Review:
Fantasy & Science Fiction, September/October 2011
| Editor: |
Gordon van Gelder |
| Issue: |
Volume 121, No. 3 & 4 |
| ISSN: |
1095-8258 |
| Pages: |
258 |
Another review of a magazine that I finished quite some time ago.
Apologies for any inaccuracies or lack of depth in the reviews.
There wasn't much in Charles de Lint's reviews in this issue that
interested me, but Michelle West covers a great selection of books. Two
of them (
The Wise Man's Fear and
The Quantum Thief) are
already on my to-read list; the third,
The Postmortal, sounded
interesting and would go on my list to purchase if I didn't already have
so many good books I've not read. Otherwise, this issue is short on
non-fiction. The only other essay entry is a film review from Kathi Maio,
which is the typical whining about all things film that
F&SF
publishes.
"Rutger and Baby Do Jotenheim" by Esther M. Friesner: Baby is a
former pole dancer with a toy poodle named Mister Snickers, which warns
you right away that this story is going to involve a few over-the-top
caricatures and more use of the word "piddle" than one might ideally want.
Rutger is a mythology professor who tolerates her for the standard reasons
in this sort of pairing. They're travelling across country to Baby's
sister's wedding when their car breaks down in Minnesota, prompting an
encounter with frost giants.
As you might expect, this is a sort of fractured fairy tale, except based
on Norse mythology instead of the more typical Grimm fare. The fun is in
watching these two apparent incompetents (but with enough knowledge of
mythology to clue in the reader) reproduce the confrontation between Thor
and Utgard-Loki. The fight with old age is particularly entertaining. If
you've read any of Friesner's other stories, you know what to expect: not
much in the way of deeper meaning, but lots of fun playing with
stereotypes and an optimistic, funny outcome. Good stuff. (7)
"The Man Inside Black Betty" by Sarah Langan: This story comes
with a mouthful of a subtitle: "Is Nicholas Wellington the World's Best
Hope?" It's also a story that purports to be written by a fictional
character, in this case one Saurub Ramesh (with Langan credited as having
done "research"). It's told in the style of first-person journalism,
relating the thoughts and impressions of Ramesh as he interviews Nicholas
Wellington. The topic is Black Betty: a black hole above Long Island
Sound. Wellington is a scientific genius and iconoclast with radical
theories of black holes that contradict how the government has been
attempting to deal with Black Betty, unsuccessfully.
The structure here was well-handled, reminding me a lot of a Michael Lewis
article during the financial collapse. Langan has a good feel for how
journalism of this type mixes personalities, politics, and facts. But
it's all setup and no story. We get some world building, and then it's
over, with no resolution except pessimism. Meh. (4)
"A Borrowed Heart" by Deborah J. Ross: Ross starts with the
trappings of urban fantasy transplanted into a Victorian world:
supernatural creatures about, a protagonist who is a high-class
prostitute, and sex and a sucubus by the second page. It evolves from
there into a family drama and an investigation, always giving the reader
the impression that a vampire will jump out at any moment. But the ending
caught me entirely by surprise and was far more effective due to its
departure from the expected path. Well done. (7)
"Bright Moment" by Daniel Marcus: The conflict between
terraforming and appreciation for the universe as we find it is an old
story pattern in science fiction, and Marcus doesn't add much here. I
think the story would have been stronger if he'd found a way to write the
same plot with a pure appeal to environmental beauty without the typical
stakes-raising. But he does sprinkle the story with a few interesting
bits, including a pod marriage and a futuristic version of extreme sports
as a way of communing with nature. (6)
"The Corpse Painter's Masterpiece" by M. Rickert: This is
typical of my reaction to a Rickert story: shading a bit too much towards
horror for me, a bit too cryptic, well-written but not really my thing.
It's about a corpse painter who does the work of an informal mortician,
improving the appearance of bodies for their funerals, and the sheriff who
brings him all the dead bodies. It takes an odd macabre twist, and I have
no idea what to make of the ending. (4)
"Aisle 1047" by Jon Armstrong: Armstrong is best known for a
couple of novels,
Grey and
Yarn, which entangle their
stories in the future of marketing and commerce. One may be unsurprised,
then, that this short story is on similar themes, with the intensity
turned up to the parody point. Tiffan3 is a department-store saleswoman,
spouting corporate slogans and advertising copy while trying to push
customers towards particular products. The story follows the escalation
into an all-out brand war, fought with the bubbly short-cut propaganda of
a thirty-second commercial. For me, it fell awkwardly between two stools:
it's a little too over-the-top and in love with its own bizarre alternate
world to be effective satire, but the world is more depressing than funny
and the advertising copy is grating. More of a curiosity than a
successful story, I think. (5)
"Anise" by Chris DeVito: Stories that undermine body integrity
and focus on the fascinated horror of violation of physical boundaries
aren't generally my thing, so take that into account in this review.
Anise's husband died, but that's not as much of a problem as it used to
be. Medical science can resurrect people via a sort of permanent,
full-body life support system, making them more cyborg than human.
"Anise" is about the social consequences of this technology in a world
where a growing number of people have a much different relationship with
their body than the typical living person today. It's a disturbing story
that is deeply concerned with the physical: sex, blood, physical intimacy
in various different forms, and a twisted type of psychological abuse. I
think fans of horror will like this more than I did, although it's not
precisely horror. It looks at the way one's perception of self and others
can change by passing through a profound physical transformation. (5)
"Spider Hill" by Donald Mead: I liked this story a lot better.
