Edited by Gardner Dozois
176 pages
Published 1992
Read from September 20 to September 21
Rating: 2 out of 5
Much like the November 1988 and November 1990 issues of IASFM, I sought this one on eBay solely because it has dinosaurs on the cover. I don’t hold high hopes for this month’s cover story, for… reasons. However, IASFM from this era — in my quite limited experience — seemed to feature at least one or two stories that make each issue worthwhile. Fingers crossed for more of those!
Best of all: there's no story from Isaac Asimov in this issue!
Tucked between letters to the editor and a full-page ad, I almost missed the poem that begins this issue: “From: A Child’s Garden of Grammar: Adverbs” by Tom Disch. It reads like a cheap imitation of Shel Silverstein. Kinda hokey but not, like, bad. Though I’m confused why it’s in a sci-fi magazine.
“Sugar’s Blues” by Allen Steele. When last we met Steele, he treated us to the mediocre cloned dinosaur technothriller “Trembling Earth” in the November 1990 IASFM. “Sugar’s Blues” is apparently the third and final tale in a series centered on Diamondback Jacks, a Merritt Island dive bar down the road from Kennedy Space Center. It’s the sort of gator country booze shack where “spacers” go to drink pitchers of Budweiser, play pool, and get into brawls in the distant future of 2023. Steele strains toward a pulp voice befitting his industrial roughnecks-in-space milieu, despite the fact that our narrator is a reporter. Our narrator intervenes in a bar fight, and gets rewarded with an explosive scoop about high-level coverups, the manufacture of memory-enhancing drugs, and general skullduggery in orbit. It’s a competently conveyed story but nothing I found interesting; it’s just manly men in a manly men’s world. The closest thing to a female character is the Vargas pinup painted tits-out on the fuselage of a privatized space shuttle. It’s the sort of sci-fi that Elon Musk’s fanboys read while they touch themselves at night, dreaming of libertarian space exploitation and boundless testosterone. C-
Another Tom Disch poem follows: “From: A Child’s Garden of Grammar: Quotation Marks.” This one ends with a punchline about kids these days and their Walkmens.
“Pickman’s Modem” by Lawrence Watt-Evans. “The title [for this tale] originated during a real-time chat on a computer network,” marvels the editorial introduction. The story begins: “I hadn’t seen Pickman on-line for some time; I thought he’d given up on the computer nets…. The nets will eat you alive if you let them.” Ah, 1992. As someone who first encountered the internet via an orange-on-black monochrome monitor in 1993, this humorous trifle about a Lovecraftian modem stirring a flame-war has a musty, nostalgic charm for me that outshines its other modest qualities. C
“Overlays” by Joel Richards. Another trip to the well of memory-enhancing drugs — clearly this was the sci-fi topic du jour in 1992. This is an atmospheric story set on the Danish island of Fanø, narrated by an aging British biologist who’s summered there for decades. Her first husband, love of her life, was downed in his Hurricane near Farø; she thinks he’s the reason she feels a connection to the cemetery and its monuments to the dead of war. This story nicely pairs the titular “overlays” of invasions and sea level changes that shaped Denmark with the “overlays” of genetic “past-life memory” putatively discovered by a visiting American neurophysiologist. (I always appreciate a title that means more than one thing.) The sci-fi element is a bit silly for the wind-swept mood of the piece; likely it would work better as contemporary fantasy, without all the set-dressings of neuropeptides and newly discovered receptors. Still, the story works well enough as it is. A respectable B
“Gate Crashing” by Jennifer Evans. Oh look, it's a near-future consumer electronics piece. (I almost always detest these.) In a world where interpersonal communication is mediated by customizable “gatekeeper” avatars, our point of view is some shitty dude named Jackson, who’s being a whiny brat because he has to talk to some gatekeepers in his quest to find some girl he saw (but never talked to) at last night's party. As Jackson pines over this hypothetical soulmate, he frets, “What if she turns out to be an absolute bitch[?]” He flips out and punches things when the girl's gatekeeper turns out to be a replica of herself, then somehow gets a date with her anyway. Tedious stuff. F
“Kingdoms in the Sky” by S.P. Somtow. A whole lot of grody tropes get wrapped up together in this one. Antonio, part-Incan son of a Chicago crime boss, gets taken down to Peru for a “business trip.” Unbeknownst to Antonio, his father made a deal with the gods to protect his coca fields, and Antonio himself is to be offered up as a mountaintop sacrifice. Antonio’s mute brother Matt has magical-autistic powers, à la Stephen King, and talks to Antonio in his dreams. It's an overlong story, and on top of everything else, it’s written in an annoying approximation of a young teen’s voice. F+
One last Tom Disch poem, “From: A Child’s Garden of Grammar: Not.” More of that same quasi-Silverstein vibe. Though it makes even less sense that this one is in Asimov’s.
“The Heaven Tree” by Jamil Nasir. This would be some solid ’90s sci-fi, immersive and atmospheric and melancholy, exploring a world where a sexually transmitted virus reverses your aging and turns you into an elfin waif with the mind of a child. Of course, this being the ’90s, we can’t have a good story without some heinous shit going on, and it isn’t hard to guess which direction this one goes. The story performs an uneasy balancing act between that requisite ’90s shock value and the much more interesting meditation on aging, fear, and death at its core. Maybe B-?
“The Virgin and the Dinosaur” by R. Garcia y Robertson. At last, here’s the reason I bought this issue. I don’t trust any story from Garcia y Robertson, who (in my admittedly limited experience) is one of the horniest SFF writers of his generation. He brings a certain Heinleinian smarm to his writing that I don’t enjoy, the vibe that he’s constantly writing one-handed. And with a title like that, I don’t expect good things. Sure enough, the story opens with our point-of-view character Jake watching a tall young redhead slink naked through the Cretaceous greenery. Glad we established our expectations for this one ahead of time, because at its heart, “Virgin” is a novella-length exploration of Jake’s quest to manipulate his uninterested coworker Peg into sex. I’m not a prude by any means, but hetero horniness is so predictable, you know? So rote and unoriginal, so eager to ignore boundaries. Oh, and Peg is still a “virgin,” according to the narrative, because she’s only ever been sexual with women before. Which — what the fuck? It’s a shame, because how often do you get an airship tour of the Late Cretaceous? This could have been a quality story in someone else’s hands — perhaps a 2020s queer author. Once again I have to shake my head at the bad luck that made dinosaur fiction’s peak coincide with the grody 1990s. Can we get a new dinosaur renaissance, pretty please? I’ll be munificent and give this one a D
And that’s it for this issue. No real surprises, just some disappointment that there weren’t more salvageable stories to counter that ’90s stink.
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