2023 read #89: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1990.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1990 issue (79:2)

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.

2023 read #88: Whereas by Layli Long Soldier.

Whereas by Layli Long Soldier

106 pages

Published 2017

Read from August 17 to August 18

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

The first half of this collection explores how language is shaped for propaganda as well as for truth. The violence of colonialism and its empty depravities, the fragmentation of self and social bonds, the scattered bones it leaves behind, all latticed and woven into fragmentary imagery and misleading occlusions. Words are tools of empire, carelessly wielded so long as the results are the same. The American empire breaches treaties with impunity. Words, however, are also possessions of the dispossessed. 

Balancing words to figure an understanding of landscape and language, Long Soldier pulls us through dizzying heights of diction, the vertigo of overlapping sounds and meaning, gaps left behind by genocide and the deliberate gutting of many cultures on behalf of the American empire. In the gaps are words too large to emerge from one throat. Grief too large to encompass condenses into loss.

“A poem about writing, bo-ring,” begins one section of “Vaporitive,” then concludes, “What am I doing here, writing. What am I doing here righting the page at funerals.” The next section muses, “I notice the carcass and her bark: both absent. / So I learn to write around it, the meat, in wide circles to be heard.”

The second half is a response to the cynical delivery and language of the 2009 Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans. To call the resolution performative would imply that anyone behind it cared enough to perform. Long Soldier’s rebuttal is astonishing, inexorable and nearly breathless, a document of a lifetime — many lifetimes — of systematic disempowerment, marginalization, partitioning. Generations of genocide and dehumanization by the colonial hordes, caught and illuminated in the language of the Resolution and in the interactions Long Soldier relates, with strangers, with family, with self, with separation. “(2) Resolutions” is as stunning a work of poetry I’ve ever encountered.

2023 read #87: Harpist in the Wind by Patricia A. McKillip.

Harpist in the Wind by Patricia A. McKillip

262 pages

Published 1979

Read from August 14 to August 17

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Closing out the trilogy that began with The Riddle-Master of Hed and Heir of Sea and Fire, Harpist has some of the usual problems I find in trilogy-caps.

At only 262 pages, you can’t call Harpist bloated, but nonetheless it’s about 25% longer than the preceding books. The page count is padded with — you guessed it! — even more journeys back and forth across the continent, as if the bulk of the first two books weren’t travelogue enough.

Loose ends get tidied up in unsatisfying ways; one character’s father, whose disappearance in Heir was used as a source of tension and emotional stakes, just strolls back into their home and says (essentially), “Yeah, I was just looking for information.” Thanks, dad.

McKillip’s previously gentle touch with the setting’s magic, full of hints and unstated implications, here turns into an outright hand-wave, as Prince Morgon’s powers just happen to do whatever the plot requires. (Suddenly he can command the dead now? He can teleport??) Morgon, as a character, has devolved from refreshingly inept bumpkin into just another brooding, godlike being; the story becomes less interesting in direct proportion to the extent of his powers. Raederle, meanwhile, gets pushed into the background, even as she joins Morgon for most of his travels.

Yet, despite all that, the beauty of McKillip’s prose carries this story, shoring up the weaknesses of its chosen one narrative and its dimensionless battles between undefined powers. She lingers in remote plains and in forested lakeshores, bejeweled caverns and rocky headlands, intimate firesides and the heights of the sky. Her descriptions don’t approach Tolkien’s level, but at times they’re poetic enough. Even more Tolkien-ish: how readily her male characters cry and hold one another and speak of their love. All good things.

Ultimately, to modern readers, the Riddle-Master trilogy feels stiff and dated, bound to the archaic notion that the land’s power rightfully belongs to some blonde dude. McKillip’s potential as a storyteller struggles against this, and against other expectations of the nascent fantasy genre. There’s nothing in this story that benefited from the structure of a trilogy, for example. I’m pretty sure you could have condensed everything worth reading in these books into a single 400 page volume, and still had plenty of space for McKillip’s leisurely sense of mood and place, of landscape, all of which is integral to the story.

But hey! At least I finished reading a trilogy! That’s rare for me nowadays.

2023 read #86: Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, November 1990.

Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, November 1990 issue (14:11-12)

Edited by Gardner Dozois

320 pages

Published 1990

Read from August 11 to August 14

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

For a long time — like, a couple decades — I’ve been trying to pin down the memory of this story I once read. I don’t know how I encountered it, how old I was, or where I read it. All I remembered was that there was a story published around the same time as Jurassic Park that, thanks to a fluke confluence of the genetic engineering and dinomania fads then fashionable in science fiction, just happened to be about cloned dinosaurs running amok in a remote corner of the modern world. The only specific detail I recalled was the story’s setting: the Okefenokee Swamp. This was not enough information to track it down.

A couple weeks ago I was browsing a directory of cover images from Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine back issues when I happened upon the cover for this issue. Raptors leaping at a Chinook helicopter — that felt familiar.

Sure enough, when I managed to track down a copy via eBay, the cover story proved to be the very story I’d been hoping to find all these years. And here it is:

“Trembling Earth” by Allen Steele. After all this time, I wasn't sure what to expect. Even though it was written independently of Jurassic Park, “Earth” is a technothriller novella that would have been right at home in Crichton’s oeuvre. The prose has a similar newspaper-reporter glibness; the characters are similarly flat. Beefy Vermont senator Petrie R. Chambliss, whom the Washington Post dubbed “the reincarnation of Teddy Roosevelt,” drags his horny aide Denny Steinberg and smarmy Secret Service agent Joe Gerhardt along for a canoe trip through the Deinonychus Observation Project in the heart of the Okefenokee. Naturally, things go wrong thanks to right-wing terrorists (perhaps the one detail of the future that sci-fi writers of this era always got correct — cf. Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick). The story is fine; I can see why it made such an impression on me in my youth, though nowadays it seems vacuous. I feel uncomfortable with the lascivious attention our protagonist Denny shows toward Tiffany Nixon, the lone female character, and especially dislike the way it ties into the climactic reveal. The “deinonychi” are weirdly identical to Crichton’s raptors: “Smart, fast-moving, and viciously, voraciously hungry, they were born killers…” One of Steele’s cleverer touches is naming the three deinonychi Freddie, Jason, and Michael, making their slasher pedigree explicit. C-

So how's the rest of the issue? Well, it’s big — a lot of pages to get through. And story number two is not a promising sign.

“The Time Traveler” by Isaac Asimov. Ugh. Another Azazel story from Asimov, as if the other one I read weren’t awful enough. Out of the myriad avenues Asimov could select to explore his misogyny, here he picks the expedient of scarcely acknowledging women exist. The story is couched in the overly-wordy irony that “intellectual” white men on the internet considered the highest manifestation of humor back in the ’00s: “Quackbrain will spend his last few remaining years unable to avenge the snubs and spurnings he has received from villains in the past, villains who did not perceive, let alone appreciate, his great talents.” There isn’t much to this puff of self-indulgence — not even enough to truly loathe it. Maybe D-?

As a palate-cleanser, we have “On Gravity and Perpetual Motion,” an enjoyable poem from David Lunde.

“Box of Light” by John Griesemer. I’ll need another palate-cleanser after this one. It's a skillfully written but dreary drugs-and-exploitation piece, the kind that cis-het white dudes swan over, thinking they're being so gritty and artistic; the kind of writing that ultimately has nothing to say beyond “Look at me being gritty and artistic!” So: our narrator is an unnamed actress who's landed a big role, shooting a film in Florida. Keith, the director, is angry she won't sleep with him, and turns everyone on set against her. Her agent Alex (who is also her boyfriend) flies down to “protect” her. Because the author is white and this is the ’90s, Alex is Black and inevitably into voodoo; against her will, he has some blood magic done on her out in the swamps. The moral is people want power, and big men like big power. F+

There are two reasons I dislike it when privileged demographics write this sort of story. One, it's exploitative, wringing publication from someone else's trauma (and a white author might not notice, say, the Birth of a Nation stench around Alex's treatment of the actress).

The second reason is, it's boring. This literary edgelordism has nothing interesting to say. The big insight in this story amounts to “There are power imbalances in the system.” Imagine if a queer writer of the global majority were asked to write this same plot from scratch. That story would be informed by actual experience with those marginalizations. And most assuredly it wouldn't be content with “There are power imbalances in the system.” Anyway...

