Seemed to me like the stories were shorter in this issue of Lightspeed Magazine, but perhaps that’s because I got into the issue and read quickly.

In-fall by Ted Kosmatka

A space-ship is heading toward a black hole. On the ship are two people, one an interrogator the other a prisoner. See the prisoner thinks he’s going to go to paradise for the cause if he dies a martyr. The side running the ship have figured out that it will never actually cross the event horizon. It will just asymptotically approach, meaning they will never die. I actually had a hard time with the story because this seemed like a very ineffective and expensive way to question someone. But then, so is Guantanamo Bay, so what do I know?

The Observer by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Let’s turn women into super-warriors by enhancing the protect your children part of their psyche. The effect of being turned into a soulless killing machine has been written about before, many times. But this is one of the more effective versions of that theme that I’ve read. Nasty, brutal, and short. Excellent.

Jenny’s Sick by David Tallerman

Although the interview with Tallerman that accompanies the story compares Jenny to an addict, I think a better comparison is to bulimics or cutters. The future brings cures for all diseases, so a new wave is drugs that make people sick. One pill to make you sick, a second to make you better. Jenny likes being sick, so she holds off on the second pill as long as she can. And then there’s her friend and roommate who sorta wants to help, and sorta doesn’t. The story is made by his complex character. Jenny is almost a prop.

The Silence of the Asonu by Ursula K. Le Guin

An alien world where the residents do not speak. Like kittens, they chit-chat a lot as children, with somewhat older children teaching the younger ones the language. But after a few years, they just stop speaking. I love the people in the story who follow the aliens around recording the few short utterances they actually do make, then construct epistemologies based on the revealed nuggets of wisdom. Because obviously, if someone doesn’t speak much, when they do it must be full of great import.

Title: Lightspeed Magazine
Issue: December 2010 (#7)
Editors: John Joseph Adams (fiction) / Andrea Kail (non-fiction)
Cover: John Picacio

For the first time since they started publishing this summer, I waited until all the stories were published on Lightspeed Magazine’s web site before I read the issue. I intended to read them there, rather than buy the epub, because copying the file to my nook is somewhat cumbersome. It’s really not all that difficult, but it does mean grabbing a USB cable and bringing it into the living room where I use my laptop, then taking the cable back to the bedroom where it lives. If only I had an end table with a drawer I’d keep it there. I did not get the same taste in furniture that my grandparents and parents’ had.

I did end up buying the issue for my Nook though. Since the last time I checked, Lightspeed is available through the Nook store. That meant I could download it over WiFi. So I did.

Solid issue. I like the non-fiction piece by The Evil Monkey on neurological sources of madness. The rest of the non-fiction didn’t do it for me. They had another interview with a game designer/writer. A lot of science fiction geeks are into gaming; I am not. Also a lot of author interviews and profiles. Those are better than a lot of author interviews on the web, but author interviews almost always seem flat to me. The fiction, well:

Standard Loneliness Package by Charles Yu

Premise is that if you don’t want to feel guilt, or any other emotion, you can pay to have someone else feel your qualia. No need to cry during a funeral. Guilt over cheating on your partner, erase it! And like a lot of crap jobs right now, the job of feeling for others gets shipped to India. A very fine story, and it might even have convinced me to read the author’s highly touted literary science fiction novel.

Faces in Revolving Souls by Caitlín R. Kiernan

Body mod people who want tolerance aren’t very tolerant of someone they think is a tourist to their ways. Nothing about the story grabs me really. I generally agree with the sentiment that there’s no reason to treat people worse because they look different, or because they want to do things to their bodies that nature didn’t provide for originally. But while I don’t want to treat people differently, I don’t understand extreme body modification. It weirds me out. I can’t look and not think why? Despite my desire to not treat them differently, I probably do.

Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters by Alice Sola Kim

A year or so ago I read Joe Haldeman’s The Accidental Time Machine. Alice Sola Kim’s story is sort of the same premise. The main character skips forward in time, and with each appearance feels displaced by the changes. From the author profile, I get the idea that the vignettes are out of order, to increase the reader’s feeling of displacement. I couldn’t tell that things were out of order, but I did feel disoriented for sure.

