When The New Yorker Caters to Homer Simpson

Yeah, I know that title is a bit aggressive, and probably unfair, considering that both this issue and the last one I read were both much better than the usual politics-driven snorefests. Instead of being an example of partisan drivel that will annoy half of the intelligent people on the planet (and cause the other half to raise their eyebrows at the obvious bending of truths to pander to one side of the political spectrum), these latest issues appear more balanced, and therefore more intelligent.

Except for the idiotic lead article for the latest one.

The article is entitled “Coin Toss” but the outside cover leaf announces it as: “How to lose a Bitcoin fortune.”

It tells the story of a man in Wales who accidentally threw away a hard drive with a bitcoin key now worth half a billion dollars.

Now, while this is interesting, it would seem to appeal more to the kind of people who block traffic by slowing down to get a really good look at an ugly car crash than to the typical New Yorker reader. It’s straight-up voyeurism mixed with schadenfreude. It’s the stuff of small-minded people’s wet dreams. National Enquirer stuff. (albeit extremely well-written considering the extremely limited interest of the subject – this disaster wasn’t the writer’s fault)

Might this be a sign that TNY is having financial difficulties and needed to raise revenue by lowering the intellectual bar? A sign that the move away from strident politics (and the sales that drives from sad, angry people) needs to be balanced somehow? Or maybe it was just a really bad miss by the editor. I don’t know. Sadly I only read the ones I buy when I travel to the US, so I can’t really identify trends here.

Now the good news: the rest of the mag was up to the usual standards, and the activism, like in the previous issue appears to be toned down, a great sign.

Particularly gratifying was that the fiction piece, “A Shooting in Rathreedane” by Colin Barrett is the best short story I’ve ever read in The New Yorker. A wonderful little police procedural with extremely regional dialogue that also serves as a character sketch–albeit a subtle one. It absolutely surprised me, in a very positive way.

And perhaps that’s the nicest thing about The New Yorker. It’s a grab-bag of a magazine that can fall to the lowest intellectual depths of anti-intellectual pandering or zombie-like political activism and then rise to the sublime. You never know if what comes next will elevate, educate or irritate.

And that is good enough to keep me coming back on occasion.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is a collection of science fiction and fantasy crime stories entitled Thin Air. He hopes readers enjoy the stories as much as he loved writing them. You can check it out here.

The End of the Pile

The June 1986 Road & Track wasn’t particularly notable for its content, except for the final installment of the long-running feature about Rob Walker‘s cars.

The cover article, for example, is one of those occasional navel-gazing moments in which the good editors of Road & Track speculated about future Corvettes. Corvette extravaganzas can be fun, if done correctly, but the question of future mid-engined versions of the model wore extremely thin over the decades until it finally happened thirty years after this issue came out.

The road tests were better than usual, though. The Lotus Turbo Esprit is a fun car, and the 80’s Shelby Chryslers were extremely fast and unrefined, like that girl (or boy) in high school we all remember so fondly now. Honda also launched the Acura Legend, to lukewarm reviews, which is funny considering how that car completely changed the US market.

The rest of the mag was nice. There was a wonderful Salon, an article on the Indy garages, and the F1 season preview.

Good stuff all, but the real reason this one is significant is that it marks the end of my second huge pile of old Road & Tracks. I am slowly filling the gaps in my collection, and the easiest way to do that has been to buy large bulk lots here in Argentina and then fill in the gaps with Ebay purchases. This one marks the end of that second bulk purchase and it means I will move on to other car mags (of which I ALSO have a humungous pile) before cleaning up some R&Ts that I bought separately.

I’m still missing dozens of mags, mostly from the 1950s and 1960s, but before addressing those big holes, I think I will attempt to get the individual items from the 1980s and get that decade complete (I already have Everything from about June 1985 to the mid 2010s, so there are a few complete decades in my collection).

It’s fun stuff.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is a collection of science fiction and fantasy crime stories entitled Thin Air. He hopes readers enjoy the stories as much as he loved writing them. You can check it out here.

Bond Bravura

With James Bond being an unfortunate target of the culture wars, that unfortunate and never-ending argument in which one tiny faction of humanity tries to squeeze the enjoyment out of life for everyone else in the name of social engineering, it’s refreshing to find an issue of a magazine that focuses on something fun regarding the character… his cars.

And there’s a lot here to enjoy. Classic & Sports Car is probably the perfect lens through which to study James Bond vehicles, because the editors are knowledgeable enough to know the major entries well and to cherry-pick the unusual and ridiculous. That Citroen might not be a typical or expected entry, but it was certainly memorable.

I particularly enjoyed the article about the guy who restored not one but TWO Esprits to painstaking Bond spec–easier said than done.

And with articles about the life and untimely death of Wolfgang von Trips and the Hispano Suiza J12, the mag is really fun.