“Getting the Bugs Out” by Janet Kagan. This is a refreshingly domestic novelette about colonists on planet Mirabile who are galvanized into action when they discover that Earth mosquitos have been introduced into their world. I enjoyed the North Woods vibe of Mirabile and its introduced fauna; narrator Annie, a.k.a Mama Jason, premier genetic scientist of Loch Moose, feels almost like a leader of a Girl Scout troop, which is a delightful new angle for this kind of story. “Bugs” is a leisurely affair. Apparently third in a series with these characters, it feels like it’s meant to be an extended hangout with familiar faces, which probably would’ve worked better if I’d known the characters beforehand. I also would have appreciated more sensory detail of Mirabile. I enjoyed “Bugs” anyway — maybe thanks to the sheer contrast with the preceding story. B

Another slight, competent poem: “Suddenly” by Vivian Vande Velde.

“Liz and Diego” by Richard Paul Russo. Ah, the ’90s. When an otherwise perfectly serviceable tale of two older people scavenging alien technology from ruined villages in war-torn Latin America — Cocoon meets Predator, with a pinch of Stand by Me — could get derailed by a randomly incestuous backstory. It’s almost comical, the way we gotta meet that shock value quota. Could’ve been pretty adequate otherwise. Oh well. D+

“The Place of No Shadows” by Alexander Jablokov. Boston has become an interstellar melting pot. Students and sages from a hundred worlds have converged on Boston’s divinity schools and universities, seeking philosophy and debating perceptions of truth even as the sea rises and slowly claims the city. That’s a cool setting for a story. Unfortunately, this story didn’t do much for me. The prose was flat; the two main characters barely registered enough for me to keep them straight. The tenor of the piece feels anti-immigrant, its viewpoint along the lines of “You risk losing your own identity when multiculturalism runs amok.” (Weird note: a secondary character is a Cambodian immigrant who, in her youth, was a speedboat raider based in Hull; she feels like she stepped right out of D. Alexander Smith’s “Dying in Hull,” in the November 1988 IASF. Clearly, during this brief window of time, there was some cultural archetype — or maybe just an anxiety shared by dudes named Alexander — regarding Cambodian speedboat pirates based in Hull, Massachusetts.) The best part of this story is the line “[He] wondered why someone would come light years to become an Episcopalian.” D+

Another poem here, “Primate Primer” by Ace G. Pilkington, which goes all in on that “violence is our inborn ape heritage” shit that the 20th century instilled in so many cynical masculine imaginations. Didn’t like it. I did find it amusing that you can rearrange some letters from the author's name to spell ape go kiling. That was more interesting than the poem.

“Reunion” by Melanie Tem. Heavy and grief-burdened, this story wallows in the pain, disappointments, abuses, and losses endured by a group of women reuniting for a sleepover to observe turning 40. As a 40 year old myself, weighed down with plenty of grief and disappointment and past abuse, I found myself sympathetic to this story, but also a touch overwhelmed by it. That's a lot of pages to sustain a threnody. There were some iffy, dated bits, too. But overall, I appreciate what Tem was trying to do. Mostly. C

I’m beginning to think a double issue from 1990 is altogether too much IASF from 1990.

“The Utility Man” by Robert Reed. Reed, staple of pro sci-fi markets for the last three decades, made his IASF debut with this entry. It’s predictably solid. Cetians have been integrating themselves into every walk of human life in order to assess our species before giving us access to their technologies. Miller is a bookish man who had to take a factory job to pay the bills, and never felt he fit in with the blue collar world. He’s excited when a Cetian takes a job at the factory, hoping the alien will gravitate toward him as a kindred mind and accept him as a friend, someone who will appreciate him, unlike these “sweatshop goons.” As someone with terrible social skills, someone who never clicked anywhere, someone who was a superior dickhead through most of my twenties, this story cuts close to my (undiagnosed but plausibly) autistic heart. B

“Eternity, Baby” by Andrew Weiner. Words I always dread to read: “[T]he following story was inspired by the rock ’n’ roll industry…” The story itself is a tale of heterosexual obsession (uninteresting), Baby Boomer nostalgia (unrelatable), and the slow unraveling of things (all too relatable). The narration reads like a Cliff’s Notes summation of a much longer and more tedious manuscript. It ends as these things always do, in a spectral knife fight with the manifestation of the idealized girl you conjured up from your teenage puppy love. D-

“The Two Janets” by Terry Bisson. This is from the same period when Bisson published “Bears Discover Fire” (which I read and reviewed here), so I had high hopes for this one. It turns out to be an airy bit of strangeness about hometowns and our inability to lead two lives. Narrator Janet left Owensboro, Kentucky, for New York City to try to break into the publishing industry. But her mother, her hometown best friend (also named Janet), and her ex-fiancée Alan all call to tell her that literary luminaries like John Updike, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth are all busy moving to Owensboro. Charming. B

A brief poem, “Under the Ice Lies Montpelier” by Scott E. Green, sketches an image of the returning Ice Age — a trope far more prevalent in the 1970s, before we had a more definite idea of where climate change would take our planet. I found the poem mediocre aside from the lovely, steampunkish line “Wolves pace blimp shadows.”

