Gordon Van Gelder

It’s very hard to do Trump-adjacent dystopia without either doing nothing more than reporting or seeming cartoonish, or both. The more successful stories tend to reach beyond ripped-from-the-headlines scenarios. Janis Ian’s story of a white woman who fetishizes the Mexican workers forced to labor in her family’s fields was the most disturbing—it feels accurate about how sexuality can relate to racism but it is dystopic so it may not be something everyone is ready to read. Deji Bryce show more Olukotun’s The Levellers is about ecological levellers with politics that are not standard left or right and thus is more thought-provoking/speculative than many of the other immigration-focused stories. Mary Anne Mohranaj’s Farewell is the best of the human immigration-focused stories, though it isn’t particularly fictional or speculative (it’s about denaturalization of naturalized nonwhites). J.S. Breukelaar’s Glow is an immigration story with a difference, about aliens and humans and the thin skin between. Harry Turtledove’s and Barry Malzberg’s stories are cartoonish; sadly, Yoon Ha Lee’s is as well, and Jane Yolen’s poem; Geoff Ryman’s story from the perspective of a sexist whose wife likes liberal North California better than the guns-and-guns republic in the south is the same. Ray Vukevich’s story about ritualized humiliation of female resistance is the best of the cartoonish/satirical ones—it manages to insert genuine menace and an understanding of what makes people complicit in oppression even when they say to themselves that they disagree. show less

Ask a politician a question nowadays and he’ll tell you what he’s focusing on and what he’s focusing on won’t be the subject of the question. It goes without saying that ‘The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction’ contains interesting non-fiction articles and book reviews but what I’m focusing on is the stories.

The big novella this issue is ‘Success’ by Michael Blumlein and I liked every word of it, except for the last page. It’s the enthralling tale of Dr Jim, a show more brilliant scientist who goes off the rails and then gets back on them, perhaps, with the aid of a similarly brilliant but more stable lady scientist. There is much deep thought built into the story about epigenetics, Lamarckism, change at the individual and social level and searching for the meaning of it all. Dr Jim brought to mind the chap in ‘Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance’, who becomes engrossed in his thoughts to the exclusion of everyday cares. There was even that old horror standby, the thing in the basement. The fact that the story was not resolved in a traditional manner was the only aspect of it not to my taste but there are plenty of readers who don‘t mind that sort of ending. Possibly it all made sense and I just didn’t understand it. Oh well, I enjoyed the ride anyway.

Novelettes next. ‘Stones And Glass’ by Matthew Hughes takes up the continuing story of the thief Raffalon, who featured in ‘Wearaway And Flambeau’ in the July/Aug 2012 issue of this magazine. Raffalon is travelling under an alias to sell some precious gems at a fair in the town of Tattermatch. It has to be done quickly because the ‘gems’ are actually common stones and will be revealed as such in a few days when the enchantment on them fades. Raffalon encounters a man called Cascor, a former provost with a very persistent manner. Like Albert E. Cowdrey, Hughes always narrates in an entertaining fashion and I enjoyed the story but was I meant to prefer Cascor, as a character, to our hero Raffalon? No matter. It is hinted that they might team up for future stories so we will get more of both.

‘Baba Makosh’ by M.K. Hobson is a very unusual fantasy featuring Russian gods and keen communist revolutionaries. It takes place during the Russian civil war of 1922. Our hero, Pudovkin, is an old-fashioned sort of chap, close to nature and does not much enjoy his current work of purging villages for Commander Tchernov, a very stern scientific revolutionary. Then they all end up in Hell and things get complicated. It’s a highly original, moving and complex story with tons of imagination. Wonderful stuff.

The underworld only features in the title of Albert E. Cowdrey’s ‘Hell For Company’, a tale that demonstrates some facility with narrative technique. First off, the narrator is an anonymous writer chatting to Mark Twain who tells him a ghost story in which the ending is narrated to Twain by the person to whom it all happened. Complicated but well done. The story itself wasn’t particularly awesome but, as ever, Cowdrey delivers it in lively language and one’s time is pleasantly spent.

