Distillations: Short Fiction Reviews, April 1977

From Locus, April 1997.
Copyright 1997 by Mark R. Kelly.

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tomorrowsf v1n5 (webzine)

Omni Fiction Salon (webzine)

F&SF 3/97

Realms of Fantasy 2/97

SF Age 3/97

Interzone 2/97

Bending the Landscape: Fantasy, Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel, eds. (White Wolf 1-56504-836-9, $19.99, 362 pp, hc) March 1997

Asimov’s 5/97

Analog 5/97

The World Wide Web may be on the verge of revolutionizing publishing, but so far there isn’t a lot of original fiction to be found there--or much else original that pertains to written sf. Most of the websites related to sf publishing (never mind the many more media and "sci-fi" sites) are extensions of print magazines (or book publishers) in one way or another. Magazines like Century (www.supranet.net/century/) and New York Review of Science Fiction (ebbs.english.vt.edu/olp/nyrsf/nyrsf.html) have handsome sites that are essentially elaborate advertisements for their print editions, with subscription information, laudatory quotes, and excerpts from the latest issues. Occasionally, as at NYRSF’s site, there is extra material like an index to the back issues. Other sites, like F&SF’s (www.enews.com:80/magazines/fsf/), are woefully out of date, presumably set up in a burst of enthusiasm that was not sustained, an all too common trend on the web. Other prominent print magazines, like Asimov’s and Analog, have no sites at all; presence on the web is no indication of status in the traditional media.

Quite a number of original "webzines" are available on the web--just explore the submenus of Yahoo to find an impressive list--but the vast majority of these are the equivalent of movie-oriented fanzines or amateur fiction vanity publications. The best webzine that covers print sf at all is Science Fiction Weekly (www.scifi.com/sfw/), a news and review service mostly about tv and movies. But it is best of a weak lot, being misnamed (it is biweekly, at best), and being locked into the print paradigm of dispensing new content in "issue"-sized dollops, updating all sections of the site at each interval. There is no reason on the web not to update individual pages when content becomes available--a section or two each day, that is--as the various general web magazines like Slate (www.slate.com) and Salon (www.salonmagazine.com) have discovered. Nothing on the web relating to sf literature begins to approach those.

One of the more promising fiction webzines last year was E-scape (www.interink.com/escape.html), which featured work in its first few "issues" by such recognizable names as K. D. Wentworth, W. Gregory Stewart, and Mark Rich. But nothing new has been posted at its site since October 1996, and one of its back issues has been mysteriously withdrawn due to "contractual obligations."

The two most reliable sources of new fiction on the web at the moment are both spin-offs of print magazines--or rather, their electronic successors. Omni’s site (www.omnimag.com) continues to offer new fiction at irregular intervals. The one-per-month stories that ran through December 1996 have been suspended, but something more innovative has taken their place: a round-robin story that’s been updated on the website as each installment has been written. This is a clever idea because it takes advantage of the web as a medium of instantaneous publication; readers can follow the progress of the story just as the participants do.

The first round-robin story finished in January, "Making Good Time", begun by James Patrick Kelly and continued with Rachel Pollack, Pat Cadigan, and Nancy Kress. Kelly sets the stage: a teenage kid gets on a bus and asks a lady what year it is. The kid has something in a box on his lap--a dinosaur. Pollack adds the next ingredient: he got it by using his mother’s time machine. Cadigan develops the situation: people on the bus react in alarm and evacuate; then the woman sees herself across the road, urging herself to take control of the bus and flee. As the installments progress, you can see one writer amplifying or dismissing a point made in a previous installment. The four writers are remarkably cooperative though, not out to foil one another with impossible new story elements, and fairly thorough in exploring the implications of ideas added previously. The result is a dizzying time-travel adventure with multiple versions of various characters trying to figure out what’s going on. Not a masterpiece by any means, but a lot of fun. (A second round-robin story is scheduled to begin March 3^rd.)

Tomorrow magazine has more recently migrated from print status to website. (Its last print issue was supposedly #24, though I’ve yet to see it--it’s not for sale anywhere, and I’ve not gotten review copies from the magazine for a couple years.) Now called tomorrowsf (www.tomorrowsf.com) and still edited by Algis Budrys, the handsome, still-growing site features stories, articles, editorials, art, and even little snippets of music that play as you pass your mouse over the story titles on the table of contents. (All of this assuming you have compatible hardware and are using a current browser like Netscape 3. Otherwise, you’re pretty much out of luck.) The site adds a story or two each week. By the fifth update, called "v1n5" on the opening screen, the fiction consists of the first part of a serial by Sheila Finch, a reprinted "William Scarff" story from the second print issue of the magazine, and five original stories, all fairly short and all of them fair to good.

