The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2018 Edition

We have finally finalized the Table of Contents for my Best of the Year book for stories from 2017. I think it's an excellent book (of course I would!) (For those who might have seen some stories I recommended in my Hugo posts that don't show up here ... the book is always influenced by considerations like length, thematic balance, avoiding too many stories from the same source, and also contractual limitations. And as I've said many times, when it comes to the final several stories I choose to include, it's a matter of agonizing over the ones I can't quite fit that are really just as good.)

These are listed in alphabetical order of original place of publication.

The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2018 Edition, edited by Rich Horton. 

Contents:

“Time Travel is Only for the Poor” by S. L. Huang (Analog)
“Emergency Protocol” by Lettie Prell (Analog)
“Persephone of the Crows” by Karen Joy Fowler (Asimov’s)
“Cupido” by Rich Larson (Asimov’s)
“Winter Timeshare” by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s)
"Soulmates.com", by Will McIntosh (Asimov's)

“Red Bark and Ambergris” by Kate Marshall (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
“Whatever Knight Comes” by Ryan Row (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
“Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue” by Charlie Jane Anders (Boston Review)
“The Significance of Significance” by Robert Reed (Clarkesworld)
“The Secret Life of Bots” by Suzanne Palmer (Clarkesworld)
“The Tale of the Alcubierre Horse” by Kathleen Ann Goonan (Extrasolar)
“Marley and Marley” by J. R. Dawson (F&SF)
“The Hermit of Houston” by Samuel R. Delany (F&SF)
“Rings” by Nina Kiriki Hoffman (F&SF)
“Starlight Express” by Michael Swanwick (F&SF)
“The Sacrifice of the Hanged Monkey” by Minsoo Kang (Fantastic)
“ZeroS” by Peter Watts (Infinity Wars)
“Ugo” by Giovanni de Feo (Lightspeed)
“Love Engine Optimization” by Matthew Kressel (Lightspeed)
“This is for You” by Bruce McAllister (Lightspeed)
“One Hour, Every Seven Years” by Alice Sola Kim (McSweeney’s)
“Montreal, 2014” by Madeline Ray (Mothership Zeta)
“Sidewalks” by Maureen McHugh (Omni)
“Shoggoths in Traffic” by Tobias S. Buckell (Patreon)
“The Fisherman and the Pig” by Kameron Hurley (Patreon)
“Utopia LOL?” by Jamie Wahls (Strange Horizons)
“An Account of the Land of Witches” by Sofia Samatar (Tender)
“Extracurricular Activities” by Yoon Ha Lee (Tor.com)
“The Martian Obelisk” by Linda Nagata (Tor.com)
“Hexagrammaton” by Hanus Seiner (Tor.com)
“Though She Be But Little” by C. S. E. Cooney (Uncanny)
“And Then There Were (N - One)” by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny)
“Fandom for Robots” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad (Uncanny)

A Forgotten SF Novel: Time Bomb, by Wilson Tucker

A Forgotten SF Novel: Time Bomb, by Wilson Tucker

a review by Rich Horton

I call this novel "forgotten", and I believe it is, largely, but its author is not forgotten in SF circles, particularly fan circles. Arthur Wilson Tucker was born in 1914, and was brought up in Bloomington, IL, where he lived most of his life. His primary career was as an electrician and projectionist. He was an active fan since the early '30s, known to everyone as Bob Tucker.  He published the legendary fanzine Le Zombie beginning in 1938, as well as The Bloomington Newsletter, and The Neo-Fan's Guide. He won the Best Fanwriter Hugo in 1970, a retrospective John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1976, and a couple of Retro-Hugos as well. He was particularly famous for the ritual of "smoothing" -- a group of people would gather round, pass around a bottle of Jim Beam, take a sip, raise their hands, and when all were done, say "smooooth" and swoop their hands down. I was "smoooothed" at my first convention, ConQuesT in Kansas City in 1998 or so -- that was the one time I met Bob Tucker. He died in 2006, shortly after his wife of 52 years, Fern, had died.

Tucker was also a professional writer, of both mysteries and SF, usually as by Wilson Tucker. His first novel, a mystery set in fannish circles called The Chinese Doll, appeared in 1946, and his last, the well-regarded SF novel Ice and Iron, in 1974. His best-remembered novels are The Lincoln Hunters (1958), The Long Loud Silence (1952), The Year of the Quiet Sun (1970) and Ice and Iron (1974, expanded 1975). I've read The Lincoln Hunters, Wild Talent, and Ice and Iron. He was said to be determinedly retired from writing after Resurrection Days appeared in 1981. (He apparently sold a novel outline to Harlan Ellison for The Last Dangerous Visions after much prodding, so there may be one unpublished work awaiting, though Tucker also apparently said that that was one story he wouldn't be eager to have unearthed.)

Tucker is also famous for having coined the term "Space Opera" (quite a disparaging term in his hands), and for the practice called "Tuckerization": using names of friends for fictional characters.

(Cover by Richard Powers)

His novels were noted for their generally rather bleak tone, a refusal to flinch from the worst implications of his ideas and of the world he saw around him. (This perhaps in contrast to his personal amiability.) This applies to Time Bomb, indeed, though perhaps not wholly effectively -- the novel is somewhat clumsily executed, and uneasily tied to an earlier novel, The Time Masters.

