Edited by Sheree Renée Thomas
258 pages
Published 2023
Read from July 31 to August 2
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
As capitalism continues to drag us down in its ecocidal death throes, bits and pieces of what I always took for granted in day to day life are falling apart. Take magazines. Literary magazines have been dying a slow death for some time, of course. The last commercial hurrah of the SFF print mag, in particular, seemed to peak around 1999; it’s been on the decline ever since, even as the quality of stories has climbed to unprecedented levels. But add paper shortages and distribution snarls on top of an already disintegrating marketplace, and suddenly you’re four weeks into July and not a single bookstore around you knows where the July issue of F&SF might be.
I could have bought the digital edition, but I like to collect and admire the physical issues. (Internalized consumerism that I excuse by pointing out how pretty F&SF issues are.) I don’t have an e-reader that I’d be happy to stare at for hours, for that matter. Eventually I resorted to buying my copy off a sketchy reseller on eBay. All this to continue reading the new issues while they're current!
“Approved Methods of Love Divination in the First-Rate City of Dushagorod” by Kristina Ten. First-rate title for a first-rate science-fantasy yarn. Some time in Earth’s future, with civilization eking along on scavenged materials a century or so into the current collapse, the unfortunate Sofia Kuzmin gets shuffled between love divinators by her increasingly agitated parents, hoping (in cultural echoes of schoolyard rituals) to learn the initial of her soulmate’s name. It is a refreshingly original dystopia, written in an engagingly propagandistic style. The worldbuilding is doled out with wonderful surety, gradually pulling back a playful façade to reveal the grim authoritarian structure beneath. This is one of the rare SFF stories that manages to be funny and unnerving at the same time. Superlative start to this issue!
“Vanishing Point” by RJ Taylor. “Big stuff in space” was long a sci-fi staple; “gargantuan bug in space” is a niche subset that perhaps reached its apotheosis with Michael Swanwick’s “Mother Grasshopper” (which I read and reviewed here). This is a professionally done but perhaps slightly old-fashioned tale of planet-hopping biological prospectors, forced into hazardous jobs to purchase their next cycle of oxygen, who encounter a world where the entire alien fauna seems to consist of a single massive beetle-like being. It was interesting to see a modern take on the standard sci-fi giant anomaly tale. I enjoyed the implicit working-class critique of certain midcentury libertarians-in-space authors. And in the end this story’s ruminations on perspective proved satisfyingly trippy. Solid.
“The Very Nasty Aquarium” by Peter S. Beagle. Another beguiling contemporary fantasy from Beagle, who makes storytelling look effortless. There’s something Tove Jansson-esque about this secret world of aquarium figurines, in which Mrs. Lopsided introduces a cold-eyed wooden pirate (and all the trouble he brings) into a tranquil realm of crystal clear water, a romantic mermaid, and a treasure-guarding diver too shy to speak to her. I do wish the mermaid and the diver had played more of a role in the narrative, but we got two charming older ladies solving metaphysical mishaps together, which is just as good.
“The Pet of Olodumare” by Joshua Uchenna Omenga and Ogchenechovwe Donald Ekpeki. An excellent mythopoeic tale of what Ekpeki has termed Afropantheology. Or at least I assume it’s mythopoeic because of the phrasing in the story’s introduction; I don’t know even a fraction of what I would like to know of Orisha lore. Regardless of whether this story was mostly original or drawn more from preexisting lore, I enjoyed it.
“Serenity Prayer” by Faith Merino. Delicate gauze of sensory description wrapped around a razor blade of patriarchal horror. A stunning work that, despite its brief length, says much about how patriarchal power is reinforced and passed down through generations. Reminiscent of “The Eye in the Heart” by Tanith Lee (which I read and reviewed here).
“We Go on Faith Alone” by K. S. Walker. A brief but heartbreaking piece that inhabits the crossroads between mundane Midwestern life and the grief attendant on the Sixth Extinction, littered with the graves of birds. Sublime and assured, it had tears pooling in my eyes all the way through.
“Little Bird” by Jill McMillan. This story takes its time establishing its genre elements, instead hooking you with characterization, deft description, and a powerful sense of place, reeling in the unseasonable September heat of early Cold War Saskatchewan: “…she notices the gathering clouds in the sky, like wool gone to rot.” The unmoored emptiness of a remote farmstead, the banality of baking pies and farm town church suppers, sharpens the uncanny touches, turning them into flints of mystery beyond the glow of a kerosene lamp, rumors of atom bombs and shadows of doppelgängers in the moonless night. Magnificent.
