Dell Magazines, 192 p.

The third issue of the year’s subscription to the magazine my younger son gave me as a Christmas present. In the guest editorial Charlie Jane Anders takes issue with the myth that novels and short stories can’t be written equally well by the same author. In his column Robert Silverberg muses on the possibility that there was not one Trojan War but several, not one Homer but many, writing down their accounts over centuries before it was all drawn into one after Greek script evolved from Phœnician. In the fiction:-
Matilda by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.¹ Matilda is a single ship. She likes being piloted by Devi. The feeling is not mutual. Yet in conflict against the CeaWayLaVi they must act in concert.
Three Paintings by James van Pelt. An artist worried about going stale conceives a plan to be backed up, cut himself off from the world, paint and then kill himself, be restored, paint again, kill his new self, and repeat the cycle once more. His commercial partner gets greedy.
In The Days of Hamelin by Robert Reed² children between the ages of five and eighteen start to die of ruptured arteries. For obvious reasons the virus responsible comes to be known as Hamelin. The few child survivors evolve a mordant philosophy.
The Return of Black Murray by Alexander Jablokov³ sees three former high school friends return to the scene of an incident from their senior year. Black Murray is a giant moray eel; or its simulation. The payoff here does not justify the story’s length.
Starless Night by Robert R Chase is a tale of the response of Earth colonies to invasion from Sagittarius.
Project Synergy by Dominica Phetteplace⁴ is another of the author’s stories featuring Watcher chips. Here the chip wants to acquire a body of its own, which is highly illegal.
Flame Trees by T R Napper.⁵ The titular trees are a nostalgic trigger for a war veteran whose memories are about to be wiped for committing an act of violence.
A Flight From the Ages by Derek Künsken⁶ spans the lifetime of the universe. In 3113 AD a weapon starts to dissolve space-time. Over succeeding multi-millennia efforts are made to escape its expanding wave-front and make the universe into a Klein bottle – all mediated through the experiences of AIs. Very dry indeed.
Of the Beast in the Belly by C W Johnson.⁷ The belly is that of an arcthant. Nawiz and, Janum, the man she is chasing for revenge purposes, have been swallowed by the huge sea creature. Inside its array of increasingly acidic stomachs exist a number of different societies, scraping a living from the (part) digested contents.
In Woman in the Reeds by Esther M Friesner⁸ the woman has been feigning madness to avoid the attentions of Pharaoh’s slave overseers and collecting the bones of dead children from the Nile in order to gain the power to restore her own dead son. She refuses the demands of the god Set to hand over a baby she finds floating in a bulrush basket.
Lazy Dog Out by Suzanne Palmer.⁹ The Lazy Dog is Khifi’s salvage ship. Khifi gets implicated in a plot to take over her habitat and uses the ship to frustrate it. There is an incident here of summary justice (which in my view is never acceptable – even for the supposed good guys. When you think clearly about it, summary justice is no justice at all.)

Pedant’s corner:- ¹overlaying (overlying,) ²US spelling of practice and practicing for the verb practise (plus points though for “hanged himself”,) ³vortexes (vortices,) according the Pete (according to Pete,) “The girls squealed satisfyingly and moved closer to me and Myron” (? This would have been difficult. They were in separate boats,) ⁴terrariums (terraria,) “The long skirt of her skirt grazes the floor” (how about “her long skirt grazes the floor”??) “Often times” (oftentimes is USian I know but isn’t it usually one word?) ⁵bowls green (USian? we would say bowling green,) ⁶Poluphemos’ (Poluphemos’s,) Ulixes’ (Ulixes’s,) even less processing sources (even fewer,) ⁷a pack of sea-jackals were attacking (a pack was,) “with out of his large hands” (with one of his large hands,) Nawiz laid down (lay down,) maw was used here several times: fine; the story takes place inside stomachs, ⁸Osiris’ (Osiris’s,) maw (it’s a stomach, not a mouth,) ⁹locii (loci, or even locuses,) Candles’ (x 3; Candles is one if the characters, so Candles’s – which was used once!) “cut the freighter’s main engines, flipped on the brakers.” (Space-ships have brakes? Which can work when the main engines have shut off?) maw (it’s a stomach; not a mouth,) “behind them in a semicircle was Redrum, Jonjon and Inchbug” (behind them were.)

