Tor.com 10/21, 10/28, 11/11, 11/18/20
While many of
Locus‘s reviewers are deeply entrenched in 2021, I’ll be spending this month and the next wrapping up everything I can from 2020. The joy of online publication is the ease of getting content quickly, but it means I rarely get to see issues in advance. So please enjoy these last hurrahs of an otherwise insane year, and make sure to keep stories from the end of 2020 in mind when it comes time for award nominations and voting.
October’s
Brenda Cooper, “
Callme and Mink“. Julie is a robot who trains service dogs. Although she’s moved around a lot in this post-collapse future, she’s settled in a seaside town, where she’s been training a younger dog for some time when a local shopkeeper refers a wandering family to her. They have an ailing daughter, unable to walk on her own, and Julie decides that they’re a worthy fit for Mink. She takes the time to train the family on how best to handle and provide for the d
“Thoughts and Prayers” is about a mother and father who advocate for gun control following their daughter’s murder only to find themselves targeted by internet trolls who harass them with violent deepfakes of their daughter. John Joseph Adams, series editor of
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, says that “Thoughts and Prayers” is exactly the kind of story he’s always looking to publish.
“Sure, you could label it an ‘issue story’ and complain about it if you’re somebody who complains about those things, but it’s presenting it in such a way that I feel like it negates that argument,” he says. “This is art. This is 100 percent art, because of how deeply it makes you think about what’s happening in the story, and how closely you get into the heads of these characters.”
There are many reasons one might have reservations about Robert Heinlein’s 1966
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress the peculiar stats, the reliance on a nigh-all powerful AI on the rebels’ side, the inexplicable moment where the narrator creepily objectifies a dead tween as she is violently killed but for me, Heinlein’s use of kinetic weapons ranks especially high on my list.
I know a lot of you are too young to know what I am talking about the book is, after all, ancient beyond measure so a quick explanation: in the novel, the rebels commandeer a linear accelerator to lob cargo pods full of rocks to the Earth. The shock and awe inspired by the orbital bombardment helps to sway the Earth into granting the Moon its independence.
It’s always seemed to me that John Joseph Adams’s
Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy series, now in its sixth volume, has served a somewhat different if equally important purpose than the more traditional year’s best volumes which have been a staple of SF publishing for more than 70 years. While those volumes have historically been SF’s way of presenting itself
to itself (always with the hopes of drawing a broader readership among those who simply want to check in on SF from time to time), Adams’s annual volumes are part of the “Best American” series of focused anthologies which began with
I recall writing a Most Anticipated post in previous years that was full of excitement and optimism. This year, well, I’d like to pretend I’m excited. I know there are good books coming in 2021. I
know it. Right now, what I’ve got is the teeth-gritted determination to last long enough to read some of them and appreciate the experience. And that? Well, that’ll have to substitute for excitement.
Roll on a comprehensive vaccine programme for 2021!
And also good books. There are so many good books coming out this year that I’m anticipating with determined pleasure, in fact, that this will be an extra-long installment…