“The Sea of Dreams” by William Barton

“Blood Dauber” by Ted Kosmatka & Michael Poore

“Wife-Stealing Time” by R. Garcia y Robertson

“Flowers of Asphodel” by Damien Broderick

“Flotsam” by Elissa Malcohn

“The Ghost Hunter’s Beautiful Daughter” by Christopher Barzak

“Where the Time Goes” by Heather Lindsley

“Erosion” by Ian Creasey

“Before My Last Breath” by Robert Reed

“Deadly Sins” by Nancy Kress

Reviewed by Steve Fahnestalk

Sometimes gafia makes one feel a bit like Rip Van Winkle. When last I read Asimov’s Gardner Dozois was the editor, and Sheila Williams was managing editor; Dozois is off writing, reviewing and anthologizing, and Williams is now editor. The October/November issue of Asimov’s is, according to the cover, a double issue, with one novella, five novelettes and four short stories. Plus the usual stuff that we don’t review, as we’re all about short fiction. (In the non-reviewed stuff I highly recommend Norman Spinrad’s book column, “On Books: The Folk of the Fringe”—Joe-Bob says “check it out!)

It appears that most of the major SF/F magazines depend on a stable of short-fiction writers; I keep seeing the same names over and over (this is not necessarily bad). Whether this is a sign of a decline in the field I don’t know, but I hope it’s not, because only a few people are writing shorts. Short fiction is the hardest thing to write well, because every word must contribute to the overall story; there’s no room for waste or dross. In any case, I applaud those writers who are submitting and getting published; good or bad, we need more of them.

The novella, “The Sea of Dreams” by William Barton, unfortunately for me, doesn’t quite make it into the “good” category. As always, remember I don’t pretend to be an authority, just someone who’s read millions of words of genre fiction. There’s a lot of dross in this one; in the beginning paragraphs, for example, we are told that the protagonist, variously known as Mr. Zed and Alan Burke, was the “single parent of an autistic child”—but then said child never figures in the story again. So why bring it up in the first place?

According to internal evidence, the story takes place (at least in the beginning; it skips about through space-time willy-nilly, including Heinlein’s “fictons,” it appears) less than a hundred years from now. Alan Burke found an alien spaceship somewhere in the asteroid belt and got rich and won two Nobel prizes by patenting the “field modulus” drive, as did his companion, a mostly computer entity named Ylva Johanssen (from a real book named Red Orm, written in Swedish in the nineteen-forties—the book figures more than once in the story, although except for the names, I fail to see the relevance), who also wrote the manual for the device. Ylva is mostly computer, but with some CNS (Central Nervous System) tissue from a real, dead woman. From here the story gets confusing.

Zed has “lizard skin”—variously described as pebbled or scaly—as a result of anti-radiation treatments. Ylva manifests in the form of “body doubles,” which are clones force-grown to adulthood, which she controls and lives through, using as waldoes, basically… but their main purpose is to allow Ylva to have sex with Mr. Zed. None of this makes sense, really. Is the lizard skin used in the story? Or the sex? Not that I can see.

From the early part of the novella, Zed and Ylva’s body double, who later gets the name Oddny Ylvasdottir—in Red Orm, Oddny is one of the twin daughters of Ylva—meet the inhabitants of Titan, who are apparently miniatures, eighteen inches tall, of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martians, and are dressed only in jeweled harnesses, à la Burroughs. The pair also meet one of Burroughs’ “kaldanes”—a kind of an oversized head on six insect legs, that has a headless body called a “rykor” that it can use like Ylva uses Oddny. From there they bounce around to a sideways Earth of 1962, where Kennedy does not successfully make the Russians back down over Cuban missiles, and to a cavern under Venus’s 800-degree surface and so on. Around and around, and not a lot of it connecting for me. One of the objections I have is that in, let’s say, Heinlein’s Number of the Beast, all the Burroughs connections are explained and make sense in context (though it was a pretty disappointing book in the end); this story explains nothing well.

Other objections: given the current state of the legality of cloning, will it be legal in less than fifty years to breed accelerated clones (who die within five to seven years because of the growth acceleration) with brains of their own, who are not allowed consciousness? Probably not. Since it’s important to the story, should I gloss over it for story’s sake? I think not. I’m not the Red Queen, who liked to believe “six impossible things before breakfast”—there’s a limit to how much forgiveness a story gets. And this one goes beyond the pale.

