Edited by Edward L. Ferman
162 pages
Published 1990
Read from August 18 to August 20
Rating: 1 out of 5
Back at it again with another SFF magazine from the turn of the ’90s featuring dinosaurs on the cover. Previously, I read two issues of Asimov’s that fit this hyper-specific niche: November 1988 and November 1990. Not to be left out, F&SF boarded the ’90s dinomania train (literally!) with this issue. Sounds fun, right?
Well.
Content warning: discussions of racism, antisemitism, misogyny, and fictional genocide ahead.
“In the Upper Cretaceous with the Summerfire Brigade” by Ian Watson. Right out of the gate (sorry, that’ll be the last of the train puns), I have issues with this one. Our narrator is a failing writer who hasn’t informed his “whining,” “selfish” wife or his 16 year old kid about their precarious finances. He’s just about the most unappealing of narrators, yet this was the go-to “Everyman” of this era. He boards a train to London for a dicey meeting with his publisher; at the station he spends an inordinate amount of time checking out a 17 year old “brown-skinned girl” and trying to pinpoint her ethnic background. The train, of course, is a technological marvel: it zips through the Cretaceous as it speeds to London. The girl, of course, is a terrorist: part of a group hijacking the time-train to demand better treatment for Asian immigrants. The whole thing is distasteful on many levels, and also not especially well written. (Why would Anita, the teenage radical, be beguiled by Bernard, the washed-up, middle-aged, genteelly racist wanker who’s been making eyes at her and treating her with affable condescension?) There isn't even any dinosaur action, just some glimpses of scaly boys in the distance. It ends (spoilers?) with our narrator musing that resettling immigrants in the Miocene is an elegant, equitable solution that should work for everyone. (It’s still Britain, after all!) All in all, what a waste of a dynamite title. Imagine that title gracing a novella about a time traveling scout troop or a Campanian summer camp, or maybe a novel about firewatch volunteers in the Laramide foothills. Sigh... what could have been. F
I've shared this anecdote in other reviews, but it's particularly relevant here, so I'll tell it again: In 1999, I was a 16 year old sci-fi writer. I imagined myself a wunderkind, needing just a couple big breaks to become a bestselling novelist. I submitted a novella to F&SF that year, 25k words of Late Cretaceous time-tourism that earned me my very first positive personal rejection. Then-editor Gordon Van Gelder wrote, “The time for this sort of thing is past, alas.” That “alas” became a load-bearing girder of my self-worth; it told my teenage self that Van Gelder would have accepted my story if the dinosaur market hadn’t crashed since the early ’90s. And maybe he would have. Not to praise my teen writing (it was awful), but it was better than “Summerfire Brigade.” If I’d been 16 in 1989 instead of 1999, and writing at that same level, I bet I really could’ve been a sci-fi wunderkind.
In an odd coincidence, when I tried to rewrite that novella into a novel in the mid-2000s, I independently came up with the idea of time-trains. Just one more reason to be disappointed with “Summerfire Brigade.”
