a war of some kind and civilization has stopped functioning but no one knows why.  As you might expect one of the first things to be lost was communications; TV news was gone, radio and telephones too, what electricity there is is produced locally.  There are sometimes scratchy messages over short wave radio but that is the extent of news from the outside world that can be gathered.

Some people become sick and medicine is needed.  A hazardous walk into town must be made to try and find a doctor who can provide the needed medicine.  Dangers are found along the way but not nearly as intense as expected.  What is found are people just trying to make the best of things as they are.

Life goes on.

Well done indeed.  A nice fresh play on an old type of story.

The author's website is HERE

More on her writing can be found HERE

Under the Moons of Venus by Damien Broderick

Sorry to say that I gave up on this one.

Multiple realities, uncertain narrator, possible insanity throughout ...

Can't follow. Not logical.

Next.

Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra by Vandana Singh

Yikes!

First of all - not Science Fiction.

This is a story about stories; about meaning from folk tales. It is self-described as a tapestry, which was apt since it would go off in one direction, come back to the beginning only to fling itself into another direction.

There is a line that describes this story well:

"The fact that you can't wrest meaning from everything like fruit from trees - that meaning is a matter of not only of story but of what the listener brings to the tale - all that is not something she can face at the moment."

So, yea, it went on like that for many pages.

It also suffered from a trope of SF that I find annoying - the use of unpronounceable names. I find that very distracting.

You can judge for yourself by reading the story HERE at Strange Horizons.

The author's website is HERE