Recensioni
Welcome to the Greenhouse: New Science Fiction on… di Gordon Van Gelder
There were only 4 fiction stories in this issue, although it was chockful of other things that had various amounts of disinterest from me. Many short pieces by many authors of what their favorite films were or what books should be made or remade into films and endless speculation about who should be cast in them. Mind numbing stuff truly. As is usual, the in depth book review columns by Charles de Lint and Michelle West were excellent focusing on books by Dean Koontz, Graham Joyce, Jonathan Carroll, Sean Stewart, Richard Grant and Mary Doria Russell. Also as usual even though this is over 20 years old now, there are now several more books for me to look for (the title by the way of de Lint's column) where my interest has been sufficiently stoked.
The four fiction stories were:
Auteur Theory • novelette by Richard Chwedyk
Goobers • short story by Harvey Jacobs
Incident at Oak Ridge • novelette by Terry Bisson
The Curse of the Demon • novelette by Ron Goulart
Each of these stories were very good and different from the other. The Bisson story was written in the form of a film script and was surprisingly effective. Goulart's story was a fantasy horror story that played on the movie film theme of the issue.
The good parts of this issue outweighed the dreck.
This is another one that I'm incredibly disappointed to not see on the Hugo ballot...
Content warnings: Non-consensual sexual situations, discussions of violence
It often seems that baby boom era scifi authors freeze all social, technological and political development sometime in the first part of the 1970s then interpret everything through that particular lens. Back in the 70's it was fresh and interesting but 40 years on, while it remains interesting, it is bit threadbare. Welcome to the Greenhouse, with one or two exceptions, falls squarely into this camp with lots of polished storytelling laboring under antiquated plot lines.
It is worth a look especially for baby boomers. Lots of stroking of the self righteous indignation gland and a safe, familiar world to run around in, a nice escape from the scary place the world is transforming into. Younger folk who have an interest in how the oldsters view climate change, will find an interesting window into another generation. But most probably will find a somewhat baffling set of tales that could have been unearthed out of a mid-seventies time capsule.
In ‘Watching The Cow’ by Alex Irvine, kids around the world are playing video games when they suddenly go blind! Seven million people were on-line and wearing VR goggles when Ariel, a research scientist, sent a pulse through them which caused hysterical blindness in thirty per cent of users, the two million children. There is no physical reason for the blindness but some disconnect has occurred between the eyes and the brain. Our protagonist and first-person narrator is Jake, Ariel’s younger brother. He is a history teacher and knows she is much smarter than him. She confesses to the misdemeanour but promises to fix it. Jake trusts her to do so. One reason he’s not too upset at the disaster is that the children are not too upset. All two million of them are coping very well with the change. Alex Irvine does a good job of personalising an interesting scientific development with strange consequences in this well-told story.
‘Devil Or Angel’ by Matthew Hughes is one of those afterlife fantasies which seem to be very popular with Americans. This one is relieved by a sense of humour, more in the telling than the tale itself which is fairly dramatic. The theology combines Christianity and Buddhism with a dose of Jiminy Cricket. The head of a record company dies in a plane collision, just as he meets the love of his life and is desperate to get together with her in the next world. Unfortunately, he has been put with the bad folks and she is with the halo-wearing crowd. The nasty pop star whose arrogance and lust landed them all there in the first place turns out to be a major league villain. It was very inventive and good fun, with enough plot twists to maintain one’s interest.
‘The Blue Celeb’ of Desmond Warzel’s story is a powder blue mid-80s Chevy Celebrity that Bill and Joe notice one day outside their barbershop in Harlem. They’re a pair of Viet Nam veterans who set up in business together when they got home. They’ve been there a long time. The neighbourhood cop, Frank, has been steadily promoted and is now Assistant Chief and Commanding Officer of Manhattan South but he comes back once a fortnight to have his hair cut. The Celeb is parked with the doors unlocked and the keys in the ignition. The fact that it’s still there, on a Harlem street, is remarkable but when someone sits in it more remarkable things happen. The plot’s too good to spoil. This is as fine as one of Stephen King’s best and in the modern urban fantasy genre there is no higher praise than that. King did a car story, too, but I hasten to point out that there is no similarity. It’s also nice that Desmond Warzel, it seems, has previously published in semi-pro magazines and this is his break into the big time. It gives hope to all those writers filling semi-pro magazines for small fees.
‘Ten Lights And Ten Darks’ by Judith Moffett is an enjoyable novelette but I am ambivalent about it. As a dog lover, I like stories about dogs. As a detester of all things paranormal that pose as actually real, I am not sure about stories that take fraudulent notions and treat them as real. In this case, it’s animal psychics, an idea so batty I had never heard of it before but googling revealed they are rife. The manly reporter hero sets out to write an exposé but then finds out that…! Nah, I won’t spoiler it. The heroine is a girl with a dog who gave up church and found herself more and more interested in the paranormal. Regrettably, she thinks that quantum physics may explain those ‘energy fields’ the cranks like so much. I would like to hear the views of a quantum physicist on this. It is important to separate fantasy from reality. Nobody opens up shop as a werewolf expert or vampire doctor because there’s no money in it but fantasy that can be made into a racket for the gullible breeds lots of businesses. Harry Houdini exposed mediums galore before he died but they thrive now. Judith Moffett did a good fantasy story here. I loved it. But I hope this type of thing doesn’t catch on. A fantasy in which homeopathy, for example, really works would leave this critic bereft of words and would be too depressing.. I loved it. But I hope this type of thing doesn’t catch on.
Now to the short stories. ‘A Brief History Of The Trans-Pacific Tunnel’ by Ken Liu was another interesting tale from a man who usually comes up with good stuff in these pages. It’s also that rare thing, an alternative history short story. In this case, the divergence is in the late thirties, when Japan proposes that it will expand peacefully if the USA co-operates in a trans-Pacific tunnel, a giant Keynesian economic reboot to kick start the world out of recession. Liu cunningly uses the technology of the time and the point of view, years later, of a tunnel digger from a poor village in Formosa. This point of view is alternated with extracts from ‘factual’ documents which detail the real history. Very well done and thoroughly enjoyable. Might not such a project kick start the world out of the current bankers recession? Ken Liu for President!
I’ll deal with the other stories more briefly but that’s partly because they take place in a recognisable version of our world today and there is no unique background to describe. Dale Bailey tells the melancholy story of a middle-aged man having a mid-life crisis in ‘This Is How You Disappear’ but gives it a fantasy twist. I suppose it’s a kind of magic realism, though as with many genres that is hard to define. It was too sad to be classed as enjoyable but it was well told and thought-provoking, at least for a middle-aged man.
‘Among Us’ by Robert Reed is about extra-terrestrials hiding among us, though the tone is low-key and not paranoid. The Neighbours, as they are called, are being monitored by a government agency. Our hero is an important agent in that department and in line for the top job. The Neighbours’ stools contain ET bacteria which is what first gave them away. They live quiet lives and are actually rather likeable folks. It was a likeable story, too, with a neat ending.
‘A Haunting In Love City’ was another yarn about Jimmy and Morrie, the gay couple who investigate paranormal activity. This time it’s a haunted house in Texas. Albert E. Cowdrey tells it with his usual charm and it passes the time pleasantly enough. Stuff happens, crises build and there is a satisfactory conclusion.
The same cannot be said of ‘Night Train To Paris’ by David Gerrold. Not much happened and then there was a vague, weak ending. Disappointing from the man who gave us tribbles and will forever be held in high esteem thereby, but what the hell, no writer can bat a thousand, hit the bull’s-eye or whatever sporting metaphor you want to use every time. It was based around a real life trip to Italy for a convention. He might have done better to write a straight article about the trip.
The ‘Departments’ section contains many book reviews by Charles de Lint and Michelle West that will make you want to read the books, had you but world enough and time. Films don’t take up so much of your life so Lucius Shepard’s recommendations might be more practical.
In the always interesting ‘Plumage From Pegasus‘, Paul Di Filippo reflects on the new trend for fiction writers to incorporate stuff from real life in their work, using recorded conversations and their own experience at jobs and so forth. When imagination fails this provides wordage and veracity, too, I suppose. It will work in stories set in the present but not in more fantastical yarns. Having written that, it occurs to me that nearly all the stories here are set in the real world in our time. No matter. ‘Fantasy & Science Fiction’ has taken us out into space and the far future before and will no doubt do so again. Meanwhile, those pining for hard science and facts can read ‘The Great Atmospheric Escape’ by Paul Doherty and Pat Murphy. Sometimes, all I need is the air that I breathe.
Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/
Fate or fortune arranged things so that I read ‘Among Friends’ by Deborah J. Ross on the same day I watched the film ‘Amish Grace’ on the television. The film is about Amish people coping with a school massacre. ‘Among Friends’ is a touching tale of Quakers trying to help slaves. I highly recommend both but I’ve always had a soft spot for the more gentle versions of Christianity.
Thomas Covington is a Quaker in pre-civil war Delaware, a border state where there are strong opinions held both for and against slavery. When he encounters a runaway slave called Nat, he feeds and takes care of him. Then the slave catcher comes with a warrant to search Tom’s home and barn. The slave catcher is a very odd fellow indeed, it turns out, but I won’t spoil the surprise. Suffice to say it’s an excellent historical fantasy of the kind that this magazine frequently provides. Ross might want to expand it into three enormous novels called ‘The Chronicles Of Thomas Covington’ to get the most mileage from the character. I hope she doesn’t.
Next up is ‘Solidarity’ by Naomi Kritzer, the latest episode in the on-going saga of Beck Garrison and the troubles she faces on her Seasted home. The Seasteds are a group of artificial islands set up by rich people tired of government interference. There is not much law on most and virtually none on a couple. Workers rights, as you might imagine, are not a priority. Having stood up for the oppressed masses, Beck has been kicked out of the family home by her father, a rich big shot. She finds that rooms are expensive and hard to get when daddy is someone most folks don’t want to offend and she ends up in the lower levels of the Seasteds – a bit like ‘Down Below’ in ‘Babylon 5’ – trying to foil a plot to wreck the funeral of a union activist. In values and writing style, Naomi Kritzer reminds me of early Heinlein, no bad thing. She has strong plots and a clean uncluttered style. I look forward to more from the Seasteds.
‘The Assassin’ of Albert E. Cowdrey’s novelette is one Andrew Walden Emerson III, who, as you might guess from the name, hails from New England, USA. Andy is on a mission to kill the president of the world and it’s the second time he’s tried. The president was elected after the war and almost immediately used emergency powers to make himself dictator, an old, old story. This is a cool tale of tough deeds by cynical people but with a touch of sentiment, too. I liked it very much. Cowdrey often writes humorous stories and there is a hint of that now and then. Our well-educated hero notes that enlisted men ‘use the f word as noun, pronoun, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction and interrogation.’ Action movies have taught many people to speak thus. The rest say ‘like’ every other word and describe everything as ‘amazing’ as though there were no other superlatives in existence. It gets you down. Happily there is a rich vocabulary evident in every page of ‘Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction’.
‘The Lost Faces’ by Sean McMullen is another historical fantasy, also dealing with slavery but this time set in ancient Rome. As with the Quaker story, it resonated nicely with my other media intake because I have just finished ‘Rubicon’ by Tom Holland, a superb history of the fall of the Roman republic and had preceded that with the second volume of ‘The Cicero Trilogy’ by Robert Harris. I am therefore soaked in all things Roman.
The scene is that ancient empire, ten months into the reign of the emperor…ah, but that would be telling. Gaius Maximus Secundus is a wealthy merchant, owner of fifty ships and a spectacular villa in Ostia but he is dissatisfied. He wants posterity to remember his name. Marcus Foldor is a slave catcher, the best in the world. Gaius shows him various wonders and reveals that they were all conceived by a slave girl from the east who has now run away. He wants her caught. Foldor goes after this formidable lady, but things don’t turn out as planned. This is an excellent fantasy – or is it Science Fiction? – with a neat ending. Valde Commendatur!
So to the short stories. I will abandon the contents page and order them by merit, clearly not objectively as it‘s all a matter of taste. My favourite, because I like readable and lightly humorous stories, was ‘The Trouble With Heaven’ by Chet Arthur. Charles Adams-Morgan is an ageing ambassador who is sent to Ambrosia for his last, pre-retirement posting. It is Earth’s poshest residential satellite, rich people circling the globe in the ultimate gated estate. The big issue on Ambrosia is the servant question: droids or humans, which is best? The Ambassador soon finds that his main duty is to go to functions, balls and soirees where the rich gather to discuss the servant problem. Complications occur due to a reporter, a rebellious technician and a hedonist hermaphrodite. It’s all jolly good fun.
Next best was the much grimmer ‘Code 666’ by Michael Reeves. Jack Mobley wakes up in an ambulance with a pain in the neck and his partner Claire beside him. He and she are paramedics and his ambulance has been in a nasty road crash. Jack was a good driver but Claire was the better paramedic and had mentored him in his early days. He had soon developed the thick skin and black humour necessary for the job. Despite a slightly obscure ending, this story was made good by that lively prose which, as Raymond Chandler pointed out, Americans do so well.
‘What The Red Oaks Knew’ by Elizabeth Bourne and Mark Bourne had the honour of the very nice cover painting this issue so clearly the editor liked it or at least thought it made for good visuals. Jimi Bone steals a car with something in the trunk and hightails it for Arkansas. He meets Pink, a girl selling bone and feather knick-knacks at a fair and they go off together to Red Star, a place in the Ozarks. Midas lives there and he owes Pink’s daddy a favour, so they can hang out with him for a while. This was a wild nature/Chinese fantasy involving wood-lore, dragons and other kinds of magic. A polished piece of work and quite enjoyable.
‘The Boy Who Drank From Lovely Women’ is by Stephen Utley and is another historical fantasy. Our hero is the wastrel son of a rich merchant, born in 1780 in Paris, who spent his time drinking and wenching until daddy sent him to join the army. He was shipped to the West Indies to fight Toussaint L’Ouverture in what is now Haiti and maybe, he’s not sure, he was cursed with immortality there by a black slave woman. Stephen Utley writes nicely but inclines to the slice of life tale without a very definite ending. A lot of people like that but I prefer a stronger story, as dished up by Naomi Kritzer and Albert E. Cowdrey. On the plus side, it’s quite amusing and the history is accurate.
Travel to the stars, it seems, will depend on slowed down animation rather than suspended animation. The heroine of ’The Long View’ by Van Aaron Hughes finds a way to slow the metabolism of humans with the right cell structure so they can get to other worlds. She goes along for the trip, with unexpected consequences. This is classic SF, taking one scientific development and exploring it’s consequences in human terms. A good idea, nicely handled but somehow the story didn’t quite sing and dance for me. Neither did ‘The Cave’ by Sean F. Lynch, about a father and son who go into a cave where time behaves in strange ways. Possibly it was a bit too long. A shorter plot might have delivered more efficiently on the slight premise.
That said, even the lesser stories in ‘Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction’ are pretty darn good and reading any of them is not time wasted. If there isn’t a strong plot there’s nice writing. If there isn’t fine writing, there’s a good plot and sometimes you get both together in a real masterpiece. There are also interesting book and film reviews and more satirical fun from Paul Di Filippo in ‘Plumage From Pegasus‘ and in ‘Curiosities’, Richart A. Lupoff brings the attention of a new generation to the works of Stephen Leacock, the Canadian humorist from days of yore. All in all another quality issue of this venerable and respected magazine.
Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/
‘Heartsmith’s Daughters’ by Harry R. Campion is a fairy tale about a village smithy whose wife is unable to have children. He manufacturers three daughters, one with a heart of cold iron, one with a heart of brass and one with a heart of gold. Their attributes match the metal of their cardiology in apt ways but they are soon the victims of evil men. A rather dark story, beautifully told. ‘The Color Of Sand’ by KJ Kabza is another excellent fairy tale featuring sandcats, enabled to talk by magic, and a good woman with a big son. To say more would be to give away the plot but it was written with the same kind of cadence as ‘Heartsmith’s Daughter’ and the same kind of language. Both have an omniscient narrator which allows for comments on the characters, something not possible with modern point-of-view techniques. Both are good clean fun and apt for inclusion in any children’s anthology. Both would sit comfortably alongside the classics of the genre.
‘Kormak The Lucky’ by Eleanor Aranson is similar. Kormak might not strike you as lucky at first because he is kidnapped from Ireland by Norwegian slavers and sold in Iceland. There he proves himself a bit too lazy to be a good slave and so is passed from master to master. Eventually, he ends up getting involved with elves, fey folk and the like in a long, involved story. It was a bit too long for my taste, to be honest, but readers more fond of elves and their ilk will like it, I’m sure. Elves and fey folk are not necessarily very nice, which is consistent, I believe, with the received wisdom. Fairy tales are often Grimm.
‘The Woman Who Married The Snow’ is by Ken Altabef, who apparently specialises in tales of an Inuit Shaman named Ulruk. This tale of Ulruk was interesting for the insights into the lives of people in the colder regions of the world and the glimpses of an intriguing system of magic. There are eloquent descriptions of landscapes and the prose is generally of high quality. Although written in a more modern idiom, it does not sit ill with the preceding stuff.