‘The Soul In The Bell Jar’ by KJ Kabza is worthy of Edgar Allan Poe. Lindsome Glass is a nice little girl and her parents have gone away travelling so she is sent to stay with her old great-uncle. He is a scientist who experiments on the vivified, dead animals bought back to a semblance of life by stitching their souls back on. Locals know him as the Stitchman and nobody goes near the ancient house. It’s an excellent dark fantasy and the author has a way with similes. Kabza’s on-line bibliography shows that he started selling stories to those little magazines that pay a few dollars per yarn about ten years ago. Now he appears regularly in the most prestigious fantasy market of all, which is encouraging for struggling writers. (Of course, they won’t all turn out as good as him, but the only way to find out is to keep writing.)

‘Through Mud One Picks A Way’ by Tim Sullivan concludes the novelettes. It is genuine Science Fiction about three aliens from Cet Four who have been transported to Earth by a businessman for purposes unknown. He has hired Uxanna Venz to communicate with them by touch telepathy, which they do well. She worked on their home planet and is an expert on the species. A nice parable about colonialism with a couple of decent twists to keep you surprised. It was mostly written in dialogue with, very little narration, but Sullivan managed to get all the background information across anyway. A neat trick.

There are only two short stories: ‘Hard Stars’ by Brendan Dubois is cunningly told so that you don’t really know what’s going on until half-way through. I won’t spoil the plot but it explores the consequences of modern information technology if things go wrong and has a great ending. I should also say that I liked it and believe the late Robert A. Heinlein would have liked it a lot as well. He might have written it if he was still around. The other short is a fantasy, ‘Sing Pilgrim’ by James Patrick Kelly. It’s about a chair that appears suddenly on Lancaster Street in Pulanski, Kansas. This jolly little piece by an award-winning short story specialist nicely finishes up the fiction in another fine issue.

‘The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction’ and several others in the genre, are now available in very reasonably priced and convenient electronic versions. That’s useful for everyone but especially for those who dwell in some far corner of a foreign field where distribution of paper copies is random at best and often non-existent.

Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/ show less

There’s a bit of a southern feel to this issue of ‘The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction’, southern USA, that is. This is evident in ‘Close Encounters’ by Andy Duncan which seems to be set in 1977 but harks back to an earlier era. Back in the 1950s, there were many UFO sightings in the USA and they became something of a fad. One old critter in his eighties has had his fifteen minutes of fame and retired to his backwoods cabin to live the quiet life. Now there‘s some new show more film out by that Spielberg feller about close encounters of the alien kind. Darned tootin’ if some right purty gal reporter don’t turn up on his doorstep and bring the whole danged business up again. He ends up a-hauling ass off to the wild blue yonder at night and watches a lot of damn fool scientists with gravimeters and spectrometers and who knows what investigating the lights in the night sky. Rest assured that Andy Duncan does a far better job of good ol’ boy US slang than I do in ’Close Encounters’ and delivers a touching tale that‘s more fantasy than SF. It ain’t too heavy on plot, frankly, but the prose and the mood evoked are a pleasure.

Southern California features next. ‘Father Juniper’s Journey To The North’ by Grania Davis is a historical fantasy narrated by the scribe Sandor, a monk who accompanied Father Juniper on a mission to Alta, California in the year of Our Lord 1769. The Franciscans wanted to save the natives from paganism and Jesuits. The Spanish King and the Governor were eager for gold. One monk had a monkey from South America which was very clever, did tricks and rode on the back of a pig. Were the monkey and pig supernatural spirits? Sandor wasn’t sure. History and Sandor tell us that Father Juniper’s noble efforts did not work out so well for the natives. This was a polished piece, like everything in the magazine, but evoked no great joy in my soul.

