{"id":10723,"date":"2019-07-12T15:05:54","date_gmt":"2019-07-12T15:05:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/?p=10723"},"modified":"2019-07-12T19:15:37","modified_gmt":"2019-07-12T19:15:37","slug":"the-magazine-of-fantasy-science-fiction-707-may-june-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/?p=10723","title":{"rendered":"The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction #707, May-June 2013"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

ISFDB link<\/a>
\nF&SF<\/em> subs<\/a> \/ Amazon UK<\/a>, USA<\/a> \/ Weightless Books<\/a><\/p>\n

Other reviews:
\nLois Tilton, Locus<\/a>
\nSam Tomaino, SF Revu<\/a>
\nMichelle Ristuccia, Tangent Online<\/a>
\nVarious, Goodreads<\/a><\/p>\n

_____________________<\/p>\n

Editor, Gordon Van Gelder<\/p>\n

Fiction:
\nGrizzled Veterans of Many and Much<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novelette by Robert Reed \u2217\u2217\u2217<\/strong>
\nBy the Light of the Electronic Moon<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Ang\u00e9lica Gorodischer (translated by Amalia Gladhart) –
\nChanges <\/em><\/strong>\u2022 novelette by Rand B. Lee \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>
\nThe Woman in the Moon<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novelette by Albert E. Cowdrey \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>
\nWormwood Is Also a Star<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novella by Andy Stewart \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>
\nDirections for Crossing Troll Bridge<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Alexandra Duncan \u2217<\/strong>
\nThe Bluehole<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novelette by Dale Bailey \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>
\nThe Mood Room<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Paul Di Filippo \u2217<\/strong>
\nDoing Emily<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Joe Haldeman \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>
\nSystems of Romance<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Ted White \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>
\nCanticle of the Beasts<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novelette by Bruce McAllister \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong><\/p>\n

Non-fiction:
\nCover<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 by Kristin Kest
\nEditorial <\/em><\/strong>\u2022 by Gordon Van Gelder
\nBooks to Look For<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 by Charles de Lint
\nBooks <\/em><\/strong>\u2022 by Elizabeth Hand
\nComing Attractions
\nCartoons <\/em><\/strong>\u2022 by Arthur Masear, Bill Long, S. Harris
\nFilms: A Funny Thing Happened on My Way to Mirkwood . . . Well, Not Really<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 by Lucius Shepard
\nResults of F&SF Competition #85<\/em><\/strong>
\nF&SF Competition #86: First Draft
\nCuriosities: Bull\u2019s Hour, by Ivan Yefremov (1968)<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 review by Anatoly Belilovsky<\/p>\n

_____________________<\/p>\n

I picked up this issue to read Andy Stewart\u2019s novella, Wormwood Is Also a Star<\/em><\/strong>, the prequel to Likho<\/em>, his piece in the March\/April 2018 issue (which I had intended reading next). Apparently you don\u2019t need to read the former before the latter, but as it is about Chernobyl, the subject of a recent (and excellent) TV drama,1<\/sup> I thought I\u2019d read it anyway.
\nThe story takes place in an alternative world where the reactor explosion also occurred, but where there are significant differences:<\/p>\n

It happened almost instantaneously\u2014inexplicably, this dome-shaped anomaly swelled up on the day of evacuation to pocket nearly five blocks of midtown Pripyat. The Angel\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019s 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.\u00a0 p. 125-126<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The story deals only glancingly with the Angel\u2019s 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.
\nEvents 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\u2019s sister several years previously; Mitka\u2019s deteriorating marital relationship; why the children have been given cyanide capsules (three have mysteriously committed suicide so far); and what Vitaly learns when he \u201creads\u201d Yuri the husband.
\nThe 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:<\/p>\n