Rob Chilson’s "As If He Were of Faerie" follows an 11 year old boy hunting for fairies with a butterfly net in the woods behind his Missouri house. He doesn’t really expect to find any, but he does find a squirrel, then a bird, a doe and fauns, and a fox and her cubs, all acting in unusual ways. He has a sly insight that’s less about fantasy than about perceptions.

Geoffrey A. Landis’s "Paradigms of Change" is a biological hard sf tale about the worldwide impact of a discovery in recombinant DNA. Scientists learn how to "repair" a Y chromosome and turn it into an X chromosome--that is, turn a man into a woman, with a transition period of a few weeks. Landis shows the impact of this possibility on a married man, on a man who yearns to be a woman, on a right-wing radio talk show host, and on others including the president of the US and the pope. The story is too sketchy to adequately explore all the implications of the idea, but there are a number of moments of satirical insight and irony.

"Fais do do" by O’Neil De Noux is set deep in Cajun country, where two reporters named Jay Jones and Jillian Jones track down a man on a houseboat who’s been catching unusually large crabs out in the swamp. It all started when that black thing with lights crashed in the bay, he says. A recurrent theme about the nature of Cajun cooking sets up a mildly gruesome surprise ending.

Yves Meynard’s "Within the Mechanism" concerns two female lovers, Berrin and Maddus, who live in bizarre, indeterminate setting called the Mechanism. Berrin returns home from hunting and finds the Anubine have been there and slaughtered Maddus. So Berrin sews Maddus back together, using methods prohibited in the city they escaped from, and the two of them set off in pursuit of the Anubine in order to regain Maddus’s memories. The story offers hints that the characters are all transformed descendants of human forebears, but otherwise provides no explanation of the setting or circumstances. It’s appealingly strange, but reads like a part of a larger work or series of stories.

My favorite story of these five is "The Hotel Vivienne" by Ragnar Kvaran and S. J. Beadle, two writers about whom nothing is given in the "about the authors" section. Aynsley Richard returns as an adult to the island of Sureva, in the Indian Ocean, where he lived as a child and where he met, while his family stayed at the eponymous hotel, the famous, difficult-to-work-with actress Lavinia Lee. Several evocative scenes at the beginning of the story describe the young boy wandering around the vast hotel while the adults are getting drunk elsewhere; the beaches; the peremptory actress who finds him sleeping in the hall and takes him back to his room. Now Aynsley has come to make a business deal to develop the area around the hotel, to tame the nearby jungle and make it more attractive to tourists. But he has visions--of the local aborigines, of deadly leopards, of Lavinia Lee. Though the theme, western developers foiled by native forces, is hardly original, and the story ends too quickly, the writing is vivid and memorable.

Returning to the traditional print magazines, the March F&SF features rare short fiction from Timothy Zahn, "The Art of War". In a far future interstellar milieu, a young diplomat, Stane Markand, discovers a new group of human "verloren" on an alien planet—an isolated group of humans of unknown origin, perhaps seeded there by aliens in the remote past. These verloren are now subjects of the alien Kailthaemil, whose price for their protection is a regular tribute of the art-objects created by the verloren. Stane returns to Earth with one of these art-objects, a calix, which quickly becomes of interest to the powerful leader Lantic Devaro, who thinks the object is a weapon. It not only influences one’s mood, it creates them through some sort of programming, Devaro says. He sends Stane on a return trip to gather more. Meanwhile Stane has fallen in love with a verloren woman, and begins to doubt the subversive motives that Devaro impugns upon the veloren, or their alien protectors.

The narrative is smooth and the situation intriguing, to a point. Stane is indeed a victim of duplicity, but the crime that occurs is not as monstrous as Zahn would have us believe. At worst, what occurs is a case of gaining unfair advantage--a politician learning as much as he can about an opponent, the better to influence and manipulate him. Hardly a crime worthy of elaborately indirect racial genocide.

