{"id":1238,"date":"2016-04-23T12:26:20","date_gmt":"2016-04-23T12:26:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/?p=1238"},"modified":"2016-05-22T14:36:08","modified_gmt":"2016-05-22T14:36:08","slug":"asimovs-science-fiction-482-march-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/?p=1238","title":{"rendered":"Asimov’s Science Fiction #482, March 2016"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"AsimovsSF201603x600\"<\/p>\n

Other Reviews:
\nGreg Hullender\u00a0and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank<\/a>
\nC. D. Lewis, Tangent Online<\/a>
\nSam\u00a0Tomaino, SF Revu<\/a>
\nMark Watson, Best SF<\/a> (forthcoming)<\/p>\n

Fiction:
\nThe Bewilderness of Lions<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novelette by Ted Kosmatka \u2665\u2665\u2665\u2665
\nThe Ship Whisperer<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Julie Novakova \u2665\u2665
\nA Partial List of Lists I have Lost Over Time<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Sunil Patel \u2665\u2665
\nProject Empathy<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novelette by Dominica Phetteplace \u2665\u2665\u2665
\nDo Not Forget Me<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Ray Nayler \u2665
\nA Little Bigotry<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by R. Neube \u2665\u2665\u2665
\nNew Earth<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by James Gunn \u2665\u2665
\nI Married a Monster from Outer Space<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novelette by Dale Bailey \u2665\u2665\u2665\u2665<\/p>\n

Non-fiction:
\nAge Diversity in Asimov\u2019s<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 editorial by Sheila Williams
\nWriting Under the Influence<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 essay by Robert Silverberg
\nSeriously, Series<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 essay by James Patrick Kelly
\nPoetry<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 Ken Poyner, Mark C. Childs, Jane Yolen, Vincent Miskell, Robert Borski
\nNext Issue<\/em><\/strong>
\nOn Books<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 Paul Di Filippo
\nSF Conventional Calendar<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 Erwin S. Strauss<\/p>\n

The fiction this month is particularly good with three novelettes that I would rate as good or better. The first of these is The Bewilderness of Lions<\/em><\/strong> by Ted Kosmatka. This is an impressive story about a young woman who mines data and subsequently comes to work for a Senator after predicting that a scandal will break on a specific weekend:<\/p>\n

Her contact slid the report across the table, and the manager leafed through it briefly as a layman might leaf through a mathematical proof of gravity. Page after page, sixty-four in all, she knew, until he started skipping ahead, and finally flipped the report, irritation showing on his ruddy face. \u201cWhat\u2019s the gist?\u201d
\n\u201cHis numbers will go down midweek, then rise on the weekend. He\u2019ll increase his chances of winning the election if he wears a red tie. He has a 32 percent chance of dropping out of the race and being driven out of office by scandal.\u201d
\n\u201cWhat?\u201d
\n\u201cHe has a 32 percent chance\u2014\u201d
\n\u201cI heard that. What scandal?\u201d
\n\u201cAny scandal.\u201d
\n\u201cWhat do you mean, any scandal?\u201d
\n\u201cIt\u2019s all in the report,\u201d she said, \u201cIf you read it. We\u2019re nearing a pinch point. By June fifteenth, there will be a scandal. Maybe the senator, or maybe someone else. But it\u2019ll be something big. Unexpected. The story will surface early in the news cycle and by end of day, it\u2019ll take over the networks. Someone will be driven out of office.\u201d
\n\u201cHow the hell do you know that?\u201d
\n\u201cIt\u2019s all in the report,\u201d she said. \u201cI found the pattern.\u201d<\/em> p.13<\/p>\n

She subsequently\u00a0notices that\u00a0scandals her data predict are not occurring but cannot explain the anomalies. That is until an old woman approaches her on an empty train and tells her to talk to a congressman who has been scandal-free\u00a0for the last twenty years…
\nAlternating\u00a0with this intriguing narrative are childhood memories of life at home with her father and autistic brother. These two threads develop and in both there is a good balance of what is said and what is left unsaid. Ultimately they come together in a satisfying, one might\u00a0say righteous, ending. Overall, an impressive mix of data, politics, shady corporations, and personal as well as political scandals. One for the \u2018Best of the Year\u2019 anthologies.<\/p>\n

The Ship Whisperer<\/em><\/strong> by Julie Novakova is an OK short story about a ship-whisperer, a human that is neurologically linked to a starship. The ship and crew are on a mission to a black hole where a strange device has been found, one that can create a manifold of time. \u00a0Minor criticisms of this would be that the motivations of the Colonel in charge are not entirely clear or convincing, and also that overall it feels like a throwback to the 1980s.
\nA Partial List of Lists I have Lost Over Time<\/em><\/strong> by Sunil Patel is another short story, this time with the neat idea of telling a story with lists. It is a pity that the story about kale, a machine to get to another dimension, and the inventor\u2019s duplicate is rather slight.<\/p>\n

