Asimov's Science Fiction 429/430

Sheila Williams (editor) Asimov's Science Fiction 429/430 (2011)
Finding myself merely whelmed by the previous issue I tackled, this one has come as a very pleasant surprise. It's another double issue so there was a lot to get through here - two novellas, a couple of novelettes, and six short stories - and although not everything pushed the right buttons for me, there was nothing annoying, or that I failed to enjoy on some level. Kit Reed's The Outside Event skates close to being a bit too self-conscious for its own good in occurring at a writers' retreat, but nevertheless gets away with it. I'm not sure if this is a first for me and the digests, but it might be.

Taking a more positive view than competent and not actually annoying, the two novellas are, in particular, exceptional. Kristine Kathryn Rusch's Stealth is space opera which actually bothers to tell a story rather than fixating on either technology or weird physics, and succeeds possibly by virtue of an atmosphere created through posing more questions than it answers. I still didn't really understand what the stealth was supposed to be by the time I finished, but it didn't seem to matter. Even more impressive, and possibly ranking as the best thing I've read in a digest, is Kij Johnson's The Man Who Bridged the Mist. As with Stealth, we're left to fill in a few unexplained gaps without any harm to the integrity of the story, and it may even be this wiggle room which leaves us with such a plausible sense of scale, and by extension reality. The story inhabits a society at late seventeenth century levels of technology, but the mist across which our man must create a suspension bridge suggests a world other than Earth without anything being clearly stated, and we should also take into account that this mostly agrarian society additionally treats the sexes as equal - so at least we know it's not fucking steampunk, and nor does it read like the work of someone in love with flywheels and top hats. As with Ursula LeGuin's writing - of which I am favourably reminded - a lot is said without very much seeming to happen; and so The Man Who Bridged the Mist is about progress, psychological as well as technological, its cost and how it leaves us changed.

 

'We are not meant to cross this without passing through it. Kit—' Rasali said, as if starting a sentence, and then fell silent. After a moment she began to speak again, her voice low, as if she were speaking to herself. 'The soul often hangs in a balance of some sort: tonight, do I lie down in the high fields with Dirk Tanner or not? At the fair, do I buy ribbons or wine? For the new ferry's headboard, do I use camphor or pearwood? Small things, right? A kiss, a ribbon, a grain that coaxes the knife this way or that. They are not, Kit Meinem of Atyar. Our souls wait for our answer, because any answer changes us. This is why I wait to decide what I feel about your bridge. I'm waiting until I know how I will be changed.'

It's not often a digest features a story of such depth that I'm moved to pick quotes in illustration of its theme, but there were a few which could have served just as well as the above. I'm sure there was a time when a contribution to Asimov's failing to include either robots or spacecraft would have brought in a tidal wave of grumbling, but as a discussion of the consequences of progress The Man Who Bridged the Mist is exactly the sort of thing they should be publishing.

...and while we're here both Eleanor Arnason's My Husband Steinn and A Hundred Hundred Daisies by Nancy Kress are of equivalent excellence, so that's three new names on the list from just one issue.