Most of the other stories in the issue are straightforward, nicely done, but not terribly exciting. Michael Thomas’s "Nightwatch" is about Nelson, a professor who once developed a pack of genetically enhanced dogs. Now the dogs have killed their wealthy master and the locals are hunting them down as monsters. The victim’s daughter pleads with Nelson, surprisingly, to try to save the dogs. They had a good reason for attacking her father, she and Nelson learn, but he wonders if maybe the dogs aren’t so dangerous they deserve to die anyway. The depiction of dogs mimicking human speech is unconvincing, but the story deals with moral dilemmas capably.

Albert E. Cowdrey’s "The Familiar" is set in a neighborhood of New Orleans filled with colorful, eccentric characters. One is Mrs. DeSaye, an insufferable gossip; another is Colonel Kennedy, who has a part-dog/part-lion marble statue that once stood in the Chinese imperial court. When a local burglar is found dead, the narrator begins to suspect that the statue is somehow alive. His strategy for dealing with his neighbors is complicated by this apparently malevolent spectre that seems to have motives of its own.

Ray Bradbury’s "The Offering" is a slight vignette about a rich man in a hospital who is given a price for the chance to live another seven to ten days. He considers the value of his life, makes a decision, and is rewarded unexpectedly. In its exuberant wistfulness, it seems the sort of story that only an old man would write.

Laurel Winter’s "David’s Ashes" is about a young woman bereft after the funeral of her husband David. She brings his ashes home in an urn, and on an impulse uses them to repot a ficus. Soon the plant begins dropping leaves on cue, communicating messages to her as if from David. Aside from an incidental motif about the meaning of the word "rixl," the story is well-done but unremarkable, a domestic fantasy like so many others we have read before.

More off-beat is Jerry Oltion’s "The Difference Between Science Fiction and Fantasy: A Mathematical Analysis", a mock-serious academic paper in which the author proposes to settle the dispute--the one about "the relative superiority of one genre over the other"--by arithmetically summing the letter values of each word. It’s a cleverly daft notion, it just doesn’t go far enough.

The best story in the issue (if perhaps not the landmark editor Rusch suggests) is Rand B. Lee’s "The Pearl", the story of the death of a gay black hustler in New York City who decides to commit suicide before his AIDS becomes debilitating. He becomes a ghost, moving through the streets where he lives. The story flashes back through his life: abused by Brother Oral in Salt Lake City as a boy; living as a houseboy with a gay couple in Denver; arriving in New York to take up a new life. Now his ghost arrives at his favorite hangout, the Mary Street Bar and Grill, where he finds not only his friends but other people from his past. The ghost story becomes a spectral reunion, like the conclusion of the film Longtime Companion given a dark, surrealistic, symbolic twist. The story compares favorably to Richard Bowes’ series of stories about street life in New York, but it’s sharper-edged, and avoids the open-endedness of that series.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch has a story in the February Realms of Fantasy. "Falling" is about Lisa, a woman who’s had enough of the abuse and disrespect of her husband Hiram. She plans to kill his dog, the dog she inevitably takes care of, before leaving him for good. But she finds when the time comes that she can’t bring herself to do it. Then a man approaches her who seems to know all her problems; he’s her guardian angel, he says, and soon he is in her home threatening Hiram, and scaring her more than Hiram did. Like most of the stories in the current F&SF, this one is competent and readable, but unremarkable; I doubt I’ll remember it next month, let alone by the end of the year.

Leslie What’s "Mothers’ Day" depicts a Piper, besieged by his one hundred children in his cave near Hameln, who fashions a new pipe and a new plan. Soon unappreciated mothers from around the world are hearing his call and drawing toward his abode. But the scheme doesn’t work out as he had envisioned. The story belongs to that genre of meta-fairy tales that examines the practical consequences of fairy tale situations, though like many of them its form limits it dramatically.

The eponymous protagonist of Dave Smeds’s "The Trigger" is a superhero, one of a Brotherhood that is well-known and accepted throughout their city. Trigger’s talent is to sense a distinctive smell in people destined to commit murder, a talent he’s had since childhood. When he senses such a person, he stalks them until he can dispatch them safely. The crime rate has dropped accordingly. But now, suddenly, he’s having doubts; he may have made a mistake with his latest target. Smeds considers a provocative theme—the conscience of a superhero, how someone with such a power could know what is right to do. Trigger finds an equitable solution to his problem, though his solution, to the extent that it’s merely a practical rather than a philosophical one, drains the impact of the thematic problem.

