Fantasy & Science Fiction 717

Gordon Van Gelder (editor) Fantasy & Science Fiction 717 (2015)
The last digest magazine I tackled was an old issue of Analog which left me feeling slightly unclean, and this, combined with a failed attempt to read the work of Yukio Mishima - a man whom I'm fairly certain Kenneth Clark would have denounced as quite, quite beastly - I've really come to appreciate Fantasy & Science Fiction, a digest which has yet to let me down. Even given that not everything in such a collection is going to click with every reader, and that I'm really not even that struck on fantasy as a genre, the standard is such that you can even appreciate the quality of the occasional turkey, and that turkeys tend to be in the eye of the beholder with Fantasy & Science Fiction; or to put it another way, even the weaker material is usually a decent read. As for this issue, I was less than knocked out by Francis Marion Soty's interpretation of a tale from One Thousand and One Nights, but the rest range from respectable to even wonderful.

Telling Stories to the Sky by Eleanor Arnason, and Jubilee: A Seastead Story by Naomi Kritzer both have enough going on for it to be worth mentioning. Better still is Dale Bailey's Lightning Jack's Last Ride, which seems to suggest that the western is alive and well, despite the author substituting cowboys for post-apocalyptic NASCAR drivers. It's also a refreshing change for being an actual narrative rather than just a plot with characters attached.

Matthew Hughes' Prisoner of Pandarius seems to be a fairly literal fantasy transposition of E.W. Hornung's Raffles the Gentleman Thief as Raffalon, who inhabits a pseudo-medieval world of taverns, spells, imps and the like. I've often found such settings to be something of a stumbling block, but Hughes really drew me in with a tightly knit and elegantly delineated mystery nevertheless based around people who nick stuff from castles and hang around with wizards. In fact Prisoner of Pandarius was so engaging that I'm  going to see if I can't find some more by the guy.

Bud Webster's Farewell Blues is actually the reason I bought this issue, having faintly known Bud online as part of a Simak appreciation group. We were hardly brothers from other mothers, but Bud was one of the people I liked in an online community which nevertheless managed to attract the usual quota of disagreeable arseholes, despite our having been brought together in mutual appreciation of an unusually gentle and pacific author. I'd enjoyed Bud's excellent and informative online articles about the aforementioned Simak, Murray Leinster, and other favourites, and he mentioned having a story featured in Fantasy & Science Fiction then departed this mortal coil before I actually had a chance to read the thing. Farewell Blues is, with a certain irony, about death and the passing of loved ones, and is dedicated to Bud's father. It's centered around jazz players in New Orleans, two of whom are named Hardy Fox and Homer Flynn after alleged members of the Residents, and refers to an afterlife which is actually the place we all go when we dream - a Mexican folk myth which I used in Against Nature; so it turns out we would have had plenty to talk about had I read this while he was still with us, not least being that Farewell Blues is a wonderful tale and the peculiar likelihood of Bud actually having known the Residents; but never mind.

Once again, I feel thoroughly restored by this thing and encouraged by the fact that it is still able to exist in a world of corporate entertainment product, franchises, and cynical marketing.

Fantasy & Science Fiction 697

Gordon Van Gelder (editor) Fantasy & Science Fiction 697 (2011)
Two years on from my previous issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction and this one initially looked as though the ship might have been going down, at least in comparison to previous issues I've read. Van Gelder seems to have proven himself a decent editor, so maybe it was just me, or maybe it was a couple of duds shoved up front so as to get them out of the way.

We open with Rutger and Baby Do Jotenheim by Esther M. Friesner which offers humourous encounters with urbane mythological figures, a genre of which I'm now thoroughly bored and have been since the fifty-three pages of Randy Henderson's appalling Bigfootloose and Finn Fancy Free which I managed to read before giving up. I've done it myself, for fuck's sake, but those were first steps and if a writer has reached the stage of someone else actually wanting to publish their shite, then they really should have got it out of their system. Rutger and Baby was funnier than Randy Henderson, but then so is almost everything else ever. Terry Pratchett has a lot to answer for.

My mood improved with Sarah Langan's The Man Inside Black Betty which, if nothing spectacular, is at least readable; which is the best one can say of most of that which follows, exceptions being Alan Peter Ryan's underwhelming Time and Tide, and Mary Rickert's The Corpse Painter's Masterpiece which, as with the previous thing I read by her, I found a bit incomprehensible; and A Borrowed Heart by Deborah J. Ross which seems to be Mills & Boon with dishy vampires and is therefore awful and a reminder of why I ordinarily tend to avoid fantasy fiction.

Albert E. Cowdrey's Where Have All the Young Men Gone? and Donald Mead's Spider Hill count as efficient and enjoyable. Karl Bunker's Overtaken and Bright Moment by Daniel Marcus are actually good; and Jon Armstrong's Aisle 1047 seemed initially impenetrable but was actually very good once I was accustomed to his weird stylistic flourishes.

