A Walk on the Quirky Side

December’s F&SF shows off the magazine’s quirky side. First up: “A Foreign Country” by Wayne Wightman. In it, a third-string reporter gets assigned to cover one of the nut-job third party candidates in a Presidential race. The candidate, Faber, wanders around the countryside, talkin’ to folks, eating lots of food, and promising “happy times” ahead. To the shock of everyone not reading the story, he actually gets elected. And he makes the reporter/narrator his chief of staff. Faber doesn’t appear to actually do anything except eat; the reporter has to make up all sorts of stuff to tell Congress. But then things get really weird: people, usually unpleasant people, start disappearing. And then folks start to forget all about the unpleasant people, so they’re not even disturbed by the sudden absences. The reporter is going nuts over all this, but only finds one other person, also a reporter, that is similarly upset. Faber won’t answer any questions directly. The ending feels a little old-fashioned once you finally glean what’s probably been going on, but over all I enjoyed this little Twilight Zone episode.

Completely different in both tone and subject matter is “Fallen Angel” by Eugene Mirabelli. Set in 1967, an angel comes crashing through this guy’s roof. She’s messed up and has a hell of an attitude. He becomes devoted to her. The story centers entirely on their relationship, as screwed up as they both are. Its got sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll, and it’s very intense, especially since it’s set entirely in a studio apartment. The sense of claustrophobia is pervasive. It doesn’t end easily, either. There’s an extent to which the speculative element is almost unnecessary—this story could have been written almost as well about any two fucked-up young folks; but the intensity of this story stays with you. Another one to remember come awards time.

“Leave” by Robert Reed examines attitudes towards war. The story centers on the son of the narrator and his wife’s best friends. All the adults were peace activists back in the day. The other couple has a son who turns out to be quite a golden boy; as such he risks being recruited for a secret alien war. The background of all this is fascinating: people who had disappeared years ago start returning, telling stories of an alien conflict out in space, sometimes even with artefacts. It’s also a good character portrait on several levels. Golden boy himself is almost incidental—the center around which everyone else revolves—but his parents, his sister, and the relationship between the two older couples are well-drawn. In the end we get a brief glimpse of the boy and his motivations on his way out the door, and then the narrator has to decide what to tell the parents. As endings go its not terribly challenging, but this does strike a well-thought-out note on its theme of how different people feel about wars and how that can affect relationships.

This year being F&SF’s 60th anniversary, they’ve been running some classic reprints; not the stories that get anthologized over and over, but the quirky stuff that perhaps younger readers haven’t seen before. “The Alarming Letters From Scottsdale” by Warner Law definitely delivers the quirkiness (the intro refers to it as ‘demented charm’). Told in epistolary form, it involves letters between a publisher and a popular mystery author. The writer has recently picked up a dog, and becomes increasingly obsessed with the animal. The dog may be a reincarnation of another writer, perhaps it’s a muse. The letters get weirder and weirder. The publishers try to get help to the author, but it doesn’t end well, either for the author or the dog. Yet the way Law writes, it’s funny even while you’re feeling bad for the dog. I have to say: nice choice on the part of the editors.

Albert E. Cowdrey, who is on my list of authors to watch, contributes “A Skeptical Spirit.” Set, as usual for Cowdrey, in the South, this story deals with a spirit researcher who takes up residence in a haunted house. He gets to know all the spirits with the help of his house-keeper, who runs seances. However, one of the former inhabitants of the house causes serious problems, not least of which revolves around the fact that the spirit, having been a skeptic and an atheist in life, cannot now believe that it is dead. Not central to the story, but pervading its every scene, is a depiction of race relations and how they’ve changed over the last century. There are still obvious race and class boundaries in the modern day, but compared to what the old spirit was living with, it’s an amazing difference. This story isn’t award-worthy in the way that “The Overseer” was earlier this year, but it will make a fine addition to the eventual collection of Cowdrey’s short fiction that I hope to see someday.

Finishing off the quirky for the issue we have “How the Day Runs Down” by John Langan. This is his contribution to John Joseph Adams’ zombie anthology of 2008, The Living Dead. This story has the oddest structure: it’s written as if describing a play, with the stage manager on stage, narrating different vignettes to the audience, with stage, lighting, and sound-effect cues thrown in. It’s incredibly effective, and although I’m not a huge zombie fan I really appreciated this story. It’s especially impressive as the fourth wall between the action and the audience gets progressively thinner. Langan has a masterful command of atmosphere and tone in this story. This is one that sticks with you, possibly award-worthy. In fact, it makes me want to read some other stories in Living Dead to see if there are other gems like this that I might have missed.

...Except Geoff Ryman.

When I titled my last post "Good Writers Doing Good, but Unexceptional, Things" I should have added: "Except Geoff Ryman." The only excuse I can think of for forgetting his story: once I had noticed a theme of unexceptionality, I mentally sorted "Days of Wonder" into a different category and never got back to it. I found this story unique and perhaps award-worthy. It's almost impossible to review this story without spoilers; the story is set up in such a way that watching the worldbuilding unfold is almost as dramatic as the character arc. So if you want to experience this story untainted by me, go read it now.

For the rest of us: in the far, far future, humans are gone. However, we leave our legacy in a large number of genetically engineered beings. Most of them have drifted far away from humanity, carrying only bits and pieces. Most of the action centers around a tribe of "horses." They're a long way from our horses: they groom, they're matrilineal, they can do primitive metalworking (with the help of the squirrels) and they can use weapons. They walk on four legs sometimes and two legs when needed.

One member of this tribe, Leveza, is much closer to us than usual. She mates for love, not randomly; she walks on two legs more often and has a shallower face. Her child is born mostly helpless instead of jumping up and running around within the first day. She is also inventive. These differences cause her a lot of friction with both the narrator, her partner, and the more traditional elements of their tribe. [Exercise for the reader: compare and contrast Ryman’s treatment of Difference in this story and The Child Garden. I can’t do it, I’ve got finals coming up!] Things come to a head when they start their annual migration and have to deal with the big “cats” that prey on them. Leveza doesn't simply kill them and/or leave them be, she actually captures one and learns from it. This does not sit well with the rest of the tribe at all. Even her own partner worries about this trend. Leveza transgresses custom after custom, until she is finally kicked out of the tribe altogether. We learn in a sort of coda that she turned out alright--certainly she has a worthy goal to work for, reuniting the species and all their disparate knowledge. However, she makes deep sacrifices, all deeply felt.

