Here's my review of the September 2010 issue of Asimov's, before I leave it on the plane in the hopes someone else will find it and enjoy it. (It's a good issue.)

• "Backlash", by Nancy Fulda (novelette) -- A cute time-traveling retired-spy-back-into-service story, which, unusually for the spy genre, features a reasonably accurate portrayal of said spy dealing with PTSD. (PTSD: It's not just nicely-cinematic flashbacks.)
• "The Palace in the Clouds", by Eugene Mirabelli (short story) -- Not to be confused with the cover story, Geoffrey Landis's The Sultan of the Clouds. It posits an aging steampunk Venice-of-the-sky, which makes for some gorgeous imagery, and goes from there. It's either inspired by Hayao Miyazaki, or he should totally make a movie of it, or both -- the image of a slowly-failing flying city and the main characters, a young boy and his aviator uncle, are all tailor-made for his style. As with Miyazaki, you won't find any deep philosophy here, more themes of family and growing up, but that's not a bad thing.
• "Wheat Rust", by Benjamin Crowell (novelette) -- Does a decent job at a story of a generation ship and the people who live there and their divergent cultures, and notably a story whose stakes are much smaller than The Destruction Of The Entire World^WShip! (As you might gather from the name, the main characters are trying to prevent an agrigultural plague.)
• "For Want of a Nail", by Mary Robinette Kowal (short story) -- Another generation ship story, with a bit of interesting generation ship morality, plus some AI morality. AIs used as the collective memory of families over generations.
• "The Sultan of the Clouds", by Geoffrey Landis (novella) -- Geoffrey Landiss is a NASA scientist, so he obviously does a good job with the geophysics of a colony of floating cities on Mars. Thankfully he does it without letting it overwhelm the story, which has some nice bits of character development and some interesting speculation about alternative family structures a la Heinlein.
• "The View from the Other Side: Science Fiction in Non-Western/Non-Anglophone Countries", by Aliette de Bodard (nonfiction) -- A follow-up to Norman Spinrad's obnoxious book review column I complained about back in April. It can be summarized as "why the opinions and perspectives of anyone but white men matter ever 101", and so pretty basic, but probably useful to start educating the clueless. (sigh)

Currently reading: the latest issue of Apex Magazine, Cat Valente's first as fiction editor!

Still going...

Asimov's, August 2010

A particularly arresting cover, IMO. An issue without a novella, which is usually a good sign.

• "Superluminosity", by Alan Wall (short story). Fell immediately and obviously into the category I mentioned yesterday (stories about insecure heterosexual white men, subtype: prove that you love me), and I skimmed it, didn't see anything to disabuse me of my first impression, and punted on it.
• "The Lovely Ugly", by Carol Emshwiller (short story). An... interesting story. (Also, warning, rape triggers.) The viewpoint character is a member of a species which achieved spaceflight and gave it up, and now maintains a studied luddite-ism. It's an interesting viewpoint. They're visited by humans, and the viewpoint character falls in love(? lust? ??) with a female member of the human crew. Lots of stuff to unpack here about race and gender and colonialism and power dynamics. I'm still not sure what I think of it.
• "Crimes, Follies, Misfortunes, and Love", by Ian Creasy (novelette). A non-misogynistic post-apocalypse! The story centers around a bunch of grandmothers in a post-Peak Oil geneology club, basically, which has the ironic problem of having too much information about their ancestors (blogs and Flickr and Twitter and even direct sense-recordings), rather than not enough. Well-characterized and thought-provoking.
• "The Battle of Little Big Science", by Pamela Rentz (short story). Another quiet little story, about one scientist's quest to get her funding for a time machine project renewed by the local tribal council. Also well-characterized and thought-provoking!
• "Warning Label", by Alexander Jablokov (novelette). A Doctorow-esque memetic engineering piece set in a world so full of warning labels that even particularly contagious memes acquire them, Wikipedia [citation needed]-style. The utility of charismatic politicians.
• "The Witch, the Tinman, the Flies", by J.M. Sidorova (short story). A not particularly SFnal but nevertheless affecting story about a geneticist in the Soviet Union and her young apprentice, by a Russian writer.
• "On the Horizon", by Nick Wolven (short story). An odd little story about a former criminal who's been trained to pick up the thoughts and feelings of other criminals, in an unspecified SFnal way, and used as a sort of human bloodhound for criminal activity. Gets a bit of a Dickian paranoid milieu right and ends suitably ambiguously.
• "Slow Boat", by Gregory Norman Bossert (novelette). Gets a geek main character exactly right (and a female geek main character, no less). A skilled corporate hacker wakes up to find herself on the slow boat to Mars (quite literally), and hilarity ensues. Hilarity here being defined as "a competent and clever person stuck in a cargo transport for half a year with only their personal digital assistant for a companion can come up with all manner of interesting revenge".

