First Review of GUD Issue 6

Skull Salad Reviews GUD Issue 6

"For me, the best story this issue was Ferrett Steinmetz’ ‘In the Garden of Rust and Salt.’ Nine-year-old Evelyn, Queen of the Junkyard, discovers unsavoury truths about her guardian and makes an unusual friend. Lovely."

Review: Albedo One Magazine (Issue 39)

Ask any twentieth-century reader of speculative fiction what they'd expect to find in an SFF magazine, and they'd probably describe something that would look a lot like Irish magazine Albedo One: a print magazine featuring a selection of SF and F stories, a non-fiction article or author interview, and some book reviews. It's a long-lived and effective formula and Albedo One is a handsome example.

Visit the Albedo One website, however, and you'll find concessions to the twenty-first century. Albedo One offers a range of online content, including Albedo 2.0 fiction--currently featuring 'The Million Pound Shop' by Ian Wild and Donald Mead's Aeon Award short-listed story 'A Falcon Sharp and Passing', as well as downloadable .pdfs of the magazine and some exciting-looking content that is still 'under construction'. It's worth visiting for the online shop alone, where you can view covers of Albedo One's past.

The issue under review, 39, has cover art by Cyril Rolando in which a dejected androgynous figure trails a love balloon through a landscape of otherworldly trees. Although the figure is heading for a bench, it's hard to believe they even know it's there, as they are so downcast. It doesn't sound like an invitation to open the magazine, but it intrigues in its own way, and its background offers the possibility of brighter alternatives.

Inside, there is an interview with prolific award-winning SF author Mike Resnick, an editorial, six pieces of fiction including a reprint of a story by Resnick, 'Hothouse Flowers', and a handful of book reviews. The magazine is well set out, with small but readable type and nicely unobtrusive embellishments to headers, footers, and pull-quotes. Author biographies appear in sidebars rather than at the end of stories, which means endings aren't stepped on. All this gives the impression of an editorial team confident in what they're producing, and who don't feel the need for bells and whistles.

John Kenny's interview with Resnick stretches over six pages of this issue, and offers a solid introduction to the writer and his work. Resnick gives the impression of holding nothing back, and talks as freely about his early work in men's magazines and adult books as he does about his dog-boarding business and his work in SFF. 'You may view my post-1980 career as a public penance for my pre-1980 career,' he says at one point. He also has a distinct vision of the future of publishing--traditional (commercial) publishing is on its way out, digital is the future, and 'the print publishers have no one to blame but themselves.' Resnick sees the digital future of publishing as being driven by writers dissatisfied with print publication, rather than by consumers who prefer to read ebooks. It's an interesting interview, although I would have liked to see some discussion of the more challenging aspects of Resnick's work.

The first story in Issue 39 is Annette Reader's 'Frogs on my Doorstep', the winning story in the Aeon Awards 2009, which are run by Albedo One's publishers Aeon Press.

This somewhat unbalanced and uneven tale tells of Ellie, who disappears from a walled garden as a child and then mysteriously reappears as an adult--or does she? The story begins with the intriguing statement that 'Reality is a myth' and then goes on to prove this by taking the reader to the set of the Oprah Winfrey show.

Okay, cheap shot. There is potential for immense impact in the scene on the show when Oprah unveils an enhanced photograph of how Ellie might look as an adult, only to be shown an almost-identical photograph, evidently years old, that is in the possession of Ellie's brother, the narrator. Ellie's father reacts to the enhanced photograph with such violence and anger that both Oprah and the reader are confused. Unfortunately, we then leave the Oprah set, and the story continues in a more prosaic fashion, with paragraphs of backstory about Ellie's disappearance.

There's a sound idea for a story here, but it's not fully realised. The most striking flaw seems to me that we never return to the set of Oprah, which makes that sequence ultimately seem something of a gimmick rather than a means of telling the story. Even the frogs of the title come in a bit late. Jack the narrator never lives in the reader's mind; first person was, arguably, not the best choice to tell this particular tale. Yet the sequence where the adult Ellie returns to her family after only a year has passed holds both truth and poignancy.

