The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 2008

In the March, 2008, issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction Alexander Jablokov sees the Cold War technology race through the eyes of “The Boarder,” Vassily, a Soviet ex-pat living in Andrew’s U.S. basement. As a metallurgist who helped to develop Sputnik, he follows the U.S. space program with avidity, influencing young Andrew with his criticisms. An affectionate character sketch full of juicy details and crunchy description, “The Boarder” reads like a eulogy to the time when the heightened tension of the Cold War made the USSR seem menacing but also alluring at the same time.

The versions of fairy tales that we grow up with can be pretty simplistic, characterologically speaking. In Rumpelstiltskin, there’s the innocent fair maid, beset by both a greedy king and a malicious magical dwarf—who will help her turn straw into gold if only she will give him her kid. Good and evil seem fairly well delineated, but, as anyone who reaches back further into the origins of such stories knows, fairies and their tales are distressingly ambiguous: neither fully kind nor fully cruel, but both at once and undeniably powerful. Nancy Springer examines this confusing, dual fairy nature in “Rumple What?”, a retelling of the tale largely sympathetic to Rumpelstiltskin. She uses a deft, encapsulated style of writing and characterization to make each of the three players—miller’s daughter, king, magical man—outwardly repulsive but inwardly sympathetic. The big revelation of Rumpelstiltskin’s true motives falters because Springer just summarizes, rather than shows, but, overall, she proves that the nature of fairies that humans term “capricious” and “moody” isn’t just the province of supernatural beings. It’s actually human nature.

Lerner, an invalid relic of the plantation South, rules his servants despotically from his bed at the turn of the 20th century in “The Overseer” by Albert E. Cowdrey . Though he is a distasteful character when the story opens, a look into his past reveals even more nasty details, including manslaughter, robbery, profiteering, slavery, hate crimes, and white supremacy—the underbelly of Southern history. Much of the conflict centers around Lerner’s contemptuous present-day treatment of his manservant, Morse. There’s something to be said for the way in which Cowdrey uses the ghostly figure of an overseer, that middleman tyrant of plantations, as an inspiration for so many of Lerner’s evil actions, but I can’t say that this story interested me much. Full of incident, but low on emotional punch, it was too overstuffed, leaving me little room in which to insert my sympathies.

I like K.D. Wentworth’s “Exit Strategy” because it starts off from familiar tropes but slowly creeps beyond them. At first, Charlsie is a vapid, superficial teen who wants to volunteer at the Church of Second Life, where terminally ill or dying people download their minds into new bodies, to piss off her dad. As Charlsie’s initial rebellion turns into sincere compassion for the church and its members, her dad and therapist panic. Wentworth’s lighthearted tone, which appears dismissive at first, dances elegantly across questions of teenage autonomy, parental concern, cults vs. religion, even transgender identity, coming to rest in an unexpected (for me, at least) and very fitting place.

From what I’ve read about mountain climbing, apparently the ascension of a peak can put you in an altered state of consciousness. Obviously, the lower oxygen levels at higher elevations may make mountaineers susceptible to dizziness, hallucinations, and scrambled thinking, but also, the act of climbing itself casts its own spell. Driven by the need to reach the top or to complete the trek, climbers find injuries, disappearances of fellow climbers, even their own impending deaths less pressing. Richard Paul Russo’s “The Second Descent” explores this strange state of mind in which climbers are running on empty. Rafael and his compatriots are trying to get down a mountain. The base of the mountain seems as elusive as the fabled golden city atop the mountain that they see, but never reach. Trapped in endless toil between the beauty of the heights and the safety of the depths, Rafael tries not to go insane in this subtly done, piercingly written piece of allegorical horror.

Donnie Darko meets It’s a Wonderful Life in “A Ten-Pound Sack of Rice” by Richard Mueller. Here we have an off-his-rocker hero who gets messages about the world’s imminent demise, a la Donnie, and, relatedly, a chance to fix things, a la George Bailey. Fortunately, “Rice” is neither as relentlessly optimistic as Life or as dopily transcendent as Donnie. Nathan, the WWII vet hero, acts like a skeptical, cantankerous son of a bitch for most of the story, even when confronting the Devil and traveling back in time. The circumstances of Nathan’s life do change, as is inevitable in these types of stories, but it is refreshing to see that he doesn’t become angelic. He just does a good thing. I would have crossed out the last overly obvious sentences and replaced them with the last sentence of the penultimate paragraph, but that’s a small criticism of a story otherwise richly set, well-detailed, and satisfyingly done.