This is an intense story, both on the part of the protagonist and the narrator. The basic story of a tribe member becoming an outsider isn't new (that one's as old as time), but this is a particularly interesting take on it. I found the world-building to be particularly good as well, both plausible and oddly surreal. One quibble is that it drags in the middle, during the long migration, as the main character begins to split from the tribe. I think some scenes could have been cut or described more briefly to move things along faster. However, between the world building, the characterization, and the deep treatment of its theme, this story more than makes up for any minor problems with pacing.

Good Writers Doing Good, But Not Exceptional, Things

The Oct/Nov double issue of F&SF comes, as usual, packed with stuff. UN-usually, however, I don’t really see any award-winners here. This issue contains stories by good, established authors practicing the craft they are known for, but not necessarily pushing themselves into new territory.

Albert Cowdry starts off with a short story: "Inside Story." He returns to his favorite setting, New Orleans, post-Hurricane Katrina. Cops investigate disappearances of people living in FEMA trailers. No points for guessing that there's something unusual going on; unfortunately this unusual thing takes the hero to another dimension/realm/place, and that weakens the story. Cowdry is strongest when his stories most closely link to New Orleans itself (see "The Overseer," which I'll be nominating for a Hugo at least this year), and the ending of this story seems disappointing in proportion to the time it spends away from the city.

"Sleepless Years" gives us a nice take on Zombie-ism by Steven Utley. A gentleman died and left his body to science; they reanimated him. However, he's got no rights since he's "dead." He also can't sleep, which tortures him. The experience of a human being in a situation where they're regarded as little more than an amazing test subject is not a new one, but it's done well here.

"'The New York Times' at Special Bargain Rates" has Stephen King's heroine talking to dead people on the phone. Also not new; King himself has done this before. This time it's all fairly benign, although the woman cannot act on a vague prophecy from her dead husband and ends up feeling bad. This is a low key example of excellent craftsmanship.

The ever-prolific Robert Reed provides "The Visionaries." This ambiguous story describes a writer offered a Faustian bargain as he gets started in writing. It turns out that some of his stories may (or may not) provide a window into a real future. Various conspiracy theories regarding the Faustian organization get kicked around at sf cons. Although the nature of the deal changes over time, the author comes to believe that he may really be seeing the future. This is a tale that has both funny and unsettling bits; I'm sure the contrast is deliberate, but it feels like the story isn't sure what it wants to be. The two threads--what the author sees in the future and what he thinks is happening now--don't mesh perfectly. However, the inside-baseball bits are fun, and Reed is always a solid story-teller.

"Private Eye" looks at the ubiquitous surveillance future, less through a Big Brother lens and more through a YouTube one. The narcissism/voyeurism angle is again, nothing really new. I'm a bit surprised that Terry Bisson didn't offer something more unique here.

"Whoever" by Carol Emshwiller is an interesting story that mutates as you read it. A woman may be suffering amnesia, or be some sort of universe hopper, or perhaps a time traveller. Perhaps she takes over other bodies. In any case, she wakes up with no memories of her past life, with nothing more than the clothes on her back, and gets to reinvent herself. Her conscious process of looking at who she wants to be is great; I'm less thrilled that she immediately gets a male protector (or at least accepts the guy who wants to fill that role, she makes some noises about not burdening him but does so anyway), but that's a minor quibble.

I had already read "Evidence of Love" somewhere else, so I'll skip that one here--M. Rickert is also always worth reading. Depressing and confusing, but with awesome craft. (See Paolo Bacigalupi in F&SF, Sept.)

"Planetesimal" by Tim Sullivan is a slight story that is neither a good character portrait nor a good sf story. On a large asteroid/planetesimal, a commited-to-duty security officer has to escort a totally-geeky-introverted-whiny-dedicated-to-his-science geologist. Their craft breaks down and they have to try to outrace the sun (Red Giant) back to base. They fall into a crater (which hadn't been there before), and get sucked into some sort of time-warped mining operation. The geek wants to stay there forever and be king of his little fiefdom, the security officer wants to get him home. At no time do they rise above their stereotypes. The "mining" thing is silly, and the science is just awful. Check this out: "They had a long way to go. But with the light gravity, it was the equivalent of only a few kilometers." Really? I didn't know that low gravity warped distances--maybe high gravity relativistically, but on a small planet? Obviously it should be something like "it [would feel like] the equivalent of only a few kilometers," but these sorts of lazy mistakes are littered all through this story. Bleah.

Finally "Scarecrow's Boy" involves a mighty sophisticated AI helping out the child of a diplomat and in the process liberating itself from a useless master. It's not necessarily plausible, but in Swanwick's hands it's a solid story.

Bacigalupi Kicks You in the Stomach, But in a Good Way

The obvious stand-out in the September issue of F&SF is "Pump Six" by Paolo Bacigalupi. You may recognize the title: it's also the title story in his short fiction collection (out this year) Pump Six and Other Stories. As titles go this one may not leap off shelves and into readers' hands, but it's a heck of a story. It shares the same outlook on the future as most of Bacigalupi's other stories: incredibly bleak. Let's look over his oeuvre, shall we? "People of Sand and Slag," is one of my all-time favorite sf stories. In the future humans can survive on 100% synthetic substances; anything can be made into food. The biosphere is almost completely wiped out, but one group of soldiers finds a dog. They try to care for it and succeed for a while, but finally get bored with it. "Calorie Man" (another one of my favorite Bacigalupi stories; I read it when I was just getting back in to sf/f short fiction): in the near future oil, gas, and coal are pretty much totally gone. Manpower powers everything; food powers people. That's great except that all the crops are under patent by megacorporations who make it illegal for anyone but themselves to grow any food. Ta-da: ultimate monopoly. Whoa. "Pop Squad:" In a world with effective immortality, over-population is such a concern that having unlicensed children is illegal. The protagonist of this story hunts down single mothers and turns them in--they're depicted as no better than drug addicts. It's totally soul-deadening, even for the hero.

Now in "Pump Six," you have a future where pollution has made people progressively more stupid. The hero is smarter than most; he at least knows not to use a lighter to check for a gas leak. He's trying to keep the sewage pumps for New York running, but they're finally starting to wear out and the last people who truly understood them are long dead. He treks over to Columbia University to try to see if their engineers can help; it turns out the university hasn't actually held classes for years. All the "students" are lounging around on the grass like contented apes. It's implied that actual devolution is being caused by the pollution, and existence as happy, mellow, stupid (and short-lived) primates is what's in store for humanity. As usual with Bacigalupi, it's a story that hits you right in the gut; it makes you feel the hopelessness on a visceral level. The only other writer that consistently hits that note for me is Alfred Bester (especially his story in Adventures in Time and Space, “Adam and No Eve”). Bacigalupi is brilliant at coming up with these scenarios, making them seem scarily plausible, then smacking you around with them. For a writer as consistently dark and depressing as Bacigalupi the thing that keeps you reading his stories is his incredible skill, and he's got that in spades.

