Asimov's SF, January 2012 (24 page)

The door slid open, and Ferron and Indrapramit entered cautiously.

The flat's resident must have triggered the door remotely, because he sat at his ease on furniture set as a chaise. A grey cat with red ear-tips crouched by his knee, rubbing the side of its face against his trousers.

"New!” said the cat. “New people! Namaskar! It's almost time for tiffin."

"Dexter Coffin,” Ferron said to the tall, thin man. “You are under arrest for the murder of Dr. Rao."

As they entered the lift and allowed it to carry them down the external wall of the Vertical City, Coffin standing in restraints between two of the patrol officers, Morganti said, “So. If I understand this properly, you—Coffin—actually
killed
Rao to assume his identity? Because you knew you were well and truly burned this time?"

Not even a flicker of his eyes indicated that he'd heard her.

Morganti sighed and turned her attention to Ferron. “What gave you the clue?"

"The scotophobin,” Ferron said. Coffin's cat, in her new livery of gray and red, miaowed plaintively in a carrier. “He didn't have memory issues. He was using it to cram Rao's life story and eccentricities so he wouldn't trip himself up."

Morganti asked, “But why liquidate his assets? Why not take them with him?” She glanced over her shoulder. “Pardon me for speaking about you as if you were a statue, Dr. Fang. But you're doing such a good impression of one."

It was Indrapramit who gestured at the Vertical City rising at their backs. “Rao wasn't wanting for assets."

Ferron nodded. “Would you have believed he was dead if you couldn't find the money? Besides, if his debt—or some of it—was recovered, Honolulu would have less reason to keep looking for him."

"So it was a misdirect. Like the frame job around Dr. Nnebuogor and the table set for two. . . ?"

Her voice trailed off as a stark blue-white light cast knife-edged shadows across her face. Something blazed in the night sky, something as stark and brilliant as a dawning sun—but cold, as cold as light can be. As cold as a reflection in a mirror.

Morganti squinted and shaded her eyes from the shine. “Is that a
hydrogen bomb?"

"If it was,” Indrapramit said, “Your eyes would be melting."

Coffin laughed, the first sound he'd made since he'd assented to understanding his rights. “It's a supernova."

He raised both wrists, bound together by the restraints, and pointed. “In the Andromeda galaxy. See how low it is to the horizon? We'll lose sight of it as soon as we're in the shadow of that tower."

"Al-Rahman,” Ferron whispered. The lift wall was darkening to a smoky shade and she could now look directly at the light. Low to the horizon, as Coffin had said. So bright it seemed to be visible as a sphere.

"Not that star. It was stable. Maybe a nearby one,” Coffin said. “Maybe they knew, and that's why they were so desperate to tell us they were out there."

"Could they have
survived
that?"

"Depends how close to Al-Rahman it was. The radiation—” Coffin shrugged in his restraints. “That's probably what killed them."

"God in Heaven,” said Morganti.

Coffin cleared his throat. “Beautiful, isn't it?"

Ferron craned her head back as the point source of the incredible radiance slipped behind a neighboring building. There was no scatter glow: the rays of light from the nova were parallel, and the shadow they entered uncompromising, black as a pool of ink.

Until this moment, she would have had to slip a skin over her perceptions to point to the Andromeda galaxy in the sky. But now it seemed like the most important thing in the world that, two and a half million years away, somebody had shouted across the void before they died.

A strange elation filled her.
Everybody talking, and nobody hears a damned thing anyone—even themselves—has to say.

"We're here,” Ferron said to the ancient light that spilled across the sky and did not pierce the shadow into which she descended. As her colleagues turned and stared, she repeated the words like a mantra. “We're here too! And we heard you."

—for Asha Cat Srinivasan Shipman, and her family

Copyright © 2011 Elizabeth Bear

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Ribofunk Redivus

Some twenty-five years ago, I coined the neologism “ribofunk,” promulgated a tongue-in-cheek manifesto, and then wrote a bunch of stories to illustrate what I'd envisioned. (As of the day I compose this essay, a quarter of a million Google Hits on the term, and counting!) The first part of the composite description designated a kind of SF that relied on the field of biology as its main scientific inspiration. The second half of the equation was meant to indicate, well, a funky style—hot, jazzy, carnal, life-affirming, and funny.

