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A Strange Horizon Worth Viewing

A Strange Horizon Worth Viewing

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sh_headI’ve sometimes bought a book without knowing anything about it because it had a cool cover. Similarly, I’ve been drawn to read a story because of a cool title.

Case in point is  “Young Love on the Run from the Federal Alien Administration New Mexico Division (1984)” by Grant Stone over at the May 9 edition of the weekly Strange Horizons webzine. The protagonist has fallen in love with an alien newly escaped from a government holding facility in Rosewell (where else?) during the aforesaid Orwellian year. The pair are on the run from grey-suited, mirrorshaded  agents who want the alien back because the captured extraterrestrials are essential to some sort of Cold War research project; at the very least, the government doesn’t want the Soviets to get ahold of them. To try to get back home, the alien is trying to jerry rig a communications device from television and cassette recorder parts, the nod to ET phoning home no doubt intentional. As you might expect, the scenario is that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t out to get you, even if they are trying to protect you. What you might not expect is that a kind heart sometimes comes from the sources you might think the most alien.

Sometimes you can’t judge a book by its cover, or a story by its title. In this case, you can.  A “strange horizon” worth viewing.

Thoughts on Joanna Russ (1937-2011)

Thoughts on Joanna Russ (1937-2011)

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69150827_130420433114I first read Joanna Russ as an assignment for a graduate seminar in science fiction. The story was “When it Changed.”  The 1972 Nebula Award winner for Best Short Story, and a 1973 Hugo nominee, it depicts the visitation of male astronauts on the entirely female world of Whileaway.

I didn’t get it.

In this exemplar of feminist SF, women on a (temporarily, it turns out) manless world act in many ways like men, particularly in terms of violent behavior. The casual way the female narrator notes she has fought three duels and that the funny thing about her wife is that “she will not handle guns” bothered me. Here I thought feminism was supposed to be about rejecting this kind of macho behavior.

What I didn’t get was that the story isn’t advocating gunplay as necessarily a good thing, but rather that women should have the right to make the same choices as men, unhampered by patriarchal-imposed expectations and restraints. Even if they are not very good choices that don’t fit into some mother-goddess worshipping, nourishing pacifist utopia.

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The moral of “When I Changed” is that even when women are somehow allowed to make whatever choices they want, without imposing values of “masculine” or “feminine” on what those choices should be, men get involved to screw things up.

Here’s a quote from The Female Man, which features Janet Evason, the narrator of “When It Changed,” as one of four women from alternate universes who cross over into each other’s realities:

As my mother once said, ‘The boys throw stones at the frog in jest. But the frogs die in earnest.”

You don’t need to be from an alternate universe to realize the truth of that.

Black Static #22

Black Static #22

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314_largeBlack Static is the horror/dark fantasy counterpart to the largely SF magazine Interzone, published in alternating months by TTA Press. The current April-May 2011 issue features fiction by Alan Wall, Time Lees, Allison J. Littlewood, Steven Pirie and Simon Kurt Unsworth.  The ‘transmissions from beyond’ themed art in every issue is by David Gentry. Peter Tennant and Tony Lee provide book and DVD/BD reviews and interviews, with regular comment supplied by Stephen Volk, Christopher Fowler and Mike O’Driscoll.  What immediately grabbed my attention is the opening paragraph to Fowler’s typically curmudgeon column:

I think I am finally going mad. As I get older, everything that other people find enjoyable, I seem to find awful.  No, beyond awful. Unwatchable, unreadable, uninvolving, stupid beyond belief!

I’m totally sympatico.

You can subscribe to the print version here, or the electronic edition here; there’s also a special discounted rate for a joint subscription to both Interzone and Black Static.

Subterranean magazine Summer 2011 Now Available

Subterranean magazine Summer 2011 Now Available

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summer-20112The 19th online issue — and 26th issue overall – of one of the genre’s leading publications, Subterranean Magazine, is now available (at least in part).

Subterranean is published quarterly. It appeared in print for seven issues (some of which are still in print and are available here) before switching to the current online format in Winter 2007. It is presented free online by Subterranean Press, and is edited by William Schafer.

