Fantasy & Science Fiction: September 2007
Aug. 10th, 2007 08:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmerriamA little while back on his blog, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
johnjosephadams said F&SF would send out free copies of the magazine to people with weblogs if they agreed to blog about the magazine. I, or course, said yes. Hey, free fiction. What more could you ask for? So, without further ado and all that, my thoughts on the September 2007 issues of F&SF.
The issue starts off strong with "Wrong Number" by Alexander Jablokov. Stephanie, in an effort to avoid seeing a man she met at a party, gives him a fake phone number. The man curses her so that everywhere she goes, the number is always there hovering in her mind, her peripheral vision, in her dreams. Stephanie's friend Marlene takes her to see Jason, a mechanic who is searching for his lost love and has the strange power to see life paths in damaged autos and then nudge reality you make little things happen.
The strength of this piece is that, while a lot is happening, it is a quiet story. Each of the character's lives are intertwined in ways they did not expect, and the ending is, if not happily ever after, at least as happy as they can be. While the story does have that "Little Magical Shop" feel, Jablokov makes you care about his characters in a very short span, and the setting, a garage, hides the magic shop behind an unusual façade.
We continue on to "Envoy Extraordinary" by Albert E. Cowdrey. Vincent Khartoum, a highly regarded interstellar diplomat, is sent to a squalid little backwater planet to negotiate with its paranoid tin-pot dictator in order to keep said dictator from creating a pirate fleet.
This story tries a different approach. You don't really like any of the characters, because frankly, they are not likable. There is the problem. There is nothing sympathetic about any of the characters, and when the inevitable betrayals and deaths happen, well, I was just glad to be finished with the thing. There was some neat world building, but that was glossed over and swallowed by the straightforward, by-the-numbers betrayal plot.
I know a lot of my friends are sick and tired of reading stories concerned with mythological deities, but I still love them. "Atalanta Loses at the Interpantheonic Trivia Bee" by Heather Lindsley hits all the right notes, keeping the tone light.
Atalanta has been recruited by Artemis, Aphrodite, and Athena to be their token human teammate at the Interpantheonic Trivia Bee. Among the other contenders, which includes deities from all the world's major pantheons, is a team with Apollo, Zeus, Hermes, and Hippomenes, who keeps sending pieces of himself to Atalanta in golden apples to show his love.
The ending is satisfying, if somewhat sappy, and the characterizing of the gods is, well, pretty typical, but the idea behind the story and the execution are shiny enough to make up for it.
It took me a while to get into the flow of John Langen's "Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of the Purple Flowers." You are tossed smack into the middle of the action and Langen uses an experimental prose-style on top of that, but I feel like the story as a whole works.
Jackie and Wayne are on the run from "The Pack" in what is obviously a post-apocalyptic world. Why Jackie and Wayne have not fallen victim to the thing that has killed off the rest of humanity is unclear, and what the Pack exactly is is never stated, but the duel tension of the young couple trying to survive and a very pregnant Jackie's increasing concern about Wayne's mental stability drive the narrative forward at a breakneck pace. This story takes some time to set in, but once it does, it is an enjoyable read. Still, I wonder if it suffers from the experimental prose form. That really threw me off of and out of the story initially.
Next up is "Requirements for the Mythology Merit Badge" by Kevin N. Haw. What can I say except: What? Basically a mocked up set of rules for how to, well, get your Mythological Merit Badge. I generally don't like these kinds of pieces and the twist at the end didn't help one bit. I was just left scratching my head at this one.
Robert Reed tackles issues of Illegal cloning, child exploitation, social paranoia, and being human with a deft hand in the multi-layered "If We Can Save Just One Child…"
In a world where citizens and the government are determined to keep predators from cloning children for immoral purposes, Gary Olsen finds himself running afoul of all the computer software that checks for suspect activities and all the paranoia his society can throw at him. Once you find yourself on the "person of interest" list, you can never get off of it and your government will always look at you askance. Olsen's anti-social tendencies and background in limnology draw attention to him from the authorities after an apparent incident of DNA theft.
Where this story succeeds is in atmosphere. You can feel the heavy oppression settle around as you read. The fact that Reed took an interesting chance with his ending, not going one of the two ways the reader might expect, enhances this dark tale.
We end the issues with "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate", by Ted Chiang. Fuwaad ibn Abbas, a fabrics merchant, meets the Alchemist Bashaarat, where Bashaarat shows Abbas his creation of time travel portals, created by alchemy. There follows demonstration, Scheherazade-like parables, and the lesson of: The future is fixed, just as is the past, but repentance and atonement can erase the past. We then follow Abbas as he atones for his grievous mistake in the past.
Chiang's writing makes the storytelling look easy, when in fact it is complex. Chiang makes the words jump through hoops, and if you are not watching close, you miss the trick. You find yourself drawn into the story, forgetting the writer, forgetting the magazine in your hand, and simply being. Again, this is a quiet tale, and at the end, Abbas is left with a different life than one might expect. This is skillful work and a joy to read.
