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

Other reviews:
C. D. Lewis, Tangent Online
John Loyd, There Ain’t no Such Thing as a Free Lunch
Lois Tilton, Locus
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Mark Watson, Best SF
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, Gordon Van Gelder

Fiction:
I’ll Follow the Sun • novelette by Paul Di Filippo ∗∗+
Yeshua’s Dog • short story by Tim Sullivan ∗∗∗
Nanabojou at the World’s Fair • short story by Justin Barbeau ∗∗∗
The Judging • novella by Rand B. Lee ∗∗∗
Feral Frolics • short story by Scott Baker ∗∗∗
The Bomb Thing • short story by K. J. Kabza ∗∗∗+
Golden Girl • novelette by Albert E. Cowdrey ∗∗∗+
The Old Science Fiction Writer • short story by David Gerrold ∗∗
Hollywood North • novella by Michael Libling ∗∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Mondolithic Studios
Cartoons • by Mark Heath, Arthur Masear (x2)
Books to Look For • by Charles de Lint
Musing on Books • by Michelle West
Films: On Novelizing Noah • by Alan Dean Foster
Films: Coming Soon to a Tablet Near You • by Kathi Maio
Coming Attractions
F&SF Competition #88: “Anagram/Raga Man” (Results)
F&SF Competition #89
Index to Volumes 126 & 127, January-December 2014
Curiosities: The Condemned Playground, by Cyril Connolly (1945) • book review by David Langford

_____________________

Editor Gordon Van Gelder’s introduction to I’ll Follow the Sun by Paul Di Filippo sets the tone for the issue:

There was a time—or so it seems to your editor—when writers turned to science fiction to explore ideas they couldn’t touch in any other medium. A fair number of stories regarded as classics today were transgressive when they first came out.
These days, however, the internet seems to thrive on posts by people who aren’t keen on tolerating viewpoints that differ from their own, and some of those posts focus on the science fiction and fantasy field. They’ve inspired us here at F&SF to give this issue an extra helping of stories that deal with touchy themes or go beyond the bounds of Political Correctness.  p. 5

Di Filippo’s story isn’t particularly edgy or transgressive (there are later stories that fit the bill better) but it does offer a different viewpoint to the homogeneity of today due to its time-traveller protagonist from 1964. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The story opens with a student called Dan Wishcup visiting his maths professor Chan Davis¹ (the science fiction writer) with the news that he has got a draft notice for the Vietnam war, but doesn’t want to go. Davis suggests that Dan claims asylum in Canada, but Dan doesn’t want to do this because of various male relatives who have served in the military, including an uncle killed in the last days of WWI. After some back and forth over the next day or two, Davis suggests that Dan time-travels to the future to wait out the war (Davis’s mathematical research has revealed the secret of time travel). Dan agrees and goes home to arrange his affairs, which include writing to his girlfriend. He also time travels to the past to find his uncle before he joins the army, and saves him from death by taking him forward in time to 1964. After the pair arrive back, Dan abandons him there and goes to see the professor. Davis gives Dan three small gold bars for him to use as money in the future, and they also bury a copy of the first issue of Action comics, for Dan to later retrieve and sell.
The rest of the story is set in Dan’s future (our present), and is largely a comedy of manners:

People appeared at first to be interacting in the manner Dan associated with 1964-era parties. Boozing, flirting, laughing, arguing, showing off, telling jokes. But all the one-on-one interactions looked to Dan to exhibit a telltale shallowness, as if the attentions of the interlocutors were not fully present, not fully engaged. And, indeed, every few minutes each person would pull out his or her phone and obsessively surf to some site—currently, the big social media buzz centered on something called “Dawgbutt”—or dash off a selfie or read a text—or even play a few rounds of some video game!
With his Martian Vision, Dan saw a room full of parasitized Pavlovian puppets.
And when their conversations did sound authentic and enthusiastic, the topics revolved around what to Dan were the most banal and pointless threads, mostly revelatory of trivial, vapid consumerist fetishes. Who discussed anything of high import these days?
“Did you see Duck Dynasty Goes to the Golden Globes?”
“I just bought this great new skin for my smartwatch. It makes it look just like a Blake’s 7 bracelet!”
“You mean to tell me you haven’t tried the Mappuccino at Starbucks yet? It’s just like drinking a stack of pancakes and syrup!”
Dan sighed deeply and moved away from his corner to get another beer. One undeniably good thing about the future: the beer tasted much better. But did that compensate for all the ills?  p. 29

