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.
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.
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