Back to the American heartlands again for Chet Arthur’s ‘The Sheriff’ but this time set in the wild western past. Jimson is an orphan who works in the town hotel and, though a simple soul, has the gift of prophecy. He see’s bits of the future. So when he tells his foster mother, Bama, that the sheriff is going to be shot, she is worried. Shore ‘nuff, the sheriff bites the dust and the man who takes his place has to track down the varmints what done it. This was a neat, old-fashioned western story, deftly told with nice touches of humour and I thoroughly enjoyed it. One advantage of fantasy is that it allows a broad range of settings and all other genres can be subsumed into it.

‘Where the Summer Dwells’ by Lynda E. Rucker was also set in the remoter parts of the USA. It was a fey, feminine tale about some young people going off to a gothic southern backwater and having something fantastical happen. The narrative was cleverly set up as the protagonist makes a trip now and recalls the past one made with other folks.

There’s a kind of Confederate feel about it when Mars revolts in ‘A Diary From Deimos’ by Michael Alexander. It’s the story of a revolution on an Earth colony world. Told in the form of a patriotic rebel lady’s diary, it echoes and satirises all those successful revolts in Robert Heinlein’s fiction by making the rebels a bit sordid and a bit gun happy, too. Earth has freed the robots and Mars doesn’t want to follow suit, a situation somewhat analogous to the war between the states, at least if you take the simplistic view that it was all about slavery. The diarist is one of those fussy, silly women that Heinlein often mocked in his fiction and there are clever one line references to Asimov’s ‘The Martian Way’ and even ‘Bartleby The Scrivener’ by Herman Melville. Call me Ishmael if this isn’t the most fun a writer can have with an old theme. I loved every word of it.

That same war between the states is looming over all in ‘The Goddess’ by Albert E. Cowdrey, who now appears in this magazine almost every issue and why not. Justin Lamarck is the son, by a slave woman, of a rich and powerful plantation owner. On a trip to London to investigate cotton machinery, he meets up with a Hindoo (the old spelling is used) named Ganesh Srinavasan, who tends him when he is seasick on the voyage back home and becomes his partner in running the plantation when Pa has a stroke. Into this powerful mix is thrown Madeleine Delatour, a dusky-skinned, sensual seventeen year-old that Ganesh finds when he is looking for a female for Justin. He gets more than he bargained for from this worshipper of Kali, but he can cope with powerful women. These ingredients might have gone to make a big, thick southern novel, a bestseller even. Why Mister Cowdrey chose to turn them into a droll, slickly plotted and slightly dark fantasy I could not say. I liked it a lot but you may not. Frankly, my dears, I don’t give a damn.

The other stories in this issue move far away from the Mason-Dixon line. ‘12:03 p.m.’ by Richard A. Lupoff definitely takes us into fantastical territory though the setting is the present day real world. Mister Castleman goes to see a psychiatrist and can tell her exactly how their conversation is going to unfold because he has had it many times before. His life tends to jump from one scene to another, changing when he touches a doorknob to leave a room and then finds himself entering another one for another repeated scene. This unfolds intriguingly and though the ending was one of those indefinite ones of which I am not fond, it was firmly fixed in the genre emblazoned on the cover of the magazine.

‘Give Up’ by Richard Butner is about Everest, in a way. For Jim’s forty-third birthday, he tells his wife, Charlotte, he wants nothing but buys himself a big blue tent that is an Everest simulation, a Backyard Everest. Jim and Charlotte are the local king and queen of trivia competitions, always winning, but he had been stumped a few months before when asked the identity of the two British explorers who died on Everest in 1924. He knew one was George Mallory who famously said, ‘because it’s there’, when asked why he wanted to climb the mountain but couldn’t identify the other bloke. This sparked an interest in Everest that led to the self-bought gift. Jim enters the tent and sets out to ‘climb’ Everest. Simulated Everest climbs are indubitably a good idea as I understand the Nepalese are now begging people to stay away because the mountain is covered in litter and corpses so popular has it become. The story did not, perhaps, live up to the originality of the concept but that might be because it reminded me of the many holodeck tales in ‘Star Trek’, of which I am not fond. (The holodeck tales, I mean. I am fond of ‘Star Trek’, obviously.)