Some of the story is more serious:

The task was not pleasant. In fact, the surfeit of rancid history sickened Dan. He encountered a tapestry of nuclear meltdowns, genocidal slaughters, inauthentic recycled pop culture, social rancor, and crushed utopian schemes. By Dan’s lights—by the hopes and dreams of 1964—the past five decades represented a global litany of failure and disappointment, a catalogue of horror and insults to the human spirit, a trash heap of cheap thrills soon discarded, an abattoir of incessant suffering and slaughter. Humanity had landed on the Moon, then abandoned it, for God’s sake! Oh, sure, there had been shining moments that exalted the human soul, and some debatable technological advances. Medicine had come a long way, that was nice. Lots of bad old prejudices had been unearthed and extirpated. (Or, as current continued instances appeared to show, had they merely been driven hypocritically below public acknowledgement?) On the whole, the world seemed a mingier, more miserable, more frightened and harried place than it had in 1964. Less tenderness, more contention. Fewer vices, more bad habits. Less ease, more stress.  p. 27

At least future Dan does not have the stress of impending nuclear annihilation, such as in the Cuban Missile Crisis a couple of years before his departure.
In the last section he meets an attractive young woman who he suspects is his daughter (Dan presumes he eventually goes back in time at some point and fathers her), and then has to cope with the unwanted sexual attraction he experiences. He finally tries to resolve matters by going to see her mother and father (Dan thinks the latter will be an older version of himself). When they all meet, Dan realises (spoiler) that her father is actually his uncle, who hooked up with his old girlfriend in 1964. There is also some chat about avatars in this part of the story, and some hand-wavium about time-travel, neither of which made much sense to me, and rather spoiled the ending of the story. A pity, as most of this is quite entertaining.
Yeshua’s Dog by Tim Sullivan takes place in in Galilee almost two thousand years ago, and tells of the death of an old storyteller and carpenter called Yeshua. The story then flashbacks to when Yeshua was alive and a Greek traveller visited to collect stories for a book. After this setup—which details the prosaic origins of many bible stories and reveals that Yeshua is most likely Jesus—there are revelations about his early years as a prophet, and his subsequent imprisonment and release.
The final act (spoiler) concerns the death of Yeshua’s faithful dog Judas (this occurs after a period of pining for his dead master), and the dog’s eventual interment alongside him. After this occurs, a bright star rises in the East, The Dog Star, or Sirius, and the villagers decide to check the tomb to see if the dog is still there. They find a miracle has occurred, but not the one the reader expects.
This is an enjoyable if provocative look at Christian history (there is a note in the introduction stating that “this story is a work of fiction”), but pieces like this always leave me (an atheist, for what it is worth) cynically wondering if the editors and publishers would be as brave with transgressive stories about other religions.² (And no, I’m not sure I would be.)
Nanabojou at the World’s Fair by Justin Barbeau is a tale about a Native American spirit/man who, after he is swindled by a forestry agent, goes to the 1904 St Louis Fair. There, after wandering around for awhile, he gatecrashes a show as a fictional “Indian”:

Slipping behind the marquee, he summoned his animal allies. “I need you to help me, my allies,” he said. “I need you to make me look authentic. First, I will need a horse.”
“I will be your horse, Nanabojou,” said the muskrat. And it became a muscled white stallion tossing its flowing mane.
“Now I need a headdress,” said Nanabojou.
“I will be your headdress,” said the grouse. It became a noble eagle-feather war bonnet with a long trailer.
“A tomahawk.”
“I will be your tomahawk,” said the eel, and it became a menacing weapon with a long wooden handle.
“Breechclout.”
“I will give you my skin for a breechclout,” said the catfish. Its skin became a gloriously beaded garment and its whiskers turned into sumptuous fringe.
When he mounted his horse, Nanabojou was noble, savage, and thrilling. He looked like no Indian had ever looked before him, though quite a few have looked like that since.
The show had already started, and a whiteman was in the sawdust-carpeted ring demonstrating his lasso tricks when Nanabojou rode into the tent with a blood-curdling yell. He raced around the ring shaking his tomahawk at the children in the front row, making them drop their ice-cream cones and scream in delicious terror. His snorting horse reared on its back legs, and no one suspected he was really dressed in fishskin, with a grouse on his head, riding a rather large muskrat. They were all too entranced with what they thought they saw.  p. 77

