Old Venus

November 10, 2014
Veteran editors Martin and Dozois (Old Mars) assemble an entertaining array of SF stories recalling the heady days of the pulps while exploring provocative themes of alienation, morality, and discovery. The stories range widely in tone: there’s a Wild West vibe to Lavie Tidhar’s “The Drowned Celestial”; Mike Resnick’s “The Godstone of Venus” is straightforwardly nostalgic; Ian McDonald’s “Botanica Veneris: Thirteen Papercuts by Ida Countess Rathangan” is a neo-Victorian traveler’s tale; and Matthew Hughes’s “Greeves and the Evening Star” is a droll Wodehouse pastiche. Eco-disasters and technical catastrophes drive protagonists to dire straits in Gwyneth Jones’s “A Planet Called Desire” and Elizabeth Bear’s “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson,” while rescue missions reveal the dark extremes of human behavior in Allen M. Steele’s “Frogheads” and Garth Nix’s “By Frogsled and Lizardback to Outcast Venusian Lepers.” Martin and Dozois celebrate past imaginings of Venus with unlikely—but entertaining and thoughtful—new notions of the second planet as a land of gritty challenge and exotic adventure.

January 1, 2015
"What a world," says a character in this lively old-school sci-fi anthology. "It's like a circle in Dante's hell."Thronemaster Martin (The Ice Dragon, 2014, etc.) and anthologist/editor Dozois (Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future, 2002, etc.) plumb a promising premise: Given that science now tells us the humanoid extraterrestrials of classic sci-fi couldn't really live on the methane and ammonia fumes of the actual planet, let's return to the glory days of Burroughs, Bradbury, Brackett and company (and that's just the B's) and "rekindle the wonderful, gorgeously colored dream of Old Venus." That old world presupposes an ocean populated by all kinds of wondrous dreams and structures; it implicates unimaginably ancient civilizations that unmake themselves, inexplicably disassembling their famed cities: "Where once was Twi-land," Michael Cassutt writes in a nicely eldritch yarn that would have done Lovecraft proud, "would now be Noon, or Nightside." The earthlings who come to Venus would be different from the ones we know, of course; Paul McAuley depicts a scenario in which the USSR and the U.S. are still bitter rivals in space, and moreover, he tells that tale from the Russian point of view: "You know there was no American plot. You know that the miners became infected with something that drove them crazy. You know the survivors are hiding, like the poor man up in the crane." The people who come to Venus, naturally, find ways to mate with the locals, which fuels yarns propelled by beings of mixed heritage, a timely matter on Earth as well. The strategy of putting modern writers to work on old-fashioned themes could go south in all kinds of ways, but all the participants acquit themselves well, if sometimes, as with the opening to Tobias S. Buckell's "Pale Blue Memories," with a hint of tongue in cheek: "I grabbed the arms of my acceleration chair as we spun, our silver bullet of a rocket ship vomiting debris and air into the cold night of Venus's stratosphere." Good fun all around. Now on to Mars, Saturn, Jupiter....

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January 1, 2015

The editors of this themed anthology of original stories asked contributors to set their tales on the Venus of sf's Golden Age, when we didn't know much about our neighboring planets and could imagine a landscape where humanity might one day come calling. The range of authors included here means that there will be something for every sf fan, although, only a few stories meet and exceed their thematic premise. The opener "Frogheads," from Allen M. Steele, is a fun detective story of a PI looking for a rich man's kid hiding somewhere on the oceans of Venus. Many of the entries are adventures that would have been at home in the pulp magazines of the past, including Garth Nix's "By Frogsled and Lizardback to Outcast Venusian Lepers," which tells of a politically fraught rescue mission to the outback of Venus. Elizabeth Bear's "The Heart's Filthy Lesson" is another brilliant story of adventure but grounded in a woman's desire for the respect of her colleagues and her lover. VERDICT With a host of best-selling authors such as Joe Haldeman, David Brin, and Ian McDonald, this is a solid choice for large sf collections.

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February 15, 2015
In their introduction, the editors promise a return to a Venus that never was: the hot, wet planet of the mid-twentieth century imagination, through the lens of contemporary writers' eyes. They deliver in a hefty tome. Every story is a perfect view of this imaginary world, and none of them disappoint. The balance of humor and seriousness is beautifully managed, and every one of these versions of Venus is worth visiting (in fiction; some of them are terrible places). Tobias Buckell's devastating Pale Blue Memories, in which a ship is shot down by Nazis, with horrifying consequences for its crew, is a stunning piece of work. Garth Nix's By Frogsled and Lizardback to Outcast Venusian Lepers is a solid visit to the wilderness on a mission more dangerous than advertised. Greeves and the Evening Star (Matthew Hughes) takes a humorous tack that is recognizably inspired by just what the title indicates. Eleanor Arnason takes on a Venus where Soviet communism survived, and the CIA is up to something sinister, and National Geographic wants to do a documentary. The anthology covers a lot of swampy Venusian ground, and does it well.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)