Edited by Gardner Dozois
144 pages
Published 2000
Read from November 3 to November 4
Rating: 2 out of 5
As with the March 2000 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction, I read a fragment of this issue when it was on newsstands at my local Barnes & Noble. I was 17 and had a handful of story rejections to my name. Some had been rough; at least one had been sorta encouraging. Of the stories, about 75% had been about dinosaurs. I wanted to regroup: read what was getting published, see what professional short fiction looked like, improve my craft. Basically, scope out the competition and take notes.
This issue just happened to have a dinosaur story in it, so that was the story I read. All these years later, that dino story is the reason I tracked down a copy of this issue to read in full today.
“The Royals of Hegn” by Ursula K. Le Guin. It’s funny that at 17 I bypassed a Le Guin story to get to a dino fic, but as a teen I was rarely allowed to read anything more recent than the Edwardian era; I don’t believe I even recognized her name at the time. I wouldn’t read any of her books until I picked up The Left Hand of Darkness around ’07. If “Hegn” had been my first exposure to Le Guin, it’s possible my teenage self would not have been impressed. It’s a droll, satirical affair set in an island kingdom where the population is so small, and so interrelated, that almost everyone is an aristocrat or king in some way. All of these royals are obsessed with the doings of the single family of inbred commoners. (Keep in mind, for context, Princess Diana’s televised funeral would have been less than two years before this was penned.) Even an indifferent Le Guin will be worthwhile, and I always appreciate a middle finger to the institutions of power, but this was not her best effort. Maybe C+
A poem follows: “The Latest Literary Device” by Timons Esaias. It worked well enough, though it housed a better poem in its heart, blunted by its ironic “device.”
“How Josiah Taylor Lost His Soul” by L. Timmel Duchamp. One of my pet peeves as a reader and writer of SFFH is when mainstream literary authors swoop in, write a book rooted in a vintage SFFH premise, and get lauded for their originality. Don’t get me wrong — I loved Never Let Me Go. But here it is in miniature, five full years before Kazuo Ishiguro released it to acclaim, awards nominations, and movie deals. Josiah Taylor is a hardline Christian CEO who’s making the leap to a senate seat. He has at his disposal a small army of clones for whenever he needs, or wants, to replace a body part. Conveniently for Taylor’s theology, clones are considered “soulless” second-order creations. Our viewpoint is a clone designated Ezekiel, who strains to overcome his loyalty modifications to aid a plot to murder and replace Josiah. Okay, so it isn’t the same story as Never Let Me Go. This is less about the fragility and fleeting beauties of a life lived as spare parts for someone else, and more about dosed hormones, bloodlust, and inconvenient erections. No one would ever say it’s on the same stratum as Never Let Me Go. But it’s a solid enough take on an already thoroughly explored trope. C
A poem: “Technoghosts” by Ruth Berman. Can you imagine a more turn-of-the-millennium title? It’s a comedic little number about vengeful ghosts updating how they get in touch with you.
CW for the next story for sexualization of a child.
