This is a 50^th Anniversary double issue… why did it have to be a double issue? I hate to start the review with a petty observation like that, but honestly, this was a bigger task than I was hoping for, especially because the November ’99 Asimov’s SF was also a double issue!

Right inside the cover is an ad for Frank M. Robinson’s Science Fiction of the 20^th Century:  An illustrated History.  Really pulling the nostalgia strings for the older sf!  Another item to put on my ‘to buy’ list.

 

Editorial, by Gordan Van Gelder

Mr. Van Gelder points out that this is the 578^th issue.  He quotes SF writer and scholar James Gunn, who wrote in 1974 that 

A genre called science fiction will continue to exist, I believe, although the magazines in which it is published may not survive… The unity of science fiction… will begin to disintegrate without the magazines as a focus.

1999 was five years before I meet James Gunn, who re-focused me on the value of shorter fiction — a belief he held consistently through his life. Van Gelder ends his editorial with a promise to keep ‘em coming, which he did until mid-2024, and it appears that F&SF recently got a new lease on life.  

Guest Editorial: I Was There When the Day the World Ended, I Was There the Day the World Began, by Ray Bradbury

When Bradbury was six or seven years old, a Pentecostal group predicted the world would end at noon on May 24^th.  Fixing an enormous lunch, he and his brother go find a tree on a hill from which to watch the show, but the world fails to end — yet, it also did end. The few cars on the street are the vanguard of a coming revolution; and more importantly, an airplane lands in the field — not quite able to get to the tiny airport nearby.

We circled the air-lost Beast in the meadowgrass, and touched it and smelled it, not knowing we were touching Tomorrow, while more of tomorrow banged by on the road below, shaped like Model A’s.

Most of the essay deals with travel technology, the bad roads, the long trains, the cloth-and-wood plane, but for a boy of 6 or 7, that’s what you would have seen first. Travel speed from horse and sail to car and plane extrapolated to rockets and FTL. 

I found it interesting that Bradbury focuses on the method of travel in this essay, but the majority of his fiction seems to have nothing to do with the mechanics of travel so much as what you do when you get where your going.

At this point I can look back at my own life and note the pace of change in many areas. Neanderthals have gone from savage sub-humans to a much more complex family, the asteroid impact that ended the dinosaurs went from fringe to accepted and from there to being ‘a big piece, but not the only piece’ of the puzzle; the importance of the micro-biome, and of course the  reality of anthropogenic climate change and the effects of environmental conditions on human civilizations and vice-versa.

I’m certain that Black Gate readers are familiar with Bradbury, or they should be, at least.  A couple of interesting side-points.

1) Recently my wife and I added the late 70s, early 80s program Ray Bradbury Theater to our viewing rotation. Two or three episodes in, remarkable stuff. There is nothing quite like trying to show the ‘near future’ on a shoestring budget! William Shatner back to this Twilight Zone roots as a man deeply scarred by his past!

2)  I’ve never seen Something Wicked This Way Comes, and last month I decided to rectify that situation, but it is one of those rare things that is not available on streaming. What is in it that The Man doesn’t want us to know? I’ve got the DVD ordered — which at this point almost feels like putting a wax cylinder on a graphophone.

3)  Bradbury’s 1980 The Martian Chronicles got short shrift in these essays because it didn’t come out in ’79. Still, for easily 40 years such a thing, a TV miniseries based on a writer’s work, was unheard of, but I suppose starting a decade ago ‘prestige’ TV started doing some of that, perhaps most recently with Neil Gaimen’s Sandman and Martha Well’s Murderbot.

4)  I actually saw Bradbury’s desk at the Chicago Writer’s Museum. Like Robert E. Howard’s desk in Cross Plains, it is surprising how small it is.

 

Fiction: “Macs,” by Terry Bisson

I manage to put the Oklahoma City Bombing out of my mind, and then around the anniversary of the occasion I’m reminded of it.  Terry Bisson’s story conceit is of Timothy McVeigh getting cloned so victims of the bombing can kill him. 

The story has a torture porn aspect and in a twist of the knife to everyone involved, as it is hinted that the real McVeigh manages to get away.  It is a decent idea, but I don’t buy it for a second.  I expect that most people who lost loved ones in the bombing would be less interested in The Man providing them with sin eater than with what The Man was going to do to prevent a future domestic terrorist attack. The answer, it appears, is to pardon domestic terrorist and/or install them in the government itself. Truly, we live in the dumbest timeline.

Although this story rubbed me wrong I owe Bisson (who died in late 2024) for several great works: “They’re Made of Meat” is a classic, and after hearing people rave about “Bears Discover Fire” it for over a decade I hauled a copy of the Asimov’s August 1990 into the Ouachita Trail and reading it by an actual campfire. Most recently I read Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, a book started by Walter Miller and finished by Bisson.

F&SF doesn’t illustrate its stories, but they have some weird cartoons

Column: Books to Look For, by Charles De Lint

A Red Heart of Memories, by Nina Kiriki Hoffman.

Hoffman has a delightful writing style, a deceptively simple approach to her prose that’s immediately accessible, but no less resonant for that… Highly recommended.

The Ballad of Billy Badass and the Rose of Turkestan, by William Sanders (a writer that, for all his success, De Lint admits he has never heard of).