Ej-Es by Nancy Kress

I’m not very fond of Prime Directive stories usually. Avoiding contaminating cultures with our technological ways seems kind of patronizing to me, but I have read more than one piece from someone in a colonized culture where they are upset by the loss of the possibility of their culture being the primary driving force in their lives/art/etc. Leaving aside the effect on any one person for moment, a monoculture probably isn’t the best for our species, but neither do I think it’s possible to preserve all cultures. There’s a bit of a sociological Heisenberg uncertainty principle going on here. When this topic is explored in fiction, it usually feels to me like the discussion just spins in circles, leaving me little to grasp and think about and no wiser. Nancy Kress’ story is entertaining as a what happens next first contact story, but it didn’t push me into thinking harder about culture bleed.

Title: Lightspeed Magazine
Issue: November 2010 (#6)
Editors: John Joseph Adams (fiction) / Andrea Kail (non-fiction)
Cover: Kai Lim

Time for the next issue of Lightspeed Magazine. October was a horror themed issue. I don’t read a lot of horror, and even less science fiction horror. Mostly I stay away from the genre because scary makes me tense and anxious, and I don’t like that.¹ However, an occasional read here or there is just fine. This is my favorite issue of the magazine, so far. The fiction was pretty disturbing, so it fit the horror bill pretty well. The non-fiction still feels really light and introductory to me. I really wish the editors would include at least one fairly deep science article every issue.

Hindsight by Sarah Langan

Black Betty appears within our solar system. Black Betty is a point of contact between our universe and another universe with very different laws of physics. Everything starts going screwy: birth defects, magnetism. Humanity reacts badly. An escape ship is built, except we can’t escape by zooting out of the solar system. Where would we go? So they decide to head into the anomaly, hoping to transition to the other universe. Nothing in the experience goes well exactly. A good story, though it didn’t really have that sense of dread that I think makes a horror story. I didn’t particularly worry about what was going to happen to the main family in the story. Perhaps that because the story focused so much on the current hell they were going through rather than how much worse it could be.

Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back by Joe R. Lansdale

The scenario starts off pretty standardly: scientists emerge from underground fortress after nuclear war. It’s not a zombie story. I’m glad, because I inevitably compare post-apocalyptic zombie stories to Night of the Coment. What the scientists face is a whole nuther ball of wax. This one gets kudos not because the horror and dread is all that great (I didn’t really feel it) but for being a creative way to make something disturbing.

The Taste of Starlight by John R. Fultz

Fultz’ story starts off similarly to one of the stories that became a chapter in Allen Steele’s Coyote. Man in suspended animation on the way to a distant colony planet is awakened early and has to face the rest of the long voyage alone. In both stories, the crewman goes a bit mad. In Fultz’ story, the key is that there isn’t enough food stored on board the ship for the crewman to last the entire voyage and he’s the only person on the ship who can operate equipment that will be needed by the colony. The colony is already established, but is failing due to the lack of the equipment. Crewman is on the rescue mission. After he eats the limited rations, he starts to look around for other sustenance and there’s only him and a few other crewmen on the ship, the rest in suspended animation. You can guess where this is going. Pretty good. Very disturbing. I do not want to read this story again.

Beachworld by Stephen King

Two crewman crash land on a desert world comprised as far as the eye can see by dunes of sand. No food and little water. Will they get rescued before they starve? Oh yeah, and the sand has a hypnotizing effect. Not quite as disturbing as the previous story, but with Stephen King, you know bad stuff is going to happen.

Title: Lightspeed Magazine
Issue: October 2010 (#5)
Editors: John Joseph Adams (fiction) / Andrea Kail (non-fiction)
Cover: Scott Grimando

This month’s issue of Lightspeed Magazine was my plane reading for my trip to Virginia Beach to see my sister and my nephew (he turns 2 today!). To be fair, I traveled on four hours sleep, so this isn’t highest quality reading or reviewing. I didn’t really enjoy this months issue. The characters in the fiction were lacking in personality. Too much third person maybe? Too much alienness? Maybe I was just too tired to connect.