I read the 1957 paperback reprint from Avon, retitled Tomorrow Plus X. The original novel was published in 1955 by Rinehart and Company, who were Tucker's publishers, for both mystery and SF, from his first novel at least throughout the '50s.

The opening chapter, in several brief sections, introduces a comedian spoofing time travel, an Illinois State police Lieutenant called to the site of a mysterious bombing, a rally for a popular populist politician, an old man working on a device of some sort, an urbane couple watching the comedian with distaste, and a telepath. The connections seem unclear at first. We are soon following Lieutenant Danforth as he continues to investigate the bombing, which is the sixth in a strange series that seemed aimed at associates of the populist politician Ben, the leader of the "Sons of America" movement. (Ben was surely modeled on Joe McCarthy at the time of writing, but yes, he does remind the contemporary reader uneasily of Donald Trump.)

Danforth is soon fired, for the crime of not having solved the bombings. But the department's telepath, a very influential man, arranges for him to keep working on the case surreptitiously. Danforth has fixed on the notion of bombs travelling through time as the means. He is pointed in the direction of a couple who just moved into the area, Gilbert and Shirley Nash. He goes to meet them -- they are a strange couple, and they had an odd history at their previous job, working at Oak Ridge (evidently this was the subject of The Time Masters). Soon it is revealed that Gilbert Nash is actually Gilgamesh, and he's 10,000 years old. Shirley is apparently also slow to age, though she's only a few decades old at this time. Danforth falls in love (hopelessly) with Shirley.

A fortuitous finding of a failed bomb in a nearby field gives Danforth the break he needs, and some good old fashioned detective work leads him to the criminal. Who seems glad to be found. But of course his secret involves time travel -- and he claims to know the future ... What will Lt. Danforth do with this knowledge?

The book is really kind of a mess. Gilbert and Shirley Nash seem wholly unnecessary characters. The explanation of how the "time bomb" worked never made much sense to me. And the conclusion, meant to be heroic (which it is, I suppose) also seemed strained. Tucker did much better in books like Ice and Iron and The Year of the Quiet Sun. (An interview from 1975 conducted by Dave Truesdale and Paul MacGuire III for Tangent mentions a novel about Gilgamesh that he was a couple of chapters into then: he must have abandoned that. I wonder if that was intended to be a third Gilbert and Shirley Nash story?)

2018 Hugo Recommendations: Short Story

Short Story

Another very long list, a set of very worthwhile short stories.

Charlie Jane Anders, "Cake Baby" (Lightspeed, 11/17)

Charlie Jane Anders, "Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue" (Boston Review, Global Dystopias)

Tim Akers, "A Death in the Wayward Drift" (Interzone, 3-4/17)

Eleanor Arnason, "Daisy" (F&SF, 3-4/17)

Kelly Barnhill, "Probably Still the Chosen One" (Lightspeed, 2/17)

Tobias Buckell, "Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance" (Cosmic Powers)

Tobias Buckell, "Shoggoths in Traffic" (Patreon, 4/17)

Rebecca Campbell, "The Fall of the Mundaneum, (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 9/28/17)

C. S. E. Cooney, "Though She Be But Little" (Uncanny, 9-10/17)

Tina Connolly, "Pipecleaner Sculptures and other Necessary Work" (Uncanny, 11-12/17)

John Crowley, "This is Our Town" (Totalitopia)

John Crowley, “Spring Break” (New Haven Noir)

Scott Dalrymple, "Marcel Proust, Incorporated" (Lightspeed, 6/17)

J. R. Dawson, "Marley and Marley" (F&SF, 11-12/17)

Kate Dollarhyde, “Lamplighter’s Eve” (Lackington’s, Fall/17)

Andy Dudak, "Cryptic Female Choice" (Interzone, 7-8/17)

Tom Greene, "Necessary Illusions" (Analog, 1-2/17)

Giovanni de Feo, "Ugo" (Lightspeed, 9/17)

Jonathan Edelstein, "Of Letters They Are Made" (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 6/22/17)

Kendra Fortmyer, "Octopus vs. Bear" (Lightspeed, 5/17)

Karen Joy Fowler, "Persephone of the Crows" (Asimov’s, 5-6/17)

A. T. Greenblatt, "A Place to Grow" (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 5/11/17)

Nina Kiriki Hoffman, "Rings" (F&SF, 5-6/16)

S. L. Huang, "Time Travel is Only for the Poor" (Analog, 11-12/17)

Kameron Hurley, "The Fisherman and the Pig" (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 9/28/17)

N. K. Jemisin, "The Evaluators" (Wired, 1/17)

Minsoo Kang, "The Sacrifice of the Hanged Monkey" (Fantastic, POC Take Over)

Alice Sola Kim, "One Hour, Every Seven Years" (McSweeney’s #49)

Matthew Kressel, "Love Engine Optimization" (Lightspeed, 6/17)

Naomi Kritzer, "Paradox" (Uncanny, 5-6/17)

Greg Kurzawa, "Soccer Fields and Frozen Lakes" (Lightspeed, 3/17)

Margo Lanagan, "Not All Ogre" (Singing My Sister Down)

