{"id":2253,"date":"2016-11-21T15:44:55","date_gmt":"2016-11-21T15:44:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/?p=2253"},"modified":"2016-11-21T15:44:55","modified_gmt":"2016-11-21T15:44:55","slug":"asimovs-science-fiction-491-december-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/?p=2253","title":{"rendered":"Asimov’s Science Fiction #491, December 2016"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"asimovssf201612x600\"<\/p>\n

Galactic Central link<\/a>
\nISFDB link<\/a><\/p>\n

Other reviews:
\nGreg Hullender\u00a0and Eric Wong,\u00a0Rocket Stack Rank<\/a>\u00a0(forthcoming)
\nSam\u00a0Tomaino,\u00a0SF Revu<\/a>\u00a0(forthcoming)
\nUnknown,\u00a0Tangent Online<\/a>\u00a0(forthcoming)
\nVarious,\u00a0Goodreads<\/a>\u00a0(forthcoming)<\/p>\n

Fiction:
\nThey Have All One Breath<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novelette by Karl Bunker \u2665\u2665\u2665\u2665
\nEmpty Shoes by the Lake<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Gay Partington Terry \u2665\u2665\u2665
\nHigherWorks<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novelette by Gregory Norman Bossert \u2665\u2665\u2665
\nHow the Damned Live On<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by James Sallis \u2665
\nThe Cold Side of the Island<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Kali Wallace \u2665\u2665
\nWhere There Is Nothing, There Is God<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novella by David Erik Nelson \u2665\u2665\u2665+<\/p>\n

Non-fiction:
\nCover<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 NASA
\nGuest Editorial: That\u2019s Far Out, So You Read it Too?<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 Sarah Pinsker
\nReflections: Dead as a Dodo<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 Robert Silverberg
\nPoetry<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 Ada Hoffman, John Richard Trtek
\nNext Issue<\/em><\/strong>
\nOn Books<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 Peter Heck
\nThe SF Convention Calendar<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 Erwin S. Strauss<\/p>\n

They Have All One Breath<\/em><\/strong> by Karl Bunker is about a world where AIs have created utopia for humanity: food, material goods, healthcare, etc. are all provided, and they have also destroyed all means of making war as well as preventing personal violence, vandalism, serious theft, etc.<\/p>\n

Lisa appeared in my life right about the time of the world\u2019s big tipping point. It was during the few days of the last war in the Middle East. The War That Wasn\u2019t; the Fizzle War. I was in a club called The Overground, and the atmosphere was defiantly celebratory. The wall-sized screen behind the stage was showing multiple videos\u2014scenes that have since become iconic, even cliched and boring: tanks rolling off their own treads and belly-flopping onto the desert sand, soldiers trying to hold onto rifles that were falling to pieces in their hands, a missile spiraling crazily through the air before burying itself in the ground with the impotent thud of a dead fish. And from other parts of the world, scenes of refugee camps where swarms of flying bots were dropping ton after ton of food, clothing, shelter materials.<\/em> p.13<\/p>\n

Paralleling the development of the AIs\u2019 rise is a story\u00a0concerning the lives of James the narrator and his partner Lisa. Their relationship is slowly being poisoned by their inability to have a child (the AIs have intervened and reduced the birth rate to one or two children for selected couples). Another constant irritant in their relationship is their differing views on the AIs\u2019 domination: he views\u00a0it, more or less, as utopia, she as a dystopia. No doubt these differing viewpoints will neatly mirror the views of readers, although I hope most will end up siding with him.
\nI have one minor criticism which is that the ending feels slightly abrupt, partially due to the phrasing of the last sentence, which should maybe have been cut, and partially due to my previously mentioned criticism of Asimov\u2019s SF<\/em> not using something like a \u25cf at the end of stories. Notwithstanding this, I thought this was a pretty good and original treatment of AIs taking over the world, and one which convincingly portrays the altruistic and pervasive way this occurs. One for the \u2018Best of the Year\u2019 anthologies.<\/p>\n

