From: Dwebb9@aol.com
Date: Tue, 15 Aug 1995 13:19:40 -0400

Name:  Don Webb
Author of Magazine reviewed: Various
Editor of Magazine: K.K. Rusch
Translator of book reviewed:
Title:  _Fantasy and Science Fiction_ Vol. 89 No. 2
Name of press:  Mercury Press
Address of small press: 
Year of publication:  August 1995 
Cloth and/or paper:  Paper
Number of pages: 162
Price:  Paper:    $3.75          Cloth:  


When I went to buy the August issue of _Fantasy and Science
Fiction_, a scary thing happened. I went to three stores and
none of them carried the magazine anymore. Well, one of them
thought they did, but couldn't find it -- maybe it fell off
the rack (which was sized for digest magazines). I went to a
specialty shop, sure enough they carried _F&SF_ but the
distributor hadn't dropped it off. We need to be subscribing
to this or one of the other digests -- it's our duty.
Fortunately Dave mailed me his copy. Yeah Dave.

	The lead story "The Canterbury Path" by Pamela D.
Hodgson deals with the idea of sacrifice so central to
Christian thinking being ported to other civilizations --
notably an insectile race the Kputkp. A fairly standard tale
with Graham Greene-style lapsed Catholic regaining faith,
and willingly dying for alien race. Complete with galactic
encyclopedia-style beginning and ending quotes. Keeping with
the religious themes, a tale by Robert Reed follows. "Our
Prayers Are With You" tells of the frustration of flood
survival victims at the endless film crews, and a magical
revival. The dark side of magic -- what if our ids did the
dirty work? -- shows up. Nicely nasty, but not Reed's
usually high average.

>From water to heat with the third story, "Dry August" by
Raymond Steiber. Here is an enjoyably dark fantasy. A
mentally feeble old man seems to be totally losing his grip
on reality as the heat rises from the parched earth, but it
turns out his frightened memory of the weather man isn't
rambling. Nicely done -- Bradbury for adults. Eric C.
Hartlep's "The Seven Beds" follows. Hartlep is trying to
write something different from the conventional homogenized
speculative fiction we're seeing too much of. I don't think
he's hit his stride yet, but this tale of a floating boy's
ranch with its seven beds below decks -- the seven
punishment beds is the closest thing to Kafka you'll see in
a commercial magazine. Watch Mr. Hartlep, this is his first
story in _F&SF_, I hope to see many more. 

I always want to write off Elizabeth Moon as a conventional
fantasists, then she comes along with something that reminds
me of her talent. "Aura" is almost Fowleresque in its prose,
a meditation on numbers from those Platonic forms that exist
in aching purity behind reality, to the numbers of taxes, to
the numbers marked on human skin at Auschwitz. I was reading
this story about half asleep on a plane, and it knocked me
awake, and blew out a few short breaths. The title refers
(in part) to the clear moment before migraine -- but also to
that emanation that comes from those things we use to hang
meanings on. A particularly beautiful section as the heroine
is in the midst of migraine begins, "Tentatively, she let
her mind visualize a number, just a number, not a dark mark
on white skin. A cascade of them, in the bright pastels of
her childhood's books, tumbled over each other, eager as
puppies." The ending sentence of the story I will not tell
you, because it is one that cannot be forgotten. But if I
had my way this story would be among the most highly
anthologized gems of our field, because of its last six
words. Well done, Ms. Moon!

	I was disappointed with Mary A. Truzillo's "Miranda's
Monster." Our particular Caliban in this classroom horror
tale is named Kane, who is eventually overcome by a mural of
Grendal, while Miranda receives instruction form Dr. Fable.
I found the charged names to be greater in intensity than
the resulting narrative. This was not true of Madeleine E.
Robbins' "Adelard's Kiss" a hot little fantasy about a lip.
This cunningly wrought piece of fantasy deals with a the
physical side of love as exemplified by a biform, a lip, and
two women. It's carnally positive, moral and has a sad
ending.  I didn't know that _F&Sf_ had such a hot side, but
I'm all for it. "Pressing her legs together she could summon
up a flush of physical memory that was momentarily
incapacitating." Unfortunately I read this story on a plane
at the beginning of a business trip away from my wife for a
week. Jeez you could've warned us.

