ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Gardner Dozois, Locus
Rich Horton, Locus
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
John D. Loyd, There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch
Patrick Mahon, SF Crowsnest
Jason McGregor, Featured Futures
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Filip Wiltgren, Tangent Online
Various, Goodreads

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Editor, C. C. Finlay

Fiction:
Widdam • novelette by Vandana Singh ∗∗∗
Aurealia • short story by Lisa Mason ∗
Neanderthals • short story by Gardner Dozois ∗∗∗
Jewel of the Heart • novella by Matthew Hughes ∗
A List of Forty-Nine Lies • short story by Steven Fischer ∗
An Equation of State • short story by Robert Reed ∗∗
Galatea in Utopia • novelette by Nick Wolven –
The Equationist • short story by J. D. Moyer ∗∗∗+
A Feather in Her Cap • short story by Mary Robinette Kowal ∗∗
The Donner Party • novelette by Dale Bailey ∗∗∗+

Non-fiction:
Galatea in Utopia • cover by Mondolithic Studios
Cartoons • Arthur Masear, Bill Long, S. Harris
Books to Look For • by Charles de Lint
Books • by Elizabeth Hand
This Way • poem by Neal Wilgus
Dear Creator • poem by Mary Soon Lee
Films: Get Off the Sink and Other Unheeded Commandments • essay by Kathi Maio
Plumage from Pegasus: Toy Sorry • essay by Paul Di Filippo
Coming Attractions
Curiosities: Up the Ladder of Gold, by E. Phillips Oppenheim • book review by Graham Andrews

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I’ve fallen behind with my reading of both this magazine and Asimov’s SF over the last year (I’ve been a time traveller, mostly in the early 1940s), so I’ve resolved to try to catch up. I figure that if I read one of each magazine every month I’ll be caught up by the end of the year. Good plan, but I note that it is the 22^nd of January already and I’m already behind (that Asimov’s SF isn’t even started yet). Onward. . . .

Widdam by Vandana Singh starts off this month’s issue of F&SF with an evocative piece:

Winter is a memory he holds close. When he was young, winter in Delhi was a tender thing, a benign spirit wafted down from the snowbound Himalayas, bringing cold air and the mist of morning. Winter was shawls and coats, the aroma of charcoal braziers in the shantytown he passed on the way to work, his breath a white cloud. Later came the smog age, the inversion layers and choking fog that crept into rooms and nostrils and lungs. Today, the poison has not left the air, but winter is gone. Dinesh lies in bed thinking about this — the covers thrown off, he looks at the crack in the ceiling, the superhero posters on the walls. The mynahs are nesting on the ventilator sill, cackling away at some private joke; on the road down below, Ranjh the taxi driver is already having an argument with one of the drugstore delivery boys over some porn video not returned, and Dinesh’s landlady in the flat below is berating the cleaning woman, who is giving it back with interest. The pack of pariah dogs is barking in the park across the road — they will be at the house any moment, waiting for him to come down and share breakfast with them. Outside his window the jacaranda tree is blooming and it’s only January. Sweat has congealed in his armpits and groin. He thinks of something Manu might have said, had he been lying next to him, but Manu has fled, like winter itself.  p. 6-7

Set in a global-warmed future we quickly learn that Dinesh is a newspaperman by day and a trawler of the dark web by night, where he talks to rogue AIs who roam the net. His partner Manu is on the Moon running a mining operation. Meanwhile on Earth there are huge mining machines called Saurs who plunder the world for resources (this uncontrolled ravaging does not really convince, especially when some of it takes place in northern Sweden). Dinesh obsesses/fantasises about the Widdam, the World-Destroying World Machine, the WDWM.
Interweaved with this spinal story, there are episodes that feature other characters. One, Val, finds a rogue Saur on her tribe’s reservation, which later receives asylum in exchange for prospecting for water; the other, Jan, is the son of the creator of code intended to control the Saurs but which made some of them go rogue. This all culminates in an epiphany for Dinesh when he stumbles into a startlingly green garden after having managed to forestall a riot.
This is a dense slice of future life that is well written, if rather slow-moving and somewhat open-ended. It is also one of those stories that, while presenting its themes of global warming and resource scarcity, avoids saying anything about overpopulation—the first order problem.
Aurealia by Lisa Mason is the story of a not particularly likeable (borderline amoral) corporate lawyer who meets a strange woman called Aurelia and quickly marries her. The rest of the story is about their relationship, and the wife’s strange behaviour. It also details his relationship with a lawyer friend, and their infidelities while on business.
The story essentially revolves around a couple of lines of dialogue (spoiler):

