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F&SF subs / Amazon UK, USA / Weightless Books

Other reviews:
Lois Tilton, Locus
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Michelle Ristuccia, Tangent Online
Various, Goodreads

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Editor, Gordon Van Gelder

Fiction:
Grizzled Veterans of Many and Much • novelette by Robert Reed ∗∗∗
By the Light of the Electronic Moon • short story by Angélica Gorodischer (translated by Amalia Gladhart) –
Changes • novelette by Rand B. Lee ∗∗∗
The Woman in the Moon • novelette by Albert E. Cowdrey ∗∗
Wormwood Is Also a Star • novella by Andy Stewart ∗∗∗
Directions for Crossing Troll Bridge • short story by Alexandra Duncan ∗
The Bluehole • novelette by Dale Bailey ∗∗∗
The Mood Room • short story by Paul Di Filippo ∗
Doing Emily • short story by Joe Haldeman ∗∗
Systems of Romance • short story by Ted White ∗∗
Canticle of the Beasts • novelette by Bruce McAllister ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Kristin Kest
Editorial • by Gordon Van Gelder
Books to Look For • by Charles de Lint
Books • by Elizabeth Hand
Coming Attractions
Cartoons • by Arthur Masear, Bill Long, S. Harris
Films: A Funny Thing Happened on My Way to Mirkwood . . . Well, Not Really • by Lucius Shepard
Results of F&SF Competition #85
F&SF Competition #86: First Draft
Curiosities: Bull’s Hour, by Ivan Yefremov (1968) • review by Anatoly Belilovsky

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I picked up this issue to read Andy Stewart’s novella, Wormwood Is Also a Star, the prequel to Likho, his piece in the March/April 2018 issue (which I had intended reading next). Apparently you don’t need to read the former before the latter, but as it is about Chernobyl, the subject of a recent (and excellent) TV drama,¹ I thought I’d read it anyway.
The story takes place in an alternative world where the reactor explosion also occurred, but where there are significant differences:

It happened almost instantaneously—inexplicably, this dome-shaped anomaly swelled up on the day of evacuation to pocket nearly five blocks of midtown Pripyat. The Angel’s Tear. And what of the angels? At the center of it, like the nucleus of a cell, a cluster of eight children of varying ages was found huddled in the bathroom of their orphanage, alive and miraculously unradiated. And, as the military doctors and scientists soon discovered, impervious to radiation. The scientists still don’t know how the bubble came to be, how it works, or why the kids developed a psychic gift they did not previously possess (or if the events are even correlative), but the truth was this strange oasis existed in a radiated desert. The scientists found a way to monitor the bubble’s energy signature when occasional bursts of excited atoms bombarded it, causing the energy field to fluctuate, to ripple, become visible for seconds at a time but not buckle.  p. 125-126

The story deals only glancingly with the Angel’s Tear, focusing on one of the older children called Vitaly, who is now nineteen, and who is the lover of a woman called Mitka. She is a married journalist who previously wrote an article about the Tear and the children which upset the government.
Events revolve around the pair, and come to a head when she and Vitaly are summoned to a Kiev house party organised at the behest of her father, a powerful official in the Defence Ministry. Several elements come together here: the death of Mitka’s sister several years previously; Mitka’s deteriorating marital relationship; why the children have been given cyanide capsules (three have mysteriously committed suicide so far); and what Vitaly learns when he “reads” Yuri the husband.
The story is generally a character driven one (in some ways it reads like a Russian novel), although it has a satisfyingly convoluted mystery underneath it all. It also has moments of dark lyricism:

