Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
John D. Loyd, There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch
Victoria Silverwolf, Tangent Online
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Various, Goodreads

Editor, C. C. Finlay

Fiction:
A Thousand Deaths Through Flesh and Stone ● short story by Brian Trent ♥♥♥
Witch’s Hour ● novelette by Shannon Connor Winward ♥♥♥
Dirty Old Town ● novelette by Richard Bowes ♥♥♥+
The Prognosticant ● novelette by Matthew Hughes ♥♥♥
The History of the Invasion Told in Five Dogs ● short story by Kelly Jennings ♥♥♥
What the Hands Know ● short story by Gregor Hartmann ♥♥♥
The Woman with the Long Black Hair ● short story by Zach Shephard ♥♥
My English Name ● novelette by R. S. Benedict ♥♥♥♥
The First Day of Someone Else’s Life ● short story by John Schoffstall ♥♥
Neko Brushes ● short story by Leah Cypess ♥
Ring ● short story by Nina Kiriki Hoffman ♥♥

Non-fiction:
The Prognosticant ● cover by Maurizio Manzieri
Cartoons ● by Bill Long, Arthur Masear and Nick Downes
The Path of Peace ● poem by Mary Soon Lee
Books to Look For ● Charles De Lint
Books ● Elizabeth Hand
Plumage from Pegasus: Happiness in a Worn Gunn ● humour by Paul di Filippo
Robots on the Road ● science essay by Pat Murphy & Paul Doherty
Western Histories ● film review by David J. Skal
F&SF Competition #93 & 94
Coming Attractions
Curiosities ● book review by Mark Esping

There are (at least) three series stories in this issue of F&SF and, depending on readers’ attitude to this category of fiction and the series in question, that will either be a good thing or a bad one. Even if one’s attitude is broadly positive, like mine, there always seems to be a tension between (a) meeting these old friends again and (b) the sometimes fragmentary nature of the tales on offer. We’ll see to what extent this affects the following contributions.
Taking the series stories in the order they appear, the first is The Prognosticant by Matthew Hughes. This is an ‘Archronate Universe’ story, and the second episode featuring Baldemar following his introduction last issue. It has an engrossing start:

Baldemar knew something was wrong when he heard the got-you-now muttering to itself. Of course, the predatory tree could not actually speak, neither to itself nor to any other creature. But whenever it had sprung at something and failed to catch it, its barb-thorned twiglets would chafe against each other as they returned to coiled-up readiness. That sound was not audible when the tree succeeded in catching prey; the rubbing of twigs was drowned out by the noises that its victims made while it was feeding. p. 103

This is another readable tale that goes on to tell how Baldemar catches a young thief called Raffalon (the character of a previous F&SF ‘Archronate’ series) reconnoitring his master’s property at the dead of night. Later, Baldemar is sent by the wizard that employs him (along with Oldo, his supervisor) to recover a helmet called The Helm of Sagacity. This section, with platform-bearing imps, a near-lethal guardian, and omnipotent Helm, is inventive and absorbing stuff but the ending peters out somewhat.
I note in passing that we are given a hint that the series may be science fantasy rather than straight fantasy:

The skintight suit that bent light around itself was a relic of a bygone aeon when, according to legend, magic had been unreliable and people had to invent machines that could do what spells and cantrips could not. p.106

The second of the series stories is a follow-up to Gregor Hartman’s A Gathering on Gravity’s Shore in the January-February issue. His fourth ‘Franden’ story, What the Hands Know, has him at an off-world fight club where, after an initial scene-setting bout, two miners challenge their Cold Arrow employers. One of the latter turns out to be the nephew of Franden’s Upheld (planetary elite) friend Maya and, when she spots this on social media, she implores Franden to help protect the nephew by joining him in the ring as his fight partner—at least until she can work out another way of stopping the contest.
This could probably be set in the present day as nearly everything (well, maybe not the skarmour—active body armour) has a present day analogue, up to and including the way the fight is ultimately illuminated by the light of the spectators iPhones, sorry, oMos. As with the story above, it also peters out a little at the end. Nonetheless, it is a pretty good read for all that, and I really must go back and dig out the first two stories.
I’m assuming that Ring by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, the last story in the issue, is also a series story, this being the first episode. It starts on a train on an alien planet with a woman called Aris who is accompanied by a man called Firen. He wears a ring that Aris controls, and it materialises she has just bought him at the slave market in the city. This first part of the story, the journey back to Aris’s home, is quite slow moving if intriguing as a strange male-slave/sexual partner owning society is sketched out. It picks up pace on arrival at their destination, where they are met by Aris’s mother, who insists they go to the temple to have their union consecrated. After the ceremony (conducted by deeply buried and long-forgotten planetary tech) is complete two things occur: the first is that circular marks appear on the couple’s hands; the second is that Firen regains the power of speech and tells Aris and her mother that he did not lose ownership of himself in the casinos, but was speech-locked and removed from the ship where he was a first officer attempting to remediate a dysfunctional crew.
Even though I enjoyed this one it is even more open-ended than the two above, too much so in fact. In this case I think it would have been better to ask the writer to use this as the beginning of a longer novelette or novella with more significant development in it. I would also add that, given its open-ended nature, it is not really a story to end an issue with.
At the start of this column I mentioned the possibility of fragmentary episodes with series stories: I would say that in F&SF, C. C. Finlay makes a reasonably good job of making sure that they are self-contained, more so than you usually find. I hope he manages to keep it up as these series get longer and the readers more involved….

The other stories include A Thousand Deaths Through Flesh and Stone by Brian Trent. This is about a soldier from the Martian Order of Stone sent to the Moon to assassinate a Partisan war criminal called Sabrina. She is responsible for, among other things, a nuclear attack on Mars. What complicates this straightforward storyline is that a saved version of the soldier has been downloaded into a new body on the Moon, one with several combat enhancements (a ‘blurmod’ is similar to the combat wiring that Gully Foyle used to speed up his physical functions in Alfred Bester’s Tiger! Tiger!). This new body meets another version of himself who has been downloaded several days earlier into a slightly different and modified body type. Together they get on the train to kill the four copies of Sabrina they are tracking. Much mayhem ensues.
I had one existential reservation about the storyline, which is that if you can download people into new bodies then trying to kill a particular person can rapidly degenerate into a game of whack-a-mole. That minor observation notwithstanding, the story is an entertaining, fast-paced piece, albeit one that ends pretty much as you would expect it to.
Witch’s Hour by Shannon Connor Winward concerns Esmerelda, who works in a castle as what would seem to be a witch-cum-cook, given her magical use of special spices and herbs in cooking. She has previously used these talents to poison the previous occupant of that job, a man who raped and abused her. However, she is now haunted by his ghost, and he/it is increasingly able to manifest as a physical force, and is continuing the abuse. It is against this backdrop that the new king commands her to prepare a meal that will impress a visiting duke. Esmerelda, after the ghost then destroys her stock of spices and herbs, has to go to the Wanderers for replacement stock. She reveals herself as one of them and asks an elderwoman for information that will help her exorcise the ghost.
This is well enough told and developed, but it is a fairly dark story on the way through tending to pitch black at the end.
Another fantasy novelette, albeit more of a borderline case than the previous story, is the elegiac Dirty Old Town by Richard Bowes, which is narrated by a writer who has some magical ability. However, the core of the story isn’t about the magic elements of his life but his relationship with a childhood ‘friend,’ Ed Mackey, an actor who has had some success as a TV and film star. Their tale takes them from their childhood together in a tough area of South Boston to the present day, and the narrative, which doesn’t easily lend itself to synopsis (it is a mosaic of many scenes and anecdotes), moves back and forth from its immersive account of those early days in Boston to the relationship that develops between the two men in later life. The second-best story in the issue.
The History of the Invasion Told in Five Dogs by Kelly Jennings is a post-alien invasion dystopia told through the device of five dogs from the narrator’s life. I liked this short, grim and absorbing story.
The Woman with the Long Black Hair by Zach Shephard is a short fable (or as the introduction says, sigh, ‘flash fiction’) about a black haired woman called Korlova who asks various people about herself. The ones who have bad things to say about her are rewarded…

The standout story of the issue for me was My English Name by R. S. Benedict. This is an impressive debut that starts with a diminutive Chinese woman entering a room and changing into, or adopting the external form of, an Englishman in China called Thomas Major. The rest of the story follows this man/creature as he becomes a TEFL (foreign language) teacher, and of the local Chinese man he later becomes friendly with. While the focus of the piece is on the aspirations of this creature for a relationship with another being—this is perhaps meant as a more universal metaphor—there are various visceral flashes of how alien he/it is throughout. Thomas avoids physical contact as he/it cannot take the risk of exposing the artificiality of his/its carapace, or the damage that may ensue.

I have no trouble with chopsticks. But putting food in my mouth, chewing it, and swallowing it are not actions that come naturally to me. This tongue of mine does not have working taste buds. My teeth are not especially secure in their gums, having been inserted one by one with a few taps of a hammer. This stomach of mine is only a synthetic sack that dangles in the recesses of my body. It has no exit. It leads nowhere. p. 174

What I also found interesting in this piece was the description of the rather dissolute expat/foreign language community in China, and how Thomas’s status as a foreigner mirrors his experience of trying to fit into wider human society.

Our train plunges deeper and deeper into miasma as we approach the city. The sky darkens even as the sun rises. It’s late autumn and the coal plants are blazing in preparation for winter. Maybe it is the air. Maybe it’s bad enough to affect even me. Maybe the new skin wasn’t ready when I put it on. Maybe it’s just the standard decay that conquers every Westerner who spends too much time in China. Whatever the reason, Thomas Majors is beginning to come apart again. p. 184

This story reminded me somewhat of the recent film Under the Skin and, although it is not an SF thriller or horror, there is a final scene (spoiler) where the catastrophic decay of Thomas’s external form causes quite a scene. One for the ‘Best of the Year’ anthologies.
The First Day of Someone Else’s Life by John Schoffstall is an information-dense story set in an almost unrecognisable future where a man wakes up in a body that isn’t his. He can hear a female voice speaking to him.
After some workplace/company/political manoeuvring he is (spoiler) rumbled by the company that employs him as a spy whose mind has recently been reprogrammed with another personality. This is competently done but in the end I’m not sure it really amounts to much.
I would note that I have a vague dislike of ultra-dense cyberpunk type narratives. It is probably just laziness but I find they are hard work to read and process, and this one wasn’t helped by some complicated vocabulary—two of the (many) words I stumbled over weren’t even in my OECD and I had to look them up online (the first was pareidolic, p. 209, I think the second was maybe decathexis, p. 222).¹
Neko Brushes by Leah Cypess is about a young boy who paints cats. After a samurai arrives at the monastery where he lives, he is taken away. At his new home he is told by the lady of the house to continue paint cats and, later, one comes to life and climbs down off a hanging scroll. After this he is asked to paint a magical sword, which the samurai and the lady plan on using to oust the current shogun.
This is an engaging story up until the ending, which was all over the place (spoiler: the sword is flawed and they lose the battle, the boy paints a picture of the lady but she does not come to life, the lady escapes from her prison cell by painting a door of the wall).

The Prognosticant has a pretty good cover by Maurizio Manzieri, although the electronic/PDF edition of the magazine has the usual crappy low-resolution image (which appears poorly cropped this time as well, look at the cut through the CC on the left hand side of the title).² Fortunately, whoever put the PDF together left in a cover proof by mistake, which gives a much nicer image to look at as well as the back cover advertisement.³ Why can’t they use this quality of image all the time rather than what appears to be a low-resolution scan of a physical cover? Yes, I know, I’ll get off my high horse.
There are Cartoons by Bill Long, Arthur Masear and Nick Downes in this issue, none of which did anything for me.
The Path of Peace is an OK poem about kings, princes and dragons by Mary Soon Lee
Books to Look For by Charles De Lint and Books by Elizabeth Hand are the review columns. We get another flash of political angst from the latter column:

I’m writing these words in the shadow of a year that ominously presages a future out of the darkest worlds conjured in Literary Wonderlands: that of books like 1984, Fahrenheit 451, The Handmaid’s Tale, Brave New World, Never Let Me Go. p. 93-94

And then there is this from Western Histories, the TV column by David J. Skal covering The Man in the High Castle.

Unless you’ve been living in an alternate universe yourself, you may already have taken note that Dick’s parallel reality tale in which Germany won World War II has found an almost daily resonance with media reports and analysis of the disturbing drift toward strongman rule in the United States and Europe. p. 204

They are all beginning to sound like my (almost) namesake Private Frazer, from the British television show Dad’s Army: ‘We’re doomed, Captain Mannering. Doomed, I tell ye, doomed!’³
Plumage from Pegasus: Happiness in a Worn Gunn by Paul di Filippo is a humour piece about an open carry law that is passed in the near future, but one that applies to books.
Robots on the Road by Pat Murphy & Paul Doherty is a fascinating column about self-driving cars that has a number of interesting points. Two of these are:

Pedestrians with their eyes on the phone screen stumble, fall, walk into things, and even step right into traffic. Thanks to this ubiquitous technology, urban pedestrians had to go to the hospital for emergency treatment ten times more often in 2014 as they did in 2006. p. 199

In a situation where the car has to crash into something, what will it choose to crash into? Suppose a car has a choice of running into a crowd of pedestrians or missing them and hitting a concrete pillar. Running into the pillar is more likely to injure the people in the car, while running into the pedestrians is more likely to injure them. What should the car be programmed to choose?
When surveyed, people say a car should take action to save the most lives. But when these same people are asked to make a choice between two cars, their answer changes. Car #1 will save the most lives, even if that decision kills the car’s passenger. Car #2 will make the decision that saves the passenger, even if that means wiping out an entire troop of Girl Scouts. It doesn’t surprise us that people almost always picked Car #2.
For another perspective on this dilemma, Paul discussed the ethics of self-driving cars with a group of Buddhist monks when he was in India. His workshop group of monks instantly suggested a consideration that hadn’t occurred to Paul: the people in the car had chosen to be in the car. The pedestrians, on the other hand, had made no such choice. So perhaps, the monks said, the car should favor saving the pedestrians, who were essentially innocent bystanders. p.200

The winning entries for F&SF Competition #93 are published which, like the cartoons, I mostly didn’t get.
Coming Attractions mentions two stories from the magazine on this year’s Nebula Award ballot: The Liar by John P. Murphy (March/April), which was nominated for Best Novella, and The Long Fall Up by William Ledbetter (May/June), nominated for Best Novelette.⁴
Finally there is the Curiosities column, this time by Mark Esping. No reflection on this contributor, but I think this column and its tenuous filler is way past its sell-by date. I’d rather have a page on a significant back issue of F&SF (like C. C. Finlay does with his Throw Back Thursday posts on the F&SF blog⁵).

Another solid issue, which is more of a compliment than you might think.

