{"id":1998,"date":"2007-11-25T10:35:54","date_gmt":"2007-11-25T10:35:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2007\/11\/25\/the-magazine-experiment-fantas\/"},"modified":"2007-11-25T10:35:54","modified_gmt":"2007-11-25T10:35:54","slug":"the-magazine-experiment-fantas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2007\/11\/25\/the-magazine-experiment-fantas\/","title":{"rendered":"The Magazine Experiment: Fantasy and Science Fiction October 2007"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of months ago, I embarked on an experiment to read some SF magazines, and see if I was really missing out on the wonderful stuff that people are always haranguing con-goers about. I bought paper copies of Analog<\/cite>‘s November issue<\/a> and the October\/ November Asimov’s<\/cite><\/a>, and commented on them here. I was unable to find paper copies of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction<\/cite>, apparently due to their obnoxious return policy, but Kate got me an electronic version of the October issue, which I read slowly on my Palm over the next month or so. I finished it a while back, but never got around to writing it up, until some other posts (about which more later) reminded me of it.<\/p>\n

If you recall, the Analog<\/cite> experiment was a failure, but Asimov’s<\/cite> fared a little better. F & SF<\/cite> kind of ended up in the middle. There are a couple of real head-scratchers in here, but most of the stories are perfectly good, if not terribly inspiring.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Starting with the bafflingly awful, I have no idea what the deal is with “The Star to Every Wandering Barque” by James Stoddard. The “story” takes up the daring premise of “what would the world be like if everyone was nice to each other?,” and proceeds to basically list the ways that the world would be a better place if everyone were just nice. There are scare quotes on “story,” because it’s really not a story. There’s no plot to speak of, and absolutely no conflict. It’s about as compelling as a shopping list, and as an extra not-bonus, it’s kind of treacly. I can’t begin to figure out why anybody would publish this.<\/p>\n

In the “competent, but kind of pointless” category, there’s Robert Silverberg’s “Against the Current,” which has a nice premise, but doesn’t go anywhere, and Albert E. Cowdry’s “The Recreation Room,” which is basically a Twilight Zone script in post-Katrina New Orleans. If you put these two together with Daryl Gregory’s “Unpossible” (which is better than the other two, but thematically similar), you have a brilliant demonstration of the article Patrick Nielsen Hayden likes to quote about how modern SF stories tend to be about the concerns of middle-aged men. “Two Weeks After” by M. Ramsey Chaman is another Twilight Zone story– well done, but with a slightly-too-cute twist ending.<\/p>\n

Two stories, “The Diamond Shadow” by Fred Chappell and “The Bird Shaman’s Girl” by Judith Moffett are very good, but part of some larger sequence of stories. Chappell’s story describes the exploits of a sort of magical investogator in a fantasy world, who has the power to manipulate shadows, and is evidently the second such published in F & SF<\/cite>. Moffett’s is part of the third novel in the Hefn sequence, set on an Earth ruled by environmentally conscious aliens (after The Ragged World<\/cite> and Time, Like an Ever-Rolling Stream<\/cite>), and while it does have a resolution to the immediate plot, it reads very much like a chunk taken out of a larger novel.<\/p>\n

(The Moffett story also sufferered, for me, from a distracting attempt to re-cast the modern world. The plot concerns a young girl who was raised in a deeply religious family and had been abused by her grandfather, who was an official of the church. In this particular religion, which is based in Utah and was founded by a Prophet who led his people there from the Midwest, all the male members of the church are part of the clergy, and they have a number of secretive practices and some offshoots have a rather troubling attitude toward gender roles. I’m speaking, of course, of the Ephremites…<\/p>\n

(Now, the plot depends on the Ephremites being somewhat icky, so I can sort of understand why she wouldn’t want to just call them Mormons. But they’re so obviously intended to be Mormons that the renaming just ends up being really distracting.)<\/p>\n

The other really notable story in the issue is Michael Swanwick’s “Urdumheim,” which is done as a sort of creation myth for the world of his forthcoming The Dragons of Babel<\/cite>. It’s remarkably comprehensible for Swanwick, dealing with an attack of logophages on early humans not long after the creation of the world. It’s probably the best story in the lot.<\/p>\n

All in all, my reaction is basically “Enh.” Most of the stories were fine, but I wouldn’t really pay for this on a regular basis. It may be that this was a dud issue, and I’ll probably try another one at some point (we got two copies in our swag bags from World Fantasy Con– anybody want to put in a good word for either the January 2007 or June 2007 issues?), but so far, I’m not seeing a lot to convince me that I really ought to be subscribing to any of these magazines.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of months ago, I embarked on an experiment to read some SF magazines, and see if I was really missing out on the wonderful stuff that people are always haranguing con-goers about. I bought paper copies of Analog‘s November issue and the October\/ November Asimov’s, and commented on them here. I was unable… Continue reading The Magazine Experiment: Fantasy and Science Fiction October 2007<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sf","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1998\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}