But by focusing their efforts on the short form, despite any hindrances, such writers are accomplishing at least three things: they are, I firmly believe, honing their skills more quickly than novelists; they are helping the field of fantastika evolve with short, sharp shocks; and they are entertaining many readers who don't desire to immerse themselves in the latest thousand-page opus or fifteen-book series.
Now from Ian Whates's splendid and groundbreaking firm, NewCon Press (which celebrated its seventh birthday in 2013), come two volumes that exactly embody all these merits.
The first one we will look at is the debut book by Mercurio D. Rivera, a name you have doubtlessly noticed in these very pages, and which has featured on several prize ballots and
Best-of
TOCs.
Across the Event Horizon
(trade paperback, $20.99, 264 pages, ISBN 978-1-907069-51-2) comes with an enthusiastic introduction by Terry Bisson, in which Bisson finds Rivera's brand of SF to be both old-school and totally twenty-firstcentury. With this estimation I will have to agree. Rivera focuses on core genre tropes with a sophistication of telling that nonetheless does not venture into the avant-garde, postmodern, or any particular hip new "movement." These are tales that might have appeared anytime in the past forty years or so, yet which nevertheless manage to seem utterly fresh and relevant to the genre scene today. Consequently, they bring to my mind comparisons with various past masters.
Rivera's fascination with aliens emerges in the first three tales, and his treatments summon up such names as James Tiptree, Michael Bishop, Philip José Farmer, and Poul Anderson. In "Dance of the Kakawroons," mankind preys on seemingly helpless avian sentients who end up having the last laugh. "Longing for Langalana" finds a race that instinctively adores humans, thus setting one individual up for heartbreak and misunderstanding. Blending religion with astrophysics, "Missionaries" tracks humanity's interactions with the Sagittarians, "a self-aware aspect of the quintessence field concentrated in complex patterns.... "
The next two tales, "Snatch Me Another" and "Dear Annabehls," form a linked pair, one tragic, one blackly humorous (illustrating Rivera's reach). The motivating MacGuffin in both is a Kuttneresque device that allows snatching of objects from alternate timelines.
A rather Strugatsky-like giant alien, the Stalk, is met by an army of human clones in "The Fifth Zhi," while "The Scent of Their Arrival" finds humans carrying a plague to a race of olfactory-biased aliens whose hopeful naïveté might doom them.
Rivera's very first sale, from only 2005, is "Bargonns Can Swizzle," a tale set in the present, where an internet chatroom hosts an unlikely interlocutor. Rivera's titular nonsense phrase here seems to me in the best SF tradition of Miles Breuer's classic "The Gostak and the Doshes." A bitter, disabled man obsessively uses Shunt technology of simulation to relive the events of his past in "Rewind, Replay."
Employing a Kurt Vonnegut-like acerbic humor in "Naked Weekend," Rivera examines the dangers of a chemically
unmediated
lifestyle. In the world of "Doubled," humans come in pairs—except for the despised Singles. Rivera channels a bit of Lucius Shepard in "Tu Sufrimiento Shall Protect Us," which immerses the reader in a feverish near-future scenario where terrorists are kept at bay only by harsh magics. A Robert Sheckley zaniness enlivens "Sleeping with the Anemone," whose premise is the making of interspecies porn. Finally, the short-short from
Nature
magazine, "Answers from the Event Horizon," offers Stapledonian wisdom from the stars.
Rivera's fictions demonstrate wit, charm, intelligence, empathy, and narrative sophistications, a suite of tools and talents that bode well for his future, and the genre's.
Not a newcomer any longer, especially given his Clarke Award victory in 2013 for
Dark Eden,
Christopher Beckett and his recent collection make a nice pairing with Rivera's. In contrast to Rivera's necessarily reaching back to his first sale,
The Peacock Cloak
(trade paper, $19.99, 240 pages, ISBN 978-1-907069-49-9), Beckett's second collection, gathers up only his most recent stuff, making for an organically tight and consistent burst of bravura speculative fiction, written at the top of a master's skillset.