A story translated from Finnish, 'The Horse Shoe Nail' by Mari Saario follows, as part of Albedo One's 'continuing commitment to bring you the best in foreign language fantastic fiction.' The author biography is endearing, including gems like, 'Finnish is a long language and Finnish science fiction short stories are not short.'

Reviewing stories in translation is a minefield for the unwary, as any flaws could easily have been inadvertently introduced at the translation stage. Certainly at times there's a roughness of language in 'The Horse Shoe Nail', but not enough to spoil the read. This is a story of portals and smith-magic, and of how lives that intersect only briefly can make long-lasting impressions. Main character Alice seeks refuge from her dysfunctional family in the old smithy once run by her late grandfather. She doesn't think she'll be disturbed there, but finds herself expected to provide smithwork for two strangers--two very strange strangers, one of whom is brusque and arrogant, and the other of whom is somewhat hairy, not quite human.

As Alice grows up and makes her way through life, she encounters these two again, but time is out of joint and although she recognises them, they don't always recognise her, taking the adult Alice for the mother of the child they met previously. When Alice has a child of her own, she's forced to make a heart-breaking decision for him that will change everyone's lives.

I wasn't entirely convinced by Alice's solution to the dilemma surrounding her child; it seemed rather neater in the author's mind than it would be in reality. Yet this is a strong story, albeit perhaps one that runs a little too long. Alice comes across as a real person with real, difficult problems that she can't easily solve, and the entrance of magic into her life brings consequences that are bittersweet. Worth a read, although its feel is Fantasy rather than SF.

Resnick's 'Hothouse Flowers' might almost have been included to prove that it's not only novice writers who produce first-person narrators that are less than fully-rounded. This is an SF story of the old, Asimov school, in which the characters are less important than the idea. About the only characterisation we get of the narrator is when he disparages his wife.

The flowers of the title are those grown by that wife, the pudgy and graceless Felicia, but also the incredibly old people that the narrator tends in his day job. Most of them seem to be effectively brain-dead. They are kept alive anyway, because, as the narrator says, 'We were so busy increasing the length of life that no one gave much thought to the quality of those extended lives.' This is the story's premise, but I found it a hard one to credit. We're nowhere near being able to keep anyone alive until they're 153 at present, yet the debate about quality of life is active and polarised. If that has changed in this future, we need to know how and why to be convinced.

There's also an extended joke about the word euthanasia that I found irritating.

Into the narrator's quiet routine of baths and resuscitations comes Bernard Goldmeier. A difficult patient who won't shut up and not die quietly, Bernard irritates the narrator no end. 'Anyway, here I've finally got someone who could thank me, could tell me that I'm appreciated, and instead he's furious because I'm going to do everything within my power to keep him alive.' There should be irony here, yet it doesn't quite work.

Nor, really, does the attempt at a parallel between the exotic, genetically-modified flowers and the patients. The similarity wasn't clear to me beyond that both need a lot of care and both sometimes get sick. Yet the narrator takes a startling new direction in his life based on the analogy he finds between people and flowers. It's a story that might have worked better at half the length.

Martin McGrath's 'Eskragh' is a short piece about loss. It opens with the funeral of the narrator's best friend's father. The best friend has already been buried, a year and a half before, or rather buried symbolically after drowning in Eskragh and never being found. The story is written with a nice minimalism and uses short scenes to evoke the grief and bewilderment the characters feel.

'Eskragh isn't big, but it is deep'.

The story's setting, Ireland during the 'Troubles', is brought to life rather than merely described, with the 'fat bumblebees'--British Army helicopters--just part of the backdrop of everyday life.

Author McGrath dedicates the story to a friend of his who 'went swimning one day and never came back', and that sense of personal loss infuses this story to great effect. I'm not sure this is either SF or F, but it is powerful.

Next comes 'Partly ES' by Uncle River. For those like me who were a tad confused, Partly is a town and ES is short for Emergency Services. This is a futuristic tale of first response in an America where Homeland Security can close the roads and keep an ambulance from getting through without needing to give any reason.