Project Empathy<\/em><\/strong> by Dominica Phetteplace is the second of the three good novelettes. This is a very information dense story about a teenager called Bel who is employed as a host by a company called Blue Cup. There are particular conditions of employment:<\/p>\n

On her tryout, she took orders and served drinks with what her evaluators described as \u201cwarmth\u201d and \u201cgrace.\u201d Over a hundred teenagers auditioned, only Bel was offered a position. Blue Cup requires close surveillance on all its employees. They want access to every interaction, both in-person and online. This normally requires the implantation of a standard Watcher chip. In Bel\u2019s case, she was fitted with a prototype of the newest version of the Watcher, the creatively titled Watcher 2.0. Not everyone can afford to care about rights and privacy. She agreed to the terms of use without even reading them.<\/em> p.44<\/p>\n

Bel goes to PCA (pre-collegiate academy) college in San Francisco where she goes from being a high achiever to finding it difficult to fit in:<\/p>\n

At PCA, there was no dance team. Her classmates were aloof, hierarchies had been entrenched, sometimes going back generations. Bel had a name but not a \u201cname.\u201d Her influence score took a dive. She was not active on any of the social media that her new peers were into, so she had to start over with new accounts. Her influence ranking plummeted. <\/em>
\nI sensed regret. She wouldn\u2019t have come to PCA had she known what it was really like. But she was here now, with her own room in a shining and clean city. Blue Cup had secured her permits to live, work, and study here. Was it better to be royalty in Concord or a peasant in the city? There was an additional consideration of her mother\u2019s anger and her father\u2019s drinking. She was probably happy to have distance and a life apart from them, but she also seemed to miss them.<\/em> p.45<\/p>\n

The bulk of the story takes place while she is on a college arranged lunch-date with three other students; the Watcher chip is in the background commenting on her reactions and occasional faux pas in a future that is an exaggerated dystopian version of our social networking and corporate present.
\nThere is a lot about surveillance, monetisation and future social mores in this piece, so much so that I think I\u2019ll probably have to read it again. Further, at the end it felt\u00a0like it should be the first part of a novella or novel.
\nWhile I\u2019m talking about this writer I\u2019d add that after reading and enjoying her last story in Asimov\u2019s SF<\/em> (Atheism and Flight<\/em>, January 2016) I looked at ISFDB and found that she had produced five stories between 2011 and 2014, but this is her third published story this year. I note more are upcoming in the next couple of issues so I presume we are lucky enough to have her writing full time.<\/p>\n

Do Not Forget Me<\/em><\/strong> by Ray Nayler is a vaguely Arabian nights-style tale, with one story nested inside another story inside another. The kernel of it is about a man who tells of never aging. This is well enough written and told but rather pointless.
\nA Little Bigotry<\/em><\/strong> by R. Neube tells of a veteran of a human-alien war, who has killed her husband and subsequently washes up on a planet far from Earth. Financially destitute she ends up accepting a job as an escort to an alien of the species she was fighting in the war. When she arrives at the home of this alien she finds its children are there, and a conversation about the war starts for their education. I don\u2019t really think this works as a story\u2014the hard boiled tone about her dealings with her ex-husband used early on doesn\u2019t really convince, and neither does the bigotry she feels for the aliens. Also,\u00a0the structure of this is pretty much non-existent, but notwithstanding all of the aforesaid I found myself liking it anyway.
\nThe last of the short stories is New Earth<\/em><\/strong> by the veteran James Gunn. This is about a starship arriving at a new planet after leaving an Earth that has destroyed itself. The two characters cannot agree whether to wake the other crew members and proceed with colonisation or not. They revive a philosopher from deep sleep to help them make a decision, and he does, but not in the way they expect.<\/p>\n

I Married a Monster from Outer Space<\/em><\/strong> by Dale Bailey is the third of the novelettes. This story starts with Ruby at her checkout in Wallmart and an alien Bug Eyed Monster arriving with a basket of shopping which it can\u2019t pay for:<\/p>\n

\u201cForget your wallet?\u201d I say.
\nBug-Eyes just stands there.
\n\u201cI\u2019m sorry, sir,\u201d says Margo, who has somehow closed the distance between the customer service counter and my chute at the speed of light. \u201cWe\u2019ll have to void your order.\u201d
\nSo that\u2019s what I have to do. Drag each item out of its bag, scan it, and dump it back into his empty basket, like a time-lapse film run in reverse. The whole time the two of them stand there staring at me, Margo with this thin-lipped sneer and the alien with no expression that you can discern. Who knows what he\u2019s thinking? He\u2019s an alien. But in that moment, I could have clawed that smug expression right off Margo\u2019s face and peed on Sam Walton\u2019s grave. What I\u2019m saying is that I feel a certain sympathy for this big heap of ugly because it wasn\u2019t too long ago that I\u2019d come up short at the grocery store and had to look on as the cashier fished stuff out of <\/em>my bags and voided them one by one, until we got down to what I could afford, which was exactly $57.30.\u00a0I\u00a0ask you: is it too much to ask to have a pint of Ben and Jerry\u2019s Boom Chocollata once in a while?<\/em> p.87<\/p>\n

