F&SF February 2009 Reviewed
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, # 679 from Spirogale Inc
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction for February 2009 is another issue that's predominantly fantasy, but in doing so editor van Gelder shows how wide a scope fantasy can cover.
World Fantasy Award
The issue leads off with World Fantasy Award winner Fred Chappell's 'Shadow of the Valley' which adds to a long and venerable tradition in fantasy, that of the honorable thief. Such honor is of course always personal, rather than strictly legal, and in this story that's certainly the case. A master shadow-thief sends two competing apprentices off to gather specimens from the flora of a mystery valley.
To pastiche Chappell's slightly ornate style, on the debit side Chappell's initially opaque language is somewhat off-putting as is the slightly Vance-ian feel of the setting, while on the credit side is an extremely well thought out milieu and the slightly Vance-ian feel of the setting (to explain, Vance is the originator for too many tributes and pastiches, but when done well as here and --more obviously-- by Matt Hughes, still works well). One of the best stories of its kind in some time.
Charles Coleman Finlay
The only pure SF story in the issue is Charles Coleman Finlay's 'The Texas Bake Sale.' Set in a balkanized USA, a party of US Marines out in the desert sets a road block for a passing convoy of vehicles, and gets more than they bargained for. It's hardly groundbreaking material, but it's probably more topical than it's ever been in light of the US economy, and Finlay paints a fine character sketch of men strained by circumstance and survival into contorting their beliefs in order to keep them.
'Winding Broomcorn' is a contemporary fantasy by Mario Milosevic in which a pastor loses his faith and his sanity after his wife dies, and regains one when a mystery visitor calls to order a new broom. Slight, but pleasant.
Stranger is Eugene Mirabelli's 'Catalog' which is set in a world where Poe's Usher family live a drop-out existence, and the protagonist gets to sleep with a pin-up who still has the staple in her navel. It's lighter than usual from Mirabelli, who's become a regular in recent months.
Jack Cady
This month's Classic Reprint is the 1993 Nebula, Bram Stoker and World Fantasy Award winning 'The Night We Buried Road Dog' by the late Jack Cady. Set in a long-vanished Montana of the early 1960s, this story of highway racers in the night thrums with atmosphere to the point where the reader can smell the gasolene. For the older reader this is a chance to meet again a long-lost friend, while for the novice Cady will be a revelation.
Non-Fiction
In the non-fiction 'Departments,' Elizabeth Hand and Charles de Lint contribute Books and Books to Look For respectively, Lucius Shepard's Films provides Babylon A.D.D., and the Curiosities column this month is filled by Lawrence Person.
Cover by Kent Bash
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