As for the non-fiction, I liked Jeff Hecht‘s piece on future weapons, and Gerald Nordley’s on the physics of space ship engines. Introductory information is all, but since I know very little about the subjects, I personally enjoyed them. Perhaps if you think more than I about the physics of such things it’ll be less interesting. The author profiles were mixed. Without the interview with Yoon Ha Lee, I wouldn’t have understand her story. Robert Silverberg’s profile told less about him than Adams’ preface/introduction to Silverberg’s story in the issue. I didn’t like the interview with Cat Rambo, but that was because it was too brief. Her answers were philosophical, but direct and based on solid reasoning. I’d love to see her writing critical pieces for a place like Tor.com (ala Jo Walton’s work there, which I love).

Adrian Michael Mulryan’s cover painting is pretty cool, although it has nothing to do with any of the stories. But why is the robot using a paintbrush?? How about a robot as a tagger with a spray paint can? Delinquent robots would be awesome!

Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain by Yoon Ha Lee

I liked the idea for this story a lot more than I liked the story itself. Rather than having a universe where every choice splits off multiple future time lines, it works in reverse. Rather, multiple time lines converge to single events. The items in the title are names of weapons which have interesting effects on the time lines that converge to the point of their use. Flower, for instance, wipes out the target’s forebears. Unfortunately for me, the story is told in a little bit more experimentalist fashion than I was capable of understanding. Other than the broad outline I couldn’t follow. The interview with Lee that followed helped some.

The Long Chase by Geoffrey Landis

After a war, one of the vanquished struggles to live separately from the victors. The main character’s brain has been uploaded into a microscopic computer. Perhaps owing to her past as a married and hating it woman, she really wants to remain independent. The winners of the war are other computer mediated minds that joined together to form a cooperative group mind. Why they fought a war over joining the group mind, I don’t know. Landis made that intentionally nebulous, if you read the interview that follows. Now she’s attempting to escape on her ship by heading out of the solar system, but the winners pursue her to get her to join. Most interesting of the issue’s stories because it has the most personality involved. Some of the piece is even about editing one’s personality. What pieces would you consider indispensable?

Amid the Words of War by Cat Rambo

A former prisoner of war works as a prostitute in a brothel on a space station. It’s been rejected by its own species, and doesn’t fit in with the human-like Espens who run the station either. It probably would have ruined the alien-ness had the story gotten more personal with Six, but I felt a distance from it that I wished wasn’t there. It’s a pretty good story, but I didn’t enjoy it due to that distance. According to the interview with Ms. Rambo, she’s set other stories in the same brothel, the Little Teacup of the Soul. I’m intrigued.

Travelers by Robert Silverberg

Four thrill seeking people travel the universe to look for new experiences. The world they visit, Sidri Akrak, is dismal, filled with grumpy anti-social residents, ferocious animals, and gray weather. In short, not such a thrill. But one of the band, the youngest, Nikomastir, reveals this is where he was born and raised. The others don’t believe him. As with other stories, the story had some distance between the text and the characters that made it not so enjoyable. It’s even told in first person and I still didn’t connect.

So, was it the travel? The tired-ness? Something inherent in the stories that wouldn’t have changed had I been in better condition. I don’t know. And I can’t really re-read them a first time again. (Perhaps in a few years I’ll have forgotten enough for a fresh read.) I liked the concepts. There wasn’t anything obviously bad about the stories. Probably me.

Title: Lightspeed Magazine
Issue: September 2010 (#4)
Editors: John Joseph Adams (fiction) / Andrea Kail (non-fiction)
Cover: Adrian Michael Mulryan

Three issues in a row read! And August is the best of them so far. One of the criticisms I’ve seen of Lightspeed is it’s failure to live up to its submission guidelines that says we encourage writers to take chances with their fiction and push the envelope. While I’ve liked both of the previous issues, none of the stories were particularly envelope pushing. Both of the original stories in this issue have a very different feel. I’m not up enough on current S.F. short stories to make a judgment (even for myself) whether or not these are truly taking chances, but they veer more that way than the rest of Lightspeed’s fare so far.