Rich Larson, "An Evening with Severyn Grimes" (Asimov’s, 7-8/17)

Rich Larson, "Cupido" (Asimov’s, 3-4/17)

Emily St. John Mandel, "Mr. Thursday" (Slate, 3/17)

Kate Marshall, "Red Bark and Ambergris" (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 8/17/17)

Bruce McAllister, "This is for You" (Lightspeed, 5/17)

Maureen McHugh, "Sidewalks" (Omni, Winter/17)

Linda Nagata, "The Martian Obelisk" (Tor.com 7/17)

Ray Nayler, "Winter Timeshare" (Asimov’s, 1-2/17)

Mari Ness, "You Will Never Know What Opens" (Lightspeed, 12/17)

Susan Palwick, "The Shining Hills" (Lightspeed, 8/17)

Dominica Phetteplace, "Oracle"(Infinity Wars)

Sarah Pinsker, "The Ones Who Know Where They Are Going" (Asimov’s, 3-4/17)

Vina Jie-Min Prasad, "Fandom for Robots" (Uncanny, 9-10/17)

Lettie Prell, "Emergency Protocol" (Analog, 9-10/17)

Madeline Ray, "Montreal 2014" (Mothership Zeta, 1/17)

Robert Reed, "The Significance of Significance" (Clarkesworld, 7/17)

Ryan Row, "Whatever Knight Comes" (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 5/25/17)

Sofia Samatar, “An Account of the Land of Witches” (Tender)

Karl Schroeder, "Eminence" (Chasing Shadows)

Gord Sellar, "Focus" (Analog, 5-6/17)

Benjanun Sriduangkaew, "No Pearls as Blue as These" (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 8/17/17)

Eric Schwitzgebel, "The Turing Machines of Babel" (Apex, 7/17)

Jack Skillingstead, "The Last Garden" (Lightspeed, 2/17)

Michael Swanwick, "Starlight Express" (F&SF, 9-10/17)

Molly Tanzer, "Nine-Tenths of the Law" (Lightspeed, 1/17)

Lavie Tidhar, "The Banffs" (Analog, 5-6/17)

Carrie Vaughn, "I Have Been Drowned in Rain" (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 4/13/17)

Jamie Wahls, "Utopia LOL?" (Strange Horizons, 6/5/17)

Daniel Wallace, "Sea Girls" (Tin House, Summer/17)

Jo Walton, "A Burden Shared" (Tor.com, 4/17)

Nick Wolven, "Confessions of a Con Girl" (Asimov’s, 11-12/17)

Caroline Yoachim, “Carnival Nine”, (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 5/11/17)

E. Lily Yu, "The White-Throated Transmigrant" (Tor.com, 6/17)

Alvaro Zinos-Amaro and Adam-Troy Castro, "A Touch of Heart" (Lightspeed, 7/17)

Lots of excellent stories there. I do have some favorites. My nomination list will include five of these, and I have to admit, I don’t know right now which five.

Maureen McHugh, "Sidewalks" (Omni, Winter/17) – Rosni Gupta is a speech pathologist for Los Angeles County, and her latest case is a woman who speaks nothing but gibberish. Rosni assumes she is perhaps autistic, but on meeting her she realizes that is not the case, and soon learns what the gibberish really is. I’ll leave the secret for the reader to discover – not that it’s particularly a new notion – but the implications are powerful, and the characters are absolutely real.

Giovanni de Feo, "Ugo" (Lightspeed, 9/17) – About a girl who repeatedly meets a strange boy named Ugo, who claims to know their common future. Eventually he tells her that he experiences “Leaps” through time, when his older self goes into a sort of fugue and travels into his younger mind. The story follows their life, and their love affair, and careers – with the question always as to how it will end, for Ugo’s knowledge of the future only goes so far. There’s an obvious hint of The Time Traveler’s Wife here, but with a somewhat darker tint – and with an ambiguous ending twist. This is a very effective, moving, and thoughtful piece.

Charlie Jane Anders, "Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue" (Boston Review, Global Dystopias) – This concerns Rachel, who has been confined in an institution to cure her particular personal problem, as the state sees it – her belief that she is a woman, though she was born a boy. Her childhood friend Jeffrey is a functionary at this particular institution. And the method of “cure” is particularly horrific – not that her situation isn’t horrific no matter how the state wished to treat her. Anders has always had the ability to present truly agonizing situations with a superficially comic surface, which only makes the realization of the horror beneath more affecting – and never more so, I think, than in this story.

Sofia Samatar, “An Account of the Land of Witches” (Tender) – It opens with a lyrical narrative by Arta, a slave who is taken by her master (a merchant) to the Land of Witches, where she learns their magic – or Dream Science – which involves language and the manipulation of time. This is absolutely lovely writing, and the magical system is beautiful. There follows – ever in different well realized voices – a “refutation” of Arta’s account by her angry master; and then a desperate section told by a Sudanese woman trapped back home by visa problems (and local strife) as she tries to research the fragments that make up Arta’s account and her master’s refutation for her degree from a US university; then a lexicon of the witches’ magical language, and then a strange almost mystical account of a journey in search of the Land. This is really striking, original, and mysterious.

