re:mote voices

Title: The Mammoth Book Of Best New SF 18
Editor: Gardner Dozois
Publisher: Robinson

This is my 8th annual collection of the Best New SF stories - Volume 18 covering 2004 and being the UK equivalent of Volume 22 of the US edition. As always Gardner Dozois selects his favourite stories of the year and presents them along with introductions and notes.

Inappropriate Behaviour by Pat Murphy starts the collection with a shipwrecked man, on an island populated only by crabs and a remote presence robot. If he can communicate with the person operating the robot then he is saved, if he can't then he will die, but communication isn't always as straight forward as you might expect. A nice story about social interaction, expectations and fairy tales.

Set in a world where people have stopped aging, frozen at the one age, Start The Clock by Benjamin Rosenbaum follows a group of Nines - people who have been physically 9 for the last 40 years, and are looking to buy a new house - shaped like a pirate galleon. But when one of the group goes missing it brings up the underlying tensions and takes us on a wander through a weird culture where odd things happen with stunted growth.

The Third Party reminds of Ken MacLeod to some degree, David Moles putting political beliefs against each other. Representatives of a "cooperative" planet infiltrate an isolated world, keen to influence the political/economical structure of the young planet. But they find that an organisation with opposing views has arrived, and they've gone for the front door rather than the back.

The Voluntary State in Christopher Rowe's story is a group mind of Tennessee kind of place, which is under attack by agents of Kentucky. A Tennessee artist is attacked and drugged and used as a means to infiltrate the state. On the whole this is an utterly incoherent piece, something which can work for some writers as the post current mental state can be a strange and interesting place, but for me this doesn't really work.

Nancy Kress is pretty reliable with her contributions to these collections, this year her story is the clever Shiva In Shadow. Which alternates between two narrative streams, two versions of reality, both featuring the same characters – but one in the flesh and the other in upload digitised format. Following the success and collapse of the same team - a superior and dismissive scientist, inferior and competitive scientist, and the manipulative and nurturing captain who is supposed to ensure that everything remains balanced.

The People of Sand And Slag by Paolo Bigaci is his second contribution to this series, and I would say I enjoyed this one more than the previous year’s story. It follows post-human tribes that eat sand and fire slag, who are entirely transformed into a pollution consuming race designed to survive in the wasteland we have made of the world. One small group make the freak discovery of a surviving dog, an old Earth animal that has somehow inconceivably made it through the changes. The interaction between the group and the dog being a vehicle to follow the weirdness of old versus new.

The Clapping Hands of God by Michael F. Flynn is a story that takes some classic ideas and gives them a contemporary edge. Follows a mixed race/religion exploration team from a gateway culture, humans who have found gates through space to other worlds. On this latest mission they find a planet with an intelligent race and are engrossed with studying them from a distance. But they are soon confused as the locals start to prepare for war, and in the end witness something that challenges their role as neutral observer.

M. John Harrison hasn’t appeared in a lot of these collections, though with his novel Light he has returned to the SF scene. The story Tourism, which originally appeared on Amazon of all places, is clearly set in the same background as Light, referring to some of the same characters and background detail. Tourism is set in a bar near a zone of flux, where a tour guide bases his operations, though on the whole this is a bar tale. Like a lot of Harrison’s short material this can tend towards the abstract, but manages to wow while he is at it.

In last year’s collection Terry Bisson’s Dear Abbey was a time travel story into the future, this year he returns with a journey into the past with Scout's Honour. A man receives a series of emails piecing together a man who has gone into the past and met with Neanderthals. Initially he thinks it is a joke, someone who knows that the study of Neanderthal man is his speciality, but as the story goes on he has his doubts.

James Patrick Kelly sets up a future where we have been invaded and the aliens have wiped out men. Leaving a woman only society in Men Are Trouble, where the devils maintain the population by making women artificially pregnant, and post-man religion is cropping up. In particular this smart story follows a private detective in the aftermath of a missing persons case gone wrong, where a devil has suggested she look closer, to uncover conspiracy.