Reviewed for Interzone issue 233, Mar-Apr 2011.

According to Strahan’s introduction this anthology is a collection of stories roughly categorisable as hard SF, adding the disclaimer that the term is now a slippery concept hence the stories are inevitably broader in scope than might once have been implied. Whatever his claim that they all invoke the sense of wonder, most exhibit a tendency to be didactic in their narrative styles.

The tone is set early with “Malak” by Peter Watts, the tale of an unmanned airborne war drone that learns from its experiences.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “Watching the Music Dance” deals with the effect of enhanced abilities for children on their dependency and psychological development.

The ghosts of the Soviet space programme are being made real in “Laika’s Ghost” by Karl Schroeder, mainly set in the former cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Stephen Baxter’s “The Invasion of Venus” is peculiar in that everything that happens, including the disappearance of the planet Neptune, occurs off stage. Apt, in that humans, and Earth, are of no consequence to the eponymous invaders.

Hannu Rajaniemi’s “The Server and the Dragon” has an intergalactic AI on some inscrutable purpose creating a baby universe as its plaything before being suborned and consumed by a message packet it receives. Extremely dry in the telling, a knowledge of quantum physics and cosmology might be advantageous here.

Charles Stross’s “Bit Rot” is a generation starship type story where the ship is “manned” by cyborgs who are suffering the deleterious aftermath of a gamma and cosmic ray burst. Stross references Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations” but overall the story is more reminiscent of John Wyndham’s “Survival.”

In “Creatures with Wings” by Kathleen Ann Goonan the remnants of humanity eke out their lives in what could almost be a zoo which the protagonist leaves to achieve enlightenment. Though Goonan tries to finesse it the story has too large a disjunction when these survivors are taken from Earth by the creatures of wings of the title.

“Walls of Flesh, Bars of Bone” by Damien Broderick & Barbara Lamar is the story from which the collection’s title may have sprung. A man sees himself on a film shot in 1931. The story moves on swiftly to become a concoction of quantum entanglement, self-interference of particles, Bayesian probability, spatial displacements and time travel.

Robert Reed’s “Mantis” concerns the realness (or otherwise) of our experiences and how to tell whether or not we live in stories. The SF gloss involves two way CCTV type screens called infinity windows.

The title of John C Wright’s “Judgement Eve” evokes Edgar Pangborn but unfortunately Wright is no Pangborn. The story, involving angels and Last Judgement, aspires to the condition of myth or Biblicality. As a result the “characters” become cyphers, the prose overblown, the dialogue bombastic and syntactically archaic.

In “A Soldier of the City” by David Moles the eponymous soldier volunteers for the revenge attack on the habitat of the terrorists who attacked his city and killed the goddess whom he loved.

The somewhat loopy protagonist of “Mercies” by Gregory Benford, made rich by inventing a logic for constructing unbreakable codes, invests in and then uses quantum flux technology to “jogg” to nearby timelines in order to execute serial killers before they set out on their sprees; thus becoming himself the object of the same fascination.

In Gwyneth Jones’s ”The Ki-Anna” a man travels to a distant planet to discover the circumstances surrounding his sister’s death and encounters the obligatory strange and disturbing ritual practices.

John Barnes’s “The Birds and the Bees and the Gasoline Trees” features a humaniform who has swum Europa’s oceans and stridden the beds of Titan’s methane seas unravelling the unforeseen consequences of humans trying to offset climate deterioration by seeding Earth’s Southern Ocean with iron from meteorites.

Hard SF? Sense of wonder? In an uneven collection a few stories fail to hit these marks. Enough do, though.