“Herself” by Katharine Newlin Burt. In an unexpected swerve, this is a reprint of a horror story first published in 1930. For a magazine that doesn’t consider unsolicited reprints, F&SF printed a fair share of them when they happened to feel like it. “Herself” is, for its time, a fairly explicit deconstruction of gender and social norms among the white and privileged. It follows our unnamed young heroine — chaste and “clean,” raised by a Mother who pretends that everything is pretty and that the socially accepted pretense built around “womanhood” is the prettiest of all — as well as Herself, an earthy, crude, bloody inversion of our heroine, well aware of the ugliness and cruelty of life. Herself has no illusions that women are ever protected the way society likes to pretend; Herself knows the sadism inherent in “virtuous,” authoritarian parenting, and relishes in it. Our heroine clings to the social script: “She knew at once that he was the right man because he matched with all the Pretty Things, with guardian angels and the Big Kind Man with Wings.” She’s scared of Herself but drawn to her in equal measure. The first couple pages are the story’s peak, a vertiginous masterpiece of modernism. But the rest of the story is still marvelously unnerving, pulling the polite gauze and secret skin away from the insidious, sickly horrors of “respectable” social norms. Inevitability, given its original publication date, certain aspects of “Herself” are dubious. But overall, I’m impressed. B
“The Three Wishes” by John Morressy. Much like Morressy’s “Conhoon and the Fairy Dancer” in the March 2000 F&SF, this is a middling humorous fantasy involving folkloric little people and boots that need mending. Clearly this was his idiom. This one does the whole “magical bureaucracy” bit that was popular at the time, nothing exciting, with a not-that-subtle allegory for the government’s treatment of veterans worked into it. C-
“We Were Butterflies” by Ray Aldridge. “[A] compelling and frightening extrapolation of the war against drugs,” promises the editorial introduction — I can imagine few sentences less appetizing in a mainstream publication in 1990. In the grim future of phosphate pits, death camps, and the Big Dry, an old man dying of lungrot somehow manages to tell our narrator long-winded tales about dope in bygone Denver. If you thought that was peak 1990, just wait until you read a sample: “I was sorta caught between being scared of the Battery Man, and wanting to stare at his girlfriend’s tits.” We hop back and forth between the dying man’s stories and our narrator — who had been chief aide to a tough-on-drugs politician, once upon a time. Our narrator, in turn, swings between 1990ish flashbacks and the Big Dry future. Said politician is acting-chief-executive for life, thanks to his dictatorial management of the “drug catastrophe”; the death camps are for drug offenders — which includes anyone who ever tried drugs, thanks to draconian Future Drug Test Technology. It’s grody Boomer bait, but what else would you expect? At least it’s honest about how the self-proclaimed “family values” fascists need a constant supply of scapegoats to maintain their power. D-
“His Spirit Wife” by Karen Haber. Another early ’90s bummer, jam-packed with internalized misogyny and weird racism. Newlywed blonde Sarah was “saved” from her stressful medical career by wealthy husband David. David’s long-term housekeeper Rosa — “small and brown” — attempts to trap poor blue-eyed Sarah’s soul with a “Gamberian Spirit Wife,” a “fetish doll” placed on the mantel, because… Rosa wants David for herself? I guess? Upper class cis-het white folks’ concerns are fucking weird. Irredeemable trash. F
While not exactly a story, a “Crossweird Puzzle” by Larry Tritton is listed as one in the table of contents. I’d gloss over it as a bit of frivolity, except some of the clues are… iffy as fuck. 21 down, for instance, is a shitty antisemitic “joke” about money. That’s a big yikes from me, buckaroos.
“In the Wheels” by Daryl Gregory. Long after nuclear winter and pandemic take out “Dead City,” country boys Zeke and Joey sneak into town to find a car they can race. It’s pretty standard stuff for the post-nuclear genre — polygamous bible cults, superstitions about “rads,” zombies — with a dollop of demons and stock-car racing thrown in. It was professionally put together, not blatantly racist, and only moderately horny (despite the polygamy). It isn’t anything spectacular, but it’s palatable, and that counts for plenty in this issue. B-
There’s, uh, been some questionable content in this issue so far. I mean, even more so than usual. Right? Oh, just you wait.
“Days of Miracles and Wonder” by Gregg Keizer. We wrap things up with a white Louisiana author who has something to say about Apartheid-era South Africa. How bad could it be? Who am I kidding — it’s fucking atrocious. There was a fashion during this time for privileged authors to Make a Point About Social Injustice by writing the most heinous, genocidal shit they could imagine about marginalized communities. (We white authors still do this to some extent, but it’s less fashionable now, or else I’m not reading books that have it.) So, massive trigger warnings here for fictional genocide, racism, and white saviorism. This story tries to Make You Think by depicting a future Afrikaner Free State that “turned this country into something God, and a white man, could be proud of” by firebombing millions of Bantu. Like, regardless of your intentions, are you sure this is making the statement you want it to make? Are you not simply dehumanizing the communities you “support” even further? It fucking ends with our protagonist Piet, now a ghost, being held and comforted by a Bantu ghost woman after he switches sides to the Pan-African ghost army and kills his genocidal cousin. Absolutely foul. I really need a grade below F
Well, shit. This was just about the most heinous issue of F&SF I’ve ever read. The most heinous issue of anything I've read, really. The two okay stories did nothing to ameliorate it. All this because it had dinosaurs on the cover.
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