Edited by George H. Scithers
192 pages
Published 1979
Read February 1
Rating: 2 out of 5
Of all the modern sci-fi magazines still on newsstands, Asimov’s has always seemed the least ashamed to put dinosaurs on its covers. They featured a tyrannosaur as recently as the September 2012 issue, long after every other mainstream magazine had put dinos away in the box of ’90s embarrassment, alongside their pastel windbreakers and whimsigoth bedspreads. Like pastel windbreakers and whimsigoth bedspreads, dinosaur fiction never stopped being cool in my opinion, so I appreciate that in a publication.
This issue here, on the other end of the spectrum — released in the magazine’s third calendar year — was Asimov’s first dino cover. Super-intelligent space-faring theropods returning to Earth in dapper little spacesuits, in 1979?? You know I gotta read that. But first, we have a whole lot of dubious ’70s sci-fi to get through.
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“Mandalay” by John M. Ford. I was unexpectedly impressed with Ford’s “Green Is the Color,” which I read and reviewed in Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder. Likewise, I was initially skeptical of “Mandalay,” a military march through alternate timelines, but the worldbuilding, at any rate, proved an unexpected delight.
Alternities Corporation offered people the opportunity to adventure, fight, and fornicate across different realities, but then came the Fracture, severing their gates from “Homeline.” Charlie Brunner, once a security guard for Alternities, assumes leadership over the surviving men (because of course they’re almost all men); only Charlie Brunner has the Key that can open the sealed gates. He leads the survivors on a years-long march through the tube ring connecting the various physical gates, each gate a hundred kilometers from the last. Sometimes they collect fresh survivors, sometimes they lose men who decide to stay in a particular “alternity.” Sometimes men die. The setting is one part WestWorld, one part Greg Bear’s Eon, with just a touch of rail-shooter video game mechanics. (Each section of tube has convenient packs of food and medicine.) The survivors march in a mix of period costumes and futuristic gear. Ford’s prose is crisp, better than what you’d expect for 1979.
Now for the negatives: It’s inevitable at this point in time (or really, any era of sci-fi between the 1960s and the early 2000s) that the characters would include Nazi and Confederate sympathizers who came to vacation in timelines where their kind won. That shit doesn’t add anything to the story beyond “gritty realism.” None of the characters are deeper than the motley items they wear. And despite its bravura setup — with its promise of endless alternate histories contaminating one another in the Fracture, and the survivors visiting them in their mismatched costumes afterward to find home — we don’t get that much out of it. Just one Barsoom-esque encounter, and one almost-but-not-quite Colorado. Feels like squandered potential.
Still, between the concept, the prose, and a solid ending, I’d say that “Mandalay” earns an adequate C+
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“A Day in Mallworld” by Somtow Sucharitkul. S. P. Somtow’s first story in Asimov’s, and the beginning of his popular Mallworld series. Like any hip and edgy male sci-fi writer between the years of 1975 and 2000, Somtow has his adolescent narrator mention 1) her virginity and 2) her “budding little breasts” on the first page. Combine that with the splash page art depicting her all but naked, and you can imagine my reluctance to proceed.
Conceptually, the setting was brilliant: The alien Selespridar have locked down the solar system until humanity might prove itself worthy. Mallworld, an outer space shopping center sprawling across thirty kilometers of habitats, is the one place humans might run into visiting Selespridar, the one place a runaway teen from the asteroidal Bible Belt might conceivably get away. It’s a clever way to literalize teen wanderlust, the romance of the mall, the need to get out of this small town scaled up to humanity as a species.
The plot of “A Day” does not live up to its setting. Our narrator Zoe, naive runaway that she is, runs into a high-ranking Selespridar, Zhangif, who’s on a quest to discover the meaning of life. She shows him Earthly religion, but it doesn’t satisfy him, so he tries acid, which almost poisons him. Then (spoilers) she discovers that the aliens can’t read, so she gets a dictionary at a decrepit bookstore and reads him the definition of “life.” It’s very silly. At least they don’t fuck (though it’s a close call). D+
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A poem by Peter Payack, “The Mover,” is a humorous science-meets-religion piece about a mover who does both local furniture moves and galactic jobs. The central conceit is that Jesus (“The Prime Mover was his ‘Old Man’”) is recontextualized as an outer space trucker. Otherwise this one is forgettable.
