Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, November 1988 issue (12:11)
Edited by Gardner Dozois
192 pages
Published 1988
Read from August 7 to August 8
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
I never intended for
Fantasy & Science Fiction to be the sole magazine I read and reviewed here. You wouldn’t know that if you judged from the rest of this blog’s
magazine tag — all eleven previous entries are issues of
F&SF. But I’ve been collecting
F&SF for the last eight-ish years, so
F&SF is what I have. Even after those eleven issues, I have (at last count) seventy-six still unread on my shelves, ranging from January 1975 to January/February 2023.
Recently, though, I began amassing a much smaller collection: issues of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction that have dinosaurs on the cover. Thanks to the economics of procuring old magazines through eBay, inadvertently I’ve accumulated a number of unrelated IASF issues along with them. Right now I have thirteen old issues to read through, only two of which — this one included — feature dinosaurian cover stories. This one is the oldest as well as the first one I obtained, so why not read it first?
Before I tuck into the stories, I want to comment on the experience of reading a physical pulp magazine from the final golden age of physical pulp magazines. The cover proclaims this issue has 192 pages, but an astonishing number of those pages are advertisements. One-quarter of the pages in the first two stories are ads; while the ads taper off after that, it’s still quite a lot of pages altogether. I wouldn’t be surprised if IASF collected more money from ads in 1988 than subscriptions. (The minimum buy for a classified ad was $123.75, and that’s in 1988 currency. For comparison, an 18 issue subscription back then was $26.97, and a newsstand copy was $2.)
They must have collected plenty of money from every source, because back then IASF put out thirteen issues each year. Here in the desolate future, where the last surviving printed pulp mags squeeze out six issues a year at best, it’s mournful and disheartening to contemplate how far we’ve fallen, even though SFF short fiction is far and away better in 2023 than it was in 1988.
“The Last Thunder Horse West of the Mississippi” by Sharon N. Farber. Case in point: A by-the-numbers dinosaurs in the Old West piece, right down to giving the Cope and Marsh rivalry — better known as the Bone Wars — central billing. Fittingly, Farber employs an antique narration style, third-person omniscient; introduces characters by describing their appearance and apparel; and never digs into anyone’s emotional state or particular point of view. Cope and Marsh, alerted to the possibility of a living dinosaur way out West, alight from the same train and hire separate guides, both of whom have had pulp novels inspired by their exploits. Their collective antics are used for humorous effect. Parts of “Thunder Horse” are reasonably entertaining; parts of it haven’t aged so well. There’s zero emotional investment to be found, and vanishingly little dinosaur action. Still, the story is better than most of the
Apex: World of Dinosaurs Anthology, so I have to give it some credit.
C+
[Edit: About two weeks after I published this review, I discovered that I had already read and reviewed “The Last Thunder Horse” — it was in the Martin H. Greenberg
Dinosaurs anthology. I read that about ten years ago, though, so the fact that I didn’t remember it isn’t a strike against me or against the story.]
A poem follows: “Living with Nuclear Weapons (after the Harvard symposium)” by Andrew Joron. Excellent concept paired with haunting imagery, but the word choice felt clunky at times. An okay effort.
“I Love Little P**sy” by Isaac Asimov. Ugh, there’s no way in hell I’m typing out that title in full. I hate that 1980s-style attempt to be “provocative.” The actual story is stuffed with Asimov’s tiresome misogyny, and it doesn’t stint on the laziest double-entendres this side of a 1950s novelty record. It’s one of the Azazel stories, a science-fantasy series Asimov wrote about a tiny demon who works wonders with nebulous soft “science.” (I wouldn’t be surprised if the character were some “hard scientist” satire of the “soft sciences.”) Our self-regarding, money-mooching narrator George goes on and on about the loathsome appearance of his spinster cousin Andromache, who had reached the simply unmarriageable age of 40, all while regaling us with his attempts to ingratiate his way into her inheritance. He enlists Azazel’s help to make Andromache’s cat love her, with predictable results. No redeeming qualities to this story whatsoever. F
A middling poem follows: “The One that Got Away” by Terry McGarry, a strained metaphor for yearning that mixes trout fishing and the Loch Ness Monster.