This time around I’m going to skip thoughts on the non-fiction pieces individually. Overall these pieces fail to carry their weight. And for the love of God, please change Carol Pinchevsky’s contract to have her produce something other than Top X lists of dubious entertainment value. This issue is pretty heavy on author profile/interviews as well, but without the depth needed in them to make them particularly interesting.

Like the cover art too.

All these items will be up at Lightspeed’s web site by the end of the month. I paid for my issue, so I get to read them a bit early.

How to Become a Mars Overlord by Catherynne M. Valente

This reads like an sales pitch for a meta-Mars get rich quick infomercial. There’s no story here, but lots of references to untold stories. I appreciate the new format, but since I’m kind of a story guy this one gets a thumbs down. I’m sure others would like it.

Patient Zero by Tananarive Due

Virus infects the world, told from the perspective of a kid in quarantine because he’s one of the first to get the disease, and the only one to survive it. Really likable character, and Ms. Due does a great job of telling about the outbreak through only hints that a kid could understand. No As you know Bob, in this story. Not getting told too much is what makes this.

Arvies by Adam-Troy Castro

This is a really creepy story. The premise is sometime in the future where people aren’t born. Through medical technology they remain fetuses, but experience life through nerve linkups with their arvies, or hosts, who have no legal existence and unstated sentience. They are human, of a sort. People get transplanted from one arvie to another in artificial wombs. It’s really hard to explain. Our main character decides she wants to do something that hasn’t been done before: give birth. Pretty good but very squicky.

More Than the Sum of His Parts by Joe Haldeman

This is the first story or book that I’ve previously read and reviewed on this blog (that I can remember at least. And looking back at what I wrote before, it still pretty much sums up what I think about it:

In some was this story was enjoyable and in others it wasn’t. The man goes mad due to technology theme is no different that The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells that I read over my Belize vacation. But for some reason the cyborg technology theme did draw me in. One thing that made that effective (where it wasn’t in The Invisible Man) was that you see the transformation from normal to power-mad. In Wells novel, the main character is mad prior to his introduction in the story.

Title: Lightspeed Magazine
Issue: August 2010 (#3)
Editors: John Joseph Adams (fiction) / Andrea Kail (non-fiction)
Cover: Daniele Scerra

Not normally someone who reads a lot of the Big 3 S.F. magazines, but the August issue last year had a story by Derek Zumsteg, a former co-worker at Expedia. I do tend to buy fiction written by people I know, so I got it in ebook format. However, it sat in my queue for a while. Now that I have the Nook, it’s more convenient to read some of my backlog.

Here’s my thoughts on the stories in the issue.

The Qualia Engine by Damien Broderick

Really smart kids kept secret, except they don’t go to Professor Xavier’s school. Broderick combines a pretty standard trope with a more philosophical rambling about what thoughts and consciousness are. I don’t like this sort of thing when it’s a thought exercise rather than the basis for a plot. And there’s not really a whole lot of plot here.

Creatures of Well-Defined Habits by Robert Reed

An interesting story. You read all the time about elderly folks who live simply but secretly have lots of money, and then they leave $1 million to a charity. Hogan in this story is sorta like that. He’s 400+ years old, one of the older humans around after genetic engineering allows people to live long lives, among other things like incorporate the D.N.A. of other animals to get their characteristics. Hogan secretly buys his local cafe so he has a place to retell his centuries worth of stories. Then he dies and an android takes his place, paid for with his estate and having his memories. The android exists just so it can retell Hogan’s stories in the cafe. Some people think it isn’t right, and do something about it. Thought this was a pretty neat take, even though I was confused as to why hate on the android, though at the end I got it.

Blue by Derek Zumsteg

Two crew people stuck together on a spaceship expedition gone wrong. Science fiction stuff pretty standard. Personality story was okay.

The Consciousness Problem by Mary Robinette Kowal

The first human clone, or at least the first one that has the memories of the original. In the tradition of scientists experimenting on themselves, the first clone is that of the scientist himself. The clone is just as smart, but as an experiment, he has to stay in the lab. Also, the scientist has issues with his wife, who’s recovering from a car accident and probably will be forever. You can sorta see where this is going. The clone doesn’t get to see the woman it loves. But it’s a scientist, so it knows it’s a bad idea. Really interesting story. Kowal takes a standard trope and fills it with really good characters instead of cookie-cutter ones. (Which is something like what she did in First Flight as well.) Might have to pick up her short story collection now, though I probably won’t go near her Jane Austen inspired Regency fantasy novel that just came out. Regency not my thing.