And the best thing is, if you end up loving this novel as much as I did, there are another fifteen backlist titles for you to go tracking down.

Flyboy Action Figure Comes with Gasmask by Jenn Monroe.

And the fact that, without explaining or justifying anything, Munroe manages to make the silly idea of a man turning into a fly not only plausible, but something we care about, all to his credit.

The article has a copy of the link to purchase the book, which now leads to a “Singapore Dating Success Advice” website.

Chocolate by Joann Harris.

The novel is set in contemporary France, but she has written it in such a way that it has a timeless quality and could almost be set anywhen. Running under it all is a deep and pleasing sensuality… made into a movie in 2000.

Eyes of Prey by Barry Hoffman

But while the characters are well-developed and fascinating, occasionally the large cast seems a little out of control, just as the prose isn’t always as polished as one might hope for. At those points, it’s Hoffman’s enthusiasm for his work, and his heartfelt belief in what’s writing that carries the reader through.

Science Fiction Magazine Story Index, 1926-1995 by Terry a Murray 

While it’s certainly not for the casual reader, I’m sure it will prove indispensable for scholars and collectors.

Column: Publisher’s Note, by Edward L. Ferman

Ferman seconds Gordan Van Gelder’s introduction, but he also lays bare that competition for SF readers is coming from TV (TV which had expanded by 1999 to cable options) and “the web” — all of it taking a bite out of readership. “In the near future, perhaps we will publish fewer, bigger issues; in the far future, F&SF may come to you in some electronic form.” Mayhap indeed!  

Column: Books, by Robert K.H. Killheffer

Computers and AI! Man… my original write-up of this column was none-to pleasant, since I have a very low opinion of AI in general, and a much lower one of all of the scam-artists pushing it.  But that was before an unelected ketamine-addled fish-faced south African and his squad of Nazi-adjacent manosphere adolescents started blundering around in the machinery of the nation.

Back to the column! Killheffer reviews:

The Age of Spiritual Machines, by Ray Kurzweil

Robots:  Mere Machines to Transcendent Mind, by Hans Moravec

Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!, by Arthur C. Clarke

Killheffer does some calculations on just how many books he might read over his lifetime: 22,000 at one per day, 7,000 at one every three days, and 4,000 at one per week, this puts him in a rather melancholy mood, a mood repeated when he read Kurzweil’s and Moravec’s books.

First of all, Kurzweil is not the guy with the dreadlocks* who was big into virtual reality and dropped it all to play music — that would be Jaron Lanier. Kurzweil predicts that a computer with the full computing capacity of the human brain will be available for a mere $1,000 as soon as 2019. So, according to the internet, the human brain’s computing capacity is an exaflop (1X10¹⁸). It’s 2025 and there are at least three exaflop-level computers.

• Frontier

The U.S. Department of Energy’s first exascale supercomputer cost an estimated $600 million. It’s located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and has a speed of 1.353 exaFLOPS.

• Aurora

This supercomputer is expected to cost about $500 million and is being used for scientific research and development. It’s located at Argonne National Laboratory.

• Isambard-AI

This supercomputer cost $273.38 million and uses over 5,000 Nvidia’s GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip units. It’s one of the world’s highest-performing supercomputers.

Swing and miss there! I think what we can all agree that computers, copiers, the internet and etc. all worked way better back in 2005-2020. It was a good 15 year run when you didn’t have to save to one drive, you didn’t have to get another damn app, AI assistants you didn’t ask for and can’t get rid of didn’t autofill incorrectly, you could search for ‘What is the computing power of the human brain?’ without google wanting to know your location, and some broken salamander-eyed tech billionaires were not running amok.

Kurzweil also predicts that we’ll have a true human-capacity AI by 2029 and by 2099 the majority of people will have made the leap into virtual immortality. He’s all aboard the AI train, but he has the barest modicum of self-awareness to ask,

But the most critical issue Kurzweil overlooks is the inevitable question “Why would we want to?” He relies rather heavily on arguments of inevitability, and assumes too easily the appeal of his imagined technologies.

I will also wager that he doesn’t really address what you’d do all day with your god-like powers. What you’d do the year after that, or the decade after that, or the century after that.

Killheffer’s self-awareness kicks off his review of Hans Moravec’s Robots: Mere Machines to Transcendent Mind, which treads the well-worn path of machines reaching a point where they can design themselves, grow ever-more powerful and efficient, go off to explore the universe (for reasons) “A giant “bubble” of Mind that will eventually consume the entire universe.”

But with his forward shields up, Killheffer is not taken so swiftly with Moravec’s vision of the far future, asking “Why would we ever choose a future like this?”

Sadly, from the perspective of 2025, the answer appears to be that ‘we’ won’t have much say in the matter. As an observational aside, I’m far more worried about robots (androids, specifically) than AI in general. An AI that has the knowledge to whip up a great omelet can’t actually make omelets without a body of some kind — yes, you could build a specific omeletbot but that shit’s expensive, $50,000 for a machine that does one thing (although, admittedly, it does it well), BUT if there is ever a working android — a humanoid robot with arms and fingers — then all bets are off. 