“Dying in Hull” by D. Alexander Smith. Perhaps the earliest modern-style climate dystopia I’ve ever read. (Compare and contrast with Elizabeth Hand’s “Echo,” which I read and reviewed
here.) In the distant future of 2004, old-timer Ethel Cobb notes the rising waters in her own house, then navigates her old family whaler boat through the flooded streets of Hull, Massachusetts, scavenging from abandoned homes. Gangs of “waterkids” — all of them Cambodian immigrants — battle a nascent warlord amid the rising tides, but that’s merely backdrop to Ethel’s quiet contemplation of a failing world. This certainly wouldn’t win any prose awards from me, and the ’80s immigrant panic underpinning the waterkid gangs is especially distasteful. That said, this is an atmospheric piece that does what it sets out to do. A respectable
B-
“Shaman” by John Shirley. Like “Hull,” this story emphasizes the precise date of its opening scene. (Perhaps that was a style favored by IASF?) In the even more distant future of 2011, a starter pack of 1980s urban dystopia tropes unfolds: gang wars, religious zealots, militarized police, blackouts, tunnel people, acid rain, posthumanism, hacking someone out of an impregnable prison, drugs, subatomic mysticism. Some dude called the Middle Man presents himself as the Wetware Medium, preaching to the populace about the Spirits of the Urban Wilderness. There’s a lot of babble about electromagnetic fields and “tribal” consciousness spilling over into consensus reality, all of which adds up to a cyberpunk American Gods prototype thirteen years before American Gods. It’s the most 1988 thing I’ve ever read. It so thoroughly encapsulates every trope and trend of its moment that I found myself entertained despite my disregard for cyberpunk dystopias (and for white people taking drugs to discover god). A surprising B
“A Different Drumstick” by Gregory Feeley. Genetic engineering resurrects gigantic dinosaurs!! Two years before
Jurassic Park! Okay, so,
technically the genetic engineering resurrects moas, but moas are giant birds and birds are dinosaurs. Sue me. The Combine clones extinct birds like the moa and the passenger pigeon in order to supply its insatiable fast food conglomerate. Our self-effacing everyman narrator Bill Crabtree works in the Combine’s West Virginia facility, and gets caught in the middle when a researcher from a rival conglomerate arrives for some hands-on industrial espionage. (Are we sure this isn’t
Jurassic Park?) As straightforward as they come, but enjoyable.
C+
“Brass” by Victor Milán. Deeply uninteresting military sci-fi, notable for using midcentury Cold War in the Kosmos tropes a mere three years before the Soviet collapse would relegate them to alternate history and slipstream bins. In a universe where Soviet-styled imperialists cynically “rescue” new worlds and new civilizations from the perils of capitalist imperialism, the pampered niece of a Chairman wants to tour a front-line planet. A series of interchangeable space-grunts are tasked with her escort. The niece, the only female character in the piece, doesn’t get a single line or even a name, and pretty much what you expect to happen closes out her part of the tale. All of it builds to a military humor punchline. D
“The Madonna of the Wolves” by Somtow Sucharitkul. My first time reading anything by Sucharitkul, whose name is prominent on
IASF covers all through the ’80s. (Also I just learned he’s the same person as composer S. P. Somtow!) Overall, it’s a mixed bag: some of it is excellent, a lot of it is questionable, and much of it suffers from de rigueur 1980s transgressiveness. Governess Speranza Martinique is tasked with escorting a young boy across Europe; it is immediately apparent to any modern reader that Johnny is a werewolf. Much like
The Devourers, this novella emphasizes the carnality of werewolves, dwelling on piss and erections, stink and virility. This being the ’80s, we have to deal with these effluvia from the little boy. Uncomfortable, to say the least. Yet somehow it manages (mostly) to be more central to the story, and (slightly) less skeevy-feeling, than
the countless stories that made sure to mention young girls’ budding breasts. (The ’80s were a weird goddamn time.) Discomfort aside, this story was well-written and well-paced, flush with sensory detail. We mostly stick to Speranza’s POV, which gives us better emotional groundwork than any other story in this issue. Her character is a bit of an ’80s men-writing-women cliché — none must know that, beneath my chaste Victorian façade, I’m passionately horny! — but it could have been worse. I’m not sure how to rate this. Maybe
B-?
And that’s it!
It was interesting to contrast this magazine to the issues of
F&SF I’ve read from this time period.
F&SF at its best tended, even at this date, toward interior perspectives, grounding its stories in the emotions of its characters. (Consider “Shore Leave Blacks” by Nancy Etchemendy in the
March 1990 F&SF.)
IASF, by contrast, focused on flashier effects, almost a cinematic perspective, at the expense of interiority; even the better stories trend a bit superficial.
Both valid approaches, both valid editorial tastes. You can judge which I prefer by how many copies of each I’ve collected over the years — 87 vs 13. Yet overall I think I liked this particular issue of IASF better than any F&SF I’ve read from this era.
I’m excited to read more recent issues of IASF, not least because I’ve been trying to get my writing into IASF since 1998. But nowadays they’re printed by a press that specializes in newsstand word-puzzle books, so they’re cheaply made, badly printed, and usually ugly, so I always hesitate to buy them. How far we’ve fallen in this late capitalist hellscape.
