Black Gate

So how are things going in “The World’s Leading Mystery Magazine?” Quite well, as it turns out, despite some significant format changes that began in the January/February 2017 issue. To save on printing and shipping costs, they’ve made the switch from monthly to bi-monthly issues, but made up for it by providing twice as many pages per issue, meaning that long-time subscribers won’t have to sacrifice a single page of mystery goodness. This issue, for example, has seventeen tales of crime and deduction.

It opens with “A Slaying Song Tonight” by Vicki Weisfeld. Honestly, I had trouble keeping track of all the characters in this one, so that the revelation of “whodunnit” kind of turned into “whowuzzthat.” Basically, one of a group of Christmas carolers commits a murder on their caroling route and it’s up to two of those carolers to suss out the guilty party.

“Flowing Waters” by Brendan Dubois was easily my favorite story of the whole bunch, concerning a military veteran who deals with her PTSD by adopting a dog who’s seen her own share of violence. Don’t feel ashamed if you cry by the end of this one.

“The Twelve Days of Dunwich” by Barbara Nadel provides a rare turn into supernatural territory with a crime story in which the narrator is the victim, who is dead … but not quite gone.

“The Children of Espiritu Santo” by David Dean concerns a gang that’s terrorizing a small town, specifically a church where a possible holy relic has recently been discovered.

“After Closing Time” by Nova Lee Maier is another one of those “plot to murder the spouse goes horribly awry” stories, complete with an appropriate O. Henry-style twist at the end.

“Night Terrors” by Owen Leddy is another standard trope story, this time it’s the one about the man who dreams of committing a murder every night, unsure why he’s plagued by the recurring dreams and terrified that those dreams will soon come true.

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This year marks the 40-year anniversary of Asimov’s and this issue not only includes a brief recap of the magazine’s history in an editorial, but also comments from each of the contributing authors about when they first read the magazine and what it means to them.

Check out the cover art by Maurizio Manzieri. That’s a scene from the first story in the magazine, “Crimson Birds of Small Miracles” by Sean Monaghan. On the surface, the story is about a father taking his two daughters to see the beautiful mechanical birds of the title, but there is also a much deeper and more touching story at work here, illustrating the truth that some tragedies will continue to follow us into the future, no matter how many advances we make with technology.

Next is “Tagging Bruno” by Allen M. Steele, a tale set in the future and on another world, yet concerned with current debates on wildlife preservation. Sure, it gets a little preachy, but the characters are all well-defined and the ending has just a tinge of fun irony to it.

“Still Life with Abyss” by Jim Grimsley starts with that old science fiction trope of the parallel universe and reverses the standard story. It’s set in a research station that monitors activities in all of the parallel universes. Of course, there are the usual “What if?” universes (America lost the Revolution, the South won the Civil War, the Nazis won World War II), but also all of the small changes in individual people’s lives. The idea is that we all have alternate paths that our lives might have taken and on some parallel world, we did. But the research team has discovered one man, one solitary man in all the recorded multiverse, whose life NEVER deviates from a single course, no matter what happens around him.

“Fatherbond” by Tim Purdom follows a group of human colonists who arrive on a new world, only to discover that another race of aliens has already arrived and is forbidding anyone to colonize it. The argument against colonizing is an interesting one. While there is no intelligent life native to the planet, intelligent life might naturally evolve there over hundreds of millions of years. So colonization is wrong not because it would displace current inhabitants, but rather because it would interfere with the natural evolution of future inhabitants. Obviously, some of the humans feel differently and the aliens’ motives aren’t as pure as initially stated.

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So I got a late start on this year’s reading, which means that I’ve just finished the January/February issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. As with any collection of stories from a variety of writers, I liked some more than others.

Before we even start, check out the cover art by Charles Vess. A little girl is using her blue magic hand to befriend a rat and a cat. You hardly even notice that she’s not so much sitting on a bed as she’s squatting up against it. (Click the image to embiggen.)

And the cover image isn’t just a random design. It’s a scene from the first story of the issue, “Vinegar and Cinnamon” by Nina Kiriki Hoffman. Nothing too deep here. Just a young witch in training who accidentally turns her brother into a rat, then has to track him down and figure out how to change him back. The writer doesn’t take the predictable route of focusing on the young witch, instead keeping the point of view on her brother and how being a rat alters his perceptions and priorities.

“The Regression Test” by Wole Talabi presents a variation on the Turing Test, as a computer program is designed to simulate the thought processes of a scientific genius. While the scientists can verify how well the program recalls information, they have no way of judging how close the personality is to the original, so they invite the scientist’s daughter to ask the program questions. Of course, there’s more going on here than a simple question-and-answer session.

“A Gathering on Gravity’s Shore” by Gregor Hartmann continues the Franden series. Since I’ve never read any other stories with this character, it was a little rough to get the character and setting straight at first. It’s basically a garden party in which Franden flirts with a botanist and tries to draw out opinions on a pending civil war.

Next is the novelette, “Homecoming” by Rachel Pollack. Again, this was part of a series of stories featuring Jack Shade, a paranormal investigator cursed to take on the case of anyone holding one of his business cards. This time, the case involves retrieving a missing piece of a woman’s soul. Of course, things go bad and Jack eventually has to enlist some supernatural help to prevent the end of the world.

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