Mitka dreams she is on the banks of the river at night. It must be countryside, for there are no buildings nearby. There is no moon, only starlight brighter than she has ever seen, so bright that each star reflects in the dark, calmly flowing waters. And she is not alone on these banks. Kassandra is with her—not Kassandra as she looked when she was alive, but dead Kassandra, clothes soggy and torn, her dark hair resting mossy on her head. Only her face is less swollen, so that she is actually recognizable. Mitka’s dead, gray sister, a rusalka now, smiles and offers her hand, and Mitka takes it and walks toward the river. She has never been to these banks before, but when she puts her bare toe into the frigid water, she knows it to be the Dnieper, this ancient, long river.
Kassandra guides Mitka waist-deep into the water, and although it is freezing, the current feels more like a cold wind flowing across her legs.
Mitka follows her sister’s gaze up to the sky where a single star burns brighter than the others, this one greenish in color while the others are white or pale blue. She watches as the star grows bright and brighter, as it slowly falls, arcing down from the sky like a green flare with a shimmering trail.
This star is such a small, bright thing as it splashes into the river far ahead of them, but the water doesn’t extinguish it. Beneath the water, the point of light grows ever brighter, casts its sickly green hue upward. And then the river ceases to flow, and human-shaped shadows surface, all around. One by one the naked figures breach, dead, floating on their backs. First her father, and then her mother, who she has only seen in pictures, and then she sees Yvonna bobbing, and then Gregor, and then Bethai. The rest of the Witch Children follow, all except Vitaly. She searches for his face among the dead, but cannot find him. She splashes through the floating mass. Some of these she recognizes: an old primary school teacher, a grocer who used to sneak her candy. More and more faces from her past, and then some unknown. The still river is thick with them.
When she turns to ask her sister for help, she finds that her sister is gone. And in the skyline all around her, the distance is ablaze, smoking. One by one, the dead open their eyes.  p. 160-161

If this has a weakness it is that the SF parts of it—the Tear, the way the children are immune to, or suppress, radiation—are not explained and, apart from Vitaly’s use of his contact telepathy ability at the party, are background furniture. That criticism apart it is quite a good novella overall, and in places better than that. I look forward to reading Likho.
Grizzled Veterans of Many and Much by Robert Reed opens with an eight year old boy called Brad at his billionaire grandfather’s Aspen house at Christmas. There, Grandpa makes an announcement that he intends to Transcend:

“There is a process called Transcendence,” Grandpa said. “It’s very new, and it is not easy. But the people who undergo it…well, they gain certain benefits. Blessings. Skills nobody else in the world can enjoy.”
“Like Spider-Man,” I said.
My uncles snarled.
But Grandpa said, “Exactly. When you Transcend, your mind is improved in so many ways, and you turn superhuman, and nothing is ever the same again.”
Superheroes had physical gifts. But even an eight-year-old kid can see the benefits in being a whole lot smarter than before.
“I’m going into the hospital tomorrow,” he said.
Most of the room groaned.
“It’s a special clinic where doctors and their very smart machines will put these tiny, tiny hair-like tubes inside my blood. It won’t take the tubes an hour to join up in the brain. I might have a headache, but I probably won’t. And once those tubes piece themselves together, I’ll be tied into computers and some very special software.”
[. . .]
“I’ll live another hundred years,” Grandpa said. “My new mind will think wondrous fancy original thoughts, and maybe some of my ideas will make life better for all of you. Though that’s not why I’m doing this. I’ve already done plenty for everybody, in my family and beyond.”  p. 10-11

The downside of this process is that, although the Transcendees experience a subjectively long period of enhanced ability (Grandpa reads Moby Dick and writes a college textbook about Melville in one ninety minute burst) they only live a matter of weeks in reality. Indeed, he dies before his wives and family can visit the clinic, the news of which comes from a video avatar of the man himself, the first of many communications his digital remains make from beyond the grave. This particular message ends with a prediction:

“One way or another, everybody will follow me. What I am is just the first drop of moisture in what will be a soft, nourishing rain.”  p. 13

After this eccentric family beginning, the rest of the story follows an older Brad through a world where an increasing number of people elect to Transcend, and charts his adventures—which are mostly to do with helping his extended family out of various scrapes. The future portrayed is an immersive and intriguing one, as is shown when Brad travels to Africa to visit his ageing mother, who is living in a back-to-nature commune (and when the Earth’s population is down to two billion and projected to drop to a quarter of that):

