Edited by C. C. Finlay
258 pages
Published 2016
Read from May 12 to May 14
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
After I read the March 2000 issue of F&SF (an issue I leafed through but didn’t buy from the bookstore as a teen), I simply had to find out when I actually bought my first current F&SF from the newsstand.
I’ve gotten many used copies from the relevant time frame from places like Half Price Books, which confused the issue, no pun intended. However, I believe this one is it. I distinctly remember how the combination of pulpy barbarian-diving-at-rock-creature cover art and the inclusion of a Ted Chiang story sold me on it. I never got around to reading this issue until now, though, despite carting it with me through five moves, the rise of American fascism, an ongoing pandemic, and a few life-altering personal crises.
Ah, to reminisce about the early days of 2016, before everything — and I mean everything — went wrong…
“More Heat than Light” by Charlotte Ashley. The editorial description of this novelette was an instant yes from me: “[A] new adventure set in a parallel world where the French Revolution comes to Quebec and revolutionaries take up arms against the English in the monster-ridden wilderness.” The tale itself proved to be a solid pseudo-historical military fantasy, with fewer monsters and less wilderness than could be desired, but it’s a narrative that explores an interesting intersection of prejudice and power: the ideal of the universal people’s republic against the reality of entrenched social hierarchies of gender, class, and race, and how much struggle it takes to dismantle those hierarchies. B
“Last of the Sharkspeakers” by Brian Trent. This novelette reads like a late 1980s piece, throwing you in at the deep end of its elaborate far-future worldbuilding. It's full of hollowed asteroid cities, scrappy tribal mutants, scheduled rainstorms, flying cargo sharks, and silly future lingo like truespeech and brainsmall. The Tower People use painwands to punish and assert control over our low-grav adapted “beltbugs,” then recruit them for their war against the icari, a branch of humanity who dare to claim Earth even though they have adapted and evolved from all their generations in deep space. Yet, despite living so deep in the future that humans have diverged into different adaptations for space life, the Tower People have names like Carol and Frank and watch news broadcasts and soap operas. “Sharkspeakers” isn't bad per se — in fact I appreciated the way it played with the religious refusal to adapt and evolve, the insular sense of superiority it confers, and the disgust and dehumanization that such people direct at the rest of us out here just living our lives — but the story is a bit of a mess. The climax and coda are especially awkward, shoehorning us into the banal military sci-fi of Trent’s broader “War Hero” universe. The whole story likely could have done more with half the length. I’ll be generous: C-
“The Nostalgia Calculator” by Rich Larson. That title is pure 2010s sci-fi, in a good way. This story, however, is pure 2010s sci-fi, in a derogatory sense. It has a smarmy, privileged, “nothing really matters because our POV is an extremely white nepo baby” vibe. It feels like the linear descendant of turn-of-the-millennium netizen cyberpunk, but gone full sleazy and cynical with age, full of tech-bro asides like the hand-job app developed by a former Ivy League classmate (“Wendee [the liberal scold girlfriend currently on a tech cleanse in Tibet] would never have to know”). The underlying conceit, that a big tech firm tracks and manipulates cycles of nostalgia, which have gone from decades in length to months, reminds me of kids-on-my-lawn memes that circulated on Facebook around this time. The story’s optimism that simply leaking the truth about corporate skullduggery would change anything is a heartbreaking relic of a naive, pre-Panama Papers, pre-Trump Cult world. I’m not the right audience for this one, and that’s okay. I did find some faint amusement in it here and there. D+
“Coyote Song” by Pat MacEwen. Yet another long-form story, a novella this time. This issue seems particularly loaded with long-forms: a novella, five novelettes, and only five short stories. Three of the first four stories are long-form. It makes the issue feel unbalanced. This one (for about half its length) is a contemporary crime scene procedural, which excites exactly zero interest. I suppose it delivers on what it sets out to do; the first half felt exactly like watching an investigation procedural show, one with a writing room both more talented and more skeptical of cops than usual, with hour long episodes and an emphasis on dark magic cases. But because I don’t care about any of that (aside from maybe the dark magic), that first half was a slog for me. Even when the story shifted gears halfway through, and became more definitively magical, I was too soured by everything that had gone before. C-
