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

I liked Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self bunches, but I’m somewhat at a loss to explain why exactly. The best I can say is that there’s a realness to the characters that I connected with, which is somewhat disconcerting because disconnectedness is a running theme throughout the stories. But sincerity in characters isn’t sufficient reason for me to read a book through in just a sitting or two (which is what I did). There’s something more here that I can’t quite figure out. I suspect I’ll see or hear someone else describe why they liked the book so much and I’ll have an a-ha moment. This is well worth reading.

The first adjective that comes to mind to about the characters in Danielle Evans book is that they are sad and melancholy. The stories feature mostly middle class blacks in not quite everyday situations, but not exactly extraordinary ones either. I’m not sure how to classify that. For instance, in one story a returned soldier from Iraq babysits his ex-girlfriend’s kid, but tells a story where he’s the girl’s father and it spins beyond his control. Because these aren’t tales of extraordinary people, everything they do is understandable, even when it’s clear they aren’t exactly doing the right thing. Or even that they are doing the right thing for themselves. But all very human.

What makes them seem sad is that they are very disconnected from their families or loved ones. They try to make connections during these episodes to fill a sort of sad void, but they mostly fail. In Virgins, two girls head into the city to spend a night clubbing after the local high school boys annoy them. They want someone to treat them well. The thing is, the attention of the city men is not effectively more meaningful, though they don’t readily recognize it. The story is filled with abandonment. Both girls leave Michael, their guy friend and escort, Jasmine leaves Erica, Erica leaves Jasmine, Erica leaves Michael (again). Looking for connections, but leave the ones they have. Other stories include the disconnect in ways other than abandonment.

Race in the United States infuses the stories, several of them explicitly. They don’t confront overt racism, the David Duke kind. Somewhat more subtle but still damaging prejudice appears. One story follows two girls dealing with reproductive issues: a white college student makes money selling her eggs, but no one wants to spend thousands for an egg donor with brown skin. Another features a school that is nominally integrated, yet the students from the whiter, richer neighborhood still receive preferential treatment. The smart black girl still does well, and might possibly be used by the administration as an exhibit for their fairness. But each character isn’t just a black person, but also a soldier, or a woman, or a parent, etc. Intersectionality is the term I would guess fits best, though I’m not knowledgeable about the sociological term to be quoted on that. Still, this is more complex than being about black life.

That’s about all I can say coherently (and that’s a stretch even) at the moment. Maybe after I see some other blog reviews something will pop into my head and I’ll leave a comment or two. I expect to see a few laudatory reviews, as it showed up on quite a few Currently Reading side bars during my searches just now.

Other blogged reviews:

• Postbourgie
• [tk] Book Bites
• 50 Books for 2010

Title: Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self
Author: Danielle Evans
Imprint / publisher: Riverhead / Penguin
Format: Advance readers copy
Length: 229 p.
Publication date: September 2010
ISBN-13: 978-1-59448-769-9

I received an advance copy of this book from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program in return for providing a review of the book on LibraryThing. In accordance with my policy on review copies, I will donate $17.13 (the cost of the book on Amazon) to the A.L.S.A.

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

The Best Short Stories of 1915 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story is the first of the series that eventually became the Best American set of series of books. It’s in the public domain and available on Google Books. I grabbed it because I wanted to see what was considered the best way back then. I did not get or appreciate a few of the stories in the 1969 edition, but they were well-crafted. 1915 is another thing though. Several of the stories appear to be selected not for the quality of the story, but for the political content. I’m quite a fan of stories being explicitly political, but in at least a couple of cases in this collection, the entries had little else going for them. They were mostly ham-handed in their treatment of the politics as well.

Some craft things I noticed. Lots of stories were of the form where one person in the story tells another person a story. Today we’d see this done with a flashback or other method. In addition, three of those were of the form where the person tells a story about themself, but doesn’t reveal that until the end of the story.

The themes fit a couple of political and moral notes: respect for veterans, America is the land of the free, immigrants are good for our country, and most of all, right living will get a person ahead.

Did not enjoy this collection, and I probably won’t read the subsequent editions edited by Edward O’Brien even though a bunch of them are public domain and free.

The Water-Hole by Maxwell Struthers Burt

Back from a stint in Arizona, a man gets into a discussion with his drinking buddies about the nature of bravery. Is it instinctual or is it conditioning? To illustrate, the Arizona man tells a story of love, where a woman’s husband and another who loves her trek out to the desert in search of gold. The husband is a boor, and jeopardizes their lives as well. And yet, the other man saves his life (instinctively!). And in a preview of many other stories, at the end his buddies figure out the Arizona man is telling a story about himself.