“Your wife, Aurelia. What a pretty name.”
He beckoned a server over, ordered vodka tonics. “Yeah, it is pretty. Means the imago of a lepidopterous insect. A butterfly. You want to hear something weird?”
“I love weird.”
“Butterflies aren’t the innocent, romantic shits everyone makes them out to be. Flitting around. Sipping nectar from flowers. No. Butterflies would just as soon slurp muddy water from a rain puddle or the juice of rotting fruit or blood from a dead animal. There’s nothing sweet about them. See them fluttering in the sun? They’re looking for a mate. That’s all they think about. They just want to copulate and reproduce.” The server brought their drinks. Robert sipped greedily. “The chrysalis, you see, has a golden color.”
“A golden cocoon,” said the little tax attorney.
“Exactly. That’s Villa Aurelia. The house where my wife and I live.”

The story then references a piece by E. T. A. Hoffman to introduce part of the gimmick when it doesn’t need to, and I’m not sure it is directly applicable anyway given that latter story is about ghouls and this one ends (spoiler) with butterflies that feed on the protagonist’s blood.
The piece is overly long, and there is probably a shorter and more effective story buried under all the lawyer/banker bashing going on in this one.
Neanderthals by Gardner Dozois is an interesting if rather fragmentary story set in the near future about a hitman teaming up with a Neanderthal guard to kill the latter’s boss. Later, when they are having drinks in a bar, we find the hitman is a time traveller. . . .
This has quite a few plates spinning for a short piece but Dozois manages to pull it off.
Jewel of the Heart by Matthew Hughes is a novella in his ‘Baldemar’ series, and this one starts with an urgent summons for him when Thelerion comes under attack by two other wizards. Thelerion orders his henchman to don the Helm—a helmet that is the manifestation of a supernatural entity in this world, and which will only communicate with Baldemar—and seek help. The Helm is aware of the attack but uninterested, whisking Thelerion and Baldemar away to the Second Plane to put Baldemar through a test which involves him finding his way out of a maze. When this task is complete, the Shadow Man (the Helm’s form in this plane) attempts to set  him further tests but Baldemar refuses until he finds out what is going on:

“I have a job for you.”
“Surely there is nothing I can do for you that you cannot do for yourself.”
“That is not the case,” said the shadow man.
“I don’t understand,” Baldemar said.
“Of course you don’t. You are a mortal of the Third Plane. You can no more understand what is possible or not possible for a being that exists simultaneously on several planes than a fruit fly could imagine what it is like to be a mist sculptor.”
Baldemar had no idea what a mist sculptor was, either, but he kept that information to himself. Besides, the Helm was still talking.
“On your plane,” it said, “I manifest as a helmet. Here on the Second Plane, I am the walking shadow that you now see. On the Fourth, I am something like a tree made from something like fire. On the Seventh, I am a multi-limbed entity called an athlenath, though you would probably call me a demon made of very busy smoke.”
“What about the Fifth and Sixth and the Eighth and Ninth Planes?” Baldemar said.
“I cannot describe to you what I am on the Fifth and Sixth Planes,” the shadow said, “because everything to do with those realms is beyond your conception. And I do not exist on the Eighth and Ninth Planes because the one who fashioned me saw no need for my presence there.”
“Someone ‘fashioned’ you? Who? What for?”
“Better to ask ‘What?’ and ‘Who for?’ But I still couldn’t answer you in any way that you could understand.” The dull black shoulders shrugged.
“I was created for a purpose. That purpose is long since fulfilled. My . . . creator chose not to exert the effort to unmake me. But he did something else, something that I would like to see undone.”
“What did he do?”
“He removed a part of me.”
“What part?”
“I’m not sure.”  p. 96-97