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“Through Time & Space with Ferdinand Feghoot!!!!!” by Grendel Briarton. As you might have guessed, “Grendel Briarton” is a pseudonym. This flash fic is actually by Reginald Bretnor, who wrote two actively distasteful stories I’ve had the misfortune to read in F&SF. It’s an elaborate setup (involving the wandering Children of Israel and a time traveling robot named Yewtoo Artoo) for an awkward pun on ferrous oxide. Bleh. How would one even rate this? Maybe F+
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“Iron Man, Plastic Ships” by L. E. Modesitt, Jr. Not my cup of tea. Where “Mandalay” felt like a precursor to ’90s sci-fi, this military spacer reads like a throwback to the early ’60s. The prose is stiff and uninteresting. We have a no-nonsense space captain, also stiff and uninteresting, who refuses to sign off on some sketchy space tugs, and sets out to test them all personally. We get terms like flexiplast and chewball. The author seems to have a particular axe to grind with plastic. (Here in the era of universal microplastic contamination, I can’t say I disagree.) Maybe D-?
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A limerick by Stephanie K. Lang, “Rebuttal to $tar War$,” is squeezed in at the bottom of a page. It critiques Princess Leia’s lack of characterization, ending with “She triumphs by being a shrew.” Meh.
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“Degraded!” by Jean S. Moore. This tale of a 22nd century professor straining to teach Joyce’s Ulysses to a particular know-it-all manchild succeeded at infuriating me against the student, and also made me more intrigued to attempt Joyce than anything else has. So I suppose it works on those levels. The rest of it — a thinking-computer assigns a distributed network of humans to analyze one word apiece from Ulysses, a twenty-one-year global effort culminating in an easy-to-digest comic book — is almost charmingly 1970s, like something from Tom Baker’s era of Doctor Who. I’d probably appreciate it more if I’d read Ulysses at any point. Still, a solid enough C
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A couple limericks pad out the rest of this page: “Blasterfight at the P.U. Corral” by Barry B. Longyear, which is a snooty protest at the bad writing of the original Battlestar Galactica; and “Where a Star Is a Ship or When Is a Micron a Parsec? or When Is TV Going to Start Hiring Science Fiction Writers?” by Tol E. Rant (which is a pen name for, uh, Barry B. Longyear), which is also a snooty protest at the bad writing of the original Battlestar Galactica.
Clearly, there was a call for writers to submit limericks attacking TV and movie sci-fi for this issue. And Barry B. Longyear was personally affronted by Battlestar Galactica.
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“Homecoming” by Barry B. Longyear. Finally, the main attraction! Hundreds of ships full of intelligent dinosaurs have been waiting in suspended animation for 70 million years, but at last the time has come for them to return to Nitola, the homeworld. Unfortunately for everyone involved, Nitola is now Earth, the homeworld of humanity. The American Air Force selects Captain Baxter, a pilot with PR credentials, to head to space to meet with them. But the Russians want to send up their own man, and warn the Nitolans not to listen to Captain Baxter. Likewise, the dinosaurs have divided opinions on how to handle the humans.
The sections from the dinosaurs’ perspective are quite good. Maybe not as alien as they could be, but Longyear does a fair job of making them seem just alien enough. Plus, just look at these handsome fellows:
They’re never referred to as “dromaeosaurs” or “deinonychuses” or anything like that, but I think the Nitolans predate even Time Safari as the earliest appearance of “raptor” dinosaurs in fiction. At least in what I’ve read.
Unfortunately for us, most of “Homecoming” is told from the human perspective, specifically Baxter's. His sections have a banal military sci-fi vibe that doesn’t do it for me. Plus, Longyear somehow manages to squeeze in some weird racism in the brief time before Baxter leaves Earth. It wouldn’t be the 1970s without it.
In the end, I’d say “Homecoming” works in more ways than it doesn’t, and is more interesting than it is off-putting. It probably gets a C+
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Lastly, one more limerick to pad out a page: “How True,” by Henry Clark, which is a metacommentary on using limericks as fillers at the bottom of a page.
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And that’s it! All in all, it could have been much worse.
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