The Wake by Donn Byrne

Wealthy farmer marries a girl, because her father had given her to him. Only thing was, she was in love with another named Kennedy, and he with her. After the marriage, she wastes away in the farmer’s house in quick order, and Kennedy vows revenge. The farmer has an interesting reaction. Other than the ugly morals of the time, this was a good story until the end, where it kind of falls apart.

Chautonville by Will Levington Comfort

Russian generals hire a folk singer, Chautonville, to inspire the men on the front lines to fight. Despite his fear of dying, he sings to them.

La Dernière Mobilisation by W. A. Dwiggins

Kind of a cool story about soldiers mobilizing at the end of a battle. Very short.

The Citizen by James Francis Dwyer

At the swearing in ceremony where he takes on U.S. citizenship, a Russian immigrant remembers back to his days in Russia when he found his Dream (capital D) of freedom in America. Very didactic.

Whose Dog—? by Frances Gregg

Young boys torment a homeless guy at the dock, where his life isn’t very valuable. Depressing.

Life by Ben Hecht

A young playwright comes across a living metaphor, and the metaphor is him. And it’s ugly.

T.B. by Fannie Hurst

Young woman works in a basement sale department under arc-lights. At night she goes to dance halls with a beau. Her roommate constantly chastises her. Then she happens on a tuberculosis exhibit and clinic and begins to think she has it because bad air and dancing gives you T.B. Also, men at dance halls are jerks who will drop you at the slightest hint of trouble.

Mr. Eberdeen’s House by Arthur Johnson

Ghost story that I didn’t quite understand. Visitor to the Eberdeen house has visions that put him in place of a ghost he sees.

Vengeance Is Mine by Virgil Jordan

An Allied pilot is assigned to check out the battlefield before the troops engage with the enemy. There’s no sign of the Germans, so the pilot lands, and can’t take off again for ugly reasons.

The Weaver Who Clad the Summer by Harris Merton Lyon

A parable about finding contentment in one’s Work, even if it won’t last but the moment (as the work of a sculptor or painter would). Also, another story where the speaker tells a story to another listener in the story, and at the end the speaker says, and it was about me!

Heart of Youth by Walter J. Muilenburg

A young farming family is faced with moving west to a place with dryer air for the health of the family’s mother. The young son wrestles with whether to stay behind and work the old farm on his own so that the family won’t have to sell it. Prepare yourself for the maudlin touching moment at the end.

The End of the Path by Newbold Noyes

Two young lovers are separated when the woman suddenly becomes enamored of her religion and joins a convent. Feeling particularly put upon, the young man enters the chapel and stabs a statue of the Virgin Mary to express how the church torments him. At that exact same moment in the convent, his former betrothed falls dead! Yet another story within a story where the storyteller exclaims and it’s about me!

The Whale and the Grasshopper by Seumas O’Brien

Decency as explained by a whale and a grasshopper. Parables. I need them explained to me.

In Berlin by Mary Boyle O’Reilly

Short short. Woman on train behaves oddly. Girls on train giggle at her behavior, thinking her worth a laugh. Man on trains explains to chagrined girls why woman behaves oddly. It has to do with the war.

The Waiting Years by Katharine Metcalf Roof

Unrequited, and very very creepy, love. Different standards from day. I get it. But reading about a man of 24 lusting after a girl of 15 is off-putting. Particularly because the man doesn’t think of the girl as a woman, which I would sorta get under the standards of the day even though I have a hard time thinking of a 15 year old as a woman. But he keeps calling her a child, and expressing his desire for her, though he’s willing to wait for her to reach adulthood first. Squick!

Zelig by Benjamin Rosenblatt

A Russian Jew comes to America for his grandson’s Bar Mitsva to keep his wife happy. He’s cranky and crabby and wants to go back to Russia, and bring the grandson back as well, even though in Russia he could not go to college because he’s Jewish. I’m missing the message in the story.

The Survivors by Elsie Singmaster

A stubborn ex-Confederate soldier spends the rest of his life trying to ruin the Memorial Day parades populated by the Union ex-soliders in his hometown by dressing in his Confederate uniform, despite his pre-war friendship with the men of the town. Another very didactic story.

The Yellow Cat by Wilbur Daniel Steele

This was actually a pretty interesting story, though hard to follow at times. A sailing vessel is discovered unmanned at sea, and the sailor who boards it to bring it home starts thinking there’s a ghost on the ship that turns into a yellow cat when he’s not looking.