"Arkfall" by Carolyn Ives Gilman is not a bad story by any means, but coming after a story like "Pump Six" it ends up seeming as light and fluffy as a cloud. It's basically a story of opposite people finding a third way, and it depends on a very contrived scenario to do it. On an alien planet, most people live in organic bubbles surrounding a sea-floor vent. They live in close proximity and have adopted mostly Asian-style social customs to deal with it: family comes first, individualism is out, no one argues directly with each other. A tourist to this world is a brash Westerner, some sort of former space jock. Inevitably he and a woman from the native culture get trapped in a bubble for an extended period. She eventually learns to be more assertive and take control of her fate; he eventually learns to get over himself and sometimes just let the world work. It's a very yin/yang sort of story. It's nicely done, but again it feels like cotton-candy dosed with opiates compared to Bacigalupi.

Another wonderful, if contrived, story comes from Michael Swanwick and Eileen Gunn. It's in the form of correspondence between an author and a certain company. Michael, the Chief Creative Officer of "Guilt Eaters of Philadelphia" promises to relieve Eileen of the guilt that comes from being a writer and not writing; she is heartily skeptical. They go back and forth on different philosophies of life, the appropriateness (and the mechanics) of what he's proposing, before finally coming to a (to me) unexpected but satisfactory arrangement. While this too is somewhat fluffy and definitely silly, it also digs a little deeper into what it means to be a writer, examining what motivates these crazy people.

The other stories in this issue fall into the RUMIR category. "Search Continues for Elderly Man" is another "he's probably dead but it may be VR" story, with some very nasty bits thrown in. I couldn't quite get at the point of it, if there was one. "Picnic on Pentecost" has a sort of hive-mind alien crash-landing on a planet. Only one part survives and cannot die; she has to fulfill the planet's plans for her. "Salad for Two" by Robert Reed keeps you turning pages. A young woman benefits from an early patron and builds a good life for herself. The future comes and she lives through it, profiting and moving out into the solar system; eventually she realizes that her life may not be what she thought it was. It's a nice twist ending, but it almost feels like Reed trivializes the neat world- and character-building he's done in the story by hanging it all on the "twist." "Run! Run!" by Jim Aikin has mean ol' fundamentalist Christians hunting down Unicorns; one farm girl tries to stand in their way. OK, I get the symbolism—Unicorns as wild sexuality and religious nuts who think all sex should be suppressed. However, while I'm no fan of the Religious Right, this story felt bludgeoning to me.

Slowly Catching Up on Magazines

First off, I did read F&SF for August, and nothing there particularly stood out. I didn’t skip any of the stories, but neither did any of them rise above the RUMIR designation (again from Joanna Russ’ comment: “The stories are routine, unoriginal, mildly interesting, and readable”).

Most of the stories in the August Asimov’s fall into the same category (of course, almost by definition, most short stories everywhere will be RUMIR). “Old Man Waiting” by Robert Reed ends with a good twist but doesn’t have much else. “Lucy” equates a robotic probe on Saturn being abandoned with people in an apartment complex being unpleasant to one another. “What You Are About to See” by Jack Skillingstead has the misfortune to follow one of the non-RUMIR stories (about which more later) which does quantum effects much better, leaving this one suffering in comparison. (It doesn’t help that Skillingstead’s style has never worked well for me; I appreciate it intellectually but it’s usually so unrelentingly depressing that I remain disengaged emotionally. This one impressed me the most of his that I’ve read so far.) “Wilmer or Wesley” is a nicely ambiguous tale by Carol Emshwiller—the protagonist may be human but is being displayed as if he’s some sort of experimental ape. The moral seems to be “treat animals as you would want to be treated.” Finally “Radio Station St. Jack” by Neal Barrett, Jr. continues his post-apocalyptic future. Somewhere around northern Texas, various groups have devolved to roughly Civil War times. There’s a settlement that’s basically friendly with local “Indians,” and they’re all threatened by a big bad group of bandits. A local “priest” runs a radio station and as a local leader, has to try to save the town. I wasn’t totally into the story but I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt… until the end when it turns out that all of the priest’s actions didn’t matter and the story was resolved from completely out of left field. Quite frustrating.


However, none of that should detract from the two most interesting stories in the issue, “Lagos” by Matthew Johnson and “Divining Light” by Ted Kosmatka.

“Lagos” takes place in a near future Nigeria. Lower class women find work going into VR and controlling various remote robotic appliances for rich Westerners—robot vacuums, dish washers and the like. Safrat is our protagonist and her brother (who sells water to make a little money; he’s hoping for one of his relatives to find him a better job) discovers that she talks in her sleep, in English. Needless to say, the VR firewalls are acting a little funny. They go see a traditional healer and find out what the problem is. At the same time her supervisor believes that her dreams may point him to a fortune, but he gets a big surprise when he tracks it down.

I appreciated this story on several levels. One is simply the fact that it is set in Nigeria and all the actors in the story are Nigerians: good, bad, and indifferent. I also appreciated the extrapolation: much like some spammers already hire kids in third-world countries to decipher all those little random “type the letters you see” boxes meant to defeat automated spam-bots, one could easily imagine it being cheaper by far to hire third-world women to run appliances than to come up with adequate artificial intelligence to do so. Finally, I appreciated that the characters (to a limited extent) rise above the level of stereotypes—difficult to do with a short story. Particularly the supervisor is not one-dimensionally greedy and exploitive, although others around him are. Also, the “shaman” is neither the deus ex machina nor a useless impediment, but someone who helps to resolve the mystery. Overall, a nicely done story that helps to push sf to more awareness of the non-Western world’s future.

That said, the real stand-out in this issue is Kosmatka’s novelette “Divining Light.” I expect to see this in many Year’s Bests and a whole bunch of awards ballots. It’s one of the few stories to unflinchingly wrestle with the implications of quantum wave function collapse, and it does it with style and emotional realism. It is pretty bleak (the tone closely resembles his previous widely recognized story, “The Prophet of Flores”), but fascinating and unique.

