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3/1/2010 5:27:30 PM
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jcompton
Posts 19
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IASFTravelogue: Former Editors Edition
Facing a weekend round-trip flight to San Francisco, I gambled that I could get through five back issues instead of my usual three. I decided to do something a little different, and instead of grabbing three random or three sequential issues, I reached for one issue from each past editor—with a double-dose of Dozois to round the set out to five.
Presented in chronological order, my findings...
December 1979: Your editor is still George Scithers. Your cover still features Asimov's picture. A big VTOL shuttlecraft is your painting.
The good:
"Written in Sand", Robert Chilson. Tale of a researcher sent back in time to Egypt in ascendance to obtain copies of lost books from the Great Library of Alexandria. To avoid any risk of timeline corruption, the researcher uses old-fashioned scribes instead of modern document imaging processes, meaning he's there for well over a decade—long enough to love and lose, which is the real focus of the piece. Effective and sufficiently moving, although I do have to wryly wonder if, much like 80s cyberpunk writers failed to anticipate widespread wireless voice and data communications just around the corner, Chilson failed to anticipate handheld high-resolution document imaging devices...
"The Cow in the Cellar", Bill Earls. Short but effective tale of post-apocalyptic survival and the risks of overplaying your hand. One of those where the lack of detail and backstory actually makes the setting more powerful. Surprisingly pointed and deft for Scithers-era.
"Hear the Crash, Hear the Roar", Jack C. Haldeman II. Jack Haldeman usually offered IASFM a sport with a futuristic twist. Here, a day at the "demolition derby" through the eyes of a superfan. In this setting, the participants are on foot, racing around and beating the hell out of each other. At its core, a story of hero worship.
The blah:
"The Web Dancer", Somtow Sucharitkul. Normally I like his work. Not here. Interstellar travel depends on special crystals, which are actually unfertilized eggs from a living mountain on a small planetoid. Galactic overlords genetically engineer acrobats to be able to dance around in mid-air, distracting the flying creatures which would otherwise fertilize the eggs, rendering an entire batch useless. Bits about destiny vs. coercion just never engaged me. Seemed like it would have either benefited from being half as long, or much much longer and better-developed.
"The Woman Who Loved the Centaur Pholus", Gene Wolfe. Bioengineering-at-home kits are producing frightening beasts at regular intervals, leading to soldiers shooting to kill. Peaceniks try to intervene, especially since many of the "frightening beasts" are actually sentient beings. Laden with imagery and quotes from the Classics, and more of a "day in the life of this setting" piece than anything else. Just didn't work for me.
"Horse Laugh", Pierce Askegren. Feghoot.
"Through Time and Space With Ferdinand Feghoot V!", Grendel Briarton. Oh, look, another Feghoot.
"Like Unto the Locust Part 1", Frederik Pohl. The first two-parter in IASFM history and the sequel to "Mars Masked" and "The Cool War", both of which I enjoyed. This one is not off to a good start, though. Maybe it's because the reluctant international bioengineering saboteur "Horny Hake" is getting more shrill now that he's less disoriented about his secret life. Maybe the concept had run its course. I'm in no rush to get to Part 2.
Columns: Martin Gardner's puzzles have started to appear. There's a short introduction to fandom "On Science Fiction Clubs", and a 20-odd page "let's play junior Analog!" nonfiction article on Voyager I.
Overall: "Written in Sand" led off the issue, so things were off to a brisk start, but "Web Dancer" ate up a lot of time with little payoff and having the Hake story come off so flat was a real disappointment. An unmemorable issue.
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3/1/2010 5:33:48 PM
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jcompton
Posts 19
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April 1982: Your editor is the transitional Kathleen Moloney. The logo is my favorite, second variation. Somtow is your cover author. Gardner also credited on the cover, which seems unusual.
The good:
"Aquila the God", Somtow Sucharitkul. Oh, there we go. This alternate-history Romans-in-the-New-World tale plays really (really) fast and loose with alternate technologies and seems to get a little too cute, especially at the end. But as light entertainment and a good start to the issue, I'll take it.