This is short and slight piece which recalls R. A. Lafferty and, like some of that writer’s work, doesn’t amount to much. But it is a pleasant enough piece anyhow.³
The Judging by Rand B. Lee is the sequel (it’s more like the second part of a serial) to Changes (F&SF, May-June 2013), reviewed in my last post. That story introduced us to a post-apocalyptic world where a Probability Storm has turned the world into a patchwork mosaic of different times, places, and possibilities. We also met the central character Whitsun, a lay brother of an order committed to bringing stability to those parts of the world they visit, a feat accomplished the “wealfire” they host.
The story picks up as Whitsun, his burro Francesca, and an uplifted husky called Treats penetrate a lethal (if you do not have wealfire) mist barrier at the edge of a human settlement. They immediately see a manned barricade and are interrogated by one of the men behind it. The first question Whitsun is asked concerns the recent Fortean-like rain of objects over the settlement:

“I regret to say that the collapse of the column was my doing, sir,” said Whitsun. “It was a columnar zone of nullified gravity that did not belong in our world, so the fire within me sent it back where it had come from. In so doing, all the creatures and debris that had been trapped within the column were released into the grip of gravity once more. I apologize if any damage was done on this side of the bridge. The fire within me took action before I could consider the possible repercussions.”
“No harm done,” said the headman slowly. “We were protected.” He hesitated, then looked Whitsun directly in the eye. “The fire within you, you say?”
“The Breath of God, sir. The same Spirit that manifested as tongues of flame above the heads of the disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ at Pentecost, and granted them the gift of understanding and speaking languages they had not learned.”
“And you believe you wield this Spirit?” the headman said.
“No, sir. We of my Company serve the Spirit. It does not serve us. We have no control over what It chooses to do or chooses not to do. But its action is always to heal, never to harm. To seek that which is hidden, to restore that which is lost, to bring harmony out of chaos, and to protect the weak when the strong threaten them.”
“Hey, Brother!” called a mustached rifleman in a red cap. “Could this magic of yours give me a bigger Juan Garçia?” The men laughed.
“Why, that depends, sir,” replied Whitsun politely. “Would your having a bigger Juan Garçia bring more or less harmony to your community?” The men laughed a second time.  p. 81-82