Two Boys by Steven Popkes

Neanderthals recreated from D.N.A. Really pretty good if you look past one weirdness. The neanderthals create for themselves a completely new culture. That’s kind of cool. But it doesn’t have a lot of reference to the existing homo sapiens culture. For instance, they create a whole new marriage and child-raising tradition out of whole cloth, where parenting roles are really different and partially communal. Particularly considering the first neanderthal in the story was raised as homo sapiens not knowing he was neanderthal for a while, it seems kind of odd that they’d successfully invent their culture that way. Regular girl satisfies her curiosity about neanderthals by going looky-looing for the house of the rumored new kid in school, a neanderthal.

Turbulence by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Some people always get stuck next to the talkative person. The protagonist gets stuck next to the talkative person who is nervous about the flight. And every time she gets nervous, something bad happens. Dude doesn’t believe her at first. More a story about worrying than about precognition.

California Burning by Michael Blumlein

Larry’s father doesn’t want to be cremated. Dad’s dead, and the crematorium returns the bones (and the fee) to Larry because they just won’t burn. Then people show up asking Larry questions, wanting to see the remains. They kind of remind me of some of the characters in Kraken. They tell one version of who they are, then another. First the police, then the health department. It becomes increasingly apparent that Larry’s dad is far more than he seemed. I’m really not sure whether I like the story or not. It hooked me though, but that might be because of the characterization for the Larry’s dad’s weird colleagues.

Solid stories mostly, but nothing I’d nominate for awards. I think the fact that the cover image was originally intended for a Stephen King book cover and was repurposed for this issue speaks volumes about the contents.

Title: Asimov’s Science Fiction
Issue: August 2009 (#403)
Editor: Sheila Williams
Cover creator: John Jude Palencar
Publication date: June 2009

In my walks around Green Lake last week, I caught up on all the podcasts from Tor.com. So here’s my thoughts.

The Final Now by Gregory Benford

Episode 12 contains Gregory Benford‘s The Final Now. All I can say is ugh. Hate this kind of meta-story.

Eros, Philia, Agape by Rachel Swirsky

Episode 13 has Eros, Philia, Agape by Rachel Swirsky, narrated by the author. Pretty good story about loving a robot. It’s not so much the love thing that made this interesting, though that’s the bulk of the story. It’s that the robot has truly strange motivations that regular people just won’t get. It made the Hugo final ballot, and deservedly so I think.

The Next Invasion by Robert Reed

Episode 14 has The Next Invasion from Robert Reed, narrated by the author (I believe). A decent but average story that kind of explores the idea of but what if the aliens are already here!

Errata by Jeff VanderMeer

Episode 15 contains Errata from Jeff VanderMeer, again narrated by the author I think. I don’t really remember exactly what VanderMeer sounds like, so I could be wrong. I do not get this story at all. I listened to it twice even. Self-referential slipstream like stuff. Alternate reality Jeff VanderMeer goes to Lake Baikal to write a story. Also contains a penguin and an assassin. Sometimes I love experimental. Normally though, including this time, I just don’t get it.

Escape to Other Worlds with Science Fiction by Jo Walton

Episode 16 had Jo Walton‘s Escape to Other Worlds with Science Fiction, narrated by Charles Stross. Walton’s created an alternate history for her Small Change series where the Nazis did significantly better than they did in real life. I forget what the point was where that history diverged from ours. I’ve only read Farthing and I have to say I don’t remember it too well. This short story is set in the United States instead of Britain, in the same universe. The United States is somewhat fascist too, from what I can tell. A woman faces a temptation to denounce her employers as closet Jews. Other events happen to show that it could have happened here. And it could have. Interspersed with news headlines, from which the story gets its title. Liked the story. Won’t re-read it.

The Film-makers of Mars by Geoff Ryman

On to Episode 17 with Geoff Ryman’s The Film-makers of Mars. Vampires meet Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series. Very well written, but pretty gimmicky.

