Asimov's Science Fiction 393/4

Sheila Williams (editor) Asimov's Science Fiction 393/4 (2008)
The lesson here was don't rush out and snap up the next issue before you've read the rest of the one you've just bought, which no-one told me. It seemed like a safe bet because Stephen Baxter's Ice War had been terrific in the September issue; and it's probably significant that it's taken me fifteen fucking years to get around to reading this one. I guess I knew on some level.

Actually, it's not a bad issue - just a bit underwhelming without the virtue of being a pleasantly slender volume through which one may breeze over the course of an afternoon. Specifically, it's a fat double helping of 240 pages comprising two novellas, two novelettes (which are shorter), and five short stories. The short stories vary, but are mostly decent and there's nothing which feels like a waste of time; although by the same token there's nothing I felt worth singling out as specifically noteworthy, possibly excepting Peter Higgins' Listening for Submarines which at least works up a powerful sense of atmosphere.

Of the novelettes, I gave up on Brandon Sanderson's Defending Elysium because the word holo-vid turns up in the third paragraph and after a couple of pages I felt I was reading something inspired by Gerry Anderson's Godawful Space Precinct TV series; and I couldn't generate the enthusiasm to read Ian R. MacLeod's The English Mutiny past the first couple of pages - an alternate history wherein the English rebel against the forces of the Colonial Indian Empire or something. It seemed well written but felt like homework. So I gave Defending Elysium another shot, made it all the way to the end, and concluded that my first impression had been about right.

On a more positive note, The Erdmann Nexus by Nancy Kress was great, and I felt could have been expanded to novel length, although the end didn't quite work for me. Likewise, the final page of Robert Reed's Truth seemed a bit unnecessary given how well it had been doing up to that point. Much of its extended page count comprises a conversation between a prisoner and his interrogator, and it does well to hold the attention in the absence of any other dynamic, building a mood so pensive and ultimately depressing as to become quite harrowing, given how much of the world of Truth is clearly the one we see outside our windows.

 

Some years ago, I had carelessly stepped off my earth, entering a realm that only resembled what was home. I was lost, and it was the worst kind of lost. No matter how hard I looked, I couldn't decipher which day and which hour had transformed everything familiar and happy.

And just like the one outside our window, it gets worse:

 

'About a thousand nukes went off, and wildfires are still burning, and the entire continent is poisonous dead. The field office is abandoned. We aren't getting any messages from anybody. Not a squeak. We've got some security cameras working, our only connection to the surface, and they're only working on battery power. It's the middle of August, but there isn't any sun, and judging by what we can see and what we can guess, it isn't even reaching forty below at noon.'

Anyway, Truth justifies my having this one on the shelf, as does the novella from Nancy Kress. It's a respectable issue, just nothing life-changing.