Did The New Yorker Lean Moderate? The End of Days is Nigh.

I’m going to be honest, I had very few hopes for the October 5th, 2020 issue of The New Yorker. The cover was political and the little half cover which tells you what’s in the magazine said: “Why Biden Must Win.”

So I was expecting it to be a prog-leaning rant issue.

Now, I’m both a non-US-citizen and a moderate, so I have very little love for the former US president, but reading an entire magazine written by his most radicalized opponents is as vomit-inducing as reading Trump’s twitter account. And that part of the magazine read exactly how you’d have expected, a laundry list of the Democratic Party’s election arguments.

That’s not why one reads The New Yorker.

Of course, the cultural section is also politically driven to a degree, with certain artists who’d never get a mention being included for the sake of diversity–but that’s fine. It’s easy to tell which are really good and which are just modern examples of angry political activists creating crap art or music or cinema.

The meat of this issue, however, is utterly brilliant.

First off, there’s an article arguing for the immediate opening of schools. This isn’t some far-right conspiracy-theory stuff, though: it’s science driven, measured and intelligent. It shows that the people who were against the reopening of schools for the 2020-21 year were driven exclusively by incorrect data (ministerpreted by politicians) and blind following of political leaders. A wonderfully unexpected piece.

Then we had an interview with Marilynne Robinson whose work seems to be anything but progressive. Another intelligent piece about an intelligent writer. And, though the piece on Artemisia Gentileschi might seem fundamentally feminist, it turns out that it intelligently argues against the fundamentalist feminism in some of the narrative about Gentileschi, and analyzes her as she would probably have wanted to be studied: as a brilliant painter who saw the world through female eyes.

All in all, a really strong issue, despite the framing, which was unfortunate.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose latest novel is a science fiction thriller entitled Splinter. If you’ve ever wondered how the limits between man and machine will be blurred in the future, you can check it out here.

The End of an Era

While I’m the first to admit that I’ve been a bit miffed with the direction Gardner Dozois had taken his Year’s Best selection over the past few years (as you can probably tell from here), there is no denying that he was a giant in the field, probably the most influential editor after the immortal John W. Campbell.

So, no matter how I felt about his recent form, I was greatly saddened by Dozois’ death in 2018. The genre is a poorer place without the staggering depth and breadth of his knowledge and his complete dedication to short SF. He might always have chosen the same authors… but he read everything and you (or at least I) believed that he was shunning the rest because his taste told him the ones he liked were better.

And even if the newer books were always full of not-so-entertianing fiction and politicized drudgery, they’re big enough that a number of really good stories always sneak in.

In this case, there is one I utterly adored entitled “Whending My Way Back Home” by Bill Johnson. It’s a smart (amazingly smart, actually) story that not only blew my mind, but did so in a subgenre I don’t always enjoy: time travel. Brilliantly written and did I mention how smart it was?

Another wonderful tale was Michael F. Flynn’s virtuoso tour-de-force entitled “Nexus”. You get the feeling that, before writing this one, Flynn jotted down the plot ideas and characters for five different stories and challenged himself to put them in a blender to create a single tale. That he pulled it off made the reader in me very happy and the writer in me very envious.

There are some other memorable ones (“An Evening with Severus Grimes” is good) and nicely some gentle ones, too. And yes, there’s some annoying bleakness and politically motivated stories in there, too.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Like Judith Merril in the sixties, “Best of” collection editors need to reflect their times. We live in an era of high political polarization and a truly childish level of discourse. Everyone seems to think that people who don’t share their views are morally inferior. Watching people discuss any kind of political question is akin to witnessing toddlers telling each other that they’re poopy-heads.

The SFF genre is not immune to this kind of stupid, unfortunately, and its fandom has broken in half along lines that vaguely follow the US political parties. One side is more literary and has the backing of the intellectual elites while the other is more entertainment-oriented and seems to be growing, but at the cost of critical derision. The silent majority of neutrals attempts to keep up good relations with both camps while wishing the activists on each side would just go away.

Dozois’ final few collections are a beautiful summation of the best of the critical darling side of the divide, while also documenting for posterity the stultified and preachy political fiction so beloved on an era where some people forget that SFF doesn’t exist to indoctrinate the masses.

A significant book.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose latest novel, the science fiction thriller Splinter, explores the line between man and machine. You can check it out here.

Why be Responsible when you can do Top Speed Tests?

I love top-speed shootouts. I love the fact that road cars exist capable of doing double (and in many places triple) the speed limit. I’m glad there are people who actually put these cars through their paces on deserted stretches of actual public roads.

Yes, I know it isn’t socially responsible and that, in the eyes of the law and many citizens, these people are criminals. Not only do I not care, I applaud the persons out there doing that. Society has way too many limitations on freedom and fun. Sometimes you just have to floor that accelerator and feel the grin spread.

Of course, Road & Track can’t do it on a public road, but I still love the fact that they took three cars which most people can’t buy and a good segment of the population disapproves of (especially the Countach, which is designed that way on purpose, to offend those who hate the rich AND those who hate speeders) and let them show what they can do. Great stuff!

Better still… the both Ferraris (Testarossa and GTO) outran the L-car.

Life is to be enjoyed and celebrated. If society creates laws that keep you from doing that (even when you’re not hurting anyone), then those laws should be broken every single time. And these cars show an intent to enjoy life despite the raised eyebrows of those who have given up on pleasure and now get their kicks ensuring that no one else can have a good time.