The Summer 2011 issue is guest edited by Gwenda Bond and focuses on young adult fiction. From her introduction:

Enter the fabulous writers whose stories you’ll find here. Each offering showcases a different facet of the many-faceted jewel that is YA. You’ll find Malinda Lo’s first short story publication, “The Fox,” a seductive tale featuring characters from her new YA high fantasy novel Huntress, alongside the best high fantasy zombie story I’ve ever read in Sarah Rees Brennan’s “Queen of Atlantis.” Both these authors–as well as Tiffany Trent (author of the Hallowmere series, and the upcoming The Unnaturalists), and Kelly Link (acclaimed short fiction author, whose YA stories were collected in Pretty Monsters)–will already be familiar to many YA readers, and to plenty of genre readers as well. If Genevieve Valentine’s story about an unusual teen pregnancy, “Demons, Your Body, and You,” is your introduction to her, I envy you; her first novel Mechanique will be out soon. Well-known SFF author Tobias Buckell provides the lone science fiction piece with “Mirror, Mirror,” while newer writer Richard Larson’s “The Ghost Party” tests the friendship of two girls against a backdrop of threats shady and eldritch. Finally, vampires: what YA issue would be complete without them? I promise you that Alaya Dawn Johnson’s hilarious, shockingly irreverent “Their Changing Bodies” is unlike any vampire story you’ve read, and that New York Times’ bestselling author Karen Joy Fowler’s “Younger Women” also opens a different, ahem, vein.

Content is released in weekly installments until the full issue is published.  As of today, Bond’s introduction and “The Fox” are available.

Andromeda Spaceways 50th and CSZ’s 1st

Andromeda Spaceways 50th and CSZ’s 1st

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asim50_cover_229_317-220x304In addition to having the coolest title for a genre fiction magazine,  Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine has reached its 50th issue milestone.  To celebrate, the cover is a reprint of the illustration by Les Petersen for the magazine’s first issue. Stories by Debbie Cowens, Damien Walters Grintalis, Shona Husk, Barry Kirwan, Ian McHugh, Nicole R. Murphy, Dennis J. Pale, Anthony Panegyres, Mark Lee Pearson, Simon Petrie, Natasha Simonova, Robert P. Switzer and Mark D. West.  Print and PDF subscriptions and single issue purchases are available here.

Meanwhile, The Cascadia Subduction Zone (named after the earthquake corridor in the Pacific Northwest that is home base for the publication) has launched its inaugural issue. While its editorial mission is to bring more attention to women writers, and is not a genre publication per se, the women on the masthead may be familiar to genre readers.  Reviews editor Nisi Shawl is a James Triptree Jr. award winner, and features editor L. Timmel Duchamp has published short sf and is, along with arts editor Kath Wilham, a founder of Aqueduct Press.  And the first issue features a poem by Ursula K. LeGuin, as well as reviews of Karen J. Fowler, M. Rickert, and Kathe Koja.  There’s also a review of Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMer.

Print and electronic editions and subscriptions are available at earth-shaking rates here.cascadia1_110x1531

Apex Magazine 23 Released

Apex Magazine 23 Released

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apexmag04pubitThe April edition of Apex Magazine boasts what publisher Jason Sizemore terms “the first of our new expanded editions.”

Editor Catherynne M. Valente’s fiction selections include Eugie Foster’s “Biba Jibun” and Michael J. Deluca marks his first Apex debut with “The Eater.” The reprints are Mike Allen’s Nebula Award-nominated “The Button Bin”  and Jennifer Pelland’s Nebula Award-nominated story “Ghosts of New York” from Dark Faith, about which I said:

The opening story, “Ghosts of New York” by Jennifer Pelland, considers the afterlife of those who made the horrific choice to jump from the Twin Towers rather than remain in a burning buidling about to collapse. The whole subgenre of 9/11 fiction is tricky, given  our collective memory of something so frighteningly incomprehensible that’s been trivialized over time with the endlessly surreal replaying loop of the imploding skyscrapers, but Pelland’s take here is vividly disturbing in suggesting that memorializing the dead can make matters worse.

Also included are Rose Lemberg’s poem “Thirteen Principles of Faith”and the history of the Nebula Awards by Michael A. Burstein.