More or less simultaneously, the predictable term “biopunk” appeared (and, in fact, my coinage is subsumed in Wikipedia under its rival). This unfortunate reliance on the clichéd “punk” suffix has been reflected, more or less, in the subsequent literature.

Take Paolo Bacigalupi's
The Windup Girl
.

Now, I love this fine novel, and helped vote it a Campbell Award. It's pure state-of-the-art biopunk. But funky it ain't. “Grim and gritty” and “funky” are polar opposites. It's like Trent Reznor versus Lady Gaga. Unfortunately, from my humor-biased perspective, grim and gritty seems to be the default mode for speculative fiction that delves into our organic future.

To paraphrase baseball legend Casey Stengel, “Can't anybody here play this ribofunk game?"

Well, it gladdens my heart to report that at least one person can. To continue the baseball metaphor a moment, debut novelist Katy Stauber has hit a home run with
Revolution World
(Night Shade Books, trade paperback, $14.99, 300 pages, ISBN 978-1-59780-233-8). Fast, funny, frenetic, it has echoes of Cory Doctorow and Bruce Sterling (at his most light-hearted). If you pictured
The Windup Girl
re-imagined by a team of Alexander Jablokov and Donald Westlake, you wouldn't be so far off.

The time is some seventy years in the future, and the scenario is almost identical to that of
The Windup Girl
: Greenhouse Earth conditions causing mass deaths, scarcity, political instability and repression, with shattered societies relying for help on gene-modding and alternate energy sources. But despite this, Stauber doesn't give in to a single dystopic thought. Her characters are living their lives as best they can, with zest and panache and even glee. I'd bring up the famous lyrics by the Police—"When the world is running down, you make the best of what's still around"—but even that sentiment does not capture the genuine uplift and optimism of
Revolution World
. (The title, by the way, refers to a popular videogame that recreates Texas history.)

Much of the mad, infectious energy of the book derives from the nature of the players. We are first introduced to gene maven Harmony Somata, head of the bio-firm named Floracopia, and her four identical daughters, chief of whom from the reader's perspective is Clio, also a gengineer. They are a madcap family of beautiful female geniuses, counterbalanced in intensity and ingenuity only by two unprepossessing yet capable Canadians, Seth and Max. Seth and his uncle Max represent Omerta, an independent country-corporation offering secure data storage to governments, terrorist groups, and private individuals alike. They are setting up a server farm in Ambrosia Springs, Texas, home to Floracopia. The men quickly find their fates entangled with the Somata clan, which is all to the good, as only knowledgeable native guides will help the newcomers deal with Texas customs, a hostile US government, and corporate spies from Malsanto. Not to mention killer rabbits as big as pitbulls and a pack of vicious Pomeranian guard dogs.

Stauber revs her plot engines at 5000 RPM, bouncing the reader from one hilarious incident to another (alternating among many POV's to achieve her ends, even, unconventionally, leapfrogging minds from one paragraph to the next), all while making room for a developing love story between Clio and Seth. But I should make it clear that
Revolution World
is no Ron Goulart-style parody, however great such farces were. It's a genuine, hard-edged speculative look at a highly probable future, but cast in humorous and upbeat terms, rendering any “message” about how we've screwed ourselves more palatable and bearable.

I know it's not a valid critical method of literary analysis, a mistake akin to comparing apples and oranges, but if you ask yourself which world you'd rather inhabit—Bacigalupi's or Stauber's—I think you'll come down on Stauber's side every time.

The Howardian Age

We are fairly unarguably in the midst of a second boom period for Robert E. Howard and his fiction, the first such heyday occurring in the 1970s and 1980s. Conan, his most famous creation, has a monthly comic book from Dark Horse (older comics featuring Conan now have handsome archive editions), and a new movie about the thick-thewed and marginally less thick-witted barbarian is forthcoming. (I believe the ex-governor of California has finally surrendered the lead role.) Lesser characters such as Solomon Kane have received cinematic treatment as well. Smart new illustrated editions of the stories, grouped thematically, appear regularly from Del Rey. The life of the author himself has merited a Hollywood biopic, with
The Whole Wide World
(1996). Can his enshrinement in the Library of America, along with his already enthroned pal Lovecraft, be far behind?

Scholarship on REH proceeds apace with his fan popularity. And one recent instance of the textual and cultural parsing of Howard serves as a very readable anthology for laymen and academicians alike.

