association-list

This isn’t going quite as quickly as I had hoped it would, par­tially because of a major com­puter outage yes­ter­day. Hooray for spend­ing a lot of money when you didn’t want to, with the pos­si­bil­ity of having to spend a lot more to get the data back. I haven’t been keep­ing my back­ups up to date as I should have, and I guess that I’m paying for it now. Oh well.

In any case. Back to the task, before I do some more com­puter surgery in hopes of being able to avoid having to pay for data recov­ery. The April/​May issue of Asimov’s is their yearly double issues. There are a couple of people who I’ve never read before, and one that I want to point out.

I’d vaguely heard of William Shunn before, but I’d never read any of his stuff. It seems right now that it’s all mag­a­zine sales, which is unfor­tu­nate, because it means that they’re going to be hard to get ahold of, at least until some­one man­ages to bring out a col­lec­tion or some­thing. I have no idea if he’s work­ing on a novel, but on the strength of his story here, enti­tled “Incli­na­tion”, I really rather hope so. I’d buy it in a heart­beat, but maybe I’m not the best person to ask on that mark, as I’m still threat­ing to reach sixty on the unread shelf, despite quite a high rate of con­sum­ing the things. At one hun­dred I’m going to stop buying for a couple of months, I promise. So, this one is good. Good enough that I would seek out his other work, were any of it avail­able in any­thing other than micro­pay­ment type ebooks, which, while a valiant effort, don’t really work for me for some reason. Per­haps it’s some­thing that I’ll talk about at some later date, as I dream about a way out of the wage-​​earner trap that acu­tally has some inter­est for me. Again, hope­fully there will be a col­lec­tion or a novel out soon, because I’d really like to get my hands on more.

I wanted to hate Greg van Eekhout’s “The Osteomancer’s Son”, as it belongs to a brand of fan­tasy that I really don’t like, but it’s a charm­ing story in its way, and I bet that a lot of people who don’t have my builtin pre­con­cep­tions will like it a lot.

“The King’s Tail”, by Con­stance Cooper was pretty all right, but I felt that it needed to be longer to really reach its full impact. Still, I’ll be keep­ing my eye out, as it was enter­tain­ingly told and could lead somewhere.

There’s some other inter­est­ing stuff here, a Liz Williams story in her Banner of Souls set­ting, an enter­tain­ing short short by Wil McCarthy, and some inter­est­ing thought on Pyr and the state of con­tem­po­rary SF by Norman Spin­rad. Not a bad issue at all.