The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January/February 2019 issue (136:1-2)
Edited by C. C. Finlay
258 pages
Published 2018
Read from January 16 to February 7
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
I'm trying something different here: reviewing an issue of a fiction magazine as if it were a book. I've been collecting speculative fiction magazines for a number of years, all the while intending to read and review their contents here, but through the magic of procrastination and inertia, I just haven't managed to do so before now.
So what prompted me to sit down and start reading my collection? In the last few months I've written a handful of short stories and sent them like beautiful ducklings out into the world, accumulating rejection after rejection from the likes of Asimov's, Clarkesworld, and this very magazine I'm reading today. Getting a story accepted by and published in Fantasy & Science Fiction has been one of my life's goals ever since 1999, when I got a personalized rejection letter from then-editor Gordon Van Gelder for a meandering and not especially interesting novella about a contract architect building a house in the Late Cretaceous. "The time for this sort of thing is past, alas," he wrote, and my teenage ego clung to that "alas." I'd leap to publish this if dinosaur stories still sold magazines like in '93 is how I chose to read that "alas."
Over the intervening years, that imaginary bandaid for a fragile ego has evolved into a genuine appreciation for F&SF as a publication. Its two "Very Best of" anthologies (1, 2) are perhaps my favorite SF short fiction collections; the tales I like best from various yearly anthologies often turn out to be sourced from F&SF. The aesthetic of its fiction—small moments, delicate beauty, character-based storytelling, often a quiet note of melancholy—is what I aspire to in my own work. Getting so many stories rejected by F&SF in such a short period of time these last few months, while not all that surprising, has been a disappointment. I had been so certain that my stories had become worthy of the magazine I loved.
But I hadn't exactly read an issue of the magazine, had I? Anthologies, best-ofs, collections, sure—but no current issues, nothing cover-to-cover fresh off the newsstand. I'm hoping to change that now—and just maybe get a better sense of the storytelling currently sought by F&SF's current editor. It's been quite some time since I read any short SF whatsoever, so reading more stories can only help my craft, regardless.
"To the Beautiful Shining Twilight" by Carrie Vaughn. All in all, I liked this story. The opening hook compacts a wealth of setting and character detail into a brief couple of paragraphs and immediately sets the mood and feel of the entire piece. Once past that opening, however, I felt that the remainder of the story—while charming—was more workmanlike than innovative. The tale of Abby and her former bandmates receiving a visit from a Knight of Faerie, thirty years after they came to the aid of the Queen of Faerie with their music, could have been a product of the 1980s urban fantasy boom; it could easily have been a direct sequel to War for the Oaks. Airen the fae knight was a cardboard standee of an equally dated genre cliche. The theme of "what happens after the adventure" is a rather more modern preoccupation, as exemplified by Among Others and Every Heart a Doorway, but had you told me this story had been published in 1988, I wouldn't have guessed otherwise. I'm a fan of 1980s faerie fantasy, so the lack of originality didn't diminish my enjoyment, but I was a little surprised to find it here.
"The Province of Saints" by Robert Reed. This one, by contrast, seems straight out of 1998. In the near future, a new prescription drug floods the human mind with empathy—which here is framed as the human animal's best tool to manipulate others. A shocking mass death unfolds on the estate of a family of wealthy rural sociopaths. The ensuing mystery investigation Makes a Statement and Makes You Think about the human condition. I think I would have been blown away by this story around the time that I received that personal rejection letter from Gordon Van Gelder. But now, having seen more of the world, I'm far from convinced of the central conceit that empathy is just another way for humans to be selfish; without buying into that idea, the rest of the story falls apart. I'm not a fan of mysteries and murders, so that works against the story as well, at least for me. Robert Reed is an excellent craftsman of short stories, but that's almost a drawback for this particular tale—it feels, well, crafted. The artifice shows.
"Joe Diablo's Farewell" by Andy Duncan. I'm not sure how I feel about this piece, a historical slice-of-life set in 1920s Manhattan served with a garnish of ghost story. The prose quality was only average, and while I appreciated (in principle) the scene where men drawn from the various under-privileged ethnic and racial groups of interwar New York City, dressed like movie Indians for a Broadway premiere, ate chickpeas and talked about how their cultures used chickpeas, it didn't really say anything new. Overall the story felt incomplete, or perhaps pressed and shaped together from scraps of several stories (or fragments of a larger one).
