Fairy Tales, Space Stations, and a Sequel to The Thing: The Nebula Awards Showcase 2018, edited by Jane Yolen

Fairy Tales, Space Stations, and a Sequel to The Thing: The Nebula Awards Showcase 2018, edited by Jane Yolen

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Nebula Awards Showcase 2018-smallThe annual Nebula Awards Showcase anthologies, which collect the Nebula Award nominees and winners, are edited by a revolving committee of editors, and that means the criteria used to select the fiction varies every year.

I think this is a great idea. Essentially, each year it gives editorial power to a new individual to select which stories to showcase. The winners are always included, of course, but picking between the nominees (especially in the novella category, which frequently would fill one and a half anthologies all on its own) is a challenge, and it needs a strong editorial hand to make tough decisions.

For example in 1980, for Nebula Winners Fourteen, Frederik Pohl jettisoned virtually every single short fiction nominee (and all the novelettes) so he could make room for just two stories, C. J. Cherryh’s Hugo Award-winning “Cassandra,” and Gene Wolfe’s massive 60-page novella “Seven American Nights.” That had to be a tough call, but I think it was the right one.

In the 2018 Showcase volume, editor Jane Yolen makes a similar choice. Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway, which won the Best Novella Nebula, is a massive 176 pages, far bigger even than Gene Wolfe’s 60-page classic, and would throughly dominate the anthology. Instead, for the first time I can remember, Yolen has chosen not to include the full version of the Nebula Award winning novella, but rather represent it with a 20-page excerpt. That leaves her with enough space to include every short story and novelette nominee (or at least, as is the case for Fran Wilde’s 96-page The Jewel and Her Lapidary, a substantial excerpt).

It’s a bold decision, and I applaud it. The 2018 Nebula Awards Showcase is a terrific volume, and it certainly gives you the opportunity to sample a wide variety of top-notch fiction from last year, including the delightfully subversive fairy tale “Seasons of Glass and Iron” by Amal El-Mohtar, Sam J. Miller’s thoughtful and creepy sequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing, “Things With Beards,” Caroline M. Yoachim’s “Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station / Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0,” and excerpts from All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders and Arabella of Mars by David D. Levine

If you’re looking for a Best Of collection that encapsulates some of the finest science fiction from last year, it makes a splendid choice. Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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Fifteen Years Gone: Water Sleeps by Glen Cook, Part 1

Fifteen Years Gone: Water Sleeps by Glen Cook, Part 1

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Water Sleeps.

In their homes, in the shadowed alleyways, in the city’s ten thousand temples, nervous whispers never cease. The Year of the Skulls. The Year of the Skulls. It is an age when no gods die and those that sleep keep stirring restlessly.

In their homes, in the shadowed alleyways or fields of grain or in the sodden paddies, in the pastures and forests and tributary cities, should a comet be seen in the sky or should an unseasonable storm strew devastation or, particularly, if the earth should shake, they murmur, “Water sleeps.” And they are afraid.

oie_1372930SSs2Hx7jI wish I had managed to finish the ninth Black Company book, Water Sleeps (1999), in a single go because, after two frustrating choppy books, Cook is back on his game. Yes, it’s very different than the bloody, battle-focused earlier books, but Water Sleeps, so far, is a tight story with narrative complexity, brutal twists, and more world-building than any of the others.

The previous volume, She is the Darkness, ended with most of the Black Company’s senior officers  — Croaker, Lady, and Murgen — and several important prisoners — the Prahbrindrah Drah of Taglios, Howler, and Lisa Bowalk — trapped by Soulcatcher and held in stasis on the demon-haunted plain of Glittering Stone.

As Water Sleeps opens, we quickly learn that Croaker et al. have been imprisoned for nearly fifteen years. Murgen’s Standardbearer-in-training, Sleepy, is acting Captain, aided by Murgen’s Nyueng Bao wife, Shara, and the increasingly feeble One-Eye and Goblin. Soulcatcher has declared herself Protector of Taglios, has made the Radisha Drah little more than a puppet, and has rendered her councilors toothless. For a decade and a half, the survivors of the Company have been hunting for a way to free their colleagues from Soulcatcher’s trap, while constantly reminding her that the Black Company never lets a betrayal go unpunished.