Tanith Lee’s "Old Flame" is an ornately told story of two star-crossed lovers in the town of San Dove. Young Raolo de Cerini falls instantly in love with Angesia Versuvio before realizing that she is the daughter of his father’s closest enemy. In consideration of the couple, the two families decide to end their long feud, but one of the de Cerinis, Livia, isn’t consulted. She has lived alone for decades since the night her new husband was killed--by the Versuvios. Livia brings a curse of sorts down upon the Versuvios in the form of a candle that will burn for 30 days. The weapon found to subvert the candle is unexpectedly, and magically, mundane.

The March SF Age is festooned with tie-ins--the cover, the movie and art columns, and Edelman’s editorial defending "sci-fi"--to the re-release of Star Wars, and whether or not by design, most of the stories in the issue are the sort of basic sf that might appeal to novice readers drawn to the issue by those tie-ins.

First is the latest in Adam-Troy Castro’s space opera comedy series about Ernst Vossof and his numbskull partner Karl Nimmitz, "Just a Couple of Highly Experimental Weapons Tucked Away Behind the Toilet Paper". An alien that looks like a coffee table covered with glass jars with fish heads in them offers Ernst and Karl riches via a scheme to sell every sentient being access to his own personal best-fit alternate universe. Soon Ernst is wondering, if these scheme is so good, why the aliens haven’t already taken advantage of it themselves. The story is fun in a thuddingly obvious, Douglas Adams sort of way.

Frederik Pohl’s "Anomaly in a Decimal Expansion" is a vignette that takes a familiar idea straight out of Carl Sagan--who’s dutifully credited--and makes a feeble joke out of it.

Stephen Baxter continues his ruminations on alternate histories of the space program in "Moon Six". Two Apollo astronauts, Bado and Slade, have landed on the moon at a site near an old Surveyor craft. Bado turns around and finds Slade, their lander, and their orbiting command module all vanished--though not the Surveyor. After a few minutes of panic, Bado sees another craft landing, out of which a female astronaut emerges. He recognizes her craft from plans for a lunar lander that were canceled. The two of them soon meet an agitated Russian cosmonaut, and then a huge direct-ascent rocket crewed by the British. They are shifting between a series of alternate realities, Bado realizes, each a different variation in how the space program developed.

Alternating scenes describe Bado arriving in Florida, in the variation he dubs Moon Six, in which there is no Kennedy Space Center, no space program, and no Mare Imbrium on the moon. He uses his memories of the reality he came from to make a living in this technologically backward timeline, and he waits over the ensuing decades for a big event that he knows will occur. The story is intriguingly structured, with the two complementary strands eventually linking, back to front. Many of the scenes are too brief; as usual, I wish Baxter had taken the time to tell us a bit more. But the glimpses into the various space programs that never got off the drawing boards are fascinating.

Phyllis Gotlieb’s "End City" is the longest story in the issue and also the most retro, full of old-fashioned SF elements: esp, domed cities, lost alien colonies. A hospital security worker named Asher finds a young girl named Sheleen, beat up by thugs from the city’s underside, who exhibits a rare form of telepathy: she’s able to broadcast but not receive. He hides her out while the hospital battles for custody of her with the city’s dreaded Social Engineers. Years later she has matured and gained control of her power, using it to her advantage as a nightclub singer of rare power. The setting, gradually revealed, is the domed city of a colony settled 275 years ago from Earth and now almost 50 years out of contact. The city is suffering an ennui of despair brought on by that loss of contact and by a plague of mutations that include the sporadic esp powers. The story is framed by a crisis in which Sheleen is threatened by a stalker and Asher races to her aid. The story is well-written on a scene to scene basis, and the characters are well-formed, but overall the mix of settings and themes is an uncomfortable one. The climax involves a threatened riot quelled by inspirational words from Sheleen about the colony’s need to reach out to fulfill its destiny. It’s a stagey transition from colorful crime melodrama to preachy social parable.

Charles Sheffield’s "What Would You Like to Know?" begins (in an apparent nod to Jack McDevitt’s well-known library story) at the Fort Markie branch library, where librarian Jack Mellon sits down to check out the latest version of the computerized query system. It’s completely new and natural-language based, able to answer any question, with access to a quantum processor and many more databases than before. Mellon hesitantly, then eagerly, indulges its powers, asking questions of personal history, then of basic philosophy. Is faster than light travel possible? When will the cure for cancer be discovered? And so on. He finds some of the answers startling, some unbelievable, before he thinks to start asking the questions that really matter, personally, to him. And therein is Sheffield’s insight, as Mellon discovers in a surprising and emotional resolution.

