Crank! #6 Winter, 1996 issue
$12 a year, checks payable to
BROKEN MIRRORS PRESS,
P.O. Box 380473,
Cambridge, MA 02238

Crank! is a small-press, literary SF magazine edited by Bryan Cholfin. Last year, Broken Mirrors Press, operated by Cholfin, received the World Fantasy Award. Crank! has marketed itself in a "package deal" with Century and I want to say it is a good deal. It is a good deal, but I'm not certain that the two literary "C" magazines of the SF world are in fact a great match.

Crank! is more hip in tone than Century. It seems likeBryan Cholfin is trying for a New Worlds type of thing, US-style. Nostalgic for those who remember Judith Merril's England Swings.

Crank! #6 contains seven stories. Some of them are not even stories by a very, very long stretch of the imagination, like Jonathan Lethem's "Holidays." Lethem lists fourteen holidays, followed by brief "definitions." Here is New Year's Eve: "Dress the cat in bags and break out the plankton sandwiches! Another year has come and gone. The first child born after the toll of midnight will frequently bear miniature antlers. They recede in the first six months and rarely reappear."

James Blaylock's "The Magic Spectacles" is a novella (I think - it begins with "Part one of three" which means there could be more to it) which details the adventures of two classic SF brothers, John and Danny. They find miraculous things which lead to goblins which lead to the odd Mr. Deener. It's all like a young boy's dream, very well done, but . . . a tad too long in the telling.

Karen Joy Fowler's "The Elizabeth Complex" is my favorite story in the issue. A truly Ballardian piece. Fowler explores the many meanings of the name Elizabeth, beginning with Elizabeth I (whose mother was unlucky at cards - and that wasn't all), then Elizabeth Taylor, and Lizzie Borden.

The less said about Robert Rogoff's "Yellow Sport Coats," the better. It's short.

Rob McCleary's "Nixon in Space" is another piece which might have appeared in New Worlds. McCleary's history is like that seasoning product, Crazy Mixed-Up Salt. All over the map, here and there, you don't quite know what you're getting. It may be the low I.Q. or altered-states version of alternate history. Ostensibly the story of Leigh, a "moon baby," the story gets going in the final two thirds with a tragic and somehow appropriately twisted tale of Nixon, who ends by being torn to pieces by an enraged mob after a failed trip into space.

I may be one of the only living people who remembers Carter Scholz' Ace Special novel Palimpsests better than two other Ace Specials published at about the same time: Lucius Shepherd's Green Eyes and William Gibson's Neuromancer. Apparently, the advances for those novels were pretty minimal; yet the line had some success, didn't it? Carter Scholz has what I would call an "OMNIesqe" story, "Make It New," in this issue of Crank!. The most Sfnal story in the issue, Scholz portrays a dreamlike Cambridge, in which a hapless hero makes small talk with simulacra of famous historical figures, searching for Ezra Pound. Forgive me, Carter, I am too stupid to figure out who "Tom" is. Obviously someone famous . . .

Michael Kandel's "Neanderthals All Along" is also more of an SF piece than the others in the book: a time travel piece with a twist. Unfortunately, I found the twist too obvious as well as traditional, especially in comparison with the rest of the magazine. I can't see this story appearing in one of the more widely-distributed magazines, because the idea is such an old one, and its smooth style does not make up for the thin characterization and old-fashioned "here's the twist, folks" ending.

Copyright © 1996 by Amy Sterling Casil. All Rights Reserved.