Sleepy is not only Captain, she’s also the Company’s Annalist. In her hands, there’s greater attention paid to politics and culture than in the other volumes. Unlike Croaker and Lady, Sleepy doesn’t see Soulcatcher and the other power brokers in Taglios just as obstacles. They are part of a complicated nexus of power centers and religious beliefs. Through her, Cook explores and underscores how they manage to run a vast realm. She’s also the only narrator in any of the books who has religious beliefs. When she explains the three main religions of Taglios — Gunni, Shadar, and her own Vehdna — she does it with a degree of sympathy absent from Croaker’s or Lady’s books.

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Birthday Reviews: Pat York’s “Great Leaving”

Birthday Reviews: Pat York’s “Great Leaving”

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Cover by Diana Sharples
Cover by Diana Sharples

Pat York was born on August 14, 1949 and died on May 21, 2005 in a car accident.

York was nominated for the Nebula in 2001 for her short story “You Wandered Off Like a Foolish Child To Break Your Heart and Mine.”

York published “The Great Leaving” in Odyssey #2, edited by Liz Holliday, in 1998. The story has never been reprinted.

York tells the story of the days leading up to the departure of a colonizing spaceship in “The Great Leaving.” Although many of her friends, including her nominal boyfriend, are leaving on the flight, Clare refuses to even consider going because she had obligations to her mother in the small village in which they live. York makes it clear that there is no other reason for Clare to remain behind. German and Japanese investors in Ireland have made the country unrecognizable and essentially have killed off any culture or national pride the people might have been able to retain.

Despite calls for her to go on the ship, Clare refuses, remaining adamant and eventually falling back on the excuse that they are well past the deadline for her to change her mind. Of course, she also does begin to change her mind after the deadline is past, partly because of a declaration of love and commitment from Michael Hackett, the aforementioned boyfriend.

While Clare’s dedication to her mother and desire to stay and try to preserve what she can of her culture is admirable, the character is not particularly memorable, her decision understandable, but not particularly defensible. Once she does change her mind, York provides a deus ex machina which can trace back to a momentary nastiness by Clare to one of the immigrants to allow Clare to leave her mother and plan a future life with Michael.

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Fantasia 2018, Day 8, Part 2: Under the Silver Lake and Laplace’s Witch

Fantasia 2018, Day 8, Part 2: Under the Silver Lake and Laplace’s Witch

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Under the Silver LakeStrangeness has many vectors; you can be weird in multiple directions at once. Whichever shape a movie takes, it’s often a good idea to have something strange in it. Something unexpected. You can usually count on movies at Fantasia to have at least one well-developed kind of weirdness in them, but the last two movies I saw on July 19, both at the large Hall Theatre, went in very different directions; one the strangest film (in a certain way) that I’d see this year, and the other imagining a world in which there is nothing unpredictable at all. The first was an odd Hollywood-set detective story, Under the Silver Lake. The second was Laplace’s Witch, an adaptation of a Japanese science-fiction novel, directed by Takashi Miike.

Under the Silver Lake is directed by David Robert Mitchell, whose previous film It Follows was a surprise hit. This is very different from that quiet teen horror film; Silver Lake follows Sam (Andrew Garfield), an unemployed 33-year-old who spies on his female neighbours and has no obvious ambitions for his life. Somehow he attracts a new neighbour (Riley Keough), who promptly disappears. Sam’s half-assed attempt to find her leads him to a loopy world defined by stream-of-consciousness conspiracy theory. There are eccentric minicomics zines that hold the key to a murderous ghoul; a killer of dogs; a king of the homeless; secret messages in pop songs; clues hidden in an old issue of Nintendo Power; parties in assorted strange locations with assorted strange people; multiple trinities of women; and secrets underlying the geography of Los Angeles.