"Coursing", Barry N. Malzberg. An offbeat, avant garde tale of the unlikely intersection between an alien overlord humanity doesn't quite take seriously, a Dirty Dozen-esque negotiator sent to deal with him, and the negotiator's emotionally clingy shipboard AI. Best read at a feverish pace, as it seems more of a hallucination than an actual story.
"Amy, at the Bottom of the Stairs", John M. Ford. Ford is one of my favorite personal "finds" of the early IASFM years. A character piece about a lone time-traveler conferring with Amy Dudley (Robsart) on the occasion of her death—ensuring, as he tells her, that she does indeed die under suspicious enough circumstances that Queen Elizabeth can never marry her husband Robert Dudley. The story implies that an assassination was indeed in the works even as her cancer-ravaged body fell down the stairs. "Haunting" has been used accurately to describe the story.
"Up, Up, and Away", Hugh Brous. A harmless the-grass-is-always-greener tale.
"Miles to Go Before I Sleep", Julie Stevens. Post-apocalyptic tale of city folk vs. country folk which certainly doesn't have much good to say about the latter.
"Darkspace", Robert F. Young. Creepy, if ultimately a little silly, tale about a dead man trying to keep himself alive in the nightmares of his wife, who killed him before he could kill her.
The blah:
"Parasites of Passion", Brian Aldiss. I might have disliked this less if the first two stories in the issue ("Aquila" and "Coursing") had been stronger, but by now my patience is wearing thin and Aldiss' story of Dr. Frankenstein and his two creations just never got me interested. Frankenstein, alive and hiding in plain sight as "Vic Barron", an entomologist with a popular syndicated TV program, is confronted by his Monster, who demands a penis so that he can satisfy his Bride. Vic ends up ensnared by Elizabeth's lust instead, and... eh, whatever.
"Isle be Seeing You", F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre. Feghoot.
"In the Wings", George Alec Effinger. One of those "it's hard to be a writer with all these characters running around in your head, and making them do what you want is always a chore" stories which never do much for me. Goes on for way too long with little to offer but a couple of gags. The punchline is cute, but I have terribly little patience for writers writing about how hard it is to be a writer, filmmakers making films about how hard it is to be a filmmaker, etc.
"Through Time and Space With Ferdinand Feghoot X!V", Grendel Briarton. Two issues with two Feghoots each. Christ.
The ugly:
"The Teaching", Sydney J. Van Scyoc. Never mind my complaints about the Feghoots, this is worse. Coming-of-age communing-with-nature snoozefest that I bailed on after six pages.
Columns: Nothing out of the ordinary for the period—editorial, books, letters, Gardner, and con list.
Overall: I was disappointed to be disappointed in Effinger's cranked-out story and even some of the "good" stories were hardly resounding winners, but I wouldn't reserve this issue solely for my enemies.
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3/1/2010 5:37:35 PM
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jcompton
Posts 19
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April 1984: Your editor is Shawna McCarthy. Logo is still my fave. Kessel is the cover story.
The good:
"The Children's Teeth are Set on Edge", Jennifer Swift. Debut story by an author who never caught on. Slightly meandering tale of a man and his clone-father, and their troubled relationship. Told from the POV of the "son" but it's the motivations and mistakes of the "father" which are most interesting—parents tend to think they know best for their children, but for an out-and-out copy, the temptation to micromanage would be even greater. Goes on a bit long just to get to the point of "it's all in your head—be your own man" but well-told regardless.
"Twilight Time", Lewis Shiner. Three issues, three "lone time traveler" tales! In this one, a political prisoner in a world dominated by the "Proctors" is sent back in time to 1961 through an experimental process. The logic of this adventure piece eludes me—our hero ends up fighting against the power of the newly-arrived ruthless alien Proctors in one-hour bursts in the past, but in the "present", the Proctors start out as willing participants in the time travel experiment and, rather than just zorching the traveler and/or mad scientist behind the travel, run off to try to stop the experiment through bureaucratic channels. Huh? But I was entertained regardless.
