C.C. Finlay (editor) Fantasy & Science Fiction 752 (2020)
The Fantasy & Science Fiction Twitter account has taken to bestowing hearts upon the links I've posted to my reviews of previous issues, which is nice, but has additionally fostered a certain sense of dread regarding this issue, the current one. I picked it up because I saw Matthew Hughes' name on the cover, then immediately realised that I would now feel obliged to say nice things about the magazine, which would be awkward if it turned out to be awful.
Thankfully it isn't. There were a couple of stories which weren't to my liking to greater or lesser degrees, but the general standard is exceptionally high, and enough so for the quality of the good stuff to fully eclipse that of material which wasn't to my taste. For the sake of balance, I'll get my objections out of the way first.
How to Burn Down the Hinterlands by Lyndsie Manusos is probably the only contribution I didn't really enjoy on any level. It has dramatic potential, although I found the author's claim of there being a lot of nods to fantasy worlds, tropes and video games that I love in it massively off-putting, particularly once we encounter entire paragraphs of faux-dramatic non-sentences impersonating a portentous voice-over of the kind usually describing the sort of exhausting CGI overload you get in superhero movies wherein Fatso the Human Flying Saucer breaks open the eternity stone and becomes as one with the reality interface of an entire universe; and usually describing this because Hinterlands seems to do just two things - that being one, the other being the scene where the music swells and we zoom in upon a craggy frown vowing to do this not just for its children, but also for its children's children, so mote it be.
Everything paused, stood still. My vision was speckled with glinting metal, shards and liquid drops of shine. The sword's essence waited there. It was not a person. It was an intangible thing, indescribable. Waiting for me.
You see, waiting for me doesn't really work as a sentence in isolation. They're just three words staring forlornly at the space just ahead where the comma should have been. Then there are plenty of other similarly inert constructions effecting to resemble portentous expectorations which work better as titles than as sentences. It's as though someone has devised a written equivalent of the art of Jim Lee - an endless swirl of ninja daggers, cinematic bodies in billowing togas, and grimacing faces with far too much cross-hatching.
I had fewer problems with Nick DiChario's beautifully written La Regina Ratto, but something nevertheless didn't sit right with me and this urban fable. Possibly it's that our main character shagging a human-sized female rodent sails a little too close to furry territory for my liking, although the parallel seems most likely unintentional
Then somewhat on the cusp we have Sarina Dorie's A Civilised and Orderly Zombie Apocalypse per School Regulations. Dorie is introduced as author of something called Womby's School for Wayward Witches - a series, naturally - which seemed ominous; and this story begins as an apparent response to the question, what if we combined Harry Potter with zombies? As a proposal, it was never going to score bigly in this house, and makes me think of Who fanfic types who list Douglas Adams as their greatest inspiration; and then about halfway through, we come to this:
In the news, they had reported that a newly developed serum could arrest the side effects of becoming infected. I just had to keep these students safe long enough for the police and paramedics to arrive and deliver the antidote.
Right. Thanks for that. My expectations weren't great, but this reads like the sort of heavy handed improvised exposition one finds in stories written by persons still in school, and while Dorie is herself a school teacher, I'm thinking ninth grade here.
Yet, despite such objections, a trace of Joyce Grenfell politely failing to keep her class from anarchy creeps in towards the end, perhaps revealing that for which Dorie had been gunning all along, and the last few pages deliver a very satisfying if admittedly gruesome conclusion. Consider me impressed.
Elsewhere, I have Gregor Hartmann's, On Vapour, Which the Night Condenses down as generally decent; and Nadia Afifi's The Bahrain Underground Bazaar and Cylin Busby's The Homestake Project are both powerfully evocative, although you can somehow tell that Busby also writes children's books.
Theodore McCombs' The Silent Partner is wonderful and reminds me a little of Ray Bradbury. A Tale of Two Witches by Albert E. Cowdrey is exceptionally good, with horror employed as an aspect of the story rather than the whole point, which I really appreciate. It's the third I've read by Cowdrey and I'm yet to be disappointed.
Amman Sabet's, Skipping Stones in the Dark is likewise wonderful. My only criticism would be that through being narrated by an artificial intelligence which observes from a distance, much of what occurs reads like a synopsis, albeit a synopsis for something I would quite happily read if expanded to novella or even novel length with all of the details filled in.
Coming at last to the main attraction, at least for me, Matthew Hughes, The Glooms, is worth the admission price alone. This is the second of his short stories that I've read, and the second to inspire me to the realisation that I really need to buy his books, which is unusual because it isn't ordinarily the sort of thing which would appeal to me - a pseudo mediaeval world of wizards and castles. Hughes writes fantasy like no-one else I've read, with a wit which really draws the reader in; and with genuinely unexpected narrative twists and turns making for a story which defies expectations; and without resorting to the clichés which often make the genre such a chore; and all occupying a plausible magical reality which feels very much as though it works as well under its own steam even after we've finished reading. Oddly, Hughes writing with the texture of daily experience combined with the clarity of what he writes - no easy magical solutions here - reminds me of Stephen Baxter albeit in a very different genre and without Baxter's occasionally overpowering pessimism.
So thankfully, it hasn't been at all difficult finding nice things to say about this issue, given that pleasing most of the people most of the time is nothing to be sniffed at; and additional praise is due for Jerry Oltion's brain-strangling essay, Is Math Real? and the poetry of Beth Cato and Mary Soon Lee, which I say as someone who very rarely connects with poetry.
