Fantasy & Science Fiction - September 2006

This issue presented three stories by different authors based around an idea provided by Harlan Ellison (who apparently insisted on his own EULA before putting the idea out there).  Those were interesting and completely different takes on the idea, which was good.  There's another John Morressy story (not a Kedrigen story, but still good) from the backlog of his stuff that had been accepted but not published.  Most interesting thing was the excerpts from letters between Ursula Le Guin and James Tiptree Jr. (aka Alice Sheldon).  Lucius Shepard also provides a review of the second movie following Night Watch.  Kind of a mixed review, but it had this interesting line:

"It's as if Dostoyevsky, Marilyn Manson, and Roger Corman were collaborating behind the scenes."

Ouch.  My brain. :-)

Lost Horizon - James Hilton

The blurb on the front says, "The haunting novel of love in Shangri-La."  Which I guess proves that people writing blurbs didn't always read the books back 1972 either when this was reprinted.  Interesting book, especially given that it was first published in 1933.  There's a central vision here of mankind's doom that's based on the view that we will just keep escalating conflict and consumption until these two things destroy us.  There's also this marvelous little exchange:

"'Slacker,'" explained Conway, "is a slang word meaning a lazy fellow, a good-for-nothing. I wasn't, of course, using it seriously."

Chang bowed his thanks for the information. He took a keen interest in languages and liked to weigh a new word philosophically. "It is significant," he said after a pause, "that the English regard slackness as a vice. We, on the other hand, should vastly prefer it to tension. Is there not too much tension in the world at present, and might it not be better if more people were slackers?"