Our protagonist is a burned-out scientist, once an up-and-coming star. A friend takes pity on him and hires him on at an R&D firm. To amuse himself, he starts replicating the famous double-slit experiment of quantum physics. If you fire a photon stream (beam of light) at two slits, the pattern on a screen on the other side will be a diffraction pattern; the photons act like waves and interfere with each other. However, if you place a detector on one of the slits, the pattern become two solid groupings behind the two slits—the act of measuring which slit the photons go through makes them behave like particles, not waves. That part is absolutely true by the way, and it’s weird enough.

Then comes the big “what if” of the story: what if it makes a difference whether or not an observer knows about the detector results? Here’s what he does: he runs the experiment with the detector on (one would expect 2 groupings on the screen behind the slits). Without checking the screen, he clears the memory of the detector, then looks at the screen—it’s an interference pattern as if the detector had never been on. He calls it retrocausality: the system behavior depends on the actions of a conscious observer in the future. If a conscious observer doesn’t “collapse the wave function” (cause the pattern to go from interference to blobs), it remains an interference pattern.

Kosmatka goes all the way with the implications of this: they start testing the meaning of a “conscious” observer. They rig up a series of lights so that animals have the capacity to collapse the wave function; none of them can. In a twist I hadn’t thought of but makes perfect, depressing sense, a pro-life group decides to test fetuses in the womb to see when they become conscious. They refuse to release their results—in fact as studies continue, it turns out not all humans can collapse the wave function. However, at this point the whole thing has already become some sort of test—of “humanness,” “consciousness,” or “soul,” depending on your agenda. In the end, the characters have to interpret and deal with what they’ve discovered. It’s an absolute triumph of taking pure, hard science and digging into the human implications. Although I might wish for a tone less bleak (I really think it’s possible to consider quantum indeterminacy without becoming an alcoholic wreck), I appreciate the characters he’s created and their investigations: pursuing the truth of the universe no matter how bizarre, and not shying away from the consequences. I haven’t done this story justice—go read it!

F&SF, July

July's F&SF contains nothing outstanding, but several pretty good stories. Some of the highlights:

"Fullbrim's Finding" by Matthew Hughes returns to his Majestrum universe. It's a Vanceian place—the universe is old and winding down, ennui is setting in. I read several of the stories set there, but lately the stories have failed to enthrall. This story fails to completely revive the franchise, but it takes a different tack. Recurring hero Henghis Hapthorn is hired to track down an errant scholar. He quickly follows the clues to find the poor man catatonic in an inn on a run-down planet. There are many catatonic folks in that inn being cared for by the proprietor. All of them came seeking truth, hoping to find it from something living in a high mountain cave. None of them came back whole.

Hapthorn decides to bite the bullet and go up to the mountain to see for himself. He of course comes back just fine. And he gets to tell us the ultimate explanation of the universe, including the explanation of human suffering. I admire Hughes for going all the way, for not pulling any punches. A lot of authors with a set-up like this would fade to black, but he puts it all out there. Unfortunately, the “ultimate explanation for everything” comes across as mighty cynical and just this side of trite. So, kudos to the author for being bold, but I doubt this one will stand the test of time.

"Reader's Guide" by Lisa Goldstein is fun. It starts off as a list of questions, the sort of thing one would use as discussion topics for a social Book Club. The book the questions address is obviously mediocre, and the question-writer doesn't hide his contempt. Eventually we get the story of the questioner (he likes to think of himself as a Reader), a person living and working in the ultimate library. The story is funny, and easy to relate to if you're a person who loves books. (We also get to sneer at crappy literature, and who doesn’t enjoy the pleasures of snark from time to time?) Speaking as a reviewer, I felt the story spoke to me particularly. It's nothing terribly deep, but enjoyable.

"The Roberts" (Michael Blumlein) is the main novella for this issue. It's an interesting piece, but it seems painfully naive. Basic concept: Robert is a guy who both lucky and unlucky in love. He lives a cyclical life: he falls in love with a woman, and riding the crest of love he becomes incredibly professionally creative (as an architect) at which point he starts spending all his time working, eventually losing the woman, losing the creativity, and losing work. To break the cycle he orders a custom-designed woman to be his lover (we'll realize this is not at all plausible and move on). (And let’s not think too hard about the fact that the guy solves his problems by creating another living being to fulfill his needs, instead of maybe examining his own problems—why is it that he can only work creatively when being loved by someone else? The whole story could probably have been averted by a trip to a psychologist’s office.) The new person, Grace, loves him even when he's working, but eventually he feels guilty for not spending enough time with her. He buys her a clone of himself, and so does she. So now there are four people: three "Roberts" and Grace. (I totally expected another Grace to show up eventually, but the author never goes there.)

So now it becomes a story about a polyamorous group, which makes it pretty shocking when the original Robert gets upset that Grace is having sex with the other Roberts. Really, he somehow thought that wasn't going to happen? Idiot. Basically the whole thing gets resolved rather tritely, with the two new Roberts forming a couple and the original Robert and Grace forming another, and going their separate ways. It would have been more interesting to see them work out their problems and form a stable group; some people can make that sort of thing work, after all.

Another troubling thing is that the author brings up rather heavy-handed stereotypes of manliness and femininity, and doesn't challenge them in any way. Some examples:

“He was raised by his mother, who adored him, and he learned, as many sons do, that love bears the face and the stamp of a woman.”

“Unlike many men, he did not despise or fear women, but rather he exalted them, on the whole a rather more forgivable offense.”

“Robert not only liked the idea of women, he liked the fact of them, he liked to be around them and beside them and face to face with them, he liked their company, their loving nature, their adaptability, their strength, their subtlety of thought. Women were the brick and mortar, the bedrock, of his world.”

“Meanwhile, unbeknownst to him, Grace—with all the wisdom, incentive and desire of a woman put on Earth to love her man and to help him in times of trouble, a woman with a job to do, a woman, like all the best women, without a selfish bone in her body—was hatching a birthday plan of her own.”

“No. 3 [created by Grace] was more talkative than 1 or 2. He was more accomodating, more domestic, more attuned to others than himself. Good for a chat over tea or coffee. Good for a drive. Good for watching TV sit-coms or dramas with.”

“No. 2 [created by Robert] was more project-oriented. He liked to do things more than talk about them. He had ambitions. He liked to stay busy. Barely a day went by that he didn’t wake up with a plan.”