Anyway, this issue needed that bit of sociopathic fun to even itself out, as it’s one of those mostly road-car issues. Competition offseason means that the racing fix is only really present in the Salon (a Lister Knobbly!!) and the 1985 F1 season roundup (a season that began promising and ended in a dirge).

Despite that, and like all the top-speed shootout issues, this one is memorable.

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer whose latest novel is an SF thriller entitled splinter. This fast-paced adventure delves deeply into the mysteries of what, exactly constitutes life and consciousness… and the fears surrounding the question. You can check it out here.

What? ANOTHER Car Magazine?

Yeah, guilty as charged. There are so many good car magazines out there that they can sometimes overwhelm my resistance when standing in front of bookstore newsstands. They are just that good.

Vintage Motorsport is a delightful mag that I only buy occasionally but which lands right in my wheelhouse: old cars and race cars.

Unlike Motorsport, the venerable and original, VM is much more focused on the American scene. As such, there are differences, and it has a much more grassroots feel (motorsport is beautifully designed, international-style, to within an inch of its life).

While I’m not really a Perry fan or a fan of the cars that run in Nascar (I like the racing, but the cars are cookie cutter, especially the modern ones), the cover story about a barn-find racer that turned out to be a significant piece of history is wonderful.

Other good articles include the Salon (I need to check if VM is doing this every issue – when R&T stopped doing Salons I really missed them), the BMW 2002 road car article and a feature about racing Corvettes. But the best article has to be the one about the Stutz Garage. So cool that the factory is being preserved.

So yeah, I may be an incurable addict.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest novel is a science fiction thriller entitled Splinter. It’s a fast-paced book that asks hard questions about where the limits of life and consciousness actually lie. You can check it out here.

An Overdose of America’s Sports Car

By now, we all know (or should know) that the Corvette is America’s sports car. Out since the fifties, it has evolved from the original gutless boulevardier through the muscle years to the current iteration as a mid-engined exotic.

February 1986, kind of marked the midpoint of that evolution, but that’s not why Road & Track placed a huge Corvette section and cover article in the mag. They did it because the Corvette was a popular car which would help sell magazines on newsstands.

It’s always a good choice when you have a lot of space dedicated to a socially non-conscious vehicle such as this one. You get well away from the boring.

But though this issue was certainly dominated by the Corvette, it was by no means an exclusive. Another interesting car was the Salon about the Triumph Dolomite, an alfa 8C 2300 clone which, as difficult as it might be to believe, is actually prettier than the legendary original. Wonderful car, if ultimately unsuccessful.

Competition was well covered, with the definition of the 1985 F1 championship (which started strong but then petered out) and the SCCA Runoffs (there weren’t memorable, but the article was penned by Peter Egan, so it was worth reading anyway!).

A solid issue.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest novel is Splinter, a science fiction thriller that explores the nature of humanity and the limits of what it might mean to be alive in the future. You can have a look at it here.

Frozen Orbit: a Compelling SF Thriller

The best thing about that huge box of Baen books I won is that the books inside were chosen by Baen, so they included lots of things that I probably wouldn’t have selected if left to my own devices. While yes, some of these books have not become my favorites, others are definite keepers.

Frozen Orbit, by Patrick Chiles, is a keeper.

This is a wonderfully mysterious hard SF thriller which keeps you reading to find out what the hell is happening out on the edge of the solar system while describing a plausible way to get there, not once, but twice.

The sense of dark foreboding creates the same sensations that you get when watching a deliberately-paced space movie. You get a sense of traveling through space, the tedium, but also the tension of knowing that death is held back by the thinnest of metal bulkheads.

The buildup was so strong, in fact, that I’d say it’s the best part of the book. The mystery’s reveal and the ending was not as strong as I’d hoped (possibly because the philosophical questions that get asked here are more relevant to those of a religious bent), but I still liked the overall book. I’d happily recommend this one, and will be on the lookout for more of Chiles’ work.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest novel is a science fiction adventure entitled Splinter. Sequel to 2017’s Outside, this page-turner attempts to identify the limits between man and machine. You can check it out here.

The Showdown… well, not quite.

And there they were, gloriously juxtaposed–counterposed, even–on the cover of the June 1985 issue of Road & Track. The two supercars that defined the decade: the brand-new, brash and bestraked Ferrari Testarossa and the ever more potent incumbent, the Lamborghini Countach.

What more could an auto enthusiast possibly want?

Well, a head-to-head comparison, of course. But that wasn’t what this issue was about. The editors had to conform themselves with one first test and one first (mostly uninstrumented) drive, on different continents, in different venues, in different conditions. The great question, which was best, would have to await an answer.

Judging by the online arguments still happening, it’s still unanswered. This is as it should be. Ferraris and Lambos of the 80s variety are not things that can be logically argued. They must be felt, and as such, there can never be a correct answer.

So maybe it’s better they weren’t compared?

Nah.

Other things in the issue were a teardown of the 55 mph speed limit, including the utter destruction of the silly myth that speed kills.

On a more positive note (nothing about the 55 mph speed limit was ever positive, not even criticism of it. Like Prohibition it is a black mark on the history of American legislation.) there were reports on the 24 Hours of Daytona and the Paris Dakar Rally (the real one, not the emasculated version we have today).

There’s also a very nice Aston Martin Salon.

A good issue, even if the cover overpromises.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is a science fiction adventure thriller that not only entertains, but also explores difficult questions about where the limits of life and consciousness lie. You can check it out here.