“A Short, Sharp Shock” by Kim Stanley Robinson. Somehow, the only other thing I’ve ever read from Robinson was a middling humorous piece, “Zürich,” in the March 1990 F&SF. I’d intended to read his Mars trilogy for the last 25 years or so, but never got around to it. “Shock” is an extended immersion in a vast world that feels remarkably like the California coast. Our protagonist wakes in the midst of nearly drowning, and finds himself with two certainties: amnesia, and a woman he recognizes on some deep level. In the night, the woman falls into the clutches of the “spine kings,” and our man climbs the high ridge encircling the world in search of her. Gorgeous descriptions and entrancingly strange worldbuilding help elevate it from that unpromising start. (I think amnesia as a trope is wearily overplayed, best relegated to the 1950s where it belongs.) There’s a tinge of sword & sorcery to the land, a hint of Sir John Mandeville in its myriad peoples. Yet I could easily imagine “Shock” getting published in the 2010s. It’s vast and weird and lovely, and I think it’s the best thing in this issue — one of the better stories I’ve read from the 1990s, in fact. A-

And that’s it! Not my favorite issue — in fact, it’s something of a step down from the November 1988 IASF. I think that’s wholly due to my personal tastes, though. Many of the stories here were quite well written; they just did nothing for me. On the other hand, Robinson's novella was better than anything in that issue. 

2023 read #85: Heir of Sea and Fire by Patricia A. McKillip.

Heir of Sea and Fire by Patricia A. McKillip

215 pages

Published 1977

Read from August 9 to August 11

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Spoilers from the first two books of this series.

The second installment of McKillip’s Riddle Master trilogy, you’d expect this book to continue from the cliffhanger that closed The Riddle-Master of Hed. You know: when Prince Morgon of Hed had pursued the riddle of his destiny to the mountain of the High One; learned that the High One was secretly a wizard thought to have been banished for centuries; learned the harpist Deth had betrayed him; and used the Great Shout to bring down the gate of the High One’s redoubt. Instead, we skip entirely across the continent to the perspective of Raederle, who was technically betrothed to Morgon before the events of Riddle-Master unfolded. As with the opening of Riddle-Master, this makes for some dense scene-setting and rapid character introductions before we can properly get invested in the story.

The reason for this perspective shift quickly becomes apparent. No one has had news of Prince Morgon for a year — until, thanks to the mystical bond between rulers and their lands in this setting, Morgon’s brother Eliard realizes he’s the new Prince of Hed, and sends to the other rulers to inform them Morgon must be dead. Raederle suspects Morgon is alive, and that the High One — the realm’s previously unimpeachable and seemingly benign high ruler — might be up to nefarious deeds, or else deposed. Certainly everything magical seems to be out of whack: dead kings walk; trees whisper; wizards bound for centuries are suddenly free. Raederle links up with the warrior Lyra (last seen vowing to protect Morgon) to hijack a ship and follow Morgon’s trail northward. Morgon’s teenage sister Tristan also shows up for the adventure as a stowaway.

McKillip’s sensitive emotional work and careful prose are doing their best, but we’re still confined by the usual limitations of 1970s fantasy. The world hinges on the desires and deeds of a single all-powerful dude. Most of the book consists of journeys back and forth across the continent. McKillip’s lords-with-swords worldbuilding hasn’t changed; most of the realms our heroes visit feel like a single castle with a ruling family, and maybe three or four commoners who get ruled by them. Moving the perspective from the chosen one in search of his destiny to the woman in search of the chosen one is only an incremental improvement, but it’s an improvement nonetheless.

At times McKillip’s touch is too delicate, implying things so faintly that I don’t even catch what’s happening until the next chapter. This is practically baked into the setting — “riddles” are simply bits of plot-relevant information that none of the characters share freely with one other.

