Edited by Edward L. Ferman
162 pages
Published 1979
Read from December 10 to December 11
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
I have about 95 unread issues of F&SF, ranging from 1968 to 2022. I also have about 40 unread issues of Asimov’s Science Fiction, most of them from the early 1990s and the early 2000s. Plus, we all have access to a plethora of free-to-read SFF magazines online. Out of this embarrassment of options, why choose this particular issue? Mostly just because. I liked the cover art, and Richard Cowper stories are usually a good time. That’s all.
“Out There Where the Big Ships Go” by Richard Cowper. That title stirred images of vast industrial starships, big interstellar freight haulers in the cold dark, planets and stars as fragile bubbles lost in the incomprehensible distance. And while it’s nothing at all like that, the backstory that gets doled out still has some potential: Pete Henderson was the commander of The Icarus, the last starship Earth sent into space. Two time-dilated centuries elapsed on Earth while Pete was out in his voyage. He returned to a broken and demoralized world that has given up on hope, a world primed to obsess about the game Kalire, which Henderson brought back from the stars — the “Game of Games,” mastery of which is a prerequisite for the galactic federation. Unfortunately, disregarding all that, this longish novelette turns out to be a crisply written but mundane coming-of-age tale set at a resort town in Latin America. Our POV is 12 year old boy Roger, who wiles away his hours at the resort while his mom socializes, plays in the Kalire tournament, and goes to the salon. Roger attracts an odd amount of interest from actress Anne Henderson, and Pete, her obviously much older husband. The result feels undercooked, disjointed, unsure whether it wants to be a spin-off of Star Trek or of Fantasy Island, with a soupçon of the musical Chess for good measure. C-
“A Sending of Serpents” by L. Sprague de Camp. Ineffectual “humorous” affair about a bank officer dealing with a rash of elderly customers withdrawing their savings to pay a cult leader, who promises reincarnation and contact with the stars. This being de Camp, he can’t resist throwing in an extended racist bit for the laughs. The story’s only redeeming feature is how it skewers Scientology. F
“The Whisper of Banshees” by Nicholas Yermakov. This is a pretty rote tale of wearable holographic “Auras,” remarkable only for how early such a cyberpunkish concept appeared. The point of view, however — an advertising VP hoping to spin a new marketing angle — is about as far from punk as you can get. D
“Love-Starved” by Charles L. Grant. Another equally privileged tale, this time with some well-to-do dude getting bored at his business and revving his convertible out into the countryside, where he falls in lust with a mixed-race woman (though Grant phrases it rather more predatorily than that). Turns out she’s a succubus! Which you really don’t want a dude from the ’70s writing about. You get both sides of the straight man coin here: dull and icky. F
“The Word Sweep” by George Zebrowski. An unusually creative and interesting setup: Sometime in the 1930s, words began to materialize as tangible objects, and could not be destroyed without creating toxic gases. Words are now rationed, carted off to the overflowing dump every morning; each neighborhood is patrolled to ensure no one buries the streets in word residue. I could imagine something along these lines getting written in the late 1990s. It’s still very much a ’70s piece despite that, but hey, points for effort! B-
“Standoff” by Raylyn Moore. Back to ’70s banality with this apocalyptic number, which seems to be trying out a stylistic flourish: refusing all proper nouns, dubbing our characters “the first man” and “the second man,” orienting our geography with terms like “the western city,” refusing to specify what’s leveling cities. The result is more muddle than flourish. It ends with a joke about… let me see… food packaging being difficult to open? Okay then. D-
“Playback” by Larry Tritten. A actor named Holt dies and winds up in Hell, where he learns that the sexual revolution has made the afterlife pretty hip, or at least more laidback on matters of sex. The demon who processes him stresses that any sex act between consenting adults is fine — but alas, this is the ’70s, so our hero is gonna have some trouble with the “consent” part. Spoilers: Holt is given a second chance, and ends up in Hell anyway. D-
“‘You’re Welcome,’ Said the Robot, and Turned to Watch the Snowflakes” by Alan Ryan. I love a good, wordy title, but this one almost sounds like it’s trying too hard for what turns out to be a standard Asimovian robot story. Our man Benny has worked at International Robots for fifteen years as a robot tutor, wired up to robot brains to train them on social interaction and feeling. Benny is grumpy and resentful because he’s fed up with his cushy, well-paying, secure job that he’s retiring from at the ripe old age of 38. (Weird how one generation’s white male angst sounds like an utterly unattainable dream forty-four years later.) Well, to be fair to this story, Benny is fed up because he’s realized International Robots recruits tutors for one skill: having no personality of their own. That’s a hard pill for a mediocre white guy to swallow. D
“The Angel of Death” by Michael Shea. Right at the doorstep of the ’80s, we’re treated to that most exhaustingly ’80s of tropes: the gleefully manic psycho killer! Engelmann is today’s standard issue psycho killer, calling random citizens to leave “tips” in doggerel rhyme before slaughtering “bitches” for the crime of having sex. But the city streets also play host to a shapeshifting alien sent to mingle with and investigate humanity. And what better way to investigate humanity than by smooth-talking an Earth babe into backseat sex? You’ll never guess what happens when Engelmann and the alien cross paths! F
And that’s it for yet another mediocre old issue! As was so often the case in these times, the cover was the best part of the issue.
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