Edited by Gardner Dozois
192 pages
Published 1987
Read from March 1 to March 2
Rating: 2 out of 5
This issue feels like a direct-to-video sequel to IASF’s August 1986 issue. There’s an overlong Orson Scott Card story, a Basil Argyros novelette from Harry Turtledove, and an offbeat dinosaur story from Tim Sullivan (which is the reason I’m reading this one), plus the obligatory poems from Robert Frazier. SFF mags always had a tendency to favor flavor-of-the-month authors (as well as the buddies of their editors), but this degree of repetition is ridiculous.
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“Images” by Harry Turtledove. It feels odd to take Basil Argyros, whom we last saw bereaved but finding faith at the lowest point in his life in “Strange Eruptions,” and turn him into an alternate history procedural detective, a sort of Byzantine Brother Cadfael. It cheapens the story arc of “Eruptuons,” in particular the character of Helen, who isn’t even mentioned in this story. On its own merits, “Images” feels desultory, lacking the emotional heart of “Eruptions.” It reads less like a story with stakes and a plot, and more like a treatise on one of Turtledove’s special interests. This time the trouble is iconoclasm, a theological position which kindles riots in the fiercely opinionated city. Basil stumbles through one such riot, and inevitably gets entangled in the ecumenical council called by the emperor to settle the topic. Befitting the genre shift to a private eye tale, there’s even a femme fatale involved in the dispute. The didactic value of “Images” is dubious; I certainly don’t know where actual Byzantine theology ends and Turtledove’s alternate history begins. I’ll admit “Images” is painless enough, which counts for something in this era of sci-fi. C-
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“Dinosaur on a Bicycle” by Tim Sullivan. Once upon a time, one of my favorite t-shirts was one I bought around 2007 and kept in rotation for almost a decade (back when a t-shirt could reasonably be expected to last for a decade). It depicted a villainous Victorian Velociraptor on a velocipede, complete with handlebar mustache, monocle, and penny-farthing. It’s venerable enough as internet jokes go, but I was surprised to find it presaged in print here, twenty years before I got that shirt.
“Bicycle” is a standard “intelligent dinosaur travels back in time and encounters humans who also traveled here from a divergent timeline” piece, nothing particularly original (though maybe it predates the heyday of that particular trend by a few years). What sets it apart is its winsomely depicted saurian steampunk aesthetic, with our intrepid Harry pedaling a penny-farthing to power the chronokineticon, a clockwork mechanism straight out of The Time Machine. (More time travel narratives, regardless of species, need to feature a carnosaur chasing a penny-farthing bike.) The humans’ time machine, in turn, is a “clockwork Mock-Dinosaur,” camouflaged in the shape of a tyrannosaur.
All too quickly, the story collapses under the weight of its own absurdity, throwing in intelligent canines and felines in their own respective chrono-contraptions, who of course fight like cats and dogs, not to mention time-traveling whales and raccoons and cockroaches and thousands of others. But the story retains some charm nonetheless, and was worth the effort of tracking it down, which can’t be said for much dinosaur fiction. B-
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A Robert Frazier poem follows: “Encased in the Amber of Probabilities.” It’s solid.
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“Waves” by Andrew Weiner. This tale presents a far-fetched sci-fi scenario: an American government that addresses economic stagnation through a near-universal dole. Advances in genetic and computer technology have rendered most jobs obsolete, leading to widespread unemployment, which the government addresses through art grants and business stipends. Pure fantasy, right? Preposterous. Weiner’s fictional Pause reminds me of the best parts of lockdown: the stimulus cash, the dilettantism, the surge of weird creativity and genuine self-discovery. However, like so many ’80s retrofutures that approximated the current moment, “Waves” is absurdly optimistic. The story itself has big sci-fi ambitions grounded in its genteel day-to-day dramas, swerving into brain wave mysticism and dark matter, psychoactive states and Big Bang cycles — all concepts more plausible than an American government supporting its citizens. The cosmic stuff doesn't quite land, but it's still a solid enough preview of the kitchen-sink approach of 1990s sci-fi. B-
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Another Robert Frazier poem: “Birds of the Mutant Rain Forest.” Also pretty good, with memorable imagery, though I prefer the first one.
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“Ice Dreams” by Sharon N. Farber. This one attempts to mix a folksy, various-tenants-at-the-boarding-house-meet-a-strange-new-character vibe, straight out of midcentury nostalgia fantasy, with a Magical Mentally Ill, the-voices-in-my-head-were-right-about-you trope, which is pure-strain 1980s. Even allowing for its humorous intentions, this story of a psychic vampire feeding off of, and spoiling, the secret daydreams of his fellow-tenants doesn’t make it work. Which is a shame, because I love What We Do in the Shadows, and I don’t think I’ve encountered psychic vampires anywhere else. Maybe D?
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“Eye for Eye” by Orson Scott Card. Oh boy, a novella-length tale about an angry, misunderstood young white man who can kill with his mind, from noted bigot Card. Taken on its own, it’s a fairly solid story, engrossing and atmospheric and well-written, grappling with the theological implications of the implacability of the biblical God. It also presents the terrifying specter of what it would be like if white Southern Baptists got superpowers. But (as was typical of white male writers of the time, but particularly suspect coming from Card) he has his side characters perform racial commentary, and just in general gums up the narration with icky eighties vibes. Like, truly, does your lone Jewish character need to quote antisemitic tropes in a self-deprecating farewell? Do we need your white narrator to say the N-word to emphasize how not-racist he is toward a Black character? Do we need said narrator to say the N-word again, later, and say it’s okay because the Black character said it first? Women as a whole are given similar treatment. Where Mick can kill with his mind, a woman he meets has the power to… make men horny. There’s something extremely Mormon about it all. The myriad subtle bigotries that were just accepted in this era feel even more insidious from a writer as legitimately (and regrettably) talented as Card was at his peak. D-?
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And that’s it! For an issue that felt like reheated leftovers, this one had some minor highlights. I’m glad I tracked down “Dinosaur on a Bicycle,” and “Waves” was definitely worth the read as well.
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