The February Interzone has the concluding installment of Brian Stableford’s two-part novella "The Black Blood of the Dead", which began in the magazine’s January issue. It’s a sequel to his popular "The Hunger and Ecstasy of Vampires" from a couple years ago. In that story, contemporaries of H. G. Wells heard about a visitation to the far future, via "timeshadows," where a race of vampires had succeeded humanity and spread out into the stars. This story begins five years later, in 1900, and the narrator is Oscar Wilde, one of the witnesses to the earlier story, now past the peak of his career and in ill health. He is contacted by another of the witnesses, the "famous detective" (who is not Sherlock Holmes, as Stableford points out in the afterword to the book edition of "Hunger", but rather the "real" detective that Holmes was based on). The detective has recreated the formula for generating timeshadows and made the journey himself. He brings Wilde and several others together to hear a new set of tales of the far future.

The earlier story was science fiction, as much as fantasy or horror, and so is this one: Stableford extends the scope of his future visions to encompass the history of the universe and its ultimate fate. One of the earlier travelers wants to replenish the earth with timeshadows of humans from Wilde’s era. A greater problem is the identification of the force that triggered the rain of comets that destroyed (or will destroy) humanity, perhaps as an incidental effect in its quest to direct the evolution of the universe. But Stableford isn't really concerned with speculative cosmology; he's interested in grafting these ideas onto a classic scientific romance, seeing how Oscar Wilde and others from that era react. And there's more to come: at the end of this story Wilde follows in the footsteps of the great detective for his own voyage to the future.

Thomas M. Disch's "Nights in the Gardens of The Kerhonkson Prison for the Aged and Infirm" relates two conversations with Chester, an inmate of the prison who has a reputation for dispensing extra pain pills to those he deems worthy. When he meets his supplier, Mrs. Schultz, in the garden, they talk at length about the cost of maintaining prisoners and about those who protest against the death penalty. Disch skillfully creates dialogue between two people who don’t have to explain everything to each other but which contains enough hints for the reader to piece things together: these two have concocted a scheme to dispense their own justice. The sf element in the story is slight, but the execution is admirable.

Jayme Lynn Blaschke’s "Project Timespan", a first story, is told by a narrator with no patience for philosophical consideration of the implications of time travel, but who nevertheless builds a time machine and is on the team to send three men to the end of time, with unforeseen disastrous consequences. There is an interesting idea here, though it’s a hand-wavey one, and the gosh-darn Texan style is irritating.

Molly Brown’s "The Psychomantium" is about Samantha Stockard, a "funeral worker" for the government who investigates and disposes of people found dead without any relatives or contacts. While handling the case of a woman found dead after two weeks during a heat wave, she finds herself drawn inside a mirror to a dark room where a blond woman hangs by a rope. After she returns to reality, she’s desperate to pursue clues to the dead woman’s identity. The story gets a bit thick with metaphysics toward the end, but it’s a fascinating realistic piece about the tasks of funeral workers even without the fantasy element.

Darrell Schweitzer’s "Refugees from an Imaginary Country" is narrated by Ben Schwartz, art editor of a campus newspaper, who one day receives a submission of a bizarre comic-strip full of elaborate, grotesque, violent images--sort of a combination of Hieronymus Bosch and R. Crumb. The artist remains anonymous, but one day Ben stumbles on to him in the campus library. He’s a slight, shy young man named Stephen Taylor who gradually opens up and reveals to Ben that everything in his panels is real: it’s a place called Chorazin, the Republic of Pain, where Stephen’s father was a ruler called a Tetrarchon. Ben humors him for a while, then offends him by suggesting that he see a doctor. Twenty years later Ben hears from Stephen again, now a successful cult artist, but with the same problem. He confronts Ben with evidence that the story is true--at least in some sense. By not insisting on a specific literal explanation the story allows a metaphorical insight into the nature of fantasy and how people like us the readers deal with it in our lives.