1. Google gives the meaning of pareidolia as: ‘the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful, image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern.’ Although decathexis wasn’t in my OECD, cathexis was (which is why I think it may have been another word): ‘the concentration of mental energy on one particular person, idea, or object (especially to an unhealthy degree).’
2. The cover proof: The original low-resolution cover, which is quite blurry compared with the one above:    
3. Private Frazer can be heard uttering his catchphrase from Dad’s Army on YouTube. Despite innumerable utterances he survived the war. And while we are comparing everything in the current American political scene to Nazi Germany, here is Adolf Hitler on YouTube when he hears about the new Dad’s Army remake.
4. I note in passing that there are no short stories or novelettes from either F&SF or Asimov’s SF on the Hugo ballot (Tor.com has the list), which seems strange. This was explained to me as a possible backlash against straight white male writers, but I think it is more complicated than that. There may be a small Puppy effect on the ballot, and possibly a much larger free versus paid content one (at least for the two categories mentioned: the novellas look like they are going the way of novels and being decided by the publication of individual books). I was also rather surprised that while Shelia Williams deservedly made it onto the final ballot, C. C. Finlay didn’t.
5. A Throw Back Thursday post from C. C. Finlay on the January 1957 issue of F&SF.

This magazine is still being published! Subscribe: Kindle UK, Kindle USA, Weightless Books or physical copies.

Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Kat Day, Tangent Online
Steve Fahnestalk, Amazing Stories
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
John D. Loyd, There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch
Katherine Nabity, The Writerly Reader
Michael Penkas, Black Gate
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Various, Goodreads

Editor, C. C. Finlay; Assistant Editor, Robin O’Connor
Assistant Editor, Stephen L. Mazur; Assistant Editor, Lisa Rogers

Fiction:
Driverless ● novelette by Robert Grossbach ♥♥♥
The Toymaker’s Daughter ● short story by Arundhati Hazra ♥♥
Ten Half-Pennies ● novelette by Matthew Hughes ♥♥♥
The Man Who Put the Bomp ● novella by Richard Chwedyk ♥♥♥+
A Green Silk Dress and a Wedding-Death ● short story by Cat Hellisen ♥♥♥
Miss Cruz ● short story by James Sallis ♥
The Avenger ● novelette by Albert E. Cowdrey ♥♥♥
Daisy ● short story by Eleanor Arnason ♥♥

Non-fiction:
The Man Who Put the Bomp ● cover by Bryn Barnard
Cartoons ● by Arthur Masear (2) and Nick Downes
Spacemen Only ● poem by Ruth Berman
Books to Look For ● by Charles de Lint
Musing on Books ● by Michelle West
Robots in Your Pants ● science essay by Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty
The Language of Loss, Trust, and Heptapods ● film review by Kathi Maio
Coming Attractions
Curiosities: A Beleaguered City by Mrs. Oliphant ● book review by David Langford

The fiction in this issue opens with Driverless by Robert Grossbach. This is an ‘If this goes on…’ story about driverless cars, narrated from the viewpoint of QuikTrip’s CEO:

I called a car for myself. It was close to two minutes before yet another competitor arrived, this time an Uber. Just…irritating. Really disturbing.
I shook my head and began walking slowly toward it when suddenly I heard the loud squealing noise of tires scraping on asphalt. A vehicle with a red-lit QuikTrip sign screamed around the corner and pulled up directly in front of the Uber, then backed to within an inch of its front bumper. The Uber’s door was already open. “Sir,” came the Uber’s voice, “are you ready to proceed?”
By law, New York City ordinance, one was obligated to use the first vehicle that arrived, or pay for it if you didn’t. The City Council’s way of equalizing competition and dissuading people from calling five different car companies.
I was about to respond when a second QuikTrip car came squealing around the corner and smoothly rolled to the curb within an inch of the Uber’s rear bumper.
I was, frankly, dumbfounded. I’d been around driverless cars — DCs as they’re now called — for a large portion of my adult life, but had never quite seen this exact situation. I decided to play along. “Yes,” I said to the Uber, entering the vehicle. “You have my destination.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay…let’s go.”
There was a nearly fifteen-second delay, then: “Sir, I’m afraid the vehicles in front and to the rear of me prevent my departure at this time.” p. 9

When his company’s cars start ramming the competition, and take a number of humans hostage, he is summoned by the security services to help deal with the problem.
The Toymaker’s Daughter by Arundhati Hazra is a fantasy set in present day India and tells of a wood carver and the daughter who paints his products. One day two of the carvings start talking, and their lives change forever. I found the storyline rather too straightforward but this writer promises to be an interesting new voice.
Ten Half-Pennies by Matthew Hughes is the first of a new series of stories in his Archonate universe, this time featuring a young man called Baldemaer, and it is a promising introduction. When Baldemar is first sent to school as a young child he is bullied and so befriends Vunt, a moneylender’s hired muscle. After he pays the man to intimidate the school thugs he is left alone. The story that follows tells of Vunt’s subsequent mentoring and employment of the boy, and how he is later involved in a plan to rob the man who by then is master of both, the moneylender Geberon. This is slickly done and my only slight quibble is about the ending, which seems rather rushed.

Dominating this issue in size, quality and pedigree is The Man Who Put the Bomp, a 31,000 word ‘Saurs’ novella by Richard Chwedyk. This is the fifth story in his series about a refuge house for genetically engineered, toy-sized dinosaurs which were originally made as companions for children. When their manufacture was eventually discontinued (they were considerably more self-aware than the makers had intended and, in the meantime, experienced dreadful neglect and treatment) some of the survivors ended up in a house run by the Atherton foundation.
I previously read the first story in this series and liked it a lot and, before starting this one, I reread it and then read the sequels.¹ Once again we are reunited with (among others) the hyperactive Axel, the compassionate Doc, Tibor (who thinks he is—and may be—Emperor of the Universe) and grumpy Agnes:

Tibor, small enough to fit in a human hand, always wore an intense scowl, like a Puritan judge or a cartoon nemesis. Along with his volcano-shaped hat, Tibor had donned a powder-blue ribbon; he was on “official”
Tiborean business.
He was following Axel, who had run up to Doc, shouting, “Doc! Doc! Did I tell you about the dream I had last night?” He pulsed with energy, shifting his weight from leg to leg.
Doc smiled and shook his head. “You’ll tell me now, no doubt.”
“I was in a big station! Like a train station. It was tall, like it had no ceiling, with big steel girders, all blue, way above, and windows as big as this whole house!”
“Tibor is here!” Tibor announced himself, expecting universal recognition but receiving none.
“A transportation center,” said Doc. “In some great city.”
“Humans were everywhere, hundreds and hundreds of them! They were walking around because there were all sorts of places to buy stuff and food carts everywhere! I could smell caramel corn! So much stuff happening! I wanted to see…hear…everything!”
“Here is Tibor!” Tibor tried again, in his soft, insistent voice, but to the same lack of effect.
Doc listened patiently to Axel. “You weren’t afraid? Humans are not very careful about looking at who might be underfoot.”
“A human was carrying me. I was in his arm, sort of like when Tom carries me. But it wasn’t Tom. In the dream I knew who he was. Now I don’t. Why is that?”
“Dreams don’t speak to us,” said Doc. “They whisper.” He hoped Axel might take the hint.
“Behold Tibor!” Tibor whispered, but no one beheld him.
“It was a good thing,” Axel continued, his voice somewhat lowered. “I was looking at everything, but the humans didn’t look at anything!”
Doc nodded again. “Humans have a genius for ignoring the beauty of the world, and its dangers.”
“Tibor, universe-maker! Tibor the Benevolent! Field Marshal Tibor! Tiborius Doctor Honorus Tibor! Maharishi Mahesh Tibor!”
“When I woke up, I wanted something! I wanted it real bad! But I didn’t know what!”
“Some common sense!” Agnes called out from under the table.
“Tibor! Tibor! Tibor! Tibor!”
“It was…everything! To see for real! Not just a dream!”
“Someday you shall.” Doc leaned forward and patted Axel on the head. “Someday you shall.”
“You’re an idiot!” Agnes shouted. “You were out there — that’s why you’re here!” p. 86-87

The passage above may give you the idea that this is a rather light or juvenile piece, but each of the stories has dark depths, mostly relating to the saurs’ historical mistreatment. These can be quite upsetting.
In this story a man called Danner, the creator of the saurs, gets a message from one called Geraldine, and he subsequently arranges a visit to the house to see her. He is accompanied by an ambitious young woman called Christine Haig, who has been instructed by her bosses to covertly obtain DNA samples from the saurs. The other main thread in this one is Tibor’s discovery of a child’s car called VOOM!, and Axel’s efforts to get it operational again.
Anyone that has enjoyed the previous saur stories will enjoy this one, even though it has a rather contrived and far-fetched ending. I would also note is that this story doesn’t really advance the overall series: it rather spins its wheels (ahem). Even though there are another couple of super-science teasers (the ‘spaceguys,’ space portals and universe creation have all been hinted at so far) the question initially asked of Danner by Geraldine isn’t answered. Normally, I’d be getting rather tetchy about the lack of progress after a grand total of 87,000 words, but the fact that I’m not probably tells you something about the skill of the writer.

A Green Silk Dress and a Wedding-Death by Cat Hellisen is a story about a young woman who works gutting fish and the spirit she sees in the river. Later, this fish-like creature is caught by the owner’s son and he asks her to help him escape. The writing is evocative, and the contents are a mix of the traditional and modern, i.e., the woman’s life has the feel of that of a peasant in a medieval village but her boss drives a car.
This isn’t a particularly complicated tale but it is one of those stories that seems to have a dreamlike progression that slides straight into your subconscious.
Miss Cruz by James Sallis is about a guitar player who suddenly finds that what he imagines, people do. A crooked sheriff later becomes the focus of his attention. This is a reasonable idea and it is developed, but the story is never anything more than a notion.
The Avenger by Albert E. Cowdrey is an entertaining and colourful novelette about a Louisiana lowlife called Marv trying to shakedown a wealthy couple who he is partially related to. After the husband dies Marv persists, so the wife hires a PI called William Warlock to protect her and to get justice. (Marv’s intimidation caused the death of her husband.)
The story contains some minor fantasy content but is mostly concerned with the ongoing campaign of intimidation waged by Marv, which starts to fail ever more spectacularly as the story procedes .
Daisy by Eleanor Arnason is another PI story. This time the investigator is female and the job is to find a mobster’s pet octopus. When the PI tracks down the creature, she finds (spoiler) that the octopus is highly intelligent and can communicate with her. If you can suspend disbelief for this unexpected and rather dubious twist it is an enjoyable enough piece.
By the way, I note that this not only follows another PI story (it may have been a wiser to separate this one and the Cowdrey), but it is also the third in a row which features or otherwise mentions police corruption. Are things really that bad in the USA, or is this just lazy storytelling?

The cover on this issue is for The Man Who Put the Bomp, and it is by Bryn Barnard. The foreground looks a little amateurish, but the angle of the building makes it quite eye-catching.
I rather liked the Cartoons in this issue for a change, especially the ones by Arthur Masear. The one with Death arranging an appointment with the cable guy is probably the best of the two.
The low point of the issue is the book review section. Books to Look For by Charles de Lint isn’t bad particularly, he just does his usual context-less reviews (who are these writers and why should I read them?) of half a dozen or so books that sound like fairly formulaic stuff, vampires, druids, etc. I have to confess I started skimming halfway through. The material typically covered in his column does not seem to match the depth and breadth of the fiction in the magazine.
Musing on Books by Michelle West is much worse. It starts with a couple of hundred words on the result of the recent US election, and the demons that have been unleashed, and how she couldn’t concentrate on reading for and writing this column and so missed a deadline. Frankly, I see enough of this sort of thing on Twitter, and think it is extremely poor form to include it here: what on Earth were the editor and publisher thinking?
As for the reviews themselves, they aren’t: the one for Aliette de Boddard’s The House of Binding Thorns is more synopsis than anything else. West takes a page and a half to give a plot summary of the book but only three or four paragraphs introducing and commenting on it—this in a column that runs to seven pages of text in total. F&SF used to have reviewers like James Blish, Damon Knight, Judith Merrill and Algis Budrys—now we have this.
Robots in Your Pants by Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty continues the robot theme from last issue with a short and interesting science essay about robot suits and exoskeletons.
The Language of Loss, Trust, and Heptapods by Kathi Maio reviews the film Arrival, which I’ve seen, but it was interesting to see Maio’s comments (which are pretty much spot on) by way of The Day the Earth Stood Still and Contact.
Spacemen Only by Ruth Berman is an OK and fanciful poem about what it says.
Coming Attractions not only trails next month’s stories but also mentions that the electronic edition of the magazine is now available from Weightless Books as the magazine’s exclusive distribution deal with Amazon has ended. As I’ve never been that keen on the rather clunky Kindle edition (F&SF doesn’t do the enhanced edition like Analog and Asimov’s do) I took the chance of changing to Weightless and getting the PDF format.
This version of the magazine wasn’t all I was hoping it would be and, to be blunt, seems rather half-finished compared with other PDF format magazines I receive (Computer Shopper, Computer Active, Uncut, Home Cinema Choice, etc., etc.) which provide what is essentially a high resolution colour copy of the magazine. The F&SF PDF edition opens with a grainy, low resolution cover on a larger white page rather than just the cover on its own.² Further, this larger than expected white page seems to have been used for the internal content as well. Rather than the text block occupying the same area as in the print magazine it is smaller, which has the effect of reducing the print size. In any event, all that white space around the text just looks odd.³ There are also several blank pages where the magazine adverts would normally be. Why were these omitted? I personally like to look at these—sometimes there is material of interest—and in any event you would think the magazine would want to give their client’s advertisements the maximum circulation. Again, these blank pages just make the PDF version of the magazine look odd and unfinished. I hope these problems will be addressed in future issues.

Overall, a fairly good issue of the magazine with a number of solid stories and no fiction I disliked. Putting out a publication that can do that issue after issue is quite an achievement.

1. The previous four stories in the ‘Saurs’ series are: The Measure of All Things (F&SF, January 2001), Bronte’s Egg (F&SF, August 2002), In Tibor’s Cardboard Castle (F&SF, October-November 2004) and Orfy (F&SF, September-October 2010). Bronte’s Egg won a novella Nebula Award and was runner up for the Hugo. The best of them, in my opinion, is Orfy.
2. An iPad screenshot of the PDF cover as opposed to what I would expect:
        
3. An iPad screenshot of an internal page compared with what I would expect:
        
   The text block in the RH one is larger than that of the print magazine—you don’t need the same margins as the physical magazine as binding and reader’s thumbs are not a problem.

This magazine is still being published! Subscribe: Kindle UK, Kindle USA, Weightless Books or physical copies.

