‘Uncanny Magazine’ is a bimonthly periodical that features essays and fiction. I’ll pick out the highlights.
The first fiction is ‘Bodies Stacked Like Firewood’ by Sam J. Miller. When Cyd, a transgender person commits suicide, tragically unhappy due to our rotten society, some of his friends blame themselves. The narrator is a promiscuous gay ‘bottom’ who goes online looking for ‘fuck buddies’. That’s okay because he’s not a heterosexual man objectifying women’s bodies by only wanting them for sex. The story contains Cyd’s fantastical theories about ‘The Great Gatsby’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald which in Cyd’s eyes predicted the Nazi Holocaust. Fitzgerald may have been told about it by his wife, Zelda, who had visions which drove her crazy. There is reference to a cis gender man. Cis gender, for those of you still living in the Stone Age, is a term for those people who have a gender identity that matches the sex they were assigned at birth, ie cismen are happy being men. They used to be called ’men‘.
- Marc Rustad is ’a queer non-binary writer’ (look it up, Stone Age Man!) and wrote ’Monster Girls Don’t Cry’. A girl lives in a castle with her sister. Sis never goes out because she has too many teeth in her mouth, all pointy and long claws in her hands. Our heroine mixes in the normal world by filing down the horns that grow out of her head and the wings that grow out of her back. After an attempted rape by her boyfriend, she decides she prefers girls. Then her ex starts stalking her and kidnaps her sister. This was well-written and the message of tolerance for those who look different has hardly ever been touched on by ‘Star Trek’ and similar so-called fantasy productions in the oppressive mainstream media.
‘To Budapest, With Love’ by Theodora Goss is a story/essay written in the present tense. It’s a first person account of the author’s duality, being Hungarian by birth but growing up in the United States of America speaking English. She is drawn back to Hungary and even managed to visit her grandparents there in the communist era. When the Berlin Wall came down, it became easier to go there but the country began to change as well. I found this rather cold and unemotional. Surely, trapped in this appalling situation, Theodora could have wrung more pity from the reader.
In ‘Some Cupids Kill With Arrows’, Meg goes on a speed dating night and meets Hercules and Cupid. As she has a Masters in Comparative Mythology, something her mother assured her would be quite useless, she is well prepared. Tansy Rayner Roberts gives us a tasteless romp about dating and heterosexual love. Not a word about the cheap objectification of oppressed womankind that everyone knows is the true nature of such things. I was frankly disgusted by this appalling mainstream trash that perpetuates the white male phallocentric world viewpoint.
I couldn’t really see the point of ‘The Unknown God’ by Ann Leckie neither. Aworo, Lord of Horses, God of the Western Plains took on male human form and fell in love with Saest, female servant of the River God Nalendar, in the city of Kalub. He asked her to marry him and, when she turned him down, cursed her: ‘Turn away from the river and die!’ This meant that if she left the river, she would die. Having spent some time with Atheists in the hills, he has returned to Kalub. This well-crafted meditation on gods, man and fraud was entertaining, I suppose, but didn’t address any of the crucial issues of white supremacy, homophobia, neo-Nazism and misogyny which are helpfully listed in this issues editorial. Disappointing.
I’ve given up reading the non-fiction in ‘Uncanny’ because it’s too heartbreaking. I thought ‘Inferior Beasts’ by Mark Oshiro was a story because the header had a severe Content Note for descriptions of child abuse and homophobia. I decided I didn’t want to read it then thought I better had. It turned out to be a review of J.K. Rowling’s ‘Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them’, just the sort of garbage where you‘d expect to find child abuse. Turns out a kid gets beaten by his mother. My mother hit me sometimes and I was so upset by this that I couldn’t read further to find the homophobia but I‘m sure it was there. These mainstream children’s films are notorious for homophobia and hatred of strong women. Remember when Bambi’s mother got shot! The author notes tell us the Mark has been ‘subjecting himself to the emotional journey that one takes when they enter a fictional world for the first time’. I was reminded of the sleeve notes on ‘Yellow Submarine’ about the Beatles. ‘They are heroes for all of us, and better than we deserve.’ After the incredible courage Mark showed in watching such a traumatic film, I’m ashamed I couldn’t finish his review. Review? The word is too small. Surely this is on a par with Primo Levi’s account of Auschwitz. He’s a hero for all of us and better than we deserve.
So, that’s ‘Uncanny Magazine’. If you’re the kind of reader who thinks fantasy should feature admirable people struggling against great odds to save other people in some sort of metaphor for the real world, too bad. If you think Science Fiction should be about engineers or scientists solving the problems of environmental catastrophe, expanding population, terraforming Mars or other real social and political issues, too bad. If you think that Science Fiction magazines should have essays and articles about real life advances in science that can benefit all mankind, well…I pity you. I pity you.
This will be the last time I review ‘Uncanny Magazine’. The torment is more than my fragile heart can stand. Did I mention that I was called big ears at school and my friend was called fatty. We never had any counseling. Oh pity me! Pity me!
Eamonn Murphy
December 2016
(pub: Uncanny Magazine. Black & white Kindle edition. Price: £2.61 (UK). ASIN: B017AT4OFU)
check out website: http://uncannymagazine.com/issues/uncanny-magazine-issue-eleven/