"On Cannon Beach", Marta Randall. Post-apocalyptic lonely explorer tale. The world is freezing over and scientists go out to take readings and, when possible, clear out more survivors. Our intrepid explorer meets, befriends, and ultimately mourns a ghost town holdout. I suspect the science of the accelerated ice age, where ice is piling up on land by the league every year, is very dubious, but I'll accept it as a short mood piece and move on.
The blah:
"The Big Dream", John Kessel. Being a fan of Raymond Chandler, I was hoping for a lot more from this piece. A Chandler pastiche which puts a real-life Chandler in the middle of a hardboiled plot, told from the POV of a Marlowe-esque private dick. The gimmick here is that the dick, Michael Davin, struggles with the loss of free-will as, behind the scenes, Chandler takes control of his life with his typewriter, shown to us in italicized passages. Later, Kessel, speaking through Davin, mocks Chandler for being down on liberated women and a man who might take one up on her offer. Ends with a damp squib of a showdown between Davin and Chandler. "In the Wings" in a trenchcoat.
"Wednesday Night Group", Michael Ward. What if a stranded extra-terrestrial turned to a vapid therapy encounter group instead of turning to great scientists or leaders of men? An insubstantial short story, that's what.
The ugly:
"White Hats", George Alec Effinger. This is getting strange. Normally I always like Effinger. The light concept could have worked for a few pages, I suppose: man gets mugged, man gets little satisfaction from police, man wonders where all the heroes have gone, all the heroes come to his house and raid his refrigerator. But there was no substance here and (with ads) it went on for nearly 20 pages. Like "The Big Dream", it seemed not so much either "SF" or "Fantasy" as merely "flight of fancy."
Columns: McCarthy liked non-fiction departments, so we have the usuals (ed/books/letters/Gardner/cons), the usually-too-cramped-to-be-substantive Gaming column, the Mooney's Module cartoon (and, randomly, another full-page cartoon filler by a different artist mid-issue) and Michael Bishop with a brief summary of the genre over the past quarter-century.
Overall: Woof. Not much to take away with me from this one. The best story is by an author with only seven other published stories, giving me little to build on. Another Effinger letdown. The cover novelette by Kessel would have worked just as well in Hitchcock's as in Asimov's, and would have had the same lack of real punch there as well. At least they're still using the logo I like...
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3/1/2010 5:40:24 PM
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jcompton
Posts 19
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March 1993: Your editor is Gardner Dozois.
The good:
"The Pact", Don Webb. Five college friends make a deal with dangerous forces to secure immortality, at the price of their friendship. Over the next fifty years their lives ebb and flow past one another (but never all five of them together at once—that was the specific price to be paid), fortunes are won and lost, relationships broken and mended, until one decides to force the others into breaking the deal. The wry twist reveal by the group's chief "warlock" is a nice payoff and makes you think about whether it is better to live as though you are dying, or as though you cannot die...
"Martin on a Wednesday", Nancy Kress. A doozy of an experimental treatment and some questionable mind-over-matter medical science are at play here. Martin suffers from pancreatic cancer, but if only he had another personality ("John") which did not believe it had pancreatic cancer, Martin would get better. Aye, but there are two rubs: 1. The other personalities will be living their own lives, not Martin's, and 2. Yes, I said "personalities" because in order to achieve a true multiple personality complex, Martin must first be implanted with "Cody", the personality of an abused child who grows up to become a raging abuser himself, then hope that "John", the regular-time personality, and "Martin", who comes out only for six hours every Wednesday to visit his wife and daughter, can keep "Cody" suppressed. There's a lot here to strain the limits of plausibility, but Kress makes it work.