This film’s a maze, in which everything refers to everything else, and occasionally to things outside of the film. It’s about, among other things, a kind of search for profundity in popular culture, and how that search is doomed to failure. It’s about the anomie of a generation of young men. It’s about voyeurism, and women performing for the male gaze, intentionally and unintentionally. It’s about 140 minutes long (to paraphrase one overrated pop singer), but it feels longer, if only because of its intentionally episodic and elliptical structure. It’s sporadically funny, but not really a comedy. It sporadically provides clues, but is only nominally a mystery. It is consistently very well-shot, and very precise in its compositions and mise-en-scene. Mainly, though, what it is, is weird.

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New Treasures: Ubo by Steve Rasnic Tem

New Treasures: Ubo by Steve Rasnic Tem

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Ubo Steve Rasnic Tem-smallSteve Rasnic Tem is one of the most acclaimed writers in modern horror. His novels include Deadfall Hotel (2012) and the Bram Stoker Award-winner Blood Kin (2014), and he’s produced over half a dozen collections, including City Fishing (2000) and Figures Unseen (2018). He’s written over 350 short stories and his fiction has won the Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy Awards.

His latest novel Ubo is a strange one, a hallucinatory tale of giant bugs and another world. In “Violence is My Biggest Fear,” an guest post at SciFiNow last year, Steve wrote:

Ubo is a dark science fictional meditation on violence and its origins. During the course of this novel I inhabit the viewpoints of some of history’s most violent figures: Jack the Ripper, Josef Stalin, and Heinrich Himmler among others. I’m not a social scientist, I’m a writer of fiction — I don’t pretend to offer any ingenious new solutions to the issue of human violence. What I do offer is an exploration, a range of eyes and angles through which to view the problem. Perhaps some readers will find their own imaginations triggered, allowing them to view violence in a somewhat different way.

Here’s the description.

Daniel is trapped in Ubo. He has no idea how long he has been imprisoned there by the roaches. Every resident has a similar memory of the journey to Ubo: a dream of dry, chitinous wings crossing the moon, the gigantic insects dropping swiftly over the houses of the neighborhood, passing through walls and windows as if by magic, or science. The creatures, like a deck of baroquely ornamented cards, fanning themselves from one hidden world into the next. And now each day they force Daniel to play a different figure from humanity’s violent history, from a frenzied Jack the Ripper to a stumbling and confused Stalin to a self-proclaimed god executing survivors atop the ruins of the world. The scenarios mutate day after day in this camp somewhere beyond the rules of time. As skies burn and prisoners go mad, identities dissolve as the experiments evolve, and no one can foretell their mysterious end.

Ubo was published by Solaris on February 9, 2017. It is 320 pages, priced at $14.99 in trade paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. The disturbing cover is by Sam Gretton. Read Steve’s Locus essay “The Long Gestation Period of Ubo” here.

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Day Keene

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Day Keene

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Gat_KeeneGander“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

“The Bloody Tide” appeared in the June, 1950 issue of Dime Detective. John D. MacDonald (my favorite writer) also appeared that month. Both men had stories in the May issue as well, with JDM scoring the cover.

The story opens with Charlie White being released from a Florida prison after serving three years for smuggling. He’s given some advice by another inmate on Death Row to go straight and stay on the outside. Get back to working on the water, even if it’s a menial job. Wouldn’t be much of a story if that’s how things go, though, would it?

White’s lover (not his wife) is waiting outside for him and drives him to a secluded beach cabin. He’s going to get back into that fast life again. While he was in jail, $1,000 had been deposited monthly into his bank account, presumably by the ‘big man,’ who he felt had cast him to the wolves.

‘The Devil came up behind me and pushed. To hell with Beth [his wife]. To hell with everything, I thought. To hell with trying to kill Senor Peso. In his way the guy had played square with me. Why should I try to goose into his grave an egg who laid so many golden pesos?’

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Birthday Reviews: Mary C. Pangborn’s “The Confession of Hamo”

Birthday Reviews: Mary C. Pangborn’s “The Confession of Hamo”

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Cover by Lawrence Ratzkin
Cover by Lawrence Ratzkin

Mary C. Pangborn was born on August 13, 1907 and died on February 20, 2000.

