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.
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.
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