Bending the Landscape: Fantasy is the first of three original anthologies of stories involving gay and lesbian characters. (Subsequent annual volumes will be of science fiction and horror.) The stories range over the whole spectrum of fantasy--not just magical other-worldly fantasy--but the book doesn’t entirely avoid the trap that most theme original anthologies fall into, that of containing stories that meet the entrance criteria for inclusion but which are otherwise unremarkable. Since there is a sizeable "genre" of general gay fiction, the trap is twofold for this book: stories can be fantasy with characters who "happen to be" gay or lesbian but whose identity doesn’t affect the fantasy story; and vice versa, stories with gay or lesbian characters which "happen to" contain some slight fantasy element that doesn’t depend on the identity of the characters. Only a few of the stories manage to fulfill both criteria in ways that are mutually interdependent.

Richard Bowes’s "In the House of the Man in the Moon" is typical of the second trap (but then, so are a fair number of F&SF stories these days), in which the fantasy element is explicit but dispensable. A middle-aged man and his lover tour the Long Island neighborhood where the former grew up, and he recalls his oppressive father, running away, and learning to become a street hustler. As a boy he felt he possessed a charm of sensitivity to danger, something he called his "grace," which served him well when he fell into the clutches of the man responsible for the torture and deaths of several hustlers. The climactic incident, the boy’s escape from and revenge upon this killer, is certainly harrowing, but it could as easily have happened without any involvement of his "grace."

Mark Shepard’s "Gary in the Shadows" is an even grittier street hustler story, a story drenched in poppers and cigarettes. Sean, a 911 operator, recalls his involvement with a boy named Gary who became a victim of queer-bashers. Now Sean gets a prank 911 call from someone who sounds like Gary. The depiction of street life is certainly convincing, but as fantasy it’s only a vague, feel-goody ghost story.

Mark Tiedemann’s "Gestures Too Late on a Gravel Road", on the other hand, is a touching fantasy that involves a gay character but not in any critical way. Hugh is bitter after being shunned by the family of his dead lover at the lover’s funeral. He drives away in grief, wandering until he’s lost. On a side road he discovers a shrine built by a wealthy man to honor his wife, and Hugh is enraged to find it vandalized. Then he finds a locked room where the man left his most private tribute. The story bravely confronts the stark reality that most of us will be forgotten after we’re gone. But that’s not a condition that depends on being gay or not.

K. L. Berac’s "Magicked Tricks" is a mystery misadventure about a hooker’s client who dies on her bed with a dart in his neck. The narrator, Nikki--points deducted for the ambiguous name--comes to her aid with the help of a cute guy from the bar where they both hang out. The elements of this story battle each other. The problem of disposing of the dead john’s body is initially a frustration in the narrator’s quest to bed the cute guy from the bar, but this problem takes over, and the romantic quest is resolved incidentally. Moreover, the author implies at the very end, everything that’s happened is only the prelude to the real story, which is about to occur after the last paragraph. The story the author gave us to read is the wrong one on two counts.

The better stories exploit the analogy between their twin themes--the similarity between being gay or lesbian in an often hostile society, and the estrangement brought about by contact with a fantastic unknown.

Carolyn Ives Gilman’s "Frost Painting" is closer to SF than fantasy. Galena travels to remote Williston, North Dakota, where her lover Thea has joined a cult that may involve visitations by aliens. Thea is a restless artist, and Galena an acerbic critic, and she doesn’t understand what Thea finds attractive in this remote setting. Thea tries to show her: isolation; lights in the trees that may be aliens; literal landscape paintings. Thea identifies human culture, and male sex in particular, as being about domination and power, and if she has to escape being human to explore her artistic expression, she will. The exploration of the conflicts between basic elements of human nature is fascinating, and suggests links between sexual urges, artistic expression, and transcendence.

On a more personal scale, Holly Wade Matter’s "Watersnakes" looks at small town adolescence. Peggy Webster and her cousin Jeff wonder about two old ladies who live together down the street. They plan a scheme to trap the ladies into revealing themselves as witches, but they learn more than they bargained for. The story shows how sexuality and magic can be both thrilling and dangerous.

More traditional in several ways is Robin Wayne Bailey’s "The Stars Are Tears", a story that’s conservative stylistically, thematically, and sexually. Set in Sanctuary (or Thieves World) it concerns two gladiator-lovers whose relationship is threatened by the appearance of a strange man, or creature, who washes up on the beach. It’s high-strung sword & sorcery in which mere attraction to an outsider apparently spells the end of the lovers’ mutual devotion.