It's about witchcraft and farm magic, about family secrets, and a sort of
coming-of-age story (for a girl rather than a boy, for once). The main
character is resourceful, determined, but also empathetic and aware of the
impact of her actions, which made her more fun to read about. I doubt
I'll remember this for too long, but when skimming through it again for a
review, I had fond memories of it. (6)
"Where Have All the Young Men Gone?" by Albert E. Cowdrey:
Cowdrey in his paranormal investigation mode, which I like better than his
horror mode. For once, the protagonist isn't even a lower-class or
backwoods character. Instead, he's a military historian travelling in
Austria who runs across a local ghost story. This is a fairly
straightforward ghost investigation that follows a familiar path (albeit
to an unusual final destination), but Cowdrey is a good story-teller and I
liked the protagonist. (7)
"Overtaken" by Karl Bunker: This is the sort of story that
delivers its moral with the force of a hammer. It's not subtle. But if
you're in the right mood for that, it's one of the better stories of its
type. It's about a long-journey starship, crew in hibernation, that's
overtaken by a far newer and faster mechanized ship from Earth that's
attempting to re-establish contact with the old ships. The story is a
conversation between the ship AIs. Save this one until you're in the mood
for an old-fashioned defense of humanity. (8)
"Time and Tide" by Alan Peter Ryan: Another pseudo-horror
story, although I think it's better classified as a haunting. A wardrobe
recalls a traumatic drowning in the childhood of the protagonist. As
these things tend to do in stories like this, reality and memory start
blurring and the wardrobe takes on a malevolent role. Not my sort of
thing. (3)
"What We Found" by Geoff Ryman: Any new Geoff Ryman story is
something to celebrate. This is a haunting story on the boundaries
between the scientific method and tribal superstition, deeply entangled
with the question of how one recovers from national and familial trauma.
How can we avoid passing the evils and madness of one generation down to
the next? Much of the story is about family trauma, told with Ryman's
exceptional grasp of character, but the science is entangled in an
ingenious way that I won't spoil.
As with
Air, this is in no way
science fiction. The science here would have fascinating and rather scary
implications for our world, but clearly is not how science actually works.
But as an insight into politics, and into healing, I found it a
startlingly effective metaphor. I loved every bit of this. By far the
best story of the issue. (9)
Rating: 7 out of 10
Short version:
Some jenkins.debian.net activities
Yesterday and today I've spent some time time on 
Second, I've moved the 
But I'm very happy to have a hopefully soon working job which will regularily test installation of Debian hurd and I do hope that some Debian kfreebsd enthusiasts will pick up and fix the existing jobs for kfreebsd tests. (Hint hint hint! I'm also totally happy to help with that!)
This reminds me to mention one last bit: Thanks to Paul Wise, jenkins.d.n bugs are now tracked in the BTS among other 
Some times it is desired to load arbitrary python files or pre-
installed python modules during application run time.I had encountered
2 such usecases, one is in 
As 
Today was a really good day, right up until the end, when it wasn't so good,
but could have been a whole lot worse, so I'm grateful for that.
I've been wanting to 
When I started to write the landing page for
A/B testing
If you do not know what A/B testing is about, take a quick look at the
The other week I was toying with using GNU stow to build an NFS-share, which would allow remote machines to boot from it.
It worked. It worked well. (Standard stuff, PXE booting with an NFS-root.)
Then I started wondering about distributions, since in one sense what I'd built was a minimal distribution.
On that basis yesterday I started hacking something more minimal:
Java Sound on Linux
I m often in the position of having my favorite Java program (AltosUI)
unable to make any sounds. Here s a history of the various adventures
I ve had.
Java and PulseAudio ALSA support
When we started playing with Java a few years ago, we discovered that
if PulseAudio were enabled, Java wouldn t make any sound. Presumably,
that was because the ALSA emulation layer offered by PulseAudio wasn t
capable of supporting Java.
The fix for that was to make sure pulseaudio would never run. That s
harder than it seems; pulseaudio is like the living dead; rising from
the grave every time you kill it. As it s nearly impossible to install
any desktop applications without gaining a bogus dependency on
pulseaudio, the solution that works best is to make sure dpkg never
manages to actually install the program with dpkg-divert:
There are several friends and family I want to be able to call with free software. The only way I could make it accessible to them was to burn 
WebRTC has been in the most recent stable releases of 
Users have 
I have always thought that having flexible deadlines in MOOCs is important,
despite not having used them too much. Until last night, that is.
The course in question is Stanford's 
I wanted to have a directory in my Dropbox where every file placed get some sort of encryption. They might be personal pictures (if you know what I mean), finance notes, patent ideas, or the like. I create those files constantly, often with my phone. While I would like to back them up on the cloud, I don t need to access them regularly. The problem is that I don t want my phone to storage them (at least not plain) for obvious reasons. And, on top of this, Android s Dropbox app does not allow to disable synchronization by folder.
So, here is the scheme I came up with. Maybe it is also useful for you or you get some idea how to improve it.
You will need an always-on-line computer with 
It is that time of the year again,