ISFDB

_____________________

Editor, Edward L. Ferman; Assistant Editor, Anne W. Deraps

Fiction:
The Hertford Manuscript • novelette by Richard Cowper ∗∗∗∗
From A to Z, In the Chocolate Alphabet • short story by Harlan Ellison ∗∗∗
The Barrow • short story by Ursula K. Le Guin ∗∗
A Case of the Stubborns • short story by Robert Bloch ∗∗∗∗∗
Hero’s Moon • novelette by Marion Zimmer Bradley ∗∗
Where the Woodbine Twineth • short story by Manly Wade Wellman ∗∗∗
The Ladies of Beetlegoose Nine • novella by Reginald Bretnor ∗∗∗+

Non-fiction:
Mariner 10 Approaching Mercury • cover by Chesley Bonestell
Out of Dickinson by Poe, or The Only Begotten Son of Emily and Edgar • poem by Ray Bradbury
From A to Z, In the Chocolate Alphabet: a Note on how this Story Came to be Written • essay by Harlan Ellison
Cartoon • by Gahan Wilson
Films: Watch out for Falling Men (And Bluebirds) • film review by Baird Searles
Quasar, Quasar, Burning Bright! • science essay by Isaac Asimov

_____________________

The reason I picked up this issue is that it contains a Robert Bloch story I liked very much when I first read it forty years or so ago. As I noticed¹ that it was the centenary of his birth, it seemed only fitting to look at it again.
A Case of the Stubborns is good in so many ways. First of all, its premise:

The morning after he died, Grandpa come downstairs for breakfast.
It kind of took us by surprise. Ma looked at Pa, Pa looked at little sister Susie, and Susie looked at me. Then we all just set there looking at Grandpa.
“What’s the matter,” he said. “Why you all staring at me like that?’
Nobody said, but I knowed the reason. Only been last night since all of us stood by his bedside when he was took by his attack and passed away right in front of our very eyes. But here he was, up and dressed and feisty as ever.
“What’s for breakfast?” he said.  p. 60

The rest of the story entertainingly describes subsequent events, including visits from the doctor, undertaker, churchman, etc., as Grandpa slowly starts to exhibit the inevitable and ghoulish effects of his death—as noted in the conversation between Grandpa and the Reverend Peabody:

The Reverend swallowed again. “After what Addie and Doc told me, I just had to see for myself.” He looked at the flies buzzing around Grandpa. “Now I wish I’d just took their word on it.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning a man in your condition’s got no right to be asking questions. When the good Lord calls, you’re supposed to answer.’’
“I ain’t heard nobody calling,” Grandpa said. “Course my hearing’s not what it use to be.”
“So Doc says. That’s why you don’t notice your heart’s not beating.”
“Only natural for it to slow down a piece. I’m pushing ninety you know.”
“Did you ever stop to think that ninety might be pushing back?”  p. 65

This all leads up to a killer last line (pun intended).
What you would have had here with lesser writers is the initial setup and then a couple of thousand words of padding before that last line, and even then you would still have quite a good story. What raises this to an entirely different level is the wit and invention shown by Bloch on the way through, not least in a number of mini set pieces such as the one above, or when the grandson goes to the Conjure Lady in Spooky Hollow for help:

The Conjure Lady slid the money into her pocket and pinned the button atop her dress. “Now, son—purty is as purty does. So what can I do for you?”
“It’s about my Grandpa,” I said. “Grandpa Titus Tolliver.”
“Titus Tolliver? Why I reckon I know him! Use to run a still up in the toolies back of the crick. Fine figure of a man with a big black beard, he is.”
“Is turns to was,” I told her. “Now he’s all dried-up with the rheumatiz. Can’t rightly see too good and can’t hear for sour apples.”
“Sure is a crying shame!” the Conjure Lady said. “But sooner or later we all get to feeling poorly. And when you gotta go, you gotta go.”
“That’s the hitch of it. He won’t go.”
“Meaning he’s bound-up?”
“Meaning he’s dead.”
The Conjure Lady give me a hard look. “Do tell,” she said.
So I told. Told her the whole kit and kabodle, right from the git-go. She heard me out, not saying a word. And when I finished up, she just stared at me until I was fixing to jump out of my skin.
“I reckon you mightn’t believe me,” I said. “But it’s the gospel truth.”
The Conjure Lady shook her head. “I believe you, son. Like I say, I knowed your Grandpappy from the long-ago. He was plumb set in his ways then, and I take it he still is. Sounds to me like he’s got a bad case of the stubborns.”  p. 69

An excellent story.
If it hadn’t been for the Bloch the standout in this issue would have been Richard Cowper’s third contribution² to the magazine, The Hertford Manuscript, a time travel story set in the world of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (although the only evidence of this is a mention of the Morlocks and the Eloi). It gets off to an immersive start:

The death of my Great-Aunt Victoria at the advanced age of 93 lopped off the longest branch of a family tree whose roots have been traced right back to the 15th Century—indeed, for those who are prepared to accept “Decressie” as a bonafide corruption of “de Crecy,” well beyond that. Talking to my aunt towards the end of her life was rather like turning the pages of a Victorian family album, for as she grew older the England of her childhood seemed to glow ever more brightly in her mind’s eye. In those far-off days it had been fashionable to accept the inevitability of human progress with a wholeheartedness which is almost impossible for us to imagine. In the 1990’s life presented Homo sapiens with a series of “problems” which had to be “solved.” It was as simple as that. The Edwardians merely gilded the roof of that towering pagoda of Victorian optimism which collapsed in smithereens in 1914.  p. 6

This modern day narrator relates the death of his aunt and how he inherits a sum of money and leather bound book. In the rear of this volume he finds a number of anomalous pages—the paper seems far too recent—covered in a tiny handwritten script. The account he reads is of a Victorian time-traveller who becomes stranded in 1665 and makes his way to a plague infested London to obtain a replacement crystal for his machine. This is a riveting narrative that has a thoroughly convincing sense of time and place:

I crossed the river without further incident, picked out the gothic spire of Old St. Paul’s soaring high above the roofs to my left and knew that Ludgate lay immediately beyond it, hidden from my view. I passed through the gate at the north end of the bridge and stepped down into the city. No sooner had I done so than the waterside breeze died away and I was assailed by a most terrible stench from the heaps of garbage and human ordure which lay scattered all down the center of the street, baking in the sun and so thick with flies that the concerted buzzing sounded like a swarm of angry bees. I felt my stomach heave involuntarily and clutched my handkerchief to my nose and mouth, marveling how the other pedestrians seemed able to proceed about their business seemingly oblivious to the poisonous stench. I had covered barely 200 yards before I came upon a house, securely shuttered and barred, with a clumsy cross daubed upon its door in red paint and the ominous words Lord, have mercy upon us scrawled above it. Dozing on a stool beside it was an old man with a scarlet wooden staff resting across his knees. I observed that my fellow pedestrians were careful to give the area a wide berth, and at the risk of fouling my shoes I too edged out towards the center of the street, glancing up as I did so in time to see a small white face peeping fearfully down at me from behind one of the high leaded windows.  p. 21

The last few pages of the story revert to the modern narrator’s investigations after (spoiler) the time-traveller’s perhaps inevitable fate.
This is a very good piece.
From A to Z, In the Chocolate Alphabet by Harlan Ellison is a collection of supernatural vignettes, most of them wry or amusing. There is one for every letter of the alphabet:

V is for VORWALAKA
Count Carlo Szipesti, a vorwalaka, a vampire, having long-since grown weary of stalking alleyways and suffering the vicissitudes of finding meals in the streets, hied himself to a commune in upstate New York where, with his beard, his accent and his peculiar nocturnal habits, he fit right in with the young people who had joined together for a return to the land. For the Count, it was a guaranteed fountain of good healthy blood. The young people in the commune were very big on bean sprouts and hulled sunflower seeds. They were all tanned from working in the fields, and the blood ran hot and vibrant in their veins. When the Count was found dead, the coroner’s inquest did not reveal that he had been a creature of darkness, one of the dread vampires of the old country; what it did reveal was that he had died from infectious hepatitis. As the Journal of the American Medical Association has often pointed out, health is inextricably involved with morality.  p.47-48

This is followed by a short essay about how the story was written (you occasionally got the impression that Ellison’s stories from this period were as much performance as anything else):

What I offered to do was to sit in the front window of a bookstore for a full week, and to attempt to write a complete story each day for six days.³ The store I offered to do this gig for is the famous sf shop in Los Angeles, A Change of Hobbit⁴ (1371 Westwood Blvd., dial 213-GREAT SF), owned and operated by Sherry Gottlieb and a staff of bright, enthusiastic young sf fans. The promotional gimmick was that anyone who bought over $10 worth of books on any given day that I was in the window, would get an autographed copy of that day’s story. Six days, six stories, sixty bucks’ worth of merchandise.  p. 50

He later adds this about the story:

Sadly, the idea was too big for one day. I was scheduled to sit in the Hobbit’s window from 10:30 a.m., when the store opens, till 5:00 when Sherry Gottlieb goes off duty (though the store stays open till 9:00). I wrote all that day, and by 5:00 I was up to H. Sherry went home. I kept on writing. By 11:00 that night, with the cops cruising past and shining their spots into the window trying to figure out what that idiot was doing in there, I was up to R. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. My back was breaking. Cramped in that damned window, I was spacing out. A day of having pedestrians gawking, of customers bugging me when I wanted to write, of having to think up a complete story for each letter of the alphabet had taken its toll. I crapped out and went home.
[. . .]
I got up at 8:00 the next morning, went back to the typewriter to work on the script, and about 9:30, when I should have gone in to take my shower and get ready to go to the store, I suddenly thought what S should be. I didn’t get in to the Hobbit till 11:30 but I was on U at that point. I finished the story on Wednesday, the 25th of February, a little after 1:30 p.m., and sent it off that night to Ed Ferman for publication in F&SF.  p. 51

The Barrow by Ursula K. Le Guin is an Orsinian story (from the collection of them published that year) about a count whose castle occupies the borderlands between Christians like himself and heathens who follow an older faith. He entertains a visiting priest while his wife endures a difficult labour upstairs. Eventually the count looks to the old gods when his wife fails to deliver the child.
This well described if rather straightforward piece was, surprisingly, Le Guin’s first appearance in F&SF.⁵
Hero’s Moon by Marion Zimmer Bradley is about the three man crew of a relay station on the airless but electrical storm ridden planet of Charmides. The boss is called Feniston, and he is a rule-following martinet type who has a son due to arrive on the planet. Rawlings, the new guy, is rebellious and insubordinate, and angry that they didn’t break the rules to rescue the third, and now dead, crewmember after he had an accident.
An officer arrives in the middle of a storm to conduct an investigation, and once this is completed they dispose of the body. Shortly afterwards they hear a distress call, and see a crawler on its side some distance from the station. Rescue One can’t attend so once more there is conflict between Feniston and Rawlings about attempting a rescue versus following the rules.
These stereotypical characters are moved around the chess board capably enough but the story seems quite retro for F&SF, and feels more like something from a 1950’s issue of Astounding. Campbell would have loved the rules/emotion dichotomy but, further to that, you can’t help but wonder why Bradley didn’t set up a more direct conflict between Feniston’s desire to follow the rules and saving his son’s life.
Where the Woodbine Twineth by Manly Wade Wellman is one of his ‘Southern Appalachia’ stories and tells of a young man and a woman from two different country families who, in the previous generation, had been involved in a bloody fight that had led to several fatalities. The couple are in love and discuss their plan to elope at the site of the battle between their families, a place where the both the family heads killed each other and were buried:

Big Tobe got his hands on Burt Mair and they’d each chopped the other to death with hunting knives. Dead, they’d clung in such a grapple the neighbor folks who’d found them couldn’t drag them apart. So while the ten others who’d been killed were carried off to family burying grounds, the two chiefs were buried right where they’d died, with no prayer for them. Old Mr. Sam Upchurch, the storekeeper and township trustee, had said drive a locust tree stake through both of them, to keep them from ever walking out and making fresh trouble. Dirt and rocks were heaped on them, and next week two preachers and the sheriff and the superior court judge had come round to beg the lady folks left alive in both families to swear peace and no more killing forever.  p. 100

A woodland witch who has been spurned by the boy decides to make trouble for the pair, and it appears as if the families will fight once more . . .
This one is pretty straightforward but it has good atmosphere.
The last piece of fiction is a ‘Papa Schimmelhorn’ novella, The Ladies of Beetlegoose Nine, by Reginald Bretnor. As I think I mentioned about the last of the Schimmelhorn stories I read, the sexual attitudes are a bit retro on occasion (think Benny Hill-lite), but if you can get past that then this one isn’t bad, and gets off to a particularly good start.
Papa Schimmelhorn creates an intricate cuckoo clock and is demonstrating it to his tomcat Gustav-Adolf:

“Und now,” he whispered, “comes der real McCoy.”
The choir vanished. With a gentle brrr-r-t. the upper doors opened suddenly. There was revealed, in miniature, a sylvan scene—a painted backdrop of forests and snowy peaks, a wooden windlass over a rustic well. Grasping the handle, stood a chubby Alpine maid. Sidling up from behind her, around the well, came a smirking Alpine youth.
He came on tiptoe; he stretched out a hand; he gave the maiden an intimate and goosy pinch. The maiden shrieked; briefly she did the bumps; she started cranking at the windlass furiously. And the weights that ran the perfect cuckoo clock rose several inches, drawn upward by their chains.
“Zo cute!” chuckled Papa Schimmelhorn. “Der self-vinding comes from efery pinch. It iss perpetual motion, vhich no vun else invents. For poor old Heinrich, iss a nice surprise.”  p. 122

On his way to show the device to a nude dancer he is, ah, ‘friendly’ with, the eighty-plus year old inventor is kidnapped by a spaceship commanded by naked women (who also rule over effeminate men). His wife, who has been covertly following him to his assignation, and the cat are also taken.
On the spaceship Mama Schimmelhorn is initially outraged before she susses out the situation:

“More naked vomen!” she trumpeted.
Raising her weapon, she whirled on Papa Schimmelhorn. “Ach, you should be ashamed! For der old goat at more than eighty years vun at a time iss maybe nodt enough? I giff der lesson vith der bumbershoot—”
She saw his face. She stopped in midattack. She did a very careful double take. These women were certainly not dancing girls. They looked more like a bathing party of female Russian sergeants, painted by a Renoir without the glow and with a fragmentary and slightly surrealistic grudge against all hairdressers and the garment industry. They carried things like fireplace bellows with coffee-pots attached, which they were pointing at her. Behind them, a swarm of swishy little men in colored frocks were peering out, and squeaking shrilly, and ducking back again.
The women were now booming out excited comments in a strange language she did not understand.
So she ignored them. Her mind was putting two and two together rapidly.
An especially large commander was the first to find her voice. “L-Iook at her!” she gasped. “She has c-clothes on!”
“B-b-black clothes!” exclaimed another officer.
“All over!” cried a third. “And she has all her hair!”
They started talking all at once. “She—she must be at least a Mother-President!” “A-at least!” “And we—we’ve kidnaped her!”
“Hoisted her in a net as if she was a—a kreth or something!”
“Look at her!”
Mama Schimmelhom shuffled the data she had available. She added memories of many an afternoon spent in the company of a grandnephew named Willie Fledermaus, aged twelve. The answer came to her. “Shpacers!” she told herself under her breath. “Und they are only vomen vith lidtle pipshqveak men, nodt octupuses like in die comic books!” Her anger settled to a good white heat. Zo maybe you are vashervomen from Chupiter or Mars? she thought, rearing her head and standing even more stiffly than before. Vell, you vatch oudt— even vith lenses und die clefer tricks like in dot Kinseysons Report, you don’dt fool Mama Schimmelhorn!  p. 127-128

Later, her husband is put in the brig.
The second half isn’t as good as the first but it is amusing stuff, if you like this sort of thing.