‘The Miracle Cure’ by Harvey Jacobs is about trained doctors refusing to believe irrefutable empirical evidence that contradicts their beliefs. Gallstones feature, along with gallbladders, in this odd yarn. It’s probably more fantasy than Science Fiction so I will deem it as a modern fairy tale to squeeze it into my classification system. Isn’t all today’s fantasy just modern fairy tales? Tricky things, labels. Words, too.
Amaranthine. That’s not a word that crops up often nowadays but ‘In the Mountains Of Frozen Fire’ by Rus Wornom is written in the style of pulp tales from a hundred years ago. He also uses ‘tenebrous’, a favourite adjective of HP Lovecraft. There are a number of exclamation marks! Commander Denis Cushing, to use the short version of his name, is a secret operative, designated M4 by the United States International Vengeance Force. He is in northern Asia on the trail of…the Cobra, a deadly killer also known as Agent ZX-12. Wornom has good fun with this parody and so will a like-minded reader. The fantastic element is probably more Science Fiction than fantasy so it makes a nice bridge between the genres in my review. Amaranthine, by the way, seems to mean eternal or everlasting in this context. It might mean red.
‘The Nambu Egg’ by Tim Sullivan is definitely Science Fiction. It’s set in the distant future when the Tachtrans Authority can beam people to a distant planet, Cet Four in this case. Adam Naraya has returned to Earth because he has a Nambu egg to sell to the head of a rich corporation, one Mr Genzler. To tell more of the plot would be to ruin it for it’s the kind of tale where things are slowly revealed. Rest assured that the length of this paragraph does not reflect the very high esteem I have for the story.
’Oh Give Me A Home’ by Adam Rakunas is more Science Fiction but set in a much nearer future, alas. It’s really a modern western in which an almost ordinary rancher fights against the big rich guys who want to take over everything. He’s more scientific than Jimmy Stewart was in the classics and the rich guys are a giant corporation rather than a moustachioed villain who runs the town but it’s the same theme with a very contemporary and relevant twist. The bad guys even have a girl employee with a soft spot for our hero. Alas, in real life there actually are giant profit-hungry agricultural companies that want to patent everything and put the world’s farmers in hock to them forever. I name no names. They have lawyers, you know.
‘The Year Of The Rat’ by Chen Qiufan is translated by Ken Liu, no mean author in his own right. Broadening the scope of the magazine with foreign translations is an excellent policy, even though it means one less slot for the homegrown talent to fill in an already competitive and limited market. Like Adam Rakunas’ updated western, this tale of unemployed Chinese graduates being used for rodent extermination is realistically bleak about how the world is going. The rats are genetically engineered and very dangerous. The former students conscripted to kill them are not happy in their work. There’s a nice undercurrent about how us little people can never be sure what’s really going on with so many vested interests feeding us disinformation. Chen Qiufan is a name worth looking out for but I won’t end a sentence with a preposition just because of that. Not with Uncle Geoff editing me.
A comedy murder mystery narrated by a giant slug makes a nice change from the above. Oliver Buckram delivers ‘Half A Conversation Overheard While Inside An Enormous Sentient Slug’, about one Lord Ash who has been murdered at his manor, possibly by his wife who has vanished. Ash had estates in the Kuiper Belt and the sentient slug was a servant so this is clearly set in the future. Elegant fun that proves brevity is the soul of wit. I hope we see more from Buckram.
I hope we will see more of ‘The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction, too, for years and years to come. Sometimes the stories seem strong on lush writing and perhaps less strong on plot. This issue was very strong on plot with every tale having a firm commitment to the story element of stories as opposed to character, theme or sensual prose. No bad thing. The fiction’s the thing, really, but it’s worth mentioning that the ‘Departments’ provide useful information on what’s good out there in film and books and ‘Plumage From Pegasus’ by Paul Di Filippo is as entertaining as usual.
Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at sfcrowsnest
I seriously enjoyed Marc Laidlaw’s story ‘Bemused‘, which though quite light in tone at the outset, tells a grim story. Gorlen is a musician, a handsome youth and fond of a good time with wine, women and the usual distractions. Spar is a gargoyle. At some time in the past, for nefarious reasons, a wizard exchanged one of their hands so that stone Spar has a fleshy one and Gorlan has one of stone. They are on a quest to track down the magician and force him to change them back. Ho-hum! Another fantasy set in a world of magic and with a slow beginning yet. But, by golly, it turned out to be a well-wrought yarn with many surprising twists. Furthermore, Laidlaw has the gift of turning a neat phrase here and there. By the last line, I loved it.
‘A 2157 cabernet from Oneil.Paris.’ One line from ‘After the Funeral’ by Daniel Marcus tells you it’s set in the future. Up to that point, apart from a mention of Oneil.London it might be a present-day story of an academic’s widow wondering what to do with her life in the days after his death. By the time you get to the Canid, Professor Sam – who seems to be some sort of highly evolved dog, you know it’s a bona fide Science Fiction story – a highly literary Science Fiction story being of the slice-of-life ilk. I incline more to plots and a conclusion but it was interesting.
‘The Game Room’ by KJ Kabza is a sort of fantasy riff on ‘And He Built A Crooked House’ by Robert Heinlein. In Kabza’s house, rooms appear and disappear and the house is constantly changing in size. Some rooms lead to the outside world, which also varies. One by one, the occupants, a family it seems, start to leave until the narrator fears being left alone. One of those very odd, slightly confusing fantasies but entertaining in its way.
Jack Shade makes a welcome return to these pages in ‘The Queen Of Eyes’ by Rachel Pollack. The Queen, like Jack, is one of a number of ‘powers’ invisible to us ordinary folks going about our business. Jack is a Traveler and lives in a hotel in New York. If someone shows up and hands him one of his business cards, he is obliged to help them. When Sarah Strand comes down from upstate New York and hands him a card, he is obliged to start looking for her missing mother, who is the Queen of Eyes. This gets him mixed up with the Nude Owl, the Society of the Morning, the Association of Angels Demons and Elementals and other strange folks. Pollack creates a rich background for another long and engrossing tale. I hope there is more to come in this series and also hope that, in the long run, Jack gets what he wants.
‘Hhasalin’ is a city of shapers in the story of that name by Susan Palwick. Lhosi is a shaper, a small furry creature rescued from the orphanage by kindly humans whose children she used to play with. Now the kids are getting bigger and Lhosi is left alone more. Shaping, making objects appear as if out of nothing, seems similar to the ‘imaging’ of L.E. Modesitt’s ‘Imager Portfolio’ series but Lhosi has a small talent compared to his mighty heroes. This was a touching story with a nice kick in the tail, neatly done.
‘Half As Old As Time’ by Rob Chilson is one of those slightly chilling tales set in the far, far distant future when vast epochs of time have passed and the Earth is really, really old. Wrann, full of guilt, is on a quest to Urish Moor where he finds the city of Babdalorn, home of Crecelius, the Last Man. The atmosphere of ancient boredom is neatly delivered but the story is not boring. Chilson is apparently inspired by Jack Vance, one of the classic writers in the genre that I never get round to reading. If Chilsom’s work in homage is anything to go by, I should.
So to the comedy. An issue of MF&SF without an Albert Cowdrey story in it is like a royal baby delivery without a hundred photographers on the hospital doorstep, quite rare. This month‘s contribution, ‘Collectors’, is about the dark world of stolen objects d’art and the people who hide them away. Herman Goering hoarded the things when the Nazis conquered Europe and one particularly sacred item vanished after his death. Cowdrey blends a crook, a witch and a right-wing nutcase into a very entertaining yarn featuring the power of God, maybe.
Gods, eh? You can’t trust ’em, especially with your beautiful seventeen-year-old daughter. ‘The Shore At The Edge Of The World’ by Eugene Mirabelli features a likeable god named Gabriel – ‘Call me Gabe’ – who spends an evening with a fishing village family. There’s a good point made at the end of this one which adds a poignant note to a mostly humorous tale.
‘myPhone20’ by Robert Grossbach is a neat extrapolation of the future for those devices that young people have permanently pressed to their ear nowadays. The lead character is an older man not inclined to keep up with the latest technology. Although the plot is fairly serious, the tone is humorous, as it is in ‘Affirmative Auction’ by James Morrow. This, though, is a story without a serious bone in its body. A ship of the Pan Galactic Virtue Patrol goes to Charleston in the year 1801 and attempts to impose fair play. Things don’t turn out as they or the reader might expect. Jolly good fun and the descriptions of the aliens were nicely grotesque. They were uglier than slugs. Oliver Buckram entertained us with a giant slug in the last issue. This issue he delivers ‘A Space Opera’ in three acts. It has Italian words, a tragic hero, a lovely heroine, dastardly villains and everything else you could wish for in an opera. I look forward to seeing it performed one day. It might be as good as Shakespeare, who features in ‘Rosary And Goldenstar’ by Geoff Ryman. The bard’s life and work is changed by a meeting with some early astronomers. It was clever and well-researched but somehow lacked clout.