Of course, even if the social engineers win and Bond becomes a shadow of himself (if he is anything but a womanizing, violent Briton with family connections to the upper class, he isn’t Bond–he’s something else with Bond’s name clumsily attached by jackasses who don’t care about the character except to use him as a symbol of their continuing crusade to destroy the joy in life), we’ll still have these cars. Most of them are ostentatious, expensive and downright antisocial.

And that’s just the way we like it.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is a collection of science fiction and fantasy crime stories entitled Thin Air. He hopes readers enjoy the stories as much as he loved writing them. You can check it out here.

Another Porsche Issue

Every once in a while during the 80s and 90s, Road & Track would haul off and do a Porsche issue. One of the first I ever bought as a teenager was in this format, too.

I’m not really certain why they did this, and they certainly didn’t do it as often for other sports car manufacturers. Ferrari articles, for example, tended to focus mostly on a single model. But the fascination with Porsche appeared to go beyond the models and to the entire lineup. My theory is that the editors were fascinated by Porsche’s never-ending attempts to supersede the immortal 911. How, they probably wondered, could a car with the engine hanging out over the rear wheels still be present in the (insert decade from the 1970s to the 1990s here).

So they went back to the well again and again to try to answer the question. In this particular issue, the 911 in normally aspirated and turbo forms was pitted against two 944s (again aspro and turbo) and a 928.

The magazine’s verdict: inconclusive.

The public’s verdict? Well, of the three, only the 911 is still on sale today.

The rest of the issue was pretty decent, with a couple of GP reports a V-16 Cadillac Salon and a report from the Frankfurt Auto Show.

But this is a Porsche Issue for the most part.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is a collection of science fiction and fantasy crime stories entitled Thin Air. He hopes readers enjoy the stories as much as he loved writing them. You can check it out here.

First Contact with a Publication

Much to my consternation when weighing my bags for the return trip, my travels to WorldCon always yield at least a few items I wouldn’t have bought (or, possibly, even encountered) had I been browsing in a Barnes and Noble.

Galaxy’s Edge is a publication I’ve been aware of for a long time, but one I’d never read. I think I may have sent them a story or two at some point, but mostly, they had a submissions process which made it difficult for random writers to send material over. Still, anything founded by Mike Resnick was interesting to me, so I watched the space.

I finally picked up a couple of copies at the publisher’s table at WorldCon, and number 48, pictured, has finally cycled to the top of my enormous TBR pile.

I’m happy to report that it’s a good mag, representing the current state of science fiction. Unlike a lot of modern SFF, these stories were mostly modern without going over the edge of the stuff that isn’t to my taste–which was a pleasant surprise.

It’s a solid collection of writing including both fiction and nonfiction, but something weird happened to me as I read: the piece I was expecting to hate ended up being my favorite.

Perhaps a little explanation won’t come amiss here. When reading the table of contents, I realized that one of the “stories” was actually the first part of a Harry Turtledove novel. Of course, I was planning to read the thing, but only because A) Turtledove is a major writer and I wanted to study what he was doing. And B) when I pick up a mag, I read the whole thing because I’m just that pig-headed.

Of course, I ended up loving the excerpt and now I’ll need to find the book. Sheesh!

The title in question is Over the Wine Dark Sea, and it’s set in ancient Greece. The writing? Makes me angry, not because it’s brilliant (it is professional-level writing, but not notable for any particular virtuosity) but because there’s a contradiction in the way he generates the magic.

The problem–and virtue–is that Turtledove is either a major expert on Greece customs in the era in question, or he did a metric crapton of research. He knows his stuff to a massive degree.

And then he puts absolutely all of that research into the text.

This is usually a recipe for disaster, and I found myself constantly annoyed at details that weren’t necessary jammed into the flow of the narrative.

But then, as my reading progressed, I also found that I was drawn into the world to a degree that is unusual in most pieces I read. And when the fragment ended, I wanted more.

So at least some of that annoying detail was necessary. How much? I don’t know… I’ve never been a master at historical fiction set deep in the past. But I think it’s safe to say that some of it was helping.

Anyhow, this is just one writer’s thoughts about another (more famous) writer’s prose. Feel free to ignore my ramblings and know that Galaxy’s Edge is eminently readable.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is a collection of science fiction and fantasy crime stories entitled Thin Air. He hopes readers enjoy the stories as much as he loved writing them. You can check it out here.

A Mystery Car

As a kid growing up in the 1980s, I knew of the Nissan Mid-4 because of the Top Trumps cards produced under license in Argentina (which my parents would buy whenever we came here to visit our family). And then I realized that Testor’s had a very pretty-looking model kit of the thing.

So, I’d assume it was an important car… but in my years as a reader of car magazines and classic car magazines, years that started at age thirteen, I never once saw an article about the car. It was a complete mystery to me that it would be so present in my mind and yet so utterly ignored by the automotive press from the 1990s on.

