Edited by George H. Scithers
182 pages
Read from February 6 to February 8
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
Following a couple years behind the October 1979 issue, we have our second Asimov’s with a prehistoric animal (…kinda) on the cover. The interior splash art for “The Time-Warp Trauma” is more promising, with a feisty Archaeopteryx menacing a schlub in a checked suit. I love me some paravian line art. It was enough to sell me on this issue, even if the tenor of the drawing suggests a humorous story to follow. Let’s give it a go!
—
“The Time-Warp Trauma” by J.O. Jeppson. A social club for psychoanalysts — “Pshrinks Anonymous” — meets in a hotel’s sub-basement dining room. The Oldest Member is perplexed by a case: Mr. Y, a retiree who is nervous about living in New York City. When Mr. Y finally makes a breakthrough, he decides to walk to his appointment through Central Park, and accidentally falls asleep in a time-warp, waking up to an Archaeopteryx in a tree. On his way to the next appointment a week later, Mr. Y experiences a La Brea tar pit scene, with an elephant and sabertooth cats. The story is mildly fun, an inoffensively humorous postmodern take on the time-warp trope, using the sci-fi concept to examine anxieties of old age and retirement. (Apparently people from previous generations who were financially and socially privileged to be able to retire felt anxiety about it? Cannot relate.) “Trauma” is far more interested in light satire of psychoanalytics than it is in its time-warp; I spent more time looking at the splash art than the story spent in its putative prehistory. Still, I will begrudgingly admit that it qualifies as dinosaur fiction. Barely. A solid enough C+
“The Gongs of Ganymede” by Martin Gardner. Damn, early Asimov’s was a weird place. I assumed this was a mediocre story about a space cult; turns out it’s a two page setup for a brain teaser math problem. Moving along.
“The Santa Clone Interview” by Valdis Augstkalns. Another humorous piece, this one constructed as an exposé interview with the Big Guy at the North Pole, who’s doing damage control after his mall Santas are revealed to be clones. It’s the kind of joke that feels like a hoary old chestnut even when you hear it for the first time. It’s fine, I guess? Except the author couldn’t resist making a crack about Medicare. Oh, the eighties. I’ll be generous and say C-
“The Jarabon” by Lee Killough. This is a moderately fun hyperspace heist caper. Kele owes everything to Sperrow, the man who recognized her thieving skills and took her off the streets. But when he sends her to steal a jarabon, an exquisitely carved jewel from an extinct civilization, and the only way to pinch it is to “ride the timewind” — staying awake during hyperspace travel, risking madness — Kele wonders if it’s worth it any longer. C+
A poem follows: “IMPROBABLE BESTIARY: The Thing in the Jar” by F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre. From browsing the tables of contents of other Asimov’s from this time, I know it’s part of a series. For a rhyming poem about a carnival “freak show” (not a promising premise), it’s pretty good. The lines have a nice singalong rhythm.
“Wrong Number” by F.M. Busby. Entry in a humorous serial about a dude with the ability to alter events after they happen. Feels awfully similar to Isaac Asimov’s Azazel series — though this installment, at any rate, is free of Asimov’s signature misogyny and grossness. Still not my cup of tea, though relatively painless. C-?
“Packing Up” by P. J. MacQuarrie. In the sanitized, minimalist future, live-in psych workers are in high demand. Bart is one such domestic, padding around the halls of his employers, the industrialist Mellewin family, making sure everyone sleeps well, keeping their neuroses under control. But Bart is approaching burnout. He fills the blank halls with his fantasies of a life and love of his own, daydreams of vacation, which get smothered by the weight of the Mellewins’ worries. It builds to Bart wondering if maybe a little anxiety, the occasional sleepless night, might be good for people. There isn’t much to this story. Its most interesting aspect is how it translates Gilded Age class norms into a soft sci-fi future. Bart isn’t a real doctor, just a specialized and trained addition to “the help.” The story’s concern with too much psychological intervention leading to coddled people who don’t know how to handle their own problems might make sense from a class-based lens. (It certainly isn’t an issue in our own society, unless you make north of six figures.) But ultimately, it feels like yet another quasi-libertarian “care makes humans too soft!” propaganda piece. Still, I didn’t dislike it. Maybe C-
“End Game” by Brian Aldiss. A palindromic story is impressive. However, between this, “The Gongs of Ganymede,” and all the humor pieces, this issue feels more like a Big Book of Puzzles & Activities than a sci-fi magazine. All gimmicks and games, not much literature.
“A Thief in Ni-Moya” by Robert Silverberg. I forget how long ago it was — maybe 2004, 2005? — but once, I was fixated on Silverberg’s Majipoor books. I read the first three volumes as quickly as I could track them down in used bookstores. Which is how I first encountered this novella: it was collected in The Majipoor Chronicles. Revisiting it all these years later, I’m struck by how much this series informed my later tastes in cozy fantasy. The setting is richly detailed, immense, as evocative with its rain-filled bathing troughs and tooled leather pouches as it is with its teeming continents and thirty-mile-high mountains. It sucked me back in right away. Some light spoilers for the story itself: Inyanna, a young shopkeeper in a remote town, gets suckered into giving up her life savings in Majipoor’s equivalent of the old “deed to the Brooklyn Bridge” scam. She travels thousands of miles to the inconceivably vast metropolis of Ni-Moya to claim her inheritance, and falls in with helpful young thief Liloyve, who invites her into the underworld of thieves. It’s a simple, well-worn tale of a rogue’s origin, one of the most Dungeons & Dragons things I’ve ever read, but told so atmospherically that I have nothing to complain about. B
—
And that’s it! I feel a tiny bit bamboozled by this issue, between the time-warp barely playing a role in “The Time-Warp Trauma,” and half the rest of the issue falling closer to brain teasers than to stories. (I exaggerate, but still.) Nonetheless, it was nice to revisit Majipoor. After almost two decades of barely thinking about it, I’m considering running through that series again.
No comments:
Post a Comment