I noted that Cleary’s ‘Out of the Dream Closet’ from Asimov’s February 2011 issue was ‘a singular story .. if not a nightmarish vision, then something from a disturbed night’s dreaming following an ill-advised late night supper of pickled comestibles’.
Well, suffice to say, he’s done it again, with an intriguing city whose inhabitant’s age changes as they traverse the street grid, getting older as they head past the 70th and much younger as they travel below the 20th. Whilst it’s in the future, the cyclist/vehicle war is still very much on, and Joey has a role to play in the design wars behind the battle on the streets.
There’s a lot of inventiveness in the story, which becomes a buddy story, and even ends up with a Bay City Rollers song, which took me back in time to age 15 in 1975, sitting at home bemoaning their music and wondering just when punk was going to be invented….
Cleary’s got a story queued up in my pile of Asimov’s Kindle issues yet to be read, which I’m looking forward to.
