Edited by Edward L. Ferman
162 pages
Published 1989
Read from October 28 to October 29
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
Much like the December 1982 issue, I’ve chosen to read this one because it marks a date of personal importance. I’ve read an unusual number issues from around this time: the regrettable September 1989, the slightly worse December 1989, the slightly more promising March 1990, and the worst issue I’ve ever read, August 1990. My expectations for this issue are correspondingly low.
“Icicle Music” by Michael Bishop. Within a couple years of this tale, Bishop wrote my tweenage self's favorite short story: “Herding with the Hadrosaurs,” in The Ultimate Dinosaur. It didn’t age that well, perhaps, but in comparison to most of the other stories in that book, it was a masterpiece. So I thought maybe this one wouldn’t be so bad. “Icicle Music” is adequate enough. The first half is an atmospheric, 1957-set tale of Christmas Eve and a deadbeat dad who comes down the chimney. I think it’s meant to be grimly funny. If we’d left it there, with (spoilers!) 12 year old Danny butchering a reindeer named Blitzen while his mother burns his dad’s body in the dump, I think it would have been a more cohesive story. Instead, we flash forward to 1987 and find that Danny, now dying, is telling the yarn of how his father’s ghost sought revenge every tenth Christmas since that night. (Bishop plays coy about it, but I think the implication is that Danny is gay and he’s dying of AIDS.) The second half isn’t bad, but I think the switch from third-person limited to conversational tell-all makes the whole thing feel imbalanced, like a framing device with only the back half of the frame. C+
Content warning for fictional SA in the next story.
“The Extra Ancestor” by Donald Barr. This one begins with a one-two punch. First, the editorial introduction tells us author Barr was appointed by Reagan to a national council on education (shudder). Next, the story opens with a professor casually blackmailing his female grad student so he can impregnate her via in vitro and perform genetics experiments by way of reproductive coercion. Yeah, fuck this story. As if that weren’t bad enough, it’s about splicing dog genes into human embryos to make, uh… telepaths. Instead, young Eddy inherits nothing more than an excellent sense of smell, and the rest of the story is — I kid you not — an extended rumination on how girls are stinky. (Speaking of dog-human hybridization, Olaf Stapledon did it better in 1944, and somehow made it less skeevy in a book with romantic bestiality. At least that was consensual.) I literally expected nothing better from a Reagan appointee, but goddamn. F
“Divergence” by Jennifer Swift. There's nowhere to go but up after that last story, but I strained to find interest in this tale of Jewel, the daughter of a media-savvy Creationist, inadvertently discovering a new branch of bacterial evolution. It's ably written, and draws neat parallels between RNA transcription and theological interpretation. Plus it does that thing I like where the title refers to several things: lifeforms diverging over time; the bacterium diverging from the rest of known life; Jewel diverging from the faith of her father. But it’s overlong, and frankly I felt apathetic about the subject matter. It ends with that wishy-washy “maybe science and religion are just different ways of understanding what God made” bullshit. (Spoiler alert: feel-good liberal attempts to understand and coddle Christian extremists have done nothing but amplify Christofascism over these last few decades.) Maybe C+
“The Name of the Demon” by Patricia Anthony. Pretty standard ’80s horror number about a couple of drug-running Texas lowlifes double-crossing a demonologist (who, because it was the ’80s, was moonlighting in the coke business). Nothing special. I think a setup like that could have had potential, but instead the story just kind of ends. D+
“Tikina-Londi” by Peni R. Griffin. Texas-flavored fairy tale about a new mother struggling to keep her child inside her house and away from Death. Mostly enjoyable, aside from some stray ’80s shittiness (the mother calls the hired girl “you little slut” when the boy makes his way out of the house under her watch). C-
“On the Wings of Imagination, Fly” by Gary Wright. Stories of truck driving have been oddly frequent in the issues of F&SF I’ve read. There was Andrew Crowley’s “Night Haul” in the September / October 2023 issue; T. R. Napper’s “Highway Requiem” in the May / June 2023 issue; further back in time, there was Russell Griffin’s “The Road King” in the February 1986 issue. That may not seem like a lot, but this issue is the sixteenth I’ve reviewed for this blog, and this is the fourth story centered on trucking, which means a truck driver story has appeared in 25% of all F&SF issues I’ve read to date. (That’s not even counting Thomas A. Easton’s “Down on the Truck Farm” in the March 1990 issue, which ends with our troubled teen protagonist apprenticing to drive a genetically engineered truck-dog.) Our trucker today is a mediocre white guy who knows he’s special but no one gives him a break, damn ’em, so he hauls low-paying payloads and hopes to write a song that’ll make it big someday. Just wait ’til you learn what he thinks about his wife! He’ll tell ya, because I’m not repeating any of it here. This story feels numbingly long, even though it isn’t, and possesses no redeeming qualities. F
“Bad Luck” by Vance Aandahl. This is a western bauble, stuck in that awkward stage where westerns had become gritty and ugly and ironic, but hadn’t yet evolved beyond investing white ex-cavalrymen as the unquestioned heroes of the genre, and Mexican banditos still exclaimed “Ay chihuahua!” (In this instance, I’m pretty sure some element of humor is involved, at least in theory.) Like, for what it is, it’s fine? But I don’t like what it is. Maybe I’ll be overly generous and say D-
“A Can of Worms” by Ben Bova. In other hands, there could be a kernel of an interesting story here. Elverda Apacheta is an indigenous sculptor from the Andes who tells a tale about when she lived on an asteroid and carved the history of her people on its surface. However, because it’s the '80s, some rich white dude shows up in his spaceship, the Adam Smith, and our Quechua sculptor is immediately smitten with his "uniqueness," and inevitably falls in love with him. (I've never read Bova before, but this whole deal fits his vibe, you know?) Anyway, "Worms" is professionally written and all that, but can't overcome the triple threat of fetishization, white saviorism, and capitalism. Also, there's a recurring motif of fatphobia, because why not. D-
And that's it for another dip into the world of '80s sci-fi and fantasy. No real highlights, a bunch of shit best left forgotten, but maybe it's slightly better than other near-contemporary issues. Which is no great praise.
No comments:
Post a Comment