Asimov's Science Fiction: July 2013 (22 page)

Kristine Kathryn Rusch's
thrilling August 2013 novella plunges us headlong into "The Application of Hope." Captain Tory Sabin developed a system for searching for faster-thanlight space vessel years after her father's craft was lost. Decades later, she must use that system in a desperate race against time to locate her lover's ship in the treacherous and unknown reaches of foldspace.

Jack Skillingstead
folds time and space together to give us the quietly moving "Arlington";
Gwendolyn Clare
transports us to a distant planet for a harsh look at "Stone to Stone, Blood to Blood";
Gregory Norman Bossert
follows artists engaged in a strange casting of "Lost Wax"; while two children in
Leah Thomas's
new tale for
Asimov's
must try to rescue their father from "The Ex-Corporal."

Robert Silverberg
has taken upon himself the enviable chore of "Rereading Simak" for his August Reflections column;
James Patrick Kelly's
On the Net asks "What Counts?";
Paul Di Filippo's
On Books examines the works of Peter F. Hamilton, Tim Powers, Kit Reed, and others; plus we'll have an array of poetry that you're sure to enjoy. Look for our August issue on sale at newsstands on June 18, 2013. Or subscribe to
Asimov's—
in paper format or in downloadable varieties—by visiting us online at
www.asimovs.com
.
We're also a vailable individually or by subscription on
Amazon.com's
Kindle and Kindle Fire,
BarnesandNoble.com's
Nook,
ebookstore.sony.com's
eReader,
Zinio.com,
and from
magzter.com/magazines!

new stories by
Ian R. MacLeod, Jack Dann, Gregory Frost, Leah Cypess, Benjamin Crowell, Charlie Jane Anders, Tom Purdom, Dominica Phetteplace, James Sallis, Ian Creasey, Sheila Finch, Alan DeNiro, M. Bennardo, Marissa Lingen,
and many others!

In the issue of this magazine dated January 2012, I touted a stellar YA graphic novel by Ben Hatke titled
Zita the Spacegirl
(2011). As I write, it's still 2012, and I get to rave now about the sequel,
Legends of Zita the Spacegirl
(First Second, trade paper, $12.99, 224 pages, ISBN: 978-1596434479). I hereby declare 2012 to have been a really good year for spacegirls!

If you recall the scenario: plucky young Earthgirl Zita, accidentally teleported offplanet and into a churning, complicated galactic civilization, performed heroically during a crisis, but ultimately remained stranded among aliens, lacking a special crystal to return her home. But she's not friendless, hanging out with a roguish human male named Piper, her giant sentient mouse buddy Pizzicato, and a few other pals.

Our new book opens at an indeterminate point after the conclusion of its predecessor. To survive, Zita is reduced to freak show status, handing out autographs under Piper's carny barkering, and trying to live down her fifteen minutes of fame. By chance, along comes a little junked robot, the Imprint-o-tron, which takes a fancy to mimic Zita. At first, Zita sees the chance to pull a "prince and the pauper" routine, and escape her responsibilities. But her fun and games go awry. Robot Zita takes her place with Piper, leaving Real Zita stranded. Just when an alien race called the Lumponians needs her to fight off an invasion of Star Hearts. Can Robot Zita do the job of a true hero? Will flesh-and-blood Zita ever reunite with Piper and her entourage? Will the Doom Squad of Judge Dredd-like cops nail her first, for spaceship theft? And what of Madrigal, star gypsy, and her giant cat Glissando? Friends, foes, or something in between? The plot twists and turns, leaving the reader continually guessing, until an exciting climax. (And also a cliffhanger; hurry up, Hatke, with Volume 3!)

Hatke does superbly here everything he did in the first volume. The storytelling is top notch: sophisticated and speculative, silly and serious by turns. Zita's characterization remains endearing and believable. The subsidiary characters all have their trademark quirks that allow them to serve as likable and admirable foils. The enigmatic relationship between Piper and Madrigal remains a deliciously unplumbed mystery.

On the art front, Hatke's designs for the assorted aliens, humans, robots and animals remain a fount of alluring fecundity. The fabled "Cantina" scene from
Star Wars
has nothing on a less-clichéd Hatke. His panel arrangements all conduce toward a smooth reading experience. And sometimes, as on pages 82-83, where he spreads out across two pages, he goes for effective widescreen fireworks. I don't believe I mentioned in my prior review how wonderful the colors are, too. A palette that ranges the spectrum from subdued to eye-popping. It must also be said that Hatke is suitably indulgent with a fair amount of "gratuitous" (read, essential) eyekicks, in the manner of the best Will Elder comics. For instance, you might be so entranced by the departure of Zita's little spaceship on page 49 that you fail to notice a giant dead (?) robot sprawled across a plateau below her. Hatke never boringly explains this stuff, either, trusting in the imaginations of his readers to fill in the blanks as they wish.

