Saturday, October 20, 2012

Lightspeed Magazine: October 2012

While not finished reading, I am enjoying this edition much more now that I know which parts to skip over...

This time, I very much enjoyed both Ebook Exclusives included. The first was a Novel Except from Blackwood by Gwenda Bond which started the story of Miranda, a socially outcast girl who starts to see mirages, only to further complicate her life. The second was a novella called Dragonfly from Ursulu K. Le Guin.

For me, reading Le Guin is always comforting, reminding me of snuggling up in warm, fluffy blanket. There is something dependable about her writing and her style means that reading her work is always more about the journey than the destination. On the other hand, this means I experience little urgency when reading her. After painstakingly tracking down her Gifts, Powers etc trilogy, I lost the third book half way through and only felt a pang of regret. I would have liked to have known what happened but didn't feel too upset about it.

One of the ironies I picked up reading the article on her is that the Earthsea movie that she did not like at all is what drew me to reading her books in the first place.

Short Stories: Science Fiction

Flowing Unimpeded to the Enlightenment by Robert Reed.

"Her name is Rhonda, but she hasn't used that ugly business since she was ten.
Artemis is a name pulled from myth, and that's what friends call her, and strangers, and it's how phantoms refer to her when she's walking inside her own dreams."

I think this is the first Robert Reed story that I have thoroughly enjoyed. Each character in the story is clear and interesting and I thought it quite fun that right after discussing the Fermi paradox in one of the articles, there was a story to explore it. I also loved the exploration of the nature of ideas and what they really mean:

"ideas as being vivid organic beings, how they collect to form communities, and some of these communities are strong and enduring, while others perish in a day or twenty years."

Nearly Departed by Pat Cadigan

Allie Deadpan explores brains, but she prefers to stay away from dead ones. In this story, she takes the plunge and so continues an interesting story which touches on the nature of creativity, sanity and identity. When I got to the end, I couldn't believe how long ago this story had been written. Definitely still relevant.

Art of War  by Nancy Kress

Like with Robert Reed, I'm not sure I've enjoyed a story by Nancy Kress before. But this story, I loved! One of my favourite things is where the emotional journey of the character is deeply intertwined with the concepts being explored, creating an inner echo to the story. In this story, the relationship between mother and son and the disastrous assumptions they can make about each other is echoed in the relationship between humans and an alien species. I also thought the construction of this story was masterful.

Bear and Shifty by Benjamin Parzybok

This story is set in a post-apocalyptic world where the apocalypse was brought by aliens and humans drift in the fringes, scrounging what they can. It continues the theme of inter-species communication and while not being as profound as the Nancy Kress story, it possesses its own poignancy and human insight.


Monday, October 1, 2012

Starting the Journey with (at) Lightspeed - Sep 2012

Browsing recently, I noticed that Lightspeed - which I understood to be a science fiction magazine - and Fantasy - which covers what you'd expect - had merged under their common editor and now offer a combined publication at a very reasonable Kindle subscription price.

Initially, I feared that Lightspeed would be too similar to Fantasy and Science Fiction - where its editor trained and to which I already have a subscription. Fortunately, it seems to have a feel of its own and some interesting quirks - like re-prints of classic stories. One quirk, the ubiquitous coverage of its writers, including those writers who write short articles about other writers annoyed me, but I did enjoy the Ebook extras, so on balance, I'll take it.

My stand-out favourite would definitely be "The Green Leopard Plague" by Walter Jon Williams. I loved how it combined a solid, multi-layered plotline with a fascinating inter-disciplinary conjecture. As an inter-disciplinarian myself, I found this story worked for me on an emotional and intellectuel level. I loved how the two layers of the plot don't quite come together and the ending was one of the few in the magazine I found truly satisfying. The actual philosophy of Williams in his interview where he promotes the elimination of death I didn't agree with, but this observation did not taint the story.

The novel excerpt from Greg Egan left me cold. I'm probably small-minded but way-out science fiction is something I have difficulty with...

The Artist Showcase is a lovely idea but is a bit lost on a Kindle.They add other material to the Kindle edition and maybe this would have borne only being in the print version.

I have read "The Streets of Ashkelon" by Harry Harrison elsewhere (and as the notes later in the magazine detail it is one of the most re-printed stories) but it is always powerful. The note from the editor in his introduction about the fact that this helped seal the deal for him becoming an atheist, I found annoying and it did detract from my experience of re-reading the story. For me, ideas I disagree with are far more palatable in the form of a powerful story than in prose. Let the story speak for itself!

Overall, I far preferred the selection of Science Fiction stories over the Fantasy selection. All of them offered something fresh, different, thought-provoking and a satisfying ending. As for the Fantasy selection, they all left me hanging. I was particularly disappointed between with the Holly Black and Nina Kiriki Hoffman stories as I really got into them and the endings left me flat. Holly Black, in particular, notes in her interview that she's finally cracked endings for short stories and I don't get it. I absolutely invested into that story - what a great start - and then, nothing...

Anyways, overall, I liked the magazine, though my enjoyment of it definitely started at the highest point and went down from there. Ending with the bite-size author interviews - for every single story - followed by little profiles of the writers of the interviews almost made me claw my eyes out. However, I shall read the next edition, avoiding the bits that have irritated me and hopefully having a more positive experience that leads me to keep my subscription past the 30-day free trial. We shall see.