Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 1999 issue (23:7)*
Edited by Gardner Dozois
144 pages
Published 1999
Read from January 19 to January 20
Rating: 3 out of 5
* Denotes a reread.
In the summer of 1999, I aspired to be a science fiction wunderkind.
I had submitted stories as early as 1998. One of my earliest subs had been a tale called “The Dinosaur Man.” It involved a misanthropic physicist building himself a house in the Cretaceous, and one of his old college friends (now a paleontologist) tracking him down after finding a human femur at a Cretaceous dig. I submitted it to Asimov’s, with unsurprising results.
When I saw this issue on the newsstand several months later — with its cover art of a Tyrannosaurus looming behind some partygoers — my first thought was that the editors of Asimov’s had stolen the idea for “The Dinosaur Man” and gotten this Michael Swanwick guy to rewrite it for publication. (What can I say? I was 16 and lived in a car. I had literally zero experience with the outside world.) Reading it proved two things: 1) no one, of course, had stolen my ideas, and 2) I was nowhere near Asimov’s league as a writer.
I read and reread this issue obsessively. Almost every story and poem here left an outsized impression upon my teenage imagination, as only your first issue of a sci-fi magazine can. (I might have read the June 1999 issue of Analog a few weeks before this one, but you get what I mean.) Traces of this issue’s creative DNA filled my notebooks for years. After reading it, I bent over my word processor with renewed energy and invigorated creativity. I wouldn’t get published for another thirteen years, and wouldn’t get published on a professional level until 2022, but at least I succeeded in getting my first positive personal rejection from F&SF later in 1999, which is something.
How has this issue aged?
“Scherzo with Tyrannosaur” by Michael Swanwick. Much (though not all) of this story was recycled into Swanwick’s
Bones of the Earth, but I want to take a moment to appreciate it as a standalone tale. It was my first realization that you could combine high quality literary sci-fi with dinosaurs — a formula I’ve been trying to approximate (with minimal success) ever since. It particularly impressed young me because it was my first encounter with an ambiguous ending: the story is left hanging, on the verge of a choice that could go either way. Rereading it now, with the benefit of decades more reading behind me, it’s a standard tangle of time travel, double lives, double timelines, and unexpected paternity. It’s tidy and elegant and written with Swanwick’s signature verve — a solid story, though it didn’t shake the earth like it did when I was 16. But in the mediocre world of dinosaur fiction, that still places “Scherzo” among the best.
B
“Another Branch of the Family Tree” by Brian Stableford. This story, in contrast to so many others in this issue, left little impression on my teenage imagination. Rereading it now, I’m not surprised: it’s a forgettable bioengineering number, mixing “bureaucracy, am I right?”-level humor with an attempt at near-future pathos. After a court orders its destruction, geneticist Beth Galton fights to save the tree she genetically grafted in memory of her twin sister. The story isn’t bad, exactly, but it was extremely au courant — 1999 sci-fi in paint-by-numbers format — which makes it feel dated today. It also has that weird tonal mismatch that comes from envisioning a bleak future through the optimism of privilege. You’re telling me water is scarce, most trees are dead, plague wars figure in recent memory, yet somehow “most” people live into their 120s thanks to the power of biotech? Like, please, my guy, develop some class consciousness: maybe that’s what awaits the rich fucks, but the rest of us likely won’t reach the age our parents are now. C-
Content warning for fictional SA in the next story.
“By Non-Hatred Only” by W.M. Shockley. This one insinuated itself deep into my teenage storytelling. “Should this be a ‘By Non-Hatred Only’ type plot?” I noted, rhetorically, on more than one outline. What I imagined that plot to be is lost to time. What’s certain is that my teenage self didn’t understand much of anything about this story. It’s a deeply ’90s spacer revenge tale about Navram, a spiritual counselor with a buried past, serving aboard the starship Koipu Laru. Shockley strains to channel Dune, giving us psychospiritual technologies, sexual spies, cryptic inner monologues, verbal fencing, paranoia about what others might know and what one’s reactions might reveal to them, a cultural abhorrence of sharing one’s “deep-meaning.” It partially works. But it’s also distastefully ’90s in a particularly Asimov’s Science Fiction way: at least a third of the story centers on Navram getting sexually assaulted by one of his clients, which triggers traumatic memories of his planet getting destroyed. I think the ending is meant to be elegant, pulling together all the different threads through Navram’s quiet manipulations, but it comes across as accidentally slapstick. D
“Evolution Never Sleeps” by Elisabeth Malartre. This one joins Stableford’s in the bin of stories that didn’t have much of an impact on me back in 1999. It's a “hard biology” piece about chipmunks turning into pack hunters: “Land piranhas,” in one character’s words. Fun concept for a story! Malartre, unfortunately, seems to have drawn her fiction-writing inspiration from airport thrillers. The characters are interchangeable. The dialogue is stiff with exposition. The whole thing reads like the early chapters of
Jurassic Park (which is not a compliment).
