From: aaron@space.ualberta.ca (Aaron Humphrey)
Subject: My view of the ESF stories(Spoilers, perhaps)
Reply-To: aaron@space.ualberta.ca
Organization: University Of Alberta, Edmonton Canada
X-Newsreader: Tin 1.1 PL4
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1992 21:49:34 GMT

Let's just start by saying that I voted "No Award" to be dead last.

And perhaps also add that IASFM is my favourite SF magazine out there, and the
only one I read consistently.  Analog and F&SF are neither consistent enough
for my tastes.

So...

My favourite was "Press Ann".  My favourite thing about the story was the style
it was written it--all dialogue or computer display.  I was impressed with the
way Bisson made it clear, without using >any< tag lines, who says each line,
and rudimentary characterization.  (That's all that's necessary--this is light
SF here.)  This was also the one I'd read before--I have a subscription to
IASFM(if they can just figure out that I've >moved<...), but I'm three years
behind.  But "Press Ann" caught my eye when I was flipping through it when I
originally got it, because of the style.

Next was "A Walk In The Sun".  So the premises of the story could have been set
up a bit better.  Obviously Landis >wanted< a marathon run around the moon,
with an incentive to stay in the sun.  Ignore the "she should have gone to the
pole" argument.  She's under pressure.  (And besides, if, as someone else said,
she was pretty much on the equator, what is the benefit of going to the pole
instead of around the Moon?  Avoiding rough terrain, perhaps?)  And I found
the sister stuff fairly convincing.  I also did not take it as a given that
she would succeed--if I was writing it, I'd have to flip a coin to see whether
she died one mountain short of rescue.

Next was "Winter Solstice".  I don't know if there's precedent in Arthurian
mythos for Merlin's living backwards.  (And I thought that if he did live
backwards, it would be more than likely that he would experience conversations
backwards too, but that's a minor point.  Maybe he's like Piers Anthony's
Chronos, and can reverse time briefly if he concentrates, or if he's in the
vicinity of a person living forward.)  Maybe it is an allegory for senility,
too.  But I still found it interesting.  And maybe it's Fantasy, not Saifai,
but--well, maybe I'm just Canadian, but for me the S in SF stands for
"Speculative", not "Science".

"Dog's Life" was mildly amusing.  I thought the magic realism of the story(how
the dogs and cats could talk to everyone, with no explanation)was well-done,
and mostly followed through logically.  And the cat was very catlike in its
behaviour...

I missed most of the point of "In The Late Cretaceous"...I liked her earlier
Faculty story, "Ado", much better.  But the characters were extremely
memorable, and amusing.  And now that I look back, the dinosaur imagery is
very evident.  (And I love the ongoing parking tickets.)

"One Perfect Morning, With Jackals" kind of missed me.  As somebody else said,
I might just have missed all his other stories in that universe.  It was a
low-key story, and successful at what it did.  But I still didn't like it as
much.

And "Buffalo"--well, it is SF, in a way, but a very minor way.  It >is< an
alternate history story, but the change in history is very minor.  Probably
John Kessel himself would have been the only one affected...  But it was too
low-key for me.  It depicted the characters well, especially the embittered
Wells, but too little happened for me.  And I'm usually not hard to satisfy
that way...

A final note.  If you didn't like the stories this year, then next year, go
out and nominate your own!  Don't gripe about what other people nominated.  If
you don't think any of these stories were any good, find the ones that are and
nominate them.  No, I didn't either--but I would probably have picked some of
these anyway.  (Besides, I voted for the Auroras.  You want me to pay for >two<
conventions I'm not going to attend?)

--
---Alfvaen(a.k.a. Aaron V. Humphrey, Page of Newts)
Canadian Network For Space Research, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
"Don't you point that raygun at me--I might just explode..."  Thomas Dolby
Current Album--The Jesus & Mary Chain:Honey's Dead
Current Read--M.J. Engh:Wheel of The Winds