For $50,000 you have an android that can make omelets, and carry plates to the dishwasher, and set the tables, and and and. And I’ve seen a lot of people whose job it is to stand between two three-million dollar machines, and make sure that one of the five things that could go wrong with the part (burring isn’t too bad or it isn’t too smooth, or there isn’t too much cutting oil, you get the idea) didn’t, and if it did, do one of the three things you need to do to fix it before putting the part into the next machine. A general function android will put all those people out of work.

And before anybody says that’ll bring prices down, I have to scan my own groceries and the price hasn’t gone down there — except for the tacit acknowledgement that I sometimes scan $25 dollars worth of Brazil nuts as $5 worth of sunflower seeds. I regret nothing!

The grand old man of hard science fiction, Arthur C. Clarke’s book Greetings, Carbon-Based Lifeforms! actually pushes back a bit on the first two books, as it is all about ‘why’.

The resignation evident in Kurzweil and Moravec, their unexamined assumption that the ways and means of American capitalism will forever dominate our culture (even relations between Moravec’s superintelligent machines are described in terms of today’s corporate politics), strike me as a sad indication of the diminishment of our vision.

Killheffer also notes that,

Clarke’s essays offer a tiny ray of light in that [Science and technology] decide the kind of futures that are possible: human wisdom must decide which are desirable. This is a dimension missing from Kurzweil’s and Moravec’s books. It’s a dimension that sf naturally brings to bear, and one can only hope that our visionary humanists — Robinson, Cadigan, Bear, et al. — will make out this territory while its still fictional, and help us claim a more desirable future while we still can.

Friends, Fans, Countrymen, take a deep breath, a shot of whiskey (and/or a bong hit) and ask yourself, are wiser heads making wise decisions?  

Fiction: “Darkrose and Diamond,” by Ursula K. Le Guin

Le Guin published her first tale, “The Barrow” in F&SF in October 1976, and her last sale, prior to this story, was “Solitude” in December, 1994.

A tale from her Earthsea setting, a wealthy Merchant of the town of Glade, in the west of Havnor, named Golden, has a son named Diamond.  Diamond has a knack for songs and tales, and Golden hopes it is a sign that the boy will become a wizard. But Diamond makes friends with a girl named Rose — the daughter of a local witch.

The story follows Diamond as he goes to study with the wizard Hemlock, who makes him mostly learn long lists of the names of things in the Language of the Making. Diamond dislikes his studies, and enjoys ‘sending’ (reaching out to Rose via magic); he is also not particularly fond of Hemlock, and isn’t surprised when Hemlock says, six months into the one-year deal, that perhaps Diamond should leave. 

He is surprised when Hemlock says that where he really needs to go is the Wizards’ school on Roke. BUT, the two have a very frank discussion about the price of being a Wizard, which is celibacy. Being a young man (maybe seventeen?) the idea is a bit frightful to Diamond, and he is alarmed that Hemlock may have used magic to ‘protect’ him from unpure thoughts within his house (which is why he is constantly sneaking off to the wharfs where he can think clearly of Rose — who is older now and named Darkrose).

Instead of going to Roke, or continuing to study with Hemlock, or getting into his father’s business, Diamond goes back to Darkrose, discovers that she’s already got a new boyfriend. Diamond throws himself into the family business and his father is happy (happier than he expected to be) to have him back. But Diamond has also given up on music, even as a hobby.

Darkrose’ beau is a musician, and his band is one of many that plays at one of Golden’s great parties, and it is at this party that Diamond makes a decision that he’ll join the band, to get back to Darkrose, and get back to music. 

And from there the tale winds down, with him being a renowned harper (although far from the greatest). It is a good story, and one that throws a fair number of curveballs — for example, the father, Golden, is not an absolute prick. A good mix of the fire and naivete of youth being tempered (but not extinguished) by the experience of age. Although both youth and age are refreshingly unsure of themselves. Diamond knows there is a good deal he doesn’t know, the wizard Hemlock knows more, but is equally hesitant because he knows more unknowns.

No dragons or Kargish raiders — it is the tale of a young man who gets an idea, “one heart” in his head and it nearly ruins his life, but he gets a second chance. I’m certain that generations of people have dreamed of going to Roke and would buy and read hundreds of stories of boys going to Roke, so Le Guin’s choice to turn away from all that, to observe the decisions that lead to a quieter life, is a bold one.

In The Wizard of Earthsea, Ged gets into a competition with another student and that competition leads to the summoning of his ‘shadow’ and is the spur for the rest of the book. But later in the book Le Guin makes a note that the other wizarding student, Jasper, for all his prowess and braggadocio, ends up later in life as essentially a court wizard (just a step or two above an entertainer) for a local lord.

I can’t help wondering if “Diamond and Darkrose” is Le Guin revisiting that idea — maybe even a bit of a literary apology to poor Jasper, whose life she painted as rather hollow and dreary compared to Ged’s, but honestly, it had a lot going for it.  

Fiction: “Objects of Desire in the Mirror May be Closer Than They Appear,” by Harlan Ellison

This is the 28^th story that Ellison wrote in a store window, and the 30^th story he sold to F&SF.  It was a story written from a Prompt (from Chris Carter), about ‘a 102-year-old pregnant corpse.’

