Asimov's Science Fiction: September 2013 (25 page)

Note that phrase,
a world that is somewhat like ours in all but one highly significant detail.
A science fiction story needs to have some underlying speculative concept, or it isn't science fiction no matter how many smeerps and greeznaks it has. And it hardly matters whether the people of the planet Kalgash have streets in their towns or gleebishes in their znoobs, so long as no specifically science fictional situation is presented in the story.

Long ago, Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson dealt with that problem in a classic series of comic masterpieces (eventually collected in 1957 as
Earthman's Burden,
about an Earthlike planet called Toka inhabited by Hokas, intelligent creatures resembling teddy bears, who in the early years of Toka's contact with Earth had seen some old Western movies and had decided to recreate the cultural milieu of those old Westerns on their own world. So they wear red bandannas and ten-gallon hats, and greet some visiting Earthmen with, "Howdy, stranger, howdy.... I'm Tex and my pardner here is Monty."

It's all wildly funny, and the perfect inversion of Horace Gold's "You'll Never See it in GALAXY" back-cover advertisement. Anderson and Dickson did indeed make use of all the clichés of the Western story in the first of the Hoka stories (appropriately called "The Sheriff of Canyon Gulch"), but everything in the story is conceptualized in a legitimately science fictional way, as one would have expected from those two masters of the genre. "If the cowboys are teddy bears," one of the Earthmen asks, "then who—or what—are the Indians?" And they soon find out: they are reptilian creatures, "big tall beings, bigger than I am, but walking sort of stooped over... tails and fangs and green skins, and their talk is full of hissing noises...."

Later Hoka stories played with the Don Juan legend, with Sherlock Holmes, with the pirates of the Caribbean, the romance of the Foreign Legion, and several other familiar standbys of classic mainstream fiction. Should these stories be considered translations of mainstream material into science fiction? Of course. Their very titles signal that. ("The Adventure of the Misplaced Hound." "Yo Ho Hoka!") But they are something more than that, much more, because they depend on an underlying science fictional postulate:
Suppose an alien species decides to imitate Earthly story formulas in real-life existence.
Here's a case where the teddy bears are called Hokas, all right, but that isn't just smeerpism, teddy bears hiding behind a funny name: they are genuine alien beings set in genuine science fiction stories.

Still, they look like teddy bears, and they have redesigned their world to look like this and that bit of what could just as well be movie scenery. Real science fictional thinking went into the Hoka stories, but they are based—deliberately and gloriously so—on Earthly predecessors, just as my "Secret Sharer" novella is a set of science fictional equivalents of Joseph Conrad's story, set aboard a fantastically imagined starship plying the galactic depths instead of a nineteenth-century sailing vessel working the Gulf of Siam. Most science fiction, under close examination, turns out to have some degree of smeerphood about it. Is true conceptual originality possible at all? Let's look at that next issue.

Jets blasting, Bat Durston came screeching down through the atmosphere of Bblizznaj, a tiny planet seven billion light years from Sol. He cut out his super-hyper-drive for the landing... and at that point, a tall, lean space-man stepped out of the tail assembly, proton gun-blaster in a space-tanned hand.

"Get back from those controls, Durston," the tall stranger lipped thinly. "You don't know it, but this is your last space trip."

Hoofs drumming, Bat Durston came galloping down through the pass at Eagle Gulch, a tiny gold colony 400 miles north of Tombstone. He spurred hard for a low overhang of rim-rock... and at that point a tall, lean wrangler stepped out from behind a high boulder, a six-shooter in a sun-tanned hand.

"Rear back and dismount, Bat Durston," the tall stranger lipped thinly. "You don't know it, but this is your last saddle-jaunt through these here parts."

It's time for our slightly spooky October/November 2013 double issue and that means it's time for a little bit of terror and ghosts, a sprinkling of the occult and the outré, along with the usual forays into physics, biological regeneration, and travels through time and space.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
will whisk you off to a scary "Encounter on Starbase Kappa."
Charlie Jane Anders
will bring you back home to an endearing group of misfits who unravel a number of secrets at "The Time Travel Club."