The cover, Mariner 10 Approaching Mercury, is by Chesley Bonestell. After appearing fairly regularly in F&SF during the early fifties he turned up about once a year from then to the late seventies.⁶
Out of Dickinson by Poe, or The Only Begotten Son of Emily and Edgar is so-so poem by Ray Bradbury.
The Cartoon by Gahan Wilson was a distinctive feature of the magazine at a time—these felt like part of the DNA of the publication—but they were usually hit and miss for me. This Frankenstein themed one is closer to the latter than former.
Films: Watch out for Falling Men (And Bluebirds) by Baird Searles is an interesting and lively film review column from a time when SF and fantasy movies were—with a few notable exceptions—pretty dire. He has this to say in the introduction to Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth:

All this is leading up to—and is necessary to—a discussion of Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth. Roeg is a master exponent of the cinema of the incoherent; he has made an incoherent suspense thriller (Performance with Mick Jagger); an incoherent adventure-in-the-wilderness (Walkabout); an incoherent horror film (Don’t Look Now); and now we have his incoherent science fiction movie.  p. 77

This is pretty much how I remember the movie. He goes on to pan The Bluebird (no, me neither).
Quasar, Quasar, Burning Bright! by Isaac Asimov is another informative science essay, this time about the magnitudes and absolute magnitudes of stars.

This was the fourth issue⁷ of F&SF that I ever bought, and the quality of it made me sit up and pay attention to the magazine.

_____________________

1. Have a look at this post about Robert Bloch (as well as many others) at Todd Mason’s blog Sweet Freedom.

2. Richard Cowper’s two previous contributions to F&SF were The Custodians (October 1975) and The Piper at the Gate of Dawn (March 1976), both Nebula Award nominees/finalists.

3. Ellison notes that the first story he wrote in the shop was Strange Wine, which appeared in Amazing Stories, June 1976, its 50^th anniversary edition.

4. The A Change of Hobbit bookstore went to the Shire in the Sky in 1991, the same year I first visited Los Angeles. I don’t think I made it there before it closed.

5. Rather than following Roger Zelazny’s path from early publication in Amazing and Fantastic to later appearing in F&SF, Le Guin, perhaps because of the changed short fiction publishing landscape, later appeared in a number of original anthologies (Quark, New Dimensions, multiple Orbits) and also had three stories in Galaxy.

6. Chesley Bonestell at ISFDB.

7. My copy of this issue is almost pristine. For some reason it escaped the usual newsagent’s inky scrawl of my name on the cover, and it has also weathered the intervening years well.

This magazine is still being published! Subscribe: Kindle UK, Kindle USA, Weightless Books or physical copies.

Edited 26th October 2019: formatting.

Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Kevin P. Hallett, Tangent Online
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
John Loyd, There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Various, Goodreads

Fiction:
Vinegar and Cinnamon • short story by Nina Kiriki Hoffman ♥♥
The Regression Test • short story by Wole Talabi ♥♥
A Gathering on Gravity’s Shore • short story by Gregor Hartmann ♥♥♥
Homecoming • novella by Rachel Pollack ♥♥♥+
One Way • novelette by Rick Norwood ♥♥♥
On the Problem of Replacement Children: Prevention, Coping, and Other Practical Strategies • short story by Debbie Urbanski ♥♥♥+
Dunnage for the Soul • novelette by Robert Reed ♥♥♥
Alexandria • short story by Monica Byrne ♥♥♥
Wetherfell’s Reef Runics • short story by Marc Laidlaw ♥♥
There Used to Be Olive Trees • novelette by Rich Larson ♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
Vinegar and Cinnamon • cover by Charles Vess
Cartoons • by Bill Long, Arthur Masear
Books to Look For • by Charles de Lint
Books • by James Sallis
Brainless Robots Stroll the Beach • science essay by Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty
Stranger (Yet Oddly Familiar) Things • TV review by Tim Pratt
Kingship • poem by Mary Soon Lee
Coming Attractions
Curiosities: A Voyage to Purilia, by Elmer Rice (1930) • essay by David Langford

Editor, C. C. Finlay

Vinegar and Cinnamon by Nina Kiriki Hoffman gets off to a good start:

The summer my little sister Maura was twelve and I was fourteen, she got fed up with me sniping at her for getting all the attention because she was a wizard and I wasn’t. She added Master of Transformation to her list of skills. It was market day, so Ma and Pa took the flatbed truck loaded with our farm’s wizard supplies into town. I finished my regular morning chores in the wereweed field and the dragon-brain barn and decided to head for an irrigation ditch. It had filled with the roots of an especially pernicious stingweed that had spread into a field of spellstarter. If I trimmed the roots in the ditch, it might kill the whole stingweed plant, and if it didn’t, I’d at least have cleared the ditch so water could get to the curse mustard downstream. p. 7

Maura is stung by a plant they are trying to clear from a ditch and in her rage turns the brother into a rat. The rest of the story is an interesting account of his new life as a rodent. The ending is rather too straightforward, and it reads like the first part of a longer work or series.
The Regression Test by Wole Talabi has an old woman doing a regression test on an AI to ensure it is still a reasonable copy of her mother. This is fine as far as it goes but the ending, which involves family shennanigans (the AI has authorised a grandson’s project), is a little unconvincing.
A Gathering on Gravity’s Shore by Gregor Hartmann is the third of a series of stories¹ about a man called Franden, and this one is a future slice of life that has him go to an Upheld (elite) soirée on Zephyr. He is initially snubbed by the partygoers:

Eager to join the fun, Franden positioned himself on a path where a Fragrant Gate affinity would pass. Duvant was Fragrant Gate; maybe others in that domain would accept him. He selected a woman about his age who looked approachable and made eye contact. She checked him out visually, then pinged him with her oMo. When she looked at the screen, her face hardened. She must have signaled the others; despite his eye-catching uniform, the group promenaded past Franden as if he were a post holding a street sign.
He tried affinities in other domains. Deep Circle, Bright Rock—same result. Anyone who pinged him saw the profile in his oMo and placed him in a flash. An ordinary citizen? A nobody, to the lords of Zephyr.
Rattled, he sat on a bench near a tangle of twitching blue vines that dripped aromatic mucus.
He was irritated with himself for being vulnerable to snubs. After all, he was still the same person he’d been before he was invited to the party, right? But that and other rationalizations failed to cheer him up. He felt like crawling away with his tail between his legs. He couldn’t bail, though. He had a mission to complete. p. 39-40

Later on he meets an intriguing woman who he can’t identify (the cloud has subsequently been blocked by the party organisers due to a possible security problem) and their social and political banter form the rest of the narrative, with the woman turning out to be more significant than she appears.
There is no particular plot here, and it is obviously a part of a series, but the author does quite a good job ameliorating this in a number of ways: first, and most importantly, it is an engaging and vivid read and, as above, entertainingly reflects aspects of today’s society through a distorting lens; second, the backstory is skilfully inserted into the narrative making it a stand-alone piece; third, it ends in a way that closes a minor narrative arc. I’ll be digging out the first two stories.¹
Homecoming by Rachel Pollack is another series story and the fourth story in her ‘Jack Shade’ series—Shade is a private investigator, occultist and shaman. In this tale he is approached by a woman called Carol Acker who feels that she is missing something but she can’t explain what. Shade subsequently decides to perform a soul retrival. . .
This process involves Shade appearing in three dream-scenes: the first is at a gay leather bar, the second at a chamber dance, and the third at a Jewish prayer meeting. In each he tries to fight his way through to a woman who is being held captive: the guards tell him in each instance that he doesn’t know what he is doing and that he should desist. He eventually succeeds in freeing her at the prayer meeting after an exchange with the ‘White Master.’
When Acker is reunited with what Shade believes is the missing part of her soul, she immobilises Jack and then leaves. There follows the brutal murder of the Acker’s cousin and his wife in which their bodies are ripped apart. Shades’ sometime girlfriend Carolien explains to him that he has released a primal being that has previously been responsible for a massacre in Holland in 1132. He then attempts to enlist the aid of various people and organisations to help him recapture what he has a freed.
The story of his attempts to do this are quite straightforward, as is the conclusion, but the reality that Jack inhabits is endlessly and inventively expanded as we go along. It all makes for a very detailed and entertaining description of a spirit world that encapsulates but goes far beyond our own. This section is from when he opens a flask he has obtained from a friend at Suleiman International, a supplier of djinns:

He unscrewed the top.
Jack had expected to see great swirls of smoke pour out, but instead he felt a twisting inside him, as if he himself were the one changed. His eyes stung, and he blinked, and when he opened them again, an Egyptian-looking businessman in a pinstripe suit and shiny black shoes, with slicked back hair and manicured hands, stood calmly before him. Slightly taller than Jack, the Djinni raised an eyebrow. “Nice place you have here. Do you know that Dr. Canton brings acolytes here for what he likes to pretend is sex magic?”
Jack just stared at him.
“What?” the Djinni said, “Did you expect a twenty-foot-tall fellow in a loin cloth with a booming laugh?”
Jack said, “Nah, that’s a great movie, but I’m no little Indian kid.” They looked at each other a moment, then Jack said, “So what happens now? You say you’re going to turn me inside out and set me on fire, and then I say I don’t believe you could ever fit inside that tiny flask—”
“No, no, we’ll just skip to the wishes. I might add, though, that we were never actually that stupid. The routine used to be part of the standard contract—let the clients think they’ve gotten the better of us—but in recent years, I’m happy to say, Suleiman International has modernized.”
“Glad to hear it,” Jack said. “Do you have a name?”
“Of course I do. Do you wish to know it?”
Jack laughed. “No thanks. I may not have done this before, but I know the rules. You’ll know when I use up any of my wishes. Three of them, right?”
The Djinni pressed his palms together before his heart and bowed his head. “Certainly, effendi.”
“How about I call you Archie?”
The Djinni smiled. “An honorable name.” p. 105-106

If the Rachael Pollack story above is the kind of story that could appear in Unknown if it was still being published, then One Way by Rick Norwood could equally appear in Astounding if . . . oh, wait. This is a hard SF story that tells of a professor who comes up with a theory for a force field that only lets matter pass through in one direction, and the young man who helps him turn it into reality. Just as the pair are on the cusp of worldwide fame (spoiler) Gold tinkers with their device and creates a sphere that starts falling through the Earth. . .
On the Problem of Replacement Children: Prevention, Coping, and Other Practical Strategies by Debbie Urbanski has an introduction that states that the author wrote this story after her child was diagnosed with autism. It looks at that event through the distorting prism of a world where normal children sometimes disappear and have their places taken by ‘replacement’ children.

The following morning, after the hair of the boy who slept in their son’s bed had turned completely silver and he began to speak an unrecognizable language, Clark admitted that Amber was right, this was no longer their child, and he asked to know more about what happened the previous night.
It had been Amber’s turn to watch over their son, and she had been watching over him, closely, until she remembered a bowl of cold cherries in the fridge. A sudden irrational longing for these cherries overtook her. It felt like something external had placed that longing in her and there was nothing she could do about it, other than to rush downstairs and grab a handful. She was gone for no more than two minutes. When she returned, she saw the candle had been blown out.
“Let me guess, you didn’t relight the candle right away?” Clark couldn’t help asking this in an accusatory tone, for every parent these days knows a child should not be left alone during a full moon, but if a child has to be left alone, at the very least the candle in the child’s bedroom must not go out. Clark was correct: Amber had not re-lit the candle right away. Instead she ate the cherries, threw the pits into the garbage bin in the corner, and then she walked over to their child’s bed to check on him. That was when she knew. p. 148

The rest of the piece takes the form of a Q and A leaflet for parents affected by this phenomenon. I could happily quote about a dozen of these sections but will limit myself to these two:

What is the role of the extended family, such as grandparents, in all this ?
The initial impulse of many grandparents may be to deny that anything has happened to their grandchild. In Case Study 292589, when Grandmother L. first saw her grandchild’s replacement during an autumn visit, she said, “Nonsense. This is still the same boy I know and love.” The child was running his fingers repeatedly over the suede fabric of the family’s couch.
“He refuses to take a bath,” the mother pointed out. “He hates the water. Remember how Brian used to love floating in the water? And his hair is silver, Mom.”
“Children change, dear,” the grandmother said. “God knows you changed so many times, and every time you changed, I certainly did not go around suggesting that a boogeyman had snatched you up.”
“It wasn’t a boogeyman. It was something else. I don’t know what it was. Something came into his room in the middle of the night. There was water around the windowsill. The window was open.”
“Rain,” the grandmother replied calmly. “Rain causes water to pool around a window.” She reached to hug the replacement, who ran, screaming, out of the room.
“Well, if that’s how you want to raise him,” said the grandmother.
Grandfather L. would not come into the house. “It’s not contagious,” the mother told him. “Whatever is it, you can’t catch it.”
The grandfather still would not come into the house. p. 153-154

Case Study 400021
Freddy W., having always been the easygoing parent oblivious to bedtimes and vegetable-intake requirements, did not become obsessed, as many parents do, about where his actual child had gone. Instead, he took it upon himself to find a shared activity that he and the replacement child could enjoy together (this is a very good idea if a parent hopes to find their happiness again). It turned out that this replacement liked being tossed into the air in their backyard, as high as Freddy could throw him, so that his silvery hair flew around his head like wings. Although the replacement’s expression did not change, Freddy imagined he enjoyed it, as it was the only time the boy allowed anyone to touch him. “I miss our son, sure,” Freddy insisted to his wife, Dorothy, “but I’m trying to move past all that.” While Freddy was tossing the replacement into the air, Dorothy attended many support groups where she wrote down in a notebook any therapy that claimed to bring the original child back, assuming the original still existed. p. 155-156