Finally, Anise by Chris DeVito is excellent, dealing with a depressingly plausible cybernetic post-humanity and reading how I always expect J.G. Ballard to read, but without that off-putting air-brushed quality; and Geoff Ryman's What We Found is fucking great and more than justifies my having ploughed through a few turds to get there. It's set in Nigeria and I'm not really quite sure what you'd call it - science-fiction only in so much as that it's about the scientific process, or rather our understanding of the same, but what matters is that it's properly a masterpiece regardless of genre.

So we got there in the end.

Fantasy & Science Fiction #676

Gordon Van Gelder (editor) Fantasy & Science Fiction 676 (2008)
Back in 2008, I decided to educate myself regarding what science-fiction* there was to be had beyond Philip K. Dick - of whom I'd already read a fair bit - and Who novels. I'd taken to picking up whatever I could find which looked interesting, mostly from charity shops, and so became familiar with Asimov, Simak, van Vogt and others; but still I felt the need to know what was going down on the mean streets of science-fiction literature right now, right at this moment, or right at that moment in this case, so I got my ass to Borders and picked up the September issues of Analog, Asimov's Science Fiction, and this one, Fantasy & Science Fiction, which seemed to be the best of the bunch.

This issue featured Paolo Bacigalupi's Pump Six, which I thought was fucking amazing, and which compelled me to buy at least a couple of his other books, and which seems even more amazing twelve years later, not least because it describes the sort of profoundly sickening environmental decline which has actually been coming true right outside our windows.

Even better was Carolyn Ives Gilman's Arkfall which makes fairly profound observations about the human condition and specifically how we relate to each other, but makes them quietly and without any shouting in one of the weirdest, most unsettling environments you could imagine, at least without invoking quantum theory. This one really affected me when I read it, and I've just noticed my having failed to read anything else by the woman, so I'll try to put that one right.

Elsewhere in the mag, Jim Aiken's Run! Run!, Robert Reed's Salad for Two, and Laura Kasischke's Search Continues for Elderly Man are decent, and probably in that order; leaving us with one of those tales told as a series of letters sent back and forth between the two protagonists which I couldn't be arsed to read, and Rand B. Lee's Picnic on Pentecost, which opens with the planet has a face like a dead circus performer, but then did nothing else to keep me from skipping ahead. To be specific, the story is mostly told by means of that Claremont-speak which attempts to fakesimulateinvoke thought by running words words words together in a cloying-annoying way - sillystupidcrappy - and which once endangered the narrative integrity of many an X-Men comic back in the day, so I couldn't be arsed to read that one either. All the same, with Pump Six and Arkfall together in this single volume, you tend not to notice a couple of duds. This issue may not quite be where it all began for me, but it was certainly where something began.

*: Referring here to the written word because I generally couldn't give a shit about film or TV, or at least ceased to do so around this time.

Fantasy & Science Fiction 613

 

Gordon Van Gelder (editor) Fantasy & Science Fiction 613 (2003)
I have new books, or at least books newly purchased which I'm yet to read, but somehow nothing is sticking. I read a few pages of London Fields, a few of a Kornbluth, part of a short story by A.E. van Vogt, but I'm not in the mood for any of them; so I'm really beginning to appreciate having accumulated unread back issues of the digests just in case, particularly those such as this one which has been mostly light without feeling either insubstantial or crappy.

This is my third back issue this year, bringing us up to 2003, and it's been the best one yet, seemingly representing a further refinement of what Fantasy & Science Fiction does. Back in April, I wrote:

Unfortunately I am no more able to read fantasy than I am able to attend renaissance fairs dressed as a fucking minstrel. As soon as I read a sentence suffixed with my Lord, my brain shuts itself down.

I guess it wasn't just me, because by 2003 the magazine is happily free of anyone with pointed ears wearing a green hat, and what we have sits loosely between speculative fiction and the modern ghost story - I'd say something in the Gothic tradition, but I'd be guessing. M. Shayne Bell's Anomalous Structures of My Dreams and Jeremy Minton's Halfway House are probably the stand-outs, but there's nothing bad here, and everything reads very much like the work of authors who care about their craft. I stumbled a little upon Mary Rickert's The Machine and Albert E. Cowdrey's Grey Star, but second run ups taken next morning paid off, particularly with The Machine, which is, on reflection, probably one of the more satisfyingly intense things I've read this year.

Fantasy and Science Fiction 586

Gordon Van Gelder (editor) Fantasy and Science Fiction 586 (2000)
Skipping two whole decades on from my previous issue, by the turn of the century Fantasy & Science Fiction has a new editor and is generally more readable - closer to the modern incarnation with which I am loosely familiar. I assume there must have been a point at which it no longer seemed practical to serialise entire soon to be published novels in the digests, and so this issue presented a much lighter, more enjoyable read, having been spared Robert Silverberg droning on about castles and fealty for a million pages. Gregory Benford comes across as a bit of a bore, and is a poor substitute for Asimov, but the rest is otherwise a major improvement. Not everything here is amazing, but neither is any of it lousy; and Brian Stableford's tale of mandrake farming in ancient Rome gets a thumbs up from me, as does Nancy Etchemendy's telling prediction of the current political climate in America; and Amy Sterling Casil's satisfyingly screwy account of George III supplying beings from outer space with mints sort of illustrates why Fantasy & Science Fiction has historically pissed over much of the competition.