And, offhandedly mentioned, Mr. Zed had created Dramaturge, software that could make a “theatrical-release quality 3D movie out of a production script”—what a thing to gloss over! There’s at least a whole book in that little phrase.

The writing is at least competent, but the story is bad. It’s the worst kind of pulp (there are very good pulp writers and very good pulp stories): as Spinrad says in his book column, Barton has “turned gelt into drek.”

The first novelette is “Blood Dauber” by Ted Kosmatka & Michael Poore. Now, this is a story. It’s set in present-day where? Georgia? We don’t really know, and it’s not necessarily relevant. Bell is the newest keeper in a zoo. Not an upscale zoo, like the San Diego zoo, but kind of a low-budget cut-rate zoo that supplements its funding by feeding the animals with castoffs, spoilage and discards from grocery wholesalers, bakeries, meat processors and even roadkill. They supplement their help with community-service workers from the local jail.

Bell lives in a trailer, probably not a double-wide, with his wife. Like the zoo, their relationship is continually underfunded but, they both agree, it’s important to do something they love, like Bell in the zoo, Lin at the mall. At the zoo, Bell is in charge of the “castle” (the entomology building), the petting zoo and the convicts. At home, he’s not in charge at all. In every mating pair of mammals, Bell thinks, one bites; Lin is the biter. Because of grinding poverty, Lin bites all the time.

One day at work, one of Bell’s co-workers finds a strange bug; a grub, really, in a pile of blackened bananas. It appears to be the larval form of some kind of Hymenoptera (the wasp genus), but it’s red, with black mouth parts. Bell puts it in a terrarium to see what it will develop into; meanwhile, Cole, the convict with a thousand hours of community service to do, enters the picture. Tensions escalate both at the zoo and at home.

The wasp, when it emerges from the paper cocoon its grub made for its metamorphosis, is a species of mud dauber by the look of it. And it’s a dark red, so… blood dauber.

The climax of the story is inevitable; you can tell what will happen to the various characters if not in detail, at least generally, before it does… but the story works just fine anyway, thanks to the interest generated by good characterization and plotting. This story worked for me on all levels, in spite of the aforementioned predictability.

“Wife-Stealing Time” by R. Garcia y Robertson is a hoot, a romp. Continuing the Martian theme, it mixes Burroughs with a Native American theme. Set on some far-future planet somewhat resembling Mars mixed with Africa. The Burroughs connections are quite intentional, even to at least two very close satellites overhead à la Barsoom. The planet’s even called Barsoom, and the inhabitants (those we know of are Crow, Huron and Apache), Burroughs’s fabled “red men,” greet each other with “Kaor”!

SinBad is a Huron, a sex offender (“Unnatural copulation, aiding in adultery, cohabiting with lesbians, that sort of thing”) and an outcast, whose sand sled is stalled on the plains a couple of hundred haads from his destination, Kaol, where he can get a bonus if he delivers his cargo of illegal offworld nanotech on time. But the wind isn’t cooperating, and he needs to park his sled and hide when the inner moon, Thuria, is up. The slavers can see the surface of Barsoom quite well from Thuria, and are on the lookout for prey. As are the ba’ath, the black-maned, giant lions of Barsoom.

SinBad is forced to camp near some ba’ath, not too far from a Crow camp, during one of the nights of Wife-Stealing Time, when Crow men can snatch wives from other Crows’ tipis. But he’s not looking to snatch, he just wants to hide until daybreak. Pretty Bottom, one of the wives from the nearby camp of Alligator Stands Up, has other ideas. As do some offworld tourists who come to hunt ba’ath—not to eat, but because they (the ba’ath) eat intelligent lifeforms. All these things come together to complicate SinBad’s life.

It’s silly, and consistent, and fun. And in this case, the Burroughs connection is justified, and works.

“Flowers of Asphodel” by Damien Broderick is partly written as an homage to Roger Zelazny and William Carlos Williams; Zelazny was the SF writer whose works, “A Rose For Ecclesiastes” and “The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth,” among others, are echoed in this work; Williams’s poem, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” supplied some specific parts (including the title) of this story, as did some of his imagery and style. But it’s more than a mashup of Zelazny and Williams. Although somewhat vaguer in plot and resolution than many novelettes, this story does, in fact, have a traditional plot buried within it.