“The Great Silence” by Allora & Calzadilla and Ted Chiang. This has to be one of the more esoteric ways I’ve seen a story wind up in F&SF: This is technically a reprint of a story that was displayed on a screen as part of a video art installation by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla. It’s a spare yet haunting piece on the colonial ecocide of Earth, drawing a parallel between humanity’s search for intelligent life at Arecibo with industrial humanity’s disregard for the other intelligent species able to communicate with us right here on Earth. It’s just a wisp of a story, more essay than story really, yet it conveys a delicate heartbreak that shatters to the core. A
“Caribou: Documentary Fragments” by Joseph Tomaras. I think sci-fi, like all genres of writing, should feel free to draw from the worst of human behavior; we need to make uncomfortable art, even painful art, art that screams against our cultural complacency. I can’t tell if “Caribou” is good art, though. It is unpleasant near-future sci-fi drawn from the cultural rot and horrors of our military occupations in Central and Southwest Asia. The story itself is framed as a transcript of a documentary on bioengineered memory modification and the always-evil machinations of DARPA. It’s a sterile (sometimes literally redacted) presentation of sexual torture and obscene crimes as a matter of national policy. On the sci-fi end of things, it draws a metaphor between the normalization of fascist values during recent decades and the (literal) viral propagation of trauma, which is conceptually apt. I recognize that some ambition went into telling this story in this way, and it’s necessary to examine and contextualize the horrors of our colonialism, but something about the disconnect between subject and format here was especially alienating (likely on purpose). I did, however, appreciate the line, “Once Americans knew, for the most part, they didn’t care.” If that doesn’t describe the 21st century so far… C
It’s a good reminder to my personal nostalgia that all was not hunky-dory in the first half of 2016. The roots of modern American fascism run deep.
“Steamboat Gothic” by Albert E. Cowdrey. This novelette could have been an enjoyable yarn about a locked room mystery, a devilish intruder, and a Victorian Gothic mansion. The writing is zippy and assured. However, its central character is an openly corrupt Louisiana sheriff, who has his palms greased via financial interests in every business venture in the parish, and at one point “rents” the labor of a prisoner from a work-release program. In other words, a tame and sanitized version of what actually happens in Louisiana. Nothing wrong with having a detestable protagonist, of course, but a protagonist who's a cop? Now that’s a bridge too far. Plus it all ends in a Boomer-y punchline about rap music. C-
“Ash” by Susan Palwick. A sweetly domestic fabulist piece examining memories, mementos, and the temptations of not letting go. It's directly inspired by the contemporaneous tiny house and minimalism movements, which of course I could critique as bourgeois affectations, ways to colonize even poverty. But this story is too earnest for all that, too tender. B
“The Secret Mirror of Moriyama House” by Yukimi Ogawa. Another gorgeously sweet and sad domestic fantasy, this one about an old woman who knits patch jobs to close the wounds of the dead and make them more presentable, and the quietly grieving young woman who becomes her assistant. B
“The Long Fall Up” by William Ledbetter. The first of two novelettes that close out this issue. This one is a hard sci-fi “realistic spaceships” piece centered on an operative launched from Jīnshān Station (at Lagrange point five) to intercept, and terminate, Veronica Perez, a woman who illegally impregnated herself in space with the intent of gestating a child fully in zero-G. Given the author’s ethnicity, and the modern-day geopolitics of the American/Chinese economic rivalry, this makes me uncomfortable — cultural Sinophobia permeates just about everything in how this one was set up. Like, did the “kill the pregnant woman in space while we lie to the world about our intentions in order to protect our space monopoly” corporate baddies have to be Chinese, William? Plenty of American businessmen would be likelier candidates for that role. Maybe you went in this direction because of your career in the American aerospace sector, William. All that, plus my general discomfort with a cis-man writing a story centered on a woman’s reproductive autonomy, and the man who rides in to save the day, made me unhappy with this one. It’s a solid story, but laden with baggage. D+
“The Stone War” by Ted Kosmatka. The final story, and the cover story at last! It's pure ’70s sword and sorcery, though better written (and more meaningful) than almost anything in that category. The story is vast, spanning from the Paleolithic to the age of kings; the vibes are immaculate, trippy, mythical, soaked with blood and quiet pathos. Under its swords and sinews, “The Stone War” offers a critique of the destructive cycles of violent performances of masculinity and their use as a tool of patriarchal power; society flourishes in their absence. B
And that’s it! It only took seven years, but I’ve finally read the very first F&SF I bought new from the newsstand. Only 53 more issues before I’ve read every F&SF in my collection!
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