F&SF September 2008 Reviewed
Fantasy & Science Fiction, Number 676 Published by Spirogale Inc
Aug 6, 2008
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction for September 2008 maintains the publication's near 60-year run of consistently excellent sci-fi.
Paolo Bacigalupi
'Pump Six' is the title story of Paolo Bacigalupi's debut collection; this novelette --as bleak as most Bacigalupi works-- opens the issue. New York City is falling apart: Most of the population is illiterate, and trace chemicals have caused widespread imbecility. One of the few who can read, Trav Alvarez is an engineer working on New York's sewage system. In the microcosmic Heart of Darkness that unfolds, it becomes very clear just how fragile humanity's hold is on civilization -- even on survival. It's an uncomfortable read, but Trav and Maggie are real people in all their innate decency leavened with flaws, and there is a grim grandeur in its final imagery.
Laura Kasischke's 'Search Continues for Elderly Man' is a short, dark piece of micro-fiction about a boy who isn't what he seems, his dog, and the old man they call upon, that --like the Lee story later- requires more than one reading to squeeze full understanding from it.
Amy Sterling Casil
For over twenty years, Amy Sterling Casil has quietly built a reputation for the depth of her world-building. Her novella 'Arkfall' is a sterling example. Colonized by Japanese, the water-world of Golconda is --with it's skin of ice over a world-spanning ocean-- a claustrophobic environment in which to care for a parent falling into senility. Osaji meets Scrappin' Jack, a hard-drinking brawler who also wants off Golconda, but is equally unable to escape. After an erupting submarine volcano strands them together in an ark alone with Osaji's mother, life looks very bleak indeed.
'Arkfall' manages to be surprising in its plot, while being comfortably familiar in the way it unfolds its character's relationship. It is sure to gain Casil wider attention, and not before time.
Rand B. Lee
Rand B. Lee has appeared more times in 2008 (three) than in the previous decade. 'Picnic on Pentacle' is ostensibly another story in the D/fy series which last featured in December 2003. But this story isn't about them at all, except -perhaps- for their impact on how humans behave. But it's doubtful whether four, six or forty-six people could have changed the fate of the expedition to Pentacle in a complex, at times disturbing piece that at times is reminiscent of 'Painwise' and other stories by James Tiptree, Jr. at the beginning of the 1970s.'
'Shed your Guilt' by Michael Swanwick and Eileen Gunn belongs to the epistolatory sub-genre, in which stories unfold through letters. Its a story that will probably appeal more to writers than fans, although it's solidly constructed, and the end follows logically from everything that's gone before.
Robert Reed
Robert Reed's 'Salad for Two' covers ground well-trodden in this piece about a check-out girl who befriends a customer. She slowly grows rich as the eons pass, but nothing is as it seems. What sets 'Salad for Two' apart is its warmth, and the sense of nostalgia for lost futures that permeates it. It's a tone that it shares with much American SF, but it's better done than most.
Bringing up the rear is Jim Aiken's 'Run! Run!' and odd little story in which unicorns exist in our future after the internet has faded into history and Christianity triumphed. It lingers longer in the memory than it should for its length, and is a poignant way to end the issue.
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