One advantage of taking the T to and from work every day is that I have a fair bit of reading time. Oddly, though both Asimov's and Analog are published by the same company, presumably printed by the same printer, etc., Pandemonium has only the September issue of the latter and not the former, or I'd have started it already.

Remaining to review: LCRW 25, and New Genre 6, the latter of which I picked up on a whim from Porter Square Books thisThursday morning.

As promised yesterday...

Asimov's, July 2010

A couple good stories, and a nice futuristic cityscape cover.

• "The Other Graces", by Alice Sola Kim (short story). This story, about a young Korean-American woman applying to colleges with the telepathic help of future versions of herself, brought back both fond and not-so-fond memories of being in high school and trying to get into college, and of being in college. I identified with the main character a lot. It also got me to learn at least very basically how to enter Korean hangul into my computer so I could run Google Translate on it. (It turns out that 대황, used as a nonsense syllable throughout the story, translates to 'rhubarb'.) Excellent.
• "Haggle Chips", by Tom Purdom (novelette). It had a promising opening line ("It was a very civilized hijack."), but I got as far as that part where the (needless to say, male) main character was being assigned three women for "emotional regulation" by his captors and punted. Maybe it gets better from there; perhaps I will come back to it later. I'm increasingly running out of interest in SF that exercises the fantasies and fears of white heterosexual men, lately, because I've read it all already.
• "Eddie's Ants", by D.T. Mitenko (short story). Another promising opening line ("Eddie laughs when he finds out what a gun does."), and a bit of a cute premise (a man tries repeatedly and ever more creatively to kill an alien hive mind for stealing his girlfriend), but ultimately it's another plot driven by white heterosexual male insecurity. I came back to it after I'd read the rest of the magazine, and it was okay -- some mildly interesting discussion of human society as a cooperative organism, akin to ants or bees -- but nothing particularly special.
• "The Jaguar House, In Shadow", by Aliette de Bodard (novelette). Set in the universe of her forthcoming "Aztec fantasy" novel Servant of the Underworld (in September), a universe where the Chinese discovered America before Columbus. A fascinating (and fascinatingly alien) set of interlocking religious and political systems, conflicted and sympathetic characters, some meditation on leadership, especially leadership under a corrupt higher leader. From a technical standpoint, it has some continuity issues, which I lay at the feet of the editors mostly, but those are relatively minor. Easily the best thing by her I've read to date (and I feel like there was something besides February's "The Wind-Blown Man", but I can't remember what).
• "Amelia Pillar's Etiquette for the Space Traveller", by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (short story). What is says on the tin. Short. Cute.
• A History of Terraforming, by Robert Reed (novella). I started it but the main character didn't compel me, the main antagonist(?) was a cartoonishly-manipulative female environmentalist straight from Central Casting, and, having skimmed the end, it's more than a bit heavy-handed in its didacticism. Not really worth it.

I'm still awake (Thursday), so I should at least get through the Asimov's...

I'm behind in my reviewing, for whatever that's worth. It's not that I haven't been reading the magazines, though it has been mostly magazines I've been reading -- I've been making ~no progress on my to-read stack of novels. Work has of course been consuming a lot of my energy. Also, more lately, the sleep meds I've been taking, some hours before bed, have been causing me to be a zombie pretty much up until bed. When I can't muster energy to get out of my chair, let alone read or watch TV or write, I can't really have a productive evening to speak of. I took the meds a bit later tonight -- I've been playing around with dosages and timing some (melatonin in the 300-1000 microgram range, nothing heavy-duty, thank goodness), so I'll write as much as I have energy for while I wait for it to kick in. I'm not liking it much, this twilight life, but I go in for the follow-up to my sleep study tomorrow, so hopefully that will point me in more productive directions.

Asimov's, June 2010

A seriously underwhelming issue.

• "The Emperor of Mars", by Allen M. Steele (novelette). I feel like I've read this one before -- pop psychology mixed with SFnal exceptionalism. Basically a young man, working on Mars, suffers the loss of his family and retreats into a universe constructed out of the SF books he's been reading, in which he's the titular emperor, in order to cope. Doesn't condemn his escapism, at least, but nothing hugely special.
• "Petopia", by Benjamin Crowell (short story). A cast-off electronic pet winds up in French-speaking Africa. Some commentary about digital haves and have-nots and so on, and the values different cultures place on things, and a bit of "the Street finds its own uses for technology", but it didn't really grab me.
• "Monkey Do", by Kit Reed (short story). Writer's animal learns to write, outshines writer, hilarity ensues. That's pretty much it.
• "The Peacock Cloak", by Chris Beckett (short story). A bit of an allegory on good and evil, set in a virtual world which recapitulated the Fall -- a dialogue between God and the Devil in SFnal clothing, basically -- and neither hugely novel in its outlook nor particularly deft in its approach, but well-told, and containing some nicely vivid imagery.
• "Voyage to the Moon", by Peter Friend (short story). An odd, arthropod From the Earth to the Moon. It's nicely alien, and it's fun to discover the odd nature of the world and try to understand it along with the characters.
• "Dreadnaught Neptune", by Anna Tambour (short story). I couldn't figure out where this was going, skipped to the end, skimmed the middle, and was still confused. The 1950's milieu that's pretty common in SF short stories doesn't do a lot for me, and this is no exception.
• Earth III by Stephen Baxter (novella). I couldn't get into the last story in this series, and I couldn't get into this one. Meh.

