Asimov's Science Fiction 392

Sheila Williams (editor) Asimov's Science Fiction 392 (2008)
I've encountered an unusual number of recurrent patterns in this issue, some to the point of irony, not least being Robert Silverberg mourning the progressive spirit of science-fiction's new wave as a casualty of the juvenile and populist, whilst mentioning in much more than just passing the publication of his own Lord Valentine's Castle, of which the looooooong excerpt I read in Fantasy & Science Fiction a while back seemed the very definition of the stuffily traditional crowd pleaser; but never mind.

During the course of his book reviews, Paul Di Filippo laments that while there have been numerous heirs to the traditions of Clarke and Heinlein, there haven't been so many following in the footsteps of that other member of the big three after which this magazine is named; and this lament occurs in the very same issue as William Barton's novella, In the Age of the Quiet Sun which revisits Asimov's tales of asteroid mining without necessarily repeating them. Barton avoids just photocopying Asimov by means of a narrative voice grounded in the immediately recognisable world of an astronaut who makes throwaway references to episodes of Land of the Lost which he saw when he was a kid, and which I didn't so I had to look it up. It could have been horribly post-modern but is handled well and is convincing, even for a story in which we discover a sophisticated extraterrestrial derelict in the vicinity of Jupiter. Indeed, the prosaic clutter of our guy's thoughts renders Barton's story all the more credible in terms which seem very much like an update of what Asimov did on his good days. In the Age of the Quiet Sun turns out to be one of the better things in the collection.

I found Horse Racing by Mary Rosenblum a little charmless. It imagines a conspiracy whereby super-rich venture capitalists buy - although sponsor might be a better word - promising children without anyone realising, assuming the good fortune of their getting to go to a better school or whatever is down to pure luck; but it isn't, because this is how said venture capitalists ensure that someone who might grow up to cure a disease or solve the issue of global warming gets to do so, which is cute, not least in seeming to support the notion that all of the worlds ills may be cured through the wonders of a free market. Maybe I just misread the thing. Maybe it was actually a parody of that which it appears to propose.

I gave up on Derek Zumsteg's Usurpers after two pages. He's a sports writer and this was his first pro-fiction, written in experimental style and so reminding me of that thing about those who run before they've learned to walk - which you would think might have been obvious to a sports writer of all people. I gather it's something athletic, and locker room high jinks ensue in loosely punctuated present tense sentences clipped so as to create impressions rather than statements.

Fifty kids fifteen to eighteen stamp their feet. Stretch. Check each other out. Hopping in place to stay loose. Bitching about the bus ride over. Vinyl benches tied up their back if they're from a poor zip. Those boys recognise King, stop him as he passes. Exchange complicated handshakes. Wish him luck and mean it. Tell him to fuck shit up and mean it.

The whole thing is written in this way and is as such unreadable, resembling the thought bubbles of persons in eighties X-Men comics which at least had a visual context to make sense of the shorthand, and I've no fucking clue what vinyl benches tied up their back is supposed to mean; but then I don't understand why sports writers even exist. I cycle twenty miles a day but not once have I felt the urge to read about cycling.

Following which, it gets better. Soldier of the Singularity by Robert R. Chase is good, or possibly efficient, with a twist ending which is at least integral to the story and doesn't just pull astonished faces at the reader. Midnight Blue by Will McIntosh pulls off a reasonable Ray Bradbury impersonation without being too obvious about it. Cut Loose the Bonds of Flesh and Bone by Ian Creasey is briefly satisfying and nicely observed.

Slug Hell by Steven Utley is set in the Paleozoic and is probably the greatest of the shorter short stories in this issue. Nothing really happens aside from a few time travelling paleontologists holding forth on the subject of prehistoric invertebrates and continental drift, but sometimes that's all you need.

The Ice War by Stephen Baxter gets the cover for obvious reasons, and while I remember it as amazing, this time around I'm troubled by details which I'm not sure I even noticed fifteen years ago. It's approximately a prequel to Anti-Ice, bringing those peculiar ice things to Earth in the eighteenth century, and specifically to the attention of Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Isaac Newton as the three of them happen to be sharing a coach journey, which all feels a bit too Doctor Who for comfort, not least because even though each of them just happens to mention their respective famous novels, as they would, only Newton seems to have a legitimate reason for his presence, in this case engaging in discussion of whether God intervenes or simply prefers to leave things running. Swift dies before he's able to finish Gulliver - for some reason - and Defoe only seems to have showed up for the sake of mentioning that he wrote Robinson Crusoe, so it all seems a bit gratuitous; but outside of this, it's still Stephen Baxter and is therefore fucking fantastic in all other respects. If anyone is still writing science-fiction in a couple of hundred years time, someone will write a novel about an alien invasion as experienced by Irvine Welsh, Stephen Hawking, and J.K. Rowling as the three of them try to enjoy a lovely day out at the seaside.

There was also some poetry but, well, you know…