The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, #759 Jan/Feb 2022by Sheree Renée Thomas (Editor)

Contents:
NOVELLA — The Art of Victory When the Game is All the World by Eugie Foster

SHORT STORIES
— Ennead in Retrospect by Christopher Mark Rose
— Full Worm Moon by Paul Lorello
— Proximity Games by M L Clark
— Salt Calls to Salt by Maiga Doocy
–doe_haven.vr by Cara Mast
–The City and the Thing Beneath It by Innocent Ilo
— There Won’t Be Questions by Joe Baumanns

NOVELETS
— Animale dei Morti by Nick DiChario
— Bone Broth by Karen Heulers
— Prison Colony Optimization by Auston Habershaw
— The Gentle Dragon Tells His Tale of Love by J.A. Pak

January’s issue of F&SF starts off with a welcome to the new year by editor Sheree Renée Thomas, talking about her family traditions for “watch night.” I’d never heard of this and loved the idea of someone standing outside on New Year’s eve watching the moon to tell when the year passes, and I enjoyed her telling of this tradition before launching into the stories, whose quality I found equal to the magazine’s reputation for discerning picks, but often wondered if they belonged in the genre publication.

Reading The Art of Victory When the Game Is All The World by Eugie Foster, which is a layered and touching novella about a contest between artificers of “pueri” whose lives are wagered on by aristocrats., you find a story within a story where the pueri are humans in their reality. Whether it’s virtual or real isn’t explained, or important. A completion between two of the technicians tests their pueri against each other to determine if one of the technician’s should change caste to become an aristocrat themselves. The pueri’s tale is It’s a lovely piece about overcoming, or being driven by, limitations but the framework. While this could as easily have been fantasy rather than SF, it didn’t need to be either. Still, a fine piece of writing and sadly the last story Foster was working on before she succumbed to cancer in 2014.

Like Foster’s story, The City and the Thing Beneath It by Innocent Ilo is only thinly science fiction despite its title and the appearance of a thing that fell out of the sky. Both stories use the aesthetic of science fiction as a frame for a more mundane tale. Not that the prose, in either case, is without merit, because they’re both solid pieces of writing. In The City and the Thing Beneath It, ilo uses a hint of afro-futurism to tell a story about how an autocratic government controls information by suppressing social media, rounding up eyewitnesses without the good sense to keep their mouth’s shut, and issuing an official truth from the mouth of the Supreme Leader. Set in Lagos (Nigeria, by assumption) it could as easily be in North Korea, or any other corrupt autocracy, but despite the brief reference to robots and the central notion that something fell out of the sky, there’s little science fiction here.

It isn’t until you get to Ennead in Retrospect by Christopher Mark Rose and Animale dei Morti by Nick DiChario, the first science fiction, and the second fantasy, that you find stories that are comfortable in their genre’s skins. Rose’s tale is about an alien station where prosaic objects are anything but prosaic, interacting with stranded human explorers/scientists to offer them fundamental changes. It’s thoughtful, interesting, and a bit hard to parse, the last of which isn’t a bug but a feature as science fiction should be something that requires a bit of brain-stretching to encompass. DiChario on the other hand sets up an engaging Italian folktale about a groom that must reanimate his dead brother to fulfill a wedding tradition and so seeks out the local witch. As we expect in a Sicilian fantasy things go horribly wrong and the groom pays a price far beyond what he imagined he bargained for. Though who is to say whether this is in the end a tragedy? Certainly, it’s a delightful fantasy.

Bone Broth, by Karen Heulers starts as a possible urban fantasy, then quietly reveals itself as urban science fiction. “Sometimes it’s hard to define where one stops and the other begins.” as one of her characters points out concerning bones that belonged to humans, animals, or possibly a race of giants. Set in one of the grittier parts of Manhatten, the protagonist is a woman born with an extra thumb, which her parents had removed to let her fit in, which never works. The story leads us down a rabbit hole in wonderful fashion, about finding your true people, which has always been resonant with readers of speculative fiction.

Full Worm Moon (Paul Lorello), Prison Colony Optimization (Auston Habershaw), and Proximity Games (M L Clark) are all solidly science fiction, though the first could as easily be cast as fantasy, dealing with the “simulation” of the memories of the deceased. I especially enjoyed Habershaw’s tale of an AI consigned to a prison/terraforming project for unspeakable crimes in which the author manages to take on the prison system while giving some thought to AIs and agency. Proximity Games in turn takes on ideas about starfaring and colonization.

There’s also poetry, two poems by Hungarian immigrant to the US, Boci Takács, winner of both Lambda and Hugo awards, and one from Gretchen Tessmer, who hails from somewhere around the US/Canadian border. Her Le Coup de Foudre crosses a few borders as well.

Breaking thins up with a fantasy about a woman wondering what would be worth turning into a mermaid for is Salt Calls to Salt by Maiga Doocy. Who doesn’t love a story about becoming (or not) a mermaid?

The last bit of science fiction shows up in a VR setting in doe_haven.vr by Cara Mast and the issue finishes up with a pair of fantasies in There Won’t Be Questions by Joe Baumanns, about a boy with the magical ability to conjure up lost things, and The Gentle Dragon Tells His Tale of Love, a delightful conceit by J.A. Pak who swears that the dragon in the story pushed her aside and insisted on writing the tale of a dragon that takes a human lover on their isolated island, only to have their tranquility shattered when a stranger drops in.

There are the usual and noteworthy columns, reviews by Charles de Lint, who leans towards fantasy, and Michelle West, who leans towards sf, as well as other departments. If we’re counting, I think that makes it 8 to 4 SF to F, not counting poems because who can say what poems are about. I read the magazine in Kindle format, which by the way is included in the Kindle Unlimited subscription, and my sole complaint is that the index is not linked to the stories, meaning you either have to read straight through or use search to find specific parts.

All in all, it’s a good issue and I liked most of it quite a bit, and those parts that didn’t grab me were not for lack of quality.