On the plus side, Ray Bradbury's "Lafayette Farewell" is amazing, easily the best thing in the issue, and infuriating given that he probably wrote it in forty-five minutes based on a conversation he had with a friend. Wayne Wightman's "Rat Run" is worth reading if only because it totally slams the town of Coalinga. I didn't like Lucius Shepard's "A Wooden Tiger" as a story, but it was really well written.
No cover photo this time because I'm lazy and the art is nothing special. No good ads in this issue, either, thought there is a video club selling Star Trek episodes on a subscription model: $25 for each two-episode tape. 
Sat Sep 26 2009 18:11 Reviews of Old Science Fiction Magazines: S&SF October 1988:
It's the boffo 39th anniversary issue, and despite a lot of big names, there's not much that holds up twenty years later. Clive Barker's gross-out "How Spoilers Bleed" is disqualified for the sentence "Now those tribes were all but decimated." Frederik Pohl's "The Star War" has a cool setup but doesn't deliver beyond some stale snark.
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