Fantasy & Science Fiction September-October 2012 Issue

As previously promised, I'm collecting my #storyeachnight tweets about the September-October 2012 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction in this post.

Here are the stories, all 11 of them in the order I read them, and my tweets:

• "Where the Summer Dwells" by Lynda E. Rucker. Atmospherically foreboding, two sets of friends with one friend in common explore a decrepit set of train tracks.
• "A Diary From Deimos" by Michael Alexander. A clever-enough reimagining of the American Civil War as a conflict between Earth and colonists on Mars. But to what end? Felt like it hit the same notes rather frequently. I see that there is a historical "A Diary From Dixie" which this presumably is intended to reference.
• "Arc" by Ken Liu. An interesting story to read on the night of having taken your eldest child to college though maybe moreso with me, personally, than for some others. A very personal examination of the first person to receive hyper-longevity treatments. 
• "12:03 PM" by Richard Lupoff. Story of a man wandering in time and space. He gets some answers but also some new questions. Third in a series of stories by Lupoff.
• "Give Up" by Richard Butner. Story of a man climbing a virtual Everest in his back yard. It has a fantastic beginning and middle but I found the ending to be underwhelming.
• "The Sheriff" by Chet Arthur. Entertaining Old West story with light fantasy elements.
• "Close Encounters" by Andy Duncan. An old man reluctantly revisits his prior experiences with aliens.
• "Theobroma Valentine" by Rand B. Lee. Strange story of psych workers orbiting a world of cacao farmers. Had a sort of mystery vibe to it along with the SF. 
• "Troll Blood" by Peter Dickinson. Charming story. Took a few pages to hook me but once it did, I was hooked all the way.
• "The Goddess" by Albert E. Cowdrey. Pre-(US) Civil War story with Kali potentially influencing events.  Alas, despite that appealing description, I wasn't crazy about this one.
• "Father Juniper's Journey to the North" by Grania Davis. Gods (and devils?) at work in 18th Century California.

As you can see, it was a solid issue, well balanced with six science fiction stories and five fantasy stories. There were no stories I out-and-out disliked though there were several which I wasn't overly enthralled by. Still, I enjoyed reading the vast majority of them, and even ones which weren't among my favorites generally had some interesting aspect which made them worth the read.

Of the stories, the ones by Liu, Arthur, Duncan, and Dickinson were my favorites. If pressed to pick a single favorite, it would most likely be the Peter Dickinson story, though I could imagine myself picking a different one in a different mood.

Fantasy and Science Fiction is the one of the "big three" which I was still picking up on the newsstand rather than getting it via subscription. I say "was" because after completing this issue, the next thing I did was go to their website and subscribe. If you have an interest in short fiction in the speculative fiction genres, this venerable publication is well worth your time.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

September/October 2012 F&SF
cover by Kent Bash

When I first started reading science fiction and fantasy short stories, it was mostly in anthologies that I picked up as a child at science fiction conventions. I'd wander the dealer's room halls (I think "huckster's room" was common terminology back then.) and pick up just about any collection of short fiction I could find cheap. This would have been in the early 1980's, when I was right around 9 to 11 years old. (So close to that "Golden Age" of science fiction -- 12.)

Among the anthologies I remember owning were collections of short stories from individual publications, often printed in the 1950s and 1960s: Astounding, Galaxy, F&SF, etc. At that age, I recall finding the Galaxy ones to hit my reading "sweet spot." The stories from the vintage F&SF stories were sometimes entertaining to me back then and they seemed to have a certain sophisticatedness at times that I remembering wanting to enjoy but didn't always "get." Of course, for "not getting it" as a youngster, nothing topped the old collections from the British New Wave publication "New Worlds." Full of authors I'd mostly never heard of and with stories that totally didn't match my then conception of "science fiction" or "fantasy", at that age these quickly moved into my "don't buy these" list.

Time went on and interests waxed and waned for me and along about the late 1980s, I got back into SF/Fantasy and had the desire to start not just reading the stuff but writing it. At that point, there were a handful of significant print magazines. Some of them, Amazing Stories and Weird Tales in particular, have had sporadic existences since that time. Some others, such as Science Fiction Age which didn't pop up until the early 1990's, came and went. But three remain, constant in their operation. Fantasy & Science Fiction (founded in 1949), Analog (founded in 1930 as Astounding), and Asimov's (a relative newcomer, founded in 1977).

Having a story appear in the pages of any one of those three would be a major life accomplishment for me. Two of them (Analog and F&SF) have connections back to some of the earliest SF I've read and Asimov's has an impressive track record, all the more so for coming into existence decades later than any surviving major digest fiction periodical. Of the three, I think that F&SF publishes fiction that most closely resonates with the me of 2012, though I enjoy items from each of the three.

Today, a copy of the upcoming issue of F&SF (September-October 2012, with stories by Peter Dickinson, Ken Liu, Grania Davis, Andy Duncan, Richard A. Lupoff and others) arrived in my mailbox. The magazine asked for bloggers who would be interested in writing about the issue and offered to send a copy for them to write about. I don't do formal reviews generally on this site, but that wasn't one of the requirements. What I will do is make a story from this issue my #storyeachnight every night until I've read the whole issue. So there will be tweets from me about every one of the 11 stories in this issue over the next couple of weeks. At the end, I'll pull it all together into a second blog post.

Regardless of whether this issue has a lot of stories that really strike a chord with me, F&SF in general is a publication that I wholeheartedly recommend and one that I hope continues to be a part of my life for many years to come.