Poetry Roundup: Strange Horizons January 2011

Cold War Champions: Bobby Fischer and Yuri Gagarin Descend to Earth by Mary A. Turzillo

Comparison between two different types of Cold War hero. A lot of overlap between the two, but the poem left me lukewarm. To much just factually stated, not quite enough resonance. And I admit, Fischer's death as a "descent to Earth" is underexplored, but a neat idea to compare with a space mission.

Merlin by Lorraine Schein

I quite like the rhythm and neat rhymes of this one. Merlin is obsessed with time and clocks and his lack of control and limited knowledge. A nice take on the character, and a nice poem.

The Skin Walker's Wife by Lisa M. Bradley

Whole poem is the course of a woman having sex with a random guy, and thinking of her body-stealing husband who she has trouble actually recognizing anyway, after he has been away getting a new body. Maybe she should stop spending her whole life waiting for him to come back to her again. A tad more graphic that it needs to be, but the supernatural, absent husband is an interesting, if obvious, metaphor for the more normal type of absent husband.

Dark Matter by Timons Esaias

Hatred, bigotry, authoritarianism, and blind adherence to tradition will always be with us, no matter how many times science or reason try to push them back. Told through the weirdly bigoted astronomy commentary of the narrator's great-uncle. Neat way to make an important observation.

Shoe by Robert Borski

The Old Woman Who Lives in a Shoe thinks about how much she loves her children in the giant shoe that fell off a giant, perhaps in the vicinity of a beanstalk. Neat images making the nursery rhyme more grounded, but not a whole lot here.

Dark Matter and Merlin are the obvious standouts; I'd give the edge to Merlin as Best of Issue, but only by a hair. I have to say, this being my first time reading Strange Horizons' poetry, that it is MUCH stronger than the typical Asimov's issue. Here's to hoping that is a trend, not just an outlier.

Steak Tartare and the Cats of Gari Babakin

Novelette by Mary Turzillo

The citizens of Gari Babakin station are all infected with Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that is altering their personalities. They are happy with these personality changes, but their corperate owners think it is a public health hazard, and worse, cutting into profits. And they're willing to kill any number of adorable kitties to do it.

A fun, quick story. But while I didn't want to stop reading it, I also didn't enjoy it overmuch. Partly because the station seems to be a little too French: the main characters are Jean-Marie, Lucile, and Benoit and their culinary mastery is focussed entirely on wine, cheese, and pastry, the only other industry being fashion; it just seems a bit too close to France for me. The author is surely aware that the French population has an 80% toxoplasma carrier rate and wanted to riff off it, but it doesn't work for me.

But the main thing that puts me off is the SCIENCE! Now I know this is a light, unrealistic fun story, but there are certain things I just can't get past. I wouldn't mind if the station had a pet unicorn, but getting details about parasites wrong is unacceptable. I suspect this is because they feel like research failure rather than deliberate innacuracy for the sake of humor. Birth defects are brough up over and over, but toxoplasma doesn't cause birth defects except in mothers newly infected around the time of the pregnancy. There is no reason you would rapidly become serum-negative for toxoplasma after being cured, espcially after years of infection. That is the whole point of memory B cells. I could go on, but these are the kind of things driving me crazy. And the whole story would have gone over better if just once she had thrown a line out there about it being a special SPACE toxoplasma that caused greater personality changes on Mars, rather than the implication that this is the standard presentation. But maybe I'm just being testy and paranoid because of my own latent Toxoplasma infection. Didn't really work for me, 2 out of 5.