The story also makes reference to Burroughs’s Martian thoats. But they’re beside the point. Isaac Hersch lives on a far future Earth that has been changed by his wife, the soi-disant Europa; once a failed musician in San Antonio, he meets a librarian who breaks his nose, then later confesses to him (during their dating/mating ritual) that she is a descendant of the people of Ancient Mu. Since Isaac is a nonconventional musician (he likes writing eleven-tone music—everything is atonal—compared to our twelve-tone scale), when she recites to him from a Muvian manuscript, he decides to set it to music.

And thereby awakes The Glorious… some alien lifeform (archaeobacteria) who sleep in the Earth’s core; through some mystical electronic alchemy related to putting the music on YouTube they pick Europa to be the Earth Mother and transform the world. (The Glorious came to Earth way back when an unknown planetoid or meteor sideswiped our planet and shaved off what came to be our Moon, also planting them inside our planet.) From their awakening the world is changed (which may be the real underlying theme in this issue, not Mars) into something we might not quite recognize. (Pity about Indonesia and New Guinea and Hawaii, and like that.) Some of it’s confusing, but in a good way. The writing is lyrical and the story interesting.

“Flotsam” by Elissa Malcohn is apparently her second story in Asimov’s—the first was printed in 1984! Well, the wait has been worth it; this is very nicely written. There’s no clue as to place, but the story begins in 1973, in what could be a very poor, Hispanic part of Florida. On the Day of Dead Fish, Mercedes finds, among the hundreds of toxic-kill fish washed ashore, what could be a baby mermaid. She takes it home in a pail and hides it in the basement in a disused bathtub, but the super, for once, is on the job and next day the basement is clean and the bathtub empty. After a couple of years she thinks she only dreamed it.

Cut to 1990, and Mercedes is working in a daycare; but she frightens the children when a video of Disney’s The Little Mermaid triggers what appears to be a psychotic break. Mercedes is fired, but gets a job later as a janitor. During her cleanup of various companies around town, she begins gathering information on violations of hazardous waste laws. She finds out that certain mutagens have engendered birth defects: deformities called sirenomela, or “mermaid syndrome.” Mercedes is not convinced that this is what she saw. Her father worked in a plant that made chemicals; she and the other town children were exposed to many toxins and mutagens; she has a first-hand familiarity with toxic waste’s effect on human and animal bodies.

The ending is not surprising, but it is hopeful in a human sense. Mercedes changes over the years, but in spite of her issues and exposures to various toxins, she has become a quieter, yet stronger person.

“The Ghost Hunter’s Beautiful Daughter ” by Christopher Barzak is a pure fantasy, but not a bad one. Sylvie and her father live in the apparently very haunted city of Warren, Connecticut. Her father’s a professional ghost hunter and clearer of haunted houses. Once he has taken a Polaroid photo of a spook, it never again troubles the living.

But only Sylvie knows that without her, there would be no ghost hunting at all; her father is not the talented one, she is. Without intending to, if she enters a haunted dwelling, she somehow makes manifest whatever is haunting the place, and if her father photographs the ghost, it becomes fixed in their photo album and is never again seen by the living.

But Sylvie has a secret too: they still talk to her from the photo album, including her mother, who is on the first page. She’s never told her father this; she knows he wouldn’t understand. He thinks that once he’s put them in the album, they’ve all gone to a better place; moved on. Sylvie knows this isn’t true. And her father is making a comfortable living from clearing ghosts from haunted dwellings.

Until one day, shortly before Halloween, a very solid ghost (until now, they have never been particularly corporeal—visible but not touchable) warns Sylvie that her father had better stop what he’s doing or “perhaps his daughter might have a fall down some haunted staircase.” The story develops from there. Not funny at all, but kind of a fun read.

The short stories begin with “Where the Time Goes” by Heather Lindsley. Another fun little piece about a pair of salvage experts. Martin and Chambers work as subcontractors for the alien Gnor. They salvage people’s wasted time, ranging back and forth in Europe and North America, for those little scraps; two minutes standing in a queue here, four minutes wool-gathering there, and so on.