Jeff Veroma’s "Mahu" tells of Sammy Retseck, an elderly man sitting on a beach in Hawaii where a native walks up to him an utters the word "mahu." When he finds out what it means, he flashes back on his Navy career 50 years before, to his friendship and then relationship with a fellow sailor. Now a tourist, he wanders the city streets near the beach and finds himself growing younger, suddenly given another chance to live his life. The story contrasts horrific events at the attack of Pearl Harbor with blatant wish-fulfillment fantasy to show how war can ruin a life in more ways than one.

By far the best story in the book is Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman’s "Fall of the Kings". In a vaguely medieval university setting, a young lecturer, Basil St. Cloud, tutors history and studies ancient manuscripts for clues to the reality of ancient magic. One of his students, a spirited young noble named Theron Campion, meets him in a tavern and is frankly flirtatious. Soon the two are engaged in a passionate affair. Basil sees in Theron the potential to be a proper noble, a better leader than the old kings. Theron is content being a libertine, but he does realize he has certain social obligations, and sets about pursuing an acceptable wife, without telling Basil. Their divergent goals lead to a misunderstanding with tragic consequences.

On a theoretical level, the story is equally supported by fantastic and gay themes. The tragedy can’t come about without the reality of Basil’s magic spells; the divergence of the lovers’ goals is a consequence of the societal pressure on gay men to fill roles that don’t personally apply. On a storytelling level, the characters are lively and complex; on one level, the flirtatious banter is wonderful, while on a deeper level, we see how their romantic desire is driven by subconscious needs. It’s notable that the authors, female, are so convincing at depicting males in love.

The May issue of Asimov’s contains two strong novellas. Bill Johnson’s "We Will Drink a Fish Together..." is set in a near future when alien Traders orbit the Earth. Tony is on the security detail for the alien ambassador Foremost, but when he gets a call that his relative Sam has died, he sets his career aside and resigns so he can attend the funeral. His family or "line" in the hills of South Dakota places great importance on family and kin, unlike the "flatlanders" in surrounding areas. Tony and other members of his family gather in the small town of Summit, where they greet old friends--eccentric characters like Indian, whose "town car" is a riding lawn mower, and Oly, an arthritic wood-carver and expert lake fisherman who makes a concoction of fish, spices, pickle juice, and alcohol in mason jars.

Then Foremost shows up in town, fleeing an assassination attempt by a rival economic faction aboard the alien ship. Tony has to assure the townspeople that the alien is a worthy person--someone properly "associated" with his line--while expediting Sam’s funeral and then protecting Foremost from an alien predator. What’s most notable about the story is that the humans are stranger than the aliens. Tony’s reunions with Indian and Oly have a ritualized quality to them; the elements of the family’s line, with its "Estep" token, is stranger than anything we learn about the aliens, whose conflicts are familiar elements of ordinary space opera. The contrast reminds us how pale much SF’nal imagination is, and gives the story, through a reversal of ground and base, an unusual attraction.

James Sarafin’s "In the Furnace of the Night" is an excellent near-future hunting story. It takes concerns similar to those in Michael Thomas’s story in F&SF and puts them into a larger context and a more exotic setting with far more powerful results. Barry Murtoch is a professional hunter in Africa who’s been hired by officials in India to hunt down three escaped tigers from Ranthambhore National Park. India has long banned tiger hunting, has in fact engaged in a tiger restoration project with biotechnology, but the tigers have escaped and killed several dozen people. Accompanying Barry is Emily Kammath, the chief park biologist in charge of the restoration project. She’s understandably unsympathetic with his charter to kill her tigers and is actively unhelpful and nasty as he tries to understand them.

The first part of the story is a psychological battle between these two people, as Emily learns what motivates Barry, and Barry learns the extent to which the restored tigers have been modified--enhanced--from the original stock. Questions of ethics are raised; isn’t it fair to give the tigers an advantage in a world where human evolution has outpaced theirs? And then there is the problem of poachers, a group of which brazenly competes with Barry’s group in pursuit of the tigers. The last quarter of the story is a harrowing pursuit between the three groups--two of humans and one of tigers--that is resolved with a finely calculated balance of justice for all involved.

The shorter stories in the issue are distinctive in various ways. Brian W. Aldiss’s "The Enigma of the Three Moons" consists of three vignettes, each involving a different sort of "moon". The first, "His Seventieth Heaven", concerns a satellite inhabited by Ryan Son Moon, a creator of visions designed to propagate "empathic intellect" to the masses on Earth. Despite his insistence that his images are devoid of political content, an interview with a terrestrial celebrity about his latest work is interrupted by Earth’s government. There is no escaping political influence.