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\u2014not 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\u2019s dead, gray sister, a rusalka<\/em> 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.
\nKassandra guides Mitka waist-deep into the water, and although it is freezing, the current feels more like a cold wind flowing across her legs.
\nMitka follows her sister\u2019s 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.
\nThis star is such a small, bright thing as it splashes into the river far ahead of them, but the water doesn\u2019t 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.
\nWhen 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.\u00a0 p. 160-161<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If this has a weakness it is that the SF parts of it\u2014the Tear, the way the children are immune to, or suppress, radiation\u2014are not explained and, apart from Vitaly\u2019s 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<\/em>.
\nGrizzled Veterans of Many and Much<\/em><\/strong> by Robert Reed opens with an eight year old boy called Brad at his billionaire grandfather\u2019s Aspen house at Christmas. There, Grandpa makes an announcement that he intends to Transcend:<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a process called Transcendence,\u201d Grandpa said. \u201cIt\u2019s very new, and it is not easy. But the people who undergo it\u2026well, they gain certain benefits. Blessings. Skills nobody else in the world can enjoy.\u201d
\n\u201cLike Spider-Man,\u201d I said.
\nMy uncles snarled.
\nBut Grandpa said, \u201cExactly. When you Transcend, your mind is improved in so many ways, and you turn superhuman, and nothing is ever the same again.\u201d
\nSuperheroes had physical gifts. But even an eight-year-old kid can see the benefits in being a whole lot smarter than before.
\n\u201cI\u2019m going into the hospital tomorrow,\u201d he said.
\nMost of the room groaned.
\n\u201cIt\u2019s a special clinic where doctors and their very smart machines will put these tiny, tiny hair-like tubes inside my blood. It won\u2019t take the tubes an hour to join up in the brain. I might have a headache, but I probably won\u2019t. And once those tubes piece themselves together, I\u2019ll be tied into computers and some very special software.\u201d
\n[. . .]
\n\u201cI\u2019ll live another hundred years,\u201d Grandpa said. \u201cMy new mind will think wondrous fancy original thoughts, and maybe some of my ideas will make life better for all of you. Though that\u2019s not why I\u2019m doing this. I\u2019ve already done plenty for everybody, in my family and beyond.\u201d\u00a0 p. 10-11<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The downside of this process is that, although the Transcendees experience a subjectively long period of enhanced ability (Grandpa reads Moby Dick<\/em> 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:<\/p>\n

\u201cOne 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.\u201d\u00a0 p. 13<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\u2014which 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\u2019s population is down to two billion and projected to drop to a quarter of that):<\/p>\n

Mogadishu looked prosperous, looked happy. There were as many smiles in the streets as there were faces, and I couldn\u2019t 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.
\nI 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.
\nNo, there weren\u2019t any explicit dangers outside the city. Unless I looked delicious to a saber-lion or cybernetic hyena, I was going to be safe enough.
\n[. . .]
\nAs 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.
\nModern life was just the proving grounds for the greater Heaven to come, which was Transcendence. p. 26-27<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Brad\u2019s answer to all this\u2014a world where the dead are more interesting than the living\u2014is (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.
\nI 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\u2014but it seems rather quixotic, and doesn\u2019t really convince. It also slightly spoils what is, at times, a occasionally dazzling story.
\nBy the Light of the Electronic Moon<\/em><\/strong> by Ang\u00e9lica Gorodischer (translated by Amalia Gladhart) is a tall tale told in a caf\u00e9 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:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 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.\u201d
\n\u201cWhat did you say?\u201d I jumped in. \u201cThat was her name?\u201d
\n\u201cNo, of course not.\u201d
\nMarcos 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\u2019t bring me anything because this didn\u2019t look like a special occasion.
\n\u201cHer name,\u201d said Trafalgar, who never puts sugar in his coffee, \u201cwas 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.\u201d
\nFrankly, I didn\u2019t give a damn about Veroboar\u2019s chronosophy.\u00a0 p. 53-54<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.
\nChanges <\/em><\/strong>by Rand B. Lee is set in a post-apocalyptic world:<\/p>\n

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\u2014faith-keepers and faith-scorners alike\u2014leaving their clothing behind, in an eerie mockery of the Fundamentalist Christian \u201cRapture\u201d predictions.
\n[. . .]
\nBut 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\u2014such as the zone that had changed the former Washington, D.C., back into a malarial swamp\u2014had 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.
\nA 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.\u00a0 p. 66-67<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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 \u201cFair Dealer,\u201d immune to the changes, and the host of \u201cwealfire\u201d 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\u2019t seen before, and which the wealfire does not like:<\/p>\n

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.
\nAnd 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.\u00a0 p. 69-70<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\u2014although 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\u2019s dealing with the pack, and his attempt to get to the humans who live behind the (according to the dogs) lethal grey mist.
\nThis 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<\/em> (F&SF<\/em>, November-December 2014), carries on exactly from this point, so what we have here isn\u2019t a novelette but part one of an unannounced two-part serial. This is unfair to readers, and it loses a star for that.
\nThe Woman in the Moon<\/em><\/strong> 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\u2019s discovery of the Selenite civilisation on the Moon. We further learn of the Professor\u2019s 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.
\nThis is moderately humorous but rambling and unstructured.
\nDirections for Crossing Troll Bridge<\/em><\/strong> 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.
\nThe Bluehole<\/em><\/strong> 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:<\/p>\n