Nonetheless, virtual reality is definitely an SF possibility that‘s becoming real and could have many applications. In ‘Theobrama Valentine’ by Rand B. Lee, it’s used in psychotherapy. The story is set in a far future with multiple alien species interacting on many worlds. Theobrama is a very special planet because of the chocolate plantations. The best chocolate known to sentients is produced there but the wealth this brings and the troubled background of the inhabitants, who started out as plantation slaves, makes it a hotbed of psychiatric troubles. Tuli is a psychiatrist who works with clients using virtual reality. Her last three clients have dismembered her while she was playing her role. An investigation is launched as this is unusual. Rand B. Lee delivers a highly entertaining story which is real hard core Science Fiction, full of weird names, strange terminology and great ideas. The notion that all emotional/rational species are subject to mental health problems is one I have not come across before. Aliens are usually presented as ruthless, evil, kindly, indifferent, logical and so forth but rarely as being as flawed as ourselves. Original.

Paul Di Filippo has a regular department called ‘Plumage From Pegasus’ which he fills with interesting stuff, often in the form of fiction as here. ‘Call Me Ishmael: LIKE/DISLIKE’ is perhaps a prediction of the future of publishing. First, spend years on social networks building up a vast array of ‘friends’. Then announce that you are going to write a novel once your customer base is all set up. Then let them in on it as you write so that it can meet with their approval. Electronic publishing is very probably the way things will be. The fact that the most appalling rubbish can become popular only makes it likely that more people will take up writing in the hopes of fame and cash. I am currently hard at work on ‘Forty Shades of Green’ the story of an Irish nymphomaniac. Note that this idea is now under copyright as it is in print. If anyone else makes millions with it, I will sue them for fifty percent.

‘Arc’ by Ken Liu opens with Lena Auzenne, in the winter of her days, being interviewed by reporters and recalling her life. When sixteen, she was made pregnant by a rich college boy who did a bunk. I didn’t like Lena when she left her baby with her parents to run off with another n’er do-well but, as she points out, the father also dodged his responsibilities and many people didn’t mind that so much, including me. Somehow a mother leaving the baby seems worse. Suitably chastened for my double standards, I read on. Lena eventually hitches up with the founder of Bodywerks, a company which has the formula for a long, healthy life. Meditations on the desirability of near immortality are not new to Science Fiction but this is a good one. Ken Liu impressed me last issue with his story ‘Real Faces’. One to watch.

Onwards. Mari is the seventh child in a big, out-going friendly family of blonde, sporty types who live in Norway, a land where, I believe, the blue parrots are easily stunned. Her fine skin burns in the mildest sun and she is more quiet and introverted than the rest of the family. There is a legend that one of her ancestors mated with a troll centuries before and that a child like her occurs every few generations. The obvious trick here is to make her an outcast but author Peter Dickinson doesn’t do that. In ‘Troll Blood’, she is an integral part of her big happy family. She falls in academically with a professor researching an ancient Norse manuscript and romantically with a hydroelectric engineer from England. When danger comes, she has to rescue the man she loves. This story had a lot of what Stephen King, in ‘Misery’, termed the ‘Gotcha’, at least for me. Pizza blackened in the oven while I read eagerly on to see what happened next. It was also a very good love story in a subtle but powerful way.

‘Contact’ by Sophie M. White

Must be

A poem.

Because the sentences

Are broken up

Into lines.

I prefer

More traditional poems

Which rhyme.

It was clever though

In a way.

I believe the usual way to review products of an anthological nature is to pick out the highlights and dismiss the rest with a line or two. I have done that with lesser magazines but I haven’t yet managed it with this one. Every yarn has some quality that deserves a mention, some impact that provokes a thought. This makes reviewing it a long job but such worthy stories, such worthy writers, should be saluted. In the teeming world market, it’s hard for talent to get noticed and in the declining short story market a magazine keeping quality fiction of this length alive deserves promotion. The electronic edition of ‘MofF&SF’ costs less than a pint of beer and will give you many more hours of pleasure. You can still have beer, mind. They are not mutually exclusive. show less

Some issues of genre fiction magazines have themes that run through their stories, whether intentional or not. The January/February 2015 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction is not one of those issues. There are a couple of stories that can be bundled together - there are a few folk tales, a couple of humorous works of light science fiction, and a couple of stories featuring the occult, but none of these connected bind together more than two of the stories in this volume's pages. If anything, show more the theme of this issue is "eclectic genre fiction". Fortunately, despite the disparate style of the various stories contained in it, this issue is mostly full of pretty good stories, and even the few stories that miss are worthy efforts.