The Bounty-Jumper by Mary Synon

One man’s shame at having been a bounty jumper during the Civil War, not because of greed but because of cowardice, and his vow to atone for his wrong.

Title: The Best Short Stories of 1915 and Yearbook of the American Short Story
Editor: Edward J. O’Brien
Series: Best American Short Stories; 1915
Imprint / publisher: Small, Maynard & Company (scanned to Google Books)
Format: ePub electronic book
Length: 274 p. (not including supplementary materials)
Publication date: 2009 (originally 1916)

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

I have a theory about why I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I enjoyed another entry in in Akashic Books noir series, Delhi Noir. Seattle Noir solid, but it didn’t grab me quite like the earlier anthology.

Theory: I have a lot of biased assumptions about Delhi that made the setting very foreboding. But being Seattle born and raised, I know this place much better and have a much harder time seeing its seedy underbelly. Oh, we have our problems. In its early days, Seattle could hold it’s own against any up and coming city. But today this is not a place where crime runs rampant, the cops are on the take, or organized crime takes a cut of everything.

In addition, with a few exceptions, the stories don’t mine the reputations and possibilities of the Seattle neighborhoods in which they’re set. Or they do use genteel areas which limit the crime possibilities to a fairly narrow set. Where’s Lake City, or Aurora, White Center, Rainier Valley? Conversely, a couple of the stories set in places I wouldn’t have expected to be so scary turned out to be quite good at imparting a dark mood.

Blood Tide by Thomas P. Hopp (Duwamish)

The anthology starts out in an area just south of downtown. The Duwamish river has been dredged and shaped into a shipping hub, surrounded by the medium heavy industries that like close proximity to easy international freight. The land once belonged to the Duwamish, a branch of the Salish tribe that inhabited the area when Europeans moved in. Unrecognized, the Duwamish dwindled in number without a reservation or a dedicated tribal government to keep them together. The tribe persevered even so. Hopp’s story interacts more with a few Duwamish members rather than the Duwamish area, which doesn’t have the distinctly Native American feel implied by the text. The crime is that of red tide poisoning, where someone has distilled the poisonous substances from the tide and used it to murder someone. The hero is Peyton McKean, a virologist of some sort. He stars in Hopp’s self-published novel The Jihad Virus. He has a journalist sidekick who comes running to write up McKean’s exploits in mutual symbiosis. While sufficiently noirish, it’s utterly predictable and clunkily written. Good for bringing some exposure to the Duwamish cause, however.

Promised Tulips by Bharti Kirchner (Wallingford)

Wallingford is not a neighborhood I would associate with dreaded crime. The essence of noir (I.M.H.O.), is the ominous knowledge that someone is going to get screwed, and that I both don’t want to watch and can’t help watching. A professional gardener who lives in Wallingford (this certainly fits the area) imagines what could have happened to her best friend who has disappeared, leaving behind a less than upset social climbing husband. The location is not dreadful, but it inspires a quietness that allows a person to think a lot, expanding worry into something huge. It’s all around a very good story.

Golden Gardens by Stephan Magcosta (Ballard)

This is another story that manages to be ominous despite the idyllic location. Magcosta uses Golden Gardens Park to set a tale of emotional revenge. The park’s beach isn’t remote, but it’s secluded from residences by the railroad and a steep bluff. Consequently, if you wanted to kill someone without being bothered by passersby, Golden Gardens wouldn’t be the worst place to do it. A Hispanic woman distraught over her soldier son’s death in Iraq wants to avenge him on the first convenient Middle Eastern looking person she can find, a cabbie. An ugly, inevitable end packs a lot of emotion. Recommended.

The Center of the Universe by Robert Lopresti (Fremont)

Fremont is yet another area that isn’t particularly seedy. It features a weird combination of left-wing free-thinking and good old crass American commercialism. Lopresti really nails the vibe of the neighborhood through the eyes of a somewhat mentally ill homeless person. He can’t always tell the difference between the true and the false already, and Fremont’s dichotomy doesn’t make things any easier. In the middle of this, our guy thinks he sees a girl get murdered, and the guys who did it to boot. Another recommended story.

Blue Sunday by Kathleen Alcalá (Central District)

Alcalá’s story doesn’t really work as noir for me. Someone’s gonna get screwed, but it happens right at the beginning so there’s little in the way of menace afterward. A couple of Iraq soldiers on leave party it up and get drunk when they run into a cop all to eager to suspect the worst of minorities. Alternates between scenes of the soldier recovering from his police encounter in the hospital and scenes of him handling Iraqis roughly. Well worth reading as a portrait of how racial bias fucks us up, and it’s an issue that comes up often in the Central District.