The soundtrack of that summer still thunders in my ears\u2014Television, the Jam, the Undertones, Jimmy\u2019s long row of vinyl. Summer days we used to lie roasting in his bedroom listening to Blank Generation<\/em> 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 \u201977 Caprice while Darkness on the Edge of Town<\/em> played on the eight-track mounted under the dash.
\nAnd 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\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy<\/em>. The smokes will probably kill me\u2014I still snap the filters off and flip them into the street\u2014but the books saved my life. It started with Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect and the Vogon Constructor Fleet, and it went on from there\u2014 Silverberg and Bradbury, Simak and Lovecraft, the lights that would illuminate my miserable high-school years.\u00a0 p. 175<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The story tells of the narrator\u2019s 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\u2014shoplifting at the local store, playing games in the local arcade, going to the movies, etc.
\nThere are three major events that stand out: the first is when they go to see the movie The Thing<\/em> (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.
\nThere is a lot of engaging period description in the story, and the writer\u2019s 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\u2019s strength; its weakness, on the other hand, is the material about the monster (even though this is buttressed by much reference to Campbell\u2019s 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\u2019t entirely convince (its hard to see how the monster could kill people\u2014even on an occasional basis\u2014without the news eventually getting out, and what does it eat when it isn\u2019t dining on the occasional human?)
\nA better than good story for the most part, but one that is flawed.
\nThe Mood Room<\/em><\/strong> 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:<\/p>\n

We called our start-up Total Immersive Environments, or TIE, and our goal was to build an artificial-reality chamber responsive to the user\u2019s thoughts. Kinda like Bradbury\u2019s \u201cThe Veldt,\u201d right? You don\u2019t know Bradbury? They burnt all his books? Ha! You had me going there for a minute.\u00a0 p. 195<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The ending involves the two inventors making love in the mood room whereupon (spoiler) the room joins in\u2014leading to its subsequent marketing as a sex toy\/partner.
\nThis all very talky (it\u2019s essentially a monologue) and the ending struck me as a bit puerile.
\nDoing Emily<\/em><\/strong> 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.
\nThis 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:<\/p>\n

A young man in a blue uniform approached with an expression that in a less innocent age would signal the intent to couple.
\nWell, this age was not so innocent. Boy and girl both knew the game and the rules, though Emily had had little practice.
\n\u201cMiss Emily. You look even more lovely than last time.\u201d
\n\u201cAnd when was that, pray tell? Grammar school?\u201d My voice startled me, because of the female template, vocal cords vibrating too fast and in the wrong place. At his expression I added, \u201cThe heat is sapping my brain. When did we meet?\u201d
\n\u201cThe Fourth of July celebration last year. There were many men in uniform; no wonder you might not remember a particular one.\u201d He touched the brim of his hat. \u201cLieutenant Joshua Brilling, U.S. Cavalry, at your service. I was in charge of your father\u2019s escort from Washington.\u201d
\n\u201cOf course I remember.\u201d I touched his forearm, hard and strong, and stepped sideways, tipping the parasol so no one else could see my face. \u201cYou look like a nice man. Shall we repair to my room?\u201d
\n\u201cPardon me?\u201d
\n\u201cCome up to my room and pleasure me relentlessly?\u201d
\n\u201cMiss Dickinson!\u201d
\n\u201cI know I\u2019m not very pretty. But you have been chaste a long time, have you not? Marooned in Washington, on your best behavior?\u201d
\nThe alternation of expressions on his face was amazing to behold. He paled and started backing up. Emily\u2019s quiet laugh turned into an infectious bray, and in a rush of postmodern narcissism I started to fall in love with myself.
\n\u201cCome 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.\u201d
\nHe 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. \u201cEmily! Professor Tomlinson! You set off a parameter alarm.\u201d
\n\u201cSorry. Just testing it.\u201d\u00a0 p. 212-213<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Unfortunately, this promising piece unravels at the end with (spoiler) a deux ex machina<\/em> malfunction that leaves the professor thinking he is Dickinson, and the men in the white coats taking him away.
\nSystems of Romance<\/em><\/strong> 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.
\nThe 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\u2019t left him.
\nNone of this really amounts to anything, but it\u2019s an okay future slice-of-life I guess. I note in passing that it reminded me of a 1970\u2019s fashion for stories about artists or musicians.
\nCanticle of the Beasts<\/em><\/strong> by Bruce McAllister is an episode in the writer\u2019s \u2018Child Pope\u2019 series,2<\/sup> and tells of three children who are pursued by \u201cDrinkers\u201d (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<\/em>, 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\u2019s father at Lake Como for a final battle with the Drinkers.
\nThis episode concerns their journey to a place of sanctuary, a chapel and caves in St. Francis\u2019s forest. As they approach the chapel they have a strange encounter with a stag and an owl:<\/p>\n

