Edited by Gardner Dozois
192 pages
Published 1986
Read from February 19 to February 20
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
Another issue of Asimov’s that promises a story at least tangentially related to dinosaurs, though this one — “Stop-Motion” by Tim Sullivan — likely offers far less prehistoric action than its splash art suggests. And, unfortunately, we have to wade through an Orson Scott Card novelette to get there. Well, let’s get into it.
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We begin with a poem by Robert Frazier: “A Worker in the Ruins of Ganymede.” Pretty good; an evocative sketch of archaeology in the outer solar system.
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“Hatrack River” by Orson Scott Card. It’s truly unfortunate that noted bigot Card was one of the few authors (after Manly Wade Wellman) who dabbled in Appalachian fantasy prior to the turn of the millennium. When I was a brand new adult, long before Card’s bigotry became common knowledge (and long before I began unpacking my own white privileges in a society built upon institutional racism), I adored the idea of his “frontier magic” series. Though even then, I found Seventh Son lackluster enough that I never continued past it. Just now, I looked up the summary of the series on Wikipedia, and it’s, um, rather more racist than I realized back then. I wasn’t particularly thrilled to have this story between me and the one story I came here to read.
Plus, “River” was incorporated as the prologue to Seventh Son. (I don’t know if authors still do this, but certainly in the ’80s and ’90s, if you were famous enough, it was common practice for the big SFF mags to publish chapters from your upcoming novels as standalone “stories.”) So on top of everything else, I’ve read this damn thing before.
On its own, “River” offers little more than broad frontier vibes and child abuse, with a sprinkle of casual racism for seasoning. It’s way too long for what it is. You could watch the 1983 movie Eyes of Fire to get a similar ambience, and have a much better time. Card was a decent enough prose author for his era, but that isn’t enough to recommend this story. D+
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cw for the following story: graphic dog death.
“Stop-Motion” by Tim Sullivan. Having read (and paged through) a lot of Asimov’s issues from the mid-’80s, I’ve discovered a curious trend from the time: lots of stories that invoke dinosaurs, or use them as a thematic motif, without being about dinosaurs. The Dinosaur Revolution had brought dinos back into pop culture in a big way, but pre-Jurassic Park, it seems like dinosaur stories were still considered old fashioned and hokey, burdened with all the pulp schlock that accumulated around them from the 1910s through the 1960s. So you got a bunch of stories that siphoned trendiness from dinosaurs without entrusting them with any starring roles.
This story slots into this oddly specific micro-trend. Eighteen year old Kevin, who dabbles in stop-motion filmmaking with his model dinosaurs, accidentally runs over a dog one night. We’re treated to pages of gory description as the dog slowly bleeds to death in Kevin’s car and in his mom’s basement, where Kevin spells out the story’s load-bearing leitmotif: “His hands had brought these creatures to life — on celluloid, at least — and here they all were, silently watching as the life ran out of this real, flesh-and-blood creature….”
Naturally, Kevin — who is grieving his father’s untimely death by being a real dickhead to his mother — gets this superstitious idea that he “sacrificed” the dog’s soul to his model tyrannosaur. When a film producer steals some of Kevin’s stop-motion work without attribution, Kevin follows the possessed-doll chain of logic and leaves the model in the producer’s office to wreak vengeance upon him. The aftermath happens off-screen, so we never “know” whether the rex did his dirty work or if it was all in Kevin’s head, blah blah blah.
Calling this story “Pet Sematary meets Ray Harryhausen” makes it sound much cooler than it really is. It’s extremely ’80s-short-horror in conception and tone: aggrieved young white man lashing out with the power of blood magic against one who has wronged him. Not my bag. It could have been worse, though. It incorporates dinosaurs into its narrative in a way I’ve never encountered before, which is rare. (Though compare and contrast with the tiny dinosaurs in David Gerrold’s “Rex,” anthologized in Dinosaur Fantastic.) I did enjoy the detail that Kevin’s rex had scraggly fur. Maybe that’s enough to bump it up to C-?
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“Strange Eruptions” by Harry Turtledove. Unsurprisingly for Turtledove, this is an alternative history piece. Thankfully it has nothing to do with either Hitler or the Civil War. “Eruptions” centers on Argyros, a magistrianos in imperial Constantinople. He’s overwhelmed by a desk full of papyrus-work, in classic 1980s cop movie style. But then smallpox sweeps through the city. Argyros’ wife Helen gets sick; he invents a baby bottle for their son, wrestles with questions of doubt and faith, and (spoilers) inadvertently discovers cowpox inoculation. While it is unexpectedly moving at times, the main draw of this story is its pseudo-historical Byzantium, which is vividly and lovingly depicted. Not a lost classic, but solid. B
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“The Dragon’s Head” by Karen Joy Fowler. It would be predictable to call this Bradburyan, but hey, it’s a child’s-eye perspective on strange, mystical, enigmatic things happening in a small town in the 1950s, so what can you do? Young Penny, who can do anything a boy can do, gets dared to trick-or-treat at the home of Mrs. McLaughlin, the neighborhood witch archetype. Mrs. McLaughlin invites her to come back for tea, where she gives Penny a kitten and tells her of the dragon, whose twin heads breathe fire and fog. The story then peters out; its mysteries never build into anything bigger than an opaque parable. Sometimes, though, a mood — a suggestion of magic — is enough. B
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A poem by Hope Athearn, “Elegy for an Alien,” is quite lovely, domestic and intimate and welcoming.
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“Aymara” by Lucius Shepard. A overlong novelette about Central American mercenaries from Lucius Shepard? What a shocker! (Sarcasm.) This one is not his best work. It reminds me of old pulp adventures, likely deliberately, and not in good ways. The prose is stiff and dated, as if Shepard had been channeling the tastes of the era. A Black character is given a thick dialect to speak.
The touches that root “Aymara” firmly in the ’80s aren’t any better. The titular Aymara is reputed to be a quasi-immortal sorceress who’s lived in a cave since the 1640s, but in reality she turns out to be a time traveler. She’s on a mission to ensure that mercenary Lee Christmas helps United Fruit take over Honduras, or else the future will suffer: “Sometimes you gotta do the wrong thing to ’chieve the right result.” Bad things need to happen so that worse things don’t happen is such a de rigueur eighties take; this story goes further, into outright accelerationism. (After everything that’s happened since 2016, I can’t abide accelerationism.)
Structurally, though, this story works as a particularly solid paradoxes vs predestination piece, and even on an off day, Shepard is a good enough author to suck me into the story. The ending, in particular, was strange and evocative in a way I wasn’t expecting. Perhaps, as a compromise, I’ll give it a middling C
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One more Robert Frazier poem for the road: “A Starpilot Muses on the Universal Tide Pool.” You can get a taste of it from the title alone. Solid stuff.
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Believe it or not, that’s it for this issue! In addition to the usual overburden of editorials, fan letters, book reviews, and logic puzzles, there’s also an extended essay by Michael Swanwick, “A User’s Guide to the Postmoderns,” which I might read at some point (or I might not). I should probably read more literary criticism instead of solely fiction on its own, but right now, I don’t wanna.
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