Critical Thinking: Review

I recently had minor surgery and spent one glorious week escaping the land of “should” and “must” and luxuriating in the land of “can’t” and “shouldn’t.” Where working out and weekly appointments gave way to naps and…more naps. No dinners to make, no bus stop runs to be had. Just long, leisurely hours with books, magazines, and the laptop, interspersed with quick trips to Starbucks for breakfast.

I learned some things. Maj. Tom has a delightful bedside manner and is most content when allowed to slightly indulge in his natural obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Lasagna has just the right slime-quotient to relieve a breathing tube-scratched throat. And if you tell a boy, “They took out a girl-part,” he will turn slightly green and stare at the toes of his shoes; but if you tell him, “They took out a girl-part and replaced it with a small nuclear power pack,” he’ll look you in the eye and say, “Oh, cool.”

Before the procedure, I indulged in a B&N run. Here’s what I found.

Analog, March 2010

Christianity and sci fi don’t mix! Sci fi editors will not accept anything vaguely defensive of the nasty evangelical right!

Hogswallop. Analog, March 2010, first story—Shane Tourtellotte’s “Of One Mind.” I swear half of you fine hobbitses have already discussed this very scenario. Brain manipulation is possible; extremism can be cut out of a person’s psyche. As soon as we’ve run out of terrorists, we’ll use it on the religious right. And the protagonist thinks this is a bad thing. What’s the world coming to?!

(For more infrequent readers, that was irony.)

Then there was an article on isotopes I didn’t have the wherewithal to follow. I pretend to be a hard SF writer, but I’m just as happy to resort to handwavium when the research bores me.

“Encounter in a Yellow Wood,” about keeping your focus on long-range plans, was poignant to this Oregon-grown, tree-canoodling soul. “Locked In” was creepy. “Ten Thousand Monkeys” argues that no amount of typewriter-endowed monkeys could turn out anything half as readable as your local cat. “Dr. Skenner’s Special Animals” was cute. (How does one provide veterinarian care for a genetically designed dragon?) “Narrow World,” about an isolated ecology evolved on a freeway strip, read like the best of Friday Challenges. And “Hub of the Matter” displayed an optimistic, rah-rah view of humanity and its potential I’ve not seen since…the last time I watched Doctor Who.

Fantasy & Science Fiction, Jan/Feb 2010

Christianity and sci fi don’t mix! Sci fi editors will not accept anything vaguely defensive of the nasty evangelical right!

Pshaw! F&SF, Jan/Feb 2010, Charles DeLint’s “Books to Look For;” review of Dean Koontz. I can’t do this justice, so I’ll just show you:

…one of the things that’s intrigued me in reading his more recent books is the spirituality that has come to underlie many of the stories in the past six or seven years. It has its basis in Christianity but bears little relation to the more strident elements that are usually presented to us by way of radio shows, TV evangelists, and the news whenever some particularly provocative quote can make a headline.

The truth is that the followers of most religions go about the practice of their faith in a much less confrontational manner. It’s the militant element that gets the press because they make better headlines. Unfortunately, that leaves those of us on the outside with a distorted view of what it’s actually about. And probably embarrasses the believers who follow their religion’s actual tenets, rather than distortions pulled out of context from their holy texts. [Page 29]

(Yeah, I’m quoting a book review from a magazine in a book review in a blog. But I thought that was pretty encouraging.)

“The Long Retreat” was either a speculative story about two infinite kingdoms at war or a commentary on our two-party political system. “Bait”—I like the world of families going and hunting fairy creatures, but…you’ll just have to read it. There was inappropriate creepiness toward the end. I think “Writers of the Future” is an important editorial on the act of writing, but I’m not sure I’m clever enough to know what exactly Charles Oberndorf was trying to say. Maybe just that it’s our responsibility as authors to present the world with possible futures to strive for instead of encouraging loyalty to the status quo. Something miko commented on just last week.

“Songwood” is a sweet romance between a gargoyle and the figurehead of the ship he’s stowed away on. “Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance” is a near-future memoir, as convoluted and unreliable as memory itself. But it boasts one setting that might have won this week’s challenge: a greenhouse, set in the middle of a field, whose windows are made entirely of 19th century photographic images developed on sheets of glass.

“The Secret Lives of Fairy Tales,” by Seven Popkes, could not be more different. A delightful series of shorts illuminating the truth behind the stories of Snow White, Cinderella, and others. Not as polished as James Finn Garner’s Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, but equally as subversive.

Kate Wilhelm’s “The Late Night Train” was so much like Jim Aiken’s “Leaving the Station” (Asimov’s, Dec. 2009) that at first I thought they were written by the same author. But the abusive, stroke-incapacitated farmer, his tremulous wife, and their decrepit farmhouse made me wonder if Wilhelm actually knew Maj. Tom’s grandparents. The ending was a little confusing (was it the daughter or the mother?), but this one hit really close to home.

Lucius Shepherd, in “Films,” points out that District 9 is eminently more understandable if you have intimate knowledge of the current state of affairs in South Africa and not just the Mandellian bliss of years ago. Dean Whitlock’s “Nanosferatu” is a politically correct revenge fantasy that could have been longer.

Finally, “City of the Dog” by John Langan. The long, descriptive, dense sentences remind me of the bandit, or another friend of mine who writes super-natural romances as if modern-day Boulder were akin to Jane Austin. Unfortunately, Langan doesn’t quite pull it off. “Arms crossed over the oversize Army greatcoat that was some anonymous Soviet officer’s contribution to her wardrobe, my girlfriend hurried back to me.” “Trying not to make too much of the coincidence, I pushed my way through to the bar, where I shouted for a Macallan I couldn’t really afford, but that earned me a respectful nod from the bartender’s shaven head.” All well and good, and the narrative character was an English major, but it comes across as uneven, especially when juxtaposed with the dialogue. Especially the dialogue of the roommate which switches from things like, “How the driver didn’t roll right over me and the animal gripping my arm, I chalk up to his caffeine-enhanced reflexes…Had it been any other vehicle, my would-be consumer might have stood its ground…” to “Shut up,” and back again.

Then there’s the second act—an overlong, rambling, needless info dump, the gist of which was already covered. (Okay, his girlfriend cheated on him so he moved to Albany to be with her and room with the guy she cheated with. Moving on…) Which is sad, because the rest of the story is a good little horror story almost worthy of vidad. I just wish vidad and the bandit had written it.

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Kersley Fitzgerald is a real-live, paid, stinkin' author. Please don't take that to mean she knows what she's talking about in any review of another writer's work.