It was a cervo<\/em> . A stag. What children called a \u201cman-deer.\u201d 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 \u201cwoman-deer\u201d 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\u2014nothing so huge and grand. Bonifacio and Caterina, it was clear, had never seen such a creature either.
\nIt was then that I felt it: the tingling on my skin, on my arms and legs\u2014the 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\u2014the 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.\u00a0 p. 239-240<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.
\nThe alternate world presented in this engaging tale convincingly combines both vampire and religious mythology, but the story is obviously part of a longer work\u2014it 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\u2019s an entertaining fragment though, and interested me enough to make me want to dig out the other stories in the series.<\/p>\n

The Cover<\/em><\/strong> by Kristin Kest is for Andy Stewart\u2019s novella, and (I think) illustrates the dream passage above.
\nThe Editorial <\/em><\/strong>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\u2019<\/em>s ex-managing editor (from 1979-1989), Anne Deveraux Jordan; and a fact check item about the first use of the term \u201ccomputer virus\u201d (Greg Benford\u2019s story The Scarred Man<\/em> from the May 1970 issue of Venture<\/em>, probably).
\nBooks to Look For<\/em><\/strong> by Charles de Lint covers a number of what appear to be generic fantasy books (and I don\u2019t mean that in a good way\u2014the content includes vampires, werewolves, ghosts, dead people, exorcisms, etc. There isn\u2019t anything here that sounds remotely original.)
\nBooks <\/em><\/strong>by Elizabeth Hand opens with a review of a new translation of a two thousand-year old novel, The Golden Ass<\/em> by Apuleius, which she usefully compares to previous translations. The second book is a graphic novel, and the third a YA one.
\n(Insert here my usual complaint about the dissonance between F&SF\u2019<\/em>s review coverage and the fiction it runs.)
\nFilms: A Funny Thing Happened on My Way to Mirkwood . . . Well, Not Really<\/em><\/strong> by Lucius Shepard begins with a discussion of trilogies before launching into a less than flattering review of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey<\/em>. There are a couple of other short horror movie reviews too (The Devil\u2019s Business<\/em> and Lake Mungo<\/em>, which he liked).
\nResults of F&SF Competition #85<\/em><\/strong> details the winners of the \u201cChick-Lit\u201d versions of SF novels (ho-hum), and F&SF Competition #86: First Draft <\/em><\/strong>sets out the next one.
\nCuriosities: Bull\u2019s Hour, by Ivan Yefremov (1968)<\/em><\/strong> is an interesting short essay about an \u201cunbook\u201d 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 . . . .)
\nThere are the usual Coming Attractions<\/em><\/strong>, Cartoons<\/em><\/strong>, and Classified Ads<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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.\u00a0 \u25cf<\/p>\n

_____________________<\/p>\n

1. Chernobyl<\/em> is a five-part TV drama that premiered in May 2019, and I highly recommended it. There is a Wikipedia page here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

2. McAllister refers to an unfinished 100,000 word novel about Emilio (the Emissary) in this short interview<\/a>.\u00a0 \u25cf<\/p>\n

This magazine is still being published!<\/strong> Subscribe: F&SF<\/em> subs<\/a> \/ Amazon UK<\/a>, USA<\/a> \/ Weightless Books<\/a><\/p>\n\"rss\"<\/a>\"rss\"<\/a><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ISFDB link F&SF subs \/ Amazon UK, USA \/ Weightless Books Other reviews: Lois Tilton, Locus Sam Tomaino, SF Revu Michelle Ristuccia, Tangent Online Various, Goodreads _____________________ Editor, Gordon Van Gelder Fiction: Grizzled Veterans of Many and Much \u2022 novelette by Robert Reed \u2217\u2217\u2217 By the Light of the Electronic Moon \u2022 short story by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fantasy-and-science-fiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pcj7-2MX","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10723"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10723\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10752,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10723\/revisions\/10752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}