Overall, however, editor Gordon Van Gelder continues to deliver the goods in this long established excellent magazine. The fact that he’s not afraid to include a considerable percentage of humorous stories may be the secret of his success.
Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/
1 
bigfootmurf | 3 altre recensioni | May 13, 2020 |
bigfootmurf | 3 altre recensioni | May 13, 2020 | The big novella this issue is ‘Success’ by Michael Blumlein and I liked every word of it, except for the last page. It’s the enthralling tale of Dr Jim, a brilliant scientist who goes off the rails and then gets back on them, perhaps, with the aid of a similarly brilliant but more stable lady scientist. There is much deep thought built into the story about epigenetics, Lamarckism, change at the individual and social level and searching for the meaning of it all. Dr Jim brought to mind the chap in ‘Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance’, who becomes engrossed in his thoughts to the exclusion of everyday cares. There was even that old horror standby, the thing in the basement. The fact that the story was not resolved in a traditional manner was the only aspect of it not to my taste but there are plenty of readers who don‘t mind that sort of ending. Possibly it all made sense and I just didn’t understand it. Oh well, I enjoyed the ride anyway.
Novelettes next. ‘Stones And Glass’ by Matthew Hughes takes up the continuing story of the thief Raffalon, who featured in ‘Wearaway And Flambeau’ in the July/Aug 2012 issue of this magazine. Raffalon is travelling under an alias to sell some precious gems at a fair in the town of Tattermatch. It has to be done quickly because the ‘gems’ are actually common stones and will be revealed as such in a few days when the enchantment on them fades. Raffalon encounters a man called Cascor, a former provost with a very persistent manner. Like Albert E. Cowdrey, Hughes always narrates in an entertaining fashion and I enjoyed the story but was I meant to prefer Cascor, as a character, to our hero Raffalon? No matter. It is hinted that they might team up for future stories so we will get more of both.
‘Baba Makosh’ by M.K. Hobson is a very unusual fantasy featuring Russian gods and keen communist revolutionaries. It takes place during the Russian civil war of 1922. Our hero, Pudovkin, is an old-fashioned sort of chap, close to nature and does not much enjoy his current work of purging villages for Commander Tchernov, a very stern scientific revolutionary. Then they all end up in Hell and things get complicated. It’s a highly original, moving and complex story with tons of imagination. Wonderful stuff.
The underworld only features in the title of Albert E. Cowdrey’s ‘Hell For Company’, a tale that demonstrates some facility with narrative technique. First off, the narrator is an anonymous writer chatting to Mark Twain who tells him a ghost story in which the ending is narrated to Twain by the person to whom it all happened. Complicated but well done. The story itself wasn’t particularly awesome but, as ever, Cowdrey delivers it in lively language and one’s time is pleasantly spent.
‘The Soul In The Bell Jar’ by KJ Kabza is worthy of Edgar Allan Poe. Lindsome Glass is a nice little girl and her parents have gone away travelling so she is sent to stay with her old great-uncle. He is a scientist who experiments on the vivified, dead animals bought back to a semblance of life by stitching their souls back on. Locals know him as the Stitchman and nobody goes near the ancient house. It’s an excellent dark fantasy and the author has a way with similes. Kabza’s on-line bibliography shows that he started selling stories to those little magazines that pay a few dollars per yarn about ten years ago. Now he appears regularly in the most prestigious fantasy market of all, which is encouraging for struggling writers. (Of course, they won’t all turn out as good as him, but the only way to find out is to keep writing.)
‘Through Mud One Picks A Way’ by Tim Sullivan concludes the novelettes. It is genuine Science Fiction about three aliens from Cet Four who have been transported to Earth by a businessman for purposes unknown. He has hired Uxanna Venz to communicate with them by touch telepathy, which they do well. She worked on their home planet and is an expert on the species. A nice parable about colonialism with a couple of decent twists to keep you surprised. It was mostly written in dialogue with, very little narration, but Sullivan managed to get all the background information across anyway. A neat trick.
There are only two short stories: ‘Hard Stars’ by Brendan Dubois is cunningly told so that you don’t really know what’s going on until half-way through. I won’t spoil the plot but it explores the consequences of modern information technology if things go wrong and has a great ending. I should also say that I liked it and believe the late Robert A. Heinlein would have liked it a lot as well. He might have written it if he was still around. The other short is a fantasy, ‘Sing Pilgrim’ by James Patrick Kelly. It’s about a chair that appears suddenly on Lancaster Street in Pulanski, Kansas. This jolly little piece by an award-winning short story specialist nicely finishes up the fiction in another fine issue.
‘The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction’ and several others in the genre, are now available in very reasonably priced and convenient electronic versions. That’s useful for everyone but especially for those who dwell in some far corner of a foreign field where distribution of paper copies is random at best and often non-existent.
Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/
The first thing I scanned was ‘The Via Panisperna Boys In “Operation Harmony”’, co-authored by Claudio Chillemi and Paul Di Filippo, two fellows clearly not frightened by quotation marks. Unless Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in 1934 and Marconi invented an iconoscope television that lets the watchers be watched, this is set in an alternative history. The lads of the title are a bunch of Italian physicists who flee to the USA to develop a weapon to fight Hitler. Quite a nice weapon really. Enrico Fermi is their leader and they enjoy playing music together. The other band members are Ettore Majorana, Emilio Segrè and Bruno Pontecorvo, all of whom can be found in Internet encyclopaedias. One of those stories that are good fun to read and was probably even more fun to write.
These historical fantasies are often entertaining, as is the case again with ‘The Man Who Hanged Three Times’ by C.C. Finlay. Consarn it, if this one ain’t set in the old west. Dagnabit, a fine tale of a drunk and no good citizen, who is accused of killing the Chinese woman with whom he lived in sin. He denies it but is found guilty and they try to hang him. The narrator of this one is interesting and it did not feature Hollywood made-up swearwords. That’s just me.
‘The New Cambrian’ by Andy Stewart is definitely my type of thing and might have been printed in one of those great SF magazines of the fifties such as ‘Astonishing’ (now ‘Analog’), ‘Galaxy’ or even ‘The Magazine Of Fantasy & Science Fiction’. It’s a good old-fashioned story of engineers and biologists working on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. Dr Schneider, a female biologist, has been lost in a tragic accident in the ice-covered ocean, the first death on the planet. It shakes everyone. Our first-person narrator is her former lover, Ty. Their affair ceased when his wife Ana came to join them at the base. Human feelings interact with the complexities of life in alien waters to make an interesting yarn that borders on horror.
There’s more Science Fiction in ‘For All Of Us Down Here’ by Alex Irvine which extrapolates the continuing separation of society into the haves and have-nots. Perhaps I should say renewed separation. We got a bit more equal for a while. Anyway, in a not too distant future, the ‘haves’ can upload themselves to the Sing, which seems to be an orbiting computer complex. Their bodies are cared for but they soon lose the knack of using them properly. The story is about an encounter between a lad in Orono, Maine (that crossword puzzle favourite, as Stephen King once called it) and a Singular. It’s a neat family drama, but the context of the story is more interesting and I am sure there are other tales, probably a novel, to be extracted from this fascinating concept. Once the technology exists, I have no doubt there will be people delighted to upload themselves into their favourite computer game and spend eternity there, especially as the condition of planet Earth deteriorates.
Moving from the Sing to Song, Seth Chambers gets the editorial mature content warning for his novella ‘In Her Eyes’ and, rightly so, as the language is crude and direct. That suits the character of the lady in it. The gentleman and first-person narrator is Alex, who works in a museum, and it’s there that he meets Song, a not very pretty woman. He likes her, despite her looks, they go out and then there are some surprises. To say more would be to ruin it for the reader but it is a raunchy yet emotional story based on an interesting Science Fictional concept. A strong contender for the best story this issue, if the magazines still ran polls.
Paul Di Filippo has the regular ‘Plumage From Pegasus’ spot as well as the aforementioned collaboration and gives us ‘The Very Last Miserabilist In Paradise’. Science has solved all mankind’s problems and there is boundless energy, food for all and no work unless you want to, and all the benefits once dreamed of by SF writers. But one SF writer is not happy. Good fun as usual.
