Fantasy and Science Fiction, Sept/Oct 2011

Image via WikipediaHaving just freshly read the Portable MFA in Creative Writing, I decided to follow Salzberg's advice and splurge on the purchase of a subscription to Fantasy and Science Fiction. This subscription costs 99 cents per month for a magazine that comes out every two months. That means that each issue costs $1.98.

I remain very impressed with the layout of this magazine. It is extremely well organized. The people who put this magazine together are really among the best I've run into. There are a few typos here and there, but nothing major. The header and footer material, however, is really great. It is really easy to navigate. It is what should be expected, but rarely gotten, from all ebooks.

A layout, however brilliant, is not the most important part of a good book. More importantly, perhaps far more importantly, is the quality of the selection of stories which are chosen. Last month I picked up a free sample from them that left me wanting for something much better than I got.

Ruter and Baby Do Jotenheim, Esther M. Friesner

Image via WikipediaFriesner picked the least likely hero for this short story. The two main characters, one Ruter and the other Baby, with Baby being the hero and the story's perspective being written in third person from the perspective of Ruter. Ruter is that type of academic who thinks he knows a lot and is very proud of his intellectual prowess. However, the author is quick to mock him into the semi pathetic academic that too many academics are. That is to say, the very small world that he is conscious of is a very small world. His girlfriend, and bubble-gum blonde stereotype, he refers to constantly as dumb and well beneath his intelligence.

Ruter runs out of gas for his VW, he and Baby argue, and then he tosses Baby's little dog, Mr. Snickers, in its bag into the woods. Baby runs after Mr. Snickers, and promptly gets lost, as does Ruter. In getting lost, they stumble onto a magical trailer and the Frost Giants - members of the mythology which Ruter coincidentally studies.

Before they may leave the trailer full of Frost Giants, they must first withstand the same trials that Thor himself did in the legend. Ruter loses consciousness after one of the giants accidentally knocks him unconscious. That left Baby to defeat the tests one-by-one until she manages to win their freedom. The scenes are slap-stick and mildly funny. She even manages to wrestle with Elli, the  anthropomorphization of old age, and defeat her with a quick application of makeup.

I think that Friesner should have done a bit more research on the Frost Giants and tried a more classical approach to their dialogue. In her story, it sounds much like the traileresque dialogue that we get from Ruter and Baby. The story was marginally funny and original.

A Borrowed Heart, Deborah J. Ross

Image via WikipediaDeborah J. Ross has a blog and a homepage where you can find more information about her. I must admit, I was somewhat surprised to see that she was no Spring chicken; more of an Autumn chicken. This is not the sort of story that I generally associate with a mature lady. But, it's all about the story, right? So forget I said any of that crap. She has quite a bit of short fiction on her bibliography on her homepage. This lady has been around and has published a lot of short fiction.

Actually, for the most part, I enjoyed this story. The setting is a few centuries back. It didn't hurt that the initial scene was semi-pornographic. The lead character, Lenore Hasland, has returned home from abroad after what I assume was a fairly successful mixed career as a whore and as a supernatural assassin. The initial scene I refer to is one where a man is being raped by a succubus, Lenore rescues him from her before engaging the succubus in a sort of twisted sub and dom lesbian scene. However, this kind of perverse scene is not repeated. Well, in any case, it certainly woke me up to the rest of the story, which was somewhat anti-climactic.

Her sister is suffering from a heart-break. However, Lenore believes she is sick as from the effects of some sort of parasitic vampire who drains but does not kill his victims. After a bit of investigating, she convinces herself that the object of her sister's affections is indeed a vampire. With this conviction, she douses him in holy water, only to find out he's just a regular guy who broke his sister's heart.

Ross's style is fairly rich, and provides a great view into her fantasy world. I enjoyed this story, even if it was anti-climactic. In its way, the fact that it was a case of mistaken identity is a little bit intriguing.

Anise, Chris DeVito

I couldn't find much information about Chris DeVito. In any case, his story, "Anise," has a number of things going for it.

The point-of-view of this story is a bit odd. It's written using, for the most part, using present tense verbs. So, rather than writing, "She was" he wrote "She is," etc.

The world has changed. The world we're shown isn't terribly dissimilar from Orwell's 1984. It's not as detailed as Orwell's, and we're only ever shown a single circle or social strata. There is mention of how people must not hold opinions contrary beyond a certain degree from the government. There's also mention of a reeducation system when people do go astray from the allowable amount of leniency.