For whatever reason, this piece is overloaded with characters. Six are introduced on the first page alone. Anyone mentioned even in passing has to have a name and perhaps a piece of information attached. It certainly reads like small town gossip, but it's necessary early on to give up any attempt at keeping everyone straight. There's just too many of them, and most have little-to-nothing to do with the story here.

That said, there isn't so much a story as a series of anecdotes. It is a bit like reading the Partly ES logbook, with occasional interludes of Golan Talinian's private life. Golan is the protagonist, in so far as there is one, and we follow him from dinner with his friends through various emergencies, with a side visit to chemtrail conspiracy theory, and back to the friends again. If you like this kind of folksy narrative, there's plenty here to keep you happy, but you might need to make a diagram of everyone who appears.

The final story in this issue is the spooky and disturbing 'Grappler' by J.L. Abbott, which traces events in the lives of 'the people' following a prophecy made by Circle of Stones on her deathbed. 'She was not fasting to see the whispering world, she was starving, but it came to the same thing. As she lay upon deer hides before she died, the truths were revealed. The first vision, that men with colored hair would come to her village. The second that a deformed man made of dust would bring death. And the third, that if her people wore leather coverings upon their feet, their spirits would be enslaved for as many lifetimes as men had fingers.'

This is a strong, well-written story that makes its people come alive. Ill-equipped though they are to deal with a world newly filled with bearded men, those trials are nothing to the eponymous Grappler, who comes demanding a wife, and is, apparently, unbeatable. None of the men of the village can stand against him, and nobody knows when he will return. Grappler is a figure to frighten the reader--he knows no sympathy or remorse, and ruthlessly uses the people's own way of life against them.

Comic relief is provided by a parrot, and this is one story that needs that relief to enable the reader to keep reading. 'All winter the bird ordered the people to get him a bucket.' Yet even this talking bird is not immune to Grappler, who will prove its downfall.

'Grappler' blends history with fable with myth to evoke an almost-time in which the people live according to their best understanding of the world. Excellent work that makes Abbott a writer to watch.

Issue 39 then rounds off with some useful book reviews.

All this for just €5.95 (approx £5 or $8).

Although not every story is successful, Albedo One is clearly not only a labour of love by the editorial team--John Kenny, Frank Ludlow, Dave Murphy, Robert Neilson, and Peter Loftus. The magazine is professionally produced, competently edited, and looks great.

Review: The Apex Book of World SF edited by Lavie Tidhar (Part 2 of 2)

Introducing this anthology, Tidhar writes, "Languages come and go. But stories stay." Fantasy, of which SF is (arguably) a sub-genre, has certainly proved resilient over the millennia. Sadly, we don't know what tales homo erectus told each other over the campfire, and we probably never will know, but if we could eavesdrop, Babel fish firmly inserted in ear, perhaps their stories would be both familiar and eerily strange. If SF is to retain the sense of wonder that is its hallmark, we need to look beyond its alleged home in the US, and to seek out and embrace the unfamiliar, the new-to-us, the wonderful, enchanting other. This anthology is a small start in that direction. Let's hope the enlargement of our SF view doesn't end here.

In Jamil Nasir's 'The Allah Stairs', we're treated to a revenge cycle with a difference. The narrator and his brother Laeth return to their home town in search of childhood memories. They seek out their old friend Laziz Tarash, whose father died in the street, screaming about monkeys, when they were boys. The story generates a sense of nostalgia, rather than threat, and even when the exotic happens, it's hard to believe anything bad will come of it. This gentle journey of reminiscence, however, is doomed to end badly, and in a shocking and unexpected way that provides a perfect echo for the ending. Mood is beautifully handled in this piece, and it draws the reader in so gently yet irresistibly that the suspensions of disbelief is never disturbed.

'Biggest Baddest Bomoh', by Tunku Halim, gave me perhaps my biggest, baddest culture shock. It's not that I'm unaccustomed to conventional Horror stories being, in general, sexist to the point of misogyny; you can't read slush and not have a special mile-thick spot on your skin for that kind of thing. It's more that this story carries no sense at all that the narrator is acting, well, badly, in asking again and again for dates he's not going to get. Sexual harassment, much? He gets his comeuppance--of course--albeit in an unforeseen fashion, but there's a strong sense throughout that the object of his passion is just that: an object to serve the story and his hubris.