The Taskmasters by Simon Wood (Downtown)

The first of four stories where the person who’s going to get screwed is being set up to take a fall for the unscrupulous. A bar brawler gets taken in by an underground group called the Taskmasters, whose ostensible reason for existing is as a band of vigilantes, righting wrongs ignored by the police. They have one method: they decide someone is guilty and execute them. Sounds like a 70s T.V. movie plot. Predictable. Not a lot of downtown flavor. And I didn’t get a feeling of peril.

What Price Retribution? by Patricia Harrington (Capitol Hill)

A half mile from my place is a steep hillside that separates the Capitol Hill neighborhood from my Eastlake home base. Between Interstate 5 and the incline, there’s only a few streets connecting the areas, at the north and south end of this bluff. However, there’s a couple of stair climbs that lead from us to them, which pass under wooded branches so dense that it’s dark in the daytime during the height of summer. Among those trees is a homeless camp according to Harrington’s story. When a homeless guy gets the crap beat out of him, the Mayor of the camp, an erstwhile cop, sobers up enough to seek revenge on the drug dealer. This one is great, not so much because I wanted to see the dealer live, but because the revenge could get really bad. (Though why a big time dealer would try to sell to penniless homeless folks in the first place is a little fuzzy.)

Till Death Do Us … by Curt Colbert (Belltown)

The second story of set ‘em up to take a fall variety. 1940s Jake Rossiter stars as a P.I. who takes a bad domestic case because he needs the money. Coincidentally within minutes of each other, both sides of a divorce case hire Rossiter to prevent the other spouse from murdering them. A fun story, but not in a dreadful way.

The Best View In Town by Paul S. Piper (Leschi)

Piper’s story is the first of two commit a crime against someone close to you for the money entries in the book. Here a drunk loser brings home a girl, only to find out the girl’s grandfather grew up next door, where he supposedly stashed away valuables that the family never recovered. And she’s damned pissed the new owners seem to have maybe found them. Just a little too predictable. Good portrait of a loser though. I liked that.

The Wrong End Of A Gun by R. Barri Flowers (South Lake Union)

The third of the set ‘em up to take a fall stories, and by far the worst story in the collection. Dude wants to get with a girl just because she’s hot, despite hundreds of warning signs that would make even the most besotted 17 year old run. And he’s a veteran of divorce court, who’s world weary tone should give him a clue. Flowers uses some awfully trite physical descriptions too: Her complexion was like maple syrup over buttered waffles. A) Food descriptions of skin tone are tiresome. B) Maple syrup I can see as a skin tone. Smooth and brown. On top of buttered waffles? Have you ever looked at buttered waffles after pouring syrup on them? They are blotchy, greasy and pockmarked. This is not attractive. Tasty and delicious in a waffle, but not so much for a complexion.

Paper Son by Brian Thornton (Chinatown)

Thornton writes historical noir set in 1889, when Seattle wasn’t exactly welcoming to its Chinese immigrants. One of them washes up dead on Mercer Island, and a rookie Treasury Agent investigates. Triads and prostitution and drug running and multiple missing people! And I definitely didn’t see where the ending was … er … going to end.

The Magnolia Bluff by Skye Moody (Magnolia)

The second of the set up people you know for money stories. Circus clown midgets have a rivalry that spills into really good resentment when one of them makes it to Hollywood. Magnolia as a setting, although described accurately, didn’t lend itself to bad shit happening.

Sherlock’s Opera by Lou Kemp (Waterfront)

Moriarity’s adoring little brother Jacob lures Sherlock Holmes to Seattle to take his revenge on the sleuth. Why? Why?

Food for Thought by G. M. Ford (Pioneer Square)

The final story is the last of the set folks up to take a fall ones, though this one works out a little differently. But again, a broke P.I. takes a domestic muscle case that he’d rather not, because he needs the money. A short, enjoyable story that broke the mold of the previous three.

A few standout stories but overall not as good as I’d hoped.

One other blogged review:

• Bookgasm

Title: Seattle Noir
Editor: Curt Colbert
Cover creator: Jon Resh (designer)
Series: Akashic Noir
Imprint / publisher: Akashic Books
Format: Paperback
Length: 268 p.
Publication date: June 2009
ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-80-4

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

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)