Fantasy & Science Fiction: March 2007

The March 2007 issue only has five stories, which is becoming almost typical.  Yes, the page count is the same every issue, and yes, one was a novella and two were novelets, but my mind is a simple thing and believes that when counting apples and oranges each still only counts as one.  It’s risky to print fewer stories.  The chance a reader will like nothing in the issue increases. 

Happily, the novella carries its weight.  It’s the second half of Matthew Hughes’s “The Helper and His Hero,”  which was my first exposure to Hughes’s Penultimate Age of Old Earth.  I loved the noösphere and the Commons where the noönaut Guth Bandar and Phlevas Wasselthorpe, the savant he reluctantly adopts as apprentice, are compelled to assume archetypal personas.  Bringing archetypes to life is a dangerous gambit.  They’re just so typical.  But Hughes pulls it off imaginatively, and seeing these figures interact with well-drawn characters is a treat.

I’m not a big fan of slipstream or emulations of magical realism.  Far too often the authors are playing games to no purpose or making literary pretensions.  But M. Rickert’s “Memoir of a Deer Woman” succeeds in using cognitive dissonance to create an unsettling mood without annoying me.  I’m grumpy enough that should be taken as a compliment.

Fred Chappell’s “Dance of Shadows” presents Astolfo and his apprentice Falco, two entertaining personalities who trade in shadows.  The dialog is fun and the setting flavorful.  It’s my favorite of the issue.  I hope to see this series of stories continue.