Then there's the multiple adjectives. "The next morning found him gazing into those warm, dreamy eyes, longing to caress her gleaming, shoulder-length hair, yearning to press his lips against her fair, smooth cheeks--not to mention those full, cherry-red lips." This is the sort of overblown writing that Western readers currently won't accept, although, conversely, it seems a lot of Western writers haven't yet realised this.

Short version: it's a Horror story. Enough said.

This brings us to my favourite story in this anthology, Aliette de Bodard's 'The Lost Xuyan Bride'. It's no secret that I like de Bodard's writing; after all, I chose her story 'As the Wheel Turns' to head up Issue 6 of GUD. It's also of course a story by a European, which might bias me in its favour, not through parochialism but simply because its themes, tropes, and approach are more accessible to me. Perhaps I even identify with the lost, just-getting-through-the-days private detective, an archetype some GUD readers might recognise from my story 'Sundown' in Issue 0. Whatever the reason(s), I thoroughly enjoyed this melancholy tale. Set in an alternative America, the story follows the private eye narrator as he searches for He Zhen, a young bride-to-be who has fled her arranged marriage and her home, leaving behind her bullet holes and blood.

It's a murky trail, inevitably, and there's much for the detective to learn about He Zhen and her passion for a culture other than her own before he finds her and learns of the choice she has made, a choice that stands for all the compromises women have to make in worlds ruled by men. A fine story that uses its world-building to calculated effect.

By contrast, 'Excerpt From a Letter by a Social-Realist Aswang', by Kristin Mandigma is a lot of fun. It isn't a story as such, nor is it a slice-of-life piece. It is, as it says, a letter. It won't necessarily generate laughter to the extent of rolling around on the floor, but more of a knowing smirk. I wasn't sure what an aswang was when I began reading, yet, when I looked up the term later, felt that my ignorance hadn't materially affected my enjoyment of this piece. What more do you need to know, than, "In this scheme of things, whether or not one eats dried fish or (imperialist) babies for sustenance should be somewhat irrelevant." Those who dabbled in left-wing politics in their youth will probably get the most out of it, provided they have the capacity to laugh at themselves--not, I admit, a customary combination.

'An Evening in the City Coffeehouse, with Lydia on my Mind' takes us into Alexsandar Ziljak's vision of the future of pornography. Forget actors; in the future, anyone who's good-enough looking can be a porn star. The narrator sends a swarm of 'flies' to film them without their knowledge, and assembles the footage into clips he can sell. No, he's not a very nice person. He is, however, in trouble, as his business partner has been murdered after trying to blackmail a porn subject who turned out to be in a very exotic line of prostitution, and he fears he's next.

Quite apart from feeling only glad that the narrator's death is imminent, I had a couple of problems with this story. Firstly, I misread it at a crucial stage, and thought the narrative was discussing how the narrator proposed escaping from Zagreb and the hit squad, when in fact he was only describing how he puts his pornography together. I'm not convinced it was entirely my fault, either; the story is in present tense throughout, which makes it tricky to detect a shift into the past.

My second problem goes deeper, however. I simply had a problem with Lydia: the prostitute who services aliens. Yes, okay, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that aliens would want to have sex with humans; after all, many humans have sex with a fascinating variety of animals--horses, sheep, chickens, and so on. It's often not a matter of who (or what) but how. Accepted. However, do sheep shaggers seek out the sheep who's considered the most attractive by the other sheep? Are chicken standards of beauty used when selecting the sex-object from the farmyard? That's the bit I find difficult to believe; that it matters so much what Lydia looks like. Because, of course, Lydia is beautiful: "beautiful face, sensual lips, long and shiny blonde hair cascading over her shoulders." This is a man's story, after all. I can't help finding this a failure of imagination along the lines of Clarke's in 'Childhood's End', where, in an allegedly perfectly equal world, women still find themselves doing the cooking.