The main character is a woman, Anise, who is married to a reconstructed man, Richard, referred to as a 'breather.' Someone who is reconstructed has died. Someone who has been reconstructed has died and been brought back to life. The amount of time a person can die, and the amount of damage that can be reversed, has been very nearly mastered altogether. People can be utterly destroyed, be dead for an hour, before being brought back to a kind of life.

Though, the return to life is not entirely perfect. There are tubes and machines which suspend death. The move from completely organic to semi-organic being does not happen entirely without consequence. Richard is completely changed. Also, the allowances for those who are semi-human breathers is much greater than it is for organics. That is to say, they are allowed the use of any and all drugs that they want without the need for a prescription. Organics, conversely, are still heavily restricted. It would seem that these people have more rights than than organics.

Another type of character is also introduced, which is interesting as well. These are mechanical creatures who have been fused with brain tissue from dead humans. I'm not sure how this works, since it seems that the only thing the doctors of this setting need is a live brain, and it is not spelled out where this brain tissue came from. There is no memory in the brain, either. The machine/brain has a personality, and an intense desire to communicate which is curtailed significantly by the company which owns it. It has a limitation of how much it can communicate non-essential information. There is also mention of how the government is making laws, giving these machines which have a certain amount of organic brain hooked up to it.

As to the rest of the story, Anise is pressured to become a breather by her husband and others. In order to become like her husband, she must kill herself. She does this, and becomes one of them. 

It is quite an interesting setting, and one I enjoyed quite a bit. A lot of the short fiction I've been reading on my Kindle seems to be just regular boring stories which are sci-fi or fantasy because a character is from outer space, as in the story "Cucumber Gravy" which was utterly pointless. This was good science fiction where we get a glimpse into someone's interpretation of a possible dystopia.

Where Have All the Young Men Gone?, Albert E. Cowdrey

Image via WikipediaThere is a very short article on Wikipedia about him as well as a partial bibliography of his short fiction. His short fiction has appeared in a multitude of magazines, and in particular, in many editions of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

The title of the story, I'm assuming, comes from the old 70s song, “Where Have all the Flowers Gone” which was lamenting the waste of human lives in the Vietnam War. I'm not sure if that's where Cowdrey picked it up, and it doesn't seem to be linked to the story. So, perhaps it's just a coincidence.

Weird tales are among my favourites. They are good horror stories without the need for blood and guts. Well, Cowdrey's story is one excellent Weird Tale. In fact, if it wasn't so long, I feel certain it would be an excellent story that would well belong in one of my favourite bygone graphic magazines. The style, plot, and characters, are all reminiscent of that style which Poe and Lovecraft made popular in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

An aged American, Henry has taken a vacation to visit a museum in Gmudt which exhibits weapons covering several centuries of technological advancements. The museum, however, in its previous incarnation having a long history as barracks for soldiers, has one particularly negative event: a young virgin woman who is raped to death by about a dozen men. The soldiers are never held accountable for the crime, as they are sent to their own set of horrors as they participate in military combat.

The girl, however, somehow becomes a semi-immortal horror. She lures soldiers and, of late, male tourists, to their deaths. One night she claims a young man and terrorizes a young woman, both of whom had made their acquaintances with Henry the night before the event. The young man had a lover who wanted to know what had happened to him, and thus convinced Henry to spend the night with him to see if they could find any truth the the legend and superstition regarding the museum.

As it so happens, they do discover that there is indeed a horror living in there. All the men who had gone there before and disappeared are all frozen inside of some kind of material. Not terribly unlike a bug having been snared by tree resin that then is frozen in what eventually becomes amber. However, the poor girl who also became a victim of the horror is not what she seems. In fact, the original girl is herself killed, and the horror taken her place. The fact that she had odd eyes alerts Henry to the fact.

They are driving down one of the crazy roads that aren't all that uncommon in the mountains of Austria. To destroy the woman, and perhaps also to join his own family who had died in a plane crash a year earlier, he purposefully plunges the car off the road and to what he hopes is their mutual doom.

Again, I really enjoyed this story. With fiction like this, I can see myself keeping my subscription to the magazine for some time.

What We Found, Geoff Ryman

Image by andreasnilsson1976 via FlickrThis is two stories in one: the first seems like an autobiography of someone who may or may not be real. In fact, after looking around for images of Ryman, it becomes clear that it is fiction. It's hard to say which story is parasitic to the other. The superior story is the one which tells the brief life story of a family The setting is in Nigeria, the characters are Nigerians. They are so black that Ryman even mentions cream used to whiten skin fails to have any effect at all on the father. So, I think the parasitic story would be the science fiction one.