This is all so exaggerated that I figured it must be satirical. I kept expecting an inversion or some other subversion, but he appears to use them unironically. Perhaps that's part of an overall strategy of simplifying, but all the simplifying makes for a much weaker story. Still, I'd recommend folks read this one and see what you think of it—I'm sure opinions will vary.

The last story of note is "Poison Victory" by Albert E. Cowdrey. Cowdrey appears to be working through examinations of human evil (see "The Overseer"), so it actually makes sense for him to turn to the Nazis. Here he uses an alternate history where the Germans didn't lose Stalingrad, more or less conquered Russia, and haven't been beaten by 1949 as Hitler is about to die of more or less natural causes. He continues the theme that evil and good are intensely personal—and that the banality of evil can capture almost anyone when it's both easier and more profitable than do-gooding. It's not a particularly great alt-history, and it doesn't have anywhere near the verve that Cowdry's work set in the American South has. It's interesting, and good enough, but compared to some of the author's other work it's ultimately disappointing.

May F&SF, in a Nutshell

"Reunion" by Robert Reed (ss, good)
"Rebecca's Locket" by S. L. Gilbow (ss, OK)
"Immortal Snake" by Rachel Pollack (nt, meh)
"Firooz and His Brother" by Alex Jeffers (ss, meh)
"Thrilling Wonder Stories" by Albert E. Cowdrey (ss, good)
"Traitor" by M. Rickert (ss, good)
"Circle" by George Tucker (nt, good)

F&SF in May provides us with a heck of a variety, and not one of them is poorly written. We've got aliens, killers, and Native American ghosts. Classic "what-if" sf, fables, and horror. I've got quibbles with some of them, but a few are really thought provoking. Good stuff (and actually reviewed in May!)

Next up is May's Analog, but we'll be into June titles before the first week in June is over, it looks like.

Darkest Before the End

F&SF has never been afraid to go dark when the situation calls for it, and "Thrilling Wonder Stories" is a chilling attack on nostalgia by Albert E. Cowdrey. The very title evokes a strong sense of nostalgia in sf fans: Thrilling Wonder Stories was published by Hugo Gernsback after he was kicked off of the seminal sf magazine, Amazing Stories. Thrilling ran between 1930 and 1936. It wasn't even a product of the "Golden Age," this was pure pulp.

Reading that sort of thing, it's no wonder that a young boy in the South, listening to his parents yelling at each other, decides that his father must be a Martian. It's easier than imagining that his cuckold of a father is really his dad. However, that's not the least of this kid's psychoses. He's also got the pre-pubescent beginnings of a very unhealthy Oedipal complex. As his parent's relationship deteriorates further, resulting in his mother briefly abandoning the boy and her husband for the boy's biological father, he also shows signs of schizophrenia. When she comes back, having been thoroughly shamed and kicked out by her former lover, the boy devolves all the way into psychopathic violence. (All the psych terms are mine, of course. They didn't necessarily have all those labels back then, at least not for this kid's social class.)

Whew, yeah, those were the Good Old Days. People may yearn for a "simpler time" when everyone had "family values," but there were costs to pay. When a married man can't acknowledge a bastard, and a single, pregnant woman has to find a husband pronto, the resulting child is unlikely to grow up in a healthy environment. Maybe the lucky ones could simply escape into pulp fiction before escaping into a "normal" life, but for the unlucky, unstable ones, life might end up a much, much darker place.

As seen in "The Overseer," Cowdrey has an unflinching ability to get into some dark places in the human psyche. His stories are mighty unsettling, but also potent examinations of the roots of human evil.

Another story with a dark edge involving children is "Traitor" by M. Rickert. In this story, a young girl is being brought up in unusual circumstances. She seems very patriotic, but her mother has a secret room that seems to be dedicated to some sort of resistance movement. The bed time story involves the mother surviving when many other people were killed, and her dedication to staying alive. Terrorism of some nature is implied to be involved, and this little girl may not be the first child her "mother" has raised. There's a lot here that is obliquely implied instead of described. Rickert leaves hints and clues and lets the reader fill in the back story. The core of the story is the emotional relationship between the mother and daughter, and like "Thrilling," it's not a healthy one. This story is less specifically horrorific than Cowdrey's, but the ending is dark and intense.

Finally we wind up the issue on lighter ground. "Circle" by George Tucker is about building condos in Miami. The Circle condo construction project is plagued by accidents. Only one guy seems immune, a native Seminole named Billy Black. He's just doing his job, trying to save up money to buy an ancestral plot of swamp, but he comes to the attention of the developer's executives. Now he has to balance his duty to his Native American ancestors with his need to get by in the modern world. It's not a straightforward path to walk, needless to say, but the resolution of the story is a satisfying one. It's not a one-size-fits-all solution to all the problems of Native Americans, but it works for Billy and that's OK. With a good sense of humor, this story deals with a delicate issue and does it well.

Exoticism without Depth

"Firooz and His Brother" by Alex Jeffers is a well-written tale set in the Middle East and Africa in the time of caravans. When Firooz is on his first caravan journey, he goes off hunting a deer, but instead is accosted by a fierce dog. When he and his dog have dispatched their attacker, they realize it was guarding an infant. Firooz brings the baby back to the caravan, and they decide the raise the baby, now named Haider, as Firooz's brother.

As they both grow, they journey together on caravans, leaving their wives and families behind them. Haider has several children with his wife, but Firooz remains childless. They've been engaging in some away-from-wives step-brother sex on the road, but when they return to the place where Haider was originally found, something very different happens. [**Here there be spoilers**]

Haider turns into a woman, and offers to carry Firooz's child. He agrees (with some trepidation). To all appearances Haider remains a man, but inside he's carrying a baby. Eventually he gives birth, and Firooz claims they "found" another baby. Once they get home, Haider admits that he's something very different, and disappears.

I very much enjoy stories that deal with different cultures, and Middle Eastern cultures especially. There is a deep story-telling tradition there, and given the politics of the world today, it's especially important to seek understanding. A story that did that exceptionally well last year was Ted Chiang's Hugo-nominated, Nebula-winning novelette "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" which adopted the nested Arabian Night's-style story structure perfectly to a science fiction time-traveling story. However, "Firooz" didn't necessarily add to or expand my understanding of either Middle Eastern culture or gender.

From a cultural point of view, the only high points are the existence of caravans, the importance of family and the importance of having children. Maybe also an acceptance of magical happenings that we would find odd today, but that's no different from reading anything by the ancient Greeks. From a gender point of view, what do we get? These two men love each other as brothers and as lovers. In an "ultimate" expression of love, however, one of the men becomes a woman to give Firooz the one thing his wife can't: a child. On the one hand, it's a touching gift involving much pain and sacrifice and showing true devotion. On the other, it's an implication that gay lovers cannot give each other what straight lovers can.