The novum in "Atomic Truth" is augmented reality, one of the hot tropes these days, and Beckett pushes it far, using it to highlight the social stratification of our technological landscape. He foregoes the teasingly telegraphed ending brilliantly. A pure gonzo tale, like some hybrid of van Vogt and Dunsany and Rucker, "Two Thieves" finds our pair of lovably sleazy protagonists embarked on an irresponsible stargate jaunt. With the vigor of such a social commentator as Harlan Ellison, Beckett offers a world gone all vigilante justice in "Johnny's New Job." There's a smattering of
Fahrenheit 451
in here as well.
Alert readers of this magazine will surely recall a recent cover story, "The Caramel Forest," which beautifully evoked the sensitive estrangements of, say, Gene Wolfe or Ian MacLeod in its depiction of children interacting with the secretive aliens on a colony world. "Greenland" conflates the metaphysics of Greg Egan with the day-after-tomorrow madness of Christopher Priest's
Fugue for a Darkening Island.
Against a Vancian interstellar backdrop, a world-weary space traveler encounters some existential nausea in "The Famous Cave Paintings on Isolus 9." "Rat Island" returns to the milieu of "Atomic Truth," finding apocalyptic verities behind the augmented reality.
More weirdness accrues to the matter transmission process in "Day 29," which incidentally shares the setting of "The Caramel Forest." In "Our Land" a history teacher slips across timelines and ends up in a Britain radically different from the one we know. Depicting the kind of random act of volitional cruelty that Camus always dealt with, "The Dessicated Man" finds a sociopathic space captain giving in to his worst impulses. Perhaps my favorite tale is "Poppyfields," for its beautiful Arcadian opening followed by a keen depiction of a man pulled between risk and stasis. Lastly, the title story concerns demiurges, rebellion, and creativity in a blend of Zelazny and Milton.
Beckett's authorial potential, which I remarked on in these very pages about five years ago, has now blossomed into a master's status.
If you mashed up Crockett Johnson's
Harold and the Purple Crayon
with Edwin Abbott's
Flatland
and Randall Garrett's
Lord Darcy
series, then sieved the result through a copy of Joseph Campbell's
The Hero with a Thousand Faces,
you might get something along the lines of Brandon Sanderson's first YA novel,
The Rithmatist
(Tor, hardcover, $17.99, 384 pages, ISBN 978-0765320322). But that artificial Frankenstein result out of your primitive laboratory probably wouldn't have the bouncy glee, the narrative verve, the sheer organic storytelling brio that Sanderson's book does. First in a series, it's a winner right out of the gate.
The initial striking thing to comment on is venue, the nature of the book's sub-created world. It's simply ingenious. We are in the "United Isles," a country that more or less maps to our familiar United States (some common history seemingly exists). But there are sixty isles, not fifty states, in the space where we expect much of North America to exist, and the bits and pieces of the drowned continent are separated by goodly sized stretches of water, producing an archipelago at once commonplace and estranged. (We will focus on only one isle here, with a short visit to another, and baleful references to a third; but the environment still hovers impressively just beyond our senses.) A beautiful endpaper map illustrates this conceit, as drawn by Ben McSweeney, who also provides charming interior illos that do so much to enhance Sanderson's tale. The time of the telling appears to be roughly the early years of an analogous twentieth century, with appropriate tech, including some essential clockwork mechanisms. For instance, quill pens and bottles of ink are still in regular use. But the dominant "science," if you will, is Rithmatics, which involves the production of animated, if not truly living, creations from simple chalked lines. And these two-dimensional critters, "chalklings," interact with threedee objects quite tangibly—and lethally, if the Glyph of Rending is employed.
Our protagonist is Joel, a poor young lad enrolled at the Armedius Academy in New Britannia as a perk of his mother's charwoman employment there. Joel has always longed to study Rithmatics, but has been shut out. Now he neglects his prole vocational classes in favor of gathering up any crumb of information on the arcane subject that falls from his more privileged classmates and their adept teachers. Soon he is cadging lessons off Professor Finch, an amiable eccentric a little reminiscent of Doc Brown in
Back to the Future.
In fact Joel and Finch develop a similar vibe. Add in a student named Melody, whose Rithmatic skills skew toward the unpredictable, and you've got a strong troupe to carry the tale, along with the colorful subsidiary characters. The plot revolves around students gone missing, a rogue Rithmatist, and a possible outbreak of the wild chalklings penned up in the isle of Nebrask. Remarkably, Sanderson makes the school setting—of course, almost de rigueur in YA fantasies post-
Potter
—feel fresh. The whole shebang climaxes with fireworks, danger, and suspense, and the projected future struggles are not so imminent as to leave the reader on a cliffhanger note.