Of course, a lot of concept cars essentially disappeared after showing up at two or three auto shows, but it also seemed that this one was too important for that.

So when this issue of Road & Track showed up in my pile, I thought the mystery would be solved. Instead, it kind of deepened. It seems that Nissan had this vehicle, packed with what, for its day, was cutting-edge tech, almost ready for production. It wasn’t just a showcase for four-valve heads, four wheel drive and four wheel steering, as noted on the cover, but an actual car on its way to production.

A quick Wikipedia search confirms that it never made it past the prototype stage. And I still don’t know why, other than the fact that many, many concept cars die on the vine. Still…

One clue that appears in this issue is a mention that it’s a car aimed at Group B competition which, considering the tech in it, makes sense. Unfortunately, the Group B category was removed as the top Rally class due to the death of Henri Toivonen in Corsica in 1986, so perhaps that affected the production plans.

The rest of the issue was a typical Reagan-boom-era issue (one thing I like about reading old magazines is that one can judge the economic climate just by looking at how well supported by advertisers magazines were in any given era, and ignore all the spin out there): thick, well-sponsored and packed with content. Of particular interest was the fact that this one held no less than three separate Grand Prix reports.

One weird thing I just saw was that this was an era where the table of contents was packed with puns, plays on words and even rhyming blurbs. Weird, but not unusual for R&T, which is about as quirky as any publication gets.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is a collection of science fiction and fantasy crime stories entitled Thin Air. He hopes readers enjoy the stories as much as he loved writing them. You can check it out here.

Exploring Space

I read a LOT of short story anthologies. Many, many of them contain one of my stories, which is either a perk or a curse of being enormously prolific (depends on how you feel about reading contributor copies), but there are also some that just have my name on them.

Niel Clarke’s The Final Frontier is one of these. It was unlikely that I’d ever give it a miss, despite… certain things.

First the obvious part – why I was a totally obvious customer for this one.

Strangely, the positives have less to do with the fact that I love space exploration stories (and think that the most important thing humanity needs to be doing is to send people out into the galaxy on a permanent basis, regardless of the risk or cost, and even if we have to support annoying billionaires in the task) than they do with the fact that I consider Niel Clarke, the editor of this tome, to be one of the good guys of the genre, and I bought this book from his table at WorldCon… because I can’t resist buying stuff I think is important from people I like.

So what made me hesitate?

Well, I know, from earlier anthos and stories published by him, that Neil and I have a very different opinion about what constitutes a good SF story. Which meant that a lot of the work in this particular volume was likely to miss my own particular sweet spot.

No worries – I’m fine with reading stories that aren’t quite perfect for me, and I duly read the book. I found exactly what I expected to find. Some stories that I quite enjoyed, some that annoyed me and one that was written in an unfortunate style that detracted from its effectiveness. Overall, however, it delivers what it says on the tin, and people with more patience than me for politically activist fiction will find it quite excellent.

Having said that, it’s time to choose favorites, and I’ll say that “Diving into the Wreck” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch appeared to be the strongest of the bunch. Perhaps I would have preferred a more conclusive ending (or simply a different one), but the buildup was solid enough to keep that from becoming a major issue.

There are other good tales in here, so if you feel inclined to read about space–with many different and especially modern takes–you’ll like this one, and you’ll find it makes you think. If your tastes go towards the space-positive, optimistic side of the spectrum, you might prefer to read a different collection.

I’m glad I read it.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is a collection of science fiction and fantasy crime stories entitled Thin Air. He hopes readers enjoy the stories as much as he loved writing them. You can check it out here.

Thin Air Collection Published

I have some writing news. My collection Thin Air – The Cosmic Crime Fiction of Gustavo Bondoni, has been released.

This one is hugely exciting to me, because I love crime fiction. And I love SF. So I love, really love, these stories. If you want to know the whole tale of why I love them so much, you should read the intro to the book.

And most of all, I LOVE this cover:

It just conveys what the book is bout so spectacularly well.

Want to know more? Here’s the back cover blurb:

Crime has always been around, and it will continue far into the future. Whether it’s priceless artifacts disappearing from a sealed container, trading useless space rocks to aliens in exchange for something far more valuable, a genetically-modified, not-quite-human-anymore celebrity who dies under mysterious circumstances, ghosts achieving the perfect revenge, or robots finding the equivalent of digital drugs, the possibilities are endless for committing-and solving-any type of crime you can imagine.

Find all of these, and more, in Thin Air: The Cosmic Crime Fiction of Gustavo Bondoni. The twenty-one tales in this volume represent over fifteen years of storytelling, giving unique perspectives from both heros and villains alike. Three of those stories appear here for the first time! So, tip back in your chair and read a few while listening to the city as it bustles by on the rainy streets below. This is sure to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

And you can check out the book, and buy a copy, here.