Asimovs Science Fiction July 2008
Volum 32 issue 7, Whole number 390 reviewed
Fiction this month from regulars Steven Utley and Briton Brian Stableford, veteran Michael Bishop, Kij Johnson, R. Neube and debutant Gord Sellar, reviews and columns..
Asimovs SF Magazine (ISSN 1065 2698, 142pp) has the usual columns and interesting fiction in their July issue.
Gord Sellar's "Lester Young and the Jupiter's Moons' Blues" has the oddest setting of any story this year. In an alternate 1940s USA, the solar system has been settled by aliens who have hired bands of Negro jazz musicians, Russian circus artistes, and French can-can dancers to entertain them on tours of the Solar System. It's a terrific story, and should deservedly bring Sellar wider exposure.
Steven Utley's Silurian Tales
Steven Utley has been writing his Silurian Tales since 1993. Rarely can a writer have focused on such an infinitesimally small part of a whole imagined universe. Over and over again Utley has looked at the effects of time travel back to the Silurian Age, sometimes writing alternate -even contradictory- views of the process. In "The Woman Under the World," he examines the effects of a malfunction in the time-travel process, and it's impact on the ghost-woman it creates. It's short, well-crafted and poignant.
R. Neube's "Cascading Violet Hair" is an eccentric love story set in the aftermath of 'the murdered earth' with an overweight clerk's attraction to a refugee, who turns out to have a long history of criminal behaviour, despite all his friend's warnings. In the end the story doesn't quite go where the reader might expect -- or perhaps it does -- but it's entertaining enough.
Michael Bishop
Michael Bishop returns to Asimovs after a long absence (fourteen years since the Hugo nominated novella "Cri de Coeur") with "Vinegar Peace, Or The Wrong -Way Used-Adult Orphanage," as bleak a story as has been published this year; Mrs K- a woman whose daughter -her last remaining child-- has been killed in The War on Worldwide Wickedness, is removed to a reverse orphanage for those parents who have outlived their children. It would be easy -and facile- to sum up Bishop's story as an outpouring of grief at the death of his son Jamie, but Bishop also articulates some trenchant thoughts on the ersatz emotion that permeates much of our society.
In Kij Johnson's "26 Monkeys, Also The Abyss" a woman and her lover travel around the USA in a touring bus with the eponymous monkeys, a claw-footed bathtub, and a magic act that culminates in the monkeys vanishing; and a few hours later, returning. It's spare, elliptical, and devastatingly moving. One of the best stories of the year.
Brian Stableford
Brian Stableford has been publishing complex short-fiction and novels since 1968. In the intervening years British and American SF has grown more homogenized; Stableford is --together with fellow Briton Ian Watson-- an ideas writer who, while still writing plot-driven fiction, is not afraid to stray into the bizarre.
"The Philosopher's Stone," is part of a sequence set in an alternate sixteenth-century England ruled over by Queen Jane, in which Francis Drake and others ascend into space in ether-ships. This is harking back to pre-Wellsian fictional universes, and to make it even more complex, Stableford introduces a colossal intergalactic power struggle as a backdrop, only imperfectly glimpsed through the filter that is the eyes of a sixteenth-century protagonist.
Because it's the third story of a sequence there's a lot of catching up to do, and this necessarily limits the impact of the story, but it's nice to see genuinely alternate-world fiction taken to such extreme lengths, and Stableford is to be commended on his vision.