"The City of Lost Desire" by Phyllis Eisenstein. I've loved the stories of Alaric the minstrel since I first encountered him like a sweet, sensitive flower while slogging through the grim mire of Lin Carter's Year's Best Fantasy. In that review I wrote, "This story showed me I've long held an unconscious desire to see high fantasy written for the aesthetic standards of F&SF." Further, reading those Lin Carter compilations, awful as they were, helped cultivate a taste for the style, mood, and rhythms of 1970s-style fantasy serials. This story ably satisfied on both counts. It's comforting to slip into a lived-in setting like Alaric's world, full of references to other adventures that may or may not have made it to print, none of which are required to understand the story at hand but make everything feel larger than one mere novella. It packs in all the rewards of an extensive epic fantasy series with none of the time investment. I enjoyed this entry quite a lot, though I will say that none of the characters aside from Alaric felt developed in any way, and the story itself went on maybe a smidgeon too long.
"The Right Number of Cats" by Jenn Reese. A tame cosmic horror microfic about learning to accept grief. Pretty good.
"Survey" by Adam-Troy Castro. My best guess about this one is that it's a third-rate retread of Ursula K. Le Guin's classic "Those Who Walk Away from Omelas," leaning hard into the shock value but offering little new to say regarding each individual's complicity in the horrors of capitalism. If the moral of the story was not "We're all complicit in the horrors of capitalism," then I'm even more lost. Did not care for this one.
"Blue as Blood" by Leah Cypress. This novelette is my favorite story in the issue so far, but it's hard to put into words why. It's an excellent example of science fiction as an avenue to explore social ideas, to examine prejudice and in-vs.-outgroup behavior from a fictional but relatable angle. "Inscrutable insectoid aliens inspire human prejudice" isn't exactly a new idea, but I loved how the social conflict was between a human girl (who absorbed the aliens' revulsion toward the color blue) and every human around her, parent and peer, which both grounded the story and provided it an extra dimension beyond the stale old trope. An engaging and effective tale.
"The Washer from the Ford" by Sean McMullen. "I should have said something sensitive and caring, but just then I was feeling like the only person on Earth who had the right to be a victim." There's just something so privileged white male about this story, and that sentence encapsulates it quite well. The narrator-hero does high-level IT support and has been cursed to be ignored by everyone around him, so despite his achievements and his PhD, he never gets the success and recognition he deserves: "...you have great talent and achieve a lot but get nowhere." The curse was inflicted upon him at the behest of a "mousy tart" he ignored in his college stud days. In the end, he wins out over the fey being who wants to take back his gift of second sight—fifteen years of involuntary celibacy have given him the fortitude to resist her sexual temptations. I liked this Melbourne-set tale of murders and supernatural bargains and counterbargains just fine—it was competently constructed, and I'm always a sucker for fey urban fantasy—but oh my lord, you couldn't write a story more tailored for the self-pitying middle-aged middle-class privileged white male demographic if you tried. There's so much to unpack here.
Being a fantasy story set in Australia, "Washer" presents a problem related but perpendicular to the one raised by Patricia Wrightson's The Ice Is Coming. Rather than appropriating local Aboriginal folklore, McMullen populates his Melbourne with creatures of European legend, erasing local beliefs altogether.
"Tactical Infantry Bot 37 Dreams of Trochees" by Marie Vibbert. A brutal yet beautiful rumination on how profitability stimulates permanent states of warfare. "War robot learns poetry and refuses to fight again" sounds like some 1960s concept-based sci-fi, but this story is effective, even though it's far from new.
"Fifteen Minutes from Now" by Erin Cashier. Akin to "Survey," this is another all-verbal piece about bloodshed and torture and techno-beaurocrats being cavalier with human lives, this time from a time-travel angle. A bit of a yawn, especially with another story so structurally and thematically similar earlier in this same issue.
"The Fall from Griffin's Peak" by Pip Coen. An amusing, unexpectedly moving, thoroughly enjoyable romp with an archetypal rogue who gets in over her head. Spoilers: I want to recycle the "glue the rogue to the chair" bit for a future D&D campaign. I think it might be tied with "Blue as Blood" as my favorite piece in this issue.
And that's it! While I know that not every story can be a winner, I was somewhat flabbergasted to read so many that just didn't do it for me. Apparently my mental picture of F&SF as the best match for my personal style was mistaken. Or maybe this was just an off issue. Either way, I have stacks of back issues I plan to read in the months and years to come.
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