Lieutenant Francene Jacobs has a murder to solve — an old man had his throat cut in the alley behind the Midnight Mission. Except for his head being nearly severed, the guy looks 60, maybe a little older. He’s also being keened over by three supermodels. A bum at the mission says the old man was in the alley with two of the three ladies, then there was a flash of green light and the old boy was dead. An autopsy shows that the corpse is remarkable — first, he’s at least 102 years old, second he’s got two sets of organs.

“What I’m describing to you, Francine, is two complete bodies jammed neatly and working well into one carcass.  And the woman in there is about three month’s gone with child.”

That evening the three supermodels who have been no real help in the investigation, only  dotting on the “love of their life” disappear outside the station in the green light.

Lt. Jacobs, later still, is also taken away by a goddess who is sometimes a god, in a green light, and after an eternity in a kind of alternate dimension, the jealousy of the being tossing her love for the child it carries leads her to murder him in an alley with a machete.

Honestly, it struck me as a bit rushed, like Harlan Ellison was trying too hard to be ‘Harlan Ellison.’  

Fiction: “How Heather Moon Kept My Life From Getting Completely Fouled Up Again” by Ron Goulart

This story has a Golden-Age 1950s-60s vibe, a very Mad Men kind of feel.  The tale is told from the POV of an unspecified near-future, in a reminiscing tone. Friend and Art Dealer Andy Lenzman. The MC, Will, an ad-man, is divorced and having a fling with Marny Olmstead, who works for another ad agency. He finds himself cursed with imps. Imps with Swedish accents who are harassing him — but only after he takes on the Sunnyland Cigarettes account.

Will has studied magic before — and a classmate, Heather Moon, helped him out of a jam in the past (possibly another story). Problem is that he doesn’t know where she is these days. For purposes of plot and setting Will is staying in an old mansion that belongs to his cousin.

Gruskin calls, says he’s got an idea for the cigarette ad from watching a famous stage magician and orders MC to go see it — and the magician’s assistant is Heather Moon.

He goes to see her backstage, her grandfather had a vision of Will in trouble and she arranged the whole thing — they have a showdown with the imps and then (no surprise) turns out Marny is behind it all.

Honestly, not as funny as the author thought. I can see how he thought it might be funny, kind of like how the writers of Mystery Men thought it looked funny, on paper at least. The story also suffers from the fact that Will doesn’t really do anything, he just kind of bounces around.

Ron Goulart had an enviable career in SFF and mystery, and ghost-wrote the TekWar books with William Shatner. He also ghosted novels featuring 1930s pulp heroes, the Phantom, Flash Gordon, and The Avenger.  

Judith Merrill

Essay:  A [Real] Writer — Homage to Ted Sturgeon by Judith Merrill

Judith Merrill passed away in 1997.  Her famous story “That Only a Mother” and this essay were two of the items found by her granddaughter in her papers. The essay includes a letter exchange with Ted Sturgeon  from the late 40s to the mid-50s. This is a glimpse not only into the world of the past, but also a bird’s eye view of the early science fiction industry.

It struck me as not unlike the correspondence between Novelyne Price and Robert Howard, but it is obvious that Theodore Sturgeon was waaay easier to get along with.

Early on, both Merrill and Sturgeon are communists (Trotskyist, specifically) which is not a good thing for you and your sailor husband to be back in the day, but damn the torpedoes!

At times their letters are almost indecipherable with jargon and references to people and events, further complicated by the fact that they would have been talking to each other the same day and referencing those conversations!

As with all writers, Merrill struggled to find the time to actually do the writing, compounded by the fact she’s a single mom. She works at ghost writing and copy editing and westerns (‘cause she has an ‘in’) but she has the passion to write, and write science fiction specifically.

Even by the early 50s the science-fiction writing community is already split into “the Campbell Gang” and FSNY (Futurian Society of New York? I’m not 100% sure). World War II still looms huge in everyone’s mind, with almost every introduction having a “this person did this during the war.”

Believe it or not, for the early 50s Merrill doesn’t experience nearly as much sexism as you would think, but she does encounter a lot of antisemitism.

What we resent, or I at least, is the knowledge that because I’m a Jew, I mustn’t talk too loud or wear too bright colors, or show any ignorance of the social graces. I don’t want to be an ambassador; I want to be me.

One thing that I thought was interesting, that reaches out form the past to touch a commonality with the modern reader is that, as always, when one looks back on one’s past, it is hard to believe that you ever had that much time or energy.

I was twenty-four years old. Now, forty-five more years down the line and a practiced teller of tales, I know that if I were inventing this story, I would never try to convince the reader that so much could have been packed into a short time. I did not believe it myself; my revisionist memory had stretched six weeks into six months — but it’s all there in the letters.

And that, I will confess, is something that resonates in my own life, it honestly seems like I managed to pack six years into three back in 1989-1992.

Another item she brings up, a thing that is lost in our time (or at least most of our places in this time) is how cheap it was rent a place. I’ve read both Fred Pohl’s Autobiography, and Novelyne Price’s and both of them lean into the cheap rent — Pohl would split the rent at a hotel for like two weeks to get out of the house and work on writing, or someone in the ‘crew’ had an empty apartment or a cabin, or a house they were watching.