Albert E. Cowdrey is a welcome regular in these pages, often with comedy, but ‘Out Of The Deep’ presents him in serious mode. After an incisive description of fifties America, the protagonist, Pete, tells us how he met Alistair McCallistair, a rich kid, whilst on holiday on the Gulf coast. Time passes and Pete is a Viet-Nam vet and a bit messed up. McCallistair has avoided the war, as rich kids did, and now hires his old friend as a bodyguard because one of the bad guys is out to kill him. The fantastical element comes from McCallistair’s cook and concubine, a lady from the Caribbean with that ol’ black magic. It’s a great story with interesting characters, not least, the messed up ‘hero’. Cowdrey is a good old-fashioned storyteller who gives you a definite beginning, middle and cathartic end. You know exactly what’s happened and there’s none of that woolly vagueness that sometimes plagues the genre. He deserves to be on the bestseller lists and many of his yarns, because they are so strong as stories, would make good films, including this one. He could easily write straight thrillers, I think, and achieve mainstream success but clearly, he has a fondness for fantasy. We are lucky to have him.
‘The Museum Of Error’ is a longer entertainment from Oliver Buckram, who has contributed hilarious short stories in the past. Herbert Linden is the Assistant Curator for military history in the museum and is called upon to investigate when the petrified cat goes missing. The cat was turned to stone by the gorgon gun of mad inventor Theophrastus Morhof who accidentally petrified himself, too, and is also an exhibit. Evil rivals at the Science Institute may be responsible for the theft. Buckram’s inventiveness in dreaming up the exhibits for the Museum of Error is almost unbelievable and there’s a good gag in nearly every paragraph. It also works pretty well as a detective story. Thoroughly enjoyable.
‘We Don’t Mean To Be Kind’ by Robert Reed is set in a distant future when the universe is winding down and some creatures catch up with the Creator. The conflict is told from both points of view. An interesting concept at the far reaches of the fantastical and I’m not sure if I liked it or not. I’m pretty sure it’s good and that my hesitancy is based on residual Catholic guilt and the fear that He might be watching me read and judging.
Moira Crone gets away with ‘The Lion Wedding’ one of those fantasies set in the ‘real’ world that are generally written by and appeal to sensitive ladies. Well-crafted and some will like it but not really my type of thing. Likewise ‘The Story Teller’ by Bruce Jay Friedman in which a professor of literature finds himself in an afterlife where a story is demanded from him. It was okay but writers writing about writing should probably be confined to non-fiction.
The stories by Cowdrey, Buckram and Chambers more than compensate for the cover price of the magazine by themselves and the additional worthy material is a bonus. I should also mention the non-fiction articles but my electronic preview does not include the current ones and by the time I get a hard copy the review is done. Generally, they are excellent. The intelligent book reports of Charles De Lint and Elizabeth Hand give me good lists of books I don’t have time to read and so are frustrating. Readers with fewer tomes to be done will find them useful. On the other hand, a movie takes up less lifespan and the film reviews, by various contributors, highlight DVDs to look out for, often ones that have not been commercially successful but are well worth a watch. Also, they are not snobbish and will allow that a half-decent Hollywood action movie of the sci-fi sort can be entertaining, too.
So, ‘The Magazine Of Fantasy & Science-Fiction’ is keeping alive several worthy traditions. For the Creator’s sake buy it and keep them going!
Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/
This month’s novella is ‘The Lightness Of The Movement’ by Pat MacEwen and its genuine Science Fiction with two human females studying the alien Neons on Hrallsted’s World. What do you do in the future if you’re a failed ballet dancer majoring in anthropology? The answer for Shannon, our first-person narrator, is to go to another planet and put on a celluloid ’costume’ with some armour capability, lots of built-in sensors and, most importantly, the ability to receive the amorous attentions of Neon males. To get this you have to do an elaborate mating dance first. Shannon is doing her thesis but the boss is Niera, the lady in the ship orbiting overhead. The theme is what ‘Star Trek’ called the Prime Directive: no open contact with a non-technological species. Unfortunately, like James T. Kirk, Shannon is rubbish at not interfering and also applies her human morality to non-humans with exciting results. Her heart’s in the right place and it’s a very entertaining and well-written story.
‘Collar’ by Leo Vladimirsky is about a man trying to get a job. This involves a long and hazardous swim from the east coast of the USA out to factory ships in international waters. The story is told from the perspective of Tom, an escort for workers whose fee is a percentage of their wages if they get a contract. A very well-constructed yarn in which the world scene is effectively conveyed in conversation and shows a future all too realistic and bleak.
After the bleak future, you might consider ‘The Uncertain Past’ which features the assassination of President Kennedy, not, on this occasion, considered as a downhill motor race. To test a new theory of time, some researchers go back to watch the murder but each one sees different things happening. Possibly they are entering parallel universes or even creating them by their presence. Ted White’s story is neatly resolved in a dramatic conclusion at another major historical event but I‘m not sure the issue was settled. In any case, it provided an interesting space-time theory and believable characters.
I believe Robert A. Heinlein wrote the first account of an inter-generational colonising starship on which everyone has forgotten the original mission and reverted to a primitive state. His story ‘Universe’ is a classic but in ‘Albion Upon The Rock’, Daniel Marcus visits the same territory. The crew of the ship have names that refer back to their origins: Sandy Ecosystems, Eden Security and Sergei Navigation, even though they are now a hunter-gatherer culture in the hydroponics decks. Jamal Operations’ wife is about to have a baby, so soon he must take the long journey, scale the cliffs to weightlessness and let the wind take him. One life, one death is the rule that keeps the balance. As Jamal goes about his business, the ship with a self-aware artificial intelligence, encounters a multi-dimensional being spread across space-time that takes an interest in it. The cosmic and the human are neatly twined in a charming story which somehow avoids the sense of futility that such material might engender in another writer. I think I liked it as much as ‘Universe’ and I like ‘Universe’ a lot.
A simple farm boy gets his arm mangled in the combine harvester and has an efficient but ugly prosthetic fitted in its place with a chip wired to his brain. The arm does not think it is an arm, however, it thinks it is ‘A Stretch Of Highway Two Lanes Wide’ in Colorado. This is definitely weird but quite effective in an odd way. Apparently, Sarah Pinsker has been submitting stories to MofF&SF since she was twelve and I’m glad she finally succeeded with this quirky little gem.
‘Hark The Wicked Witches Sing’ is by Ron Goulart, who generally has fun with his creations rather than taking them too seriously. The title of the story is also the title of a horror musical written by Hix, a B-movie writer in forties Hollywood. Apparently, there are a number of stories about Hix but this is the first one I’ve come across. The B-movie titles scattered through it were entertaining and the yarn capered along amusingly for a while but the ending, while leaving room for a sequel, was a bit flat.
An issue of MofF&SF without Albert E. Cowdrey is like a day without rain in England – very rare. Last time, he was in serious mode. This time he returns to comedy with ‘Byzantine History 101’, a sequel to ‘The Woman In The Moon’ which appeared in the May/June 2013 issue of this magazine. In that yarn, Professor Threefoot had agreed to let his daughter’s useless husband, Adam, write his authorised biography. Now his grandson, another Adam, who follows in his late father’s footsteps so far as utility goes, has hooked up with an antique dealer called Terrence, a man who can give Threefoot a run for his money when it comes to selfish, ruthless pragmatism. Obviously, such a homosexual pairing cannot carry Threefoot’s DNA into the next generation but he has plans. Very entertaining, as usual with Cowdrey.
Oliver Buckram is becoming almost as much an MofF&SF regular as Albert E. Cowdrey and is just as welcome. This issue’s offering is ‘A Struggle Between Rivals Ends Surprisingly’. The story is set in a busy port and the odd title is a reflection of the culture of beetle-like creatures who conduct all mercantile negotiations according to classic scenarios such as ‘clever servant outwits rich foreigners’ or ‘a son slayed unknowingly by command of divinity’. Treya is a human negotiator and her ex-lover, Neb, is her rival in bidding for a rich contract. The title is a neat plot summary. This is not quite as good as Buckram’s previous stories but, as they were brilliant, that’s not much of a criticism. Very good.
Even though I usually like everything explained in a story I’ll forgive Gordon Eklund for ‘I Said I Was Sorry, Didn’t I’ because it’s such good fun. The story is set in present-day America. Our hero has caused the end of the universe, which is to happen shortly, and is therefore unpopular and has to wear a false beard to avoid public attention. His wife kicks him out, but he has three sisters who may put up with him. Like Terrence and Threefoot from Cowdrey’s story, he’s not very loveable or politically correct but he is amusing.