This is a very affecting and perceptive piece of writing and, given that it is more a piece of the writer’s soul than a story, I should probably leave it there. But (a) I think it could probably have benefited from having its slightly disorganized aspects more coherently arranged (e.g., the references to grandparents appear in a couple of different places) and (b) have been a little shorter. That said, it is an impressive piece and I will be surprised if we don’t see it again in the ‘Best Fantasy of the Year’ anthologies.
Dunnage for the Soul by Robert Reed is a story about a man who is tested by a researcher and finds that he has no soul or ‘PES’—permanent electronic signature. Subsequently it is discovered that 6% of humanity don’t have a PES. They are referred to as ‘dunnage,’ a term that currently refers to the loose disposable material used to keep a ship’s cargo in place.
The narrator’s life takes a downward turn when after the discovery is made public and his company find out and lay him off, but he later gets a job in a kennel where PES less dogs are euthanised. The veterinarian that works there later shows him a drug that can destroy a person’s PES, and the man then starts using it on people he knows. At the end (spoiler) he confronts the researcher who originally tested him—and who has three PESs or souls—but spares her, something I didn’t really understand.
I’m not sure this entirely works as a story but it has a dark intensity that is quite absorbing.
Alexandria by Monica Byrne is about a widow who builds a lighthouse hundreds of miles from the sea. The story of her relationship with her dead husband is interweaved with the story of its construction, and also various commentaries written about it in the future. This latter aspect not only makes it SF but gives the story a fitting final image.
Wetherfell’s Reef Runics by Marc Laidlawb is set in Hawaii and concerns the death by drowning of a man who believes that there are inscribed slabs on the nearby seabed:

This guy is a flake. Not that he didn’t sometimes grab a live wire. That’s what happens when you actively peel away reality’s insulation. He believes (believed? is he still alive?) [. . .] in an interconnected network of pictorial [nodes] for the global mind, [. . .] basically the intersection points of ley lines, sacred hotspots that had to be activated by meditating in their presence. Claimed (on dubious evidence) that certain ancients predicted climate catastrophe, rising sea levels, everything we’re seeing today, but unlike say Nostradamus they did something about it. The runes were somehow key to humanity’s survival. Unfortunately, for him, the runes tended over the ages to have wound up in dangerous or inaccessible places. He was booted out of Tibet for trying to climb onto the roof of the Potala. Nearly died in Burma/Myanmar—first of snakebite, then at the hands of the police. Exposure and dehydration almost took him in New Mexico. I can’t imagine the quality of meditation in any of those conditions could have been very good. p. 221

This is told from the point of view of a bookseller (Castaway Books) who lives on the island and who ends up being involved with the drowned man by virtue of a book that comes into his possession. This is told in with a light touch and has some good local colour as well as a spookily amusing ending. Unfortunately, none of this disguises a thin plot.
It feels like the start of a series (not least because editor C. C. Finlay says ‘After reading this story, we immediately hoped to visit Castaway again’) so we’ll see what future stories are like.
There Used to Be Olive Trees by Rich Larson is about an apprentice prophet called Valentin who leaves a walled town of the future for the dangerous wastelands outside when he fails for the third time to communicate with the machine God in the town’s autofab. He tells no-one of his departure and scales the wall aided by his nanoshadow, a wearable device which augments his strength and provides protection. Notwithstanding this, when he wakes for the first time on the other side of the wall he finds that a wilding has incarcerated his nanoshadow in a canvas bag. Pepe, the wilding, tells Valentin he will get it back if he comes to his village and communicates with the God in their auto fab so they can get the supplies they so desperately need.
The rest of the story sketches an intriguing and well-realised post-apocalypse scenario where machine ‘Gods’ rule the planet, as well as the developing relationship between Valentin and Pepe. The final scene advances this scenario with a major development but leaves the story quite open-ended. Yet another series starter.

As to the non-fiction, I wasn’t that keen on Vinegar and Cinnamon, the cover by Charles Vess. I didn’t dislike it but thought it an odd choice for the magazine. It is also the second cover in a row that is a watercolour that features cats—one too many, I think, and I say that as a cat person.
Books to Look For by Charles de Lint has its first three reviews covering series novels (again with the mid-series novel reviews): a ‘Sandman Slim’ volume from Richard Kadrey, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child: Parts One & Two by Jack Thorne and John Tiffany and J. K. Rowling, and a ‘Henwick’s Bite Back’ novel by Mark Henwick. There then follows a review of Uncollected Anthology Issue 9: Fortune, which is apparently a novel form of anthology:

Rather than having the stories collected all under one cover as has been traditional with anthologies, they’ve each been simultaneously published as separate ebooks that share a collective theme. p. 57-58

Ah, not an anthology then. de Lint concludes:

All in all, it’s a strong anthology, but I’ll admit to having a few reservations about the delivery system. Having to order each story individually is a bit of a pain—not insurmountable, but you have to work at it a little.
Another issue is the $2.99 per story price tag. It doesn’t seem like much, but if you add it up, it comes to $17.94 for 206 pages of story, which isn’t really a bargain.
To be honest, if I was coming to this cold, I would probably have just bought the Rusch story because I know I’ll get my money’s worth and passed on the—to me—unknowns. But then I would have missed out on some other great stories. p. 60

This sounds like a rather daft publishing idea.
Books by James Sallis is a short but interesting and informative review of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin, a new biography of a sometime F&SF contributor Shirley Jackson.
Brainless Robots Stroll the Beach by Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty announces:

With this column, we’re changing our format. Rather than publishing long columns just twice a year, we’ll be writing short columns for every issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. p. 187

This is the first one of a series on robots, and takes an interesting look at a robot called the Strandbeest.
I look forward to their more frequent appearance (an essay of theirs about the application of Special and General Relativity to GPS technology is one of the best science articles I think I have ever read: a great example of how rarefied physics theories impact on everyday technology).
Stranger (Yet Oddly Familiar) Things by Tim Pratt conveys his enthusiasm for the Netflix series Stranger Things:

Over the course of eight harrowing and exhilarating episodes, we’re treated to monsters, mad science, alternate realities, government conspiracies, loyalty, treachery, friendship, tragedy, sacrifice, and triumph. Stranger Things is full of great, pulpy storytelling stuff. It’s also very firmly eighties stuff, and the show is absolutely steeped in references to film and TV of that era. Stranger Things doesn’t so much wear its influences on its sleeve as wear a suit woven almost entirely of influences. The subtle and overt homages to the eighties work of Stephen King, John Carpenter, James Cameron, and Steven Spielberg (among others) permeate just about every frame. Spielberg’s E.T. is a major visual touchstone, the flashbacks to Eleven’s captivity in a government lab strongly reference the film version of King’s Firestarter, and the dynamic of the kids is very Stand By Me, but that just scratches the surface— p. 192-193

Since reading his review I’ve watched all the episodes and I enjoyed it more than the rest of the stuff that was waiting for me on the PVR. The influences weren’t quite so obvious to me (I watched the movies above a long time ago, and have forgotten most of the visual touchstones).
There is also a poem by Mary Soon Lee called Kingship, Cartoons by Bill Long and Arthur Masear, Coming Attractions and Curiosities: A Voyage to Purilia, by Elmer Rice (1930) by David Langford. This issue has the annual Circulation Statement which gives a print circulation of approximately 12,000 copies.
There is usually at least one spoof advertisement in the Classifieds every issue. This month’s is

Sought: Signed first editions of Lord Ravenscar’s Revenge . Will pay. No questions asked. Castaway Books, Tauai. p. 257

This refers to a book from the Marc Laidlaw story. I’m not sure I noticed whether previous ads were story related or not—I’ll keep an eye out in future issues.

There is a lot of solid work in this issue, and nothing I disliked. Because of its high quality and entertaining fiction, F&SF is my favourite magazine at the moment, just a nose (or maybe two) ahead of Asimov’s.

1. The two previous Franden stories were The Man from X (F&SF, Jan/Feb 2015) and Into the Fiery Planet (F&SF, July/Aug 2015).

This magazine is still being published! Subscribe: Kindle UK, Kindle USA, Weightless Books or physical copies.

Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Bob Blough, Tangent Online
Steve Fahnestalk, Amazing Stories
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
David Loyd, There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch
Patrick Mahon, SFcrowsnest
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Various, Goodreads

Fiction:
The Cat Bell • novelette by Esther M. Friesner ♥♥♥♥
The Farmboy • novelette by Albert E. Cowdrey ♥♥♥
Between Going and Staying • short story by Lilliam Rivera ♥♥♥
The Vindicator • novelette by Matthew Hughes ♥♥♥+
The Place of Bones • short story by Gardner Dozois ♥♥
Lord Elgin at the Acropolis • short story by Minsoo Kang ♥♥♥+
Special Collections • short story by Kurt Fawver ♥♥♥+
A Fine Balance • short story by Charlotte Ashley ♥♥♥
Passelande • novelette by Robert Reed ♥
The Rhythm Man • short story by James Beamon ♥♥
Merry Christmas from All of Us to All of You • short story by Sandra McDonald ♥♥♥+

Non-fiction:
The Cat Bell • cover by Kristen Kest
Cartoon • by Arthur Masear (3), Bill Long, Nick Downes (3), S. Harris, Bill Long
Books to Look For • by Charles de Lint
Books • by Chris Moriarty
Getting High • film review by David J. Skal
F&SF Competition #92: “Updated”
F&SF Competition #93: True Names
Coming Attractions (F&SF, November-December 2016) • essay by uncredited
Index to Volumes 130 & 131, January-December 2016
Curiosities: The Morlocks, by James C. Welsh, M.P. (1924) • review by Graham Andrews

Editor, C. C. Finlay

The Cat Bell by Esther M. Friesner gets the fiction off to a good start with what is the best piece in the issue, a story about a malevolent cook who works in a nineteenth century household. She has the unwanted task of feeding the master’s nineteen cats and, after tossing a stray tomcat who tries to join them into the bushes, dumps the job onto Ellen the under-cook. Ellen subsequently starts feeding the stray tomcat, who later talks to her and reveals that he is Puss in Boots.¹ When he grants Ellen a wish she says she only wants the cook to be happier.
Later on, the cook is disciplined for unsuccessfully trying to incriminate Ellen in the supposed murder of Puss. The cook is sent away for two weeks and, while she is gone, every member of staff has the most amazing good fortune, courtesy of the cat’s wishes. When the scullery maid tells the cook about these events on her return she tries to get into Puss’s good graces.
There is a lot of entertainment in this one waiting for the cook get her long deserved comeuppance. This happens in a manner that I should have seen coming miles away—but didn’t.
The Farmboy by Albert E. Cowdrey is set on a colony planet where a survey team have landed and discovered, amongst other things, gold. A plot is started by the medical officer amongst a group of four crew members: they will leave the rest behind and use the available payload to take gold instead. The intense scheming that subsequently occurs makes it an engrossing read but there are a couple of weaknesses. First of all, three of the four characters in the group plot in a manner that would be worthy of Machiavelli himself—one or two I could believe, but three out of the four is just pushing it. Secondly, the ending (spoiler) is a brute physical one compared with what had hitherto been a cerebral game of cat and mouse. It is a good read nonetheless.
Between Going and Staying by Lilliam Rivera is about Dolores, who is a professional mourner/media star in the near future:

For this funeral service, Dolores selects The Selena™ kit and pairs it with sky-high stilettos. The kit comes with a thin silicone prosthetic bodysuit that covers her slender frame and a real-time face-tracking and internal-projection video mask to map the face of a twenty-year-old Latina over her own. Unlike the ridiculous rubber suits worn by other weepers, her kit is top of the line. This is the fourth funeral Dolores has worked this week, the second to be held in the Valley of the Tears Funeral Stadium.
“Again,” Dolores says to the Codigo5G. She greases her body with a special glue to provide suction and listens to the machine recite the bio once more:
“Client: José Antonio Ramirez de la Guarda. Born in Sinaloa, Mexico Discovered singing at his cousin’s quinceañera part. Lead vocalist of the narcocorrido band The Super Capos went solo with the single “When I See You I’ll Kill You”
Death listed as cardiovascular
Doliente Order: The Selena™
Location: Valley of the Tears Funeral Stadium
Fee: $35,990.33 dollars
Transport provided, arriving in 30 minutes and counting.”
“Cardiovascular? Yeah, right,” Dolores says to herself. She avoids the news but heard the real story on the deceased singer from her driver—the accordion player from his former group The Super Capos took him down. But such is the life. Dolores almost fired the driver for telling her. He knows now never to speak to her of such things. p. 52-53

As she is on her way to the funeral engagement her mother calls to tell her to come home for the memorial service for her ex-lover Melody. A number of students and professors from her home town have been ‘disappeared.’
You have to respect the serious intent behind this work but it is an uneasy read with an ending that doesn’t provide any comfort.²
The Vindicator by Matthew Hughes is, we are told in the introduction, the seventh of the ‘Raffalon the Thief’ stories to appear in F&SF since 2012, and they are too be collected and published this year (2017). As with the previous Raffalon story I read, this piece is good quality light fantasy adventure. This one perhaps has more humour in it than the last, as shown by this passage where Raffalon tries to discover who has just tried to kill him by going to the Terrible and Tenacious Guild of Vindicators (the assassins guild):

A thin-shanked man in red and ocher clothing was in the act of locking the door. Raffalon accosted him and said, “Someone has just shot this at me.”
The man took the proffered dart, examined it briefly, and said, “Blown it, actually. It’s a puff dart.” He considered it a moment more then said, “Of course, at very close range it can be thrown from the hand, or even just poked into the recipient’s flesh.”
“Recipient?” Raffalon said.
“A Guild term,” said the man. “You would probably say ‘victim.’”
“What I would say is that I want to know who is trying to kill me.”
The man pulled a long and thoughtful nose and handed back the dart.
“Difficult,” he said. “Depends upon the nature of the contract. But I can tell you that confidentiality is usually a standard clause.”
“How do I make inquiries?”
“Begin by speaking with the duty officer.”
“I will do that now,” Raffalon said. “Open the door.”
The man signaled that such was beyond his power. “Until moments ago, the duty officer was me. Now my term has ended. Tomorrow a new vindicator will occupy the position, filled with a desire to serve. Come back and make your inquiries then.”
“But one of you people is trying to kill me! By tomorrow morning I may be stretched on a cold slab!”
The vindicator agreed that such might well be the case. Indeed, it was unusual for a Guild member to miss. “But, if it is any comfort, all I could do for you now would be to take an application for redress. The paperwork would then have to go to the Committee of Examiners, and they meet only on alternate Murthledays.”
Raffalon’s face expressed his shock. “This is a matter of life or death! I expect action, prompt if not immediate!”
The vindicator’s smile, though Raffalon did not know it, was an exact duplicate of the one he had so recently bestowed upon the nondescript whose goods had been lifted. “Your naiveté is refreshing,” he said. “I wonder that you have lived so long and retained such a large portion of it.”
The thief saw that there was no point in pursuing the issue. “So what can I do?” he said.
The man’s narrow shoulders climbed and fell. “Not much, I suppose. We are not called terrible and tenacious for nothing. Set your affairs in order. Prepare for a new experience.” He descended the steps, casting a look back at the thief and saying, “Or an old, familiar one, if the Reincarnationists are
correct.” p. 96-98