Theodore Sturgeon

Apart from the milieu they lived in there is a discussion of the writing craft, and of the difficulties inherent in it, in even getting started in it.  Also, just how easily we can be discouraged from following our more artistic visions; as discussed in a letter from her to Ted:

Imagination… I didn’t realize… that it was something that could be developed and wasn’t just an “is an is or is an is not” deal. I don’t know what factors you had in mind when you said my imagination had been stifled, but I think I can follow it pretty easily. Start with the kind of reaction I had to music when I was a kid — someone would laugh at me, so I’d go away from whatever was beautiful, and forget about it. Toss in an intensely socially conscious environment during my adolescence, where the searching out of the Facts became the ultimate desideratum. Add a husband who called poetry “poultry,” which would have been all right if he had ever called it anything else, even when he wrote it. Run through this a thread of enforced independence, personal, and then financial, which kept the sheltering roof anywhere but overhead, and let the sunlight in a little too bright a little too often, so that many things were seen in sharp relief that might have benefited by shades and tone. Combine it with a sharply analytical mind, which I have. My dreams went underground.

During the time of the letter exchange, people marry, divorce, write. Ted Sturgeon wins the Argosy annual contest for “Bianca’s Hands” (which I heard James E. Gunn read live at the Sturgeon Award in like 2019 — top tier stuff). Judith and Ted become lovers, Ted continues to encourage her to write SF.

Judith’s daughter has a cold, and then measles, and then — an article in the New York Herald Tribune about the U.S. Army denying rumors of infanticide in Japan due to nuclear fallout.

The idea for “That Only A Mother” begins to grow in her mind, pushing itself to the front of her consciousness until she finally gets an opportunity to sit at a typewriter for eight hours and hammer it out. She shows it to Ted, who likes it, makes a few comments, and says he’ll get in touch with his agent. 

Two days later he officially breaks off his romance with her.  The story was rejected by the slicks before getting picked up.

In a way, her success story mirrors so many others, a combination of the right time and place, and the right people.

A Rejection Letter for Judith Merrill’s “That Only A Mother” — Fools!  

Fiction: “New York Vignette,” by Theodore Sturgeon

The story has a bit of a rough start — like a play — a submission letter to a made-up SFF magazine PULSE, that asked for a story when a writer just can’t create. Eventually the narrator wanders New York City. Ends up following a man in a brown coat and hat. From behind he sees the man nod and smile at people, wonders if he is smiling at them or with them.

Outside of Radio City Music Hall, the man diverts and goes to talk to two women and gives them tickets to a show at — the very show they were hoping to see.

A few streets over, the man climbs a ladder and gives the workman atop it the pair of pliers he needs.

At 50^th street the MC catches the guy and he turns to face him and flashes him a smile and nod.

It was like looking into a bright light, but it didn’t dazzle. It was warm, like the windows of farmhouses late at night when there’s snow. It made me smile too, the biggest, widest smile that ever happened to me, so wide that I heard a little… [ONE CLEAR CHUCK, AS WHEN ONE CHUCKS TO A HORSE, BUT ONLY ONE]… somewhere in my back teeth… I suddenly wanted to be home, next to robin and Tandy and my wife, while I felt just that way.

The last the MC sees of him, a bum is asking him for a dime, for a cuppa joe, and he produces a cuppa joe out of his pocket. The MC, writing to the magazine, simply ends saying that he was clearly is in a good mood, but he found it odd that the man didn’t give him an idea for a story for PULSE.  

Fiction: “A Hero of the Empire,” by Robert Silverberg

A tale out of Robert Silverberg’s Roma Eternia series — in which the roman Empire survives into the modern day. It is set around 700 AD  and already, there is a bit of alternate history feel to it, although I’m not cognizant enough about the history to tell the difference.

The story is a collection of letters from the MC (Corbulo) to his friend Horatius, outlining his travels after being banished by Emperor Justinian for getting his freak on with the emperor’s new cup-bearer before the Emperor can do it.

Aft a bit of travelogue, Corbulo gets to Mecca — where he languishes trying to figure out how to do something to get back in Justinian’s good graces.

At first he thinks he’ll spy on the goings on of the Greeks of the Eastern Empire, mostly by hanging out and drinking with a man named Nicomedes. By chance he meets a local named Mahmud who pushes back against the polytheism of the Saracens and who has had visions of a One God. A fundamentally ridiculous idea.

To Mahmud, the fact that there is only one god, whose nature is abstract and incomprehensible to mortals, is the great sublime law from which all other laws flow. This will probably make no more sense to you, Horatius, than it does to me, but it is not our business to be philosophers.

Silverberg does a good job of portraying the power of charisma in the person of Mahmud. A charisma that makes Corbulo realize that the Romans have so much tolerance for so many gods of so many people because they truly believe in none of them, and no true philosopher has taken the gods seriously for a generation.

Corbulo realizes that the Eastern Greeks are not the threat, Mahmud is. Mahmud is already on the outs with the priests and idol makers of Mecca. Corbulo bribes one of the idol makers to take Mahmud out as he goes to the coast.

Again I’m somewhat surprised that alternate history writers seem to go after the project with an axe. Couldn’t just be a different version of Islam, or maybe the Sunnis come out on top instead of the Shias, or whatever. Gotta go all the way upstream to the source! If the mountain won’t come to Muhmud, indeed.  

