Month: April 2010

april/may asimov’s

Since I have it right here and I can't concentrate on anything more complex tonight, here's the capsule review of the April/May 2010 double issue of Asimov's.

  • "The Union of Soil and Sky", by Gregory Norman Bossert (novella) — As mentioned previously, I don't usually read the novellas, but the description of an archaeological dig in the first couple paragraphs grabbed my interest, and I found myself reading it in spite of myself, so that should tell you something. The resolution felt a little clichéd to me, though I'm not sure how many resolutions the "alien archaeological dig" story really has, and it was also spoiled a little for me by something that has nothing to do with the story itself. But there's a nicely consistent alien civilization that the archaeologists are exploring, there's a nicely-realized alien character and (to my eye) an alien sign language that displays knowledge of real-world sign languages. The archaeologists are interesting characters without needing to be action heroes, and are obviously intellectuals without needing to prove it to us every other sentence. I felt like they were scientists like the scientists I know, which is to say, people I'd like to get to know and hang out with. In the end it's not a groundbreaking story in the "alien archaeological dig" sub-genre, but I'd still highly recommend it.
  • "Mindband", by Pamela Sargent (novella) — This one didn't grab me after a few pages, so I skipped it, but I might go back to it. It has an interesting hook — a bridge collapse mixed up with some kind of memory-erasing something.
  • "Jackie's-Boy", by Steven Popkes (novella) — It was clear from the first couple paragraphs that this was going to be another post-apocalyptic story, and I'm kind of running thin on interest in them right now, so I punted it. Wins points for evoking its world with an economy of words, though, to wit: "The Long Bottom Boys had taken over the gate of the Saint Louis Zoo from Nature Phil's gang. London Bob had killed in single combat, and eaten, Nature Phil. That pretty much, constituted possession."
  • "Alten Kameraden", by Barry B. Longyear (novellette) — An interesting story of the last days of the Third Reich, and it doesn't pull too many punches.
  • "Unforseen", by Molly Gloss (short story) — A story about an adjustor for a company that insures against freak coincidences resulting in death, ie. "Remediable Death". It took me a few pages to get into it, but it turned out to be an interesting premise, and well-executed.
  • "Adrift", by Eugene Fischer (short story) — A story about human trafficking. For all that the subject matter is barely SFnal, it's a well-written, affecting, and humane story.
  • "They Laughed At Me In Vienna and Again In Prague, and Then In Belfast, and Don't Forget Hanoi! But I'll Show Them! I'll Show Them All, I Tell You!", by Tim McDaniel (short story) — The long title is cute but could be abbreviated to "The Mad Scientist's Daughter". Despite the boringly conventional gender roles on display, it's a cute story.
  • "Malick Pan", by Sara Genge (short story) — Less interesting than Ms. Genge's earlier stories, though set in the same universe as "Shoes-To-Run". Post-apocalyptic, about a little boy who doesn't want to grow up (and has a bit of nanotechnological help with that).
  • "Pretty To Think So", by Robert Reed (short story) — Apocalyptic fiction, and an undifferentiated entry in that genre.

I don't usually comment on the columns, though I do usually read the book reviews, which are often useful, and Robert Silverberg's column, which is consistently awesome. I got a couple pages into Norman Spinrad's review column, "Third World Worlds", though, and got fed up with his defensive reviews of white men writing books about the so-called Third World. It read like another entry on the side of white privilege in RaceFail 2009 (warning: addictive in a trainwreck kind of way), and I don't need any more of that stupidity in my life right now, thank you very much, so I skipped it.

Conveniently, I just picked up the June issue of Asimov's. 🙂

january and february 2010 asimov’s

Since I find myself in MITSFS — which is to say near back issues of Asimov’s, which I don’t keep at home — at an ungodly early hour, with very little brain but unable to sleep, now seems like a good time to go through the January and February issues and do my capsule reviews, as I promised I would. Oh, and I’ve already made a real post this week anyway. As always, I put these up here mostly to jog my own memory later on and on the very off chance someone will find them interesting.