Linda Nagata, "The Martian Obelisk" (Tor.com, 7/17) – set in a future in which a series of disasters, with causes in human nature, in environmental collapse, and in technological missteps, has led to a realization that humanity is doomed. One old architect, in a gesture of, perhaps, memorialization of the species, has taken over the remaining machines of an abortive Mars colony to create a huge obelisk that might end up the last surviving great human structure after we are gone. But her project is threatened when a vehicle from one of the other Martian colonies (all of which failed) approaches. Is the vehicle’s AI haywire? Has it been hijacked by someone else on Earth? The real answer is more inspiring – and if perhaps just a bit pat, the conclusion is profoundly moving.

Karen Joy Fowler, "Persephone of the Crows" (Asimov’s, 5-6/17) – is just wrenchingly brilliant, using apparently true (in story terms) fantastical elements in service of character examination, and in so doing resolves itself without really resolving any of the questions the fantastical elements might inspire. Which, to a devoted reader of the fantastic can be in a way disappointing. But on its own terms I think this story delivers. Polly is a 10-year old girl at who meets another girl who claims to have seen a real fairy. Polly is envious of the other girl for lots of reasons – money is one, parents are another, and Polly’s wishes for something better in her life only intensify that night – until the drive home, when her drunken father loses control of the car – and things get strange. Be careful what you wish for, perhaps? Though that sounds a bit facile – the story doesn’t quite go where you expect it to, and in the end we have a sharp portrayal of its main character and a sad look at her perception of her family.

Tobias Buckell, "Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance" (Cosmic Powers) – A starship maintenance robot, after a successful battle, by happenstance rescues a CEO of the enemy fleet, and finds himself inveigled/bribed/coerced into rendering assistance. The story turns on the complex intersection of intriguing speculation about AIs and identity, economics, contract law, moral law, free will and orbital mechanics. In other words, really cool stuff.  

Tobias Buckell, "Shoggoths in Traffic" (Patreon, 4/17) – is a clever Lovecraftian crime story, in which a couple of people steal (repossess!) a car from a drug dealer and try to take it to Miami – but on the way run into a weird highway exit and a biker magician and – well, you’ll not think of cloverleafs and other traffic patterns in quite the same way after this!

My Recommendation Posts:
Best Novel, Series, YA
Best Editor, Campbell Award

Short Story
Novelette

Novella

Dramatic Presentation, Fan Writer, Fanzine
Other Hugos

2018 Hugo Recommendations: Novelette

Novelette

This is my long list of novelettes I’ve considered for nomination, largely the list of those I put in the Recommended Reading section of my Locus reviews (with a few additions).

Daniel Abraham, “The Mocking Tower” (The Book of Swords)  

Nina Allan, “Neptune’s Trident” (Clarkesworld, 6/17)

Charlie Jane Anders, “A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime” (Cosmic Powers) 

G. V. Anderson, “I Am Not I” (F&SF, 7-8/17)

Dale Bailey, “Come As You Are” (Asimov’s, 5-6/1)

R. S. Benedict, “My English Name” (F&SF, 5-6/17)

Maggie Clark, “Belly Up” (Analog, 7-8/17)

Samuel R. Delany, “The Hermit of Houston” (F&SF, 9-10/17)

Christopher East, “An Inflexible Truth” (Lightspeed, 8/17)

Greg Egan, “The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine” (Asimov’s, 11-12/17)

Greg Egan, “Uncanny Valley” (Tor.com, 8-17)

Kate Elliott, “’I am a Handsome Man’ said Apollo Crow” (The Book of Swords)  

Max Gladstone, “Crispin’s Model” (Tor.com, 10/17)

Theodora Goss, “Come See the Living Dryad” (Tor.com, 3/17)

Robert Grossbach, “Driverless” (F&SF, 3-4/17)

Austen Habershaw, “The Masochist's Assistant” (F&SF, 7-8/17)

Maria Dahvana Headley, “Black Powder” (The Djinn Falls in Love)  

Simone Heller, “How Bees Fly” (Clarkesworld, 2/17)

Chi Hui, “Rain Ship” (Clarkesworld, 2/17)

Xia Jia, “Goodnight Melancholy” (Clarkesworld, 3/17)

Mary Robinette Kowal, “The Worshipful Society of Glovers” (Uncanny, 7-8/17)

Yoon Ha Lee, “Extracurricular Activities” (Tor.com, 2/17)

Yoon Ha Lee, “The Chameleon’s Gloves” (Cosmic Powers)
Will McIntosh, “Soulmates.com” (Asimov’s, 3-4/17)

Sean McMullen, “The Influence Machine” (Interzone, 3-4/17)

David Erik Nelson, “Whatever Comes After Calcutta” (F&SF, 11-12/17)

Suzanne Palmer, “Books of the Risen Sea” (Asimov’s, 9-10/17)

Suzanne Palmer, “The Secret Life of Bots” (Clarkesworld, 9/17)

Susan Palwick, “Remote Presence” (Lightspeed, 4/17)

K. J. Parker, “Message in a Bottle” (The Djinn Falls in Love)  

Tony Pi, “That Lingering Sweetness” (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 4/27/17)

Sarah Pinsker, “Wind Will Rove” (Asimov’s, 9-10/17)

Vina Jie-Min Prasad, “A Series of Steaks” (Clarkesworld, 1/17)