I hate to be one of those critics who read into stories things that shouldn't be there. However, if you flip through the archives of this blog, you'll I've been getting a rapid education in gender and queer theory lately. Any story that involves fluidity between genders invites the reader to analyze what it's saying about gender. This story doesn't seem to be saying much of anything, except possibly something mildly offensive. Other than that, it's just a pretty love story in an exotic setting with an Alien Other. When I went looking for something deeper in it, I didn't find anything.

Modern Myths

"Immortal Snake" by Rachel Pollack is one of those stories that casts itself in explicitly mythic language. It begins:

"Long ago, in a time beyond memory, Great Powers owned the land, the water, and even the air. Of all these empires, the strongest was a land called Written in the Sky."

This story form is not uncommon in the pages of short story collections (I don't know of any novel-length work using these conventions). Among others, Michael Swanwick has used it to good effect recently (although I'm not currently coming up with the title of the story I'm thinking of).

Authors typically have a very specific reason for writing using this style. A myth generally has a specific purpose. The ones I've seen are usually either cautionary tales, or explanations of how a world came to be. "Immortal Snake" doesn't make any moves in the direction of the latter purpose; it seems instead to be a story with a cautionary moral. However, I don't think that a story with the moral "damned if you do and damned if you don't" is really the best fit for the mythic style. [Spoilers ahead in the story description.]

The kingdom described in the story has a very elaborate set-up for cycling through their kings. When the astrologers determine that the signs are right, they kill and cook two of the king's companions, feed them to him thus poisoning him, and he dies. They take his skin, hang it up, and then choose a new king. It's symbolic of a snake shedding its skin each year. The king lives a life as hedonistic or as useful as he chooses, but lives under the threat of the astrologers knocking on his door at any time. For time immemorial the realm has been operating this way: it is implied that this has been a very stable arrangement—the kingdom has been successful in its wars, and while there's poverty it isn't described as being extreme.

Obviously, one doesn't write stories about static situations, one writes them about times of change. This king's companions are his sister, who cares passionately about the poor, and a story-teller. It turns out that the story-teller can mesmerize anyone with his gifts, even the astrologers. They neglect their duties in order to listen to him night after night. The sister and the story-teller fall in love, and plot things out in such a way as to overthrow the rule of the astrologers. Their coup succeeds.

The king serves out his term, ruling well and dying a natural death. The story-teller succeeds him, reigns benevolently, and dies peacefully. However, in the last nine paragraphs of this novelette, the story-teller's sons fight a bloody civil war of succession, ruining the kingdom to the extent that their main enemy easily conquers them, kills and enslaves the populace, and sows the land with salt. The end.

WTF? What moral shall we derive from this? An author's note at the end states that this is based on a real myth from the Darfur region, implying that their problems have ancient origins. That seems horrible to me: Darfur's problems stem from mundane conflicts over land, religion and ethnicity, and have been exacerbated by climate change. To imply that they have some mythic origin would be to suggest that there's nothing we can do about it, it's simply their fate.

If the story is meant to have a moral in its own right, the only one I can derive is: it's better to be ruled by a silly, arbitrary, oligarchical system than to rock the boat; if you insist on change it'll all end in tears. That also seems like a less than perfectly useful message in this day and age, when change is what we will dearly need to get out of the straits we're in. Perhaps someone else can offer a better explanation of the author's goal with this story, but as I read it I found it very disappointing.

Satisfying Short SF

I think I'll propose that one of the key differences between "mainstream" and "genre" fiction is that in genre fiction, when people go searching for answers, they find them. Why are the crops blighted? See Evil Wizard in Yonder Tower. Whodunit? The Butler. What is the common thread linking 12 exceptional graduates (the members of which include senators, celebrities, pro-athletes and Nobel prize winners) of a small mid-western high school? That's the question in "Reunion." A woman comes to town before their thirtieth high school reunion, looking for answers as to what happened to make this small group so exceptional. The early death of one of their classmates may hold some clues (and a fairly cynical moral for the story, if you want to read that into it). It's lighter than some stories that Robert Reed has already produced this year (see "Five Thrillers" in April's F&SF among others.) I think Reed is one of my favorite short story authors simply because he provides satisfying explanations for his puzzles pretty much every time. It may not be avant-garde, but it's good sf.


"Rebecca's Locket" is a very brief piece of amusing "what if?" by S. L. Gilbow. What if you could download someone's personality, before they died, into a small piece of jewelry? Perhaps just big enough for a small camera, microphone and speakers? You could be comforted by the personality of your loved one speaking to you in your time of grief... or not. The final fate of Jerry, the gentleman in the locket, will come as no surprise to the attentive reader. It's a funny reminder that sometimes, functional immortality is NOT a boon to those "left behind" (see "Helen's Last Will" in March's Analog for the more romanticized version of cyber-life after death).

The Summary for April's F&SF

"First Editions" John Stoddard (good)
"Five Thrillers" Robert Reed (excellent)
"The Nocturnal Adventure of Dr. O and Mr. D." Tim Sullivan (meh)
"The Fountain of Neptune" Kate Wilhelm (good)
"The 400-Million-Year Itch" Steve Utley (OK)

Robert Reed is in top form, Stoddard and Wilhelm are fun and interesting, and those more than makes up for the average quality stories from Sullivan and Utley.

You know, it turns out I don't skip as many stories when I read these issues as I thought I was. It speaks highly of the general level of quality that even mediocre stories seem to usually hold my interest.

April F&SF, Pt. II

After the Reed and Stoddard stories, April's F&SF takes a turn for the slipstream. "The Nocturnal Adventure of Dr. O and Mr. D." by Tim Sullivan, involves two characters wandering around a foggy, suburban landscape. They visit another character. If you'll pardon the spoiler, it turns out they're all dead. They continue wandering. I read a similar story back in March ("The Second Descent" by Richard Paul Russo, and my opinion stands. I'm biased against these sorts of stories, so they have to work harder/be better to overcome my resistance. This one doesn't do it. I finished it, but that's about all I can say for it. I feel bad - stories using this trope are obviously well-received, and I'm sure the authors are saying interesting things about the human condition. Unfortunately the message doesn't get to me through the vagueness of it all.

