Content area
Full Text
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 2001, Gordon Van Gelder, Ed., 143 Cream Hill Rd., West Cornwall, CT, 06796-9975. $3.50 for one, $38.97/11, ($46.97 outside US), 162 pgs.
The first novelette in this issue, Richard Chwedyk's "The Measure of All Things," is worth the price of admission. In fact, this story makes an entire year's subscription worth it. The story should be nominated for a Hugo and a Nebula. It's award-winning material. It's simply that good.
The story is a perfect mix of emotion, plot, idea, and energy. Tom Groverton is the curator of an unusual house. It is the near future and man has found a way to bio-engineer toy dinosaurs, to create them as play things in an image and size more suited to cartoons than real life. They can move, think, and talk, and-like most toys built for children-be quickly discarded. But what do you do with a living thing that gets left out in the woods, or abused by a sadistic child or simply abandoned in the city? Tom Groverton works for the Atherton foundation, which establishes houses designed to make the 'saurs comfortable as they live out the remainder of their damaged lives.
Chwedyk writes this story with such angst and pathos that it becomes difficult to read through the tears which fill your eyes. The story could be a statement about modern life and the things we discard as children only to return to as adults. For this is what happens in the story. Adults return to these houses looking for the things they so cruelly abandoned. Chwedyk places the perfect amount of emphasis on the 'saurs plight by allowing us to watch through the lens of Tom Groverton, himself a somewhat discarded and unwanted thing. The first person perspective allows us to see and feel through Groverton, to watch with the same pain he looks at the world with, to sense the frustration and compassion with which he cares for his charges, and to react as he does to their stories.
This is a story that should win awards. It should win awards for itself, for the magazine, and for Gordon Van Gelder who chose it and then placed it in the lead position. This is...