Robert Reed, “Leash on a Man” (F&SF, 9-10/17)

Robert Reed, “Dunnage of the Soul” (F&SF, 1-2/17)

Alastair Reynolds, “Night Passage” (Infinite Stars)

Kenneth Schneyer, “Keepsakes” (Analog, 11-12/17)

Hanus Seiner, “Hexagrammaton” (Tor.com, 5/17)

Lavie Tidhar, “Waterfalling” (The Book of Swords)  

Genevieve Valentine, “Intro to Prom” (Clarkesworld, 10/17)

Will Waller, “Phantom Architecture” (Rivet Journal, Fall/17)

Peter Watts, “ZeroS” (Infinity Wars)

Alex Wells, “Angel of the Blockade” (Tor.com, 9/17)

The top candidates for my ballot are:

1.       Yoon Ha Lee, “Extracurricular Activities” (Tor.com, 2/17) – a quite funny, and quite clever, story concerning the earlier life of a very significant character in Lee’s first novel, Ninefox Gambit. Shuos Jedao is an undercover operative for the Heptarchate, assigned to infiltrate a space station controlled by another polity, and to rescue the crew of a merchanter ship that had really been heptarchate spies, including an old classmate.

2.       Suzanne Palmer, “The Secret Life of Bots” (Clarkesworld, 9/17) – a very old bot on a battered Ship trying to stop an alien attack on Earth. It shows a surprising amount of initiative – even, one might say, imagination – in dealing with the Incidental. Might that not be useful in dealing with the aliens? Or might bots have their own ideas about their own place?

3.       Samuel R. Delany, “The Hermit of Houston” (F&SF, 9-10/17) – This is set some time in the future, in a strange future, hard to get a grip on (the best kind), from one angle seeming sort of pastoral utopia, from other angles utterly horrifying. It’s mostly about the narrator’s long-time lover, an older man named Cellibrex (sometimes), and about the hints he lets drop of some of the true nature of this future. There is extremely interesting treatment of gender, and of politics, and of law and custom and memory – and I don’t get everything that’s going on in the story, in a good way.

4.       Will McIntosh, “Soulmates.com” (Asimov’s, 3-4/17) -- The story is scary, and morally provocative, and resolved with honesty. It’s about a man using an AI service to meet potential partners, and finding a really interesting woman – but somehow she never wants to meet in real life. Of course, she’s an AI – and the protagonist doesn’t react very well to that revelation.

5.       Peter Watts, “ZeroS” (Infinity Wars) -- posits a technology that turns soldiers into non-conscious actors – for it turns out the unconscious has spooky abilities. Which are pretty scary for the humans who end up sort of “riding” their unconscious – especially when they learn what their “zombie” selves are capable of. For an extra fillip of spookiness, the story is told from the POV of a soldier who actually died, and who has been resurrected by this particular technology – at an increasingly horrible price.

6.       Hanus Seiner, “Hexagrammaton” (Tor.com, 5/17) –  A man serves as a sort of intermediary to Europans who have survived an alien virus, guiding a young woman to visit her father when he realizes she is infected with the virus – and with a purpose. Another thread shows a man – the same man? – in prison – and somehow both these threads seem to turn on understanding the alien language, and its multiple meanings for the same sentence. The linguistic weirdness reminded me of Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life”, and though it’s not THAT good, it’s pretty weird cool stuff.

The other stories on the verge are Kenneth Schneyer’s “Keepsakes”, Alastair Reynolds’ “Night Passage”, Daniel Abraham’s “The Mocking Tower”, and Kate Elliott’s , “’I am a Handsome Man’ said Apollo Crow”.

My Recommendation Posts:
Best Novel, Series, YA
Best Editor, Campbell Award

Short Story
Novelette

Novella

Dramatic Presentation, Fan Writer, Fanzine
Other Hugos

Two of Ursula K. Le Guin's Lesser Known Novels

Two of Ursula K. Le Guin's Lesser Known Novels: The Beginning Place and Very Far Away From Anywhere Else

a review by Rich Horton

I wanted to take another look at some of the work of the great Ursula K. Le Guin, who died January 22, and in particular I wanted to write about a couple of less celebrated novels. So I chose two books I read when they came out, and enjoyed, but hadn't thought of much since then. The more significant of these is The Beginning Place, from 1980. This is an adult novel, though its protagonists are young (20), and I suspect when I first encountered it, when I was the same age as they, I thought of it as YA. The other book is a shortish novella, about 20,000 words, and undeniably YA, and also non-fantastical. This is Very Far Away From Anywhere Else, about two high achieving but lonely high school seniors falling in love, or at least in friendship. (I was also about the same age as the protagonists when I first read it.)

The covers shown are from the Bantam editions. I'm pretty sure I read Very Far Away From Anywhere Else first in the Atheneum edition, borrowed from the library, however. (The Beginning Place was also been published under the title Threshold in the UK.) (N.B. That is supposed to be Hugh on the cover of The Beginning Place but it doesn't look anything like him.)

The two books resemble each other in one quite significant way: both are stories about relatively young people, social misfits to some degree or other, who meet and fall in love. That is, I suppose, hardly an unusual plot -- indeed, stated that baldly, it approaches cliché. That said, the four main characters are each quite different to each other -- and The Beginning Place, not surprisingly, is a more complex novel, and is doing some interesting things with the classic portal fantasy structure. (Very Far Away From Anywhere Else, as noted, is not Fantasy at all.)