But perhaps what is most enthralling about the book is the solidity and palpability of Rithmatics, as it has been heavily conceptualized and laid out visually by Sanderson, who has always displayed a talent for making his various occult systems into believable realities. Rithmatics features a comprehensible set of rules and possibilities that do not conduce toward either extravagance or blandness. It's a science of sorts, and its mysterious historical origins tantalize. And in fact Joel's whole approach to the field and his eventual discoveries have a sort of Tom Swift air to them.
In short, Sanderson's words could not leap off the page more lively unless they were chalklings indeed!
I have been remiss in failing to consider the excellent work of Chris Moriarty, as embodied in her first two novels,
Spin State
(2003) and
Spin Control
(2006). Although I received copies of both upon publication and pondered them with keen interest, strictures of time and attention thwarted my reading. When
Ghost Spin
(Spectra, trade paper, $16.00, 576 pages, ISBN 978-0553384949) arrived recently, I felt I could delay acquaintance no longer, and jumped right in. Immediately, I knew I was missing some thick and resonant backstory. But I felt utterly at home and up-to-speed regardless, thanks to Moriarty's skillful storytelling. While I will certainly return to the earlier books, coming into her series at volume three was not a bad move at all.
Moriarty's universe might at first seem to slot comfortably into the spectrum of postmodern space opera defined by Alastair Reynolds and Peter Hamilton. But on closer inspection I find her more akin to allied radical and trangressive folks: Paul McAuley, M. John Harrison, and Linda Nagata. Moriarty's cyberpunk/biopunk proclivities, as well as her grim and gritty scenarios and characters, stand shoulder-to-shoulder with these illustrious predecessors.
It's some four centuries into our future, and part of the galaxy is host to a UN-con trolled network of planets, linked by the Bose-Einstein condensate-powered FTL system. But the network is running out of BE fuel, and humanity's brief interstellar empire is on the way out: "It was the more remote Colonies and Trusteeships along the Periphery who were falling off the map one by one as they lost their field arrays, subjecting millions of posthuman colonials to the agonizing choice between becoming impoverished refugees or permanent castaways on isolated, partially terraformed planets whose impoverished gene pools and biospheres would soon doom them to the status of walking ghosts." This scenario lends a delightfully melancholy tinge to the whole proceedings, á la Asimov's Foundation or Poul Anderson's Long Night.
But these stranded citizens are not the singular ghost of the title. That role falls to Hy Cohen, an artificial intelligence "married" to the human woman Catherine Li. Cohen's self has been fragmented and distributed across the galaxy in pieces. Catherine sets out, in a strange techno-love story, to reassemble her husband. This quest will lead to her own curious duplication by means of matter transmission, and her assumption of pirate status with Lucky Llewllyn, bearer of one of the Cohen ghosts. And luckily, there is still vigor and dynamism left in the galaxy, in a place called the Drift, where many forces contend for control of non-BE travel options.
Moriarty boasts all the essential traits SF writers must display. She displays a facility for inventing new, muscular language and for inserting ideas seamlessly or via adroit infodumps into the plot. Her sentences are juicy with information complexity, and her observations on society and culture are of the same nature as those of Iain Banks. Her lively characters move through a variety of exotic venues, and her narrative is as unpredictable and yet as fated as living itself.
Moriarty's story engines spin at high RPMs.
It's time could marry the lusty, brutethe climax of a late Easter weekend. I'll be at Boskone and LunaCon. Through February, Asimovians should also consider ChattaCon, CapriCon, RadCon, ConDor and Potlatch. Plan for social weekends with your favorite SF authors, editors, artists, and fellow fans. For an explanation of our con(vention)s, a sample of SF folk-songs, and info on fanzines and clubs, send me a SASE (self-addressed, stamped #10 [business] envelope) at 10 Hill #22-L, Newark NJ 07102. The hot line is (973) 242-5999. If a machine answers (with a list of the week's cons), leave a message and I'll call back on my nickel. When writing cons, send an SASE. For free listings, tell me of your con five months out. Look for me at cons behind the Filthy Pierre badge, playing a musical keyboard. —Erwin S. Strauss