Asimov’s: January 2008
February 6, 2008 by Andy
The January 2008 issue of Asimov’s seems to have a theme of fate and regret. My favorite story was Tanith Lee’s, “The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald,” which touches both themes, focusing on the fate of a quarantined city. The plague in question displays some far-fetched but intriguing adaptations to encourage contagion, but the real interest lies in the two viewpoint characters: a woman ravaged by the disease, and a man who is an immune witness to the suffering of his city and his friends.
The characters are strong, especially those in the never-realized middle-aged love triangle. The perspective shifts did leave my plodding brain momentarily discomfited, but the reflection on society’s preoccupation with transient beauty and the meditation on universal doom gave me pleasure. I’m just that kind of guy.
“Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders” is another story dealing with old age. I know criticizing Mike Resnick is like pointing out that elephants have small tails, but the voices of the two old men just don’t seem right to me (whereas the voices in Lee’s story were spot-on). Part of it may be their use of the f-word. In my experience men of that generation may swear plenty, but they usually favor different words. My own idiosyncratic roadblocks aside, I quite enjoyed this story.
The two old men, long-time business partners now sharing a room in a retirement home, decide to visit the magic shop where they hung out as kids. What they find is more than the sleight of hand they remember. It also comes at a greater price. It reminds me of the Tom Hanks movie Big, with its eerie Zoltar machine that grants double-edged wishes. That this piece about regret and nostalgia could summon some of my own says something.
I tend to dig my heels in deeper the more abstract a story gets. But before it sinks into murkiness, Deborah Coates’s, “The Whale’s Lover,” succeeds in establishing a thick miasma of guilt. This burden drives the protagonist as surely as revenge drives Ahab, and when the mood finally overcomes the narrative the consumation feels right.
Moving back from regret to fate (though one can never wholly escape either), Will McIntosh’s “Unlikely” contains few surprises, notwithstanding its title. But I love the idea, which extrapolates the rash of bizarre correlative studies we’ve been seeing from economists, most famously in Leavitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics, which expose for our astonishment such facts as that men who wear red ties are 58% more likely to go bald, or that children who tie their shoes with the two-loop method are 81% more likely to attend an Ivy League school. (Yes, I made those up.)
Not bothering to address the correlation vs. causation issue, McIntosh presents a world where something completely random, like the geographic proximity of two strangers, can be determined to significantly reduce the number of accidental deaths citywide. This makes it Samuel’s civic duty to hang out with a kooky new age lady. Being a retired philosophy professor, he can’t help but wonder what it also suggests for his personal destiny.
It’s a fun little story, and I like Samuel’s sardonic one-liners.