From fun to fantasy. Arthur and Alexis are childless and doing okay when suddenly she gets pregnant and he has to deal with it. ‘Butterscotch’ is a fantasy because it features ‘travelers’, odd creatures that have appeared lately, moving about the land aimlessly. They seem to be made of vacuum cleaner waste and leave a small trail, ‘the way a burning cigarette dragged along the asphalt might.’ Nobody knows where they came from. The slightest blow reduces them to dust. A traveller appears in the garden when Alexis becomes pregnant and her pregnancy becomes difficult. Is there a connection? The mother-in-law from Hell moves in to help. She is ‘built like a toy train, squat and bulky’ and smells ‘like a mixture of stew and lingering aerosols’. D.M. Armstrong’s deft use of language makes his interesting and honest story – honest about fatherhood – very effective.
‘Draft 31’ by Michael Libling is one of those stories where telling what it’s about spoils the ending, so I won’t. It opens with a small town doctor having to treat the son of his former high school sweetheart and from there on develops nicely. The narrative viewpoint switches from time to time, which I don’t mind at all, but it’s unusual nowadays, forbidden by the arbiters of literature. In this case, it was probably essential. Normally, I like things more clear-cut but the vagueness on this one worked somehow.
There are two very good fairy tales in this issue. The first, a novelette, is ‘Apprentice’ by Jon DeCles in which Dafyd, the difficult stable boy, is assigned, by his fellow villagers to serve the local wizard as payment for that worthy getting rid of a gryphon. This turns out well at first because the wizard is quite a kindly, forgiving old fellow, certainly nicer than Dafyd’s previous masters or his parents, who got rid of him at the first opportunity. All the elements of the tale come together in a splendid conclusion which, happily, leaves the way open for a sequel. I hope Jon DeCles has one in mind.
The other fairy tale, ’Our Vegetable Love’ by Rob Chilson, features sentient trees, with which we are all familiar now. These don’t talk like C.S. Lewis, booming, but rather in a ‘woody groan’. They also speak in a northern English dialect. I won’t give away the secret of the trees’
sentience but it’s very clever and the story of Grandpa Tree’s interactions with his naughty granddaughter on Bonfire Day is great. In mellow middle age, I am coming to like this kind of thing, partly because I am fond of the omniscient narrator, forbidden in most modern fiction but allowed in this particular sub-genre. ‘The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction’ features faery frequently and many of these tales, slightly edited for adult content in some cases, could be put into a good anthology for children.
Reading and reviewing this not inconsiderable quantity of fiction every two months takes a lot of time but I don’t begrudge it. ‘The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction’ continues to deliver the goods and sometimes, the greats.
Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/
‘The End Of The Silk Road’ is a novelette. Private investigator Mike Drayton is hired by Victor Grossman, head of Superior Silk, to investigate a drug dealer who has turned his brother into a heavily indebted junkie. The twist is that Superior Silk is located on Venus and the drug dealer is a ‘froggie’ or native Venusian called Uluugan Ugulma and the drug is Ulka, also Venusian. Mike travels from Earth to Venus by airship through the interplanetary atmosphere. David D. Levine’s story uses the hard-boiled private detective plot framework and narrative style in an interesting new world. Obviously, blondes are involved, too. It was clever, fast-paced and very enjoyable.
‘Rooksnight’ by Marc Laidlaw is another novelette featuring the bard with a stone hand and the gargoyle with a fleshy one, their respective appendages having been exchanged by a sorcerer. Gorlen and Spar have teamed up to search for him but they encounter various other troubles in their wandering. This time it’s the Knights of Reclamation, followers of a vanished lord who had a great treasure ages ago which was lost and scattered around the world. The Knights’ mission is to recover this treasure so that the lord will come back in some way. The presumption is that any treasure they come across is theirs. Clearly they were the merchant bankers of their day. A crowd of rooks have a fortress full of jewels and the Knights need the gargoyle to get them through its various dangers. Inventive and quietly witty, this was not quite as enjoyable as the previous tale featuring these heroes but it was certainly good.
‘Containment Zone: A Seasted Story’ is a novelette by Naomi Kritzer. The series must be popular enough now to put the brand name in the title. Hardly surprising as the episodes are very readable and cover interesting themes. The Seasted is a man-made archipelago in the Pacific Ocean, west of California. Kritzer writes lively, dialogue-heavy prose in a conversational style similar to that of Robert Heinlein. One character is accused of yammering! Meaningless talk. The themes of ruthless capitalism, extreme libertarianism and the struggles of the poor workers are relevant to our times. My impression is that Kritzer is more on the side of the workers than the late Robert Heinlein, though the early Robert Heinlein was a different matter. Our hero is Beck Garrison, a young lady blessed with a rich and powerful father but cursed by a conscience. This yarn about a plague unleashed on the Seasted was not the best of them but it was entertaining. Indubitably, they will one day be collected into a book.
On to the short stories and beginners first. Alyssa Wong is a talented graduate of the Clarion Writer’s Workshop for Science Fiction and Fantasy and ‘The Fisher Queen’ is her first published story. It’s well told and one is always glad to welcome fresh talent to the genre. Unfortunately, and the fault is mine, this yarn about dubious relations between seamen and mermaids made me think of Troy McClure and ‘The Simpsons’ episode ‘A Fish Called Selma’ so I couldn’t take it seriously. Other readers may get more from it, I hope.
‘White Curtain’ is a translation from the Russian of a story by Pavel Amnuel and deals with multiple realities created each time we make a choice. Two learned gentlemen in this field were both mad for the same woman and one was jilted. A very moving story about true love and it’s always nice to see foreign Science Fiction stories and widen our horizons.
‘The Memory Cage’ by Tim Sullivan proposes that, by a trick of quantum physics, it may be possible to collate old particles together and form a kind of ghost of a dead person, to whom the living can talk. Our hero, Jim, has issues with his late father who bought him up to be a ‘real’ man. Following this ethos, his brother went to war and died. The setting is a believable future with research stations on Titan, oligarchs, terrorists, sex change for the fun of it and long life due to advances in medical science. The problem is as old as man. ‘They f**k you up your mum and dad’ as Phillip Larkin pointed out.
‘The Shadow In The Corner’ is an excellent homage to an old master of dark fantasy. Our narrator, Arnold Boatwright, is a scientist working at the famous Miskatonic University. With his colleague, Agrawal Narendra, he hopes to create a window to look into other worlds. Obviously, the past talk of ‘elder things’ is not a concern to serious scientists until…! Nobody modern could duplicate Lovecraft’s prose – we don’t have the same education – but Jonathan Andrew Sheen captures the spirit of that old master in a tale of true terror. Great stuff.
In ‘Plumage From Pegasus’, this issue an NSA man is involved in Operation Nudge’em. The secret service hopes to influence the masses by popular fiction. This has happened in the past accidentally, with ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ and some works of Dickens but doing it deliberately isn‘t going so well. Paul Di Filippo’s pieces usually have a serious point to make. No hint of that in ‘Presidential Cryptotrivia’, a spoof historical article by the always amusing Oliver Buckram. Good fun but not really a story, this alternative view of the US Presidency might have been written by Gore Vidal when he was drunk.
Along with the usual interesting non-fiction and book reviews, this collection of stories adds up to another good issue of that venerable publication, ‘The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction’.
Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/
First up is that old pro Brian W. Aldiss with ‘Benkoelen’ which is the name of an ‘isolated stone peg in the middle of the ocean’ near Sumatra. The oceans are rising and Coyne goes to visit his sister who is running a monkey sanctuary on the island. He has bad news. There is no good news which is the point of the story. It was okay as a slice of life but didn’t set me afire.
I think ‘Damned When You Do’ by Jeff Carlson is more fantasy than Science Fiction. A boy is born who, fresh out of the womb, sets off rolling around and around the world then gets to his feet aged about three and carries on running. He has devastating impacts as the world seems to turn under his feet. He can slow it’s rotation. In general, he’s a well-meaning lad though as his constant touring has given him a taste of many cultures. The story’s told from the point of view of his father. It’s highly entertaining and very different from anything else.
This anthology dates from 2011, by which time author Judith Moffett had already spotted that young people couldn’t bear to be separated from their phones. Kayley is working with Jane out in the wilds of Kentucky, monitoring bird activity. Jane is a strange old lady who virtually lives off the land. Kayley constantly monitors her friends on Facebook and other sites. Then a tornado hits and she loses contact. Good generation gap survival story with likeable characters.
Matthew Hughes is a regular writer for ‘The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction’ and has a bent for humour, nicely demonstrated here. Billionaire Bunky Sansom decides to tackle global warming by contacting advanced aliens who may have had the problem before us. Why bother reinventing the wheel? He pumps billions into finding extra-terrestrial intelligence with some success and a surprising result. This was short and sweet and satisfying.