(Cover by Elizabeth Malczynski)

I'll note right here that I'll essentially be describing much of the plot of each book. I don't think that "spoiling" like this harms the books at all, but I know many people disagree. As a quick summary I can say that I enjoyed both books, though The Beginning Place is the better and more interesting book, and uses its fairly traditional portal fantasy plot very well in service of a story about people of our own world, who must ultimately make their home in our world.

So, then, the earlier and shorter book. Very Far Away From Anywhere Else is, unusually for Le Guin as far as I can recall, told in the first person, though the narrator, Owen Griffiths, makes sure to tell us that he's transcribing an oral account he recorded. Le Guin's care in acknowledging the narration is evident. This is something of a classical convention, I think. Owen is 17 at the time of the story's events, and a senior in High School, in a town on the Pacific Coast. (He notes that he is a year younger than his classmates, having got into school early. I found this a little odd because I was 17 until October of my Freshman year in college, and I never skipped a grade or anything, though Owen turns 17 in November, so he'd have been a month younger than me.)

Owen is, basically, a nerd, and the smartest kid in class, and he doesn't have any real friends. He loves his parents, but they clearly don't get him either. He wants to go to MIT (or maybe Cal Tech) and study the physiological basis of psychology, but his mother wants him to go to "State", which happens to be in town. He doesn't like sports, except he used to enjoy touch football. He's frustrated when his Dad buys him a car ... he doesn't want a car, he wants to be able to afford to go to MIT. (All this makes him sympathetic, perhaps particularly to someone like me, who was in a similar boat, though I've always liked sports -- but I think Le Guin stomps her feet a bit on what she thinks is virtue and what she thinks is wrongness.)

He happens to stumble into conversation on the bus one day with a classmate, and as it happens a neighbor, another senior, Natalie Field. Natalie is like Owen, except her obsession is not science but music. Specifically composition. Before long he and Natalie are close friends, willing to talk to each other about anything. Until Owen spoils it when he gets it into his head that he ought to want to have sex with her. And Natalie isn't ready. This all makes a lot of emotional sense. The resolution turns on a car crash, and the question of Owen attending MIT, and Owen's decision to see Natalie's songs performed even after they have drifted apart.

It's really a pretty simple novel -- not surprising at its length. I thought it a bit overdetermined at times -- the main characters a bit too too special -- aspects a bit unfairly moralizing. But it's still intensely enjoyable, and the final 10 or 20 pages are pretty powerful in their way. Not a great work -- but Le Guin at less than her best was still an effective writer.

The Beginning Place is an altogether more interesting novel. It is a pure portal fantasy, with a plot that at its most basic level is very traditional: a couple of characters, misfits to some extent in our world, find their ways (through a Portal) into another world, where it turns out they are the people needed to go on a Quest and Right a Wrong that threatens that world. But the novel is ultimately more interested in the two characters growing to realize that the true desolation they must resolve is that blighting their lives, in our world.

It alternates its viewpoint between the two main characters, each about 20. Hugh Rogers is working as a checker at a supermarket in an unnamed town. He lives with his mother, who is needy and controlling. He want to study library science and be a librarian, but he's constrained to follow his mother, who has moved multiple times since his father left them. He's stuck, and, worse, stuck in a lifeless and corrupted landscape. And one evening he just runs -- runs through his neighborhood and others and to a wooded area near a paint factory, and finds himself by a creek -- and drinks the water and feels, somehow, home.

Irene Pannis shares an apartment with a not terribly stable young couple. Her father has died, and her stepfather is both feckless and sexually threatening. She wants her own place, but seems destined to have to deal with life at her mother's. But, since she was 13 she has been able to find occasional refuge in another place -- beyond the same creek Hugh has found, in a land where time runs more quickly than in our world, where it is always twilight, and where she finds a town where she is welcome, where she makes friends, and feels at peace.

Irene discovers Hugh while he is sleeping by the creek, and resents what she considers an incursion. But the town -- Mountain Town, or Tembreabrezi, is threatened -- the roads cannot be traveled, and so they don't get the food they need, and can't sell what they make. It seems that Hugh is, in the classical portal fantasy sense, the hero who is needed, and Irene angrily brings him to Tembreabrezi. And they learn that Hugh can always get in to this world, and Irene can always get out. Hugh is enchanted by the Lord of the place, and his lovely blond daughter Allia, while Irene feels closer to the Mayor, or Master, a dark man.

As the home life of both Irene and Hugh gets worse -- Irene is forced to return to her mother and her grabby stepfather, and Hugh's mother is still colder to him -- they decide to spend the time in Tembreabrezi needed to satisfy whatever quest is called for. There is some resistance -- the Master's grandfather, at some cost (the whole nature not revealed) -- had saved the town long before. However, in the end it is Irene and Hugh alone who travel up the mountain, and we get hints of what prior sacrifice was required -- but the two force a different resolution. (There are reminders of the Abraham/Isaac sacrifice story, and, too, Hugh remarks once, that with his father dead and his mother rejecting him, that he is a man without parents -- a significant remark, I thought.) The ultimate resolution of the main quest is, in an oddly appropriate way, a bit anticlimactic (though a true climax follows). And while Tembreabrezi is presumably restored, that's not what seems to matter. What matters is Hugh and Irene coming to realize that their true home is in our world -- and that they must make their own way there (together, as it happens).