Listed on the contents page as a novelette but actually a 3,700 word short story, Empty Shoes by the Lake<\/em><\/strong> by Gay Partington Terry is a fantasy about a boy and a girl who know each other at school, and whose lives diverge when they grow up. The boy Rafi sends Becca various items from his travels: one of these is a cracked blue bowl. Becca realises that she can see visions in the pools of water that leak from the bowl. Matters progress…. This is a neat fantasy with a particularly good last image.<\/p>\n

HigherWorks<\/em><\/strong> by Gregory Norman Bossert is a densely written story about a USER (US economic refugee) called Leanne Dyer in the UK. The events take place on the day of a planned rave in the Camden Catacombs, and we follow her and a couple of her friends as she distributes nanoware to people who are invited to attend.<\/p>\n

Dyer shifts against the wall\u2014the bricks are rough and still night-cool in the shade of the bridge, and her jacket is thin across the shoulders, lining long gone and the leather worn smooth by years of brick stone iron concrete carbon\u2014and breaks down the approaching couple without quite making eye contact.
\nThe Wayward has got an eye out for cops or worse, blathering in his terrible Bert-the-chimney-sweep cod Cockney, sounds stoned but his brain is just like that. \u201c\u2014ghosts, you know? The nano, sometimes it don\u2019t break down, it digs in, makes a nest in the parental lobe\u2014\u201d
\n\u201cParietal.\u201d Dyer says. The couple are a matched Saxon blond\u2014expensive haircuts, and the girl\u2019s wearing Havilland genesplice chestnut wedges with live shoots trained around her calves, cost a thousand quid easy. Not cops, not dressed that way; more likely the sort that think that Drop parties damage property values, that nano should be reserved for medical and military purposes, that refugees belong safely sorted with their own kind in the camps in Dover. The sort to take a map now and call the cops later. But he has an active tat peeking out of the edge of his sleeve, and she\u2019s got corneal implants, so Dyer risks it.
\n\u201cOpt-in,\u201d she says, quietly, and sees the guy\u2019s teeth flash. The girl taps the guy\u2019s thigh with one hand and reaches out with the other. Dyer slips a map from her jacket pocket, hits the girl\u2019s hand\u2014more a handshake than a slap, oh so proper British\u2014 and meets the girl\u2019s gaze. Pixels swirl in her eyes, and recognition. \u201cHigherWorks,\u201d the girl mouths, and swats the guy\u2019s leg again as they ramble on out into the sunlight by the canal.<\/em> p.36<\/p>\n

As she moves around this future Britain she is being stalked by a bounty hunter for her IP violations, while seeing ghost images of herself (I think) which may have something to do with her previous pre-Crash work in the USA on independent self-repairing nanoware. I say \u2018I think\u2019 as this is not a story for the lazy reader and it was a few pages before it started making sense to me. Ultimately, I think I was more impressed by this than enjoyed it, and I was rather reminded me of those dense and convoluted cyberpunk stories of the eighties.<\/p>\n

How the Damned Live On<\/em><\/strong> by James Sallis is a very short and inconsequential piece about people marooned on an island. One talks to a spider about their perception of time.<\/p>\n

The Cold Side of the Island<\/em><\/strong> by Kali Wallace is a melancholy story about a woman called Lacie who goes back to her home town for the funeral of Jesse, a childhood friend. She misses the funeral because of the winter snow and a traffic accident.
\nAs well as being a story about her childhood friends this is also about Lacie\u2019s ageing mother, and how Lacie, Jesse and another friend called Thea found the corpse of a strange creature in the woods when they were teenagers. They spent that summer watching it decay until they finally boiled and divided the bones between the three of them. None of them ever spoke to anyone else about the creature.<\/p>\n