Fiction: “Fish in a Barrel,” by Jonathan Carroll

An uncanny story about a secretive government agency.

Mr. Kropik has a young visitor which, since they work for a super-science or maybe supernatural agency, is rare. The kid’s caught Kropik in the middle of lunch and the old man stoically does his job, pulling the boy’s file that contains all of his memories. Kropik keeps to himself that whatever memories he might be looking for are in among a lot of things he is best not remembering; such things will crack your will like an eggshell.

As the boy opens the file, Kropik’s cowoerker, Mr. Aoyagi comes in, only somewhat sorry that he interrupted them, and asks the boy his name — and pretty predicably, it turns out that the boy is a younger version of Kropik, who has been sent from upstairs to ease the older Kropik into retirement.

Eh… outside of a study of two co-worders who deeply dislike each other, it didn’t do much for me. One of those stories where the author bends over backward to get everything in place.

Column — Plumage From Pegasus:  The History of Snivilization, by Paul Di Filippo

I’m not sure if this is a consistent article/column or a one-off. Some deep fandom takes about something called the “Smith File”:  a near-legendary file of Doc Smith stories that were rejected by various F&SF editors through the years 1950-65, pretty funny how he (or Di Filippo writes him) apes writers’ styles/ideas but can’t shake his one idea.

“Second Stage Tweener”

By Leigh “Doctoress” Brackett, Lady Ph.D. (1955)

A taxicab turned the corner and come slowly down the street.  “Here he is!” shrieked the Children of the Lins.  “Uncle Kimball!”

Fiction: “The Shrine for Lost Children,” by Poul Anderson

Nameless M.C. is in Japan, observing the Great Buddha in Kamakura, playing tourist and just barely admitting that she would like some of that Zen Buddhist serenity. She has been cursed her whole life to carry the spirit of her dead twin sister, Jenny.

The story is split between her wanderings in the Japanese city of Kama Kura and vignettes of her life — usually Jenny’s thoughts and needs are intruding on her and causing problems, or just the inevitable fallout of the burden of her secret — jobs lost, relationships tanked. Eventually going back to her poor broken-hearted mother who cannot let Jenny go, and won’t let the M.C. let go of her either.

In the real-time world, the M.C. has some trouble finding the way to Kannon (the goddess of mercy) Hall and the view of the city with the autumn colors. She knows that there is a monument to dead children somewhere near and she’s trying to avoid it, but in her haste (remember, this is before Google Maps or maybe even pre-Mapquest) she comes upon it.

Rank upon rank, rank above rank, hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds, they lined this part of the stair, which otherwise turned upward to the let, and surrounded landing. There we alike, doll-sized figures of a robed man, unpainted, earth hue. That made the articles of clothing on a number of them, mainly red caps or bibs, doubly vivid, even at this hour.

Passing through, she gets to the shrine and makes a cleansing offering and, maybe, for the first time, askes Jenny to come to her. Which she does, for once, as an adult, calm and ready to move on.

Anderson dos a great job of dangling the speculative bit — cojoined twin? Absorbed twin? Ghost? Was it all in the M.C.’s mind? Even though the story doesn’t answer the question he pulls it off to a satisfying conclusion.  

Fiction: “The Dynasters Volume I, On the Downs,” by Howard Waldrop

Ah, Howard Waldrop, a tragic loss this year.

A tale of cavemen and the prehistoric world. A bit of a rough start with names like “Ug” and “Ab”, and “Mo,” but the founding group finds the Downs and finds it a good place to live and the story takes place over multiple generations and it becomes clear that this particular group are not actually human — close, but not Homo Sapiens at least. 

Over time they encounter Neanderthals and then Homo Habilis, and finally Homo Sapiens. Waldrop manages to make them alien enough, with amazing memoires (a comet marks time for them, over generations), an ability to count, and use simple tools, but only innovate when they encounter another group — which they always fight and beat. 

The story ends with them charging down at a group who carry “curved staffs and bundles of straight sticks,” presumably they are charging to their first defeat — something the reader knows, but the characters don’t.

Fiction: “Kenny,” by Robert Scheckley

Eight or nine stories and in finally a science fiction story! Kenny, one of about a hundred of the People rouses himself from a deep torpor and announces that the Ship is about to reach a Planet. He runs to tell the Masters who are either piloting the ship or playing a game, he’s not sure.

Heaving a great sigh, the masters reluctantly begin the process of releasing the People to explore.

Kenny and the other People came racing down the gangplank and onto the surface of the new planet, they paused a moment to sniff the air and taste the soil. It didn’t kill them so they started running toward a nearby forest. They were a stream of people, large and robust, and variously colored white, red, black, yellow and brown, running upright for the most part, although a few went on all fours.

The masters, it appears, seed planets (or at least this one) with the People.  

Fiction: “The Happiest Day of her Life,” by Kate Wilhelm

It is a bit hard to believe, but I think this is the first Kate Wilhelm story I’ve ever read.

Reba Cameron is getting married in a day and her well-laid plans are thrown out of whack by the early arrival of her mother Sonya and her mother’s new Guy. Sonya is a bit of a busy-body who immediately tries to re-do the wedding plans, and up-end the schedule. 