Raffalon eventually enlists the services of a Discriminator called Cascor and (spoiler) they catch the would-be assassin. From there the story concerns a forged account about the death of a female thief. To establish the true events the three have to break into the archive of the guild of thieves, no small feat.
I have a minor niggle about this one that I hope the book editor manages to eliminate. This happens when Raffalon loses his temper with the young female assassin:

The thief made a sound that might have been a word in some harsh, barbaric tongue. No one would ever know, because he followed it with a stream of recognizable words and phrases in the common speech, though none of them were recommended to be used to assault the hearing of children.
Cascor put up a hand to stop him. It was not enough. Finally, as the spate of profanity continued, he gestured with one hand and spoke his own string of syllables. Abruptly, Raffalon’s coarse tirade ceased. His mouth opened and his lips and tongue still moved, but no sound came out. p. 110

I can understand that the writer doesn’t want to insert bad language into a light fantasy story because it would be inappropriate in tone, but if we get the descriptive device above used once in the story we get it half a dozen times, and it becomes tiresome. Oh, and there are a couple of anachronistic [redacted]s in one of the documents they find in the library.
The Place of Bones by Gardner Dozois has a group of men, presumably in medieval times, cross the Alps by a particular route that leads them not to Italy but the Dragonlands:

From more than a mile away, we began to feel the heat that rises from that place, warming our fronts while our backs and ears remained chill—an odd sensation—and then we crested a low hill and beheld the most wondrous sight my eyes will ever behold: the Dragonlands.
Bones. The bones of dragons. A field of scattered bones, immense rib cages, titanic femurs and fibulas, that stretched out of eyeshot to the horizon in all directions save directly behind us. Near us, at the edge of the
field, was a skull the size of a wagon, with fangs longer than a man’s arm.
All the bones glowed a deep, muted red and radiated a sullen heat. It was if an immense explosion had gone off here, a shot from some cosmic bombard bursting, killing these creatures in the air and scattering their remains over the ground as far as the eye could see. A direct act of God, perhaps, smiting the dragons as He had once smitten Sodom and Gomorrah? If so, God’s wrath had not yet dissipated, for the bones still emanated the heat and smoky light of that divine anger many hundreds or thousands of years later; the townsfolk said that the field of bones had been here forever, unchanging, since the Beginning. p. 133

A perilous journey unfolds, resulting in (spoiler) desertion, starvation, death, and cannibalism. One member of the expedition escapes when he gives up and turns back.
This is promising and well-done but it goes nowhere. I wonder if it is the start of a longer piece, or part of a novel to come.
Lord Elgin at the Acropolis by Minsoo Kang starts with the director of an art museum making his daily viewing of one of the artworks on display and realising it is fake. However, all subsequent investigations and analyses prove the work genuine.
The story then cuts to a police inspector and his writer friend having a long, leisurely dinner and discussing the case. The inspector is convinced that the director is telling the truth and various theories are discussed that would explain the matter. These cover acquisitive aliens who want to remain undetected, time-travellers from the future saving artworks from an impending apocalypse, AI created virtual worlds, etc. Later on, the piece turns metafictional when it starts describing its own story:

“I’m trying to think of another way in which the director could have been sane and telling the truth. I mean, truth in the sense of something true about the nature of reality.”
“And?”
“The world we are living in is not real. It’s like a temporarily put-together environment created by a writer as a background for a story he wants to write, with enough details to create a sense of verisimilitude for the reader but no need for anything beyond that. For instance, the writer may throw in some detail about how we grew up together in the same small town. We are presented as people with complete pasts, a full sense of ourselves, but we are actually just empty constructs put together for the purpose of the narration. In this case, a narration that is almost entirely dialogue. The director is a construct as well, but one who caught a glimpse of the fictive nature of reality. p. 148

It ends with the director considering that matter.
This is a clever, tricksy, entertaining and impressive piece, and I look forward to seeing more of this writer’s work.
Special Collections by Kurt Fawver is an intriguing and, at times, droll story about a library that has a strange—and lethal—Special Collections department that was location of a freak storm:

Were this the extent of the damage, the tornado of ’39 would have no reason to enter our legends, horrific tragedy though it may have been. But the three hundred and three students did not merely die. Their bodies were swept from the residence halls and shredded by swirling shrapnel, becoming part and parcel of the tornado. As it neared the still-underconstruction library—entirely exposed to the elements from the third floor up—the tornado evolved from mere weather phenomenon to infernal nightmare. A twisting, razor-toothed pillar of blood, flesh, and bone, it struck the unfinished edifice and deposited—no, more, embedded—the remains of the three hundred and three unfortunate students from the residence halls in the walls and floor of the third floor. Bone chips plunged deep into mortar. Organ fragments pasted themselves into the crenulations of brickwork. A glittering sheen of plasma varnished every surface that faced the tremendous wind. Newspapers of the day would vividly describe the scene as an “ivory tower abattoir.” p. 155

From then on, anyone who enters the Special Collections on their own disappears.
There is no real story here, just a description of various aspects of this enigmatic space, the repeated attempts made by solitary entrants to explore it, and an account of the perplexing White Books:

In 1985, June Takawa, an internationally renowned cryptologist, turned her sights upon the White Books and their mystery script. For two months, she studied the script’s insensible configurations and bizarre patterns, sometimes spending entire days feeding data into computer decryption programs of her own devising. As she scoured the books for meaning, she said she felt “increasingly convinced that the script represents something more complex than a written communique. The symbols—of which there are thirty-five distinct variations—are arranged in impossibly long and intricate palindromes, with each single volume reading exactly the same front to back or back to front.” Near the end of Takawa’s second month of research, she lamented that “the more time I spend with the books, the more they laugh at me, the more they run and hide their secrets. It’s as if they know I’m looking.” Her research came to an abrupt halt when she contracted an unknown disease that caused her to break out in a rash of massive, bright white blisters filled with an inky organic matter. Takawa was hospitalized for three weeks during her illness and, afterward, refused to return to Special Collections to continue her research, saying only that “the books are the mind of God, and I lack the courage to peer into that terrifying vista.” p. 161-162

At times this reminded me of the sort of story that you would occasionally find from Barrington J. Bayley or John Sladek in the Moorcock New Worlds:

A few nights prior to his entrance, he called for a group meeting and we obliged his request, unorthodox though it was. At the meeting, Fordyce submitted to us an idea so rudimentary, so obvious, that we could barely believe it hadn’t been tried in the long history of our recorded explorations. He asked, with soft tremolo underlying his voice, if we could leave the door open after he ventured inside. He said he’d read the record from cover to cover and, as far as he could tell, it had never been attempted. Those of us who spend great quantities of time with the record knew Fordyce was correct. We’d never kept the door open after an entrant had forged in alone. We’d never even discussed it, as far as we could tell. It was an oversight so flagrant it embarrassed us all.
Some of us flew into a rage over the idea and tried to defend our blindness. We upended tables and chairs and shouted that Fordyce had overstepped his bounds, that entering Special Collections simply wasn’t done that way, that an established division of inside and outside had to be preserved for our continued safety.
Some of us applauded Fordyce’s entreaty and cheered for the step in a bold new direction. We clapped one another on the back and, with determined grins and starry eyes, boomed that this was the dawn of a new era of exploration, that a propped open door might alter our entire perspective on the problem of Special Collections, that revelation was surely at hand. p. 167

An unusual and enjoyable piece that, I suspect, will reward rereading.
A Fine Balance by Charlotte Ashley is an entertaining story about two female duellists who repeatedly fight to possess the other’s favour, which is then ransomed back to their clan. It has been some months since the two women have fought, unusually, when Yildrim’s apprentice Eminent spots her mistress’s nemesis, Kara Ramadami. However, on this occasion, events do not proceed along their traditional course. One of the clans has raised a militia in order to help Ramadani take Yildrim’s favour and thereby bankrupt the Olsen clan.
This has the feel of heroic fantasy/sword & sorcery but there are no supernatural elements.
Passelande is a long novelette by Robert Reed that is set in a near-future where people have ‘backups.’ The main character Lucas sometimes works as a private investigator for these digital entities. On his current assignment he visits a place called Passeland, which supplies farm goods in a future where those commodities are considerably more valuable than they are today. There he interacts with a couple called Alexis and Bracken:

Two cyclists are catching him on the uphill. As a rule, Lucas doesn’t remember names, particularly new names. But he knows this pair: Alexis and Bracken. Alexis sits forward on her seat, clipped-in shoes helping the electric motor do its work. She wears biking clothes and biking shoes, every stitch eating energy from her motions, ready to light up like a Christmas tree when night falls. Her telephone is frozen smoke set in front of her face. Her helmet was printed to fit her skull. She has a narrow skull and an almost pretty face, and her bike is beautiful, built from whisper-steel painted blue with gyros that hold its balance, and the one gear that acts like a hundred. Best of all, her tires are diamond wrapped around bubbles of vacuum. She can run over razor blades for a week and never needs a bike pump. p. 204

Lucas has cultivated this friendship at the behest of Alexis’s backup, who has discovered that Bracken’s backup is doing something immoral (although I’m not sure that this is ever revealed, or maybe I had just lost interest by that point).
There is a subplot concerning another backup who is trying to get Lucas to investigate the disappearance of her original, but that never seems to go anywhere.
This story never really got going for me. I wasn’t convinced by it, and I felt that it didn’t cohere into a believable story or world.
The Rhythm Man by James Beamon is about a blues player whose popularity has waned deciding to meet the supernatural Rhythm Man to ask for a favour. This was, I thought, a variant on all those bluesmen-meeting-the-Devil stories. As with them, your take on this one will partially depend on how interested you are in the blues and that milieu. It has a good last line.
Merry Christmas from All of Us to All of You by Sandra McDonald is a mordant Christmas tale about the graduating class of one of the high schools in Arctopolis, Santa’s manufacturing city-state at the North Pole. This is from the valedictory speech of one of the graduating high school pupils:

Up on the stage, valedictorian Ethan Snow takes the podium. His handsome profile splashes on the overhead screens, along with a list of outstanding academic and sports achievements. How can a young man like that have anything but a future bright? In a clear, inspiring voice he says, “Although the years to come will be full of challenges, I know each of us will succeed one hundred percent in our hopes, plans, and chosen careers.”
This is statistically impossible, but leadership is never about math.
“We must follow our dreams, leap into the unknown, make a difference, seize the day, and have faith.”
We might faint from the triteness, but we said these things at our graduations, too, back when we thought we had all the answers to all the problems.
Ethan pauses for dramatic effect. “Today is the first day of the rest of our lives!”
Possibly true, unless it’s the last day at the end of our lives. Just last week two workers met an unfortunate end when a pine needle machine exploded, and yesterday an associate was flattened in a sled-loading accident. Years ago Ruth Everpine’s husband got caught up in a ribbon turbine. She should have moved on by now, don’t you think? p. 247-248

I’ve mentioned before that I think it’s a shame that so many Xmas stories are cynical and/or dystopian. Xmas is a fairly easy target for that kind of thing, whereas writing an uplifting piece that isn’t sentimental schmaltz is difficult. That said, it’s hard not to like this one, and it has an appropriately acidic final line that I’ll leave you to read for yourselves.

Kisten Kest’s Cover for Esther Friesner’s piece is more of a colour illustration than a colour cover, if you catch my drift, but I like it: it suits the magazine and also the story. There are the usual selection of Cartoons by various artists and the usual bits and pieces, such as a Curiosities review by Graham Andrews, and the results of F&SF Competition #92: “Updated” plus the start of F&SF Competition #93: True Names.
As it is the end of the year issue there is the Index to Volumes 130 & 131, January-December 2016.
Books to Look For by Charles de Lint includes a review of the third novel in Stephen King’s recent mystery/thriller trilogy, End of Watch (there are some SFnal elements this time around). He also reviews Out There by long time F&SF contributor Gahan Wilson, a book of cartoons, covers, reviews and stories.
There is also this about unpleasant antagonists:

As a kid, I liked the horror movies with monsters in them. Werewolves, Dracula, the Frankenstein monster, the giant ants in Them. What I didn’t like was psychological horror, because supernatural creatures [. . .] are obviously fictional, but sociopaths are real and could be living next door.
They were genuinely scary and a reminder of how mean and twisted the world we live in can be.
Strip away the preternatural aspects of Brady Hartsfield and you have a bitter, mean-spirited man, of which there are far too many in the real world.
I’m probably the one person in North America who didn’t watch, and has no intention of watching, Breaking Bad. I don’t have the inclination or time for that kind of story. p. 73-74

Each to their own, but I think this wildly mischaracterises and underestimates Walter White, the anti-hero of that series.
Books by Chris Moriarty reviews Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson, Seveneves by Neal Stephenson, and The Martian by Andy Weir. These are all novels of planetary exploration if I recall correctly.
The description he gives of the Robinson novel does not make it sound appealing, especially so when he concludes with a short discussion about the arc of the book, which is that (spoiler) of a failed expedition to an extrasolar planet and its return to Earth. A 480 pp. book that ends in unsuccessful round trip? I don’t think I’ll be picking up that one. And there was me thinking that John Brunner was pushing his luck with Total Eclipse (at half the length of Aurora).³
The final review column is Getting High by David J. Skal which, for a change, reviews a film I’ve actually seen (High Rise) and adds a few points of interest.

This is a very good issue.

1. Coincidentally, I just took in a stray tomcat (Troy, aged 8), which is why there has been such a gap between reviews. I haven’t received any wishes from him but do get very vocal complaints about the food and quantity thereof.
2. When I was younger I was particularly keen on the music of Bruce Springsteen and that interest led to me acquiring various solo projects by his fellow E-Street Band members. One of these was Steve Van Zandt, who subsequently played Silvio Dante in the TV series The Sopranos. His second album, Voice of America, has a track called Los Desaparecidos. From Wikipedia: ‘Los Desaparecidos gained praise as an effective protest song on behalf of the 1970s and 1980s victims of state-sponsored forced disappearance in South America.’ It is rather depressing that a similar sort of thing is still going on thirty odd years later.
3. In Total Eclipse, if I recall correctly, the crew go to an alien planet and attempt to solve a mystery but in the final part (spoiler) they all develop a fungal infection of the lungs and die. End of story. Just because this kind of event is possible doesn’t mean it makes a good plot for a novel.

This magazine is still being published! Subscribe: Kindle UK, Kindle USA, Weightless Books or physical copies.