“Gather Me a Treasure” by Jordan Chase-Young. Gorgeous science-fantasy piece melding the rhythms of classical myth — a chimerical creature in a candle-starred grotto, offerings brought in hope of a loved one’s resurrection — to the aesthetics of battered space marines in a cruel universe. Two flavors that go unexpectedly well together. Short but quite good.
“NPC (or Eight Haxploits to Maximize Your Endgame Farming: A Player’s Guide)” by DaVaun Sanders. Near-future consumer electronics stories are hit or miss with me — mostly miss, if we’re being honest. For every “Piggyback Girl” (by M. H. Ayinde, read and reviewed here), there are far too many like “Loyal Puppies” (by Rick Heller, read and reviewed here). This one is NOT the cheeky romp suggested by the title. It’s a grim and cynical tale that’s barely science fiction until the very end. The hideous toxic masculinity, exploitation, and violence-as-viral-entertainment of our current reality, where kids reach for their phones to record the aftermath of school shootings, get only a slight nudge from the AR game Ruckus. Raising a teenager in this late capitalist hellworld myself, I found “NPC” painful, an important and well-written read but not an enjoyable one. It broke my heart, not with the clean break of catharsis but with a jagged crunch of glass.
“A Half-Remembered World” by Aimee Ogden. Back at it again with another gigantic creature feature, this time a melancholy novella set in a world where human cities crowd on the backs of enormous migratory crabs. At over 50 pages, the story is perhaps a tad overlong. A time-jump in the middle makes it feel like two serial novelettes pressed together. But Ogden makes excellent use of the space to fashion a pervasive sense of place, full of anthropological detail of what life would be like for cultures built atop (and beneath) deity-sized crabs: the daily routines necessary to keep the city fed and clothed and watered, the resource scarcity that would complicate life when a crab nears its senescence. “World” is more than just worldbuilding; Ogden strikes an excellent balance between the shape of the setting and how the setting shapes the life, longings, and losses of protagonist Melu. As a writer, I want to learn to let my stories breathe like this, to follow them to their full conclusion. I’m glad I was able to spend so much time with Melu in this vast, haunting world.
“A Meal for Fredrick” by Nick Thomas. There’s nothing objectionable about this tale of a paper-craft dragon, the suburban family he protects, and the suburban father’s spiral into superstitious anxiety over its propitiation, but it does feel like a step down after the unbroken roll of absolute bangers that preceded it.
“The Day of the Sea” by Jennifer Hudak. Another all-time banger. Gorgeously written and spellbinding fable of rising seas, drowned crops, and the patient listening powers of a grandmother. A new folklore vital for our drowning world.
“What to Do When a Protagonist Visits Your Generic Village” by Dan Peacock. Pretty much exactly what you would expect from that title: a perfectly serviceable litany of heroic fantasy tropes strung together for amusing effect. Not much else to it beyond that, though.
Two poems follow here: “How to Pack for a Quest” by Mary Soon Lee and “Lost Lines from Ariel’s Song” by Gretchen Tessmer. “Quest” is a somewhat more lyrical (and certainly more compact) variation on the same theme as “Your Generic Village.” “Ariel’s Song” is a delightful spin through theatre and vengeance and Shakespearean iconography.
“Pedestals, Proclivities, and Perpetuities” by Celeste Rita Baker. This is the sort of satirical “mundane but make it surreal” not-quite-speculative piece that F&SF would publish from time to time. Rightly or wrongly, I associate this vibe most with the 1980s. It is densely packed with allusions to race, money, power, and privilege, strongly critical of the rich, white, moneyed, and powerful — all of which places it worlds above any similar satires penned by comfortable white men in prior decades. Still not my favorite type of story, though.
“A Time to Sing” by Eddie D. Moore. The shortest prose piece I’ve ever reviewed in F&SF — a whole paragraph! It really isn’t much, in all honesty. If you squint maybe you could read into it a parable of the little guy overthrowing the powerful, but that’s about it. But it flows nicely into the next story, which I always appreciate.
“The Giant’s Dream” by Beth Goder. This one, a story of an artist who resides inside a vast and cavernous giant and dreams his dreams with him when she sleeps, is a short, surreal thing of unearthly beauty. It pairs so well with the other giant creatures stories in this issue, particularly with “A Half-Remembered World.” Unexpectedly wonderful.
And that’s it for this issue! Overall, I can say, without any hesitation, that this is my favorite single issue of F&SF to date. I’ve read only eleven issues in full, but I enjoyed every single tale here, and the vast majority of them were astonishingly good. Let’s hope that this magazine still has years and decades left in it, however precarious the present may seem.
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