2018 Hugo Recommendations: Novella

Novella

I thought this was a strong year for novellas, and the following is my long list of potential nominees:

Peter Beagle, In Calabria (Tachyon)

Damien Broderick, “Tao Zero”, (Asimov’s, 3-4/17)

Lois McMaster Bujold, The Prisoner of Limnos (Spectrum)

Jaime Fenn, The Martian Job (NewCon Press)    

Michael F. Flynn, “Nexus” (Analog, 3-4/17)          

Kathleen Ann Goonan, “The Tale of the Alcubierre Horse”, (Extrasolar)

Karen Heuler, In Search of Lost Time (Aqueduct)

Dave Hutchinson, Acadie (Tor.com Publishing)

Alexander Jablokov, “How Sere Picked Up Her Laundry” (Asimov’s, 7-8/17)

Marc Laidlaw, “Stillborne”, (F&SF, 11-12/17)       

Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Prime Meridian (Innsmouth Free Press)

David Erik Nelson, “There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House”, (F&SF, 7-8/17)         

Alec Nevala-Lee , “The Proving Ground” (Analog, 1-2/17)

K. J. Parker, Mightier Than the Sword (Subterranean)    

Sarah Pinsker, “And Then There Were N – One”, (Uncanny, 3-4/17)          

Rachel Pollack, “Homecoming”, (F&SF, 1-2/17)

R. Garcia y Robertson, “The Girl Who Stole Herself”, (Asimov’s, 7-8/17)

Christopher Rowe, “The Border State” (Telling the Map)

Sofia Samatar, “Fallow" (Tender)

Jeremiah Tolbert, “The Dragon of Dread Peak”, (Lightspeed, 10/17)          

Cynthia Ward, ”The Adventure of the Incognita Countess” (Aqueduct)

Martha Wells, All Systems Red (Tor.com Publishing)

Of these stories – none of which would disappoint me if they won the Hugo – my four favorites, in no particular order, are:

1.       Sofia Samatar, “Fallow” – Samatar’s debut collection, Tender (Small Beer Press), is absolutely essential.  There are two new stories, this novella, and a short story, “An Account of the Land of Witches”, and both are outstanding. "Fallow" is the story of three different sort of rebels on a struggling colony, apparently inhabited by an Amish-like sect, trying to maintain their identity while hoping for a return to an ecologically ruined Earth when it becomes potentially re-inhabitable. But that doesn't get at what's so cool about it -- beautiful writing, haunting characters, and a real sense of mystery and strangeness.

2.       Sarah Pinsker, “And Then There Were (N – One)” – A story about a convention of alternate Sarah Pinskers, complete with a murder. It is warmly told – funny at time, certainly the milieu is familiar to any SF con-goer. But it’s dark as well – after, there’s a murder – and it intelligently deals with issue of identity and contingency.

3.       Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Prime Meridian – This story came kind of out of left field – not exactly so, as Moreno-Garcia has certainly done some first-rate writing, but this was published to begin with as an ebook available to supporters of an Indiegogo campaign. It will be more generally available in 2018 (including in at least one Best of the Year volume). And it’s tremendous work, mixing a convincing portrayal of near future Mexico City with dreams of trips to Mars – both the protagonist’s hopes to be an actual colonist, and a fading movie star’s memories of a movie she made about Mars.

4.       Kathleen Ann Goonan – “The Tale of the Alcubierre Horse” – just to prove you don’t have to be a woman whose first name starts with S! This is an ambitious and moving story of the first starship, which ends up crewed by a group of super-intelligent children and an older woman.

The current leaders for the fifth position on my ballot are Broderick’s “Tao Zero”, a rather crazy sort of superscientific tale, lots of fun; Hutchinson’s Acadie, a twisty story of the true nature of an utopian seeming space habitat; Tolbert’s “The Dragon of Dread Peak”, also lots of fun, about a group of teens exploring a dangerous magical rift in their city; and Wells’ All Systems Red, an often funny, and quite action-filled, story of an AI security android who really doesn’t like humans all that much.

My Recommendation Posts:
Best Novel, Series, YA
Best Editor, Campbell Award

Short Story
Novelette

Novella

Dramatic Presentation, Fan Writer, Fanzine
Other Hugos

First Hugo Recommendations: Dramatic Presentation, Fan Writer, Fanzine

Dramatic Presentation

I think this was a pretty strong year for SF movies – at any rate, there are five movies I can nominate without feeling bad. And, I should add, I don’t watch enough movies to say that there aren’t some even better ones out there. Ask Matthew Foster! (But don’t ask him about Logan – he’s just wrong about that! <g>)

My five nominees:

1.       The Shape of Water – clearly, of those I’ve seen, the best SF/Fantasy movie of the year. (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is the best movie of the year, if you’re asking.) This is a delicious hommage to – and improvement on – The Creature From the Black Lagoon and its sequels. Directed by Guillermo del Toro, and starring Sally Hawkins as a janitor who encounters the creature in a military installation, and falls in love with him. It’s a visually impressive film, and a very moving film. Some of the plot machinations are a bit creaky, sure, but the whole thing hangs together and comes to a powerful conclusion. Also features strong performances from Richard Jenkins, Olivia Spencer, and Michael Shannon.