Prisoners of Pandarius by Matthew Hughes is a heist story that turns into a mystery with a twinge of political intrigue all set in what seems to be a fairly standard fantasy world. Raffalon is a somewhat unhappy member of the Ancient and Honorable Society of Purloiners and Purveyors who was recently disappointed by what he judges to have been an unfair ruling by the masters of the Guild. Approached by the provostman turned sorcerer Cascor, Raffalon agrees to perform a break-in in exchange for information. After the robbery produces some unexpected results, Raffalon winds up imprisoned in a foreign city before a fortuitous turn of events sets everything to rights and the story ends. The characters are fun to follow around, and the individual scenes are well-crafted, but the story suffers somewhat due to the overly rushed ending and the fact that the nature of the nefarious plot that Raffalon almost unwittingly unravels is never actually explained.

A former NASCAR driver turned romantic outlaw, the title character of Lightning Jack's Last Ride by Dale Bailey hearkens back to the roots of stock car racing when moonshiners would try to outrace Federal authorities on the back roads of rural America. Except this story is set in the future, after NASCAR has collapsed due to gasoline shortages, and Lightning Jack's crimes are high stakes robberies involving hijacking moving tanker trucks full of precious gasoline. The story is told from the perspective of Gus March, former crew chief for Lightning Jack turned fellow outlaw as Gus looks back decades after Jack died, apparently in a car wreck during his final attempted hijacking. Except it turns out that isn't the true story, and the reality is both grimmer and more depressing than the dashing end provided by the video records. The story isn't so much a post-apocalyptic story as it is a mid-apocalyptic story, taking place during the chaos of a collapsing United States as sectional powers duel with central authority and ordinary folk just try to cope as the world bakes from global warming while coping with a decaying infrastructure built around the dying gasoline culture they grew up with. For anyone wanting to scratch their Mad Max or Car Wars itch, this story is perfect.

Jubilee: A Seastead Story by Naomi Kritzer is, unsurprisingly, another installment in Krizter's series concerning Seastead, a collection of offshore colonies of fugitives, libertarians, and desperate people living on ships converted into artificial islands in international waters. In this segment of the story, just on the brink of Seastead's Golden Jubilee, not one, but two plagues have swept the ships, either incapacitating or killing large numbers of seasteaders. One is a nano-tech plague that causes people to become fixated upon some task, and is called the "worker bee disease". The other is simply cholera. Beck, dealing with a newly arrived mother who wants to take her away to California, volunteers to help the Humanists as they attempt to get the surly and suspicious denizens of the various ships to let them try to halt the spread of these maladies. Under Beck's guidance, the Humanists navigate the quirky culture of the seastead and figure out what was causing the cholera epidemic, with the solution to the mystery illustrating in blunt terms why leaving the provision of public amenities to an unregulated private concern is probably a really bad idea. Despite Beck's affection for the place, seastead as presented is a nightmarish hellhole, which is about what one should probably expect from a lawless society run almost entirely by people seeking profits above everything else. The story itself rolls along fairly quickly, and in the end the plagues are put on the run, although it seems pretty clear that had there been some sort of functional government in place, many lives could have been saved.