It was wrapped in a faded Patriots T-shirt, soft threadbare fabric tucked around the horns and jammed into the eye sockets. The long jut of the jaw stuck out through the neck hole. The shirt had been Jesse\u2019s. Lacie lifted the bundle, inhaled, but all she could smell was dust and her own perfume, still clinging to the funeral dress from the last time she had worn it.<\/em>
\nOne of the horns had slipped free. She brushed her finger along the clean white curve. It was the left horn, the crooked one that had been split and healed with a fungal mass of scar tissue. One eye socket was larger than the other; Thea had measured them after they brought the skeleton out of the woods. Jesse had dug through his mother\u2019s sewing things to find a tape measure for her, and Lacie had recorded each number: sockets, teeth, jaw, horns. When they had measured everything they could think to measure, Lacie turned to a fresh page in her sketchbook to draw the skull while Jesse and Thea argued over what its asymmetry meant, whether there were others like it, what it was and where it had come from and how it had died.<\/em> p.59<\/p>\n

This is a well written, characterised and absorbing story but I am not sure it amounts to anything, and I suspect that it is much more\u00a0about forgotten friendships than the strange creature they find\u2014unless I\u2019ve missed the point of course, and the rotting creature and its bones are a metaphor for something else such as the way relationships decay and fall apart for example. It\u00a0also made me think about Norman Spinrad\u2019s review column in last month\u2019s issue and I wondered if this is the kind of story he meant when he said\u00a0\u2018literary writers [need to learn] how to incorporate true speculative content in their well-written stories and [rediscover] what a dramatically successful story really is.\u2019<\/p>\n

Where There Is Nothing, There Is God<\/em><\/strong> by David Erik Nelson is a \u2018New Guys Time Portal\u2019 novella but is completely self-contained as far as I can tell\u2014I haven\u2019t read the two previous stories, The New Guys Always Work Overtime<\/em> (Asimov\u2019s SF<\/em>, February 2013) and There Was No Sound of Thunder<\/em> (Asimov\u2019s SF<\/em>, June 2014), but after reading this one I wish I had. The movie pitch to the Sci-Fi Channel would be Breaking Bad<\/em> meets Connie Willis\u2019s The Doomsday Book<\/em>.
\nThe story starts with a drug-dealer sending an out of work actor called Paul back through a time-portal to a late-eighteenth century Massachusetts village with crystal meth, the plan being to get the villagers hooked on the \u2018sacrement\u2019 of the drug and get them to provide various silver objects in exchange.<\/p>\n

And then the other parishioners were upon us. I turned and greeted them, holding my arms broad and offering a brief benediction. They knelt in a semicircle around me.
\nYoung Charles dropped to his knees mid-word, and clasped his empty hands in front of his mouth in supplication. Just as with Mr. Last of the Mohicans, I set my hands on the blacksmith\u2019s head, mumbled something vaguely ecclesiastical, then brought out the snuffbox and administered a bump to each nostril. He shivered exultantly, but kept his supplicant posture. The man to his left held a spoon peeking up above the fingers of his clasped hands. This I took and used as a scoop, offering two small bumps before dropping the spoon into my satchel. I continued down the line, mumbling and scooping, juggling the little snuffbox awkwardly as I laid hands on each parishioner. One held a buckle instead of a spoon, so I pocketed that and gave him a single toot from my nail. He frowned when I stepped away, but didn\u2019t open his eyes or say a word.
\nI didn\u2019t notice, not until I was right in front of her, that the little girl held a spoon as well. I set my hands on her head. I\u2019d assumed her hair\u2014which was a frizzy, dull brown\u2014would be coarse and greasy, but it was soft as bunny fur. I mumbled my blessing, gently took her spoon, and stepped away to her mother without offering the sacrament.
\nI don\u2019t imagine that will earn me any points with anyone, not now, but I wanted to go on the record: I did not give a little girl crystal meth.<\/em> p.83<\/p>\n