After work she sees the alien sitting under a tree and decides to take back to her trailer-park\u00a0home, husband Donny, dog and two cats. As the story progresses the alien is seldom offstage but doesn\u2019t do much apart from sit, eat, drink and make the occasional buzzing communication:<\/p>\n

After a while\u2014I don\u2019t know how long\u2014he buzzes at me again, and I say, \u201cIt\u2019s nothing, really.\u201d And then, because that\u2019s obviously a lie, I say, \u201cIt just made me sad, having to drag all that stuff in your basket back across the scanner. Don\u2019t you have any money?\u201d I ask, which is kind of a stupid question. He\u2019s an alien, after all.
\nGort buzzes.
\nI pretend I know what he\u2019s saying, and I say, \u201cWe get by, I guess.\u201d
\nBut we didn\u2019t, hardly. There was always something. I was seventeen when I got pregnant, and here we are five years later. It might have turned out different, I guess, but everything went wrong at once. First the doctor put me on bed rest. Then I was too sick for homebound, and then the baby and all that.
\nBlah, blah, blah. Everybody\u2019s got trouble. Mine is nothing special, and I know it, but here I am on the verge of tears all over again. Gort buzzes at me, and this time I can\u2019t help it, I start to cry a little. \u201cIt\u2019s nothing,\u201d I say. \u201cI just get weepy when I\u2019m tired.\u201d
\nGort buzzes, and I pretend I know what he\u2019s saying.<\/em> p.92<\/p>\n

As we can see from the paragraphs above the alien in this story is a foil and\/or mirror to Ruth\u2019s life of quiet desperation. Her life is limned by these exchanges: she is married as a result of an unplanned pregnancy to a man who may or may not love her; their baby girl died and they are crippled by huge medical bills.
\nDonny, a skilled auto mechanic, finds Gort\u2019s spaceship and decides he can fix it, while Ruth spends more time in the company of her mostly silent companion.
\nThis is at times a rather sad and melancholy story but (spoiler) ends\u00a0with\u00a0a ray of hope. It is an affecting story and one for the \u2018Best of the Year\u2019 collections.<\/p>\n

Moving onto the non-fiction, I can\u2019t say I am a big fan of this month\u2019s cover by Fred Gambino but that is not the artists fault, more that I don\u2019t think that a BEM on the cover is a good \u2018look\u2019 for a modern SF magazine.
\nThe issue\u2019s editorial, Age Diversity in Asimov\u2019s<\/em><\/strong> by Sheila Williams, is about age diversity in fiction and, specifically, young people featuring in the magazine\u2019s stories. Writing Under the Influence<\/em><\/strong> by Robert Silverberg is a column about the influence of other writers and books. He discusses the works of his that have been inspired\u00a0and\/or influenced by Walter de la Mare\u2019s The Three Mulla-Mulgars<\/em> (these include Son of Man<\/em>, Lord of Darkness<\/em>, At Winter\u2019s End<\/em> and Kingdoms of the Wall<\/em>). In James Patrick Kelley\u2019s column Seriously, Series<\/em><\/strong> he looks at the writing of series works with comments from Alan Smale, Carrie Vaughn and Walter Jon Williams. There are a number of poems that range from OK to so-so (I can\u2019t say any of the items in the last three issues have really spoken to me so maybe it is the reader and not the poets at fault here). Finally, there is an interesting On Books<\/em><\/strong> by Paul Di Filippo where he reviews books by K. J. Parker (Tom Holt), Carolyn Ives Gilman, Fran Wilde and Samuel Delany. Unlike the recent columns I read in F&SF<\/em>, there is background information and context.<\/p>\n

This is a good issue of the magazine so don\u2019t miss it.<\/p>\n

This magazine is still being published!<\/b> Subscribe: Kindle UK<\/a>, Kindle USA<\/a>\u00a0or physical & digital copies<\/a>.<\/p>\n\"rss\"<\/a>\"rss\"<\/a><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Other Reviews: Greg Hullender\u00a0and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank C. D. Lewis, Tangent Online Sam\u00a0Tomaino, SF Revu Mark Watson, Best SF (forthcoming) Fiction: The Bewilderness of Lions \u2022 novelette by Ted Kosmatka \u2665\u2665\u2665\u2665 The Ship Whisperer \u2022 short story by Julie Novakova \u2665\u2665 A Partial List of Lists I have Lost Over Time \u2022 short […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asimovs-science-fiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pcj7-jY","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1238"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1238\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1347,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1238\/revisions\/1347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}