Apex Magazine 23 is sold online for $2.99; it’s also available in Kindle, Nook, and a downloadable format through Smashwords. Previous issues are available through their back issue page. We last profiled Apex with Issue 22.

You can subscribe and get 12 issues for just $19.99.

Interzone March-April 2011

Interzone March-April 2011

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303_largeIn the mail this week is the latest Interzone. The  fiction features a novella by Nina Allan, “The Silver Wand,” and stories by Tim Lees (“Crosstown Traffic”), Chris Butler (“Tell Me Everything”), and Ray Clule (“Tethered to the Cold and the Dying”).

The magazine is the print home for David Lanford’s “Ansible Link,” a miscellany of genre news. I found this item from the regularly featured “As Others See Us” department particularly humorous:

Kazuo Ishiguro’s clone-themed novel Never Let Me Go can’t be sf even though he says it is, because he’s respectable. To clarify: “It isn’t science fiction–indeed its procedures are the very reverse of generic, for there is no analogy at work in the text, which instead labours (sic) to produce its iterative naturalism as a kind of sub-set or derivation of our own.” (Guardian)

That certainly clears things up.

Steampunk II

Steampunk II

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spYou can read my review of Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer over at the SF Site.  Here’s the general gist:

The various VanderMeer collections stand out because of their sense of humor about genre classification lacking in most academic treatments and that they supplement terrific fiction with offbeat critical discussions, typography and other diversions of interest. A prime example here is “A Secret History of Steampunk,” a collage incorporating graphics, multiple authors, and just plain weirdness to satirize the academic research and discussion of obscure literary fragments…many of these tales are positively brilliant. Margo Lanagan’s “Machine Made” is a disturbing fable of a sexually repressed newlywed taking revenge on a doltish husband whom she discovers seeks pleasures of the flesh through a mechanical servant. Caitlín R. Kiernan’s “The Steam Dancer (1896)” relates the desires of a woman rescued from death with bionic appendages who only feels truly whole as a saloon dancer before an audience of opium addicts attentive to her body, but oblivious to her artistry. As long as we’re on the subject of mechanically enabled creatures, “The Cast Iron Kid” by Andrew Knighton presents a Western gunfight in which the title character is undone not by a six-shooter, but by principles of subatomic physics. “As Recorded on Brass Cylinders: Adagio for Two Dancers” by James L. Grant and Lisa Matchev probably could have been recast as a “mainstream” SF story in which a pair of androids share the troubling human emotions of love and loyalty;  however, put in a steampunk context, it seems to me that much more poignant..

Miscellaneous Musings

Miscellaneous Musings

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Reading The New York Times on-line (something I used to read about people doing in science fiction novels; I still prefer the actual paper version, though my resistance to eventually getting an e-book reader of some kind is slowly crumbling), I came across these two divergent items of interest to those who ponder the stability of our immediate universe:

elliot2-obit-popupAstronomer James Elliot gets a featured obit because he discovered the rings of Uranus (okay, wipe that smirk off your face). What’s also noteworthy is that he apparently did so in a kind of jury-rigged  fashion.  According to the Times obituary:

In 1977, using a telescope in an airplane, Dr. Elliot led a team of Cornell University scientists to observe the planet Uranus when it passed between Earth and a star. Flying at night over a patch of the Indian Ocean where Uranus’s shadow was to be cast, he had the foresight to turn on his equipment more than a half-hour early. This allowed him to record a series of slight dimmings that provided the first evidence of Uranus’s rings…“In the current culture of giant spacecraft missions and multibillion-dollar experiments,” Dr. [Michael] Person said, “he showed that someone dedicated to science with relatively small resources could still make very exciting discoveries.”

12japan-cnd-span4-articlelargeAlso in the news is the tsunami and the largest earthquake in a century or more that hit Japan. Whatever our global technological progress (even while world politics continues to destabilize), we tend to forget just how fragile we are as a species even without our efforts to do ourselves in.  During the Cold War, the end of the world was nuclear.  Then it was terrorism and religious fanatacism.  But, maybe it will end up just being good old Mother Nature.  Time to go reread J.G. Ballard.