Oddly enough, in this totally G-rated book, I flashed at times on the work of R-rated Vaughan Bodē, in such SF books
as
Sunpot
and
Cobalt-60.
Maybe it was the slangy speech of some of the aliens that reminded me of Bodē's comics. Certainly, the styles of the two artists are not similar. But I think that Hatke shares some of Bodē's irreverent zest for life. And that's essential for a winning series such as this one.

British writer Peter Dickinson, now aged eighty-four, has always had a curious glancing relationship with fantastika. His career has intersected our genre many times, often quite substantially and impressively. He's won awards in the UK. But he's just as well known, if not better known, for his mystery novels, and has never quite attained a slot in the higher pantheon of SF/F/H authors, or, I would venture, in the forefront of the consciousness of many fans. Perhaps his splendid new collection from Small Beer Press's Big Mouth House imprint,
Earth and Air: Tales of Elemental Creatures
(trade paper, $14.95, 256 pages, ISBN 978-1618730381) will help change that undeservedly low profile.

It eventuates that this volume is third in a series, unknown to me. Dickinson and his celebrated fantasist mate Robin McKinley have previously released two co-authored books$#x2014;
Water
and
Fire
$#x2014; concerning elemental beings from those two classical realms. Lacking fresh stories from McKinley with which to partner, and seeking to circumvent his own mortality, Dickinson has chosen to go solo with his own tales from the remaining two spheres.

From the very first story, "Troll," we are plainly in the hands of a master. This narrative concern Mari Gellers, who bears ancestral nonhuman genes from some generations-past female-troll intercourse, and what happens when she herself marries and runs afoul of her lineage. Dickinson's voice in the mimetic first half of this story is supple and assured, powerful yet subtle. When the supernatural intervenes in the second half, we are perfectly primed. Dual plotlines converge, and a surprise ending tops it all. Brilliant!

The next tale, "Ridiki," exhibits the same taut, smooth, hypnotic blend of naturalism and the uncanny. A young Greek lad named Steff loses his beloved dog to a snake's bite, then finds himself embarking on a half-believed supernatural quest to recover her. Dickinson's prose does not waste a word. His understatement achieves more than any brand of pyrotechnics, proving that restraint is more effective than excess when it comes to creating an atmosphere of the weird, and conducing toward emotional identification between reader and protagonist.

"Wizand" extends Dickinson's reach, since it is a kind of science fiction/horror tale, a blend of Hal Clement and Michael Shea. In a semi-scientific preface, Dickinson reveals the existence of creatures called wizands, who throughout human history have taken symbiotic psychic possession of certain individuals$#x2014;mainly those we come to call witches. In our modern era, an ancient wizand joins forces with a young girl named Sophie Winner. Dickinson follows her curious occult growth into young adulthood, when her coolly inhuman final fate overtakes her.

In "Talaria," Dickinson gets a kind of Robert E. Howard vibe going at first, which gradually transitions into a sort of Lord Dunsany fabulistic atmosphere. Early in the first Christian millennium, a slave named Varro escapes from Timbuktu. At a desert oasis he has an encounter with a mythic beast, and survives. But the Ovidian metamorphosis he undergoes leads to an unforeseen existence for him, much grander than anything he could have predicted.

"Scops" takes place in Christian Byzantium, with fairy-tale directness. A simple brother and sister, Yanni and Euphanie, come into possession of an tutelary animal familiar, which in turns opens them to the attention of the pagan gods. Then the pair must deal with an irruption of darker forces, using their humble skills to the utmost.

Finally, "The Fifth Element" ventures into pure SF territory, of the Simak or Sheckley or van Vogt kind. On a strange planet, the crew of a commercial spaceship$#x2014;a hybrid mix of many species, including one Man$#x2014;finds itself facing a weird threat$#x2014;from within its own ranks!

This volume delivers a vast range of reading pleasure, from a writer who, despite not dwelling exclusively within our big tent of fantastika, proves himself a solid family patriarch and mage.

Although 2012 might have been a good year for spacegirls, it also took away from us the beloved Ray Bradbury, who, even at the end of a long distinguished career, was still gifting us with more work. Perhaps most significantly, right around the time of Bradbury's passing, Subterranean Press brought out
Nemo!
(hardcover, $35.00, 176 pages, ISBN 978-1-59606-397-6), Bradbury's translation into film script of Winsor Mc-Cay's classic
Little Nemo in Slumberland.
The book must be approached on three planes: how well is the script written, strictly as a reading experience; how good a movie would it make; and how faithfully does it conjure up the atmosphere and spirit of the original?

By way of background, I cannot find any history relating to the composition of this work. An internal reference to the music of John Williams makes it at least somewhat contemporary. What I'm guessing is that it derives from Bradbury's well-documented stint working on the animated cartoon from 1989,
Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland.

