Dragons and swords and magic, oh my!
Originally published at spitkitten dot com. You can comment here or there.
So, I was lucky enough to snag a free copy of the August/September 09 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction in a blogging promotion, which made me really excited because I’m a pretty shameless F&SF fangirl, with a respectably sized pile of back issues stacked on one corner of my office bookshelf. So, when my issue arrived, fat and ripe, I was stoked.
It’s a damn fine issue, although it’s lighter on the SF this time around, and weighted towards fantasy. Good-enough fantasy, well-crafted and tempered, but enough to remind me that I just don’t love reading high or middle fantasy in general. I’m cool with singular elements of fantasy-dragons, swords, magic, and the like-but I zone out of a piece if there’s a convergence of multiple classic fantasy elements. In fact, as I paged past a few of the opening fantasy stories, I came across Elizabeth Hand’s Books column which quotes the great Ursula Le Guin (Hand is reviewing Cheek By Jowl: Essays in this part): “The only kind of fiction that is read with equal (if differing) pleasure at eight, and at 16, and at 68, seems to be the fantasy and its close relation, the animal story.” And all I could think was, Oh, Ursula. I wish it were so.
So, I have to admit there were some stories in here that I skimmed. But there were a few that stood out and will earn this issue a place on top of my groaning stack: “Icarus Saved From The Skies,” a translation of a short piece by French Fabulist Georges-Oliver Chataureynaud whose ending has all the punch of a tickle but bowls over in its restraint; Albert E. Cowdry’s “The Private Eye,” worth its weight in gold for style alone; the moody and quiet (and done in artful second person), “You are Such a One,” by Nancy Springer; and my favorite, editor Gordon Van Gelder’s choice reprint from 2000, Tina Kuzminski’s “The Goddamned Tooth Fairy.”
All in all, fangirl status remains thumbs way up.