Edward L. Ferman (editor) Fantasy & Science Fiction 345 (1980)
Freed from the tyranny of the to be read pile, I find myself at liberty to scour my shelves for anything which escaped the net first time around, titles I may have owned for a while without actually noticing my failure to have read them. This is one of a dozen or so issues of the digest magazines - a category also including issues of Analog, Asimov's Science Fiction, and Amazing Stories - mostly excavated from the crappiest of thrift stores out of a sense of pity in the belief that, being magazines rather than books in the normal sense, their existence is on a more ephemeral footing, thus requiring that I rescue them. Of course, being arguably more ephemeral than your regular book store novels, such magazines seem to present an elevated possibility of weird obsurities by persons who only had one decent story in them, or whose work never made it into an anthology. On occasion I've bought these magazines from news stands as they were published - mainly just for the sake of poking a thermometer up science fiction's bottom in order to assess its health at time of purchase - but I've never been a regular subscriber, because I've always had too much waiting to be read as it is without asking for extra homework.
Anyway, here we are. In February 1980, I was a regular reader of the Star Wars and Doctor Who comics, plus 2000AD, and Tornado; I bought Sham 69's Hersham Boys album and was thinking about buying Never Mind the Bollocks; and I received a Valentine's Day card from the girl I fancied at school, which turned out to have been sent by her friends in jest, prompting me towards a period of bitter introspection. Fantasy & Science Fiction was a long, long way off my radar.
This is probably the most underwhelming issue of the magazine I've encountered, although to be fair, it has been a nevertheless pleasurable delve even if the rewards aren't what I had hoped they might be. Most of the book is taken up with the final quarter of Silverberg's Lord Valentine's Castle, published in instalments for some reason, which is readable but dull as fuck. I've read Silverberg before, and if not consistently amazing, he wrote well when it suited him. Lord Valentine's Castle is possibly symptomatic of the late seventies upsurge in fantasy fiction, the stuff against which Gibson's Neuromancer was supposedly a reaction just as the Damned had been a reaction against Pink Floyd, should you subscribe to that reductionist and not entirely workable theory. To me it reads like Silverberg going to see Star Wars, noticing the success of Frank Herbert's Dune, then deciding he wants in on the action.
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. For this reason I managed only three pages of Tanith Lee's Cyrion in Bronze - also in the issue - then gave up. I made it through Silverberg's contribution, but without much enthusiasm. I have a theory that fantasy is mostly written by and for dunces. They lack the skill to describe the existing world with any sort of insight, and, lacking imagination, are only able to compose using a well established cast of characters and ideas already found within the public domain - elves, wizards, castles, magic by which plot can be moved forward without the need of complicated explanation, vampires, imps, plucky young farmhands, and so on and so forth. Successful fantasy, what little of it there may be, is either exceptionally well written or else does something unexpected with its staples - which I suppose leaves us with Simak, Tolkien, Clark Ashton Smith, and maybe a couple of others. Lord Valentine's Castle, like much of the genre, may as well be a novelisation of the drama imagined by small boys playing with action figures, my Lord.
Jack Massa's The Daydream Enhancer and Robert Grossbach's All Things Come to Those Who Weight are okay, at least short and sweet; and Fud Smee by Connor Cochran - writing as Freff - is mostly great but for an underwhelming conclusion. Cochran is better known as an illustrator, but Fud Smee seems like the best thing in here by some way, so it's a shame he didn't write more, or at least have more published.
Actually, the best thing in here is probably Asimov's The Finger of God, an essay on why Hitler lost and why the US bombed Japan even though the war was pretty much over. Asimov's writing is well suited to this sort of analysis, and this essay capably illustrates why he enjoyed such a stellar reputation. I only wish I liked his science fiction novels as much beyond the one or two which were exceptional.
