Asimov's SF September 2008
Volume 32 issue 8, Whole number 391 -- Science Fiction reviewed
Jul 30, 2008
Unusually September's issue of Asimov's SF Magazine (ISSN 1065 2698, 142pp) carries only short stories and novelettes, rather than the trademark novellas for which the magazine has become so noted.
William Barton opens with 'In the Age of the Quiet Sun,' a ramming together of two existent titles (The Age of Aquarius and Wilson Tucker's The Year of the Quiet Sun) which pretty much sums up this story. Those who love acronyms, jargon, name-checks of the SF canon and pop culture from the middle 20th century will love it.
At least Robert R Chase tries to create something original with 'Soldier of the Singularity,' although there is still a barely subsumed urge to look back to some lost Golden Age of SF. Sadly, the story is bogged down with extended infodumps, and changes direction far too abruptly.
Mary Rosenblum
The issue really only gets into gear with Mary Rosenblum's 'Horse Racing,' in which futures traders do literally what their name says, by backing prospective high-flyers, in the same way that dealers will buy horses as an investment; and the gamble can backfire in exactly the same way. Rosenblum wisely concentrates on the story's revelations as much as the idea, and the result should garner Honourable Mentions, if not inclusion in one or more Year's Best.
Ian Creasey is a name less-known than Rosenblum, but he's rapidly earned himself a place as another Asimov's regular. 'Cut Free the Bonds of Flesh and Bone' tells an acerbic story of when death may not be the final chapter in our lives, and the emotional fall-out that that particular development may wreak on family life through a Scottish reporter and her domineering mother. An excellent story.
Stephen Utley
Utley has been writing his Silurian Tales for fifteen years now with a persistence that verges on obsession, depicting closely-observed cameos of the lives of time-travelers on the other side of a wormhole that allows access to only one point in space and time, to earth of over four hundred million years ago. 'Slug Hell' is as intensely visual a vignette as prose can convey.
Will McIntosh seems to be everywhere at the moment; he's had stories in Strange Horizons, Black Static and Interzone this year. The temptation to call 'Midnight Blue' charming is almost overwhelming, but it woulds be a pun too far. It's an engaging tale of a suburbia where small symbiotic life forms crop up which, when combined and absorbed, bestow powers on their users. It's a beautifully written story that makes the whole issue worth reading.
Derek Zumsteg's 'Usurpers' takes the plot from Ian MacDonald's 1990 novellette 'Winning' and inverts it from the perspective of a young black runner in Seattle racing against genetically enhanced rich kids; it has neither MacDonald's lyricism nor the searing ending of that story, but it's competent in it's brutal, angry way and bodes well for more from an author whose first prose sale this is.
Stephen Baxter
The issue ends with Stephen Baxter returning to the universe of his early steampunk novel, Anti-Ice with the outstanding 'The Ice War.' Wastrel Jack Hobbes is chased out of town by an angry farmer when a comet falls to earth disgorging ice-eggs which hatch into larger creatures. Hobbes falls in with Sir Isaac Newton, Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift, who are all on a mission from the King to stop the invasion, but it in natural forces which come to their aid. Baxter is unrivalled at creating uchronias (alternate worlds) which feel absolutely real, and this wondrous little frozen gem is no exception.
A high point to end a wildly uneven issue.
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