Tanith Lee
Tanith Lee. Black Fire. (Lightspeed Magazine #8, January 2011).
Cleverly written, in the form of three witness statements from couples relating almost identical events.
Tanith Lee. Torhec the Sculptor. (Asimovs October/November 2010).
A fairly routine story, below par from an author such as Lee.
Interzone Number 191 September 2003
Gregory Benford. Naturals. Dawn is a young girl with an untouched genotype of great vintage. She has been brought up by a Meta, a large group of adults who share the parenting function, who have a less ancient genotype but whom are still Originals – people with virtually no connection to external machine intelligences. As [...]
Interzone, Number 154, April 2000
Lord Soho, Richard Calder. A rich, entertaining story, a far distant sequel to the author’s Malignos story which appeared previously in Interzone, and which has been expanded into a novel by the same name. (note: a further sequela to this current story, appears in Interzone #159, September 2000) Richard Pike attains his majority, inheriting the [...]
Fantasy and Science Fiction, October/November 2002
Charles Coleman Finlay. A Democracy of Trolls. Not an obvious collective noun for the rock-dwelling sun-hating trolls in this story. Despite their base manners (eating rotten meat as a preference) and limited intelligence, democracy by means of voting is a key means of decision making within tribes. A mother whose recently born child has died [...]
Asimovs, January 2008
Rudy Rucker and Marc Laidlaw. The Perfect Wave. Rucker has collaborated in Asimovs recently with Bruce Sterling, with ‘Hormiga Canyon’ in Aug 2007 featuring a pair of dudes heading into uncharted nano-territory in the desert. Here Rucker and Laidlaw serve up some surfpunk SF, in which a VR-surfing facility out back of Cheezemore Ratt’s Surf [...]
Asimovs, February 2007
Alex Wilson. Outgoing. A countdown to a climax, with 10 episodes in the lives of an unlikely pair. Episode 10 sees young Tara playing marbles, her favourite being one blue/white orb which reminds her of Earth, and who finds out that she has brittle bones. The other is Chris Moser, a precocious 13-year old who [...]
Asimovs, August 2004
William Barton. The Gods of A Lesser Creation. Barton returns to the setting of previous stories of his ‘Heart of Desire’ (Asimovs Jan 2000) and ‘The Engine of Desire’ (Asimovs Aug 2002), and explores similar themes of what it is to be human, through HLL-357 a genmod cyborg, half-human and half-god and half-mechanical (OK math [...]
Subterfuge. Edited by Ian Whates, Newcon Press. 2008
Ian Whates latest collection under the NewCon imprint comes in a variety of flavours : paperback, hardback, and special (extra stories!) limited-edition, signed hardback. It is the latter of these reviewed here. And Whates has provided another strong collection, bigger than previous volumes, and worth looking out for. The standard of writing, and the invention in the stories, is almost uniformly excellent, and is strongly recommended
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