	I had to read a "A Birthday" twice. This is not author
Esther M. Friesner's fault, because the prose is flawless.
It was because I was so anxious to classify it into one of
two camps that I missed its complexity. Now it's not the
great prose of Ms. Moon's story, but it is one of the most
thought-provoking stories about abortion issues I've read.
The narrative strategy is built around a monstrous secret --
something is going on with the narrator and her daughter
Tessa -- something so terrible that the narrator can not
bring herself to think of it. It is Tessa's sixth birthday,
and everyone is giving Linda, the narrator, a hell of a lot
of space. Her boss lets her off work, so she goes to the
women's center -- because she has to be busy, has to be
doing something. She has an unsettling interaction with the
head of the center -- a woman named Oralee, who lives with
her lover Corinne. The narrator doesn't dislike or fear
lesbians, but doesn't like Oralee because Oralee is a
pretend lesbian. What's wrong with this society? Oralee gets
Linda to be a "runner." Simple errands. She's got to do some
ATM banking for women. What's wrong here? Then after the
anxiety gets almost unbearable, we see the ATM scene. The
ATM displays a computer simulation of the aborted child of
the woman whose password has been typed in. Ten, twenty,
thirty seconds. Everyone in the line knows. So most of the
women can't take it. It goes on till the "child" is six,
which Tessa is today. Then no more. The activites of the
runners are illegal. This is supposed to be the compromise
between the those who would blow up abortion clinics and
those who demand reproductive rights. This isn't a simple
story. I kept trying to get it to perfectly match my
politics and my views, but it kept escaping simple frames.
It is, of course, a mirror. 

	The last tale is by Ian Watson. Ian Watson is my idol
because he's got eight short story collections published.
This shows the extreme good sense of his publisher, the
short story being the best form of speculative fiction. "The
Amber Room" is good, but not one of Watson's best. It will
also be appearing in White Wolf's _Tombs_ anthology. Burn,
the obsessive hero is seeking an amber room -- once a
plaything of the Czars lost during the second world war. The
time-preserving qualities of amber have become linked in his
mind with Isabelle, the wife of his employer Max, whom he
named Amber for "the tan of her skin and the beads of her
nipples." His quest takes him through the surreal landscape
of the fallen Soviet empire with its Russian mafiosos and
new dark nationalism springing up like weeds through the
cracks of inferior Soviet concrete. Slowly bit by adventure
story bit Burn hero learns that the amber room exists in the
open air in the high mountains of Slovakia. He will hang
glide over it, Burn's other obsession is with hang-gliding,
his Amber fell from the sky after hang gliding. He will
recapture her memory in the amber room. He understands from
the very first the nature of his quest on some level is not
for Amber/Isabel but for an interior Amber -- a memory
caught in his own soul, where his hopeful projections and
terrified observations upon his boss's highly eroticized
wife are the reality. His take on fiction and memory is a
commentary not only the story, but on the reasons why most
of SF's aging readership reads SF nowadays:

"We don't remember a past event in itself, but rather our
memory of that event. Subsequently we remember the memory of
a memory . . .Essentially memories are fictions."

Despite his understanding (or perhaps because of his denial
of that same understanding) he finds the amber room, and
suffers an obvious metaphorical fate. "The Amber Room"
serves as an interesting commentary on "Aura," "Adelard's
Kiss," and even "Miranda's Monster." Each in some sense is a
critical comment on other -- they're fictive interaction
carefully made sure by Kris Rusch's editing. This
constellation of meaning gives this issue of _Fantasy and
Science Fiction_ a greater scope than an average issue and
hints at what SF magazines could be -- even in these days of
declining words. . . 

	
 

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