Baldemar agrees to the task on condition that the Helm will save his master Thelerion and the estate, and his quest starts when he puts the helm down and it generates a new reality. In this new world Baldemar is eventually ends up in a giant house. There he finds the dead owner in a huge bed and a talking doll underneath. Baldemar and the doll leave the house and continue on the quest, and later come to a river and an ogre. Baldemar is killed by the ogre and finds himself back at the gate. Next time around he picks up a sword in the giant’s house and kills the ogre.
Baldemar agrees to the task on condition that the Helm will save his master Thelerion and the estate, and his quest starts when he puts the helm down and it generates a new reality. In this new world Baldemar is eventually ends up in a giant house. There he finds the dead owner in a huge bed and a talking doll underneath. Baldemar and the doll leave the house and continue on the quest, and later come to a river and an ogre. Baldemar is killed by the ogre and finds himself back at the gate. Next time around he picks up a sword in the giant’s house and kills the ogre.
This latter sequence illustrates this story’s biggest problem, which is that the bulk of it essentially reads like someone’s account of a video game they recently played, and is about as interesting. Apart from Baldemar going through the various levels there are other things that don’t work, such as the realities that Baldemar ends up in after the fight with the ogre. These include one ‘level’ where he ends up in a Western and is killed by three cowboys, and then one where he finds himself getting off a motorbike at a gas station and going for coffee. These completely obliterate any suspension of disbelief. Matters do not improve in the rest of the piece which, in short, involves Baldemar dragging the doll into the non-reality greyness that has been creeping up behind them during their previous adventures. The pair arrive in yet another world and end up in a castle looking for a jewel.
Finally, if all this isn’t bad enough, Baldemar wanders around throughout most of this (overly long) story following his intuition until he finds various objects, a process that makes the reader a mere spectator.
I’ve really enjoyed several of Matthew Hughes’ previous stories in F&SF—this one was a big disappointment.
A List of Forty-Nine Lies by Steven Fischer is a short two page piece about a man on his way to detonate an EMP bomb in a future totalitarian state. If you like the style (it is written in negative sentences that contradict the reality of the story, e. g., “My name is not Levi”, “I am not afraid”, etc.) then you may like it better than me. I thought it rather pointless.
An Equation of State by Robert Reed tells of aliens arriving in our solar system and setting up in the asteroid belt (or thereabouts). There they build a wall, or a series of defences around the solar system, waiting for humanity to break out from their planet.
While they wait, one of their number, a diplomat, goes to observe humanity and lives as a horse, a rat, and then a number of humans:

I am a horse because horses always stand near the fight. But I can make myself into any creature, including an upright beast that wears blue and talks about mating rituals and cooked birds, joking about his fear and his death when he isn’t casting long gazes at the green hills to come.
Why not be human?
Because the temptation to influence these creatures would be too much. I never stop reminding myself of that. Yet something is happening, some portion of my mind shifting.
“Time to move,” says the soldier in charge.
“Looking good, son,” says the soldier who likes horses, patting my flank with a flattened hand.
I snort once, with authority. I don’t want this man to die. Which is the oddest thought for an entity like me. Empathy for a drop of water and the warm, slow life inside that water. Another fifty wars need to pass before I begin to make sense of my impulses…these wicked, obvious thoughts secretly dancing inside my mind…   p. 150

At the end of the story (spoiler) one of his own kind comes to retrieve him but the diplomat refuses and turns rogue. The motivation for this wasn’t clear to me, and I didn’t entirely understand the ending—even if there is a subtext here about current US immigration politics it is a bit mystifying—but the slice of life section in the middle is quite good.
I’m beginning to develop a distinct dislike for Nick Wolven’s work (although I enjoyed his recent Confessions of a Con Girl in Asimov’s SF, November-December 2017) and rapidly started losing patience with Galatea in Utopia. This one’s about gender fluidity in the future (enabled by machines), and it starts with the narrator turning himself into a 100% XX woman at home before going out:

I end up at the Wrecked Room, which is not my usual crowd. The table in the back is almost full. Steve is here, doing his Great White Male impression. We call him Moby Dick because he’s a living myth. Blond hair, blue irises, right down to the F. Scott Fitz-all-American chin. Which to my eyes reads as a little desperate, but his mom’s from Iceland, so who can say? Then there’s a blazingly beautiful South Asian woman, except she’s not actually a woman, and probably not South Asian. I scan her TruMe earring when she pushes back her hair. Her — no, his name is Logan Ames, and he identifies as ninety-nine XY. (And while we’re on the subject, why do so many people stop at ninety-nine?) Tonight, like me, he’s decided to play against type. You can always tell the ones who are into role-playing. We’re the showboaters, the caricatures, getting off on our own otherness, whatever that means.
Also at the table are Charlotte and Dean, who are a little younger and tend to stick to safe zones. Charlotte’s always around seventy-five XX, pretty but not too pretty, red hair, light brown skin. Dean: same, except eighty percent XY. Most nights they end up going home together.
It’s the fifth person who gets my attention.  p. 160-161

This is a man called Alan who is apparently unable (for auto-immune reasons) to change his body to whatever combination of XX/XY he wants. They start seeing each other, and the rest of the story is an account of their dysfunctional affair.
If you are into issues of gender fluidity, identity, and relationships, then this may be of interest (although personally I find Wolven’s characters and their endless solipsism tedious beyond belief), but you will have to contend with the writer’s baggy, talking-heads, down-with-the-kids style that made this, along with the subject matter, almost unreadable for me.
It also has a scene that qualifies it for the 2018 Bad Sex awards:

As I draw him inside me, I imagine it’s his heart pulsing up between my hips, ticking down in a rhythm set by nature, the very same heart he had in his mother’s womb. I slide off and he fountains for me, spilling silver thread. And I know that something has been pulled loose inside him, that he is a little more perfect at this moment, a little more completely his unalterable self.  p. 167

Awful.
After a very mixed bag of stories so far, the final three entries manage to avoid adding another duffer to the total, and a couple of them are pretty good. The Equationist by J. D. Moyer is the first of those and is about a gifted child who realises his mathematical ability enables him to work out what people’s “equations” are. The rest of the story, which telescopes out along the rest of his life, shows how the people he encounters are actually more complicated than that.
It is initially quite dazzling, throwing out handfuls of passages that you want to quote:

When Niall was eight, he thought his father was a slightly curving line. Gus Skinner worked as an accountant at a large Seattle-based technology company, and watched basketball on television while drinking beer, and boiled hot dogs in a saucepan on Friday evenings. At some point, Niall’s father lost his taste for basketball and switched to watching tournament poker on television (while drinking Scotch), and cooked steaks in the cast-iron skillet for Friday dinner instead of boiling hot dogs.
His father’s life changed in slow, gradual, inconsequential ways.
Or so Niall thought.
Niall’s mother was a wavy line. At the peak of each wave, Lori Skinner started writing epic historical fiction novels, or made plans to remodel their house (and once began the remodel herself, with safety goggles and a sledgehammer). At the trough of each wave, his mother spent most days in bed and cried a lot, while his father heated microwave dinners and installed drywall.  p. 200-201

That night at dinner his father was absent, and his mother quiet and strict. Niall and Nathan exchanged puzzled glances. In the next months they learned their father had moved in with a woman named Monica, was smoking marijuana, and no longer worked at the Seattle technology company. The brothers overheard hushed conversations they weren’t supposed to hear, as well as shouted and screamed exchanges where the adults gave no heed to who heard what.
[. . .]
The most disturbing thing was that his father’s life was no longer a predictable square root function. Some unknown force had intervened. Either that, or Niall’s idea was completely wrong, and people could not be described by functions or equations. Maybe he’d imagined the whole thing.
His mother’s regular oscillations continued, though reduced in amplitude, maybe as a result of her new regimen of vitamins, yoga, and green juice. Their neighbor Mr. Markham began to visit, once to adjust the water-pressure valve in the basement, another time to ignite an extinguished pilot light. Afterward, his mother served Mr. Markham coffee and the two spoke quietly, the former glancing at Nathan and Niall nervously, as if the boys might attack. Niall didn’t mind having him around. Mr. Markham was a cubic function, gradual progress interrupted by regular reversals.  p. 201

