Edited by Edward L. Ferman
162 pages
Published 1989
Read from September 29 to September 30
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
I've been collecting issues of Fantasy & Science Fiction for years. Not that long ago, I used to collect other magazines too: Asimov's, an occasional Analog, a 1990s fantasy magazine called Adventures in Sword & Sorcery, random fanzines from the 1970s. But life has put forth many upheavals in the last few years (to say the least). Now I'm down to one shelf of F&SF, which ranges from this issue to the current one.
I haven't read any of these issues yet, which is a situation I've wanted to fix for as many years as I've been collecting them. The last time I read a full issue of F&SF was back in February 2019, which we can all agree was a long ass time ago. Some recent issues have stories written by people I know personally, and it's been my #1 dream market since 1999 or so, so it's all the more embarrassing that I haven't gotten around to them. Perhaps I'll read one of those issues next.
September 1989 is my oldest issue, but otherwise it doesn't seem to have any distinguishing characteristics. None of the stories are considered classics, as far as I know; David Brin is the only name I recognize on the TOC. It is noteworthy that every single one of these stories seems to have been written by a dude. Even in 1989, that had to have seemed a bit fishy.
"Steel Dogs" by Ray Aldridge. The cover story, "Dogs" has 1989 written all over it. In a star-faring far future, a theme park modeled after fae and fantasy tales was built around a central AI brain on a pleasure planet, its sumptuous castle and forest populated with android trolls, elves, huntsmen, and sporting dogs. The androids were "filled" with the revenant consciousnesses of criminals, the hunting dogs with canine revenants; even the dungeon rats are robotic, animated by the ghosts of dead rats. Seven hundred years have passed; the pleasure planet has fallen out of fashion, and for centuries the revenant murderers and pirates have acted out their roles without guests to entertain. A growing population of marooned human survivors lives on the planet's scattered islands. Our tale begins as Aandred, the revenant consciousness of a galactic pirate uploaded into the body of a grinning metal Huntsman, bounds out with his hounds to capture a trespasser and bring her back to Droam, the AI at the heart of the castle. The story has potential; it is structured efficiently, securing the reader's interest, smoothly doling out each and every character and plot device as needed. There are iffy moments, like when Aandred takes a long moment to take stock of his captive Sundee while she's naked and unconscious, but overall it isn't as dubious to modern eyes as it could've been. A solid effort, though not a forgotten classic.
"How Hamster Loved the Actroid with Garbo's Eyes" by Chet Williamson. It's fascinating to see early sci-fi speculations around what would become modern-day technological norms. This is a loose hacker-fi retelling of Galatea and Pygmalion rooted in a technology that we would recognize today as deep fake CGI. It isn't a good sci-fi retelling; the narrative voice is sweaty and casual in a too-forced way, reminding me altogether too much of the standard voice used in old cishet Usenet erotica. The R-slur is dropped casually at one point. As far as the story itself goes, I find it funny that the futuristic "Synthecin" is produced by a solitary genius "hacking" (i.e., programming) rather than by a dedicated and overworked team of animators. The public at large goes gaga over new John Wayne and Greta Garbo films for no reason other than the plot needs them to (and because the author was, presumably, a fan of the classics). Both white male main characters are effortlessly brilliant and rich because that's the kind of story this is. Overall, I give it a shrug.
So, uh, for this next one, prepare yourself for some heavy content warnings. Real life SA, SA of children, exploitation, racism. It's rough.
"Where Do We Go When We Sleep?" by Roger Robert Lovin. My ick-sense immediately tingled with this one, possibly because the very first line begins "The cocoa-colored young man..." So I googled this guy and... fucking yikes. A Christian pastor associated with the Discordian movement, this fucker was a sexual predator who especially went after girls. He was arrested for this in 1979, but his friend circle managed to bribe his way out of any real repercussions. He fled to Belize in order to continue his sexual predations on children in a colonized land where he would be untouchable. And it was from there that he wrote and sent in this story, which happens to be about a white man coming to solve a metaphysical mystery in a colonized land. Lovin may or may not have faked his death in 1991. I learned all this on an increasingly horrified google dive before I read any farther into this story. I do not owe any sexual predator the time it takes to actually read their shit. I gave it a shot anyway, and gave up within a few pages as the ick factor and casual racism (complete with phonetically rendered dialogue straight out of Mark Twain) piled on. Fuck this guy and fuck this story.
"Uneasy Street" by Marc Laidlaw. After the last two tales, I'm not in the most optimistic frame of mind for this one. And it didn't do anything to change my mind. It's grim and grimy near-future street drug stuff, rote and uninteresting, and badly written at that. (The main character helpfully doles out exposition: "Easy? That new drug, you mean?") Except for the first story, this issue has been dire so far.
"Somewhere Dreamers Wake" by Wayne Wightman. This feels like a 1960s High Concept Sci-Fi piece slathered with a veneer of aren't-I-so-clever 1980s irony, and I mean neither descriptor in a complimentary way. Faceless technocrats sketch out the parameters of religion and race in committee before sending down pod people (all "defective" personality types from the universe's penal system) to populate a synthetic biome on an experimental planet. And suddenly a young man named Wayne comes to consciousness in his high school in the year 1964 and wouldn't you know it, it was Earth all along! Even the editorial intro to this one describes it as a "basic theme in SF," and that's putting it generously. This stuff would have been dusty even in the heyday of The Twilight Zone.
"The Third Effect" by Edward F. Shaver. A tale of white-collar mediocrity crossing paths with the mathematically ineffable underpinnings of the cosmos. Investment analyst David (whose sex life is fantastic, thank you for asking!) notices that the seventh elevator at his firm's office tower never comes for him. He tallies the probabilities of this and finds they're a trillion to one. But other people see only six elevators, so David must confront the reality of the seventh elevator -- and the trillion-to-one "miracle" he mathematically believes to be awaiting him, for good or ill. When the seventh elevator finally arrives, he takes it -- and [randomly rolls some dice] becomes a vampire! Oops. A modestly entertaining story, nothing especially memorable, not enough to redeem the last four.
"Privacy" by David Brin. A testosterone-soaked "teen gangs mouthing slang and seeking outlets for violence in a tech dystopia" story, pretty standard stuff. This one is improved by the somewhat prescient wrinkle that the old folks in this society are hooked on spying, recording, and reporting any teen mischief in their vicinity, forming a distributed network surveillance state. Still, all in all I can't relate to all this masculist bullshit about how young men intrinsically need violence and honor and boy, weren't things so much better when having a boyfriend was a girl's only source of social status and security? Blech. Well-written but not my kind of thing.
And that's that. I finally read another entry in my magazine collection. And just like the January/February 2019 issue, this one is getting donated somewhere. I've read plenty of excellent F&SF content from the Ferman era, and I've read plenty of excellent sci-fi and fantasy from the late '80s, so I have no idea why this issue was so abhorrent. Absolutely not worth keeping.