I'm not asleep yet. I'll get through as many reviews as I can tonight and post them, one a day for the next N days, until I run out.

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

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

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

Conveniently, I just picked up the June issue of Asimov's. :-)

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

Without further ado...

Asimov's January 2010

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

Asimov's February 2010

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

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

...or, five things make a post.

This week for me was very full of very little of import to the wider world, so here's bits and pieces of stuff:

1. I'm playing around with ikiwiki as the potential new backend for my blog and liking it a fair bit. (I know co-Iron Blogger spang uses it for her site.) It bills itself as a "wiki compiler", which seems not quite right -- or at least I'm using it as a more general web site compiler -- but it's impressively effective for something which generates static pages and uses only a cookie and a CGI script to do all its interaction with the user. It's backed by pretty much whatever version control system you want, which plays exactly to my kinks in software design -- I chose Git. I may at some point roll my own database-backed comment module, because the current file-backed one feels a little clunky, but for the moment I'm still working on more basic things. Web design is hard; good web design seems fscking impossible. Also, like, free time. I'm going to get the site looking halfways decent and then figure out how to move all my data (and URLs, and and and) over from Blogger. But I have a site that's stored in a Git repository and updates when I 'git push' to it, and that makes me really happy.
2. I finished the latest Asimov's on the T some time this week. I gave it to an acquaintance who was looking for reading material, so I'm just doing this from memory and the preview of the issue posted on Asimov's web site, but here's what I thought of the stories in it. (Since I'm trying to put my thoughts together for Hugo nominations this year and finding it frustrating to remember everything I read, I figure if I do it here I'll have something to consult come next year. I'll try to go back and do the first couple issues of the year in a bit. It's mostly for my own use, but I figure other people may be interested too -- if you have thoughts on the stories, feel free to chime in. :-)
   • "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down", by William Preston (novelette) -- a really wonderful deconstruction of pulp/superhero/superspy stories, well-written and thoughtful; definitely potential Hugo material.
   • "The Tower", by Kristine Katheryn Rusch -- the novella (novelette); it didn't grab me, so I didn't read it.
   • "Blind Cat Dance", by Alexander Jablokov (novelette) -- gene-modded animals and the people who manage them, and manage each other; interesting ideas, an arrestingly wrong protagonist and other interesting and well-developed characters. Hugo potential.
   • "Centaurs", by Benjamin Crowell (short story) -- Bleh. Hormones IN SPAAAAAACE. One-dimensional teenage protagonists, including a not-very-convincingly-rendered damsel in distressteenage girl. Its only saving grace is that it didn't have the expected ending, but that wasn't nearly enough to redeem it for me.
   • "Ticket Inspector Gliden Becomes the First Martyr of the Glorious Human Uprising", by Derek Zumsteg (short story) -- this one was amusing and included some trenchant observations on public transit. It mostly casts tensions of our own time into SFnal terms, but it does so without heavy-handedness. I'm not sure it's Hugo-worthy, but it made me smile.
   • "The Speed of Dreams", by Will Ludwigsen (short story) -- a cute and amusing story told by a well-realized 8th grader as her science report, with an icepick of an ending. I still can't figure out what I think of it.



3. Now I need something new to read on the T. The April/May Asimov's should be up soon -- I need to check Pandemonium for it -- but in the meantime I'm reading Valentine, written by Alex de Campi and drawn by Christine Larsen, a comic about two soldiers in Napolean's army in its harrowing retreat from Moscow who are entrusted with the future of magic on Earth. It was featured in a Big Idea piece on John Scalzi's web site and caught my eye. It's primarily being distributed for mobile devices, which is actually a pretty pleasant way to read comics, so I'm reading it on my G1 (though it's also available for iPhone and a bunch of other formats). You can download the first issue for free on the Android Marketplace and buy the next three for a buck apiece. Each one is about a T ride for me, and I'm enjoying it so far. Suggestions for other things to read on the T -- which is to say short things, especially fiction -- would be welcomed. :-)


4. MITSFS got the microfilm scans back -- thanks to NESFA for funding the project! They look good -- obviously the covers don't come out, but they didn't in the microfilm either, so that's not a loss, and the text is crisp and eminently readable. Now to figure out what to do with them... (My next MITSFS project is probably to find the legal people to make the Google Books thing happen? Gah.)


5. I just spent 45 minutes being interviewed by my housemate on my IM habits for his UI design class. It was amusing. Also apparently I have a lot of things I pay attention to. :-)
   

Edit 2010-Apr-08: Added story lengths, tagged as asimovs.