Asimov's June 2010

In my never-ending quest to catch up on reading my SF mags, I recently tackled the June issue of Asimov's. Here are some quick thoughts.

Allen M. Steele continues to impress with "The Emperor of Mars," a sweet ode to Mars SF over the years and the story of how a man deals with the loss of his family. This is a complete departure from his Coyote stories but just as engaging. I think maybe I should delve into his catalog a bit further in 2011.

Chris Beckett's "The Peacock Cloak" was an interesting exploration of how people go about helping a brand-new world...by making the same mistakes that humanity has been making for years.

Stephen Baxter's "Earth III" is a continuation of a series of stories but I don't remember reading "Earth II," to be honest. It's a story of power, exploration, and challenging the predominant views of the world. I enjoyed it.

The rest of the stories were solid enough but nothing else jumps out as worth mentioning here.

I have started the next of the now 11 magazines I have stacked up, so I'm sure I'll be writing about it soon.

The Pile #2

Here's an updated look at the to-be-read pile to my right, from top to bottom...

Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories Volume 1 - We have been reading selections from here for the past 2 weeks of class, which has been just fine with me. This week we will be discussing "A Scandal in Bohemia" and "The Five Orange Pips" to close out our semester (outside of the paper due Wed. and our final the following Wed.). At some point, I would like to read everything in this and the second volume.

Asimov's June 2010 - Yes, I'm still many months behind on my SF magazines but I have at least started this one, which got off to a great start with Allen M. Steele's "The Emperor of Mars."

The Passages of H.M. - I just read about Jay Parini's novel based on Herman Melville's exploits and decided to request it at the library. It came in and I picked up it today. For some reason, my 19th century Brit Lit class has me thinking of the same period in American Lit and Melville is a biggie.

Masked - This has not been touched since the last picture of the pile. It will be at some point.

Chew Vol. 2 - The same can be said about this.

Fables Vol. 14: Witches - This latest volume of the long-running series just came out Thursday and I can't wait to dive into it. I really should finish the paper before that happens, though.

F&SF Mar./Apr. 2010

One reason I haven't been doing these posts on the SF mags I've read this year is that I haven't read that many of them. However, I ran out of space in the nightstand drawer I store the unread mags in and that spurred me to get reading. It's no secret I like the anthology format and I consider F&SF to be the better of the two SF mags I read on a regular (well, sort of) basis.

Humor is difficult to writer because it is so easy for the words to fall flat on the page. A couple stories this time out worked well - "Epidapheles and the Insufficiently Affectionate Ocelot" by Ramsey Shehadeh and "The Frog Comrade" by Benjamin Rosenbaum. The former was a tale of a bumbling wizard narrated by an invisible chair named Door that mixed humor with an affecting character study of Door and the latter was a twist on the old princess and the frog story with a nice dose of Communism thrown in. Once you throw in Paul Di Filippo's "Plumage From Pegasus" about a penal system full of writers, you've got a nice set of humor.

The humor works well in contrast to darker stories, of which there were a few good examples. Dennis Danvers' "The Fairy Princess" is a story of a woman divorced from life and newly-sentient sex robots. "Blue Fire" by Bruce McAllister looks at the night a child Pope met a child vampire and what it meant for both of their souls.

You also get your classic themes and classic writers in this issue. The opening story was a take on mythology and time-crossed love ("Amor Fugit" by Alexandra Duncan) and the always dependable Albert E. Cowdrey gave us a story about art and death in "Fort Clay, Louisiana: A Tragical History." Mix that with the books column and the hide-and-seek nod to one of the stories in the classifieds and you get another good issue.

The Pile

Now that I've written about the last two things I've read, I thought I'd run down what's currently sitting in my to-be-read pile. I'll go top to bottom...

The Mar./Apr. issue of F&SF - No, you didn't read that cover date incorrectly. I'm waaaaay behind on my SF magazine reading - there are 3 more issues of F&SF and 7 (!) of Asimov's still socked away in a drawer (well, the drawer isn't big enough to hold them all, so some are shifted to the bookshelves behind me) after this one. On the plus side, I've read over 120 pages of this issue since last night and will read more after this post is completed.

English Victorian Poetry - We're spending two days on poems from this anthology between novels in my English class. We covered Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Matthew Arnold on Wednesday and will discuss Alfred, Lord Tennyson on Monday.

The Woman in White - This novel by Wilkie Collins is next up after the poetry. It's the longest novel we've read in class so far and I'll need to knock out large chunks in a short amount of time. I'd heard of Collins before this but not the book and I'm eager to check it out. Strangely, it also got a mention in Bob Dylan in America.

Masked - This is an anthology of super-hero prose stories edited by Lou Anders, who usually puts these sorts of things together very well. I've read the first four stories so far but that was a while ago. It's not that I've lost interest - I just need to carve out some more time.

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk - I was a fan of David Sedaris's essays in The New Yorker back when I was a subscriber and this small book of short stories seemed like a good way to check in with him again. The title alone, you know?

The Last Run - This is the third (and final?) Tara Chace novel from Greg Rucka, a series that started as the comic Queen & Country. You know, I'm still not sure I own all those trades (a quick check reveals I didn't get the final one of the main series or a couple of the offshoots). Anyway, the last novel came out in 2005, so it's been a while.

Chew Vol. 2 - This collects issues #6-10 of the ongoing series about cibopathic Tony Chu. It's an odd premise and a great book.

Fantastic Four - This is one of the most venerable comics in the Marvel Universe, of course. This particular collection contains the first six issues of the current run by Jonathan Hickman which has gotten pretty good reviews. The first story is a multiple worlds tale and I'm a sucker for those, so I'm interested to see Hickman's take on the team.

It'll take a while to get through these but I'm always ready to read...