Actually, I'm less inclined to see it as science fiction as it is anti-science fiction. I'm not really sure what Ryman's intention with this part of the story is. It seems to want to suggest that science is only accurate for as long as it's unobserved. Or, to put it another way, once we observe some ideas and facts around a particular phenomena, the phenomena goes back into the bag. I do believe that this was a stab at several sciences, most particularly he seemed to be criticising Darwin's Theory of Evolution and promoting creation in its place. "If witchcraft once worked and science is wearing out, then it seems to me that God loves our freedom more than stable truth."

I did enjoy the autobiographical fiction to a certain extent, but adding the parasitic story to it so that it could be get the science fiction label seems rather lame even if it is on the back of a very interesting and well written story.

"The Man Inside Black Betty: Is Nicholas Wellington the World's Best Last Hope?" Saurub Ramesh

Image via WikipediaOf the stories I've read thus far, this one sort of hit a new low for me. While it certainly fits the definition of science fiction, and even the concept is kind of interesting if not altogether too silly to take seriously as a possible event in earth's history of disaster, it is so poorly written that it's impossible to enjoy this piece.

The main character is one of the main problems. He's some kind of skid-row/prison inmate meets science genius. The Vin Diesel meets unprecedented scientific genius. I should be kinder to Vin Diesel. He isn't as hideous as the character portrayed is. But imagine Hollywood trying to sell him as a particularly adept scientist. I know bucking sterotypes is never a bad idea, but the reason a lot of scientific types are more often skinny and underpowered is because they spend their time with their noses in books. The reason tough guys are tough is because they work hard at the gym or doing whatever physical exercise is required for them to be tough. That this character somehow inherits the ability to be scientific without any particular effort aside from some chance reading material and a particular gift for solving puzzles is beyond belief.

The second part that makes this story sort of beyond dumb and therefore difficult, if not impossible, to enjoy, is the science fiction aspect. The premise is that the genius predicts some wacky miniature black hole that will suddenly appear in the sky, in geosynchronous orbit in the sky, but not so high as to reach the region of space, somehow has little effect on the earth itself. Sure, some airplanes, rockets, and lots of birds get sucked into this odd phenomenon, somehow the atmosphere and air do not. Also, it seems to have no effect on anything in the beginning. A black hole, even one meter across, would have an immense effect on everything around it. In order for something to be a black hole at all, it is presumed to have a great deal of density. It would have a greater mass than the earth itself. How am I supposed to buy the idea that it would somehow have almost no effect on the earth or anything else around it?

This story was terrible. I honestly don't know how it got in this magazine. Maybe the author knows the editor personally?

"Bright Moment", Daniel Marcus

Image via WikipediaThis was another story I felt might ought to have been left out. It's a short story about a planet that's undergoing terraforming for imminent human use. One of the main characters is out surfing the huge waves (not sure what was causing the waves. Waves, being caused by the moon on earth, are not so large. Yet, no orbiting body is mentioned that might cause such a wave on this body. In fact, it seems to be a satellite itself in orbit around a large ringed planet described like Saturn. But, that's not how waves work. Earth's waves follow the moon in orbit around the earth, not the Sun which it orbits. That's how it would work on a satellite as well. There would be no large waves.

I guess this takes me to something I guess I expect in science fiction: that there be some correlation between the real universe (the laws) or at least the theoretical universe (see warp speed, etc). When it blows basic fundamental laws of physics, I find myself discarding any appreciation for the tale.

In essence, after finding giant squid on the satellite around the ringed planet, the hero tries to stop the terraforming. The corporation in charge of the terraforming doesn't really care. Thus, he takes matters into his own hands and becomes the equivalent of a modern-day eco-terrorist. He plants a huge bomb in the wormhole which links earth to this satellite to sever the tie.

The Corpse Painter's Masterpiece, M. Rickert

Image via WikipediaThis story was quite interesting for several reasons. The first being the tenses used by the author throughout the piece. Like "Anise," a lot of the story is told in simple present tense. However, she does so in a much more fluid, adept, and polished manner. There was a moment, for a few paragraphs, that the story slipped into the traditional past tense narrative. I'm not sure how author and editor could have missed it, but the sore thumb was not all that bothersome that it ruined the experience of the story. It was more interesting the way she played around, and successfully, with a variety of tenses to play around with the timeline of the story. It was quite interesting, and may merit a little experimentation on my part in the not so distant future. Where "Anise" seemed kind of choppy and at times seeming to have been written by a beginner, Rickert seems to be well practised and skillful at it.

