The Ramshead Algorithm, KJ Kabza

Image via WikipediaAs mentioned in the previous post, this story is what was given freely from Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine which I gave a preliminary impression of before I got into the free story, "The Ramshead Algorithm," by KJ Kabza.

My overall impression of the magazine got off to a very bad start. At the top of the page, it is written "Novelets." What kind of proofreader or editor can live with himself after misspelling a header like that? How embarrassing! But perhaps this omen should have been heeded well. It certainly would have saved me the hour or so it took me to get through this story.

When I was a kid, I was really enamoured with a number of stories based on doors to other worlds. Edgar Rice Burroughs Martian series, and Terry Brooks' series about the Magic Kingdom of Landover, are just two series that readily come to mind which heavily used this tool to bring us from earth proper to another much more interesting and magical land. The whole novelette read like it was really supposed to be an opening to one of these types of series, but then got chopped off at the end.

To boil the tale down, it's the story of a father who wants to tear down a maze of bushes in his backyard to close the gate to another world. His wife and the mother of his three children is from that realm. However, she hasn't come back for so long that he is ready to tear down the gate forever. His son, however, does everything, and succeeds in, stopping him from destroying that gate.

I suppose it's not a really bad tale. However, there are a number of things that bothered me. The first that comes to mind is the author's apparent inability to write distinctive dialogue. All of the characters in the story seem to have roughly the same voice. The other thing that was a little burdensome was all the unnecessary descriptions of expensive items belonging to a family which is wealthy almost beyond imagination: think Bill Gates or Carlos Slim. Descriptions of $400 dollar pants or this designer or that designer item might make sense from the perspective of someone who is not rich, but not from the narrative of the main character who is wearing them and unbelievably wealthy. That is to say, when I put on a pair of jeans, I don't say to myself, "This is a pair of $20 jeans" or "these socks cost $3." In some parts of the world, this is an expensive wardrobe. For other people, it is very much a lower class wardrobe. But, I don't think of the value of these items all the time. I don't think a billionaire would always be remembering the cost of every item of his or her wardrobe either. $900 to a billionaire has less value than $20 does to me. In any case, due to this, it just seems that the author enjoyed putting him or herself into the shoes of the wealthy. I suppose in this way, one might conjecture that it was a fantasy. But, when I read a tale that is fantasy, I expect something closer to a full ensemble of the fantastic. I want to see dragons, wizards, and unicorns (or something along those lines.) Of course I wouldn't object to someone building a new superset of fantastical creatures, but one does not accomplish that sort of thing in a novelette.

I guess what I'm saying is that if this is the best that this edition of Fantasy and Science Fiction has to offer, I will not feel tempted to part with my dollars. Am I too demanding as a reader?