The latter half of the story, where Niall learns that he can alter people’s equations, is more muted, but it is still a strikingly original and engaging piece of work. If I have one minor quibble it is the use of the word “brutish” in the last sentence. It doesn’t seem quite right given his final decision. One for the ‘Best of the Year’ anthologies.
A Feather in Her Cap by Mary Robinette Kowal is about a hat maker in some non-specific feudal world who has a side-line as an assassin. When she is stiffed by one of her clients, she enlists the help of a burglar friend to rob his strong-box. While the friend does this, she goes to her client’s chamber to leave a particular type of calling card. . . . Matters do not go as planned.
This is a slick piece, but it has a slight, episodic arc that makes it read like part of a novel or series and, by the by, has no fantasy content.
The Donner Party by Dale Bailey is a parallel world story set in a Victorian Britain where the upper classes partake of ensouled (human) flesh at the start of the society season. This is all seen viewed through the eyes of Mrs Breen, a lowly born woman whose self-made grandfather’s fortune bought her a match above her station She is now a social climber.
After an unexpected invitation to a “First Feast” for her and her husband, she finds herself at Lady Donner’s table:

What she would recall, fresh at every remove, was the food — not because she was a gourmand or a glutton, but because each new dish, served up by the footman at her shoulder, was a reminder that she had at last achieved the apotheosis to which she had so long aspired. And no dish more reminded her of this new status than the neat cutlets of ensouled flesh, reserved alone in all the year for the First Feast and Second Day dinner that celebrated the divinely ordained social order.
It was delicious.
“Do try it with your butter,” Mr. Cavendish recommended, and Mrs. Breen cut a dainty portion, dipped it into the ramekin of melted butter beside her plate, and slipped it into her mouth. It was nothing like she had expected. It seemed to evanesce on her tongue, the butter a mere grace note to a stronger, slightly sweet taste, moist and rich. Pork was the closest she could come to it, but as a comparison it was utterly inadequate. She immediately wanted more of it — more than the modest portion on her plate, and she knew it would be improper to eat all of that. She wasn’t some common scullery maid, devouring her dinner like a half-starved animal. At the mere thought of such a base creature, Mrs. Breen shuddered and felt a renewed sense of her own place in the world.
She took a sip of wine.
“How do you like the stripling, dear?” Lady Donner asked from the head of the table.
Mrs. Breen looked up, uncertain how to reply. One wanted to be properly deferential, but it would be unseemly to fawn. “Most excellent, my lady,” she ventured, to nods all around the table, so that was all right. She hesitated, uncertain whether to say more — really, the etiquette books were entirely inadequate — only to be saved from having to make the decision by a much bewhiskered gentleman, Mr. Miller, who said, “The young lady is quite right. Your cook has outdone herself. Wherever did you find such a choice cut?”
Mrs. Breen allowed herself another bite.
“The credit is all Lord Donner’s,” Lady Donner said. “He located this remote farm in Derbyshire where they do the most remarkable thing. They tether the little creatures inside these tiny crates, where they feed them up from birth.” “Muscles atrophy,” Lord Donner said. “Keeps the meat tender.”
“It’s the newest thing,” Lady Donner said. “How he found the place, I’ll never know.  p. 230-231

Mrs Breen later becomes friends with Lady Donner and the story charts the former’s upward trajectory until, that is, the next year, when the refusal of a Second Day invitation by Mrs Breen (she perceives it as inferior to last year’s) leads to a rift between the two and Mrs Breen’s subsequent social exclusion.
Running in parallel with this are encounters with the lower classes (who object to the upper classes’ cannibalism—“The Anthropophagic Crisis”), and various scenes with Sophie, the Breens’ daughter and one-time favourite of Lady Donner.
When the Breens return to London the year after the rift, an unexpected First Feast invitation arrives for them—and their daughter—from Lady Donner.
The story proceeds to an obvious but nevertheless compelling end.
There are obvious metaphors in this piece about class, capitalism, and inter-generational fairness that, for a change, actually added to my enjoyment of the story. If I have one quibble it is about the ending, which (spoiler) reveals that Sophie’s sacrifice was arranged by Mr Breen alone, and comes as a surprise to his wife. I think it would have been a more effective end if she, having already revealed herself as an entirely unsympathetic character, had colluded in the plan.
I’ll be surprised if this one doesn’t end up in quite a few of the ‘Year’s Bests’.

