The latest issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction carries the usual idiosyncratic mix of stories from returning regulars, new voices and an occasional long-time absentee.
Ian R. MacLeodIan
R. MacLeod returns after a twelve year absence with 'Recrossing The Styx.' Aboard a cruise lining touring the Mediterranean, shipboard entertainer Frank meets Dottie Warren, who is a Minder to her dead husband Warren. Like Silverberg's classic 'Born With The Dead," MacLeod's future world is populated by those who have been reanimated. But as Frank falls in love with Dottie and they plot to free her from her marriage, there is a savage twist in store. Highly Recommended.
Michael Alexander's 'Advances In Modern Chemotherapy' begins less than promisingly in a chemo ward, and with a narrative laden down with medical terminology. But after a slow start a tribute to Alfred Bester and a story that's aware of the genre's history ("Telepathy sounds so...fifties, she said") blossoms into a charming tale. Highly Recommended.
After two SF stories to open the issue, the focus switches to fantasy: 'Brothers of the River' by Rick Norwood is an Arcadian fantasy set 'Before the Flood' featuring two very different brothers and their relationship with the Older Gods. It's pleasant but slight, and not quite up to what's gone before.
John Langan
John Langan's 'The Revel' is a much darker beast, a second person point of view horror story of a werewolf that deconstructs the classic version of the story and seduces the reader into the story, in the same way as A A Attanasio's 'The Dark One: A Mythograph,' but given that they were fifteen years apart, any connection is unlikely, and perhaps shows how rare such stories are. Outstanding.
Like the Norwood, Brenda Carre's 'The Tale Of Nameless Chameleon' is a fantasy featuring various Gods in a pre- or alt-history setting. Unlike the Norwood, though this one has a little more bite and a protagonist who is a genuine character.
Albert E. Cowdrey'
Mister Sweetpants And The Living Dead' is another of Albert E. Cowdrey's trademark Southern States re-working of a spec-fic staple. This time it's zombies and gay sex that he turns his attention to. Great characterization, a well-evoked Florida locale and a wicked sense of humour and laconic narration combine well. Recommended.
Ramsey Shehadeh's 'Epidapheles and the Inadequately Enraged Demon' is the second story of the year about the rather inept wizrd and his familiar, a stool called Door. It's a little better than the first one, but still disappointing by F & SF's standards -- although editor van Gelder seems to take a perverse delight in polarizing opinion.
Richard Bowes
Richard Bowes' 'Pining To Be Human' shares its mid-1960s upstate New York setting with Elizabeth Hand's ' Illyria,' which is also ostensibly about acting while looking at a world alongside our own, but this is much more grounded in the period in question. The narrator believes himself to be a witch (fey) boy such as those who visited his parents when he was young, who wants to be human; Everyone in the company but Professor Cortland, so deep in the closet he didn’t get the joke, now said Witch Boy and Human Boy instead of gay and straight. Recommended.
Ken Altabef's 'The Lost Elephants of Kenyisha' takes the reader to the border between Kenya and Tanzania for a near-future story about a spectral elephant herd that provides the catalyst for the end of the species in a sad, elegaic story that straddles Sf and fantasy.
Heather Lindsley
Heather Lindsley's 'Introduction to Joyous Cooking, 200th Anniversary Edition' is however, out and out sf in the tradition of Damon Knight's 'To Serve Man' - although it doesn't have that classic story's bite. Two hundred years of recipes encompassing eco-catastrophe, first contact and matter transmission, all in a few hundred words. Highly Recommended.
'The Precedent' by Sean McMullen takes the reader twenty-five years into the future, after the oil has run out and civilization has all-but collapsed. Jason Hall is one of millions of people born in the twentieth century who is put on trial by the younger generation for wasting the world's resources. Judgement at Nuremburg meets The Seventh Seal in a post-apocalyptic setting. Grim, but Outstanding.
Departments
The Departments -Charles de Lint's Books to Look For, Paul di Filippo's Plumage From Pegasus with its rather odd book tour, Lucius Shepard on films and Paul Doherty and Pat Murphy's science article on cold- are all competent enough.
The ace in this pack is unexpectedly James Sallis on Books, which focuses this issue on Mark Rich's Biography of Cyril Kornbluth, who died too young at 35: We know beyond any doubt that, on that commuter train platform in 1958, with Cyril Kornbluth's death, the loss was huge—to the genre, to that bag of rattling oddments we call literature, and to every one of us who works in solitude and in silence here behind these strange machines. Outstanding.
Colin Harvey - Author six novels, and editor of four anthologies; professional reviewer since 2003, including six years at Strange Horizons. Member of ...