2.       Logan – Possibly my favorite superhero movie ever, but I’ll concede that’s not my favorite genre. Kind of a passing the torch movie, from the “original” X-Men to a new and different generation, and with a really powerful ending. Stars Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Dafne Keen and more …

3.       Blade Runner 2049 – I thought this movie was a really strong sequel to a truly great original. The future seemed a plausible future to Blade Runner, and the story was – with a couple of bumps – exciting and affecting. Harrison Ford, Robin Wright, Ryan Gosling, etc.

4.       Wonder Woman – Hey, I liked this movie. It was fun. It was cool to have a female superhero as the lead, and Gal Gadot did a good job. But it also had the things that annoy me about superhero movies – the abilities that always seem to scale to just what the plot requires at a given time – the exaggerated plot with exaggerated sneering villains (and, yes, Michael Shannon’s character was a bit of an exaggerated sneering villain in The Shape of Water, but his performance, and the way his character was written, transcended that) … So, fun, fine, but it’s really getting overpraised. Also starred Robin Wright (again), Chris Pine, etc …

5.       The Last Jedi – Fun as well, but, well, I recommend Adam Roberts’ review in Strange Horizons, which details pretty convincingly the overly silly aspects that make it just a bit too stupid. I did like Kelly Marie Tran as Rose, and Laura Dern as Admiral Holdo – it also features, of course, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Daisy Ridley, Oscar Isaac, etc. etc. – and some cute aliens.

I think The Shape of Water very clearly the best of these. There’s a gulf after that, and then Logan and Blade Runner 2049, then another gulf, and Wonder Woman and The Last Jedi. I saw a few more that weren’t as good (Guardians of the Galaxy 2, for example, was disappointing though not awful), but I’m certain I missed some interesting stuff.

As for Short Form, I watch relatively little TV. I did see the Black Mirror episode “U. S. S. Callister”, and I think it is definitely worthy of a Hugo nomination. I'm still on Season 1 of Stranger Things, so I don't yet have a 2017 nominee.

Best Fan Writer

The two fan writers I want to promote the most this year are a couple I mentioned last year as well: John Boston and John O’Neill. John Boston’s most publicly available recent stuff is at Galactic Journey, where he reviews issues of Amazing from 55 years ago, month by month. (It will be noted, perhaps, that I also review issues of Amazing from the same period, at Black Gate.) John’s work there is linked by this tag: http://galacticjourney.org/tag/john-boston/.

As for John O’Neill, of course his central contribution is as editor of Black Gate, for which he writes a great deal of the content, often about “vintage” books he’s found on Ebay or at conventions, and also about upcoming fantasy books.

Time for just a bit of obligatory self-promotion. I am a fan writer (at least my blog writing and my stuff for Black Gate qualifies, if perhaps not my work for Locus, which I guess is now officially professional). I would note in particular my reviews of old magazines at Black Gate, particularly Amazing and Fantastic in the Cele Goldsmith Lalli era, and my various reviews of Ace Doubles (and other SF) at my blog Strange at Ecbatan (rrhorton.blogspot.com) (and often linked from Black Gate.) My blog also includes the occasional Convention Report (I did a long one on this year’s World Fantasy), and other newsy things such this exact article!  I also contributed a piece to the special Journey Planet Programmatic (http://journeyplanet.weebly.com/journey-planet/issue-35-programatic) issue guest-edited by Steven Silver. I would be greatly honored if anyone thought my work worthy of a Best Fan Writer nomination.

Best Fanzine

As I did last year, I plan to nominate Black Gate, Galactic Journey, and Rocket Stack Rank for the Best Fanzine Hugo. I’m particularly partial in this context to Black Gate, primarily of course because I have been a contributor since the print days (issue #2 and most of the subsequent issues). Black Gate is notable for publishing a lot of content on a very wide variety of topics, from promoting new book releases to publishing occasional original and reprinted fiction to reviewing old issues of Galaxy (Matthew Wuertz) and Amazing/Fantastic/etc. (me) to intriguing posts about travel and architecture by Sean MacLachlan. Rocket Stack Rank and Galactic Journey are a bit more tightly focused: the former primarily reviews and rates short fiction, as well as assembling statistics about other reviewers (myself included) and their reactions to the stories; while the latter, as I mentioned above, is reviewing old SF magazines from 55 years past.

Finally, I’ll mention the other SF-oriented site I read and enjoy regularly – File 770 (http://file770.com/ ), which is (deservedly) very well known, having been nominated for the Best Fanzine Hugo numerous times and having won some as well. 2018 is their 40^th Anniversary! Happy Birthday!

It's worth noting that there are a ton of other fanzines/blogs out there, and I know a lot of them are excellent. I just don't have time to check them out regularly.

My Recommendation Posts:

Best Novel, Series, YA
Best Editor, Campbell Award

Short Story
Novelette

Novella

Dramatic Presentation, Fan Writer, Fanzine
Other Hugos