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(yes, the timing seems weird on this because I thought I had finished the issue, I picked up "Witches Abroad" and read that, and then today went back and read the book review column in the back of this issue.)
23) Asimov's, May/June 2018
I have mixed feelings about how Asimov's is going, these days. They often tend to buy serialized short stories, and I've been happy with that when I liked the author. (Oh how I wish Kage Baker were still alive! They published all her cyborg stories, and I loved seeing those characters return, Joseph and Louis especially. In one story I swear they almost seem to be spoofing Good Omens style, with Joseph as Crowley and Louis as the sort of kyewt-boi Aziraphale in the style of sixteen-year-old fangirls. Amusing possibly only to me and other fanfic readers! But I digress...) But lately they've hooked into a lot of serieses from particular authors who's styles are very flat on the characterization. I apparently need be able to relate to someone in a story, go figure. So when there's a high percentage of those all appearing in the same issue it gets kind of dull for me. I have to admit, when those "Terminus" stories appear (they are always in pairs) I generally skim through them very quickly. I mean, it makes sense, that they feel like sitting in an airport terminal, because these are the back stories for a bunch of characters waiting in a spaceport terminal, but... I avoid talking to people on planes, too.
It gets particularly frustrating, though, when you see something almost make a mark and then fall short by really just not trying. There were some weird omissions in "The Wandering Warriors" by Rick Wilber and Alan Smale, for instance. It was all pretty self-indulgent: A baseball team from the late 1940s goes back to ancient Rome, summoned by a spell or prayer of an empress (hand-wavy bullshit) and plays ball in the Colosseum. But what really got me was when, near the end of the story, we hear that the team has actually been touring towns around Rome, whereas up until that point it had appeared that they'd been kept in the one training building in the city. It's so patchy and obvious that they didn't even try to make the story flow. I can't EVEN. Sheesh, if you don't want to take the effort to think about it yourself, post it for a few million fans to read over and pay attention to their comments before you publish. AO3 works great for this, guys. Especially as they're clearly writing fanfic for the series that the main character viewpoint is from, the baseball player/spy that Asimov's has published a bunch of (similarly emotionally flat) stories about. Frankly, if they'd shoved him into a background position or eliminated him entirely and focused on the other main viewpoint character, Quentin, I'd have been happier. Quentin is one of the two black players on the team, and they have to pretend they are from Cuba, when they are touring the US, and still can't get served in a lot of restaurants in the '40s. The authors took the time to point out that the ancient Romans seem way less racist, but don't actually find a way to work this in so that anything happens with it in the story. There was this kernel of possibility there, if they'd only taken time to explain things more (random god nobody's ever heard of moves them back in time in response to prayer and then it all doesn't work anyway? What??) and develop some character and emotional depth.
However, and in some balance to that, I just finished reading the book review and was kind of interested in how the reviewer (Norman Spinrad), instead of coming out and saying he hated this or liked that, instead wrote an essay in which he mentioned all three books he had to read, but the essay was really about the evolution of time travel and alternate reality/alternate history stories, beginning with Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court" and touching on "The Man In The High Castle" by Philip K. Dick. The books he had to read were "Tropic of Kansas" (Christopher Brown), "The Genius Plague" (David Walton) and "The Berlin Project" (Gregory Benford), and by the end he made me want to read "The Berlin Project" and avoid "Tropic of Kansas" at all costs, without ever actually saying anything bad about Brown. So, yes, Norman Spinrad, everybody. (And because I am me, here's my crit on his crit: I do notice that he repeated himself - yes, I am ADD, I got it the first time, move on - and also that he used the same word - "chez" - many times. He does read in French, so I should not presume to criticize the context in which he uses it, but I thought the French phrase we usually use in English to mean 'in the style of' was 'a la'. All in all, though, not much crit on an essay that enthralled me.)
23) Asimov's, May/June 2018
I have mixed feelings about how Asimov's is going, these days. They often tend to buy serialized short stories, and I've been happy with that when I liked the author. (Oh how I wish Kage Baker were still alive! They published all her cyborg stories, and I loved seeing those characters return, Joseph and Louis especially. In one story I swear they almost seem to be spoofing Good Omens style, with Joseph as Crowley and Louis as the sort of kyewt-boi Aziraphale in the style of sixteen-year-old fangirls. Amusing possibly only to me and other fanfic readers! But I digress...) But lately they've hooked into a lot of serieses from particular authors who's styles are very flat on the characterization. I apparently need be able to relate to someone in a story, go figure. So when there's a high percentage of those all appearing in the same issue it gets kind of dull for me. I have to admit, when those "Terminus" stories appear (they are always in pairs) I generally skim through them very quickly. I mean, it makes sense, that they feel like sitting in an airport terminal, because these are the back stories for a bunch of characters waiting in a spaceport terminal, but... I avoid talking to people on planes, too.
It gets particularly frustrating, though, when you see something almost make a mark and then fall short by really just not trying. There were some weird omissions in "The Wandering Warriors" by Rick Wilber and Alan Smale, for instance. It was all pretty self-indulgent: A baseball team from the late 1940s goes back to ancient Rome, summoned by a spell or prayer of an empress (hand-wavy bullshit) and plays ball in the Colosseum. But what really got me was when, near the end of the story, we hear that the team has actually been touring towns around Rome, whereas up until that point it had appeared that they'd been kept in the one training building in the city. It's so patchy and obvious that they didn't even try to make the story flow. I can't EVEN. Sheesh, if you don't want to take the effort to think about it yourself, post it for a few million fans to read over and pay attention to their comments before you publish. AO3 works great for this, guys. Especially as they're clearly writing fanfic for the series that the main character viewpoint is from, the baseball player/spy that Asimov's has published a bunch of (similarly emotionally flat) stories about. Frankly, if they'd shoved him into a background position or eliminated him entirely and focused on the other main viewpoint character, Quentin, I'd have been happier. Quentin is one of the two black players on the team, and they have to pretend they are from Cuba, when they are touring the US, and still can't get served in a lot of restaurants in the '40s. The authors took the time to point out that the ancient Romans seem way less racist, but don't actually find a way to work this in so that anything happens with it in the story. There was this kernel of possibility there, if they'd only taken time to explain things more (random god nobody's ever heard of moves them back in time in response to prayer and then it all doesn't work anyway? What??) and develop some character and emotional depth.
However, and in some balance to that, I just finished reading the book review and was kind of interested in how the reviewer (Norman Spinrad), instead of coming out and saying he hated this or liked that, instead wrote an essay in which he mentioned all three books he had to read, but the essay was really about the evolution of time travel and alternate reality/alternate history stories, beginning with Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court" and touching on "The Man In The High Castle" by Philip K. Dick. The books he had to read were "Tropic of Kansas" (Christopher Brown), "The Genius Plague" (David Walton) and "The Berlin Project" (Gregory Benford), and by the end he made me want to read "The Berlin Project" and avoid "Tropic of Kansas" at all costs, without ever actually saying anything bad about Brown. So, yes, Norman Spinrad, everybody. (And because I am me, here's my crit on his crit: I do notice that he repeated himself - yes, I am ADD, I got it the first time, move on - and also that he used the same word - "chez" - many times. He does read in French, so I should not presume to criticize the context in which he uses it, but I thought the French phrase we usually use in English to mean 'in the style of' was 'a la'. All in all, though, not much crit on an essay that enthralled me.)