The story is the other interesting thing. I wouldn't really call this a horror, but what happens is horrible. I didn't feel a good buildup of tension. However, it's still enjoyable. It centres around two central characters: a sheriff and a corpse painter. The corpse painter is a man who paints the dead. I was not able to find much information about corpse painters in general earlier in the year, the sheriff's son had died. His wife was devastated to the point of becoming little more than a zombie. 

One night, the sheriff is accosted by a shining light, which draws him to the cemetery and plot in which his son had been buried and subsequently where he was no more than bones. The sheriff digs him up and has the corpse painter paint the bones. He then takes the bones home and gives them to his wife for a Christmas present. It's not scary by any stretch of the imagination, but definitely a very strange and enjoyable tale.

Aisle 1047, Jon Armstrong

Image by Andrew Griffith via FlickrWell, I wouldn't classify this piece as either science fiction or fantasy. However, it has a twisted sense of humour to it. It was an interesting story about a saleslady in a big department store. Getting inside of the ditsy brain and getting a taste of what she had to go through in order to survive her ordeal was very entertaining. Essentially, she gets trained to become like a ninja killer in order to maintain her life in retail. 

To be honest, Armstrong left me wanting more story to go with the strange world which she lives in. Not really my cup of tea, I'd think, but quite twisted is up my alley.

"Spider Hill", Donald Mead

If Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, then what do you call a witch who is impregnated and then discarded? Well, "Spider Hill" explores that idea. It's fairly well written. It's very short. An old granny a long time ago was knocked up and left by a carnie operator. In revenge, when granny was just a young mother and not a granny, she takes revenge against the man and an entire group by releasing deadly spiders which then kill the whole group.

However, she is not satisfied with this mass murder. She needs to hold their spirits to the hill on which they died. To this end, she performs some witchcraft. When her granddaughter finds out that she has been aiding her granny to that end, she rebels. To accomplish this, she enlists a young man to take her virginity on Spider Hill. Granny forgives her for the betrayal, and she's never really required to pay the cost of her terrible crimes. It's a sort-of-fun tale for Halloween.

"Overtaken", Karl Bunker

This is another very simple short story. Roughly summed up: a large AI controlled ship is sent off to look for a new inhabitable planet. While off looking, many years later, earth has technologically evolved (or so claims a vessel which comes up alongside the AI, Aotea, has actually caught up and claims to be trying to retrieve the ship.

Aotea tells a story about how a woman sacrificed her life to repair the ship. After telling the story, Aotea asks Rejoindre, what it thinks of the story. After saying that it has no thought at all of it, Aotea incinerates the little vessel. It is not entirely clear why. Perhaps this type of speculation is what might give the story some sort of redeeming feature. It might be one of those stories that would be nifty in a fiction speculation class in trying to identify the motivation of the AI, Aotea. Perhaps it did not want the life of the lost worker to be in vain, perhaps it didn't want to become obsolete. It's hard to say. However, one downside to this story is that I have a hard time buying into the dialogue of the AI characters. I just cannot imagine a sophisticated AI, perhaps evolving to a degree, amongst highly educated scientists, talks like a common couch potato.

"Time and Tide", Alan Peter Ryan

This is the final short fiction in this edition of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

This is a sort of sad tale about a young boy, Frank Parsons who grows up being the elder second fiddle to a beloved younger brother. Everything goes the younger brother's route. That is, until he drowns in the ocean.

The father, very upset at having lost 'junior,' who is essentially a younger version of himself, uses an old piece of furniture, a certain wardrobe, that had been in the family for generations to get revenge against Frank for not being the one who drowned rather than the loved son. That is to say, it is bewitched. Somehow, through the magic of the wardrobe, the father manages to murder the son.

It was not a bad story. It had a little originality, and it was well written.

Final Thoughts

I do believe that this edition of Fantasy and Science Fiction was worth $2. There were a lot of stories. There is a lot more to read than what I found in the other magazine which I tried, Lightspeed. There was a variety of quality of material and method. I think it was a good decision to buy a subscription, and I do not regret it at all.

However, one real criticism I have of this magazine is the book review section. This is an ebook. I am an ebook reader. Yet, in the end of the book, it is promoting/reviewing pbooks (print books). They really ought to be promoting/ reviewing ebooks, not pbooks. I suppose it's just a little criticism. Nonetheless, I think it's something that the editors ought to consider.