Pangborn didn’t publish very many works during her career. Her first story appeared in 1979 and she published six stories by 1985 with one more appearing in 1996. Although she has written a novel, it has not yet been published. Three of her stories appeared in the Universe series, another in the New Dimensions series, one in Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Mary C. Pangborn’s third story was “The Confession of Hamo,” originally published in 1980 in Terry Carr’s Universe 10. Carr enjoyed the story so much that he included it the next year in his Fantasy Annual IV. When Several of the stories that appeared in the Fantasy Annual series were translated into Spanish for inclusion in the book Fantasias in 1989, “The Confession of Hamo” was one of them.

The title of “The Confession of Hamo” tells the reader exactly what they should expect, although without any of the details. Hamo, living in fifteenth century England, is confessing his sins to Brother Albertus, although it isn’t entirely clear that Hamo is fully aware of the extent and nature of his sins. Hamo has been traveling the countryside with his friend, Tom o’Fowey, who calls himself Moses the Mage. The two scam people into believing that they can change base metal into gold.

Through their travels, they occasionally meet up with another charlatan who goes by the name Black Jamie, who teaches them how to make it appear that they are creating gold. Although Hamo never explicitly identifies Black Jamie, it is clear that he is a representation of the Devil. Instead, Hamo is more concerned about the crime of alchemy that he and Tom practiced, although at the same time he is clearly proud of the scam they perpetrated.

Eventually, Black Jamie sends Hamo on a quest, warning him that part of himself would be taken from him. Hamo’s biggest concern that he would lose his genitalia proves to be unfounded, although he does lose an non-tangible part of himself which proves to be a huge problem for someone who earns their money scamming others. Hamo, who now calls himself the Accursed, also finds that Tom has been taken prisoner by the sheriff, and it’s up to the now destitute Hamo to figure out a way to free him without his own biggest asset.

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Fantasia 2018, Day 8, Part 1: The Fortress

Fantasia 2018, Day 8, Part 1: The Fortress

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The FortressThe first movie I saw at Fantasia on Thursday, July 19, was at the J.A. De Sève Theatre, a Korean film called The Fortress (Namhansanseong, 남한산성). Based on a novel by Hoon Kim, Dong-hyuk Hwang wrote the screenplay and directed his own adaptation. It’s a historical war story, set in 1636 when the Chinese Qing dynasty invaded Joseon-ruled Korea. The royal court has to flee before the Qing armies, taking refuge in a mountain castle, the fortress of the title. The Qing besiege the place, and the film follows what happens in the fortress as a result. More precisely, it follows the dispute between two of the officials of King Injo (Hae-il Park): on the one hand Myeong-gil Choi (Byung-hun Lee, who was in RED 2 and was Storm Shadow in the G.I. Joe movies), the Interior Minister who wants to negotiate with the Qing and if necessary surrender; and on the other, Sang-heon Kim (Yoon-seok Kim), the Minister of Rites who wants to hold out until the end, believing that an army’s gathering in the south that will strike north and relieve the fortress.

A blacksmith (Soo Go, The Royal Tailor) from a nearby village conscripted to serve as a soldier is the voice of the common man, while Prime Minster Ryu Kim (Song Young-chang, Kundo: Age of the Rampant) schemes to maintain his place and refuses to consider surrender. Class conflicts develop, as the court tries to keep the soldiers in line while allotting them the barest minimum of supplies needed to survive a harsh winter. Meanwhile conflicts among the court are a mix of show and threat, ministers alternately genuflecting to the King and calling for each others’ heads.

At its heart, though, this movie is about the dispute between Choi and Kim. The key is that both are honourable men, and both have deep principles informing their positions on the war. They respect each other, by and large, but are utterly opposed — with the Prime Minister a kind of wild card in their conflict. The difference between the two men is established from the very opening scenes of the movie. Choi goes alone on horseback to negotiate with the Qing, and does not flinch when they launch a flight of arrows that fall purposely just short of his mount: this establishes he’s a brave man, which we need to understand to grasp that his desire for negotiation doesn’t come from personal cowardice. Then we see a ferryman lead Kim across an icy lake to the fortress, and observe fatalistically that on the next day he’ll do the same for the Qing. Kim responds by killing him, establishing his ruthlessness but also his determination to save Joseon’s independence.