There you have it. The issue was filled with mostly well done stories, with only a couple of unsatisfying pieces.
johnjosephadams said F&SF would send out free copies of the magazine to people with weblogs if they agreed to blog about the magazine. I, or course, said yes. Hey, free fiction. What more could you ask for? So, without further ado and all that, my thoughts on the September 2007 issues of F&SF.The issue starts off strong with "Wrong Number" by Alexander Jablokov. Stephanie, in an effort to avoid seeing a man she met at a party, gives him a fake phone number. The man curses her so that everywhere she goes, the number is always there hovering in her mind, her peripheral vision, in her dreams. Stephanie's friend Marlene takes her to see Jason, a mechanic who is searching for his lost love and has the strange power to see life paths in damaged autos and then nudge reality you make little things happen.
The strength of this piece is that, while a lot is happening, it is a quiet story. Each of the character's lives are intertwined in ways they did not expect, and the ending is, if not happily ever after, at least as happy as they can be. While the story does have that "Little Magical Shop" feel, Jablokov makes you care about his characters in a very short span, and the setting, a garage, hides the magic shop behind an unusual façade.
We continue on to "Envoy Extraordinary" by Albert E. Cowdrey. Vincent Khartoum, a highly regarded interstellar diplomat, is sent to a squalid little backwater planet to negotiate with its paranoid tin-pot dictator in order to keep said dictator from creating a pirate fleet.
This story tries a different approach. You don't really like any of the characters, because frankly, they are not likable. There is the problem. There is nothing sympathetic about any of the characters, and when the inevitable betrayals and deaths happen, well, I was just glad to be finished with the thing. There was some neat world building, but that was glossed over and swallowed by the straightforward, by-the-numbers betrayal plot.
I know a lot of my friends are sick and tired of reading stories concerned with mythological deities, but I still love them. "Atalanta Loses at the Interpantheonic Trivia Bee" by Heather Lindsley hits all the right notes, keeping the tone light.
Atalanta has been recruited by Artemis, Aphrodite, and Athena to be their token human teammate at the Interpantheonic Trivia Bee. Among the other contenders, which includes deities from all the world's major pantheons, is a team with Apollo, Zeus, Hermes, and Hippomenes, who keeps sending pieces of himself to Atalanta in golden apples to show his love.
The ending is satisfying, if somewhat sappy, and the characterizing of the gods is, well, pretty typical, but the idea behind the story and the execution are shiny enough to make up for it.
It took me a while to get into the flow of John Langen's "Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of the Purple Flowers." You are tossed smack into the middle of the action and Langen uses an experimental prose-style on top of that, but I feel like the story as a whole works.
Jackie and Wayne are on the run from "The Pack" in what is obviously a post-apocalyptic world. Why Jackie and Wayne have not fallen victim to the thing that has killed off the rest of humanity is unclear, and what the Pack exactly is is never stated, but the duel tension of the young couple trying to survive and a very pregnant Jackie's increasing concern about Wayne's mental stability drive the narrative forward at a breakneck pace. This story takes some time to set in, but once it does, it is an enjoyable read. Still, I wonder if it suffers from the experimental prose form. That really threw me off of and out of the story initially.
Next up is "Requirements for the Mythology Merit Badge" by Kevin N. Haw. What can I say except: What? Basically a mocked up set of rules for how to, well, get your Mythological Merit Badge. I generally don't like these kinds of pieces and the twist at the end didn't help one bit. I was just left scratching my head at this one.
Robert Reed tackles issues of Illegal cloning, child exploitation, social paranoia, and being human with a deft hand in the multi-layered "If We Can Save Just One Child…"
In a world where citizens and the government are determined to keep predators from cloning children for immoral purposes, Gary Olsen finds himself running afoul of all the computer software that checks for suspect activities and all the paranoia his society can throw at him. Once you find yourself on the "person of interest" list, you can never get off of it and your government will always look at you askance. Olsen's anti-social tendencies and background in limnology draw attention to him from the authorities after an apparent incident of DNA theft.
Where this story succeeds is in atmosphere. You can feel the heavy oppression settle around as you read. The fact that Reed took an interesting chance with his ending, not going one of the two ways the reader might expect, enhances this dark tale.
We end the issues with "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate", by Ted Chiang. Fuwaad ibn Abbas, a fabrics merchant, meets the Alchemist Bashaarat, where Bashaarat shows Abbas his creation of time travel portals, created by alchemy. There follows demonstration, Scheherazade-like parables, and the lesson of: The future is fixed, just as is the past, but repentance and atonement can erase the past. We then follow Abbas as he atones for his grievous mistake in the past.
Chiang's writing makes the storytelling look easy, when in fact it is complex. Chiang makes the words jump through hoops, and if you are not watching close, you miss the trick. You find yourself drawn into the story, forgetting the writer, forgetting the magazine in your hand, and simply being. Again, this is a quiet tale, and at the end, Abbas is left with a different life than one might expect. This is skillful work and a joy to read.
There you have it. The issue was filled with mostly well done stories, with only a couple of unsatisfying pieces.
