Sun 9 Jul 2017
SF Stories I’m Reading: ALEXANDER JABLOKOV “How Sere Picked Up Her Laundry.”
Posted by Steve under Science Fiction & Fantasy , Stories I'm Reading[5] Comments
ALEXANDER JABLOKOV “How Sere Picked Up Her Laundry.” Sere Glagolit #1. Novella. Lead story in Asimov’s Science Fiction, July/August 2017.
Of the three (or maybe four) SF print magazines still remaining, I think the best science fiction stories come from Asimov’s. (Not surprisingly, the best fantasy stories appear in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.)
Analog SF is tied a little too closely to the traditional SF tale, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s what the magazine’s readers want and have come to expect. The science fiction in Asimov’s is considerably more adventurous and what’s more, the stories in it are noticeably better written.
Case in point, this the first appearance of PI Sere Glagolit. Having had her business stolen out from under her by her former partner, she’s working on her own now, and having a difficult time of it. The planet where she lives, by the way, is not Earth. It’s a world with two suns and in particular, Sere works in a city called Tempest, one that is populated by pockets of all shapes and varieties of alien races, including humans (called the Om).
She’s hired to find out who’s been buying up the leases of a collected sequence of properties leading from the bottom of Drur Reef to the top. She soon learns that a cleaning organization called Ferrulin is involved, not a criminal enterprise, by any means, but as Sere says, they have “more than a couple of toes over the line.” While working on the case, she also learns how it was that a small time exterminator accidentally killed himself in a tunnel through the mysterious butte, a landmark of some note in the city.
As in all good private eye stories, there is a lot of footwork (and more) to be done, lots of false leads, lots of non-human characters with non-human motivations to talk to, and above all, a setting with lots of exotic scenery for the reader to gradually learn his/her own way around in. Thankfully, at novella length (over 30 oversized pages of solid print), there’s plenty of time and space to do so.
More stories are promised, which is good news indeed.
July 9th, 2017 at 3:55 pm
A quick email note from the author confirms that more stories about Sere Glagolit are in the works.
July 9th, 2017 at 4:16 pm
The SF mystery well done is always a pleasure to read. I;ve been neglecting the digests since I no longer have a newstand source, maybe it is time based on recent reviews and some friends being published regularly there to do some e-subs through Kindle. Most are well discounted, and you don’t end up with piles of digests everywhere.
July 9th, 2017 at 5:34 pm
The SF mystery is a tough combination to do successfully, but when done right, you can enjoy it even well after you’re done reading it.
July 9th, 2017 at 5:41 pm
I believe that INTERZONE qualifies as a SF magazine in print form, but the local Barnes and Noble is awfully hit or miss in carrying it — mostly miss.
I’ve neglected all of the genre fiction magazines for a long time. It’s only been since March that I started buying them again, and more than that, actually reading them. I think the SF magazines are much better than either ELLERY QUEEN or ALFRED HITCHCOCK, the two mystery magazines still going.
I think the latter haven’t taken good advantage of the larger size they’ve gone to, in their move to coming out bi-monthly. You’ll notice that this one by Jablokov is a novella, but neither mystery magazine seems to have gone in that direction.
July 15th, 2017 at 9:23 am
Over the years I noticed that Barnes and Noble sometimes carried INTERZONE but I could never count on them to have every issue in stock.
A few months ago I managed to buy a complete set of this UK SF magazine, over 260 issues going back to the first number in 1982. It is an interesting SF magazine but not really distributed well in the US.
I certainly agree with you about the SF magazines being better than the mystery magazines.