Reba just wants to get through the day without losing her cool or giving the New Guy a chance to kill her — which is an odd history from her youth. New boyfriends and fires and car crashes and falling off gondolas.

Reba’s trying her best to get through her day at the hospital where she works, a technician is certain that she signed up for to be a subject in a medical trial — nothing major, just a blood draw — which Reba reacts to with a degree of alarm outside of the inconvenience the draw causes.

The hotel where the wedding is to be held is a huge convention center with a gathering of the Model Train Enthusiasts, a competing science convention, and a bro-sci convention all going on at the same time. And among the people there, she sees a young man intently watching an older man who is talking to that same technician from the hospital, only now she’s pretty sure that the tech doesn’t work at the hospital.

More wedding day hijinks ensue and people keep trying to get her blood. Her fiancé tells her about a crank named Dr. Bresson who believes in a ‘luck gene’ and is certain that she has it. Her fiancé wants her to just give some blood and collect a big fat check for it.

She leaves off the wedding and flees, runs into the reporter/watcher who she is instantly attracted to. Turns out he is a luck-gene carrier, too.

The story was overall just ‘meh’ for me. My wife and I eloped so we didn’t have to deal with this kind of thing! I remember a Luck gene from Larry Niven’s Ringworld, Tandy, I think, had it — not throwing shade, but unlike Niven, nobody got laid in Wilhelm’s story.

Fiction: “A  Fish Story,” by Gene Wolf

Three guys go on a fishing trip, Bruce, Rob, and the unnamed first-person narrator. On the second night they see a UFO — not a flying saucer, just something they can’t identify, and that leads to them talking about the supernatural.

Rob had an aunt who was a spiritualist. Scared him silly when he was a boy. When he is grown up, his Aunt Elspeth is dying, and well, there is nobody else around, so Rob goes to see her. 

Horrible four or five hours, she’s struggling to breathe, and rambling. Eventually he starts hearing her voice in his head when she’s not talking. Rob tries to make her promise not to send any messages from beyond the grave. 

Maybe he sleeps for a minute, and when he wakes up she’s dead. Rob gets up, not sure he’s going to tell anyone or just leave. In the waiting room he sees himself, sittin’ there readin’ Readers Digest. A nurse comes in and leads him (the double) past himself to see his aunt. Rob grabs the Readers Digest and takes it home but doesn’t read it.

Back to camping trip — Rob screams, they try to calm him down.

There actually was something shrieking up on the bluff, but I cannot say with any confidence what it was. A wildcat, perhaps, or a cougar.

That’s where it ends. Not a bad piece, about right for its length.  

Column: A Scientists Notebook, Expecting the Unexpected, by Gregory Benford

Benford — again! Benford looks ahead to the future! The year 2000 (which I found odd — that’s less than 2 months away from the date of publication!)

Many future thinkers, especially sf writers, are now less interested in making straightforward predictions of the future, and thus in helping determine it, precisely because they do not believe that linear, programmatic determinism is the right angle of attack.

He delves into the growing friction between stasis and change. Does the future belong to physicists? Chemists? Astronomical resources to uplift the bulk of humanity (which I did not know was a problem).

He hammers that biology will be where it is at. Takes some potshots at anyone hinting that maybe we just put on the brakes a bit. Some funny bits of ads/articles from the future. He has a weird prediction about wearable computers, which we already in the rearview mirror due to smart phones (or blackberries, to be more 1999 appropriate).

In reality biology ran aground a bit with stem-cells and Bush and 9/11, and while a thousand good things have come from that branch of the sciences, like everything else, there are Forces eager to clip as much off that branch as they can.  

 

Like I Said, Weird

Fiction: “Acceptance Speech,” by Carol Emshwiller

A human is giving a speech to an audience of aliens as best she can with language and body-language barriers. She is telling the Noble Poets of the Consortium about herself, that she was kidnapped from her world, managed to survive a maze-like test, and by chance, managed to blurt out a poem — something the natives find powerful.

I paid for a cool, perfumy drink — my first taste of such things as you drink every day — with my first poem, not knowing, then, its true value. Not even knowing that it was a poem.

This leads to different tests, including throwing rocks and demanding they ‘confess’ and she comes to know the value of their favorite syllables.

Through more painful lessons, she learns the language and syntax, and from there her poems grow better (although, she confesses, some of them she barely thinks of as poetry), until she falls under the tutorship of the Humble Master himself.

Eventually there is duel between them, whips and daggers and poetry all at once, and what breaks the Humble Master is that she won’t kill him, which is either an act mercy or of unrelenting cruelty, that rocks them all back on their clawed heels and tails.

This is a remarkable tale, a story within a story, a narration of a story that the narrator does not entirely understand.

 

Weird, But Not Inaccurate

Fiction: “Crocodile Rock,” by Lucious Shepard

I will admit some trepidation upon starting this story, since I thought it was the Elton John Song. Thankfully, it was not.

An American expatriate living in Abidjan, Africa, and studying pythons, Michael is in a bad way: a bender brought on by “the rich miseries of Africa.” A hangover keeps him from even being able to bang his 17-year old girlfriend, Patience.