"Mwalimu in the Squared Circle", Mike Resnick. Decorated short story which takes its what-if cue from a real-life fantastic event, when Uganda's Idi Amin actually dared Tanzania's Julius Nyerere to a boxing match to settle the conflict between their countries. The gag, of course, is that Amin was a huge, powerful man, and Nyerere was a slight scholarly type. Oh, and did we mention that Amin wanted Muhammad Ali to referee? In Resnick's story, the bout actually comes to pass. It ends as it must, but not before Nyerere goes through a sort of internal hero's journey and transformation, played out in his head between rounds as he desperately seeks a winning (or even surviving) strategy. It's easy to see why the voters liked it.
The blah:
"The Parrot Man", Kathleen Ann Goonan. Burned-out cougar of a bioengineer meets and beds a man who turns out to be part of her aborted pet project in human hybrids with animal sensitivities. The happy ending felt tacked-on and unlikely.
"Vision Quest", Joseph F. Pumilia. I think this started out as a writing exercise of "What would happen if Hunter S. Thompson came face-to-face with a dragon?" and the author tried to build a story around it. The characters feel inconsistent, the action doesn't interest me or feel motivated... meh.
"The Redemption of August", Tom Purdom. So I pick four issues at semi-random, and I get four lone-time-traveler tales? What are the odds? In this one, two time travelers have a surprisingly gentlemanly competition in France 1914 over the Schlieffen Plan. The gimmick is that Man A travels back in time from our reality and broadcasts a radio message to General von Kluck, ensuring that he sticks to the plan instead of wandering into the "Miracle of the Marne." Man A reasons that a victorious Germany would have prevented the subsequent need for World War II and the dangerous Atomic Age. Man B is from the alternate timeline Man A creates, in which Prussians rule Europe with an iron fist and people yearn for a better life. I'm spending a lot of time describing a story that I put under this heading simply because it's an interesting idea told with a healthy dose of ambiguity considering the tradeoffs of the two histories, but the actual struggle between A and B is so unintentionally ridiculous that it compromises the seriousness of the concept.
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3/1/2010 5:41:46 PM
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jcompton
Posts 19
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March 1993: (Continued. 4000 character limit is very tight.)
Still the blah:
"The King's Kiss", M. Shayne Bell. Dozois was buying stories about inspirational African leaders this month. Fantastical mood piece about a proud African king with the power to heal and inspire.
"Death on the Nile", Connie Willis. Normally Willis either really amuses or really depresses me, but rarely am I left cold. A half-dozen tourists are heading for Cairo, but only the protagonist has the mental acuity to notice all of the clues which indicate they're actually all dead.
"Driving the Chevy Biscayne to Oblivion", Kandis Elliot. Debut story. A fantastical story which seems more like the author clearing some semi-autobiographical memories out of the closet than anything else. A couple of potentially touching moments are obscured by my overall unease, wondering just what the heck I, the reader, am doing here. Arguably also a time-travel piece, but that's giving the premise too much credit, honestly.
Columns: It's the interregnum between the guest editorials and Silverberg's slot, so all we have are Letters, Books (still Baird Searles even this late) and cons.
Overall: Early Dell era, so pagecount is down from the peak at 192, cover art is changing, and it feels like they've gone to the slightly less stiff cover stock. Another disappointing, homage-based cover story (Willis) and an awful lot of middle-of-the-road stories, but the three I liked, I liked a lot.
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3/1/2010 5:46:18 PM
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jcompton
Posts 19
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January 1998: Your editor is still Gardner Dozois.
The good:
"Mother Death", Robert Reed. In the far future, augmented humans of terrifyingly advanced capabilities have had a fight for dominance, sparked by the accidental destruction of the galactic core by a parallel universe experiment gone wrong. The winners stripped the losers (who sparked the accident) of power and in many cases identity, but keep the ultimate villain alive as a symbol and punching bag. Through a whirlwind series of competitions, abuses of power, and hubris on both sides, this decision creates yet another tragedy. The moral of the story is that old standby: Never forget that history is written by the victors.
"King Moron", R. Neube. Earth is a smoldering ruin and what remains of the British Empire is the starship Windsor, guided by figurehead direct descendant Richard IV. Before being discovered, however, he led a hardscabble, uneducated, homeless life, leading to the titular moniker. He wins one for the good guys, though. Feels like Sheckley.
