Clones don’t seem quite as popular these days as they were back in the 1970s and ’80s, when we were treated on a fairly regular basis to stories about celebrity clones, spare-parts clones, hazardous-duty clones, doppelganger clones, identity-crisis clones, cheap-labor clones, ominous replacement clones, survivalist clones, posthuman clones,
tabula-rasa clones, and, inevitably, murder-mystery clones. Sarah Gailey touches upon that last in some ingenious ways in
The Echo Wife, a solidly written novel that gains more of its strength from the voice and conflicted character of its narrator than from its rather plot-contrived version of cloning technology. One of the problems inherent in clone fiction is that, since clones are essentially newborns, the tale of an adult clone needs to play out over decades, during which the original ages while the clone grows up with an inevitably different set of experiences. Gailey skirts this problem by having their brilliant-geneticist narrato
With its long and shady history, poker seems to have a natural affinity for fantasy writers, ranging from Edward Whittemore (
Jerusalem Poker) to Tim Powers (
Last Call). It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the ever-eclectic Lavie Tidhar turns his attention to it with
The Big Blind, which is peppered with cardsharp lingo and informed descriptions of high-stakes games. There’s not actually a shred of SF or fantasy in the novella, so the obvious question is, why mention it at all here? Well, Tidhar has long taken a kind of perverse glee in his own unpredictability, sometimes blurring the line between pointed literary allusiveness and simple attention deficit, as evidenced most recently by his bizarre reinvention of Arthurian legends in
I’ve always distrusted the notion of “comfort reading,” especially as it applies to our little corner of the swamp. After all, the very idea of horror fiction involves
discomfort, and SF characteristically challenges our sense of the stability of everything from nations to our bodies to the planet itself. I suppose fantasy does leave room for endless retellings of familiar tales with familiar heroes, but the most memorable fantasies are those which subvert and question that very familiarity, like Lavie Tidhar’s recent deconstruction of Arthuriana in
By Force Alone. But there’s another sort of comfort reading that has less to do with the tales than with the tellers, and no better examples can be found than two important new retrospective collections,
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
Like a number of writers who have arrived with a splash in the last decade or two, Alaya Dawn Johnson seems to have written nearly as many novels as short stories. That’s not actually the case, of course – her website lists seven novels, and her first collection,
Reconstruction, contains ten stories – but it’s probably fair to say that Johnson’s rapidly rising reputation derives mostly from those novels, and from a few stories reprinted in “year’s best” anthologies and one quite distinctive Nebula winner. I have no idea if Johnson has felt more comfortable with longer forms, as N.K. Jemisin said she was in her introduction to her first collection last year, but as with Jemisin’s collection, it’s not hard to view these stories as a way of testing different waters, experimenting with genre boundaries, trying out different styles, forms, and themes. This is one reason I find first story collections so fascinating: they show us, intentionally or not, a write