An occult tinged mystery. Portrait of a Witch by Albert E. Cowdrey takes place on Little Antenora in the Caribbean, as hapless accountant Alfred Engle is pressured by the FBI into taking a position with the wealthy Lord Pye to help them unravel a series of murders that seem to be connected with Lady Pye. The story moves along, slowly building tension as it progresses from depicting a fairly bucolic, albeit somewhat quirky manor house on a remote island with an apparently kindly and generous English patron engaged in some minor and moderately benign lording over the native population and from there ratcheting things up the the revelation of the nastiness of Lady Pye and a couple of unexplained deaths. The story is somewhat devious, first making the reader think it is going in one direction and then reversing the field and dashing in the opposite direction. The only real weakness to the story is that the mystery isn't solved, so much as it is simply revealed when a character, for no real apparent reason at all, just explains everything near the end, almost as if Cowdrey got to the point where he was tired of the story and just wanted to cap it off in a hurry.

Set in a small town in the Louisiana bayou, Farewell Blues by Bud Webster features a jazz band that finds itself caught up in strange supernatural events that end up costing them their coronet player. Told by Juney Walker, a jazz trumpeter from the backwoods of Virginia, the story focuses on the small quartet, including Jake, who Juney describes as the best coronet player of all time. While the band is working a gig in a roadhouse in a town named Bayou Cane, strange things begin to happen, including the dead returning to walk among the living, and strange frog-like beasts rising up from the swamps. Despite these rather obvious supernatural events, the story has a dream-like quality that always seems to circle around the story, hinting at what is happening and what is at stake but never quite making everything clear until the big climax at the end, and even in its resolution the story has a bit of an enigmatic feel. There is a lot packed into this story ranging from a visitor from the dream world, to mysterious wise bayou dwellers, to reunions with dead relatives, to an epic battle against evil, but even with this much going on, the story avoids overflowing its bounds - although there are a few plot elements that are hinted at more than they are explained.

A story about a poor beggar girl who yearns to be a storyteller, Telling Stories to the Sky by Eleanor Arnason feels like it is itself a folk tale of the sort that would be told by a storyteller in the market square of an ancient trading city. The main character is an orphaned beggar girl named Swallow who loves stories, but cannot be a storyteller because of her gender, so instead she writes a story on a kite which ends up being carried away by the wind. In short order the North Wind asks her to join his court and tell him stories, which is where many stories would stop. But for Swallow her breezy benefactor is both a source of happiness and a source of troubles, which causes some interesting twists and turns. This being a mixture of a folk and fairy tale, everything works out reasonably well at the end, but Swallow has to endure a few bumps along the way to get there. Another folk tale based story, The Gazelle Who Begged for Her Life by Francis Marion Soty is a retelling of a story from 1,000 Nights involving a jealous wife, a doomed concubine, a shepherd girl with aspirations, a husband on a mission, and, finally, a Jinn with a dead son who serves as the audience for the tale. When the story opens, the merchant, a man named Kafar, is leading a gazelle to its death, with seemingly cold-hearted immunity to the creature's silent pleas for mercy. After accidentally killing a Jinn's son by throwing pomegranate seeds, Kafar recounts the series of events that led him to this point as a means of trying to placate the furious and vengeful Jinn. What follows is a story of love, betrayal, murder, and magic. By the end of the story, the emotional tone of the opening pages is completely reversed, making the merchant much more sympathetic, and the gazelle much more sinister.

Eric Schwitzgebel tackles the question of theodicy in Out of the Jar by imagining a protagonist who turns out to be living in a computer simulated world run in the computer of a somewhat callous teenager who takes the position of "God" for this world. Most of the story is taken up with examining the different ways that the teenaged "God" of the world justifies his whims and cruelties to the protagonist, who starts as a philosophy professor, and later connives his way into being a robot dinosaur. As the author is a philosophy professor who examines the question of theodicy in his professional life, this story seems to be a little bit autobiographical on some points, which gives the story an even creepier feel as it progresses. One hopes that the autobiographical nature of the story ends with the protagonist contemplating how God can commit evil, but in the back of the reader's mind one has to worry that Schwitzgebel has spent some time serving as the almighty's pet dinosaur while plotting his downfall, which is a somewhat disturbing thought. As a story, however, this works pretty well, and is a reasonably interesting take on an old philosophical question.