The one eerie person you definitely don't want at your door gives
Sheila Finch
"A Very Small Dispensation"; though the same can't be said of the soul sucker who assures
Gregory Frost
that "No Others Are Genuine";
Ian Creasey
shows us that even science fictional ghosts can't rest "Within These Well Scrubbed Walls";
Jack Dann
reveals the horror that looms for those who are "Waiting for Medusa";
Meg Pontecorvo
gives us an unlucky teenager who discovers what it really means to be "Grounded";
Joel Richards
does some "Deep Diving" into deep space to resolve a murder mystery; in
Neal Asher's
far future, it's hard to trust those "Memories of Earth";
Igor Teper
lyrically composes an ode to "Quantum Orpheus, at the Light Cone's Apex";
Alan DeNiro
develops an innovative, and dangerous art form, in "The Wildfires of Antarctica"; human biology takes off in an equally wild direction for
Ian McHugh
"When the Rain Comin"; and
Paul Di Filippo
conveys what a fool believes in "Adventures in Homogamy: A Love Story."

"Translations II,"
Robert Silverberg's
Reflections column, looks at SF writers inspired by real-life events;
Ed Finn's
Thought Experiment introduces us to the people responsible for "Dreaming Up a Center for Science and the Imagination";
Norman Spinrad's
On Books reviews the suspect logic that attempts to market to stable demographics by dividing books into "Genre Versus Literature";
James Patrick Kelly's
On the Net interviews and reminisces about editor-authors who work "Both Sides of the Desk"; plus we'll have an array of poetry and other features you're sure to enjoy. Look for our October/November issue on sale at newsstands on August 27, 2013. Or subscribe to
Asimov's
—in paper format or in downloadable varieties—by visiting us online at
www.asimovs.com.
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OTHER SEASONS:
The Best of Neal Barrett, Jr.
By Neal Barrett, Jr.
Subterranean Press, $40.00 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-59606-406-5

Barrett, whose work has appeared frequently in
Asimov's,
is one of those authors who transcends category. He has published notable works of SF, crime fiction, historical fiction, YA fiction, comics, and a fair number of titles that defy easy pigeonholing. He also has the respect of his fellow pros, as evidenced by his choice as Author Emeritus by SFWA in 2010. This deluxe "best of" collection would be a fine introduction to his work for anyone who hasn't yet caught up with it.

Included here is "Ginny Sweethips' Flying Circus," nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards in 1988. The setup is a post-apocalyptic world with the protagonist traveling from one settlement to the next in an armored van, from which she and her crew dispense "Sex*Tacos* Dangerous Drugs," according to the sign on display—though none is quite what the sign promises. It also includes talking dogs and a man-sized possum—all heavily armed. The overall effect might best be described as "gonzo"—a word that could have been invented with Barrett in mind. Oh yeah, it's laugh-out-loud funny, too.

But that's only one side of Barrett's artistry. "Stairs," a Sturgeon Award winner in 1989, is a starker vision—a world confined to what looks like a sort of apartment building, with the stairs of the title bustling with the residents. The story focuses on Mary Louise, who lives alone in one of the apartments, fearful of the world outside. What we see of the world beyond her apartment is fragmentary, enigmatic—and piques one's curiosity over what brought such a world into being.

"The Stentorii Luggage" is a story that could have appeared in the heyday of
Galaxy
magazine during the fifties. The protagonist is the manager of a hotel catering to alien races, a smart-mouthed, savvy character faced with a dilemma involving carnivorous shapeshifters brought in as pets by some of his guests—and let loose by a dim-witted bellhop. Barrett plays the situation for laughs, but the suspense is real, the pacing is right on the money, and the solution is suitably ingenious.

Or take "Perpetuity Blues," the story of Maggie McKenna of Marble Creek, Texas. The story has undeniable SF elements—including a character who purports to be a time-traveling alien—but much of the fun of the story is the sheer weirdness of the Texan characters, who often remind this reader both of the "Tuna, Texas" plays and Mary Cooper, Sheldon's mother in "The Big Bang Theory." The dialogue is delicious, showing off Barrett's fine ear for the nuances of regional speech patterns—not just in Texas, but in New York, where Maggie eventually ends up, seeking a career as a writer. Barrett throws in enough bizarre plot twists to keep the reader off balance, but the ending flows logically from what's preceded it.