Mogadishu looked prosperous, looked happy. There were as many smiles in the streets as there were faces, and I couldn’t count either, the city was so jammed with people. Children and their parents crowded me, plus a very few elderly, and there were armies of machines busily chasing jobs and hobbies and whatever else it was that our mechanical servants did with their neurons.
I walked through the crowds for an hour before finding a proper rental shop. I said that I wanted a car, except what I got was more a spaceship with tires. The grinning young office worker had been in town only three months, but he acted like the expert that I needed. And I needed nothing less than the best, he claimed. Driving through the interior could turn frustrating without warning.
No, there weren’t any explicit dangers outside the city. Unless I looked delicious to a saber-lion or cybernetic hyena, I was going to be safe enough.
[. . .]
As promised, the car was a wonder, and my drive proved interesting, what with the beautiful scenery woven around an endless boredom. Rains had been reliable for several years and rivers and grasslands were prospering in what used to be wastelands, and of course the wild game had returned, often wearing embellishments given by cold clever dreamers. The young highways were still in good repair, but the last economic boom that had swept across the continent, destroying drought and civil unrest, had also erased the farms that would have thrived in the new Eden. When every patch of ground is a national park, parks cease to matter very much. Each slice of this countryside was as splendid as most of its neighbors, and every time one more person Transcended, another ex-peasant from the wilderness could move into a magical city, buy an empty apartment for cheap, and settle into a robot-aided existence free of dust and dreariness.
Modern life was just the proving grounds for the greater Heaven to come, which was Transcendence. p. 26-27

Brad’s answer to all this—a world where the dead are more interesting than the living—is (spoiler) to create a simulated world and go back to that original Christmas announcement from Grandpa. There, once more an eight year old boy, Brad tells the rest of his family where they are, that there is no Transcendence in this reality, and that they need to get on with their lives. Then the simulated Brad goes outside and gets knocked down by a car, leaving them in their new world.
I can see that this closing scene mirrors the opening one, and that it provides a sense of poetic justice/balance to someone who feels as Brad does about the Transcendence process—but it seems rather quixotic, and doesn’t really convince. It also slightly spoils what is, at times, a occasionally dazzling story.
By the Light of the Electronic Moon by Angélica Gorodischer (translated by Amalia Gladhart) is a tall tale told in a café in between endless cups of coffee and glasses of sherry. One man relates to another the trouble he got himself into on a planet governed by a thousand woman:

“The next day I received another note, on letterhead but without seals, in which I was told that the interview was with the Enlightened and Chaste Lady Guinevere Lapis Lazuli.”
“What did you say?” I jumped in. “That was her name?”
“No, of course not.”
Marcos had put down the paper he had collected at one of the other tables, and now he was coming with the fourth double coffee. He didn’t bring me anything because this didn’t look like a special occasion.
“Her name,” said Trafalgar, who never puts sugar in his coffee, “was something that sounded like that. In any case, what they told me was that the interview had been postponed until the next day because the enlightened, chaste and so forth, who was a member of the Central Government, had begun her annual proceedings before the Division of Integral Relations of the Secretariat of Private Communication. The year there lasts almost twice as long as here and the days are longer and so are the hours.”
Frankly, I didn’t give a damn about Veroboar’s chronosophy.  p. 53-54

Me neither. I also found the mannered style tedious beyond belief, and struggled to get through what is a heavily padded story, but this may appeal to others.
Changes by Rand B. Lee is set in a post-apocalyptic world:

Nobody knew why the Great Probability Storm had struck when it had, fifteen years previously, or where it had come from. In an instant, millions of people the world over had vanished—faith-keepers and faith-scorners alike—leaving their clothing behind, in an eerie mockery of the Fundamentalist Christian “Rapture” predictions.
[. . .]
But nobody had any explanations to proffer concerning why the Storm had splintered the world into probability-zones, replacing slices of the known, familiar present with slices of past, future, or alternative presents more or less probable. Some mini-zones had been found as small as a meter or two across. Others—such as the zone that had changed the former Washington, D.C., back into a malarial swamp—had been large enough to affect entire cities (or in the case of Luxembourg, entire nations). And the Storm had continued to generate smaller probability-squalls at irregular intervals, sending ripples of Change throughout a splintered world that now resembled a mosaic more than anything else.
A husband and wife might lie down together one evening and wake up the next morning to find that one of them had been replaced by a stranger who possessed a complete memory of their nonexistent years of married life together. A Manhattan bicycle courier, zipping round a corner, might find himself splashing through the muddy streets of old Nieuw Amsterdam under the astonished eyes of black-hatted burghers. And sometimes the squalls, like the Great Probability Storm before them, wreaked Changes of Lovecraftian surrealism.  p. 66-67

The story concerns Whitsun and his burro Francesca as they travel through this unstable, changing world. Whitsun is a lay-brother of a non-religious order, or “Fair Dealer,” immune to the changes, and the host of “wealfire” which can stabilise, retrieve, or banish items from the probability squalls. An example of the latter occurs when Whitsun comes across an abandoned auto of a type he hasn’t seen before, and which the wealfire does not like:

Quickly, driven by the sudden sense of urgency that always gripped him at such times, the red-robed man pushed up his left sleeve. His forearm emerged, and the moon picked out the haze of pale scars that covered his forearm from wrist to elbow. Taking a knife from his belt, he clicked open a blade and made a small cut in his skin right below the wrist. A dark spot welled up, grew, elongated, began to trickle.
And the wealfire rejoiced. The tension in him was suddenly released, like an arrow from the bow. He felt the lightest pulse of pleasure, not the coruscations of joy he endured during a Judging. But the outlines of the vehicle trembled, and with a pop of inrushing air, appeared (without moving a centimeter) to dwindle, faster and faster, its ceramic white reddening as it shrank, as though it were receding at impossible speeds into the distance, not shrinking in place. And then it disappeared, leaving only three slim smudges on the desert clay to mark where it had been.  p. 69-70

After this, Whitsun and Francesca journey towards a futuristic looking city on the horizon. Before they get there a probability storm changes this glass and steel vision into a more prosaic looking Southwestern town—although Whitsun soon revises that estimation when he sees a number of crucifixes with burned bodies on them. They continue into town and see other odd things too: jackrabbits that have a malevolent appearance; a vertical column of what appears to be brown smoke (this turns out to be an null-gravity column); and a mist-wall that cuts through the town. Then they meet a pack of telepathic uplifted dogs. The greater part of the story concerns Whitsun’s dealing with the pack, and his attempt to get to the humans who live behind the (according to the dogs) lethal grey mist.
This is all entertainingly fantastic, and I was thoroughly enjoying the story when it just stopped dead in its tracks! I note that the sequel, The Judging (F&SF, November-December 2014), carries on exactly from this point, so what we have here isn’t a novelette but part one of an unannounced two-part serial. This is unfair to readers, and it loses a star for that.
The Woman in the Moon by Albert E. Cowdrey is a rambling monologue from a Professor Threefoot of the year 2077. Threefoot lectures his fellow academic, but unemployed, son-in-law about his own early career, marital infidelity, and a female colleague/lover’s discovery of the Selenite civilisation on the Moon. We further learn of the Professor’s plagiarism of her work after she is killed in a reactor explosion, and how the research material he used for his definitive book on the Selenites may include parts of a novel his ex-lover had been writing.
This is moderately humorous but rambling and unstructured.
Directions for Crossing Troll Bridge by Alexandra Duncan gives five short rules for doing just that. If there is a point to these 334 words, I missed what it is.
The Bluehole by Dale Bailey is set in the summer of 1982 and, for those who were of a certain age at that time, it will provide an immersive, Stephen King-like reading experience:

The soundtrack of that summer still thunders in my ears—Television, the Jam, the Undertones, Jimmy’s long row of vinyl. Summer days we used to lie roasting in his bedroom listening to Blank Generation and talking about girls. Jimmy was infinitely more knowledgeable than I was. I had my kiss. He had a hand job in the back seat of a ’77 Caprice while Darkness on the Edge of Town played on the eight-track mounted under the dash.
And I remember the day out on the stoop when he changed the course of my life forever. He handed me a Marlboro with the butt snapped off and a battered paperback copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The smokes will probably kill me—I still snap the filters off and flip them into the street—but the books saved my life. It started with Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect and the Vogon Constructor Fleet, and it went on from there— Silverberg and Bradbury, Simak and Lovecraft, the lights that would illuminate my miserable high-school years.  p. 175

The story tells of the narrator’s friendship with (and unrequited love for) a new neighbour called Jimmy, a good-looking, cool, and charismatic young man. Most of the story details their everyday adventures—shoplifting at the local store, playing games in the local arcade, going to the movies, etc.
There are three major events that stand out: the first is when they go to see the movie The Thing (they also find, read and discuss the John W. Campbell story beforehand); the second and third consist of two swimming trips they make to the Bluehole, a large lake reputed to be the home of a monster that has killed in the past.
There is a lot of engaging period description in the story, and the writer’s domestic circumstances provide even more complexity (there is a dead mother, an absentee cop father, and a drug dealing and hostile older brother). And on top of this are his feelings for Jimmy. This material is the story’s strength; its weakness, on the other hand, is the material about the monster (even though this is buttressed by much reference to Campbell’s tale), which (spoiler) finally appears in the climactic scene, attacking Jimmy while the pair are swimming, and pulling him under the surface (he does not reappear). This doesn’t entirely convince (its hard to see how the monster could kill people—even on an occasional basis—without the news eventually getting out, and what does it eat when it isn’t dining on the occasional human?)
A better than good story for the most part, but one that is flawed.
The Mood Room by Paul Di Filippo is a short piece that takes the form of an interview with a programmer involved in the development of Mood Rooms:

We called our start-up Total Immersive Environments, or TIE, and our goal was to build an artificial-reality chamber responsive to the user’s thoughts. Kinda like Bradbury’s “The Veldt,” right? You don’t know Bradbury? They burnt all his books? Ha! You had me going there for a minute.  p. 195

The ending involves the two inventors making love in the mood room whereupon (spoiler) the room joins in—leading to its subsequent marketing as a sex toy/partner.
This all very talky (it’s essentially a monologue) and the ending struck me as a bit puerile.
Doing Emily by Joe Haldeman is another VR tale (and immediately after the di Filippo story, too). This one has a university professor in a bar talking to a simulator engineer about his recent experiences as Hemingway and Fitzgerald, before making an appointment to be Emily Dickinson that afternoon.
This is an entertaining and engaging piece for the most part, with a number of lively touches, such as when the professor deliberately explores the program limits of Dickinson:

A young man in a blue uniform approached with an expression that in a less innocent age would signal the intent to couple.
Well, this age was not so innocent. Boy and girl both knew the game and the rules, though Emily had had little practice.
“Miss Emily. You look even more lovely than last time.”
“And when was that, pray tell? Grammar school?” My voice startled me, because of the female template, vocal cords vibrating too fast and in the wrong place. At his expression I added, “The heat is sapping my brain. When did we meet?”
“The Fourth of July celebration last year. There were many men in uniform; no wonder you might not remember a particular one.” He touched the brim of his hat. “Lieutenant Joshua Brilling, U.S. Cavalry, at your service. I was in charge of your father’s escort from Washington.”
“Of course I remember.” I touched his forearm, hard and strong, and stepped sideways, tipping the parasol so no one else could see my face. “You look like a nice man. Shall we repair to my room?”
“Pardon me?”
“Come up to my room and pleasure me relentlessly?”
“Miss Dickinson!”
“I know I’m not very pretty. But you have been chaste a long time, have you not? Marooned in Washington, on your best behavior?”
The alternation of expressions on his face was amazing to behold. He paled and started backing up. Emily’s quiet laugh turned into an infectious bray, and in a rush of postmodern narcissism I started to fall in love with myself.
“Come on, now; I am the virgin mother of modern American poetry. If you want, I could have Walt Whitman join us in a threesome. That would be a story for the boys back in the barracks.”
He froze and started to glow green around the edges. The goggle-eyed Roberto appeared, looking weary and anachronistic with his face mods and white lab apron. “Emily! Professor Tomlinson! You set off a parameter alarm.”
“Sorry. Just testing it.”  p. 212-213

Unfortunately, this promising piece unravels at the end with (spoiler) a deux ex machina malfunction that leaves the professor thinking he is Dickinson, and the men in the white coats taking him away.
Systems of Romance by Ted White is about a musician in the future who is over two hundred years old. He meets a young wunderkind called Cecilia-B at a party, she moves in, and they become lovers and musical collaborators. Later it materialises that she is more interested in his longevity connections than his musical ones (not everyone in this future world is offered extended life), and they have a fight about this that causes them to separate.
The remainder of the story (spoiler) has the narrator reflect on their relationship after she dies in a natural catastrophe six years later. He ponders what would have happened if she hadn’t left him.
None of this really amounts to anything, but it’s an okay future slice-of-life I guess. I note in passing that it reminded me of a 1970’s fashion for stories about artists or musicians.
Canticle of the Beasts by Bruce McAllister is an episode in the writer’s ‘Child Pope’ series,² and tells of three children who are pursued by “Drinkers” (vampires) and other (secular) forces in fifteenth century Italy. The trio are the narrator Emilio, who is the Emissary of the spirit of La Compassione, and whose skin glows in the presence of Drinkers; the Child Pope Bonifacio; and Caterina, who is a reincarnation of the Madonna of Provenzano, and a seeress. They are travelling to see Emilio’s father at Lake Como for a final battle with the Drinkers.
This episode concerns their journey to a place of sanctuary, a chapel and caves in St. Francis’s forest. As they approach the chapel they have a strange encounter with a stag and an owl:

It was a cervo . A stag. What children called a “man-deer.” But it could not be. It was too large, too much like a dream, and yet it was no dream. A great man-deer with antlers that reached out like arms toward the oaks around it. I had seen a statue of such a creature in the abandoned garden of a Roman villa in Luni the second time my mother took me to the carnival there. The bronze had been touched by so many fingers that its nose and antlers were bright as the sun. I had seen little replicas of the same creature carved of wood or cast in metal and sold every Saturday at the village market, and had often wished for the money to buy one. I had also once seen a “woman-deer” in the hills above the village, when my mother and I had traveled by wagon to the witch who slept with lizards, hoping for a blessing for my rash. Yet nothing like this—nothing so huge and grand. Bonifacio and Caterina, it was clear, had never seen such a creature either.
It was then that I felt it: the tingling on my skin, on my arms and legs—the same tingling I had felt upon meeting Caterina for the first time. The tingling that told me she was indeed the incarnation of the Madonna. The tingling I had felt on the road from Siena, too, at a tiny chapel of blue tiles—the sensation that had made me decide we should take another road. I had come to believe that, just as the glow of my skin foretold the arrival of Drinkers, so the tingling meant the presence of something sacred, incarnate or not.  p. 239-240

The stag and the owl (spoiler) are the spirits of Saint Francis and Saint Clare, and these two protect the trio when searching soldiers, and then Drinkers, arrive in the caves.
The alternate world presented in this engaging tale convincingly combines both vampire and religious mythology, but the story is obviously part of a longer work—it starts with a fairly clunky data dump which synopsises earlier tales, and the ending telegraphs future events on the way to a final battle. It’s an entertaining fragment though, and interested me enough to make me want to dig out the other stories in the series.

The Cover by Kristin Kest is for Andy Stewart’s novella, and (I think) illustrates the dream passage above.
The Editorial by Gordon Van Gelder is a short piece that has information about new anthologies from the publisher of the magazine, Spilogale; an obituary for F&SF’s ex-managing editor (from 1979-1989), Anne Deveraux Jordan; and a fact check item about the first use of the term “computer virus” (Greg Benford’s story The Scarred Man from the May 1970 issue of Venture, probably).
Books to Look For by Charles de Lint covers a number of what appear to be generic fantasy books (and I don’t mean that in a good way—the content includes vampires, werewolves, ghosts, dead people, exorcisms, etc. There isn’t anything here that sounds remotely original.)
Books by Elizabeth Hand opens with a review of a new translation of a two thousand-year old novel, The Golden Ass by Apuleius, which she usefully compares to previous translations. The second book is a graphic novel, and the third a YA one.
(Insert here my usual complaint about the dissonance between F&SF’s review coverage and the fiction it runs.)
Films: A Funny Thing Happened on My Way to Mirkwood . . . Well, Not Really by Lucius Shepard begins with a discussion of trilogies before launching into a less than flattering review of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. There are a couple of other short horror movie reviews too (The Devil’s Business and Lake Mungo, which he liked).
Results of F&SF Competition #85 details the winners of the “Chick-Lit” versions of SF novels (ho-hum), and F&SF Competition #86: First Draft sets out the next one.
Curiosities: Bull’s Hour, by Ivan Yefremov (1968) is an interesting short essay about an “unbook” from the Soviet era (the writer read it in the Kislovodsk public library in 1971, but on later enquiry was told that the writer had never written a book by that name . . . .)
There are the usual Coming Attractions, Cartoons, and Classified Ads.

In conclusion this is a somewhat exasperating issue, given the amount of material that is potentially very good indeed but which is let down by various failings (the lack of ending in the case of the Lee and McAllister stories; an ending that doesn’t quite work in the Reed; and unintegrated SFnal elements in the Stewart and Bailey). I note that the short fiction is much weaker than the novelette and novella length material. An interesting issue overall, though.  ●

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1. Chernobyl is a five-part TV drama that premiered in May 2019, and I highly recommended it. There is a Wikipedia page here.

2. McAllister refers to an unfinished 100,000 word novel about Emilio (the Emissary) in this short interview.  ●

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