I’m not a big fan of this month’s Cover for Nick Wolven’s story. While it certainly represents the story, and is eye-catching enough, there is something off-putting about that plastic-looking face.
There are three Cartoons: I liked the Narcissus one by Arthur Masear, but didn’t like Bill Long’s slimming space suit, and thought S. Harris’s quantum car okay.
Books to Look For by Charles de Lint is nine pages long, the first four of which deal with two comic books, and the last page is about manga art (sigh). Books by Elizabeth Hand covers, amongst others, Amatka by Karin Tidbeck, which she obviously liked, but her review makes it difficult to fathom exactly what the book is about:

Amatka can be read on many levels: as a straightforward interplanetary adventure; as a satire on the communal experiment; as a stark warning against censorship; as environmental fable and a critique of colonialism. But mostly it’s a novel about the importance of words and imagination, and how a culture suffers and ultimately declines into fascism when those are repressed or forbidden, as Vanja learns toward the book’s end, when she dares to do “that shameful thing, to truly imagine that a thing was something other than it was.”  p. 83

I didn’t think much of This Way, a poem by Neal Wilgus which seems to be imaging a scene from a B movie, but thought Dear Creator by Mary Soon Lee, a verse rejection letter for universe creators, quite good.
Films: Get Off the Sink and Other Unheeded Commandments by Kathi Maio is a mixed review of Mother! It did not make me want to rush out and see it.
Plumage from Pegasus: Toy Sorry by Paul Di Filippo is a humour piece that contains an idea that should probably have been used in a story. It tells the tale of two kids who get MiniScribez^TM set for Xmas. These are miniature living dolls of writers who can generate a VR environment of their books to tell their stories. Of course the kids eventually get bored with their toys, and the group of writers they have by now amassed are left to their own devices (literally). They go native:

In the basement, the MiniScribez™, now apparently self-actualized — whether from boredom or a programming glitch or some unanticipated synergy amongst themselves — were having a wild party or rave or orgy. Wild music issued from the rec room’s commandeered audio system. Many of the MiniScribez™ had shed some or all of their clothing. They had borrowed appropriately proportioned accessories from my GI Joe collection and from Kendra’s Barbie gear. Worst of all, they had somehow made their way to Dad’s bar and gotten into the liquor.
And so a drunken, topless Stephenie Meyer was hanging halfout of an upper-story dollhouse window and vomiting — very realistically, I should add, in tribute to the makers of the MiniScribez™. John Green was behind the wheel of Barbie’s hot-pink Zero-CarbonFootprint Convertible with Suzanne Collins beside him. They had somehow overclocked the little electric motor and were tearing madly around the basement at about twenty miles per hour, with bendy straws extending from their lips into a nip-sized bottle of vodka perched in the back seat. Homer and Mark Twain had stripped to their underwear and were locked in a grunting wrestling match. Neil Gaiman was perched, singing, on the ridgeline of the roof with J. K. Rowling on one knee and Andre Norton on the other. Scott Westerfeld and Lois Lowry were fencing with plastic machetes formerly employed by the bad guys of Cobra Command. Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov were arguing over who had gotten the bigger advances, and seemed ready to trade punches.  p. 195-196

Curiosities: Up the Ladder of Gold, by E. Phillips Oppenheim by Graham Andrews reviews what sounds like a very dated techno-political thriller (“League of Nations”, “Benevolent Dictators Appreciation Society”, etc.), Up the Ladder of Gold by E. Phillips Oppenheim (1931).

This issue is a mixed bag at best, and one of the most uneven issues I can recall.  ●

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