The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 2008

In the first short story, “Balancing Accounts” by James L. Cambias, of the February 2008 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Annie is a sentient spaceship (I think) whose owners allow her the independence to seek out and trade for metal, electronics, and other supplies needed for interstellar travel. Mostly, Annie thinks in a calculus of measurable gains and losses, things she can quantify. Then she’s ordered to protect a human—a type of being that she has very little experience with—and, in the ensuing struggle with hostile repo robots over the custody of the small human, Annie learns about the more nebulous currency of emotions. The trope of “tough character having heart softened by a child” gets new and clever life here, with Cambias successfully inhabiting the mind of an A.I. who’s convincingly robotic and also sympathetic. The worldcraft and the character development, both terse and sophisticated, really make this story.

Weird stuff happens when you get mixed up with time-traveling bibliophiles. So discovers young auction agent, Sam, when, after a career-breaking loss at an auction for a rare book, he draws close to the small society of three erudite, used bookstore clerks and their time machine. They tinker with the past, rippling profound changes out to the future. Should they try to make everything “right?” What is “right,” anyway? In “Retrospect,” Ann Miller leads us in a low-key, but pointed, musing about what exactly the best of all possible worlds might be. Uniting a relatively lucid perspective on time travel with a pretty cool version of the future in which Columbus never got to the New World, the author proves her writerly chops. Apparently, this is her first published story; I look forward to more.

Sanson doesn’t want a paranormal ghostwriting project. Yet, he is working on the titular “Memoirs of the Witch Queen,” the subject of which, Inza, begins magically interfering with his life (clearing his allergies, killing his debt collector, sidelining his picky editor, etc.). As Inza embroils herself deeper in Sanson’s life, the anti-occult police pop up, wanting Sanson to be a secret agent for them. From Ron Goulart, this is a well-balanced piece of minor silliness with no pretensions and several vampires, which usually improve things, in my highly biased opinion.

The main character in Matthew Hughes’s “Petri Parousia,” Jim Feltham, gets sucked into yet another of long-time pest Wally Applethorpe’s genetic research schemes. He’s going to find Jesus’ DNA. A potentially interesting plot, yes, but Hughes expends much more energy on the entertaining dynamic between crotchety Jim and socially clueless Wally. I could have read a longer story about the bickering between these two characters; as it was, when the last sentence rolled around, it seemed like a disappointing joke that wasted the sprightly banter before it. While “Memoirs of the Witch Queen” doesn’t strain for effect, I can see “Petri Parousia” mugging, trying to be funnier than it actually is.

If soccer is really awesome and dinosaurs are really awesome, what could be even more awesome than dinosaurs playing soccer? “Bread and Circus” by Steven Popkes takes the conceit and runs with it, seriously imagining how gigantic talking saurons might modify the game, while not neglecting the humorous potential of herbivores vs. carnivores. I’m personally biased against sports matches as a subject for short stories, in part because the quick action of a game can be hard to represent in print, but Popkes does a fine job here with a story about a (human) coach whose team and marriage are in the toilet. Expertly executed and comically violent slapstick, with particularly amusing intercuts of marriage/soccer match commentary.

As the title indicates, “Philologos; or, A Murder in Bistrita” by Deborah Doyle and James Macdonald concerns a Victorian philologist, William Sharps, and the murder he is charged with. Sharps, being immersed in a hunt for rare books, has nothing to do with said murder, so, when locally influential Baron Totosy rescues him from certain punishment, he feels grateful. But then Totosy traps Sharps in his castle, and events ensue that prove that, gratifyingly enough, Sharps has lots more brains than the characters in Dracula, also menaced by Romanian supernatural horrors. This compact, fleetly paced and beautifully crafted mystery demonstrates what Sherlock Holmes would be like if he investigated monstrous affairs.

In “If Angels Fight” by Richard Bowes, the main character returns to his youthful Boston stomping grounds at the behest of his childhood friend’s sister, Carol. Carol wants the main character (who, as far as I can tell, remains nameless throughout) to hunt down her younger brother, Mark, a moody, intense black sheep in an otherwise glittering family of political high achievers. Complicating this quest is the fact that Mark has (supposedly) been dead for decades and, when alive, exerted an elusive, controlling effect on people’s minds, almost like possession. Bowes tells this story mostly in flashbacks that richly evoke the neighborhoods of Boston and its incestuous political culture. Beneath the casual and sometimes clichéd turns of the main character’s narrative voice, there runs a striking meditation on Mark’s isolation—trapped in his own body as if locked in a tower. Bowes sustains an appealingly melancholy mood, a long sigh of wistfulness for glory that the main character glimpses, but never partakes of.