“Downriver” by James Sarafin. After a confrontation between Alaska Natives and the federal government leaves Anchorage (and 40% of Alaska’s population) destroyed, Ed, a hunting lodge proprietor, keeps his clients captive as menial labor, helping him survive out in the bush while martial law and secession movements cut them off from the outside world. What had been a mildly interesting premise collapses in a wave of ’80s-style grodiness when a derelict boat drifts by their camp, its only survivor an adolescent girl. You can guess how the rest goes. This story is competently written, but has no reason to exist other than a wish to be edgy. Maybe, generously, F+
“The Shunned Trailer” by Esther M. Friesner. Humorous and horny Lovecraft pastiche, written in a tongue-in-cheek antique style. Our hero, a fratty Harvard bro on spring break, wants to get drunk and get laid. After some hitchhiking misadventures, he winds up sheltering from a storm in a trailer park full of mutant hillbillies who worship the Elder Gods. It wasn’t terrible, but “Trailer” quickly wore out all two of its jokes and overstayed its welcome. It’s weird, though, how there have been two stories in this issue about trashy inbred freaks. C-
“Tyrannous and Strong” by O’Neil De Noux. Here at age 40, with well over ten years of deliberately wide-ranging reading behind me, it’s quaint to remember how impressionable I was in my teens. Every short story I read back then (and there were so few of them) inspired three or four copycat ideas. I only read this story once, standing there in the Barnes & Noble, but in my notebooks from that time, you’ll find several references: “set this on a ‘Tyrannous & Strong’ type world” and so forth. I also went through a brief fad for widowed main characters. Even our narrator MacIntyre’s talking household computer found its way into one of my earliest Timeworld stories. I’m aware now that De Noux’s world of Octavion — an alien planet with magenta trees, turquoise waters, remote livestock stations, and creatures that happen to be identical to dinosaurs — is a midcentury sci-fi trope, entertaining enough but not nearly as original as my teen self believed. I did enjoy the world De Noux built, though it’s really just dinos, a ranch, hot sun, and some trees of unusual color. The story is slight, little more than a would-be Hemingway’s “a man’s gotta kill the beast to protect what’s his” affair. The titular tyrannosaur is, in all essentials, the one from Jurassic Park. If this were about anything other than dinosaurs, “Tyrannous” would be a big shrug, little more than an extended action sequence. But it’s hard to find decent dino fiction, and of all the stories I’ve tracked down in magazines from this era, this one has aged the most gracefully. So I’ll give it a little boost in the ratings, as a treat. B-
“The Forest Between the Worlds” by G. David Nordley. Early on in this blog, I used to make more of a distinction between hard and soft science fiction, but I let that lapse as I read more sci-fi that couldn’t be cleanly sorted into either category. However, when a story comes with fuckin’ diagrams, I’ll go ahead and file it under hard sci-fi. I mean, look at this:
Ridiculous. Like, we get it, you Did The Math for your story. Goddamn.
Still, the setting is the most interesting aspect of this sprawling novella. Haze and Shadow are a double world, tidally locked, bridged by the titular column of forest, grappling them together in an unlikely but stable configuration. One is reminded of Pluto and Charon in Catherynne M. Valente’s Radiance. It’s a compelling science fictional concept from an era of compelling space opera worlds. It’s richly detailed and is a worthy addition to the Big Stuff in Space tradition.
The characters and outline of the story are less compelling. Sharada is a human anthropologist who’s been getting a bit too personal with the spiderlike Forest People — “going native,” in the colonial phrase. She fucks them because of course she postulates that they communicate information through fluid exchange. And because Haze and Shadow are hothouse worlds, she and all the other human scientists are naked most of the time. Akil, our viewpoint character, is sent up the Forest with fellow researcher Marianne to find Sharada and bring her back to base for a disciplinary hearing. But the spidery Forest People might be more interested in the humans than it seems.
And, of course, because it’s a dude writing sci-fi, I have to CW again for sexualization of a child.
Turns out Sharada has brought the 12 year old daughter of one of the higher-ups into the Forest — the Forest with the fuck-to-communicate aliens. Fucking ugh. I didn’t need to read that. There’s also some genes-are-destiny bullshit about how, before humans genetically modified themselves, women were just naturally more emotional and worse at math. Marianne’s sapphic nature is pointedly called “not an ancient human tradition,” and to get comfort from Akil, she switches to straight like it’s nothing.
Fucking ugh. None of that bullshit was necessary in the space forest novella, my dude. None of it. Violating a 12 year old character added precisely nothing to the story beyond shock value. “Women are so biologically bad at math we had to genetically modify our species” is spectacularly absurd. Pretending lesbianism is some newfangled kink is on that same level.
This story is a wildly mixed bag. Worldbuilding is a solid A. Story is an adequate C or C+. Extraneous “gender is genes” bullshit and child assault? Big old F. Eff eff eff. Maybe I’ll average it out to something around D-
Or hell, I’ll just go with F
Well, that was a wild ride. Good lord. At least the dino story was okay??
I was planning on a paragraph or two about my teenage writing journey and what I wish had gone differently, but I don't want my personal baggage associated with this issue anymore.
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