Dominic Green. Blue Water, Grey Death.
Non-genre story about two men who get in above their depth. They find out that dolphins are not quite as friendly as they are made out to be.
Alexander Glass. Lucid.
Glass is a young British author who has produced some good stories to date. Here is his take on the issue of Alzheimers, which has been covered by others of late. Technological constructs enable the human memory to be mapped and storied, but for Carol this technology comes to late, as her husband is failing fast from Alzheimbers. Or is it too late? Can she take on a construct of his failing memory and live with it, keeping him alive beyond his physical death.
Thomas M. Disch. Ringo Night at a Martian Sportsbar.
Another single pager about the far future goddess Rwng.
Zoran Zivkovic. The Violinist.
An ageing professor on his hospital death-bed is visited by violin music which transports him, not to the music of the spheres, but to his childhood and to the achingly beautiful sound of a master violinist at work in a high garret. His is almost able to grasp the ungraspable, comprehend the uncomprehenable, bare the cloaked mysteries of life. Can he manage to convey his knowledge before his last breath?
Liz Williams. Sharecropper.
Another story from IZ regular. In remote rural Tashkent the local villagers take a major risk in defying the authorities in order to plant seed which has not been GM-ed by the west to produce only one harvest.
Don Webb. The Yellow Flower.
A new girlfriend with a metaphysical bent proves challenging to the protagonist. Can he change his ways to keep the relationship going. If not, will the relationship fade away, as if it never happened……
Andy Robertson. The Eater.
I got a few pages into this story, a strange far-future story, and then rather belatedly put two and two together. The other part of this equation being the cheesy full back cover advert for a website offering monies for stories set in William Hope Hodgson’s ‘classic Entropic Romance’ ‘The Night Land’. Sure enough there had been a quote from said book at the beginning of the story, and the author credit at the end points out that the author, Andy Robertson, is a co-editor of IZ and is behind the web site in question.
Not being at all keen on sharecrops I baled out of the story at that point.
Other stuff
- Paul Brazier interviews Jan Siegel (an embarassing number of studio photographs!)
- David Langford’s Ansible Link
- NIck Lower reviews HP and the PS, Atlantis: the Lost Empire, Alejandro Amenabar’s The Others, and Jan Svankmajer’s Little Otik
- Evelyn Lewes reviews the TV mini-series ‘Dune’
- Paul Brazier reviews Paul Cornell’s ‘Something More’, Spider Robinson’s ‘The Free Lunch’, Karen Haber’s ‘Meditations on Middle Earth’
- Liz William reviews ‘The Ant Men of Tibet, and Other Stories’, and Gus Smith’s ‘Feather & Bone’
- Matt Colborn reviews Liz William’s ‘The Ghost Sister’, and the anthology ‘Starlight 3’, Eric Brown’s ‘A Writer’s Life’ and Conrad William’s ‘Nearly People’
- Matt Coward reviews Robert Rankin’s ‘The Fandom of the Operator’ and ‘Web Site Story’
- Paul Beardley reviews some audio tapes
Conclusion.
The final story, the Hodgson sharecrop is the longest story by far, which is a shame IMHO as I would rather have seen the Williams or Webb stories at greater length
