Read: F&SF March 2008
I'm afraid this issue was quite a disappointment for me.
"The Overseer" by Albert E. Cowdrey. A Civil War tale, interspersed and narrated from a time afterward. A ghost story, but one in which the ghost never feels threatening or frightening, and only seems to come up once and a while. The plotting was interesting and the back-and-forth between the past and present was done quite well. Unfortunately, the ending didn't quite satisfy.
"The Boarder" by Alexander Jablokov. There's no speculative element here, but it does deal with the space program, so that lets it get away with being in this magazine. I'd have to say that this was my slight favorite, even if I felt like this story never really went anywhere.
"Rumple What?' by Nancy Springer. I hate fairy tale retellings. This was no exception.
"Exit Strategy" by KD Wentworth. Brain downloading once again. The last year, I have read almost a dozen stories using some variant on this idea. Here, we focus more on the idea of people donating their bodies to the terminally ill. The development of the protagonist is nicely done, although the reveal in the end seemed unnecessary to me--it would have been fine without it, and I didn't feel that it was foreshadowed enough. My second favorite in the issue.
"The Second Descent" by Richard Paul Russo. I have no idea what was happening in this story. Something with Shangri-La. And maybe everybody is dead? Or not? Ambiguity abounds here. It's more about mood and half-formed thoughts than anything else. I didn't enjoy it, but I didn't hate it either.
"A Ten Pound Sack of Rice" by Richard Mueller. An old WWII fighter pilot, in his last days, has an encounter with the Devil. This story did not work for me at all. The dialogue was written in a style that made reading the story a struggle. There was no senswunda in this story, nor any of the others this month.
That's the big disappointment for me here. I read SF for good stories, but a great story brings something more than these do. So many of the stories here have a kind of obsession with the past and history. I like history okay, but this issue seemed too heavy with stories set in the past.
I hope April is better. Not sure when my subscription expires, but I can't afford to renew it right now.