But it does seem that McKillip’s skill and confidence have grown in the interval since Riddle-Master. Or, at any rate, I seemed to like Heir a smidgeon better than the first book. Once again, however, we end with only further hints, questions, and unstated revelations. Guess I’ll have to finish the trilogy.

2023 read #84: The Smallest of Bones by Holly Lyn Walrath.

The Smallest of Bones by Holly Lyn Walrath

71 pages

Published 2021

Read August 9

Rating: 4 out of 5

The back cover calls this collection “A haunting ossuary of tiny poems,” which is such a precise phrase that I’m quoting it instead of trying to come up with my own description.

To pile onto the bone metaphor, these poems are delicate yet hard-edged — articulations of queer identity, the marrow of blasphemous sensuality, fragile remains of ghosts, the violent reshaping of bodies through trauma and power. Skulls are collected by bigoted scientists who cage with categories. Ribs shape into valleys. Hips are widened for childbearing, “Because even our bones are made for what men want.” Jaws are fractured in domestic violence. “Hiding our hearts is easy when we have so many bones,” Walrath informs us in “Sternum.”

But of course this collection is knotted together with ropes of embodiment, knit with nerves, flush with desire and the heat of skin. Most of all it is flooded with ghosts: ghosts of those lost, ghosts of lost selves, ghosts inflicted upon us by traumas to myriad to anatomize.

A running list of favorites:

“Cranium”

“there are few places left”

“where the demon’s tongue”

“no one else will remember”

“to love so much your body changes”

“there’s only this”

“Sacrum”

“there’s a town born underwater”

“when you leave me”

“you hold a light up to your teeth”

“have you ever crushed”

“Calcaneus”

“and sometimes I pray for you I can’t help it”

2023 read #83: Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, November 1988.

Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, November 1988 issue (12:11)

Edited by Gardner Dozois

192 pages

Published 1988

Read from August 7 to August 8

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I never intended for Fantasy & Science Fiction to be the sole magazine I read and reviewed here. You wouldn’t know that if you judged from the rest of this blog’s magazine tag — all eleven previous entries are issues of F&SF. But I’ve been collecting F&SF for the last eight-ish years, so F&SF is what I have. Even after those eleven issues, I have (at last count) seventy-six still unread on my shelves, ranging from January 1975 to January/February 2023.

Recently, though, I began amassing a much smaller collection: issues of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction that have dinosaurs on the cover. Thanks to the economics of procuring old magazines through eBay, inadvertently I’ve accumulated a number of unrelated IASF issues along with them. Right now I have thirteen old issues to read through, only two of which — this one included — feature dinosaurian cover stories. This one is the oldest as well as the first one I obtained, so why not read it first?

Before I tuck into the stories, I want to comment on the experience of reading a physical pulp magazine from the final golden age of physical pulp magazines. The cover proclaims this issue has 192 pages, but an astonishing number of those pages are advertisements. One-quarter of the pages in the first two stories are ads; while the ads taper off after that, it’s still quite a lot of pages altogether. I wouldn’t be surprised if IASF collected more money from ads in 1988 than subscriptions. (The minimum buy for a classified ad was $123.75, and that’s in 1988 currency. For comparison, an 18 issue subscription back then was $26.97, and a newsstand copy was $2.)

They must have collected plenty of money from every source, because back then IASF put out thirteen issues each year. Here in the desolate future, where the last surviving printed pulp mags squeeze out six issues a year at best, it’s mournful and disheartening to contemplate how far we’ve fallen, even though SFF short fiction is far and away better in 2023 than it was in 1988.

“The Last Thunder Horse West of the Mississippi” by Sharon N. Farber. Case in point: A by-the-numbers dinosaurs in the Old West piece, right down to giving the Cope and Marsh rivalry — better known as the Bone Wars — central billing. Fittingly, Farber employs an antique narration style, third-person omniscient; introduces characters by describing their appearance and apparel; and never digs into anyone’s emotional state or particular point of view. Cope and Marsh, alerted to the possibility of a living dinosaur way out West, alight from the same train and hire separate guides, both of whom have had pulp novels inspired by their exploits. Their collective antics are used for humorous effect. Parts of “Thunder Horse” are reasonably entertaining; parts of it haven’t aged so well. There’s zero emotional investment to be found, and vanishingly little dinosaur action. Still, the story is better than most of the Apex: World of Dinosaurs Anthology, so I have to give it some credit. C+

[Edit: About two weeks after I published this review, I discovered that I had already read and reviewed “The Last Thunder Horse” — it was in the Martin H. Greenberg Dinosaurs anthology. I read that about ten years ago, though, so the fact that I didn’t remember it isn’t a strike against me or against the story.]