First, the writing. Most scripts (dialogue aside) are written as banal instruction sets for the director, actors, and film-making crew. There are exceptions, of course. Alan Moore's comicbook scripts are famous for being elaborate works of art. I would put Bradbury's
Nemo!
in the middling ranks of that superior class. It's eminently readable as sheer prose, full of patented Bradbury zip and zest and language. "MACHINERY grinds and TINKLES, PURRS and intercogs in secret stuffs." Gorgeous! Whether he intended for this script to be published widely, or just could not help exerting himself to the fullest for even a minimal audience, Bradbury does not stint or compromise on his prose. The text is full of his typical joy and relish for the fantastic.

What about the watchability of the movie that would result from this script, always assuming that talented film people did their best with it? At 176 pages, translating at the industry standard of one minute of screentime per page of script, we're talking about a three-hour film. Plainly, this script is too long. Nemo doesn't even really get to Slumberland till about sixty pages in$#x2014;using up the first hour of screentime! Then, I also find an excess of chases and huggermugger, as opposed to any character development or world-building. No, purely as a cinematic blueprint, however much fun it might be to read, this script will not cut it.

But it's on the third plane that, sadly, Bradbury loses me entirely. The dream-world he builds might be fascinating, might be primal Bradbury, full of his touchstones$#x2014;but it's not McCay's creation, despite an odd moment or two that visually replicates the newspaper strips. What went wrong?

First, Bradbury attempts to give Nemo a backstory. This is precisely the wrong move. Nemo's cipher-like little boy existence allowed him to stand in for every human visitor who ever wandered nightly past the Gates of Sleep. Nemo, as we all know, means "no one," and so he should remain. Now, instead, the arc of his back-story has to be fulfilled by Nemo's adventures in Slumberland, giving them the programmatic quality McCay avoided so well. This culminates in an explicit moral on page 155.

Second, Bradbury's Slumberland has no internal consistency, no invariant geography, no sense of another ontological realm with its own backstory. It's too silly, without grandeur or mystery. Paradoxically, this venue needs substantiali

ty, not Nemo. It has to feel more real than he is! Third, the serial nature of the comic strips is gone, whereby Nemo inched closer and closer to his ultimate destination in each installment. Fourth, Bradbury introduces a new, useless character: Omen, Nemo's doppelganger, a kind of Peter Pan demiurge. Doubling Nemo deprives the visitor from the daylight world of half his responsibilities and privileges, half his dangers and rewards. Lastly, the "physics" of Slumberland are all bent from McCay's simple yet powerful paradigm of total immersion until accidental wakening. Now they are unclear, allowing pretty much anything to happen, thus rendering everything equally consequential or inconsequential.

Many, if not all, of these defects were doubtlessly induced by the demands of the movies: certain inescapable Hollywood beliefs about character and plot. Much like the unsatisfactory movie versions of Seuss and Sendak$#x2014;two creators influenced by McCay$#x2014;this script cannot address nor capture the true Jungian surrealism of the original. It just evaporates with the light of day.

Cat Rambo's new story collection,
Near & Far/Far & Near
(Hydra House, trade paper, $16.95, 294 pages ISBN 978-0-984301-4-5) comes with an old-school hook. It's printed in the classic Ace Double fashion$#x2014;dos-a-dos, as John Clute dubs it$#x2014;with half the stories,
Far,
dealing with the distant future, while those in
Near
relate more closely to the present. But of course, this packaging is merely frosting on a delicious fictional red velvet cake.

Let's start with a sampling from
Near.
"The Mermaids Singing, Each to Each" is Delany-quality speculation about marine scavengers, and in fact makes me recall "Driftglass." Weird chrono-trips are the topic of "Peaches of Immortality." Straight-up horror fills "Close Your Eyes," while Ballardian decadence informs "Real Fur." "Vocobox" read like a blend of Henry Kuttner and Barry Malzberg. And Heinleinian SF gets dragged into the twenty-first century with "Long Enough and Just So Long."

Rambo's prose is always muscular and streamlined, yet capable of poetic effects. Her plotting is tight and suspenseful. Her speculations are full of cyberpunkish intensity, and yet respectful of hard-core SF conceits. She has a love for biological tropes. Consider this description from "Memories of Moments, Bright as Falling Stars." "The Exams were the freak show I expected. Rich people buy mods and make them unnoticeable, plant them in a gut or hollow out a leg. This level, people want to make sure you know what they got. Wal-Mart memory spikes blossomed like cartoon hair from one girl's scalp, colored sunshine yellow, but most had chosen bracelets, jelly purple and red, covering their forearms. One kid had scales, but they looked like a home job, and judging from the way he worried at them with his fingernails, they felt like it too."

The offerings in
Far
are rich with exotic aliens ("A Querulous Flute of Bone"); weird social systems ("Seeking Nothing"); and disruptive technologies to which humans have made strange accommodations ("Surrogates"). Readers will savor piquant tastes of James Tiptree, David Marusek, and Jack Vance in these colorful tales.