Writers take note of a neat way of doing a data dump.
After his preliminary interrogation Whitsun is told to strip, and Sheriff Montoya (Whitsun’s interlocutor) searches his possessions, finding a partially melted crucifix. Montoya pulls out his own nearly identical cross, and Whitsun explains he found the melted one at the site of many burned bodies. Montoya wonders what this similarity means, and dispatches men to investigate. Whitsun, Francesca, and Treats are eventually allowed into the town.
Here Whitsun meets Rosalie, one of the settlement’s matriarchs, and there is talk about the Probability Storm that changed the world, and Whitsun’s warning that there is another storm coming. Whitsun meets an old hippy called Hank, and at this point the story starts to drag a little. This is partly because some of the material from earlier in the story is rehashed, and partly because numerous other characters turn up (Hank’s vet son, and his pregnant and near hysterical wife, etc.).
While all these new characters are milling around, a volatile young gunman called Arthur arrives, pointing a rifle at Whitsun and accusing his of being one of them. This sets up the climactic events of the story, which involves Arthur shooting Whitsun. At the moment Arthur fires, Whitsun sees a vision of a woman called Sister Merit. She tells Whitsun she is like him, and was killed by the townspeople for her blood, which they use to protect the town. She says that they will do the same to him. There is also a suggestion in among all this that she may be responsible for the burned bodies.
More crucially she tells Whitsun to choose which version of the future he wants: one where he is killed, or one where Arthur is shot by Sheriff Montoya. Whitsun chooses the latter, time reverses, and Arthur is badly wounded as Montoya arrives and shoots. Whitsun then treats the injured man with his wealfire, the effort making him pass out. When Whitsun comes to he finds himself in captivity.
The rest of the story (spoiler) is about how he escapes what the townsfolk have planned for him.
This is a story that is vivid, original, and very entertaining in parts, but it has major problems, the most obvious that this story and Changes should have been published as a single novella. This isn’t a huge ask as together they run to around 31,000 words—doable in the large size issues of F&SF (it would be about 80 pages long)—and in any event the text could do with some trimming (chapter three of this story drags because Whitsun explains his backstory to everyone he meets). The other major failing it has is at the climax of the story, which has Whitsun making another timeline choice (I think) but one that baffled me—what exactly happens here?
These two stories feel rather like the rough draft of a superior unbifurcated work—one that could have been a ‘Best of the Year’ story.
Feral Frolics by Scott Baker⁴ won’t be one for cat-lovers, as it starts with an animal control contractor called O’Callaghan killing cats rather than taking them alive to the shelter. He does this because (a) they make less of a mess dead, and (b) he gets paid more, as they don’t then have to be euthanized. Unfortunately (for him) he is filmed killing a pedigree cat, and prosecuted:

[The] image was crystal clear. You could see the Persian’s shiny white fur and bright lavender collar, two and a half million volts of blue sparks crawling up and down the baton and crackling off the cat’s nametag each time I zapped it. When I saw the video on the big screen in court, saw myself grinning and giggling and almost hopping up and down with delight, it even creeped me out.
[. . .]
Because of the angle you couldn’t make out my features all that well, but my red hair, black clothes, and holstered red-and-black wildlife Taser, not to mention the truck and logo, were there for everyone to see. There was no way anybody could claim it wasn’t me, and my lawyer didn’t even try.
Instead, he went for an insanity defense that got laughed out of court. I paid him a fortune and the only thing he accomplished was making people believe that not only was I a sick, evil pervert, I was an insane sick, evil pervert.  p. 129-130

After his trial he goes to prison, an experience described with more black humour:

I lost my job and my license, which was no surprise, but I hadn’t expected to be sentenced to a full year in Soledad for aggravated cruelty to animals. The guards despised me even more than they despised everybody else, and there were dozens of crazy-violent cat lovers locked up there. Killing people was okay if you were a psychopath, but you better not touch their fucking cats. Even the Aryan Brotherhood looked down on me like I was some wannabe serial killer pervert without the balls to stand up like a man and kill real people. All of which meant I was lucky the worst that happened was getting raped a couple of times and getting the shit beat out of me whenever somebody was looking for an easy target.  p. 130

The story then moves forward a few years to the present, where O’Callaghan has left behind the notoriety of his crimes—then (spoiler) the furniture company he works for tells him to deliver a couch to a kitty-cafe. O’Callaghan worries that he might be recognised, but this doesn’t happen, or so it seems . . . .
The supernatural ending does not have the verisimilitude of the rest of the story (those green teeth, etc., are  little odd), and it suffers accordingly. If the author had treated the cat-humans that run the café in a more naturalistic way I think this would have been more effective. Still, this is quite a good read and, notwithstanding the unsympathetic viewpoint character, the enjoyment comes from O’Callaghan’s unvarnished and pointed observations about the world.
The Bomb Thing by K. J. Kabza opens with the narrator Blaine, an employee at Wacko Taco, talking about his buddy:

Mason is my best friend. He’s about 5’10” and 185 lbs., and with the buzz cut and the scar by his eye from that fight in junior year, he looks like a real asshole. And he is, sometimes. But then he smiles, and his whole face lights up, and you feel like everything in the world is gonna be okay. One look at that smile and you’d follow him anywhere.
And I have, too.
But I’m not gay, or anything.
Mason works at the university. He’s a janitor, but he’s like the janitor in that movie who secretly solves all those problems on the blackboard in the hallway. Mason says he could make significant contributions to science, if he felt like it, which he doesn’t. That’s one thing that’s so great about him: Mason is his own man, and you can’t tell him what to do. The fight he got into junior year? The other guy was a cop.  p. 146