A poem follows: “Living with Nuclear Weapons (after the Harvard symposium)” by Andrew Joron. Excellent concept paired with haunting imagery, but the word choice felt clunky at times. An okay effort.

“I Love Little P**sy” by Isaac Asimov. Ugh, there’s no way in hell I’m typing out that title in full. I hate that 1980s-style attempt to be “provocative.” The actual story is stuffed with Asimov’s tiresome misogyny, and it doesn’t stint on the laziest double-entendres this side of a 1950s novelty record. It’s one of the Azazel stories, a science-fantasy series Asimov wrote about a tiny demon who works wonders with nebulous soft “science.” (I wouldn’t be surprised if the character were some “hard scientist” satire of the “soft sciences.”) Our self-regarding, money-mooching narrator George goes on and on about the loathsome appearance of his spinster cousin Andromache, who had reached the simply unmarriageable age of 40, all while regaling us with his attempts to ingratiate his way into her inheritance. He enlists Azazel’s help to make Andromache’s cat love her, with predictable results. No redeeming qualities to this story whatsoever. F

A middling poem follows: “The One that Got Away” by Terry McGarry, a strained metaphor for yearning that mixes trout fishing and the Loch Ness Monster.

“Dying in Hull” by D. Alexander Smith. Perhaps the earliest modern-style climate dystopia I’ve ever read. (Compare and contrast with Elizabeth Hand’s “Echo,” which I read and reviewed here.) In the distant future of 2004, old-timer Ethel Cobb notes the rising waters in her own house, then navigates her old family whaler boat through the flooded streets of Hull, Massachusetts, scavenging from abandoned homes. Gangs of “waterkids” — all of them Cambodian immigrants — battle a nascent warlord amid the rising tides, but that’s merely backdrop to Ethel’s quiet contemplation of a failing world. This certainly wouldn’t win any prose awards from me, and the ’80s immigrant panic underpinning the waterkid gangs is especially distasteful. That said, this is an atmospheric piece that does what it sets out to do. A respectable B-

“Shaman” by John Shirley. Like “Hull,” this story emphasizes the precise date of its opening scene. (Perhaps that was a style favored by IASF?) In the even more distant future of 2011, a starter pack of 1980s urban dystopia tropes unfolds: gang wars, religious zealots, militarized police, blackouts, tunnel people, acid rain, posthumanism, hacking someone out of an impregnable prison, drugs, subatomic mysticism. Some dude called the Middle Man presents himself as the Wetware Medium, preaching to the populace about the Spirits of the Urban Wilderness. There’s a lot of babble about electromagnetic fields and “tribal” consciousness spilling over into consensus reality, all of which adds up to a cyberpunk American Gods prototype thirteen years before American Gods. It’s the most 1988 thing I’ve ever read. It so thoroughly encapsulates every trope and trend of its moment that I found myself entertained despite my disregard for cyberpunk dystopias (and for white people taking drugs to discover god). A surprising B

“A Different Drumstick” by Gregory Feeley. Genetic engineering resurrects gigantic dinosaurs!! Two years before Jurassic Park! Okay, so, technically the genetic engineering resurrects moas, but moas are giant birds and birds are dinosaurs. Sue me. The Combine clones extinct birds like the moa and the passenger pigeon in order to supply its insatiable fast food conglomerate. Our self-effacing everyman narrator Bill Crabtree works in the Combine’s West Virginia facility, and gets caught in the middle when a researcher from a rival conglomerate arrives for some hands-on industrial espionage. (Are we sure this isn’t Jurassic Park?) As straightforward as they come, but enjoyable. C+

“Brass” by Victor Milán. Deeply uninteresting military sci-fi, notable for using midcentury Cold War in the Kosmos tropes a mere three years before the Soviet collapse would relegate them to alternate history and slipstream bins. In a universe where Soviet-styled imperialists cynically “rescue” new worlds and new civilizations from the perils of capitalist imperialism, the pampered niece of a Chairman wants to tour a front-line planet. A series of interchangeable space-grunts are tasked with her escort. The niece, the only female character in the piece, doesn’t get a single line or even a name, and pretty much what you expect to happen closes out her part of the tale. All of it builds to a military humor punchline. D

