Minor Thoughts from me to you

Asimov’s, September 2014
by Sheila Williams

My rating: ★★★☆☆
Read From: 22 August 2014 - 26 August 2014
Goal: Flotsam & Jetsam

Novelettes

Place of Worship by Tochi Onyebuchi—Lit fiction. I couldn't even read it; I had to just skim it. It seemed to wander around aimlessly. It was less of a story and more of a meandering reflection. Parts happened in space—that was about the only thing in it that could be loosely considered to be SF.

A Lullaby in Glass by Amanda Forrest—New writer takes us to a future Vietnam. A young man struggles to figure out what caused a recent production failure, to protect his family. I feel like I should have felt more than I did, reading this story. But I didn't.

Bogdavi’s Dream by Tom Purdom—This novella is the concluding piece of a much longer story that Purdom's been writing about interspecies war in the distant future. Groups of humans and aliens will have to join together to fight other groups of humans and aliens, to protect the dream of peaceful coexistence. Before reading this, I hunted down some of Purdom's previous stories. I enjoyed them. This feels more like the mid-50's SF that I read growing up.

Short Stories

Patterns by James Gunn—A secret lurks inside of the most hidden of patterns. Of course, to talk about the secret is to trigger another pattern: denial, denunciation, and ridicule followed by dismissal and irrelevance. But the secret is still there, still lurking, still waiting. This was extremely short, but I really like it.

Everyone Will Want One by Kelly Sandoval—What is it about this new toy and why will every teen want one? It just might hold the key to gaining social status in the most elite of cliques. Isn't that reason enough? This was another really good story. It's something that's plausible and that I could imagine being reality in another decade or two.

Scouting Report by Rick Wilber—A baseball scout spends a few days watching Cuban teams, checking out some new prospects. He also reflects on the aftermath of an alien crash that occured 10 years ago. I wanted to like this story more than I did. The infodumping was heavy handed and I feel like the main character is a real dunce for not seeing what was obvious to me just one-third of the way into the story.

Windows by Susan Palwick—This story showcases the harsher side of life. A mother travels to a far-away prison to pay a visit for her son's birthday and to share birthday greetings from his sister, onboard a generational space ship. She arrives at the prison only to learn that the generational ship just exploded, but hides that news from her son in order to create a happier birthday for him. It's another story, in this issue, that I didn't really feel was SF at all. The only sci-fi element in the story was that it mentioned a generational ship. I think a story needs more than that to qualify as SF.

Departments

Reflections: Flashing Before My Eyes by Robert Silverberg—Every career has to start somewhere and this is Silverberg's story of how he started his. Silverberg reflects on the SF magazines that he admired as a teen and his struggles to get his own stories into these magazines, next to the writers that he so admired.

Thought Experiment: Tomorrow Through the Past by Allen M. Steele—This is a speech that Steele gave at the Philcon Science Fiction Convention, in 2013. He looks back at the history of the SF field and how the genre has reinvented itself over the years. He laments the current clichés: alien invasions, space battles, dystopias, and guys in body armor shooting at each other with big guns. He argues that SF has become paranoid and militaristic and needs to regain a sense of optimism, to tell stories with positive outcomes instead of just stories with negative outcomes. He argues that the genre needs to be more about stories set in the future, rather than just stories about the future. It's a thought provoking speech and I hope some of the authors and editors in the field are inspired by it.

My Take

I liked Steele's speech. I liked three of the seven stories in this issue. Asimov's continues to be something that I subscribe to and read but not something that I eagerly wait for each month.