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Future Treasures: The Stars Now Unclaimed by Drew Williams

Future Treasures: The Stars Now Unclaimed by Drew Williams

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The Stars Now Unclaimed-smallDrew Williams’s fiction debut The Stars Now Unclaimed sounds like just what I’m looking for in my late-summer reading: a colorful far-future space opera. Here’s a snippet from the Publisher’s Weekly capsule review:

Williams’s sarcastic, trope-filled debut is a science fiction adventure that never takes itself too seriously. Jane is a human member of the Justified sect who’s trying to make up for what she views as the worst thing she’s ever done. A few generations ago, the universe was hit by the pulse, a weapon that destroyed all other weaponry. It got out of control and set planets back technologically, leaving some without even electricity. Jane’s sect was the one that released it, with her help. Now she’s trying to right her wrongs by traveling to different planets to find kids who have gained powers because of the pulse… it’s an enjoyable ride full of dry humor and thrilling action scenes.

Here’s the publisher’s description.

Jane Kamali is an agent for the Justified. Her mission: to recruit children with miraculous gifts in the hope that they might prevent the Pulse from once again sending countless worlds back to the dark ages.

Hot on her trail is the Pax — a collection of fascist zealots who believe they are the rightful rulers of the galaxy and who remain untouched by the Pulse.

Now Jane, a handful of comrades from her past, and a telekinetic girl called Esa must fight their way through a galaxy full of dangerous conflicts, remnants of ancient technology, and other hidden dangers.

And that’s just the beginning…

The Stars Now Unclaimed is the opening volume in the Universe After series. Read Chapter One at Tor.com.

The Stars Now Unclaimed will be published by Tor Books on August 21, 2018. It is 448 pages, priced at $24.99 for the hardcover and $11.99 for the digital edition. See all our coverage of the best upcoming SF and Fantasy here.

Birthday Reviews: Brenda Cooper’s “Second Shift”

Birthday Reviews: Brenda Cooper’s “Second Shift”

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Love & Rockets
Love & Rockets

Brenda Cooper was born on August 12, 1960.

Cooper has won the Endeavour Award twice, for her novels The Silver Ship and the Sea and Edge of Dark. The latter was also a nominee for the Golden Duck Hal Clement Award while the former was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award. Her short story “Savant Songs” was nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. Cooper has collaborated with Larry Niven on both short fiction and a novel.

Cooper write “Second Shift” for the anthology Love & Rockets, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Kerrie Hughes in 2010. In 2015, she included it in her collection Cracking the Sky.

Brenda Cooper looks at a strange form of love in “Second Shift.” Lance Parker is on a solo mission to the asteroid belt to mine ore. Because such missions take so long, companionship is necessary to help the astronauts maintain a sense of sanity. To this end, Sulieyan and Kami have both been hired to maintain contact with him, in shifts, to provide Lance with the required human contact that a computer just can’t provide.

Although the first rule is not to form a relationship with the astronaut, Kami and Lance have both proclaimed their love for each other, even as they realize that there is practically no chance of them ever meeting in real life. Lance’s mission is a lengthy and dangerous one and for him Kami and Sulieyan are simply voices in an otherwise empty cockpit. The situation, however, doesn’t make the feelings Kami has for him, or vice versa, and less real. Seeing what is happening, Sulieyan sends her grandson, Hart, to interview Kami for a newspaper article on love.

In a normal story, Hart and Kami would hit it off and Kami would transfer her affection to Suleiyan’s son, however, in Cooper’s story, Kami remains true to her distant and as yet unmet love. Her interactions with Hart are non-romantic, yet focus on a discussion of what love is and who Kami and Lance can be in love with each other despite the barriers places between them.

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