Combining time travel, with a bit of humor and a bit of romance, History's Best Places to Kiss by Nik Houser follows Ray and Karen Fox as they journey backwards in an attempt to stop the relationship that they believe has brought them both so much pain. The pair manage to shake their TimeGuide and evade capture as they rampage through first their own pasts and later through all of human history as they unsuccessfully attempt to derail their incipient romance. Eventually the pair find themselves huddled in a cave in the prehistoric era, at which point the story takes a turn that seem predictable before deftly evading the expected. The story turns out to be quite funny and a little bit endearing. Another humorous story, but with a little bit more of a bite, The Man from X by Gregor Hartmann imagines a writer so desperate to be noticed that he attempts to emigrate from his enormously overpopulated planet of eighty billion to the relative backwater of Zephyr, a planet still being terraformed that is home to a mere 100 million people. It seems that the competition in the arts fields on "X" is so fierce that it is nearly impossible to make any headway, so our protagonist has concocted a scheme to secure himself a position on more hospitable shores. Unfortunately, his conniving doesn't work out as he planned, to somewhat humorous effect, although the humor is tinged with just a hint of bitter satire.

A sea tale of obsession and regret, The Chart of the Vagrant Mariner by Alan Baxter follows the bloody pirate captain Reeve as he pursues a map that leads to madness and despair. Unfortunately, burdened by too many moving parts in a space too small to accommodate them, the story just doesn't really come together very well. We are told Reeve was obsessed with gold, but gave that up to be obsessed with revenge, which he gives up in the story to be obsessed with a map, but without being shown reeve's successive obsessions, they are just a collection of assertions without impact. We are told that Reeve and the narrator were both in love with a woman named Esme before she died, although in different ways, but once again there is no space in the story to give weight to the lost romance. Reeve is supposed to have been close friends with his first-mate, a relationship that is clearly intended to make it shocking when Reeve turns on him, but the reader is given very little that shows this friendship, so the scene falls a little bit flat. The story opens up with Reeve recruiting a new crew because his old crew mostly got killed in an engagement with the Royal Navy, which seems like an odd thing to wedge into a story that is already as crowded as this one is. Further, the encounter with the Royal Navy is placed in the past, making it little more than a footnote to the story. With more space to actually show the reader the obsessions, relationships, and events that are referenced, a longer version of this story could be quite good. As it is, however, it feels rushed and hollow.

The first poem in the volume is Robot Agonistes by Alan Ira Gordon, which offers a somewhat melancholy take on the question of robot nostalgia. It imagines a retired robot actor spending its last days in front of a television set watching old science fiction movies while lost in memories of his former fellow robot actors. The second is An Undiscovered Country by Robert Frazier, a rather creepy little work about an exploratory expedition gone wrong.

Fantasy & Science Fiction has a tradition of having fairly basic science fact articles, and this issue is no exception with Falling into the Unknowable by Paul Doherty and Pat Murphy giving an overview of what black holes are and how they work. The article is fairly straightforward and won't supply much in the way of revelations for most science fiction fans who are reasonably well-versed in astronomy, but not everyone is, so there is definitely a place for this sort of piece. There appears to be one small error, as it talks about an event happening in 2014 as something to look forward to, and the article was published in 2015. Despite this, for anyone looking to gain a basic understanding of black holes, or just looking for a modest refresher, this is a decent place to start.

Ultimately, this is a fairly ordinary issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. On the plus side, even an ordinary issue of this magazine is a collection of pretty good stories, but on the down side, there aren't really any stories that are more than pretty good. From the intrigue-laden fantasy of Prisoners of Pandarius to the time-traveling hijinks of History's Best Places to Kiss to the libertarian insanity of Jubilee: A Seastead Story to the creepy occult mystery of Portrait of a Witch, this issue is filled with interesting and engaging stories. Even the stories that don't quite work, such as The Chart of the Vagrant Mariner are intriguing misses. Lacking in any stand out pieces of fiction, this issue is serviceable, but unspectacular, making it worth a read, but not particularly notable.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less