The story carries on in much the same vein as the pair have their lunch outside the university while eyeing up a female student unloading her car outside the “Nerd Department”. After commenting on her physical attributes in forthright terms, Mason goes over and hits on her while Blaine watches. Blaine later finds out that Mason has arranged to give her a private tour of the Math department that evening.
Of course, the visit is far from straightforward, and it materialises that Phyllis, the “girl”, is actually an alien sent to Earth to stop the development of a time machine—but we only discover this after Mason picks up the device and accidentally triggers it, sending all three of them back to 1968. The rest of the story details Blaine and Mason’s adventures there as they hideout from Phyllis in the basement of a frat house. This is all told in a very amusing but politically incorrect manner (when Phyllis correctly identifies Blaine’s secret crush on Mason, he repeatedly protests “I’m not gay”). However, despite this latter aspect, the story manages to have its cake and eat it (i.e. it gives the appearance of being politically incorrect but isn’t really). In the final scene Blaine also manages to have his (not-gay) cake and eat it, but you’ll need to read the story to find out how.
One for my imaginary ‘Best of the Year’ collection, I think.
Another story for that anthology may be Golden Girl by Albert E. Cowdrey. This opens with a young woman called Doreen at the home of a man called Valois. She is supposedly there to catalog the old eccentric’s book collection, but really wants to find information about four recent deaths (three insect-related, and one of those her grandmother) in the neighbouring properties.
As Doreen settles into the job she befriends the butler and his wife and, one day, when Valois is out, the butler shows her the secret elevator key that takes them to the third floor and Valois’s private quarters. Later, after she moves into her grandmother’s nearby house, all the staff are fired—a result of her discovered trip to the third floor—and she remains the only one working there.
In the penultimate section the insect theme surfaces again (there are previous mentions of bee-keeping as well as the deaths) when Doreen (spoiler) explores the surrounding properties, and discovers it isn’t smoke coming out of the nearby chimneys but swarms of bees. Valois catches her snooping around—he has become younger since she last saw him—and then imprisons and rapes her, all of which is described graphically. We later learn that his youth—and his insect-like lack of pity—is due to a special kind of royal jelly the bees produce, and which he proceeds to feed to her. There is a biter-bit, or stinger-stung, denouement.
If I have one niggle about the story it is the fact that, despite the fact the pair are supposed to become more pitiless the more jelly they consume, Doreen still gets her grandfather out of the hospital at the end of the story to care for him. That apart, this is an atmospheric and immersive horror story, and one of Cowdrey’s best.
The Old Science Fiction Writer by David Gerrold is yet another story that has the writer as a character, and has a future version of Gerrold telling his grandson what things were like before the Big Think, what a science fiction writer was, and what they did. It includes modest little snippets like this:

“I wrote stories. People paid to read them. They gave me their money, sometimes a lot, so I ate every day and wore nice clothes and lived in a big house.”
“People really paid you for your stories?”
“Yes, they did. Once they even gave me an award.”
“No, they didn’t!”
“Yes, they did. And they paid me a lot because I was good at it.”  p. 192

How modest, but apart from that irritant it’s okay I suppose.
Hollywood North by Michael Libling is set in late 1950’s Trenton in Canada, and concerns the narrator Gus’s friendship with another boy called Jack—or Jack the Finder as he is known because of his knack for finding things. The descriptions of these childhood days are very well done, as is shown by the passage where Gus, who hero-worships Jack from afar, first encounters him:

Jack and I went to the same school. Dufferin Public. I could have told him easy how I felt, but I knew the risks. One ordinary kid declaring fandom to another is a bad idea any way you cut it. It is going to come off as weird. Smart kids nip the inclination in the bud. And I counted myself among them, until the morning my brain turned to Jiffy Pop.
I scoured the playground, locked him in my sights, and charged ahead. “You’re Jack,” I said.
“Yeah. I know.”
And without additional formality, my three years of self-restraint and meticulously cultivated anonymity went down the toilet in a sycophantic rush of verbal diarrhea. “I just want to say that uh how I think it’s really neat how you know how like how you find stuff like me too uh five dollars once outside the A&P uh I’m always looking uh Mommy uh my mom uh she said uh uh.” Mommy. I’d said Mommy. My mastery of the awkward was flawless. Kill me now.
His buddies were roaring. I was by far the funniest thing they’d heard and seen since Moe last blinded Curly.
“You got a screw loose or what, kid?”
“Look at that, Jack. You found yourself a little girlfriend.”
“You gonna cry? You gonna go tell Mommy on us?”
Jack laughed along with them, and man, I hated him right then like I’d never hated anyone. “Is that so?” he said to me, and returned to his friends and their football, jogging long and deep as he signaled for a pass, leaving me behind, alone, and, in retrospect, shielded from further ridicule.
I was never anything more than an average student. But when it came to beating up on myself, I was scholarship material from the get-go. Never took much. A minor setback, the slightest slight, and I’d agonize like nobody’s business. On those days, I knew to avoid Annie. She’d only try to cheer me up. Good thing, outside of school, we went our separate ways.  p. 200

Annie is Gus’s other friend, and in due course all three become close friends.
As Gus and Jack’s relationship develops we find out that Trenton used to have a film industry (hence the “Hollywood North” of the title) but that it shut down when the “talkies” started. More ominously, we also learn that the town has had a disproportionate number of disasters: a train wreck; an ammunition plant blowing up; planes colliding over the town; a landslide; multiple drownings, etc.
The initial arc of the story, however, concerns a set of caption cards which Jack finds (these are intertitles for silent movies, and are presented as images throughout the story). Initially the boys take the cards to the local newspaper reporter Bryan McGrath, who Jack knows well, having been interviewed and photographed by him on multiple occasions about his previous finds. McGrath reacts badly to the intertitles however, threatening the two kids and forcing them to promise to burn them.
What they actually do is go to the local dry cleaners and talk to a Mr Blackhurst, an acquaintance of Jack’s from his father’s diner. They discover that the intertitles are from films that Blackhurst made during his time in the movie industry (and which McGrath wrote for), and the boys learn about the town’s history of movie production. When Blackhurst comments that it was the fear that closed the studios, not the talkies, they are interrupted by Evie, Blackhurst’s Hollywood-beautiful wife. She makes Jack and Gus leave.
Before the two boys can make any further progress on the mystery (and while avoiding McGrath, who constantly snoops on them), Jack abruptly moves away from the town due to his parent’s divorce. He doesn’t tell Gus he is going.
A few years pass before Jack returns to the town and, after some frostiness, all three all end up as friends again. However, there is tension later when Jack and Annie become boyfriend and girlfriend.
The two boys then get jobs at the marina, where they start seeing Mr Blackhurst regularly (he commutes across the water from his house). When (spoiler) he dies suddenly, the boys are told by the dockmaster to return the boat to his wife. They are met by Evie at the house, and she takes them to a private cinema in the basement and shows them Blackhurst’s films: the mystery of the town’s tragedies is revealed.
After this there is an accident that involves the three children, and then a further section which takes place years later, when Evie dies and leaves Gus the house in her will. Gus is told to watch one final movie, which reveals the horrific events that really occurred during the “accident” that the three were involved in, the details of which Gus has forgotten or suppressed.
This is a very good piece which not only has a satisfying and original supernatural mystery set in a convincing milieu, but also has a coda that chillingly recasts previous events. Definitely one for the ‘Best of the Year’ collections.⁵