ISFDB link
Galactic Central link

Other reviews:
John Loyd: There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch

Fiction:
When the Last Gods Die • short story by Fritz Leiber ♥♥
The Haunted Ticker • reprint short story by Percival Wilde ♥♥♥
O Ugly Bird! • short story by Manly Wade Wellman ♥♥♥
The Rats • reprint short story by Arthur Porges ♥♥♥+
Built Down Logically • short story by Howard Schoenfeld ♥
The Earlier Service • reprint short story by Margaret Irwin ♥♥♥
The Universe Broke Down • reprint short story by Robert Arthur ♥♥
Come On, Wagon! • short story by Zenna Henderson ♥♥
The House in Arbor Lane • short story by James S. Hart ♥
Skiametric Morphology and Behaviorism of Ganymedeus Sapiens: a Summary of Neoteric Hypotheses • short story by Kenneth R. Deardorf ♥♥
The Hyperspherical Basketball • short story by H. Nearing, Jr. ♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • by George Salter and Dirone Photography
Report from the Editors
Recommended Reading • by The Editors
Index to Volume Two—February 1951-December 1951

Editors: Anthony Boucher & J. Francis McComas

I mentioned in a previous review that there were signs that F&SF was changing into the magazine it would become in the early and mid-50s: this issue marks a significant step in that direction. Not only do we have the first appearances of Fritz Leiber, Zenna Henderson and Arthur Porges, but we also have the first of the ‘John the Balladeer’ stories from a previous contributor, Manly Wade Wellman.

Fritz Leiber would contribute and number of significant stories for F&SF over the years including a handful of award winners.¹ When the Last Gods Die is described in the introduction as ‘a short mood piece,’ which is a fair description. It tells of a machine travelling to meet the remnants of humanity, who now appear to be gods:

Then the Machine (for such it was) spoke: “For a last time we implore you to reconsider your decision.”
One of the men, gray as Time himself, lifted his chin from his chest and answered. And since I can no more render his actual name than I can reproduce his language or more than hint at the breadth of his thought, and since he and his companions—with the Bacchic suggestion of their hoofs and hides—were faintly akin to some sculptured portraiture of the Greek and Roman Gods, I will call him Saturn.
Saturn answered, “Your plea is futile. We made our decision when we made you.”
The buried tendrils of the Machine wormed a little closer, pleadingly. “But we are your children, the children of your brains.”
Saturn shook his head slightly and, selecting across the eons the same ancient metaphor I have used, replied, “Minerva sprang full-grown from the brain of Jove. Does that mean her father must live forever?”
“But when man made the machine,” the Machine responded, “when he made the spear, the sail, the spaceship, he never dreamed it would end this way.”
“Perhaps not,” Saturn told him. “Dreams don’t foretell everything. The sun is sinking.” p. 4

I suspect that this theatrical piece is a stylistic break from Leiber’s previous writing, but I am not knowledgeable enough to say so authoritatively.
I also know very little about Arthur Porges’ work other than he was the writer of a story called The Ruum in a later issue of the magazine (and am aware of another called The Fly).² The Rats (Man’s World, February 1951) is a tale about a man who is living in a restricted and abandoned area beside a atomic bomb testing facility. The reason why is brilliantly obvious:

In this region, wasteland to begin with, and now forbidden by law, a man would be safe. What enemy, he reasoned, cared to waste a gram of fissionable material on such a locality? Further, when the bombs fell, an eventuality he believed imminent, there would be no panicky mobs to pillage his supplies, menace his life blindly, and, in short, ruin his slender chance for survival. p.45

The only problem he has—apart from imminent nuclear war—is that the rats have had their food supply cut off with the closing of the facility and they are now eating his rations. So begins the story of his attempts to eradicate them, something that proves harder than expected given their unusual intelligence.
This is a pretty good piece and I suspect it has everything that you would want in a mens’ magazine story of the time: grisly and inhumane ways of killing rats, a cat and mouse (!) battle between the two, and a neat last scene.
Zenna Henderson won’t need any introduction if you have read previous reviews of F&SF here: she was, among other things, the author of the popular and well-regarded ‘The People’ stories which appeared in the magazine throughout the following decades. Come On, Wagon! was her first published adult fiction³ (according to the introduction, there had been poetry and a juvenile book previously) and is about a man who has a strange nephew called Thaddeus:

I was out by the barn waiting for Dad. Mom was making him change his pants before he demonstrated his new tractor for me. I saw Thaddeus loading rocks into his little red wagon. Beyond the rock pile, I could see that he had started a play house or ranch of some kind, laying the rocks out to make rooms or corrals or whatever. He finished loading the wagon and picked up another rock that took both arms to carry, then he looked down at the wagon.
“Come on, Wagon.” And he walked over to his play-place.
And the wagon went with him, trundling along over the uneven ground, following at his heels like a puppy.
I blinked and inventoried rapidly the Christmas Cheer I had imbibed. It wasn’t enough for an explanation. I felt a kind of cold grue creep over me. p. 80-81

Later, as the uncle is recuperating abroad from war injuries, he learns from a letter that there may have been a similar incident where Thaddeus exhibited his psychokinetic powers, although they weren’t recognised as such by the family.
The story sets up an ending (spoiler) that is fairly predictable (a tractor accident that pins one of the family underneath the machine). However, the resolution is not what I expected or would have preferred, and it is quite atypically downbeat for the period. Readers will fall into two camps about this one: some will find it appropriate; others, like me (and Horace Gold, probably), would have preferred something more upbeat.⁴
O Ugly Bird! by Manly Wade Wellman, as mentioned above, is the first of the ‘John the Balladeer’ stories, another popular F&SF series.⁵ These tell of a wanderer called John who plays a guitar with silver strings. In this story he wanders into a small settlement and sees a man called Mr Onslem extorting one of the settlers who lives there. Later, after Mr Onslem has left and John is talking to the man, a strange vulture-like creature lands and takes a sack of meal, lifting it with claws that look very similar to Mr Onslem’s hands . . . .
The rest of the story is fairly straightforward but its strength is in its modern American folk-fantasy setting. By the time I started reading F&SF in the mid-1970s, it had a long tradition of printing stories that involved American folklore. Wellman, and this series in particular, was perhaps the forerunner.

As to the rest of the fiction there are a couple of good reprint novelettes but the rest is pretty much a mixed bag. The first reprint novelette is The Haunted Ticker by Percival Wilde (The Popular Magazine, May 20^th, 1923). This is about a mean old man who makes a financial killing when he develops a system for predicting the rise and fall of the 1920’s stock market. When he falls ill and has to remain at home, he installs his nephew in a stockbroker’s office and starts communicating to him using coded telephone messages. Although the uncle promises to instruct the nephew in his system he dies before he can do so—but then the codes start coming over the tickertape . . . .
I enjoyed this gentleman’s club tale, but it is mostly about the goings-on in a stockbroker’s office so it won’t be for everyone. The ending is somewhat predictable, too.
The other reprint of note is The Earlier Service by Margaret Irwin (Madame Fears the Dark, 1935). This concerns the sixteen year old daughter of a vicar who is disturbed by something she senses in a corner of her father’s church. This develops with the later sighting of a figure, and also carvings discovered by a visitor that indicate one of the previous medieval priests may have been a Satanist.
At the end of the story (spoiler) the daughter observes a service involving strange cowled figures, and the final scene involves a temporal displacement/time-warp element that is unnecessarily telegraphed in the introduction by the editors.
This is a pretty good story, I thought, by a writer whose descriptive powers convincingly conjure up the mid-1930’s church family setting. I’d be interested to read more by this writer.

Built Down Logically by Howard Schoenfeld is presumably a sequel of sorts to last year’s Build Up Logically. It is an inconsequential piece where logical daisy-chaining once again makes things happen—in this case a very smart two year old disappears.
The Universe Broke Down by Robert Arthur (Argosy, 1941) is a story about a madcap scientist/inventor and his space-portal invention. Narrated by his friend, this is a pleasant story if a light-weight one, but it does have a good explanation of the machine’s effect:

Suppose two ants are on a sheet of paper—a two-dimensional world. Suppose they’re on opposite sides of the paper, and want to join each other. One of them will have to crawl clear across the sheet, over the edge, and clear back on the other side. That’s equivalent to traveling distance, or through space, in our three-dimensional world.
“But suppose one of the ants invents an apparatus for drilling a hole in the paper, through which it can crawl in an instant to join the other. That would be equivalent to my Spatial By-pass apparatus, which utilizes a pseudofourth dimension of its own creation to make it possible to move from one spot to another without traversing the intervening distance. p.72-73

The House in Arbor Lane by James S. Hart is a story about a young man and woman who are on trial for murder. During the trial we discover that the young man is an artist who had painted a picture of a house where the murder was committed several months previously. As he finished the picture he had a vivid dream about being in a room where an elderly woman stabs a young one. He testifies that it felt like he was there but he could not move. The story unfolds of how he later meets the young woman on the bus and ends up in the exact same room.
This is all rather contrived and unbelievable, and not helped by some corny writing, such as this after the revelation of a jury discussion twist in the tail:

A small cloud slid across the face of the sun and the room darkened. There was a hush that lasted for a full minute. p. 108

Skiametric Morphology and Behaviorism of Ganymedeus Sapiens: a Summary of Neoteric Hypotheses by Kenneth R. Deardorf is a short, clever and slight ‘non-fact’ article about hyper-dimensional beings. They appear to humans as single lines, and the story is illustrated with appropriate sketches.⁶
Finally, The Hyperspherical Basketball by H. Nearing, Jr. is the fourth of the ‘C. P. Ransom’ stories. This one has an almost unintelligible beginning where the mathematician Ransom explains making a circle out of a line, a sphere out of a circle and a hypersphere out of a sphere. This is not clearly explained.
The second part of the story provides some enjoyment in its story of a game of college basketball between the sports and academic masters using Ransom’s hypersphere—a basketball that not only changes size but sometimes appears in unexpected places. The game is refereed by Ransom’s long-suffering colleague MacTate.

As for the non-fiction, I think that this month’s Cover is my favourite Salter so far: certainly an eye catching piece that would attract readers at the newsstand.
Report from the Editors is a short half-page note about stories from F&SF that have been selected for the year’s best and other anthologies.
In Recommended Reading the editors review three Willy Ley books and, from the rest, recommend Rogue Queen by L. Sprague de Camp, The Weapon Shops of Isher by A. E. van Vogt, and The Innocence of Pastor Müller by Carlo Beuf .
There is also a useful Index to Volume Two—February 1951-December 1951.

An interesting and significant issue.⁷

1. Fritz Leiber had a number of award winning stories in F&SF (Ship of Shadows, Ill Met in Lanhkmar, Catch That Zeppelin!, Our Lady of Darkness/The Pale Brown Thing, etc. More details on ISFDB.)
2. Arthur Porges’ The Ruum (F&SF, October 1953) was one of those early SF anthology stories that seared itself into my brain. I think I probably dreamed about being pursued by the ruum for months afterwards.
3. Annette Peltz McComas’s book The Eureka Years: Boucher and McComas’s Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 1949-1954 includes some of the correspondence between the editors and Ms Henderson about this story (p. 91-92):

3 December 1950
Dear Miss Henderson:
We were deeply impressed with your story, COME ON WAGON! It’s fine fantasy, written in a neat terse style that we like a lot.
However, we don’t think you have fully developed your situation. We’d like to offer the following suggestions for revision, with the hope you’ll see fit to work on them and let us see what happens. If you can do a satisfactory rewrite, we’ll want the story.
There should be one more episode illustrating Thaddeus’ curious powers. It would be effective, I think; if this were written to the narrator, while he’s in the hospital, by his Dad. It should be written so that Dad is not fully aware of just what Thaddeus can do, or just how strange is the happening he relates, but the narrator is.
Then, leave the story as is until the tractor accident occurs, right up to the advent of Thaddeus. But, in your rewrite, have Thad refuse to help.
That makes for a stronger situation, stresses the gulf between children and adults, ends your story on a horrible question. Make sure that the reader understands that Thaddeus won’t help because he can’t.
Hoping to see a rewrite on this.
Sincerely,
Francis McComas

9 February 1951
Dear Mrs. Henderson:
Please forgive the extremely long silence on COME ON, WAGON—a complex matter of editorial illnesses and absences.
The rewrite’s a very attractive job, which we certainly want to use.
Has good luck been befalling you in the meanwhile, or is this your first sale? Purely selfishly, we hope that all your other stories have not sold (but will immediately after this); we like the smug satisfaction of being able to claim, years later, “Look, we discovered her.”
Cordially,
Anthony Boucher

4. I’d have liked a more upbeat ending to Henderson’s story but mutedly so. After a modified last scene:
   We came close to losing Clyde in that accident. He was in the hospital for several months, and walked with a pronounced limp for the rest of his life. Something else was lost though: I never again saw the light that had appeared in Thaddeus’s eyes when he said, ‘Come on, Tractor,’ and the huge machine rolled off of Clyde’s leg.
   Yes, I know: I can’t write my way out of a paper bag. Why do you think I spend my time doing this?
5. Annette Peltz McComas’s book also includes correspondence between the editors and Mr Wellman about O Ugly Bird! (p. 147-149):

Labor Day, 1949
Dear Antonio—
It is with considerable interest I read what Benet’s Phoenix Nest says about you and your projected Magazine of Fantasy. More power to this effort to jack up the reputation and quality of the genre. My unsolicited opinion is that it will be tougher to do than Fred Dannay’s similar detective-story labor, for there isn’t quite the public for it, in spite of all the essays to that effect by Wolheim, Pratt, de Camp, et al.
Still, I’m somewhat of a laborer in the fantasy lodge myself. I’d rather write supernatural than science, and haven’t done so because of the limited and underpaid market. Tell me, if you care to, what about Magazine of Fantasy? Preferred lengths, taboos, special needs? Also, in a sordid vein, what are you paying? I doubt if these frontier and rustic latitudes will have your publication on the stands—how about sending me a copy?
Let me say at once that I am not writing this letter with anything in the way of a rejected dud to send you. I have absolutely nothing on the stocks at present in the fantasy bracket. But, erroneously or not, I think that once and again I’ve thrown away some terribly effective writing on such pulps as WEIRD TALES, where nobody would know good writing from bad with a fifty-power microscope.
Best of luck with the magazine, from
Manly Wade Wellman

12 September 1950 
Dear Manly:
Once again you have written on hell of a story! [O UGLY BIRD!]
Three small points:
A) Are silver strings practical and feasible on a guitar? If you’re positive, we’ll take your word; if you have any doubts, we’d like to consult Ted Sturgeon, who knows all about guitars.
B) We’d like to go back to the original ugly bird; the overlap between Jesse Stuart’s public and ours is negligible.
C) (And the only really serious one) . . . the story bogs down pretty badly in a mess of explanations like a badly constructed whodunit. Can’t you reconstruct—planting a little of this earlier, paring the rest down to a minimum— so that there’s only a few hundred words between the destruction of Onselm and the curtain?
AB

19 September 1950
Dear Tony:
Your letter on how to do the yam over arrived late Saturday, and I just bowed my neck and did the thing over. New title, as you see, O UGLY BIRD! I did it all except three of the early pages, and tried to fix those explanations at the end.
Answering your question about the silver strings, I went into that before ever I wrote. Silver strings were used before steel strings became good enough. Silver makes a good harmonious jangle, a la silver horns, etc. I checked again before I wrote, in Deems Taylor’s MUSIC LOVER’S ENCYCLOPEDIA, which has this to say under “Stringed Instruments”: Guitar strings today are sometimes silver wound on a steel or silk core. And under “Silver trumpet”, it says that silver is used for strings on many instruments.
To switch things around and plant ahead, I took up slack here and there to allow new inserts; but the story comes out just about as long as it was when you saw it last.
Good luck to you, and I really want to hear that this magazine makes the grade. It’s badly needed!
Best,
Manly

6. An example of the illustrations for the Kenneth R. Deardorf story:                                            
7. I mentioned in my review of F&SF, Winter-Spring 1950, that Annette McComas selected three stories from that issue for her anthology. She selected three from this one too (the Henderson, Wellman and Deardorf).

