Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine - Issue 29.pdf - Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine - allforjesus2001

Issue #29 RRP $8.95

ORIGINAL FICTION BY:

Sue Bursztynski

David Dumitru

David J Kane

Paul E Martens

Simon Petrie

Kevin Veale

Editorial

…Dirk Flinthart

I had plans for this issue.

I figured it might be fun to mess with the formula — to explore the

possibilities inherent to the magazine form, if you will. Nothing too

shocking: I thought I’d choose a general theme and select interesting

stories that explored it, to create new layers of meaning through the

contrasting ideas of the various writers. Simple, but nifty.

But then I had second thoughts. Not because there weren’t enough

stories, or that it was too hard to do. Nope. It all runs a bit deeper than

that.

In the fiction world at the moment there are two opposite trends

conspiring to make reading new work ever more painful. The most

obvious is the commercialization of the novel: the amount of pure

crap on the shelves is staggering. It’s next to impossible to find an

interesting new novel from a big publishing house these days. All the

big boys seem to want is the same old same old, only bigger and less

challenging.

Meanwhile, the short story is becoming ever less commercial, and

is in serious danger of being wholly pwned by the Literati, a perverted

subset of fiction folk that I loathe like herpes and telemarketing. I’m

not the only one who thinks so, either. From a review by Sam Sacks of

Best New American Voices 2006 :

“... Without ignoring the occasional flashes of verve, the stories

included are so monotonous that they seem to have been written by a

single person of middling talent. All but one of them are written in the

first person; a similar percentage hinge upon the narrator’s difficulties

with dysfunctional or deceased members of his or her family, or with

ex-lovers. The tone is always confessional and saturated with self-pity.

The plot and action are always negligible. ..”

Dirk Flinthart

(read the whole thing here — http://www.nypress.com/18/48/

books/SamSacks.cfm)

To be fair, Sam is pissing at length mostly on the output of writers’

workshops, but I believe you could apply his comments to many

respected short story outlets. There’s no money in short stuff, I guess

— so the Art Nazis are moving in to claim it for their own. I haven’t been

able to read a ‘literary’ mag and keep my lunch down for a few years.

Worse still, I have a nasty suspicion that ‘The Art’ is becoming more

important than the story for a number of writers and editors in Spec

Fiction too.

That’s plain scary.

I took up reading SF and fantasy and horror when I was about six

years old, because, goddammit, it was interesting. There were stories to

be told. Ideas to be explored. Wild and woolly tales to be savoured. It

was fun.

Don’t mistake me: I value artistic and literate prose. I love well-

crafted stories. I’m delighted that we’re not condemned to bash out

tales of rayguns and rockets and big-boobed blondes any more. But I’ll

be damned if I’m going to take a beautiful thing like ASIM, and try to

turn it into some beret-junkie’s post-modernist wet dream of Literary

Speculative Fiction.

I had plans for this issue. I didn’t chase them. Instead, I picked a

bunch of stories that I liked. I hope you like them too.

Dirk Flinthart

Editor, Issue 29

ANDROMEDA SPACEWAYS Inflight Magazine

Vol. 5/Issue 6

Issue 29

Fiction

7 Murder on The Zenith Express. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Simon Petrie

19 Scattersmith. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . David J Kane

30 A Day in Her Lives. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kevin Veale

61 Of Loaves, Fishes and Mars Bars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sue Bursztynski

69 The Color of a Brontosaurus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Paul E Martens

81 From the Inside, Out . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . David Dumitru

Special FEatures

4 Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dirk Flinthart

90 On Adrian Bedford . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Edwina Harvey

92 Reviews

— The Axis of Time Trilogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dirk Flinthart

— Through Soft Air. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ian Nichols

Regular Features

95 Author biographies

96 Acknowledgements

Editor, Issue 29

Dirk Flinthart

Andromeda Spaceways Publishing Co-op Ltd

c/- Simon Haynes, PO Box 127, Belmont, Western

Australia, 6984 (subscriptions only)

http://www.andromedaspaceways.com

Published bimonthly by Andromeda Spaceways Publishing

Co-op. RRP A$7.95. Subscription rates are are available

from the website.

Andromeda Spaceways Publishing Co-op actively encourages

literary and artistic contributions. Submissions should be

made online by emailing:

asimsubmissions@gmail.com

Submission guidelines are available from the website. Please

read them.

ISSN 1446–781X

Assistant Editor Thanks to Sue

Bursztynski, Tehani Wessely and Zara Baxter

Editor-in-chief

Robbie Matthews

Layout

Zara Baxter

Subscriptions

Simon Haynes

Advertising

Tehani Wessely

Cover Art

Nicola Robinson

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

(November 11, 1922–April 11, 2007)

…Dirk Flinthart

“Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn’t mean

we deserve to conquer the Universe.” Kurt Vonnegut, Novel Hocus Pocus 1990

Kurt Vonnegut was a man who might well have been a giant of the SF genre

if he had chosen to restrict himself. He was bigger than that, though. Not that

he was too good for science fiction; just that he had a hell of a lot more to say

than one single genre could hold. His books blended satire, black humour, science

fiction and simple, observational storytelling into a unique fusion. It’s said you can

recognize a great writer by their particular ‘voice’ and style. Of Vonnegut, it was

unquestionably true.

If you want details of his life and career, go and pull them up off Wikipedia.

What you get here is my response to the man’s life and works, and yes, his death

— and from that, maybe a clue as to what he meant to Science Fiction, if there is

such a capital-letters thing.

I found Cat’s Cradle when I was about 12. At the time, I was reading a lot

of SF. Most of it was what 12-year-old SF fans with excessive reading skills get

into: Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Niven, etc. I wasn’t picky, though. I’d

discovered Ellison and Spinrad and Le Guin, Moorcock and Brunner too, and

even though their visions were collectively weirder and often far more bleak than

the Campbell-driven material I’d first encountered, the imagery and energy and

imagination were still there. They were different, but they were still science fiction

writers, and I enjoyed their work.

Vonnegut threw my head into a completely different space.

Cat’s Cradle is generally reviewed as a work of science fiction, and in its central

plot device — an allotrope of water-ice called “ice-nine” which freezes at about

45°C and therefore has the capacity to restructure the water of the whole world

into a solid — there’s a clear SF connection. The rest of it, though...even for a

smart kid with a headful of Ellison, it was craziness piled on slapstick. Vonnegut’s

characters varied from outrageously cartoonish caricatures through to infinitely

sympathetic, beautifully rendered, hapless everyman slobs. He veered off the

narrative at will, tossing in jokes, literary references, self-deprecating authorial

observations, imaginary religions and philosophies, and in later books ( Breakfast

of Champions, for example), even his own crude felt-tipped pen sketches. His

caricature of a puckered anus, placed into the book for no reason other than

because he could, has become iconic.

Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine - Issue 29.pdf

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