Reading Short SF and Fantasy 2

Analog (1-2/12). The January-February double issue includes the first part of Robert J. Sawyer’s new novel, Triggers, a near-future thriller involving an accident that causes people to be able to read the mind of a nearby person — including the U.S. president. It starts slowly and awkwardly but rapidly picks up speed; by the end of the first part I was looking forward to the rest. Two novellas are sequels to earlier work I haven’t seen: “Project Herakles” by Stephen Baxter combines Chinese giants with an attempted coup in 1968 Britain, with all the things I find problematic about alternate history starring real historical figures; Rajnar Vajra’s “Doctor Alien and the Spindles of Infinity” is a pan-galactic romp with interesting aliens, but the resolution is a bit too simple. Sean McMullen is back with another piece of steampunky alternate history: “Ninety Thousand Horses” posits a rocketry project in turn-of-the-century Britain. The short stories were rather frothy and the Probability Zero piece was a fatwa-inducing Feghoot.

Apex 31 (12/11) was not as strong as the November issue. But that’s not to say that, for example, “The 24 Hour Brother” by Christopher Barzak isn’t a good story, though it’s redolent of, and therefore up against, stories with a similar theme like Dozois’s “Morning Child” and Ellison’s “Jeffty Is Five.”

I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the stories in Beneath Ceaseless Skies 83-84 (12/11). “Heartless” by Peadar Ó Guilín is a brilliantly nasty piece of work about dependency on magic; Derek Kunsken’s tale of Renaissance gods and magic, “The God Thieves,” is also a very good story, with first-rate worldbuilding. Also nice was “The Gardens of Landler Abbey,” Megan Arkenberg’s deceptively mannerish but ultimately chilling story of war and punishment.

Clarkesworld 61-63 (10/11, 11/11, 12/11). Clarkesworld is having a good run lately: of the four of its stories that made the cut for Dozois’s Year’s Best anthology, three were published in the fourth quarter of this year. Catherynne Valente’s novella, “Silently and Very Fast,” was serialized across these three issues (part one, part two, part three); it’s also available in book form. It’s a rumination on artificial intelligence; typically replete with Valente’s lyrical and mythologically informed prose, it’s nonetheless unremittingly hard SF with a devastating reveal at the end. An ambitious tale that covers so many bases. The other two Year’s Best selections come from the November issue: “A Militant Peace” by David Klecha and Tobias Buckell, a very fine look at the future of peacekeeping that examines how non-violent military intervention would look; and “The Smell of Orange Groves,” a prosaic story by Lavie Tidhar about the effects of a strange kind of family tie. Other Clarkesworld stories I liked include “Staying Behind,” a sort of left-behind post-rapture singularity tale by Ken Liu; and Ben Peek’s “Sirius,” about a plague on another planet, told from the perspective of its recently deceased victims.