Without further ado…

Asimov’s January 2010

  • “Marya and the Pirate”, by Geoffry Landiss (novelette). Geoff Landiss! OMG. Interesting in both its technical and human detail. Nothing wildly ground-breaking, but a good story well-told. (Plot is approximately: hijacking. IN SPAAAAACE! with extra bonus “two people in a locked room for an extended period of time”, which I feel like I’ve seen before, but, still, Mr. Landiss tells it well.)
  • “Conditional Love”, by Felicity Shoulders (short story). Really pretty brilliant. A doctor dealing with human genetic engineering patients in a situation equivalent to foster care, in the persons of a brilliant girl with no limbs and a young boy who imprints on everyone he meets. Seems to me to deal well with the disability issues. Short, cutting. Excellent.
  • “A Letter From the Emperor”, by Steve Rasnic Tem (short story). This is an interesting piece, hard to categorize, a dialogue between a human and an AI about the outcome of a diplomatic mission and the reasons behind the human’s partner’s suicide. Ambiguous in a good way.
  • “Wonder House”, by Chris Roberson (short story). The history of the comics publishers transposed into an alternate-history Israel. Interesting in its recapitulation of that history but not intrinsically otherwise.
  • “The Good Hand”, by Robert Reed (novelette). Has as its namesake an interesting alternate-historical Martin Scorcese movie, and is set in an alternate history where the US maintained a monopoly on the atomic bomb, but is otherwise kind of a standard “ugly American” tale.
  • “Wilds”, by Carol Emshwiller (short story). Man goes into nature to find his true self, civilization follows, hilarity ensues. Well-written but not hugely novel as a tale.
  • “The Jekyll Island Horror”, by Allen M. Steele (novelette). A pitch-perfect lost-memoir updating of The War of the Worlds for 1930’s Georgia, and well-told, but again nothing hugely novel.
  • “Louisa Drifting”, by Mark Rich (poem). I read the poetry but am usually not moved enough to comment on it. It’s almost all free-verse poetry, so there’s little interest inherent in the technical requirements of the form, and what ideas they have I usually find either uninteresting or better explored in something a bit longer. This one, though, is a cute dissection of a failed spacecraft and a failing relationship, which is exactly as long as it should be and not a line longer.

Asimov’s February 2010

  • “Stone Wall Truth”, by Caroline M. Yoachim (novelette). Lyrically brutal. I feel like the main character’s ending epiphany is a little trite, but the imagery of the story makes up for some of that.
  • “Dead Air”, by Damien Broderick (short story). It’s written in a namedrop-heavy style that provides a good simulacrum of modern life and its information overload, but that combined with a bit too much peevish couples sniping at each other over stupid things in the beginning, and I got overwhelmed and bored and bounced off it.
  • “The Woman Who Waited Forever”, by Bruce McAllister (novelette). An interesting little ghost story set in an Italian village after the Second World War, and treats with class and nationality issues interestingly — a lot of the story centers around some Army brats’ interaction with a local boy — but not a whole lot more than that.
  • “The Bold Explorer in the Place Beyond”, by David Erik Nelson (short story). This is a fascinating little story of steampunky, chibi-Cthuloid first contact gone wrong as narrated by a drunk to no one in particular and overheard by a sober eavesdropper. I didn’t know you could do that in fiction. It wasn’t quite emotionally satisfying, but that doesn’t make it bad per se — I don’t know quite what to make of it.
  • “The Wind-Blown Man”, by Aliette de Bodard (novelette). A very Chinese future, this one. A disaffected monk and a potential Messiah. It didn’t quite bowl me over, but it was well-written and worth the time to read.
  • “The Ice Line”, by Stephen Baxter (novella). As per my usual novella procedure, it didn’t grab me in the first couple pages and so I punted it entirely.

Oh, also Hugo nominees are up. I’m pleased to see a few things I nominated make the cut. (Though three Doctor Who episodes, none of them good? WTF?) Overall it’s a strong slate this year.

procrastination

As you may have noticed, I failed to post last week, thus missing my first week since I started Iron Blogger. Oops. When I started, I promised myself that I wouldn’t post if I didn’t have anything to say, and, this weekend, I couldn’t come up with a topic I felt compelled by, and, therefore, made no post.

Just from following Planet Iron Blogger in my RSS reader, I’ve been observing for a while that a lot of posts seem to get made right up against the 6 AM Monday morning deadline, which fits with my anecdotal experience of MIT people and my friends in particular as doing things right up against the deadline. This evening, I set out to back my vague biases up with data, so I grabbed Nelson’s Iron Blogger code and ended up producing this graph of posts over the history of Iron Blogger:

Mmm, that’s a pretty obvious cycle there, wouldn’t you say? (The data is only as complete as the RSS feeds of everyone involved, which usually only carry a certain number of posts, and which I haven’t been tracking since the beginning of Iron Blogger, so I mistrust the older data. I think Nelson has the full historical set, and I could drag it out of my e-mail if I felt like it.)

I’d say that pretty clearly supports my hypothesis. Not bad for a few hours’ work, and go go gadget matplotlib. I’ll try to put the code up somewhere once I’ve cleaned it up a bit. I’ve spent too much time on this tonight as it is, thereby demonstrating another MIT tendency, viz. staying up too late.