‘Come Again Some Other Day’ by Michael Alexander goes with the notion that climate change is unpredictable because it’s not all natural. Heat is being dumped onto our time from the future. His heroes, Hap and Gladys, spend their days trying to move it elsewhere without messing up the past too much. Unusual and interesting.
I probably liked ‘Turtle Love’ by Joseph Green even more today than I would have a year ago. Amos and Stephanie Byers are losing their house in Florida to rising sea levels but will be compensated by the Federal government. Amos works for the department that’s building dams to save what land they can while Stephanie is a marine biologist striving to save turtles as their beaches are lost. There’s a more dramatic subplot about a nut sending Amos threatening letters but the main thing I got from this was sane Americans working together in an effective Federal program to cope with catastrophe. We can only hope it happens that way. The style was nicely low key and the characters were likeable.
In the olden days of England, circuit judges toured the country dispensing justice. Between 1789 and 1912, the US had a similar system and, after the big flood, it comes back in ‘The Californian Queen Comes A-Calling’ by Pat MacEwen. The California Queen is a paddle steamer that brings Judge John Herbert of the First Circuit Court of Central Valley to Atwater. But our heroine is Taliesha Daniels, the prosecuting attorney, an ex-marine who combines the ability to fight pirates with sound legal knowledge and a strong sense of justice. A clever, twisting plot and a solid extrapolation of how things might be if the west gets wild again.
Veteran SF writer Alan Dean Foster has fun with global warming in ‘That Creeping Sensation’. He predicts that in response to the increase in carbon dioxide, the plant life of Earth will expand wildly to gobble it all up. This produces an oxygen-rich atmosphere that allows insects to grow huge as they did in the Carboniferous Era. Sergeant Lisa-Marie and Corporal Gustaffson are part of a military corps assigned to deal with six-inch bees and three-foot roaches in Atlanta. I note that Foster names both characters in the second sentence, opens with a small crisis and then explains the back story before plunging them into the main one. It’s also written in the third person past tense. Hurrah! Too many short stories now are written in odd tenses, conceal the name or sex of the main character and obscure the details you need for several pages to create a false sense of mystery and a real sense of annoyance. It’s nice to be in the hands of an old pro. The basic idea is a great premise for a B movie to watch on the Horror Channel late one night.
The next few stories were a bit ho-hum, not bad but not great, and it occurred to me that wise old editor Gordon Van Gelder had put the best stuff up front. However, it all finished beautifully with a novelette from M.J. Locke entitled ‘True North’. On the last day of March 2099, near Rexford Montana, Lewis Behrend Jessen met Patricia. ‘Bear’, as Jessen is known, is sixty-seven years-old, seven feet tall, big-boned and has a Colt .45 revolver with ivory grips. His wife died recently but insisted he go on living. They took to the wilderness a while back and stocked up, foreseeing the bad times ahead. Patricia is a teenage Mexican girl leading a band of children north to Canada and beyond through an area of dangerous Warlords. It all gets a bit hokey (hell, to a cynic, this is pure American corn) but it made a great uplifting and hopeful conclusion to an anthology about hard times ahead. I loved it.
Interesting that this book fetches quite high prices second-hand now, maybe the world is waking up to the issue. If you can get it cheap, I recommend it and, even if you can’t, I still do.
Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/
Everyone knows immigrants are the source of all a country’s problems so in the future the crackdown on foreigners, except those needed as cheap labour, will be more severe. The book opens strongly with ‘Sneakers’ by Michael Libling. Two innocent Canadians go south to buy a pair of sneakers, which are cheaper in the United States. Regrettably, things have changed on the border and their situation becomes difficult, even scary. This has a great kick in the tail and may be a warning for those ex-colonials in the savage north. They should have stayed under the rule of good Queen Bess. We Brits would have taken care of them.
‘Glow’ by S.S. Breukelaar has real aliens from another planet who are under threat on election night from Bud Towers and the Humanity First Party. Some actually support him, assuming that Bud is only out to get lowlife aliens and not respectable folks like themselves. Bud’s opponent is an alien-loving woman, who will go to jail for financial misdemeanours if he wins. The theme of this anthology invites allegory.
In my extensive reading, I haven’t come across many female protagonists mad for sex (I don’t read those sort of books) but there’s one in ‘His Sweat Like Stars On The Rio Grande’ by Janis Jan. Working for Local Immigration and Customs Enforcement on the famous Wall, she meets a hot Mexican, fourth generation with a rare green card. She’s ruthless in pursuit of her libidinous longings but, despite her job, this is really about slavery. We do like our cheap food.
A scarier story of slavery is ‘The Adventure of You’ by Paul la Forge. It consists of a list of instructions to coal miner John Arnold Arnold (that is his name). They come from the Synod which forbids certain things, not least among them escaping to the surface which is a myth and doesn’t exist anyway. As dear old Harold Macmillan knew, the best way of keeping the oppressed down is to convince them they’re actually very lucky.
‘Newsletter’ by Jennifer Marie Brisset is in the form of a newsletter to a book group from the community bookstore. It warns them that the state now monitors which books they buy and that certain titles are no longer available. The prospect is chilling for readers but hopefully, things won’t get this bad.
‘Loser’ is by Matthew Hughes who writes many good stories for ‘The Magazine Of Fantasy & Science Fiction’. Loser 114 is in a camp doing hard labour. He used to work for ‘National Commentator’ magazine and wrote an interesting piece on how people switched from ‘citizens in a society’ to ‘consumers in an economy’. He’s recruited to betray his old comrades who have fled to Canada with his wife and child held hostage to make sure he complies. This is a thoughtful and interesting narrative from an author more noted for his humour.
‘Dangerous’ by Lisa Mason is a hilarious story about compulsory vagina registration with the federal government. No mention of male reproductive organs which are presumably free to hang out wherever they like.
‘Statues Of Limitations’ by Jay Russell is a conversation between Sal and Bobby in New York. Incorrect statues are being replaced all over the city. Atlas is removed from Rockefeller Center for being ‘an insidious three-dimensional trope for two thousand years of hegemonic patriarchy’. This was hilarious, the best thing in the book and a warning to look left as well as right when guarding your freedom of speech.
One of the longest here is ‘Burning Down The House’ by Ted White. Nik’s block is burnt down by armed gangs so she goes to see Jonny, a pimp. She won’t work for him but they are sort of friends. He arranges for her to meet a One Percenter who’s doing an IQ experiment to prove that poor people aren’t stupid. A sad story of exploitation but Nik’s struggle makes an interesting yarn.
Ron Goulart enjoys himself with ‘The Amazing Transformation Of The White House Dog.’ Like FDR and Nixon, the President wants to have a dog but he’s allergic to them. Norbert’s Uncle Josh is an inventor and has made Fido #7, a clever talking robot canine. J. Edgar Nofzinger, head of the Alternative FBI comes to check it out. Fido is approved and will keep the president company in the wee small hours while he tweets. Great fun and a pleasant change from the myriad bleak visions, though I admit there’s a lot to be bleak about.
‘Designed For Your Safety’ by Elizabeth Bourne is told in the form of emails from Sophie Goldstein to Emily Wilson. Sophie has obtained a good job in a fantastic new office building that’s solar-powered with a huge roof garden which uses the workers own processed poo as manure. It’s practically self-sufficient which is just as well when the outside world falls apart and they are locked in by the building for their own safety. This is almost an updated ‘Lord Of The Flies’ with adults. The crisis worsens steadily in a clever plot and if it was stretched out a bit it might make a good film.
Overall, this is a worthy anthology. In fact, there wasn’t a duff story in the bunch but as many are very short the book as a whole is a bitty read. The brief to keep it brief led many writers to go the epistolary route, usually e-mails between parties but also a newsletter and even a story told in Facebook posts. The general tone was inevitably serious, that’s the nature of dystopian fiction, but the loaf is leavened by bits of humour.
Although not all the stories are about Trump-related issues, they are all set in a near future USA and this is, in general, a howl of rage by the liberals of America against the new president and a feast of fiction guaranteed to make red necks redder. There are brief notes on the authors at the back of the book if you want to find out more about them. I doff my cap to Thomas Kaufsek who has remained ‘true to his resolution not to have his own website’.
Roll on the Mid-Term elections!
Eamonn Murphy
Southern California features next. ‘Father Juniper’s Journey To The North’ by Grania Davis is a historical fantasy narrated by the scribe Sandor, a monk who accompanied Father Juniper on a mission to Alta, California in the year of Our Lord 1769. The Franciscans wanted to save the natives from paganism and Jesuits. The Spanish King and the Governor were eager for gold. One monk had a monkey from South America which was very clever, did tricks and rode on the back of a pig. Were the monkey and pig supernatural spirits? Sandor wasn’t sure. History and Sandor tell us that Father Juniper’s noble efforts did not work out so well for the natives. This was a polished piece, like everything in the magazine, but evoked no great joy in my soul.