D+
A Michael Bishop poem, “Secrets of the Alien Reliquary,” may have been my very first exposure to sci-fi poetry. And what a horny first exposure it is! Reading it again, with plenty of queer alien sexuality poetry of my own out there, I think it still holds up.
“Angels of Ashes” by Alastair Reynolds. I can't remember if I originally “got” that the title was a play on Angela’s Ashes, which had been a recent mega-bestseller when this was written. This is another story that fueled my teenage imagination, to the point where a substantial percentage of an early setting was pilfered from it, with only the lightest cosmetic changes. (Don’t worry, I never tried to publish it.) Human priest Sergio is ordained in a religious order that reveres the teachings of the Kiwidinok, alien robots who briefly visited the solar system. Most of the order is android in nature; most liturgical power is in android hands, giving them considerable political power as well. Sergio is summoned to hear the final words of Ivan, the man who, long ago, had been selected to absorb the wisdom of the Kiwidinok. Naturally, there’s more to Ivan’s story than the official creed admits, and the androids aren’t happy with the revelations. The setting is baroque and strange and beautiful, mingling religion with asymmetric physics, terraforming, brain function, supernovas, the anthropic principle, and, of course, quantum superpositioning — a throw-everything-in-the-pot approach that is just so ineffably ’90s. (I mean that positively, for once.) Of the two tales in this issue that center on monastic vows, in the form of bionic implants, complicating the pursuit of political action in space, I prefer this one over “By Non-Hatred Only.” It’s kind of strange that two stories with such specific overlaps were in the same issue, but I suppose that’s how trends work in sci-fi and fantasy. B+
“Interview with an Artist” by Geoffrey A. Landis. For such a slight story with such a well-thumbed premise — time traveler alters the timeline so that Hitler becomes a modestly successful artist, then discovers that “Nasfi” atrocities had been even worse in the resulting future — this one made a big impact on me when I was young. Probably because it was my first time reading anything like it. (An example of how “Artist” influenced me: At 17, I drafted a shock-value comedy titled “Time Cannibals!” based quite loosely around this story’s Hitler vs time travelers vibe. The opening line went: “I ate Adolf Hitler.” Thank goodness I never subbed it anywhere.) Rereading this now, I think it still works fine for what it is. C+
“Baby’s Fire” by Robert Reed. This novella solves a mystery of what the fuck did I read that’s been in the back of my mind for a good two decades. See, long ago, I had read what appeared to be the middle section of a serialized novel: it picked up smack in the middle of the action and ended with a cliffhanger. Had it been in Analog? That sounded right, because it was a sprawling cosmic godhood yarn involving an incomprehensibly privileged stable of humans turning themselves into technologically augmented gods. There was a galactic chase; shapeshifting disguises on various planets; bodies made of arcane math and dark matter; black holes; wormholes; an attempt to birth a new universe. Millions of years transpired. It was vast and rococo in a way I’d never seen before. And here it is! What kept me from finding it earlier was the impression that it was part of a serialized novel. “Baby’s Fire” literally begins mid-word — a pretentious touch that thoroughly impressed my teenage self. Instead, it is part of a cycle dubbed the Sister Alice stories, published sporadically over much of a decade. Now I’m curious to track more of them down, because this entry is delightfully entertaining. And of course, to keep with the theme of this review, I recognize so many elements in this story that I subconsciously pilfered for later worldbuilding, in particular the concept of posthumanist Families with the powers of gods, which found its way into my Timeworlds setting (though that aspect is now, thankfully, backgrounded). “Fire” is crusted with its share of ’90s cultural barnacles — one character talks about how the talent for terraforming lies in the Chamberlain Family’s genes, which really isn’t how genetics works — but still, it earns at least a B+
And that’s it! It was humbling to rediscover the origins of so many of my early settings and projects — purloined, one and all, from the stories here. All writers borrow; creativity is in how you rework what you stole, and I think I’ve grown more skilled at that in the last couple decades. But I had forgotten just how blatant my teenage thefts had been.
