After a plethora of zombie and vampire stories of late, nice to see a somewhat different post-apocalyptic story, in a multi-perspective story which does something quite rare in such stories.
Tag Archives | Allen Steele
Fantasy and Science Fiction June 2001
Counting the Shapes. Yoon Ha Lee. Fantasy with a mathematical bent – in fact, fantasy with magic with a mathematical bent. A female mathemagician, a long-lost son, a dark, evil enemy – an almost perfect recipe for bog-standard fantasy phare. Fortunately, Yoon Ha Lee handles the story elements quite deftly and manages to create a […]
Asimovs, February 2008
Michael Swanwick. From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled… The opening paragraph is a doozy – it describes the titular city on Europa, and does so quite beautifully across several sentences, and then kicks into a higher gear as the narrator describes herself : a simulation of one of the humans killed in the destruction of […]
Asimovs, January 2008
Rudy Rucker and Marc Laidlaw. The Perfect Wave. Rucker has collaborated in Asimovs recently with Bruce Sterling, with ‘Hormiga Canyon’ in Aug 2007 featuring a pair of dudes heading into uncharted nano-territory in the desert. Here Rucker and Laidlaw serve up some surfpunk SF, in which a VR-surfing facility out back of Cheezemore Ratt’s Surf […]
Asimovs, October/November 2007
Greg Egan. Dark Integers. A sequel to the well-received and Dozoised (13th) ‘Luminous’ from Asimovs, Sept 1995. According to my mini-summation of that volume : “Massive computing power is used to probe mathematical certainties. And if 2+2 does not equal 4, then what does that mean for the fabric of the universe? Maths was never […]
Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, July 2001 (Peanut Press edition).
A slightly weaker than usual issue perhaps – certainly for someone like me for whom the opening SF mystery did little for, and certainly considering the calibre of the authors in this issue.
Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, March 2001 (Peanut Press edition)
Reflections. Robert Silverberg. Robert Silverberg’s ‘Reflections’ looks back, with rose-tinted spectacles (of a metaphorical nature) at the New Wave of SF in the 1960. An issue or two back James Patrick Kelly pondered ‘on being a cyberpunk’. I wonder how the future will view this period? A fairly low-key period, with sharecrop, media tie-ins a […]
Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, January 2001 (Peanut Press edition).
Robert Silverberg’s editorial ‘Reflections: The Evaporation of Reputations’ ponders the nature of fame and reputation, citing the example of A. Merritt, a very popular and high profile fantasy author of the 1930/40s, whose work is now little known. Allen Steele’s Stealing Alabama is a standout story. It starts as it continues throughout the story, by […]