The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 2008

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction has been running since 1949 and, as its title hints, offers a catholic mix of SF of varying degrees of hardness, as well as fantasy, and even outright horror and occasional slipstream. Its stories often have a more urbane, less intense style than the majority of stories in the pages of its major competitors, and while individual copies of the magazine are rarely landmark issues, its quality is cumulative, nor does it often offer duds.

2008 opens with Sean McMullen’s “The Twilight Year,” a Celtic fantasy set in a sixth century Britain ravaged by barbarians from Northern Europe, against whom only a few local squires preserving the Roman way of life hold fast. Worse, crops are failing after a summer all but occluded by ash from one of Krakatoa’s periodic eruptions (so the header tells us). Against this chaos-ravaged backdrop, a wandering minstrel meets an envoy of the Eastern Roman Empire from Byzantium. The minstrel scratches a marginal existence singing for the squires’ entertainment, but while they want comedies, he prefers ballads about a British warrior, Arturian, who roams the land exacting revenge on the descendants of the Romans that ravaged his country five centuries earlier. The envoy hopes that the minstrel will be the means by which he will meet the elusive Arturian, but there is a darker side to a warrior king’s war against the “Romans.”

McMullen draws an evocative portrait of life in Britain after “the Golden Age” of Roman rule in what turns out to be an effective variation on Arthurian legend. However, occasionally the author’s voice intrudes, as when McMullen tries to explain the Year Without a Summer of 535-536:

“The snow is mixed with fine red dust,” Valcian pointed out. “Perhaps a storm raised it from a distant desert, or a volcano blasted it into the winds.”

A sixth-century observer might well note dust in the wind near a volcano, but whether they would understand enough climatology to rationalize it as the origin of tainted snowfall thousands of miles away is debatable. And Vulcanism is only one theory advanced for the origin of that summer’s extreme weather, so McMullen’s need for a lecture itself seems redundant.

Secondly, there’s McMullen’s occasional third-millennium narration; “I established my identity” sounds like nothing a sixth-century bard would say, as one of several such false notes. In the end, “The Twilight Year” is good—it’s almost very good, but not quite.

“It’s a Wonderful Life” by Michaela Roessner is a Christmas story (the magazine is dated January, but many of its subscribers will read the magazine while their families tune into Scrooged or some other seasonal material) that tells of Cal, a Vietnam vet now working as a janitor at a top secret DoD installation that’s busy sending “volunteers” into the past to change history. It’s Cal’s belief that the missions are failing because they’re too ambitious, as he tells a couple of young volunteers enjoying a last meal. Cal is a film buff and quotes the number of missed opportunities to make great films—and thereby make people feel better about their lives—much to the amused contempt of the volunteers. Because it’s a Christmas story, it has a feel-good ending that’s as slight as Cal’s suggested “improvements to the past,” but it’s charming and well put together, if one can accept the lax security at a supposedly secret installation, so overall it’s worth the read.

John Kessel’s “Pride and Prometheus” also looks at historical popular entertainment, but in this case, Regency (early nineteenth century) Literature. In arranging for Mary Bennet (younger sister of Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet, heroine of Pride and Prejudice) to meet with Victor Frankenstein at a ball in Grosvenor, Kessel ventures into well-trodden territory: Mary Shelley’s proto-scientist has virtually a whole sub-sub-genre to himself, most notably Steven Utley and Howard Waldrop’s “Black as the Pit, From Pole to Pole,” a gumbo of a story which is held together by Frankenstein’s creation.

But where Kessel scores is in fusing two seemingly disparate genres together so beautifully; it’s a wonderful Austen pastiche, and only rarely does he ever let control of his material slip. Once the initial bemusement at such an unlikely juxtaposition has passed, it’s a well-written story in its own right, with Mary [Bennet] at times quoting contemporary beliefs in such a way that they feel as if they could as easily have come from the mouth of Mary Shelley, who was, after all, a feminist almost two centuries before the term was popularized.

While the first half of the story is as light a soufflé as any Austen created, the mood gradually darkens with the second half to bring it emotionally closer to Shelley’s Gothic denouement—although in the end, Kessel reins in the story to steer a middle course which, unlike many genre romances, avoids both a contrived resolution and some of the histrionics that characterized his source material, and he manages to wring fresh pathos from what could, in a lesser writer’s hands, simply be a reworking of familiar materials. In all, “Pride and Prometheus” is highly recommended.

“The Quest for Creeping Charlie” by James Powell is essentially filler; it’s well plotted, as one would expect of a veteran writer (Powell has been contributing to EQMM and other magazines for over forty years), amusing, but ultimately unsatisfying. Because the story is almost all narrative—and omniscient at that—there’s little to hook the reader emotionally to the story of a man’s obsessive search for the Megamensalopes, “the smartest of all the animals…” But it’s competent, and others may like it better than I.

Ruth Nestvold’s “Mars: A Traveler’s Guide” shares with Powell brevity—it’s only three hundred words longer—and a cool, distant tone, yet Nestvold gives us a poignant glimpse into the desperate requests for information from a computerized travel guide, made by a stranded traveller doomed by a series of freak accidents. Those who have studied transport disasters will recognize the horrific inevitability of supposed fail-safes not working in a cascade. It’s a better, stronger story than the Powell, and an object lesson in how to write very short stories.

Onto “Mystery Hill” by Alex Irvine, the last and longest story in the issue (it’s a couple of hundred words short of novella length), and almost the best. In the end, if “Pride and Prometheus” shades the honours, it’s because this wickedly funny tale of a “sentimental tourist-trap shyster” in an obscure corner of Michigan, and the visiting physics professor for whom he falls like a toppling tree, never quite lives up to its first half. That’s not to say that the story isn’t good—it is; very good, in fact. It is deceptively simple, the characterization as acute as cute can be, and Irvine’s tongue is so far back in his cheek that it’s a miracle he doesn’t swallow it.

Mystery Hill is a tourist trap which Ken Kassarjian has been running for over thirty years, in an area where gravity does strange things, where the local teenagers like to pogo on the seventeenth hole of his golf course, and where the conspiracy nuts have woven Ken into the fabric of their theories (“‘So it is today,’ she said. ‘That’s why you’re keeping everyone out. You know, don’t you, Ken?’”). When Professor Fara Oussemitski (Irvine seems to have a fascination for Armenian-sounding names) shows up wanting to take readings, he learns what goes into bootlegger Little Boozy Boswell’s mysterious and mind-altering hooch, and what the secret of Mystery Hill actually is.

The problem is not that the climax falls flat so much as that no second half could actually deliver everything that Irvine promises in the first without disappearing into outright lunacy, and in the end, Irvine pulls away from that to deliver a fine, well-structured, coherent story that makes perfect sense, but which packs no emotional wallop.

And which maybe—now I think about it—begs a sequel. It would explain why Mystery Hill does not so much end as fizzles out, and is so less than the sum of its gloriously daft parts.

So to conclude: two so-so stories, two that verge on being memorable, and two which will probably make it into a Year’s Best, or at least the Honorable Mentions. Which is one of the great things about F&SF, every month they manage to deliver a magazine that’s deceptively easy to read. Producing a magazine regularly whose issues may not be individual classics, but which are rarely duds is as hard as the stories are readable. That The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is homing in on its sixtieth year is a testament to how often and how well the magazine delivers.