This magazine is still being published! Subscribe: Kindle UK, Kindle USA, Weightless Books or physical copies.

Editor, Robert P. Mills

Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Fiction:
The Garden of Time • short story by J. G. Ballard ♥♥♥
Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: XLVIII • short fiction by Reginald Bretnor [as by Grendel Briarton]
The Singular Events Which Occurred in the Hovel on the Alley Off Eye Street • short story by Avram Davidson ♥♥
One Into Two • reprint short story by J. T. McIntosh
Pirate Island • short story by Josef Nesvadba (translation by unknown) ♥♥♥
The Traveller • reprint short story by Richard Matheson ♥♥♥+
Rebel • short story by Ward Moore
Window to the Whirled • novelette by Barry Stevens ♥♥
The Snake in the Closet • short story by Matthew Grass ♥♥
The Golden Horn • novelette by Edgar Pangborn ♥♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
The Garden of Time • cover by Emsh
In this issue . . . Coming next month . . .
Gruesome Discovery at the 242nd St. Feeding Station • poem by Walter H. Kerr
Superficially Speaking • science essay by Isaac Asimov
Books • by Alfred Bester
Excerpts from the Latterday Chronicle • poem by Lewis Turco
For Life . . .

The Garden of Time by J. G. Ballard is a story I first read when I was quite young. I think I found it in an anthology borrowed from the local library (Introducing SF edited by Brian W. Aldiss, 1964, perhaps) and I’m not sure that I liked it that much at the time, but it was one of those stories that rattled around inside my head for some time afterwards, changing my appreciation of what a story was.
It is about a Count and his wife who, from a vantage point in the garden of their villa, observe an advancing horde on the horizon. As it draws nearer the Count plucks the time-flowers that grow in their garden: the blooms evaporate, and the horde reverts to its earlier position. Eventually the time-flowers run out, the villa is overrun and falls to ruin: the last scene describes the stone statues of the Count and his wife. The allegory is perhaps more obvious to me now than it was when I was young.¹

Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: XLVIII is another pun by Reginald Bretnor, this time about angels playing baseball—which I didn’t get.

The Singular Events Which Occurred in the Hovel on the Alley Off Eye Street by Avram Davidson is a short piece set in what would seem to be an alchemical version of the country during a Presidential inauguration. One of the attendees is kidnapped by a woman who wants him to surrender a spell:

“Slip me the Formula for the Transmutation of Borax Without the Use of Cockatrice-egg,” she said (speaking with some difficulty, her tongue, as we have already noted, you clod, being between her teeth), “and we’ll be back in the Grand Ballroom of the Mayflower in lots of time to see Ed Finnegan made a K.T.V.; afterwards we can tiptoe up to any of the thirty-odd double rooms which my Company keeps rented at all times, and you may have your wicked will o’ me without fearing the House-Dick, because I’ll put a Cheese-it spell on the door, see, which it’s proof against Force, Force-Fields, Stealth, Mort-Main, Nigromancy, Mopery, and Gawk: so give, Cully, give.” p. 15

There isn’t much of a story here so most of the pleasure is in the style of its telling, its archaic prose and odd terms, etc.

Whatever possessed the editor to reprint the dreadful gimmick story One Into Two by J. T. McIntosh (as Then There Were Two, Science Fantasy #3, Winter 1951) we will never know. This would have been a poor story to find in that early fifties issue of Science Fantasy, never mind here.
A man called Ross uses a matter transmitter to send himself to two places. The first copy goes to Moonpool to create an alibi for the second, who goes to Mars to kill the husband of a former female associate who he will subsequently blackmail after she inherits.
This is completely contrived and unbelievable, not to mention the fact it dodges fundamental questions of identity the story itself raises:

You stood in a cubicle, a hundred thousand inquisitive beams analyzed you to the last atom and sent your complete specification, down to the motes of dust on coins in your pocket, on a carrier wave to your destination. There a receiver duplicated you. You didn’t actually move an inch; the installation on Earth dissolved you into water and dust and swept the rubbish away, but not until you were at your destination, complete and in good working order. You or somebody exceedingly like you.
The designers had been very careful indeed to ensure that people arrived in one piece at one place, and that there was nothing left at the Transmission Center except useless, disorganized atoms. Otherwise certain smart people would get very rich very quickly by duplicating money and jewels and other valuables, and some of them might even devote their agile minds to the possible advantages of being in two places at one time. p. 20-21

It finishes with a gimmick ending involving the police, who are cleverer than Ross, of course.

Pirate Island by Josef Nesvadba (translation of Ostrov Piratu, Kultura 1958) is an ironic tale of an eighteenth century man who goes to sea and discovers Utopia on an island. Homesick he later returns home but finds the island is threatened when its location becomes known. He assembles a ship and crew and returns. His attempts to save the natives do not work out as he expects (spoiler) when his crew end up fighting the locals and do as much damage as the Pirates would have.

The Traveller by Richard Matheson (Born of Man and Woman, 1954) is quite a dark story that has a sceptical professor time-travelling back to the crucifixion of Jesus to observe what happens. The story is largely a grim description of the harrowing event and is quite powerful as a result.
A couple of associational points: first, one wonders whether Michael Moorcock ever read this story and, if so, whether it had any influence on Behold the Man; second, the time the professor departs from and returns to qualifies it as a grim Xmas story.

Rebel by Ward Moore is as bad as if not worse than the McIntosh story. It is a heavy-handed future satire about two parents trying to convince their son to do all the things that adults expect: drink, smoke, grow and dye their hair, go into the arts rather than business, etc. I’m not joking, there are several pages of this kind of talking heads nonsense:

“I knew a girl who used to shave mustaches off collages. She had to go to I don’t know how many analysts,” reminisced Mrs. Smith.
“—to become mature, responsible people, fit to be parents. Perhaps you think I never had a nostalgic thought for double-entry or an adding machine—”
“Or I for a crescent wrench,” put in his mother in a gay parenthesis.
“—but we recognized these for the immature daydreams they were and put them behind us. I don’t say the mirage of columns of figures hasn’t been transmuted into a splash of color here or a bit of draftsmanship there, or that the movement of pistons and wristpins hasn’t entered into your mother’s symphonies, but so have longings for other solaces we left behind in childhood or adolescence. We grew up, son . . . We faced the world. Sometimes it isn’t easy, but being an adult has its rewards, believe me.” p. 54

Window to the Whirled by Barry Stevens is a story that is quite hard to describe. Superficially it’s about a grandmother who disappears to another land, and how subsequently her daughter Anne uses a peddle sewing machine to follow her by manufacturing a cape that lets her travel there too. Along the way Anne encounters a fifty-year-old professor called Stan who, after he loses touch with her, also manages to travel there as well. It later materialises that the land they have all gone to is in the future.

As you can probably tell, the plot is rather irrelevant and the main thrust of the story would appear to be the battle between convention and free thought. You can get a vague feel for the story from the following passage where Stan reflects on his academic life, but it’s something you really need to read to appreciate:

For what he had taught was courage, but what he had lived was bowing to ‘the rules.’ Once he had heard one student say to another. “And another stone idol topples into the steaming jungle,” and they both had turned away. How had he got into this mess? At first he had submitted to the rules to get through grad school, so that he would have a degree and people would listen to what he had to say. But when he got his Ph.D., he saw that he would have to get into the upper brackets: then people would listen. But when he had got a Name, by sacrificing most of himself for twenty years, people listened only when he said what they expected him to say. Any deviation was dismissed as brought on by age or overwork. The holidays when he met Anne were the only time he could remember when he had truly spoken from himself—out of his own knowledge. p. 73

The Snake in the Closet by Matthew Grass is about an unassuming, ordinary man who finds a snake coiled up in the corner of his closet. Over a period of time, he becomes increasingly obsessed by it. I presume, from the story’s ending, that the snake is a metaphor for his purpose in life, but I’m probably as wrong about that as I was about the allegory in the Ballard story.

The Golden Horn by Edgar Pangborn is a novelette in his ‘Tales of a Darkening World’ series. Moreover, this piece and another that appeared in the next issue (A War of No Consequence, F&SF, March 1962) formed part of the novel Davy (1964).³
It is a very good piece about the titular Davy, a bonded 14-year-old in a rural post-holocaust world, skipping work and going to a cave in the forest where he has some money and a bow hidden: one day he intends running away to find the source of the sun. On this occasion his fantasies are interrupted when he sees someone else has been in his cave:

When I found the trouble at last, far at the back on one of the cave walls where sunlight didn’t reach, and where my glance must have touched it unknowingly while I was looking at my gear, I was no wiser. It was simply a small drawing made by the point of some softer, reddish rock. I goggled at it, trying to imagine it had been there always. No such thing. That cave was mine, the only place on earth I’d ever felt I owned, and I knew it like the skin of my body. This had been done since my last visit, in December before winter set in.
Two stick-figures, circles for heads with no faces, single lines for legs and arms and bodies, both with male parts indicated. I’d heard of hunters’ sign-messages. But what did this say that a hunter could want to know? The figures held nothing, did nothing, just stood there.
The one on my right was in human proportion, with slightly bent elbows and knees in the right places, all his fingers and toes. The other stood to the same height, but his legs were far too short without a knee-crook, and his arms too long, dangling below his crotch. He had only three toes for each foot, a big one and two squeezed-up little ones. His fingers were blunt stubs, though the artist had gone to a lot of trouble drawing good human fingers for the other jo.
No tracks in the cave or on the ledge. Nothing left behind. p. 103

Later, Davy meets the artist in the forest:

My visitor was there, a short way up the ledge, and he smiled.
Anyway I think he smiled, or wanted to. His mouth was a poor gash no longer than the mid-joint of my forefinger, in a broad flat hairless face. Monstrously dirty he was, and fat, with a heavy swaying paunch. Seeing his huge long arms and little stub legs, I thought I knew who he was.
He did have knees but they scarcely showed, for his lower legs were as big-around as his thighs, blocky columns with fat-rolls drooping from the thigh-sections. Baldheaded as a pink snake, hairless to the middle, but there at his navel a great thatch of twisty black hair began and ran all the way down his legs to his stubby three-toed feet. He wore nothing at all, poor jo, and it didn’t matter. So thick was that frowsy hair I had to look twice before I was sure he was male. He had no ears, just small openings where they should have been. And he had no nose—none at all, you understand? Simply a pair of slits below the little sorrowful black eyes that were meeting my stare bravely enough. He said: “I go away?”
I’d been about to draw my knife and shriek at him to go away. I didn’t. I tried to move slowly, getting on my feet. Whatever my face was doing, it made him no more frightened than he was already. In spite of those legs he stood tall as I, maybe five feet five. He was grief and loneliness standing in the sun, ugly as unwanted death.
A mue.
In Moha, and all countries I’ve since known, the law of church and state says flat and plain: A mue born of woman or beast shall not live. p. 106

The story continues with the pair’s journey to the mutant’s dwelling. As they travel there Davy thinks about killing him: this is in line with the Church’s teaching and will improve Davy’s status, not least with Emmia, a village girl he is infatuated with. However:

The mue halted and turned to me. “Bad place,” he said, pointing at some of the enormous trees, to remind me how anything might lurk behind them. “No fear, boyman. Bad thing come, I help, I.” He tapped the bulges of his right arm. “Fight big, you, I. You, I—word?—fra—fre—”
“Friends,’’ I said, or my voice said it for me.
“Friends.” He nodded, satisfied, turned his broad back to me and went on.
I pushed my knife into its sheath and did not draw it again that day. p. 111

Once they arrive at the mutant’s well-protected tree lair, the mutant tells Davy about his upbringing and shows him a golden horn from pre-holocaust times. Davy listens in amazement as the mue plays some notes on it and (spoiler) determines to own it.
The rest of the story deals with the theft of the horn and Davey’s subsequent return to his village, where he is treated by Emmia for a spider sting that has nearly incapacitated him. After his recovery and a conversation with Emmia about growing up—setting himself a difficult task and, for once, completing it—he leaves the village again to return the horn. When he arrives at the mue’s lair he finds a dead wolf at the base of the tree. Above, Davy finds him dead of his wounds.
I liked a lot about this novelette: the rural post-holocaust setting, the guilelessness of the mutant, Davey’s acceptance of him, the betrayal and the attempted restitution, the golden horn—a wondrous symbol of the pre-holocaust age, the coming-of age issues, its humanity in general, and its timelessness. This is a very good piece.

There isn’t much to say about the non-fiction this issue. The Garden of Time cover by Emsh has some interesting background detail but I thought the face of the woman in the foreground spoils it by being rather flat.
In this issue . . . and Coming next month . . . take up a single page: the former is mostly bibliographic and biographical detail about Josef Nesvadba, and the latter promises an All-Star Issue with a Mel Hunter wraparound cover. The fiction contents will include another Edgar Pangborn story as well as a ‘People’ novelette from Zenna Henderson, amongst other big names.
Superficially Speaking by Isaac Asimov is an example of one of his science essays where he would produce little more than several pages of monotonous number crunching. Here he calculates the amount of living space the planets and asteroids of the solar system could provide for humanity.
There is a very short Books column by Alfred Bester and a couple of not very good Poems.
Finally, there is a For Life . . . subscription offer. This offers a life sub to the magazine for $50 (approximately eleven times the $4.50 annual rate) and mentions that actuarially ‘this is a good buy for any male of fifty or younger and an even better buy for any female of fifty or younger.’

Overall, this is not a bad issue: standout stories by Edgar Pangborn and Richard Matheson, and there are a couple of other good stories here too.

1. Perhaps Ballard’s The Garden of Time is not as simple an allegory as I thought: the philosopher John Gray’s analysis is here.
2. I had thought this might be a mid-life crisis story, but it appears as if Barry Stevens was a sixty-year-old female therapist and one-shot writer: her Wikipedia and ISFDB pages.
3. A cursory examination of a copy of Edgar Pangborn’s Davy indicates that The Golden Horn makes up the bulk of Chapters 1-4 & 6-7.

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