Freed from the tyranny of the to be read pile, I find myself at liberty to scour my shelves for anything which escaped the net first time around, titles I may have owned for a while without actually noticing my failure to have read them. This is one of a dozen or so issues of the digest magazines - a category also including issues of Analog, Asimov's Science Fiction, and Amazing Stories - mostly excavated from the crappiest of thrift stores out of a sense of pity in the belief that, being magazines rather than books in the normal sense, their existence is on a more ephemeral footing, thus requiring that I rescue them. Of course, being arguably more ephemeral than your regular book store novels, such magazines seem to present an elevated possibility of weird obsurities by persons who only had one decent story in them, or whose work never made it into an anthology. On occasion I've bought these magazines from news stands as they were published - mainly just for the sake of poking a thermometer up science fiction's bottom in order to assess its health at time of purchase - but I've never been a regular subscriber, because I've always had too much waiting to be read as it is without asking for extra homework.
Anyway, here we are. In February 1980, I was a regular reader of the Star Wars and Doctor Who comics, plus 2000AD, and Tornado; I bought Sham 69's Hersham Boys album and was thinking about buying Never Mind the Bollocks; and I received a Valentine's Day card from the girl I fancied at school, which turned out to have been sent by her friends in jest, prompting me towards a period of bitter introspection. Fantasy & Science Fiction was a long, long way off my radar.
This is probably the most underwhelming issue of the magazine I've encountered, although to be fair, it has been a nevertheless pleasurable delve even if the rewards aren't what I had hoped they might be. Most of the book is taken up with the final quarter of Silverberg's Lord Valentine's Castle, published in instalments for some reason, which is readable but dull as fuck. I've read Silverberg before, and if not consistently amazing, he wrote well when it suited him. Lord Valentine's Castle is possibly symptomatic of the late seventies upsurge in fantasy fiction, the stuff against which Gibson's Neuromancer was supposedly a reaction just as the Damned had been a reaction against Pink Floyd, should you subscribe to that reductionist and not entirely workable theory. To me it reads like Silverberg going to see Star Wars, noticing the success of Frank Herbert's Dune, then deciding he wants in on the action.
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. For this reason I managed only three pages of Tanith Lee's Cyrion in Bronze - also in the issue - then gave up. I made it through Silverberg's contribution, but without much enthusiasm. I have a theory that fantasy is mostly written by and for dunces. They lack the skill to describe the existing world with any sort of insight, and, lacking imagination, are only able to compose using a well established cast of characters and ideas already found within the public domain - elves, wizards, castles, magic by which plot can be moved forward without the need of complicated explanation, vampires, imps, plucky young farmhands, and so on and so forth. Successful fantasy, what little of it there may be, is either exceptionally well written or else does something unexpected with its staples - which I suppose leaves us with Simak, Tolkien, Clark Ashton Smith, and maybe a couple of others. Lord Valentine's Castle, like much of the genre, may as well be a novelisation of the drama imagined by small boys playing with action figures, my Lord.
Jack Massa's The Daydream Enhancer and Robert Grossbach's All Things Come to Those Who Weight are okay, at least short and sweet; and Fud Smee by Connor Cochran - writing as Freff - is mostly great but for an underwhelming conclusion. Cochran is better known as an illustrator, but Fud Smee seems like the best thing in here by some way, so it's a shame he didn't write more, or at least have more published.
Actually, the best thing in here is probably Asimov's The Finger of God, an essay on why Hitler lost and why the US bombed Japan even though the war was pretty much over. Asimov's writing is well suited to this sort of analysis, and this essay capably illustrates why he enjoyed such a stellar reputation. I only wish I liked his science fiction novels as much beyond the one or two which were exceptional.
The rest of the magazine comprises reviews, notably by Joanna Russ who made her name with The Female Man, which I still haven't read. Her reviews are insightful if a little dense, and she clearly had no fear of naming names when some beloved science fiction sacred cow curled off a stinker, doubtless accounting for the small ad in the rear of the magazine campaigning for her removal from its pages. I expect she opined something harsh but fair about Heinlein. That said, her better reviews don't inspire me to rush out and buy anything any more than Baird Searles' amusingly withering review of Nicholas Meyer's Time After Time has me looking for the DVD on Amazon.
I've read better issues of this magazine, but this was still interesting and has left me well disposed towards Joanna Russ on the grounds that she was probably doing something right in annoying the mysterious TDC of Glen Burnie, Maryland.
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