First Flight by Mary Robinette Kowal

Episode 18 has the first story I’ve ever read by Mary Robinette Kowal, First Flight. Time travel story that doesn’t add much to the time travel trope, but it is quite well written from the character perspective. Louise is a time traveler because she’s old; time travel only works as far back as a person has been alive. Louise is old enough to have been alive before the Wright brothers first flew. And the time travel company’s investors want to get footage of that historic event. One of the few stories I’ve read with a particularly aged heroine. Recommended.

Four Horsemen, at Their Leisure by Richard Parks

Episode 19 contains Richard Parks‘ Four Horsemen, at Their Leisure, narrated by Mur Lafferty. Definitely not my kind of story. Much like Gregory Benford’s The Final Now, this is also an end-times philosophic bent story. In other words, navel gazing thoughts about the nature of reality. Bleah.

Firstborn by Brandon Sanderson

Episode 20 appears to be the last Tor.com Story Podcast, for the moment at least, and it contains Firstborn by Brandon Sanderson. This is a fairly long old-school style space opera short story. Dennison Crestmar is the son of a high-ranking naval guy, and the 20 years younger brother of Varion Crestmar. Varion’s been off subduing the provinces for decades as a military commander that never loses. Dennison is expected to be like his brother, but doesn’t have the skill. He loses all the time. The ending is absolute crap though.

Obviously, I didn’t have a lot to say about most of these. I thought most of the podcasts were pretty uninspiring. Having listened to a few Mur Lafferty-produced Escape Pod episodes, I think they are much better work than these done for Tor.com. The story selection was limited to ones that had already appeared on Tor.com, so I can’t really fault her for that. But her chit-chat on Escape Pod is much more engaging than anything she did on Tor.com. And the audio quality of the narration for this podcast was generally sub-par. Authors aren’t always the best choices for reading their own work. Plus, in more than a few cases, someone should have edited the flubs out. If the Tor.com Story Podcast comes back from hiatus, I will probably only check it out to see if the production has improved.

Grabbed the second issue of Lightspeed Magazine last night. I’ve been reading Miéville’s Kraken but I’m finding it to be not something I’m enjoying. Surprising, in fact. So I figured some short fiction would be a good palate cleanser.

Overall I thought this issue was a little meatier than the first issue. I liked it, but the first issue definitely felt light, particularly with the non-fiction. This issue upgrades that portion. The non-fiction is still much less substantial than I’d like, but it’s an improvement.

All these items will be up at Lightspeed’s web site by the end of the month. I paid for my issue, so I get to read them a bit early.

No Time Like the Present by Carol Emshwiller

Carol Emshwiller’s The Mount is one of my favorite novels of all time. I’ve also seen her talk a few times at WisCon, and she impressed me every time. This is one of her more normal science fiction stories. It’s a time travel story told from a little bit of an unusual viewpoint; the people in the time being visited. Shows very much how odd people from the future would be.

Top Five Time Travel Nightmares by Carol Pinchefsky

A very unsatisfying review of five time travel issues that repeatedly come up. Stuff anyone who’s thought about time travel at all will have thought of.

Manumission by Tobias S. Buckell

Kind of an origin story for Pepper, a character who appeared in Buckell’s Xenowealth series (Crystal Rain, etc.). He’s a bionic man doing what bionic men do, fight for their masters. Here he has only one memory of himself, that of someone using racial epithets against him. The rest has been wiped by ShinnCo, which has booby-trapped Pepper’s equipment so that he’ll die if he doesn’t follow their orders. Can he win his freedom by killing for them? Nothing particularly deep here, but a well written plot and I don’t think I could ever get enough of Pepper. He’s super human but not so much that I thought he’d necessarily win.

You Are the Person You Are Now by The Evil Monkey (of Neurotopia

Non-fiction piece about what can be done with memory and what we know about it. I’d say about Wikipedia level of detail.

The Zeppelin Conductors’ Society Annual Gentlemen’s Ball by Genevieve Valentine

Kind of a nice take on zeppelins. Along with like a billion other things in steampunk, they’ve been somewhat fetishized. Here Valentine looks at the people who make them go. The conductors of the story work inside the helium balloons, which (like astronauts) makes them taller and weaker. As noted in the author profile that follows, a lot of the industrial age society that steampunk centers itself on was built on the backs of workers who didn’t get to see the benefits of its wonders.

