Edited by Edward L. Ferman
162 pages
Published 1982
Read from October 10 to October 12
Rating: 1 out of 5
Over the years I’ve collected an unruly amount of F&SF issues, and I don’t have a plan for how I want to read them all.
At one point I thought I might alternate between my oldest unread and my newest unread, reading forward and backward until I closed the gap, but that would take years of sticking to a plan — a plan that would be thrown out of whack every time I collected an issue from a time I’d already covered. Then I thought I might read an issue at a time from random decades, picking whatever looked most appealing from the six decades my collection covers: one from the 1960s here, then one from the 2000s, and so forth. I might do that at some point.
None of that really matters. For now, I’m picking issues more or less at random. Here’s one from a calendar month that has personal significance to me. It isn’t the oldest in my collection, but it’ll be the oldest issue I’ve read to date. I’ve read some amazing fantasy from this era, but I don’t have high hopes! (Too many eighties men on the TOC.)
“Condemned, A Kiss, and Sleep” by Wayne Wightman. I haven’t had much luck with the Wayne Wightman stories I’ve encountered. This one — his very first in F&SF — does not offer encouragement. It begins with our narrator, Rodan Samsara, inflicting his sci-fi trainwreck of a name upon us, then describing how sexy the Oracle of Delphi is, even though their relationship is just business. The story is a tedious piece about a pleasure planet with an inevitable dark side, rattled out in a pulpy man’s-man voice. There are fist fights and “handweapons.” For some reason, there are space hillbillies named Earl and Cleetus. The pleasure planet’s illusions provide the tale with passing interest here and there, but it doesn't last, and the story is about twice as long as it needs to be. I’ll be generous and say D
“Promises” by Lewis Shiner. Barely a blip of a story, in the midcentury Body Snatchers vein. Already old-fashioned even in 1982. A shrug. C-
“The Man Who Ate Himself” by Rudy Rucker. Another throwback piece that feels like it should have been printed no later than 1967. A pair of immature geniuses have been hired by a dying billionaire to blast him into space and keep him there, away from any planet or star, for the duration of the universe — but time is circular, wouldn’t you know, and everything comes back to where it started from. I think it’s supposed to be funny? It’s hard to tell, because it isn’t funny. Not much else here to redeem the piece besides its contempt for billionaires, which bumps its grade up just a little. F+
“The Corsican Box” by Mike Conner. God, I abhor the cis-het male perspective, especially in anything written before 2010 (and most things written after 2010). Even when the POV isn’t being outright lecherous, it always feels slimy. For instance, maybe it’ll emphasize how the Female is being weird, grumpy, withdrawn, etc., and how quickly our hero gives up on making sense of the Female. Your whole world doesn’t revolve around my happiness? Must be female troubles. This time around, Perri’s troubles are divorce, threats of a custody battle, and a jealous ex-husband who doesn’t appreciate that our hero Russ is sleeping with her. And our hero Russ sympathizes with him: “I could understand how Perri frustrated him.” God, what a shit-stain. Aside from that, this is a rote “antiques dealer finds a cursed box” number; it’s sluggishly paced, much too long, and the reveal, when it finally comes, isn’t that interesting. (It’s a vendetta curse from those uncivilized Corsicans! It makes Russ successful in business but also hot-headed and violent!) The climactic fist-fight at an amusement park is unintentionally absurd. F
“Coming Back” by Damien Broderick. This one was a struggle to read, a mix of gross and boring, and it wasn’t worth the effort. We open with typical Horny Man musings about our hero’s coworker, then immediately move on to a gruff senator threatening the funding of the technobabble factory where our hero works. (The senator bridges the conceptual gap by sexually harassing said coworker.) They’ve invented a limited form of time-reversal, our protagonist gets caught in it and time comes unglued, blah blah blah. Our hero uses his time loop situation to attempt to sexually assault his coworker. Then another time loop brings her back to him, this time impressed by his masculine competence. Absolute garbage. F
“What Did the Deazies Do?” by Richard Cowper. After that unparalleled string of dogshit stories, I’m shocked — actually shocked! — to find a competently written, atmospheric, and not overtly horrible contemporary fantasy piece. Young Jim, relocated to rural East Anglia before the Blitz, meets local wise-woman Miss Sarah Deazie, who shows him strange physics-defying clockworks made by her ancestor. The clockworks offer passage between here and “the other side.” Later, during the war, an American major learns of Miss Deazie, and sniffs after the devices she owns. His ancestors — like hers — came from “the other side,” and he tries to press a claim to the clockworks. Maybe it’s the shock of finding an actually good story here, but I’ll give this a full B
“The Day the Martels Got the Cable” by Pat Cadigan. I’ve been looking forward to this one ever since I looked at the TOC. Cyberpunk stalwart Cadigan penning a speculative story about cable TV? Talk about a forgotten retrofuture! It begins with the most benign glimpse of heterosexuality we’ve seen in this issue: Lydia and David are a young professional couple, and even though Lydia does all the organizational labor, David is game to have her call him in sick to work so he can wait for the cable guy. “Hell, he didn’t even feel funny about her making more money than he did.” (The fact that this would still be considered progressive four decades later is depressing.) It ends with a “the feminists are taking over!” gag that, I assume, was fully tongue-in-cheek. Maybe B-?
“The Way Down the Hill” by Tim Powers. A clan of immortals who periodically adopt new bodies, new sexes, new genders. Sounds like it could be cool, queer, gender-expansive stuff, right? Alas, this author adopts an attitude of gender-determinism: “It always upset me to consider how thoroughly even the keenest-edged minds are at the mercy of hormones and such biological baggage,” narrator Saul fumes, after discovering his bygone bearded drinking companion Marcus is now a woman, “Doubtless in a snit.” This story had been mildly intriguing up to that point, but it can fuck right off. The rest of the story involves Saul making difficult choices to “save” a fetus he fathered, as if that would fucking matter to an immortal body-hopping parasite. Maybe this features enough storytelling competence to merit an F+
Well, this issue was a fiasco! Even though I hadn’t expected much, I had hoped for a better showing than that. I still think the August 1990 issue is worse, but that’s only because few things could top the audacious shittiness of that issue.
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