The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Oct-Nov 2008

This special double issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction contains pieces by a number of genre big names, including Michael Swanwick, Terry Bisson, mundane science fiction movement founder Geoff Ryman, and Stephen King.

Laurel Winter’s “Going Back in Time” is a light, brief riff on the incoherence of a world where quantum uncertainty manifests itself at the macro level, related through the breaking up of a story into bits related out of order. The basic concept struck me as pretty well-worn by this point, however, and while I think it still has comic possibilities, the handling this time around didn’t win me over.

In Michael Swanwick’s “The Scarecrow’s Boy,” a boy flees a car crash and is found by a household robot who promises to take him to safety. While I am a fan of Swanwick’s work, and this piece is full of the charming trademark touches that I (and I am sure, many others) look forward to when reading his fiction, the story, unusually for this highly accomplished author, is somewhat marred by a plot that struck me as underwritten rather than subtly developed.

Carol Emshwiller’s “Whoever” tells the story of a woman who has lost her memory. Interestingly enough, the implication is that she lost it by choice, which is at the root of the story. While Emshwiller’s nameless protagonist is not unmindful of the potential for embarrassment this situation causes (as when she reacts to coming to while lying in a dirty doorway), what prevails is a sense of possibilities, the loss of memory and at least a potentially liberating experience.

The relationship between freedom and memory is one well worth exploring, but I have to say that Emshwiller’s story struck me as overly cheerful in that regard, the sense of possibilities this time around a case of simple naïveté. Barring something horrible, after all (which would necessarily be unremembered here), why should anyone be so upbeat about not remembering their old life? Is the past really escaped, a new life really found so easily? In the end, it felt too much like the Oprah Winfrey take on the situation for my taste.

M. Rickert’s “Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment: One Daughter’s Personal Account” is written from the point of view of a girl whose mother has “disappeared” in a theocratic future America reminiscent of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. It is, however, not a simple redo of that earlier story, and if anything, this piece struck me as being creepier than Atwood’s book, partly because of the use of the perspective of a child who has never known any other world; and partly because of Rickert’s subtler worldbuilding (though admittedly, it also has the advantage of being more recent, enabling it to exploit more immediate sources of anxiety). While there certainly are politics here, Rickert succeeds in crafting a very personal (and devastating) tale.

Stephen King’s “The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates” is about a woman who gets a phone call from her husband, who was reported dead in a disastrous plane crash two days before. Not a horror story as those who know King only by reputation might guess it to be, its sensibility is, as the editorial introduction tells us, rather more The Twilight Zone, with its core located not in its supernatural gimmickry, but its treatment of the hold that old connections have over us. The small details are handled masterfully, but I felt that the story would have been more engaging if it gave the reader a deeper sense of the relationship between the couple.

Steven Utley’s “Sleepless Years” is about a man literally brought back from the dead, a zombie experimentally reanimated who now lives without sleep, related by the frustrated zombie himself. The story’s focus is on the narrator’s coping with the fact of his revival and all its implications, which Utley has thoroughly developed in this compelling piece.

The title of Terry Bisson’s “Private Eye” implies that the story is another piece in the long-established genre tradition of inverting noir clichés. While some of that certainly goes on, this pleasant surprise, rather than aiming for the more obvious approach of a Raymond Chandler parody, innovatively and humorously brings together the implications of old-fashioned voyeurism and futuristic high-tech.

Scott Bradfield’s “Dazzle Joins the Screenwriter’s Guild” is, as the tile hints, a Hollywood story. The twist is that “Dazzle” is a talking dog, which tweaks the show business clichés enough to get a little more mileage out of them, though how one feels about this kind of story in general will still have much to do with their reaction to Bradfield’s piece.

Albert E. Cowdrey’s “Inside Story,” set in post-Katrina New Orleans, features a cop who walks through the door of a FEMA trailer in the course of an investigation to find himself in a “nine-dimensional bubble universe.” A gonzo take on the alien abduction story, it gets by on sheer, lighthearted strangeness.

Robert Reed’s “The Visionaries” opens as a story of a type that I’ve long ago come to find problematic, the tale of a frustrated author. (Whenever I see one, I suspect the author’s just being lazy, in the manner of so much bad independent film made by, of, and for frustrated writers whose sole interest seems to be their not-very-interesting selves.) However, to Reed’s credit, the story is more thoughtful about the situation than most such pieces, which tend to truck in tired clichés rather than the realities of “the writing life.” More importantly, the overly familiar situation quickly proves to be a launch pad for something else, a more sophisticated (but light) metafictional musing on the problem of trying to predict the future.

Tim Sullivan’s “Planetesimal Dawn,” by contrast, opens in that most traditional of science fiction environments, space, specifically the surface of an asteroid (LGC-1) on which a pair of explorers (Nozaki and Wolverton) have just landed. As is usually the case with such stories, a surprise awaits them. The story was not comedic in the sense that I expected reading Sullivan’s biographical blurb, but it does bring a sense of whimsy to some familiar elements.

The last piece, Geoff Ryman’s “Days of Wonder,” shifts away from a spacefaring far future to a reprimitivized one whose inhabitants look back to machine-minded Ancestors, while being surrounded by (and even embodying) technological legacies of theirs that make their world more than a simple reversion to a prehistoric way of life. The plot itself focuses on the migration of his protagonist and narrator Akwa’s “herd,” which eventually becomes a quest after something more. A cleverly constructed and highly readable piece, it was the most effective piece of storytelling in the issue.