A Very Brief History of Airships by Gregory K. H. Bryant

Another Wikipedia level overview of the history of dirigibles. Interesting, but only because I know very little about the machines.

…For a Single Yesterday by George R. R. Martin

A third story where memories play a part. Emshwiller’s story also uses memory, but in a more minor way. This is post-nuclear-war survivors making their way. Although this is not a David Brin Postman or Cormac McCarthy Road style man trying to hold onto humanity or civilization in the face of relentless barbarity. The conflict here is really about moving on when your life has been upended. One of the members of a small hippie like commune has lost the love of his life in the blast, and now he has to find a way to go on.

Music Is Science Fiction: An Interview With The Lisps by Desirina Boskovich

So the Lisps have made a steampunk musical or some such thing. I don’t know much about the musical and this didn’t really tell me. So it’s really really hard to get interested in the behind-the-music interview with the band that created it. But if you’ve seen one of the 5 showings (or maybe series of showings, I’m not sure), maybe this’ll be your thing. I wish the writer had established more of a baseline of this musical.

One minor improvement. This time around the cover art inside wasn’t fuzzy when displayed on my Nook. Maybe they have a better resolution for the cover, or maybe Nook improved image display with the 1.4 release. Either way, it was nice.

Title: Lightspeed Magazine
Issue: July 2010 (#2)
Editors: John Joseph Adams (fiction) / Andrea Kail (non-fiction)

Reunions

Richard Ford reads John Cheever’s Reunion. Charlie, a young man, seeks out his father, divorced from his mother for three years, and who he doesn’t know very well. It’s a little bit of idolization. He wants a photograph to remember the meeting. They meet for lunch. But why his parents are divorced becomes apparent, and Charlie becomes disillusioned with he father. It’s a very poignant story, but not in a maudlin make you cry kind of way. More in a made me irritable way. On behalf of Charlie. I get the impression that Charlie isn’t irritated though. That’s okay, I’ll do it on his behalf.

Download (link is to New Yorker hosted MP3 and was valid as of the time of posting)

The Dating Game

Junot Díaz reads his own story, How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie), though the selection was picked and discussed by Edwidge Danticat. The reading comes from an older C.D. of New Yorker fiction. I’m not quite sure what I think of this story. The style doesn’t bother me; it’s told as instructions from one person to another about how to date girls. As Danticat notes in their discussion, it’s a boy story (as opposed to a girl story), and it’s reflective more of a young man’s hopes rather than reality. The race, class, and sexual politics in it are very different than what I grew up with. I never even considered inviting someone over when my parents were gone in order to hopefully get some. But I was shyer and less bold than the narrator of this story. Interesting, but inconclusive.

Download (link is to New Yorker hosted MP3 and was valid as of the time of posting)

Note: These were distributed as podcasts during March. It appears that the show airs on the radio somewhat differently.

An Hour with Sherman Alexie

I don’t often get emotional over my reading. I’m just not that kind of guy. But listening last year to Sherman Alexie read his book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian got me sniffling pretty damn good. As short as it is, it’s still a long investment in time and money. Selected Shorts gives you something free, and requires less than an hour of listening. Click on it now. Download. Listen. This is amazing! What is it? Well, it has an interview with Sherman, and he reads a few of his poems. Those parts are good. But what’s great is a reading of Alexie’s story Breaking and Entering by actor B.D. Wong. I only know Wong as the psychologist on Law & Order: S.V.U., but he’s got a number of awards for acting on Broadway. And his reading here is incredible! A Chinese American reading a story written by a Native American about a Native American mistaken for a white man who kills a black teenager. Kid breaks into a house he thinks is empty. In a scuffle, the owner kills him. The story is from his book War Dances. Did I mention it’s amazing?