A better slipstream story is Kate Wilhelm's "The Fountain of Neptune." A woman discovers that she is dying and has only months to live. She pulls up stakes and moves to Rome to enjoy her final days in beautiful settings, not surrounded by sadness. Her illness is a brain tumor, and when she begins to see changes in the eponymous fountain, she thinks she's beginning to succumb. A handsome man strikes up a conversation with her, and she begins to think that maybe something more fantastic is going on. In the end she embraces the mystery of what the man and the fountain represent. She probably also embraces her own death, but it feels like a life-affirming choice. The only minor quibble I have with the story is that it completely ignores the logistical difficulties of moving to Rome, and never mentions where she is getting the money for this sort of thing. Totally over-literal thinking about a story this nice, I know, but that omission stood out for me. Personal quirk, nothing to really detract from the story for most people: just assume she's putting it all on credit cards and keep reading.

Going back to classic sf, the final story is "The 400-Million-Year Itch" by Steven Utley. It's set in a universe he's written in before, where we've established a physical link to another universe, one where the Earth is barely past the primordial-soup phase. The main character, Amy, is an assistant to Dr. Cutsinger, the man who established the link. He's a great man, in much demand, but a complete jerk to work for. Everything revolves around him, and Amy is beginning to realize that she may never escape from his orbit to have a real career in physics for herself. For the first time, Dr. Cutsinger is visiting the other universe, taking her with him, of course. She gets away for awhile to do some serious thinking about her own future. In the meantime, she meets some of the other scientists and celebrities who are visiting the research installation. This is a solid story, a fairly realistic character piece. However, the story suffers from trying to do too much: a lot of time the focus is off Amy and on the dinner table conversations between the various luminaries instead, with an un-named science fiction author getting a lot of page-time. His diatribes, while funny and well-aimed, detract from the core of the story, and sometimes Amy feels like an afterthought in her own story. That may be intentional echoing of her situation with the professor, but to me it felt like a shame.

Finishing March F&SF

Finishing off the March issue of F&SF, there were two ignorable short stories.

"The Second Descent" by Richard Paul Russo is one of those "they're all dead" stories. I was initially hooked by the setting - a group of mountaineers descending a difficult mountain. It seemed that some of them had died up there. They have to get off the mountain, and they're trying to reach a city. However, as time goes on it seems that they aren't making any progress. Sometimes they can see the city, looking nearer or farther, most times they can't. The membership of the group keeps shifting, with people we thought were dead popping up again at points. It's all very vague. The implication is that they're all dead and they'll never get to the city, but so what? None of the characters have much in the way of characterization. I finished this one because I kept hoping it would resolve into something different, but it doesn't. It just ends. Every reader has their own preferences; I've got a large soft spot for stories about sentient books. Unfortunately I have an innate bias against stories about ambiguously dead people wandering aimlessly around a symbolic landscape. This story didn't overcome that bias.

The last story I ended up skipping. "A Ten-Pound Sack of Rice" by Richard Mueller starts out with an old man musing on his mortality. He speculates on the end of the world and his immediate surroundings in a very disconnected way. He thinks a bunch, and after a few pages his cat actually moves, the first action in the story. Then the old man starts musing about the cats he's had. And then I decided to pass. It didn't look like there was any danger of anything actually happening, and the man wasn't an interesting enough character to demand that I find out what happens to him. I suspect that there's something wrong when the apocalypse and the memory of cats past get roughly equal billing.

"Exit Strategy" by K. D. Wentworth

This story revolves around an intriguing concept: people who no longer wish to live can donate their body to those with terminal illnesses. The original consciousness is wiped out, and replaced with a new one. (Let's leave any discussion of technological plausibility out of this, shall we?) Charlsie is a teenage girl going through usual teenage girl angst. She walks into one of "Second Life's" temples/clinics, hoping to off herself. They make her fill out a bunch of paperwork and send her home. She keeps coming around, and they suggest that she do volunteer work around the place. She meets several individuals who have undergone the procedure, and others who are waiting to do donate.

Her father finds out where she's been spending her after-school time and completely flips out. He'd prefer it if she were doing something normal, like sex and drugs. Charlsie is dragged into therapy, and the therapist's misinterpretations of everything are very pointedly funny. By this time of course, Charlsie is over her mild suicidal phase and enjoys doing her volunteer work, but the therapist keeps harping on it. Eventually we find out why her father over-reacted the way he did.

Although presented with the trappings of a cult, with church-like offices, monastic-seeming volunteers and people calling each other Brother and Sister, the author represents the Second Lifers as thoroughly reasonable people. They're perfectly aware that for many teenagers suicidal thoughts are merely a passing phase. They take their screening responsibility completely seriously, and by encouraging Charlsie to volunteer, they help her get a little perspective. Sometimes one of the most important step in maturation is simply getting over yourself.

There are two big flaws that I saw in this story, neither one a deal-killer, but each noticeable. The more minor one is that the Second Lifers assign people needing bodies to donors completely randomly. This leads to lots of insti-sex-changes. I strongly suspect that anyone setting up a system like this would aim to match bodies and brains a little more closely, especially with regards to the extremely sensitive aspect of gender.

My other concern plays off John Clute's idea of the "Real Year" of a story. The most common example used is that the "Real Year" of most Ray Bradbury stories is roughly 1927. Heinlein's Real Year tends to be around 1940, and Charles Stross has gotten up to at least 1999. The Real Year of this story can't be any later than 1985. For instance, Charlsie had titled a school paper "The Division of Labor: How Women Always Like Get the Shaft." Her character seems to be based on a valley girl from an 80's movie more than any contemporary teenager. She introduces herself at the Second Life Temple thusly:

"I'm, like, tired of living," she said, unwrapping a piece of Tart Tangerine gum, "so, as you brochure says, I thought I'd give someone more optimistic a chance."

It's grating at first, although she gradually drops the valley girl act, and that becomes a noticeable narrative technique to show her growing up. All in all this is a good story, one that makes you think.

"Rumple What?" by Nancy Springer

This short story is a re-telling of the Rumplestiltskin fairy tale. It gives real motivations and agendas to the otherwise stock characters. The farmer's daughter, a basically practical girl, can't believe her father is out to kill her. When rescued by Rumplestiltskin, she fully intends to fulfill the "first born child" part of the bargain. However, when she gives birth, the maternal instinct kicks in with a vengeance, and she can't imagine voluntarily giving up her beautiful baby. Rumplestiltskin himself is a creature ostracized by everyone. He's not human, not elf, not dwarf or pixie. In asking for the child, he hopes to raise someone that will love him for him, instead of shunning him for his difference. The author has to resort to "the force of story" to get Rumplestiltskin to give the girl a way out (the name-guessing), but other than that this story fills in the missing motivations in the fairy tale, answering the "why" questions that arise.