"Taking Care of Daddy", Brian C. Coad. Broad but darkly humorous tale of a little girl sticking a thumb in The Man's eye to ensure that the local mad scientist doesn't get to carve up her daddy for lack of good health insurance. (Or maybe the little girl is just deluded and causes mass mayhem because she's a little girl who makes some terrible leaps in logic. It's possible.)
The blah:
"Approaching Perimelasma", Geoffrey A. Landis. Landis knows more about astrophysics than you do. Just read one of his stories. This could just as easily been written up for Analog as a piece of speculative non-fiction. The premise: What would you see if you could spiral down a black hole at super-high speeds with the perceptual equipment to understand what was happening, then escape through a hypothetical movable wormhole to tell the tale? Instead of being written straight, there's a microscopic cyborg protagonist to build the fiction around. The trip into the "sideways" dimension allowing time travel is interesting. But it's not much of a story, as such.
"Evolution in Guadalajara", Kandis Elliot. "Disorienting" is what I call it. A group of naturalist crusaders travel through a world, or worlds, constantly being remade by the modern definition of "progress"—the strip-mall kind. The mechanics of the instant venture capital market which shows up late in the story are handled much better (and engagingly) by Charles Stross just a few years later.
"Reflections on Life and Death", Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Near-future tale of hard times, euthanasia, and compassion in the face of ambivalence. Marked down mostly because it backs into a platitude-powered non-ending.
Columns: Silverberg's here, as are Books (Heck's turn at the plate), 1997 index (page eater!), cons, and reader's award ballot. Letters are by now "something that we used to do."
Overall: I'm never quite sure where Robert Reed's stories are going to take me, and he threw in some feints and surprises again this time. Kandis Elliot is 0-for-2 with one strikeout in my book. Landis' story and arguably Elliot's involves time travel, so that's five out of five issues with the Lone Time Traveler. We're in the dying days of the classic digest size, down to 160 pages and flimsy covers. You can really see where the magazine hasn't really committed to embracing the Internet for high-volume, low-value information—we're certainly in the "commercial Internet era" by now, but correspondence is still only a numerical Compuserve address, and the Index, Cons, and Awards take up seven valuable pages that could have been turned into a seventh short story (or more room for one or more of the existing pieces.)
edited by jcompton on 3/3/2010
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3/3/2010 4:24:07 PM
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Sam Wilson
Posts 1015
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Interesting cruise down memory lane. My only thought: DEATH ON THE NILE by Connie Willis, won the Hugo and is on your blah list, which shows how much tastes vary.
--
If the rule that you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
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3/3/2010 5:00:54 PM
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jcompton
Posts 19
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For whatever reason, I tend to be underimpressed with stories under the general heading of "cover novellas that Dozois bought a second time for Year's Best."
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3/9/2010 8:56:37 PM
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Tom Purdom
Posts 834
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jcompton wrote:
March 1993: Your editor is Gardner Dozois.
"The Redemption of August", Tom Purdom. So I pick four issues at semi-random, and I get four lone-time-traveler tales? What are the odds? In this one, two time travelers have a surprisingly gentlemanly competition in France 1914 over the Schlieffen Plan. The gimmick is that Man A travels back in time from our reality and broadcasts a radio message to General von Kluck, ensuring that he sticks to the plan instead of wandering into the "Miracle of the Marne." Man A reasons that a victorious Germany would have prevented the subsequent need for World War II and the dangerous Atomic Age. Man B is from the alternate timeline Man A creates, in which Prussians rule Europe with an iron fist and people yearn for a better life. I'm spending a lot of time describing a story that I put under this heading simply because it's an interesting idea told with a healthy dose of ambiguity considering the tradeoffs of the two histories, but the actual struggle between A and B is so unintentionally ridiculous that it compromises the seriousness of the concept.
As I remember it, it was intentional. To me it seemed droll. I believe the narrator points out the contrast at one point.
It was also logical, given the premises of the story. But mostly I thought it fitted the wry, ironic cast of the story.
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