New short fiction from Nancy Kress, James Patrick Kelly, Ian R. Macleod, Lawrence Persson, Forrest Aguirre, and a debut for Felicity Shoulders. Book Reviews by Peter Heck
Asimov's Science Fiction (ISSN 1065-2698, 142pp) for June 2008 has the usual Departments: Sheila Williams introduces, Peter Heck reviews Books, Erwin Strauss highlights the convention calendar, and Robert Silverberg offers his thoughts in his monthly column. And of course Asimov's fiction is as heavy-hitting as ever.
James Patrick Kelly
Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author and pundit James Patrick Kelly has two different anniversaries to celebrate in the June 2008 issue.
Kelly celebrates the tenth anniversary of his 'On The Net' column this month with some nostalgia, and a lot of links. The column is available on the website, and worth checking out.
Kelly also contributes a story to a June issue for the twenty-fifth consecutive time. Starting with 'Saint Theresa of the Aliens' in 1984, Kelly has contributed a roll-call of the best SF stories of the last two decades to each consecutive June issue including the landmark 'Think Like A Dinosaur,' 'Bernardo's House' and 'The Prisoner of Chillon' (a personal favourite).
Ironically 'Surprise Party' isn't one of the strongest stories Kelly's ever written, at least on first read-through. But on re-reading this glimpse into one possible fuure of professional fiction writing improves considerably, and Mercedes Nunez and her 'beamers' ("in the old virtual reality days...you watched and listened to neuros, instead of inviting them to live between your ears." [p.39] may well end up some awards ballots and/or in or more of the 'Best of' anthologies.
Nancy Kress
The issue actually opens with 'Call Back Yesterday,' the sort of story -which opens in an institute that isn't what it seems- that Nancy Kress could probably write almost on auto-pilot. The story isn't bad, but it's remarkably similar in tone and content to many others Kress has delivered over the years, and full of stock characters that don't linger very long.
Much better is a debut story, Felicity Shoulder's 'Burgerdroid.' A woman is paid by a fast-food company to impersonate a robot so that they can charge premiums for their product, in a poignant tale that examines identity and the depersonalization of work. Highly recommended.
1962
With '1962' Forrest Aguirre commendably avoids certainty when ending the story of a leukemia-stricken adolescent, his widowed mother, and the two old codgers who act as surrogate parents during the Cuban Missile Crisis (Which sadly, is too often a default setting for American SF). It's intriguing to read the old arguments in favour of the Soviet Union from a Fellow Traveller and his sparring partner's reactionary rants with the benefit of hindsight and distance.
Like '1962,' Derek Kunksen's 'Beneath Sunlit Shallows' recovers from an awkward opening to become a fine, powerful examination of the emotional and ethical consequences of genetic engineering.
In Lawrence Persson's 'Gabe's Globster,' a misanthropic recluse encounters the eponymous creature on a Carribean beach. None of the individual elements -reclusive artist, impoverished surroundings, first contact- are unique, but Persson blends them together pleasingly and shows that in the right hands even the oldest tropes gain new life.
Ian R. MacLeod
'The Hob Carpet' by Ian R. Macleod is set in an alternate world where Neanderthals live amongst humans as slaves. When the world lurches toward another ice age, one man who has bothered to learn Hob ways is made a scapegoat. But the narrator is more than simply a heretic, he's this world's Darwin. To say more than that it's one of the very best stories of the year would be superfluous,
