Science fiction roundup
“Blackfish City” by Sam J. Miller, Ecco, 336 pages, $22.99
The real star of this first science fiction novel by a young writer with an impressive track record of short fiction (and one powerful young-adult novel, “The Art of Starving”) is the fabulous Arctic city of the title. Qaanaaq is an eight-armed floating city built somewhere east of Greenland and home to many refugees from the “sunken world” of drowned cities and rising sea levels. As with many future cities, it’s oppressive for some, luxurious for others, and we meet colorful characters from all strata: a political worker, an aging fighter, a wealthy heir and a street kid working part time for a criminal syndicate. Most spectacular is the city’s newest arrival: a mysterious woman who shows up riding an orca and accompanied by a huge polar bear — and who seems to have some spectacular fighting skills of her own.
These days, we tend to label almost any future city as dystopian, but the term hardly does justice to Miller’s complex society. Qaanaaq is governed mostly by artificial intelligence, though there are politicians and managers, capitalists and workers, gangsters and petty thieves. As each of his main characters strives toward some goal, they gain insights not only into the true nature of their city but into their own families as well. “Space Opera” by Catherynne M. Valente, Saga, 304 pages, $19.99
Admirers of Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” will feel at home in this wildly comical and cheerfully absurd galactic adventure, which finds the fate of human civilization in the hands of an over-the-hill glam-rock band whose star performer is already dead. When aliens, who look a little like flamingos and a little like the Road Runner, appear simultaneously all over the world, they make us an offer we literally can’t refuse: competing in a gigantic Eurovision-type song contest called the Metagalactic Grand Prix. There are only two catches: The aliens choose who will represent Earth, and whoever ends up last in the contest gets their whole civilization wiped out.
Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros desperately try to find a song that will enable them to save the world, but the plot takes a back seat to Valente’s hilarious barrage of alien societies. One is an artificial intelligence that takes the form of the annoying Microsoft “Office Assistant” paper clip; another is an intelligent virus that turns other life forms into zombies. Equally entertaining are her sometimes snarky sidebars about pop icons from David Bowie to the Carpenters. Valente’s gift for rich language seems to serve her well in what at times reads like stream-ofconsciousness comedy. “Time Was” by Ian McDonald, Tor.com, 144 pages, $14.99
Ian McDonald is among the world’s finest science fiction writers, and one reason is his versatility. “Time Was” begins as an intriguing mystery, turns into a kind of time-travel tale and ends up as a sensitive romance stretching over decades. McDonald is admired for his detailed multicultural futures and intricate plotting, but he can be one of the field’s more elegant stylists as well.
The story begins when an antiquarian bookseller acquires an anonymous book of poetry from the 1930s called “Time Was” and finds in it a love letter from someone named Tom to his lover Ben, with a cryptic reference that “the next translation is not far off.” With the aid of a woman he meets through Facebook and a war museum archivist, he discovers that Tom and Ben appear not only in photos from the First World War but from World War II, and even in a documentary about the 1990s Bosnian War — showing almost no signs of aging. Other chapters reveal the developing love affair from the point of view of Tom, a poet, who eventually reveals some important secrets — but not enough for us to anticipate McDonald’s surprisingly moving ending.
Gary K. Wolfe is the editor of “American Science Fiction.”