Back to the American heartlands again for Chet Arthur’s ‘The Sheriff’ but this time set in the wild western past. Jimson is an orphan who works in the town hotel and, though a simple soul, has the gift of prophecy. He see’s bits of the future. So when he tells his foster mother, Bama, that the sheriff is going to be shot, she is worried. Shore ‘nuff, the sheriff bites the dust and the man who takes his place has to track down the varmints what done it. This was a neat, old-fashioned western story, deftly told with nice touches of humour and I thoroughly enjoyed it. One advantage of fantasy is that it allows a broad range of settings and all other genres can be subsumed into it.
‘Where the Summer Dwells’ by Lynda E. Rucker was also set in the remoter parts of the USA. It was a fey, feminine tale about some young people going off to a gothic southern backwater and having something fantastical happen. The narrative was cleverly set up as the protagonist makes a trip now and recalls the past one made with other folks.
There’s a kind of Confederate feel about it when Mars revolts in ‘A Diary From Deimos’ by Michael Alexander. It’s the story of a revolution on an Earth colony world. Told in the form of a patriotic rebel lady’s diary, it echoes and satirises all those successful revolts in Robert Heinlein’s fiction by making the rebels a bit sordid and a bit gun happy, too. Earth has freed the robots and Mars doesn’t want to follow suit, a situation somewhat analogous to the war between the states, at least if you take the simplistic view that it was all about slavery. The diarist is one of those fussy, silly women that Heinlein often mocked in his fiction and there are clever one line references to Asimov’s ‘The Martian Way’ and even ‘Bartleby The Scrivener’ by Herman Melville. Call me Ishmael if this isn’t the most fun a writer can have with an old theme. I loved every word of it.
That same war between the states is looming over all in ‘The Goddess’ by Albert E. Cowdrey, who now appears in this magazine almost every issue and why not. Justin Lamarck is the son, by a slave woman, of a rich and powerful plantation owner. On a trip to London to investigate cotton machinery, he meets up with a Hindoo (the old spelling is used) named Ganesh Srinavasan, who tends him when he is seasick on the voyage back home and becomes his partner in running the plantation when Pa has a stroke. Into this powerful mix is thrown Madeleine Delatour, a dusky-skinned, sensual seventeen year-old that Ganesh finds when he is looking for a female for Justin. He gets more than he bargained for from this worshipper of Kali, but he can cope with powerful women. These ingredients might have gone to make a big, thick southern novel, a bestseller even. Why Mister Cowdrey chose to turn them into a droll, slickly plotted and slightly dark fantasy I could not say. I liked it a lot but you may not. Frankly, my dears, I don’t give a damn.
The other stories in this issue move far away from the Mason-Dixon line. ‘12:03 p.m.’ by Richard A. Lupoff definitely takes us into fantastical territory though the setting is the present day real world. Mister Castleman goes to see a psychiatrist and can tell her exactly how their conversation is going to unfold because he has had it many times before. His life tends to jump from one scene to another, changing when he touches a doorknob to leave a room and then finds himself entering another one for another repeated scene. This unfolds intriguingly and though the ending was one of those indefinite ones of which I am not fond, it was firmly fixed in the genre emblazoned on the cover of the magazine.
‘Give Up’ by Richard Butner is about Everest, in a way. For Jim’s forty-third birthday, he tells his wife, Charlotte, he wants nothing but buys himself a big blue tent that is an Everest simulation, a Backyard Everest. Jim and Charlotte are the local king and queen of trivia competitions, always winning, but he had been stumped a few months before when asked the identity of the two British explorers who died on Everest in 1924. He knew one was George Mallory who famously said, ‘because it’s there’, when asked why he wanted to climb the mountain but couldn’t identify the other bloke. This sparked an interest in Everest that led to the self-bought gift. Jim enters the tent and sets out to ‘climb’ Everest. Simulated Everest climbs are indubitably a good idea as I understand the Nepalese are now begging people to stay away because the mountain is covered in litter and corpses so popular has it become. The story did not, perhaps, live up to the originality of the concept but that might be because it reminded me of the many holodeck tales in ‘Star Trek’, of which I am not fond. (The holodeck tales, I mean. I am fond of ‘Star Trek’, obviously.)
Nonetheless, virtual reality is definitely an SF possibility that‘s becoming real and could have many applications. In ‘Theobrama Valentine’ by Rand B. Lee, it’s used in psychotherapy. The story is set in a far future with multiple alien species interacting on many worlds. Theobrama is a very special planet because of the chocolate plantations. The best chocolate known to sentients is produced there but the wealth this brings and the troubled background of the inhabitants, who started out as plantation slaves, makes it a hotbed of psychiatric troubles. Tuli is a psychiatrist who works with clients using virtual reality. Her last three clients have dismembered her while she was playing her role. An investigation is launched as this is unusual. Rand B. Lee delivers a highly entertaining story which is real hard core Science Fiction, full of weird names, strange terminology and great ideas. The notion that all emotional/rational species are subject to mental health problems is one I have not come across before. Aliens are usually presented as ruthless, evil, kindly, indifferent, logical and so forth but rarely as being as flawed as ourselves. Original.
Paul Di Filippo has a regular department called ‘Plumage From Pegasus’ which he fills with interesting stuff, often in the form of fiction as here. ‘Call Me Ishmael: LIKE/DISLIKE’ is perhaps a prediction of the future of publishing. First, spend years on social networks building up a vast array of ‘friends’. Then announce that you are going to write a novel once your customer base is all set up. Then let them in on it as you write so that it can meet with their approval. Electronic publishing is very probably the way things will be. The fact that the most appalling rubbish can become popular only makes it likely that more people will take up writing in the hopes of fame and cash. I am currently hard at work on ‘Forty Shades of Green’ the story of an Irish nymphomaniac. Note that this idea is now under copyright as it is in print. If anyone else makes millions with it, I will sue them for fifty percent.
‘Arc’ by Ken Liu opens with Lena Auzenne, in the winter of her days, being interviewed by reporters and recalling her life. When sixteen, she was made pregnant by a rich college boy who did a bunk. I didn’t like Lena when she left her baby with her parents to run off with another n’er do-well but, as she points out, the father also dodged his responsibilities and many people didn’t mind that so much, including me. Somehow a mother leaving the baby seems worse. Suitably chastened for my double standards, I read on. Lena eventually hitches up with the founder of Bodywerks, a company which has the formula for a long, healthy life. Meditations on the desirability of near immortality are not new to Science Fiction but this is a good one. Ken Liu impressed me last issue with his story ‘Real Faces’. One to watch.
Onwards. Mari is the seventh child in a big, out-going friendly family of blonde, sporty types who live in Norway, a land where, I believe, the blue parrots are easily stunned. Her fine skin burns in the mildest sun and she is more quiet and introverted than the rest of the family. There is a legend that one of her ancestors mated with a troll centuries before and that a child like her occurs every few generations. The obvious trick here is to make her an outcast but author Peter Dickinson doesn’t do that. In ‘Troll Blood’, she is an integral part of her big happy family. She falls in academically with a professor researching an ancient Norse manuscript and romantically with a hydroelectric engineer from England. When danger comes, she has to rescue the man she loves. This story had a lot of what Stephen King, in ‘Misery’, termed the ‘Gotcha’, at least for me. Pizza blackened in the oven while I read eagerly on to see what happened next. It was also a very good love story in a subtle but powerful way.
‘Contact’ by Sophie M. White
Must be
A poem.
Because the sentences
Are broken up
Into lines.
I prefer
More traditional poems
Which rhyme.
It was clever though
In a way.
I believe the usual way to review products of an anthological nature is to pick out the highlights and dismiss the rest with a line or two. I have done that with lesser magazines but I haven’t yet managed it with this one. Every yarn has some quality that deserves a mention, some impact that provokes a thought. This makes reviewing it a long job but such worthy stories, such worthy writers, should be saluted. In the teeming world market, it’s hard for talent to get noticed and in the declining short story market a magazine keeping quality fiction of this length alive deserves promotion. The electronic edition of ‘MofF&SF’ costs less than a pint of beer and will give you many more hours of pleasure. You can still have beer, mind. They are not mutually exclusive.
Collegamenti
Wikipedia (English)
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction page (English)
Questo sito utilizza i cookies per fornire i nostri servizi, per migliorare le prestazioni, per analisi, e (per gli utenti che accedono senza fare login) per la pubblicità. Usando LibraryThing confermi di aver letto e capito le nostre condizioni di servizio e la politica sulla privacy. Il tuo uso del sito e dei servizi è soggetto a tali politiche e condizioni.