I am pointing now to
The Robert E. Howard Reader
(Borgo Press, trade paper, $14.99, 212 pages, ISBN 978-1-4344-1165-5, edited by Darrell Schweitzer. Schweitzer has rendered admirable yeoman service to SF/F/H over the years with several volumes of essays and interviews that capture lots of critical insights into fantastika, as well as primary-source recollections from the creators, and this volume is no less of a valuable accomplishment. Mixing new material with reprints, it offers everything from personal musings on Howard to close analyses of the primary texts.

We start with a chatty reminiscence from Michael Moorcock about what Howard means to him, and how his early reading of Conan was instrumental in creating Elric. This is a fine opener, and leads naturally to the next piece by Leo Grin, which charts the rise and fall and rise of REH's popularity, including the current boom. L. Sprague de Camp offers a broad but handy outline and weighing of the kinds of fiction Howard wrote, followed by Poul Anderson's personal appreciation of the work. Fritz Leiber and Robert Weinberg dig hard into the unique stylistic bag of tricks Howard employed, while S. T. Joshi goes deep into the correspondence between REH and HPL (400,000 extant words!).

Mark Hall examines the anthropological roots of the Hyborian Age, while Charles Hoffman takes an early story ("Xuthal of the Dusk") and contrasts it with its late-career reworking ("Red Nails"). “Howard's Oriental Stories” are summarized and investigated perceptively by Don D'Ammassa. Schweitzer doffs his editorial hat and puts on his critic's cap to look at Kull as a prototype of Conan, and Robert Price examines the actual depth of Solomon Kane's Puritanism.

The story “Beyond the Black River” gets a close reading from George Scithers, and Gary Romeo offers a fascinating catalog of all the times REH himself has appeared as a metafictional character. Surely the funniest and oddest piece here is Howard Waldrop's “A Journey to Cross Plains,” which is the contemporaneous account written by twenty-year-old Waldrop upon his visit to REH's hometown—with footnotes from Waldrop's putative maturity added! And rounding out the volume are Scott Connors with his examination of the marketplace realities of pulp magazines, and Steve Tompkins on REH's literary heirs.

By the end of this fine assemblage of essays, the reader—novice or expert—will feel invigorated and eager to return once again to Howard's undying, crimson-shadowed pages.

Lovely Zita, Meteor Made

Problem Number One: Not enough YA fiction is science fiction; the majority of YA fantastika is overbalanced in favor of fantasy.

Problem Number Two: The audience for comics is greying; there are not enough titles that serve as gateway drugs for younger readers.

Combined Solution to Both Problems One and Two:
Zita the Spacegirl
(First Second Books, trade paper, $10.99, 192 pages, ISBN 978-1-59643-446-2), written and drawn by Ben Hatke. This nifty offering, promising to be merely the first volume in a series, does everything right to lure young readers, keep them entertained, and hook them on science fiction. And guess what else? I, an adult reader of some mumblety-mumble decades worth of prior reading, found the book absolutely charming and rewarding as well.

Let's look at the volume in three ways: the sheer story, the art, and the subliminals.

One afternoon, spunky yet average Earthgirl Zita (pre-adolescent, maybe ten to twelve years old) and her pal Joseph are roughhousing in a field when they come upon a smoking crater with a meteoroid at the bottom. (Nerdy Joseph is very particular about the term “meteoroid,” and I have betrayed his scientific accuracy in my section title only reluctantly, to achieve the proper Beatlesque pun.) Protruding from the meteoroid is a gadget. Zita grabs the device and boldly yet unwisely employs it, opening up a stargate through which Joseph is immediately snatched by a fuzzy tentacle, before the rift snaps shut. After a brief interval of panic and despair, Zita reopens the boomtube and follows.

She emerges on a planet overstuffed with weird sophonts of a thousand races, most of whom just ignore her. Her stargate device shattered by the clumsy footstep of a hulking giant named Strong-Strong, she quickly learns the planet is under death sentence from imminent collision with an asteroid, and that Joseph is the captive of a race called the Sciptorians. Getting advice and help from a fellow human named Piper, a duplicitous rogue, she embarks on a journey to the Scriptorian castle to rescue her buddy, picking up friends and helpers along the way, including a giant mouse, a braggart battlebot, and a timorous junkbot.