News You Can Bruise for 2008 May 25

Rachel C. went to London and we went to Brooklyn and we saw each other through the Telectroscope. I just realized that I should have told my sister Rachel about the Telectroscope and seen her too, but I didn't think about it because I was already meeting a Rachel. Despite its technical uselessness (Rachel and I were texting back and forth to coordinate our meeting up at the scope) it was really great because of its public nature. I think there should be more bidirectional public portals between countries.

After Telectroscope we walked around Brooklyn Heights for a while, which was fun. There are pictures! I bought some books off my wishlist. The pictures you crave: Sumana preparing a sign for the Fitzchalmers family as Manhattan looms in the background. My most successful picture taken through the Telectroscope. Sumana pats the blue pig. The tiny basil plants we got yesterday at the farmers' market.

Read while subwaying to and from Brooklyn. This was a really great issue, excepting one well-written horror story that I didn't like because I don't really like horror. "Just Another Cowboy" by Esther N. Friesner had a really funny tall-tale voice, and then the voice started getting a little old and my mind started wandering and coming up with little riffs, and then one of the riffs I'd thought of actually happened in the story. I love it when a plan comes together.

Also funny were "Torah! Torah! Torah!" by Thomas M. Disch, sometime collaborator with John Sladek, and Alison Bowman's "The Copywriter", which is pretty much The Ballad of Michigan J. (Honestly I think TBoMJ has a more satisfying resolution, though it's totally unsellable.)

Not funny but very good was Charles Coleman Finlay's "The Political Officer", which as you can tell from the title tackles an organizational structure seen not often enough in SF. Intriguingly, Finlay published a story called "Fading Quayle, Dancing Quayle" in an anthology about zombies, making it possible that he's written a cross between "Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia", Zombies: The Movie, and (dare we hope?) Pamela Sergeant's Nebula-winning "Danny Goes To Mars".

Movie column is an appreciation of Donnie Darko, which I haven't seen. Book column mentions two excellent stories I've read and recommend to you: Ted Chiang's "Seventy-Two Letters" and Greg Egan's "Oracle". Both stories about computer science, actually.