“The Madonna of the Wolves” by Somtow Sucharitkul. My first time reading anything by Sucharitkul, whose name is prominent on IASF covers all through the ’80s. (Also I just learned he’s the same person as composer S. P. Somtow!) Overall, it’s a mixed bag: some of it is excellent, a lot of it is questionable, and much of it suffers from de rigueur 1980s transgressiveness. Governess Speranza Martinique is tasked with escorting a young boy across Europe; it is immediately apparent to any modern reader that Johnny is a werewolf. Much like The Devourers, this novella emphasizes the carnality of werewolves, dwelling on piss and erections, stink and virility. This being the ’80s, we have to deal with these effluvia from the little boy. Uncomfortable, to say the least. Yet somehow it manages (mostly) to be more central to the story, and (slightly) less skeevy-feeling, than the countless stories that made sure to mention young girls’ budding breasts. (The ’80s were a weird goddamn time.) Discomfort aside, this story was well-written and well-paced, flush with sensory detail. We mostly stick to Speranza’s POV, which gives us better emotional groundwork than any other story in this issue. Her character is a bit of an ’80s men-writing-women cliché — none must know that, beneath my chaste Victorian façade, I’m passionately horny! — but it could have been worse. I’m not sure how to rate this. Maybe B-?

And that’s it!

It was interesting to contrast this magazine to the issues of F&SF I’ve read from this time period. F&SF at its best tended, even at this date, toward interior perspectives, grounding its stories in the emotions of its characters. (Consider “Shore Leave Blacks” by Nancy Etchemendy in the March 1990 F&SF.) IASF, by contrast, focused on flashier effects, almost a cinematic perspective, at the expense of interiority; even the better stories trend a bit superficial.

Both valid approaches, both valid editorial tastes. You can judge which I prefer by how many copies of each I’ve collected over the years — 87 vs 13. Yet overall I think I liked this particular issue of IASF better than any F&SF I’ve read from this era.

I’m excited to read more recent issues of IASF, not least because I’ve been trying to get my writing into IASF since 1998. But nowadays they’re printed by a press that specializes in newsstand word-puzzle books, so they’re cheaply made, badly printed, and usually ugly, so I always hesitate to buy them. How far we’ve fallen in this late capitalist hellscape.

2023 read #82: Bitter by Akwaeke Emezi.

Bitter by Akwaeke Emezi

265 pages

Published 2022

Read from August 3 to August 7

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Prequel to Emezi’s excellent Pet, Bitter takes place a generation prior, during the revolution that established the utopian society of Lucille. Bitter is a teenage artist living in the mysterious Eucalyptus school, invited there like so many other queer and castoff young talents. She is making the most of the first stable, supportive environment of her life, and resents the revolutionary Assata movement, which battles cops and other forces of injustice in the streets outside Eucalyptus. Bitter has lost any hope that conditions in Lucille could ever get better. She also has the ability to bring some of her artistic creations to life — including angels, who come through the gate of her blood to promise vengeance and death to the billionaires and other monsters who torment Lucille. And of course Bitter isn’t the only student at Eucalyptus with the power to be a gate. 

As with the middle third of Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland, much of the story here centers on an abused and deeply traumatized teenager learning to find healing and safety in community — and learning to risk danger to protect and preserve that community. Having been an abused and deeply traumatized teenager myself, I could have used books like this at that age. Living in an abusive and deeply traumatizing society here in the death throes of capitalism, we could all use more books like this every day.

Wherever Bitter sounds a bit didactic, I remind myself that we need books that teach about community and communication skills and processing your own emotions in healthy ways. Characters communicating and demonstrating emotional intelligence only feels stiff because we’re used to books centering miscommunication and petty resentment as plot devices. The white supremacist capitalist system all around us has always emphasized individualism, always discouraged community, and one way it does this is through pop culture. Just like with Andi C. Buchanan’s Sanctuary, teaching new ways to think and behave and how to practice intentional community is much of the point of the book.

2023 read #81: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/August 2023.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/August 2023 issue (145:1-2)

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.