Kage Baker crops up most years in these collections, usually with a “Company” story. The company are a group of time travellers who pop up through out time to preserve and steal artefacts. Mother AEgepyt doesn’t seem to explicitly be a Company story, though Dozois suggests that it is, and there is an undercurrent that could back that up. Though if you were unfamiliar with Baker’s work this would just seem to be story about Medieval Europe, with suggestions of mystery and magic. As usual Baker is a decent writer, but her work just does little for me.

I have to admit that I wasn’t especially familiar with Vernor Vinge before last year’s collection. Like Cookie Monster, Synthetic Serenity is a particularly nice piece, even if it especially short. A short snap shot of a story depicting a kind of post-singularity where bleeding edge kids go to school with future shocked adults who have life extensions, but have to go back to basics just to keep up.

To a degree Mary Rosenblum’s Skin Deep is a story about stem cell and clone tissue research helping to give a burn victim a face. But the depth of story is more about perceptions, relationships and the like – how we rely on our faces, how we interact with people, and the motivations that affect those things.

Vandana Singh’s Delhi initially reminds strongly of Robert Silverberg, the peripheral overlaps of reality/time. Though as it builds it perhaps progresses more towards something that recalls works by John Shirley, Simon Ings or Kathleen Ann Goonan. While at the same time the piece is also partially a history of Delhi with some comment on that. The story of the man who looks across the overlaps, and the strange encounters he has is memorable, particularly as it reaches conclusion.

The Tribes of Bela by Albert E. Cowdrey reminds a little of John Varley's The Bellman from the previous year, in that they are both enjoyable murder mysteries. Taking the base line of a crime/thriller and placing it in a very SF setting. Here a police officer arrives on a mining planet to investigate a series of murders only to find out he is quickly out of his depth – with all hell quickly breaking loose!

Over the years of reading collections I’ve found that the stories that often the stories that I don’t especially enjoy are the alternate history time travel pieces. William Sanders’s Sitka is a good of exactly that. An alt.history vs time travel piece, teaming up Jack London and Lenin in an America run by Russia. The pair plotting to start World War 1 and by extension the Russian Revolution. The narrative switching between the plotters and time travel witnesses. The witnesses part in the story is particularly redundant, as they are reduced to a sentence here and there and on the whole contribute nothing to the piece.

On the other hand Leviathan Wept by Daniel Abraham is very much the kind of story that makes this collection such essential reading. Our narrator is a member of counter terrorism cells that take the fight to the terrorist, using integrated technology. We follow him and his cell, all plugged into each other as they make a tactical strike, only for something very odd to happen as a result. From cutting edge action adventure Leviathan Wept switches into singularity territory.

Colin P Davies’s The Defenders must be the shortest piece in the collection at just 3 pages. Short but sweet, The Defenders is a good introduction to Davies’s writing, following a man as he goes out in boat with his grand daughter. Floating above a battle site they discuss the role of the defenders, great dragon like genetic engineered beasts that fought off a demon attack. Her view is youthful and romantic, his is more cynical and experienced.

Through the eyes of the one life extended ship master we follow a group of humans as they flee global destruction on a generation ship in Stephen Baxter’s novella Mayflower II. Following the rise and fall of the population and the path evolution takes in a captive group – the trends that survive, the genetic traits that find favour, the political/social structures that work or don’t in a closed set of people.

I am more familiar with Caitlin R. Kiernan from her comic work, having worked on a few titles for Vertigo. Here she offers a short story, Riding The White Bull, which follows specialist agents or “scrubbers” who go into infected areas to deal with the contaminated. When we reached Jupiter’s moon Europa, we found something alien there, and it followed us back, infecting those it comes in contact with. The plot follows the history of one particular agent and the horrors of the job, though in the end the piece is a bit patchy in plot terms, but it is interesting, even if it does leave you wondering about what it is really all about.