Several of the stories (including "Stairs") show Barrett experimenting with language, somewhere between the mode of "A Clockwork Orange" and that of Walt Kelly's "Pogo," depending on the mood of the story. "Slidin," one of the newer pieces in the collection, is close to the latter mode as it begins, with an underpinning of Texas dialect, deftly twisted into near-relatives of the original words: "skyscrappers," or "pre-hysterical"—actually, that last one
is
out of Pogo. Laureen, the protagonist, is "kinda whole" in a world where everyone else is drastically mutated—one of her brothers "doesn't breathe air," for example, and her Grandpa Foot can send "nasty" dreams to anyone who annoys him—frequently to her. The family group is going to view the remains of the world that was before—whatever happened, 283 years before. And then the story takes a frightening turn, rushing to its stark conclusion. It's a tour de force of post-apocalyptic SF.

Those are just a few of the highlights of the five-hundred-plus-page collection, in stories that call up echoes of sfnal voices from Robert Sheckley to James Tiptree Jr., but in the end are unmistakably Barrett's. At the same time, his style always carries the flavor of the different eras he has written in. "Stentorii Luggage" is quintessential late fifties, while "Ginny Sweethips" will carry readers back to the new wave/hippie atmosphere of the sixties and seventies. The more recent stories also have the feel of their eras.

Whatever the style, high among his gifts is a rare command of prose rhythm, a fine-tuned sense of when to spin out a phrase and when to clip one short. He also has a good sense of pace, whether in the fast-moving early pulpish stories or the more sinister post-apocalyptic pieces.

With 28 stories, spanning more than five decades, from the sixties to the current century, this volume is an overdue testimony to the accomplishment of one of our best authors.

CYBERPUNK:
Stories of Hardware,
Software, Wetware,
Revolution and Evolution
Edited by Victoria Blake
Underland Press, $15.95
ISBN: 978-1-937-6308-2

Hard as it may be to believe, the cyberpunk revolution is three decades old. That means there are hot young authors—and whole battalions of readers—who weren't yet born when William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Lewis Shiner, and their cohorts were tearing down the walls of SF-dom and doing their bad-boy act on myriad convention panels. If that doesn't make you feel old, it ought to—unless you're one of those twenty-something readers, in which case you probably ought to read this book to see where a lot of the commonplaces of your world-view actually come from.

Editor Blake, who is also the founder of Underland Press, has brought together an excellent cross-section of the cyberpunk era, fleshed out with more recent pieces that carry on the spirit of the original movement. For anyone who was around during the eighties, the phrase "cyberpunk anthology" almost immediately conjures up
Mirrorshades,
the definitive document of the movement, edited by Sterling. Interestingly, that collection and this have only one story in common—the seminal "Mozart in Mirrorshades," by Sterling and Shiner. On the other hand, most of the authors represented in the earlier collection are in this one—in several cases, with more interesting or representative stories. In addition to those already mentioned, we have work by Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Greg Bear, Paul DiFillipo, and Pat Cadigan, all
Mirrorshades
authors.

To begin with, Gibson's contribution here is "Johnny Mnemonic," practically the ur-text of cyberpunk. Published in 1981, it looks at the idea of implanting a cybernetic database in the human body—a more or less logical extension of ideas that people like Arthur C. Clarke had been hinting at for some time. But SF is made as much of words as of ideas, and that's where Gibson marked out fresh territory. From the first line—"I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks..." the reader has been pulled into a world that has much more to do with noir thrillers than with the SF styles of the preceding era. It was that tough, no-frills attitude as much as a blasé attitude about manipulating body parts according to the dictates of fashion—a theme the author could have picked up from Samuel R. Delany, among others—that set the tone for the new era. Gibson parlayed those traits into a string of acclaimed short stories, then took it to novel length and at that point there was no stopping the punk SF revolution.