The second vignette describes a victim of a revolution, Mike Moone, carried away to his execution. The third follows a killer squad into the wilderness on a world wracked by religious schism to seek out and kill a musician who is composing new music. As in the first vignette, the connection between politics and art is not easy to break.

In Esther M. Friesner’s "Prey", Alana Amir, a rich ambitious woman, has decided she must possess Yoshi, a pop singer who performs to screaming throngs. But first she has to get past Yoshi’s "mamagon," monster-mother, who is short and fat and gross and overly protective of her son. Alana retreats, employs a high-tech device to take the mother out of the picture, and is eventually successful in her pursuit of Yoshi--she thinks. Friesner has done a number of stories recently that seem designed to counteract her reputation as a writer of light comedy. This story is well-executed, but it’s so grim it’s unpleasant, a story in which all the characters are bad and no one wins. I think Friesner has made her point.

Stephen Baxter is at his most grandiose and most telegraphic in "Soliton Star", a far future tale about the fate of the universe. Jack Raoul travels to the Galactic halo to monitor an illegal experiment dealing with quagma, packets of the primordial matter of the universe, conducted by spherical aliens called Silver Ghosts. Jack reviews the origins of dark and light matter to understand how dark matter "creatures," Photino birds, are a threat to the light matter, or baryonic, stars that maintain human existence. The Silver Ghosts’ scheme is designed to remove this threat, but Jack quickly perceives an ulterior motive in the powerful AI that is controlling the experiment. As usual, Baxter’s ideas are dazzling, but as is still sometimes the case in his stories, the presentation of them is so compressed that most of the emotional affect is squandered.

Cynthia Ward’s "On the Last Day of School" is set on a planet of Lambda Aurigae where humans have settled with three-sexed alien Shahashee. Mike Stein-Carver returns to his family ranch for summer break. He’s confused and upset by accusations of having a townie girlfriend, partly because of his father’s hysterical disapproval of the idea, and also because Mike’s impressions of sex and love have been formed by his superficial knowledge of the way the aliens mate. He rides out into the plains and encounters two alien friends who shock him by inviting him to join them in love-making. There’s nothing especially original in the ideas of this story, but in presentation it’s an effective lesson on the difference between sex and love, alien style.

Lisa Goldstein’s "Fortune and Misfortune" engagingly follows Pam, an aspiring actress in Hollywood, who befriends a more beautiful rival named Jessie. Unlike Jessie, Pam is happy to take stage parts of Shakespeare and Sophocles where there are no casting directors watching. While researching one such play, she reads words in a book that promises to bring anyone who reads them ill fortune all their life. Sure enough, things start going wrong for Pam, while Jessie lands a plumb role in a Harrison Ford movie. Goldstein jars the reader’s attention by periodically addressing the reader directly, comparing Pam’s plight to the probable circumstances of the reader--and gives us the very words that Pam reads that promised to have such great effect. The result is a pleasant, curious metafiction.

The lead story in the May Analog is Paul Levinson’s "Loose Ends", a story that deals with some of the same "chronology protection" ideas that lay behind his now-Nebula-nominated story from 1995, "The Chronology Protection Case". In the new story Jeff Harris, a time traveler from 2084, arrives in New York in November, 1963, to influence the course of history. But he’s missed his target, which was January 1986; he’d intended to avert the Challenger explosion. He makes an attempt to save JFK anyway, but is prevented by a string of coincidences that culminates in the destruction of his return device. Stuck in 1963, he becomes a college instructor, has an affair with one of his students, and keeps a watch out for signs from fellow time-travelers who may be looking for him.

The story is a loose-jointed, leisurely tour through basic time travel situations. His team from 2084 wasn’t even sure it could affect history, and his JFK misadventure didn’t prove the possibility one way or the other. But he does plant a seed to change his own memories, and that works. Levinson casually mentions that in the assassination, Johnson was wounded, and Governor Connolly killed as well, but Jeff doesn’t take particular notice of any discrepancy. In the end, a similar discrepancy proves at least that multiple realities are possible (though the first incident told the reader that already). An amusing secondary premise is an off-hand explanation for why the 1960s were so marked by cultural radicalism.