It's good, however, that this story is as short as it is. There's obviously a very long and involved essay lurking in this story, just begging to come out. The whole tone of it smacks more of commentary than of fiction. There's nothing wrong with that, and on the whole it is a funny and thoughtful piece, but it swings a little too close to didacticism for comfort.

"The Overseer" by Albert E. Cowdrey

The novella in the March issue of F&SF is remarkably good. It will almost certainly be on my awards-nomination lists for 2008. Cowdrey blends historical drama with horror to write a creepy yet beautiful story about real, human, not over-the-top evil.

The story takes place in two times: in the early 1900s Nicholas Lerner is a old rich cripple, slowly dying. He has a big house in New Orleans, and some servants to care for him. He is secretly writing his memoirs and these writings make up the other sections, detailing his life in the South before, during and after the Civil War.

He describes his childhood on the plantation in idyllic terms, but there were also problems. His father treated the slaves "too well," especially his mixed-race offspring. Eventually he hires a cruel overseer to literally whip them into shape. As young Nick is about to leave for college, the overseer begins to get overly familiar with Nick's sister. Nick encourages his black half-brother, Royal, to kill the overseer if necessary, which Royal eventually does. Right after this the war breaks out. Nick joins the Confederate army, fights in one battle and has to have his arm amputated. His family plantation is confiscated, his father drinks himself to death, and eventually he must try to support himself and his sister however he can - very difficult for a one-armed man in war time. He turns to mugging, then smuggling, making connections with shady people that will leave him well-off when the war ends. Meanwhile Royal joined with a colored regiment and used his natural leadership, eventually becoming a leading figure amongst the black politicians in the Reconstruction South.

Throughout, the ghost of the overseer haunts Nick. The ghost is an enabler, helping him to steal, to avoid detection, and to kill when needed. As he navigates the political waters of the post-war climate, playing both sides of the fence between progressive politicians and the KKK, the overseer is always there.

In the real world, Nick's main manservant, Morse, has been getting into trouble. He's met some shady characters himself while supplying Nick's opium addiction, and has been relying on his relationship to Nick to get out of them. Nick is a mean old man, but he realizes how dependent he is on his servants. The climax of the memoir story and the resolution of Nick and Morse's relationship is dramatic but not histrionic, and the figure of the overseer continues to loom large.

Cowdrey does some remarkably good things in this story. For one, Nick is very straightforward about his evil deeds. He does what he does in order to get by and further himself, not out of any psychotic or political agenda. One gets the feeling that in peaceful times, when it easy to advance while being basically righteous, he could have been a "good" man, i.e. he is a morally neutral character shaped by the ease of evil in the chaos of war. Even with supernatural help, Nick's evil is mundane.

Next, the examinations of race relations in the antebellum and postbellum South are not presented in any simple way here. While Nick idealizes the plantation he grew up on, he is not blind to its problems. Nick himself admires Royal in many ways, but after the war he is uncomfortable with the equality for which the blacks are trying to reach. Likewise, in the more modern time period we see that blacks have come farther, they are paid more and have more autonomy, but are still relegated to "their place," and are punished when they transgress the firm but unwritten boundaries. One is forced to compare what Cowdrey writes to what we read in the newspapers everyday.

The other two masterful touches have to do with style. For one, the third-person narrative voice of the modern sections and Nick's first person narrations have completely different tones and styles. They are easy to tell apart. Nick's voice matches up particularly well with the tone of Civil War memoirs that I have read. And with both voices, the story is beautifully written and completely readable, with the prose pulling you through the story without a stumble, something I always look for and particularly appreciate in a writer. The other well-done aspect is Cowdrey's ability to evoke a sense of place. He specializes in New Orleans and its surroundings; almost all his short fiction is set around there. Here he continues to do it well, and also to evoke the sense of change over time - New Orleans during the Civil War was a very different place than it was afterwards.

This is one of the best stories that I have read so far this year. I'm particularly impressed because I don't usually like stories classified as "horror," but it wasn't until after I was finished with this one that I realized that it could be classified that way. As with all the best writing, while I was reading it I wasn't thinking about genre or classifications, instead I was caught up in it. I hope that this will earn the author some recognition come awards season.

"The Boarder" by Alexander Jablokov

Possibly the most interesting aspect of "The Boarder," the lead story in March F&SF, is that by some definitions it isn't sf of any kind. In some ways, it's perfectly mainstream. Instead of having speculative elements, instead it is a historical story about science itself. In this case, the narrator remembers a Russian boarder his parents took in when he was young. Vassily was a metallurgist, and had worked on the Russian space program for some time in the 50s and 60s. The story doesn't have a plot: the narrator and Vassily interact, the narrator begins to grow up, and eventually Vassily moves on.

Some people would argue that stories like this don't belong in the speculative fiction magazines, but I think they have a place. Similar arguments were made about four of Neal Stephenson's books: Cryptonomicon and also all three books of the Baroque Cycle. However, I think there's a lot of value in fiction that examines ideas, even without speculative elements. Certainly if we harken back to Hugo Gernsback's aim of making science fiction educational Stephenson's works are great, and Jablokov's story also mentioned things I'd never known, or even much thought about, regarding the Russian space effort.

What worries me about "The Boarder" is its atmosphere of nostalgia. As a space afficionado myself, I want our dreams of space to be active and forward looking, not passive and backwards looking. Especially looking at the Russian efforts engender melancholy: half-assed engineering pushed beyond any reasonable timelines or safety margins in the name of furthering a political propaganda agenda. It may be good to remember that humanity's dreams were abused that way, but it is depressing.

Back to the story itself (I'm afraid I've been falling into the "talking about things other than the work at hand" trap that, among other things, other reviewers have been criticizing of late), it is generally a successful piece. Vassily captures our interest, the more so for being somewhat mysterious. The balance of information about the Russian space effort and Vassily personally is good, as is the pacing of revelations. However, this is interwoven with small vignettes about the narrator's youth and growth, and that didn't seem to work out as well. Those sections didn't reinforce the theme or tone that the Vassily sections had - Jablokov may have been shooting for contrasts, but that didn't come across either. Despite some of its structural flaws, I'm glad to have read this story; it was thought-provoking in some very positive ways.