Falling Star by Brendan DuBois presents us with a post-viral technology crash America. A hardware eating virus has crashed the world, leaving people isolated, making people feel as though they have been punished. An old astronaut returns to his home town, but with the rise of an anti-technology morality, the people don’t want him there.

Robert Reed’s Dragons of Summer Gulch is a kind of steampunk western, with dragons as WMD. Dragon claws as armour piercing bullets, dragon scales as armour, but what of dragon eggs? An ex-soldier goes searching the desert and finds a batch of eggs, and it soon becomes a pitch battle as everyone tries to get their hands on these artefacts that could change the whole world!

James L. Cambias’s The Ocean of the Blind is a particularly naughty little story about the media, popularity and 1st contact. An ocean planet, a group of scientists, and an over zealous nature reporter are studying a race of aliens that are a cross between lobsters and whales. When the reporter tries to get closer than the authorities are happy with, he gets more of an exclusive than he bargained for!

Eleanor Arnason follows up her previous story The Potter Of Bones which was included in volume 16 with The Garden - A Hwarhath Science Fictional Romance. In The Potter Of Bones, Arnason followed the female side of Hwarhath culture, this time she deals with the male. The story is something of a mixed bag, following the alien race of the Hwarhath, who are at war with humans. The Hwarhath story comes with notes for human readers, which is a nice touch, but in the end the piece is patchy. The ending in particular lets it down, there are clearly other stories by Arnason that feature the Hwarhath, and the turn the end takes relies too heavily on one of those stories that wasn’t included in one of these collections.

It is 2003 and Tony Blair has taken us to war in Iraq, there are people in the streets protesting, there is an air of dissatisfaction, a helpless knowing that there is not a lot we can do about it. Then the news about New Suffolk breaks, a man has worked out how to open a wormhole, and has set up an idealised new England on another planet. The result in Peter F. Hamilton’s contemporary piece Footvote is national collapse, protestors and refugees, and people voting with their feet.

The stories by Paul Di Filippo that have been included in these collections are usually reliably quirky and interesting pieces. However Sisyphus and the Stranger steers itself into alt.history territory, which as I’ve already said I am not a huge fan of. Like Sitka earlier in the collection this is an alt.history which stems from the start of World War 1. France discovered the N-Ray, and took over the world. Some years after the war Albert Camus is the right hand man to the French representative in Algeria. He is bored and stuck in a rut when he is offered a chance to make a change by a stranger.

My first encounter with Paul Melko was in the previous year’s collection, and everything I’ve read by him since I’ve enjoyed. Ten Sigmas is no exception, again it reminds of something Greg Egan might have done, with a more human edge to it. The narrator is a multiple man, a man who can sense the multiple realities that surround him, and has used that to make a fortune – stealing songs from other realities and writing them in his own. But when he is put in a situation where he must react, his unique ability is challenged to the limit – is what occurs in a parallel reality going to hold in his, will there be a path through which he will survive the events that he decides to set underway?

The final story in the collection is a piece called Investments by Walter Jon Williams, which is a follow up to a couple of his recent novels. Humanity has fought a war with an alien race and lost, and has now been absorbed into the alien empire. An ex-soldier has made an investment in the expansion of a young planet, but becomes worried when he learns about parties who were profiteering during the war are involved in the deal. He sets about trying to catch them in the act, but the story transforms from financial drama to international rescue as things blow out of proportion.

As usual a good number of these stories were originally printed online, have been posted for award consideration, or are included on the author's own sites, the following links lead to nearly half of the material in this volume:
Inapropriate Behaviour - Pat Murphy
The Voluntary State - Christopher Rowe
The People of Sand And Slag - Paolo Bigaci
The Clapping Hands of God - Michael F. Flynn
Tourism - M. John Harrison
Scout's Honour - Terry Bisson
Men Are Trouble - James Patrick Kelly
Synthetic Serenity - Vernor Vinge
Leviathan Wept - Daniel Abraham
Dragons of Summer Gulch - Robert Reed