They’re barely breaking even, so Gnor sends them to Russia, ca. 1847, to give some time back to a young author named Leo Tolstoy. They are assisted by a young woman from 1983 named Janine, who was for some reason not frozen when they used The Pauser on her. Janine learns how to steal time herself and turns the table on Martin and Chambers. I’ll let you read what happens; I hate spoiling good endings. It’s another fun one. (I’m also partial to light-hearted SF/F, as that’s my writing style, so I tend to review well-done humorous or semi-humorous writing favorably.)

“Erosion” by Ian Creasey is about Winston’s last days on Earth. No, he’s not dying, Earth is. Winston has decided to emigrate to the stars, as Earth is fast becoming uninhabitable (we know the feeling, don’t we?). It’s at least a couple of centuries ahead of today, and Earth is getting old and tired. Since Winston was born in North Yorkshire, he visits Scarborough, to test his new exo-skin in a real environment. The exo-skin is impervious to harm, and he can choose not only his coloration (he’s actually a black man) but what sensory impressions his skin relays to him.

On the headlands above the sea, Winston finds a row of weathered memorial benches from a previous century, and sits on one. He interacts with its memorial hologram of a long-dead woman, then sets off along the cliffs feeling rather invulnerable. However, the cliff edges are very eroded and Winston has an accidental fall, which points out that no matter how invulnerable the exo-skin, the human flesh beneath has not changed.

In the end, Winston wonders whether the exo-skin and other augmentations are eroding his humanity, and begins to fear that perhaps his future won’t be all grand adventure on other planets. The story’s a nice reminder that perhaps there’s still a value in our “too, too solid flesh.”

“Before My Last Breath” by Robert Reed is another story of change, erosion and, perhaps, the commonality of life. In the Powder River basin of Wyoming (which supplies something like 40% of the US’s coal needs), an unusual fossil is discovered in the next place due to be mined; the off-duty company geologist who finds it has a hard time getting anyone to pay attention… the mining company, of course, is anxious to get on with digging the coal, and not concerned with fossils. Fossils are common in that area. But finally the find is trumpeted around the world: we’ve found evidence of alien life, some prehistoric non-human intelligent life in Wyoming!

Dr. Greene, the discoverer, presents the skeleton of what comes to be known as “George” to the President, who visits the site. Later, when they discover that there are thousands of these fossils in a burial ground, the aliens come collectively to be known as “georges”—Reed draws parallels between our society and what ethnologists and the like are able to discern of the aliens; how they lived and why they were on Earth. It’s all quite poignant and well written. (No Mars here, just stranded alien travellers.) Reed is one of the early “Writers Of The Future” discovered by that contest. And he has very much lived up to his early promise.

The last short is “Deadly Sins” by Nancy Kress, which is nearly a short-short. It tells the story of a future criminal named Renata, who worked as a lab assistant for a now-deceased biochemist named Rudy Malter. Dr. Malter was working on something classified, and for reasons of her own, Renata has killed Dr. Malter and destroyed all his notes, lab specimens and the like, with acid. The semi-intelligent AI of her cell is interrogating her as the story begins.

In slightly over three pages Nancy Kress has set up a murderer, parts of a future society, a crime and a victim and explained what happened and why. This is how a story should be written, as opposed to the ramblings of the lead novella. And when you finish the story, you’ll see why I keep visualizing her as the late (?) Bela Talbot of the series Supernatural. Character and motivations are quite similar. (In case you’re wondering, we never actually saw Bela die.)

So all in all, Asimov’s seems to be doing all right under Williams, but I don’t think Dozois or Scithers would have bought “Sea of Dreams.”

Note:  I’m surprised a magazine like Asimov’s doesn’t have a copyeditor. There are at least 3 glaring typos that I noticed, and probably more that I didn’t—Spinrad’s column attributes “The Second Coming” to “William Butler Years”; the editor claims to be a big fan of Trek, but cites “Gene Rodenberry”; in “Blood Dauber,” the protagonist speaks of “parthanogenesis”—I can’t see any excuse for these. At least “omphallos,” instead of “omphalos” (from “Flowers of Asphodel”) could be a variant spelling of the Greek word, rather than a typo. Unless he means “penis-navel.”