As you can see from the above, Paul develops qualms about what he is doing and these proliferate on subsequent trips as he sees the villagers rapidly become meth addicts, a puzzling situation as he is only visiting once every three weeks. Needless to say, when he tries to quit it is made very clear to him that there are some very bad mobsters in south Boston who will not tolerate that course of action. He decides he will have to come up with a plan to get rid of Chico the dealer and Peggy the university professor (who has been fencing the silverwork).
\nIt is about this point in the narrative (spoiler) that he goes back to the village and sees his body strung up on a tree and realises that the reason the villagers are so far gone is that there have been versions of him visiting from other timestreams\u2026.
\nIf this all sounds a bit grim it is anything but. Like Breaking Bad<\/em> this has a strong streak of black humour running through\u00a0it and is very entertaining. If it has a weakness it is the development of the multiple universe concept as this is all rather glossed over and distracts from the main story (why did all the copies of him come back to the same reality? Why were there only a handful rather than hundreds?) This and a couple of other little niggles stop it being a four-star story (why is the only apparent use of time travel this nefarious activity?) \u00a0Even so, a possible for the \u2018Best of the Year\u2019 collections on account of its brio.<\/p>\n

The non-fiction includes the usual columns and leads off with a nice astronomical photo from NASA on the Cover<\/em><\/strong>.
\nGuest Editorial: That\u2019s Far Out, So You Read it Too?<\/em><\/strong> by Sarah Pinsker is a short piece about how science fiction is like music: I was not convinced.
\nReflections: Dead as a Dodo<\/em><\/strong> by Robert Silverberg discusses the process by which the Dodo became extinct before commenting about the possibility of it being brought back to life in the future. I agree with his conclusion that this would be a good idea but sincerely hope they don\u2019t end up \u2018waddling around in our zoos.\u2019
\nThere is less Poetry<\/em><\/strong> in this issue than normal. Ada Hoffman\u2019s Million Year Elegies: Archaeopteryx<\/em><\/strong>, an speculative elegy for the creature, isn\u2019t bad, and Relativistic Dicksinson<\/em><\/strong> by John Richard Trtek is OK. As regular readers will realise,\u00a0this puts both head and shoulders above the bulk of the poetry published this year.
\nNext Issue<\/em><\/strong> states that it will be a double issue to celebrate the magazine\u2019s fortieth anniversary. What is left unsaid is that, according to recent Locus<\/em> news, both Asimov\u2019s SF<\/em> and Analog<\/em> will be moving to a bimonthly schedule using the current double issue format. I guess the positives of this are reduced cover art, printing and mailing costs, the negatives a loss of casual news-stand purchases due to a higher cover price.
\nOn Books<\/em><\/strong> by Peter Heck left me thinking that he\u00a0is something of a menace as a reviewer. Heck has such a gift for enthusing you about the books he is reviewing it was a struggle\u00a0not to go online and order several of them. Just as well: how would I get all these magazines read?1<\/sup><\/p>\n

This is a strong issue and worth picking up: all the fiction bar the Sallis is worth your attention.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. That said, I\u2019m going to have to dip into Lois McMaster Bujold\u2019s work. She is not only praised in this column\u00a0but one of her books has been the monthly choice of one of the Yahoo Groups I\u2019m a member of and I\u2019ve been aware of people singing her praises. I could review Analog<\/em>, May 1989, and read the Hugo and Nebula winning The Mountains of Mourning<\/em>. I think I also need to go back and reread Charles Stross\u2019s The Atrocity Archive<\/em> and catch up with that series, too.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\"rss\"<\/a>\"rss\"<\/a><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Galactic Central link ISFDB link Other reviews: Greg Hullender\u00a0and Eric Wong,\u00a0Rocket Stack Rank\u00a0(forthcoming) Sam\u00a0Tomaino,\u00a0SF Revu\u00a0(forthcoming) Unknown,\u00a0Tangent Online\u00a0(forthcoming) Various,\u00a0Goodreads\u00a0(forthcoming) Fiction: They Have All One Breath \u2022 novelette by Karl Bunker \u2665\u2665\u2665\u2665 Empty Shoes by the Lake \u2022 short story by Gay Partington Terry \u2665\u2665\u2665 HigherWorks \u2022 novelette by Gregory Norman Bossert \u2665\u2665\u2665 How the Damned Live […]<\/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-2253","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-Al","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2253","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=2253"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2268,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2253\/revisions\/2268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}