A call from an old college frenemy, Randy, draws him back into action — the situation: murders that have been attributed to sorcery — Crocodile men, specifically. This case has a witness how saw it happen, three men and two women killed and started eating people. One of the men is in custody and has confessed to both the murder and sorcery.

Gilbert Buma is a charismatic ju-ju man and Randy wants Micheal to check him out, as an expert on reptiles, and as someone wo is not new to African superstition, but also not overcome by it. Micheal agrees and goes to the city of Gogado, set himself up in the Vert Du Rive hotel, a stone’s throw from the Kilombo river.

With all the pieces in position, six pages in, Shepard spins a mesmerizing tale. A tale of a despairing country, two broken men, a cursed or poisonous or polluted river, a corrupt court system inherited from a more corrupt and violent system, and the eponymous ‘crocodile rock’ — a great wide shelf of stone protruding into the Kilombo where crocodiles in unnatural numbers sun themselves and tumble drunkenly into the river.

Gilbert Burma is a man of indeterminate age and both great physical strength and force of personality, not so unusual in a country of witch-men and cults, but more importantly Gilbert Burma tells Michael Mosley some important things: the location of an albino python (something Mosley has been seeking to breed and sell and get outta Africa and the special hell that is academia) and that ‘his brothers and sisters will not harm him,” which is important because it will take a little time for the truth to be revealed.

Michael Mosley, after a night of drinking, has his first crocodile dream, of lolling along the current and being pulled toward a deep blue pool and from there… Mosley wakes to find himself outside of the hotel on the great rock in the river — the idea that he was sleepwalking is terrifying, but more so is that there is a crocodile on the landward side of the rock.

The top of its massive head at rest was parallel with the mid-point of my thigh, and its open jaws could have accommodated an oil drum. With its scales gilded by firelight, its pupils cored with orange brilliance, it would have been at home by Cerberus’s side, an idol of pure menace guarding a portal into hell — that was my first thought (if I can call those chill lancing of a frightened garbled language that shot through my brain “thoughts”), that beyond the portcullis of stained and twisted teeth, deep in its hollow tube of a belly, lay a gateway opening into some greater torment.

Michael Mosley makes a sudden desperate leap to the edge of the shore and claws up the muddy bank before the creatures can get to him and manages to get away from it on the muddy flats.

The story stacks horror and mystery one atop the other, with Mosley fearing his grip on reality is failing and Burma the witch-doctor assuring him not to worry, that Mosley is simply sharing in Burma’s dreams and memories and that the most important thing for him to do is to have patience — Patience also being the name of Mosley’s 17-year old girlfriend.

The awful reality seems to be that Burma is not a man who can turn into a crocodile, but a crocodile who, fleeing something in the river he cannot understand, has turned into a man.

Politics and the cult of personality style lead to Burma’s being released (or allowed to escape) and Mosley and Patience fleeing back to the U.S. where Mosley takes a teaching job and, as community college and academia is a special kind of hell, he often finds himself stuck in his car on the commute.

I become distant form human thoughts and desires, tranquil in the face of the unknown, and I see myself gliding along that white riverine strip, a soul and flesh encased in steel, one of thousands of such entities, and we are all moving inexorably toward a far-off patch of glowing red, brilliant and flickering like fire, drawn to it by a force beyond our comprehension, but confident that when we reach it we will be transformed in a fashion that will allow us to survive the great trouble that afflicts us all, clear in the truth of our salvation… not the much advertised salvation of religion, but salvation through the processes of nature, which often manifest in arcane ways and seem as wildly illogical as the consequences of a magic spell.

It leaves you with the unasked question: in a world so cursed that crocodiles become men, what do, what can, men become?

Sadly, Lucious Shepard would pass away in 2014. This African setting is a bit of a departure for him as he seems to have written a lot of stories set in South America.  

Column: Curiosities, The Seeing I and Other Gems, by Kristine Katheryn Rusch.

Rusch has a problem the point of “Curiosities” is to put a spotlight on obscure near-forgotten books. Instead she nods to F&SF itself, specifically Charles’ Beaumont’s column “The Seeing Eye” from December 1959, where he talks with high hopes about a TV series he’s involved with: The Twilight Zone. 

She tips the hat to some of the greats in F&SF including Starship Troopers, A Canticle for Liebowitz, and the long list of great authors —  a solid end to issue.  

 

*I rarely trust a white guy with dreadlocks, but Lanier… maybe.

Previous entries the Quatro-Decadal Reviews include:

November 1969

Amazing Stories

Galaxy Science Fiction,

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

Worlds of If

Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact

Venture Science Fiction

A Decadal Review of Science Fiction from November 1969: Wrap-up

November 1979

Quatro-Decadal Review, November 1979: A Brief Look Back

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

Galileo Magazine of Science & Fiction

Analog Science Fiction Science Fact

Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction

Amazing Stories

Omni

A Decadal Review of Science Fiction from 1979: Wrap-up

November 1989

Jump Back! Quatro-Decadal Review, Looking Ahead to November, 1989

Amazing Stories

Analog

Asimov’s

Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

Weird Tales

November 1999

Booyah! Quatro-Decadal Review, an Introduction to the World as it was in November 1999

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Adrian Simmons is an editor for Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, check out their Best-of Volume 4 Anthology, or support them on Patreon!