The Cover is a fairly bland looking effort by Mondolithic Studios, but the more I look at it (especially at larger size) the more I like it. (I note that no effort has been made to left justify the list of contributors’ names, or move them down the page to avoid overprinting the central image).
Books to Look For by Charles de Lint has reviews of a comic book superhero mashup, the third in Stephen Jay Gould’s ‘Jumper’ series, a children’s book, a werewolf trilogy, and what seems to be a novella/graphic story hybrid from Gaiman & Campbell. The usual random selection, in other words.
Musing on Books by Michelle West starts with a review of The Causal Angel by Hannu Rajaniemi, which is the third in a trilogy—not the kind of book to start a column with I’d suggest (it’s an instant turnoff for those that haven’t read the first two). The next review is the fifth of Charles Stross’s ‘Laundry’ novels (although you can apparently can jump into the series here, as West has). The remaining novels sound like the usual fantasy product (spirits, souls, werewolves, half-goblin emperors, etc).
Films: On Novelizing Noah by Alan Dean Foster is a conversation between Foster and the voice of God where they discuss the prospective novelisation of the movie Noah. A treat.
Films: Coming Soon to a Tablet Near You by Kathi Maio begins with Hollywood business talk about theatre release vs. video on demand release before discussing the promising sounding SF adventure movie Snowpiercer (I haven’t heard of it, or the second more thoughtful film I Origins—I’ll have to track them down). Snowpiercer features a train that constantly circles a post-apocalyptic world, and which contains a microcosm of our current society and its social inequality:

The series of battles—most as hand to hand combat—that the rebels must fight are only to be expected in this kind of (literally) linear warfare plot. But Bong Joon-ho is such a skilled director that he adds a ferocious grace, and even a smattering of humor, to the proceedings; each bloodbath is fresh and gripping. It helps that each car offers a striking new backdrop for the next confrontation. From the gray landscapes of the prison car and the manufacturing car where a feverish worker produces the horrific gelatinous protein bars that are the back-car peons’ only form of sustenance, Curtis and his cohorts move forward to increasingly posh and colorful cars where the elite live. These include a botanical garden car, an aquarium car (and sometime sushi bar), a meat locker car, a schoolroom (overseen by a frenetic, pregnant schoolmarm played well by Alison Pill), salon and spa cars, and even a disco car more drug-drenched than the most hedonistic days of Studio 54.  p. 185

The film essays are of much better quality than the book ones.
F&SF Competition #88: “Anagram/Raga Man” (Results) has some submissions that aren’t bad (Blade Runner = Beerland Run). The new competition, F&SF Competition #89, requires limericks.
The Index to Volumes 126 & 127, January-December 2014 reveals four stories each from Oliver Buckram and Albert E. Cowdrey (Van Gelder does have his favourites), two and a half (one collaboration) from Paul Di Filippo, and two each from David Gerrold, Michael Libling, Robert Reed, and Tim Sullivan.
Curiosities: The Condemned Playground, by Cyril Connolly (1945) by David Langford looks at a book which contains, among the other “essays and squibs”, some funny satires.
There are the usual Cartoons, and Coming Attractions.

This is an impressive issue, with one very good supernatural novella, and several other good stories.  ●

_____________________

1. I learned this about Chan Davis from Di Filippo’s story:

In 1953 Chan Davis had been a professor at the University of Michigan—with an odd sideline as a writer of curious and accomplished science fiction stories—when he had run afoul of the House Un-American Activites Committee for his “subversive” leanings. He had lost his job, been blacklisted from academic employment in the whole nation, and, after some delay in coming to trial, received a short but punitive prison sentence.  p. 7

Davis’s Wikipedia page is here.

2. There is a joke in Steve Coogan’s movie Alpha Papa (which features the character Alan Partridge, an inept radio show host, chiding his sidekick Simon)—“Never, never criticise Muslims. Only Christians. And Jews a little bit.”

3. There is a (very short) review of a second ‘Nanabojou’ story by Justin Barbeau (Nanabojou and the Race Question) by me here.

4. The introduction to Scott Baker’s story states he last appeared in F&SF in 1986. His ISFDB page shows substantial activity during the eighties and nineties, but not much this century.

5. Hollywood North was a novella finalist for the 2015 World Fantasy Awards.
As the author notes below in the comments, the story has been expanded into a novel and will be published soon (Amazon UK/USA). ●

F&SF is still being published: F&SF subs/Amazon UK, USA/Weightless Books