Download (link is to NPR-hosted MP3 and was valid as of the time of posting)

Mysterious Circumstances

The first story in this episode is Thomas Walsh’s Double Check. It’s an old pulp story from Black Mask in 1933. Detective investigates threats against a bank executive. The banks is on the rocks, and so there are lots of people who stand to lose money because of the guy. Lots of people with reason to threaten or off him. Gangsters get involved. Explosions! A complicit woman! Wisecracks! And a really good reading by gravelly voiced James Naughton.

The second piece is Dave Barry‘s False Alarm from his book Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up, read by Larry Keith. Some typical Dave Barry bits about how he can mess up his home alarm system repeatedly. I’m not really sure why, but Dave Barry humor doesn’t really do a lot for me. Including this story.

Download (link is to NPR-hosted MP3 and was valid as of the time of posting)

Creatures of the Night

Vampire stories!

The first story is Stephen King’s Popsy published in Nightmares and Dreamscapes and read by Michael Imperioli. Sheridan is a gambler who got in too deep. Now he grabs little kids for a pedophile who pays off Sheridan’s marker to the mob. In this case, he tells a crying kid in the mall that he can help find the kid’s Popsy. Only Popsy finds him. This one didn’t really do a whole lot for me. It’s obvious where it’s going. It isn’t really scary. It isn’t really that creepy. Maybe I’m just desensitized.

Second story is a spoof written by host Isaiah Sheffer called Hotel Transylvania, read by the author. Here’s the thing. Spoofs written by outsiders have to be really good. Sheffer’s piece just comes off as condescension toward the horror genre.

Third story is Night Calls written and read by Lisa Fugard. Not a vampire story. A man cares for a rare heron in the bird sanctuary where he works. His daughter visits. The heron gets out. The father searches for the heron. Very melancholy tale.

Download (link is to NPR-hosted MP3 and was valid as of the time of posting)

The Things They Carried

A replay of an earlier performance of Tim O’Brien‘s The Things They Carried from the collection of the same title, read by Dylan Baker. This is a Viet Nam war story. I’d never heard of it before, but it sure shows up as important in my Google searches. It’s less a war is hell story than a war is soul sucking story. At the beginning, O’Brien describes a platoon of soldiers by what they carry. At the beginning it’s stuff like P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs. Gradually, the things he describes them carrying become more and more immaterial, poise, and dignity. Really amazing story, and you really do get to know the men by the things they carry. Baker’s reading is superb.

Download (link is to NPR-hosted MP3 and was valid as of the time of posting)

Lost and Found

Four stories this episode.

First up is Etgar Keret‘s Good Intentions read by Leonard Nimoy. I believe the story was written originally in Hebrew and translated to English by Miriam Schlesinger. It can be found in his book The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God & Other Stories. A hit man who thinks he has no feeling anymore finds out he can’t kill a man he admires. This felt very trite and unoriginal.

The second story is actually an essay by Colson Whitehead called Lost and Found from The Colossus of New York. It’s read by Alec Baldwin. I really liked this essay. Both Sag Harbor and this essay center on the place of memory and nostalgia in our lives. From saying that there are eight million New Yorks (or more), one for each person who experiences the city, to nailing down the experience where a place becomes fixed to a viewer at first view, Whitehead nail some really common experiences of place. Mix that in with some personal attachment to New York makes for something special. I think having a native New Yorker read this helps.

Third story: My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid from At the Bottom of the River, read by Laurine Towler. Unfortunately, I didn’t get this at all. It’s a mother and daughter story, but I only get that because Isaiah Sheffer says it is and the narrator keeps referring to her mother. This story is above my pay grade.

And last story is Charles Johnson‘s A Soldier for the Crown performed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson. The story appears in Johnson’s collection Soulcatcher and Other Stories. First off, I had no idea about the history of the Black Loyalists during the American Revolution. This is something my history classes never covered, and I’m kind of pissed and kind of ashamed I haven’t learned about it before. Johnson’s story is about a fifteen year old slave who adopts the name Alexander Freeman after abandoning an American master to fight for the British along with a brother and a cousin, neither of whom survive the war. Alexander Freeman does though. It’s second person, which would be tougher to read in print, but works well in audio format. The story is good, though possibly that’s partly my thrill at learning something interesting about American history that I should have known.

Download (link is to NPR-hosted MP3 and was valid as of the time of posting)