F&SF August 2008 Reviewed

Marc Laidlaw opens the August issue of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction with a novelette featuring Gorlen Vizenfirthe, the bard who last appeared in the mid-90s, who now returns with 'Childrun.' It's clever, although the plot's telegraphed from about half-way through, and there's enough inventiveness and originality to make Gorlen's return something to anticipate.

Charles Coleman Finlay

Almost half the issue is devoted to Charles Coleman Finlay's novella 'The Political Prisoner.' It's the sequel to the Hugo and Nebula nominated 'The Political Officer' which was featured in the April 2002 issue and did much to get Coleman on the ballot for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

Having survived the events of the earlier story, Maxim Nikomedes has returned to his homeworld, Jerusalem, a pioneer world where political repression has supplanted idealism. Max is swept up in a deadly putsch between rival government departments. His goal is to survive the initial chaos, and he succeeds the 'reprocessing' but is dispatched on a death ride aboard a packed bus to a labour camp.

It's a harsh, unrelenting, clearly influenced by stories from survivors of twentieth-century concentration camps with its desperate survival strategies; any 'victory' won by the protagonists is a crabbed, stunted one, but the very meanness of that victory adds to its sweetness. Such is the level of detail that the story is an uncomfortable mirror of events that happened not so long ago, and in some places are still happening.

Fantasy and Science Fiction

The short stories in this issue are mostly very short, but unlike in earler issues, but effective for all that.

Scott Dalrymple returns with a second story in consecutive months with the 950-word 'An Open Letter to Earth,' a wickedly funny piece of debunking of kidnapped-by-aliens stories.

Rand B. Lee's 'Bounty' isn't much longer, but unlike his acclaimed 'Litany' in the June issue, this is a short, sharp shocker about the way a future America could go under the religious right and a return to the hysteria of Maccarthyism

These flash fictions bracket 'Another Perfect Day' by Steven Popkes, also a returning F&SF regular. Sam Prokofiev is cleaning his gun one day when a man appears from nowhere and tries to wrestle it from his hand. The man is a time-traveller intent on preventing Prokofiev from committing suicide; but his (and our) Sergei Prokofiev killed himself in 1945 in New York, and this is Florida in 1947. What starts as a time-travel story mutates into one of parallel universes and becomes ever-more complex, demanding more than one reading. Delightful.

Richard Mueller

Concluding August's fiction is Richard Muellers 'But Wait! There's More!' in which an unemployed scriptwriter takes a job writing infomercials, the despised lowest of the low hackwork, to persuade people to buy and sell souls. It's a variation on the deal with the devil trope that by characterization and neat plot twists manages to be different enough to be one of the better efforts of its kind.

There are also the regular departments, including book and film reviews and the humour of Paul di Filippo's delightful 'Plumage from Pegasus.'

While this issue does have several outstanding stories, the length of the cover story destabilizes it slightly, making it one of the weaker issues of the year, but there is still much to enjoy.

Cover by Kent Bash

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