Anil Menon's 'Into the Night' is a story of the culture clash that ensues when widower Kallikulam Ramaswamy Iyer moves from Mumbai to live with his daughter on the island of Meridian in the Canaries, "going to a land of cannibals for the sake of their bright-eyed girl who only thirty-seven years ago had begun a mustard seed as modest as an ant's fart." Bereft without his wife, who effectively acted as his biographical memory, Kallikulam is old and waiting to die. The futuristic culture baffles him. When he expresses his interest in elephants via the 'hearsees' used to connect everyone with everyone, he discovers he's invited a young man sitting nearby to engage in a sexual act. This incident mirrors one in his daughter's childhood, for which a young man was beaten, but even after this experience, he's unable to view the past any differently from how he saw it when it was the present. He's a fish out of water: a lost soul who only survives because he's prickly.

"What is the solution?" he once asked the Flamingo in Tamil, "if the ones I love hate what I love?"

This story's view seems to be that there is no solution, save to make the journey of the title. A valid viewpoint, but not a comforting one.

'Elegy' by Melanie Fazie is also about loss, in this case the narrator's loss of her two children, who (may) have been taken by one of the trees near to her house, perhaps as a punishment. "I don't know how Benjamin failed to see the two masks set in the bark. Two faces drawn in the higher part of the trunk, just below the nodes of your main branches, as if carved from the same wood." The children's father's response to their loss is drink and denial; the mother pleads desperately, endlessly, for the children's return, even if they are changed by their experience. Yet the reader can never be sure if this is what has happened to the children at all.

The collection ends with Zoran Zivkovic's 'Compartments', a story set on a train that may or may not be allegorical. Zivkovic's work is familiar to me from the pages of Interzone, in the dim and distant days when I subscribed to that magazine. I always found his work inaccessible; it seemed hard-edged with determination to keep out any trace of human sensibility. So it is here, too, I think--and I confess I gave up trying to read this piece about fourteen pages in. So all I can tell you is there's a beautiful woman (of course) who is judged for her response to a man's sexual interest in her (of course) and a story-within-the-story about a wax button that wasn't.

This anthology is certainly eclectic. It's sad, funny, moving, and infuriating by turns. Tidhar has given us a mere taste of the powder on top of the iceberg of the offshore SF that's out there, but it's a taste that surely will have us searching for more. This anthology is a must-have, more, a must-read, a must-share-it-with-your-friends, even. Let's all lift our heads out of the trough of the usual fare and seek out something different, something new, something wonderful.

The gorgeous cover art is by Randall McDonald, and it wraps onto the back, too. Lovely design there by Apex.

Lavie Tidhar's work appears in GUD Issue 0 (The Infinite Monkeys Protocol), GUD Issue 1 (Hello Goodbye), and GUD Issue 6 (The Last Butterfly).

Review: The Apex Book of World SF edited by Lavie Tidhar (Part 1 of 2)

According to author James Gunn, in an essay in World Literature Today, Volume 84, Number 3, May/June 2010, "To consider science fiction in countries other than the United States, one must start from these shores. American science fiction is the base line against which all the other fantastic literatures in languages other than English must be measured."

Gunn justifies this claim by stating that only in 1926 New York did SF become a distinct genre, then, curiously, punctures his own argument by referring to HG Wells' 'scientific romances', which, interestingly, Wells also referred to as 'scientifiction'. If that wasn't at least an attempt to create a separate genre for SF, then what was it?

Yet the question that really goes unanswered, is, what about the SF written "in countries other than the United States" but not "in languages other than English"? That vast body of literature seems to fall between two stools in Gunn's argument; or, to be blunter, as far he's concerned, it either doesn't exist or doesn't matter enough to require measurement.

Perhaps that only goes to prove that, at times, we all need a good editor.

For writer and editor Lavie Tidhar, however, the attitude encapsulated in the introduction to Gunn's essay is only one spur to his efforts to raise the profile of World SF, both in his blog http://worldsf.wordpress.com and in The Apex Book of World SF, a 'sampling of the finest authors from around the world'. For make no mistake, Lavie Tidhar is a man with a mission.

His Apex anthology offers sixteen stories from a large chunk of the world outside the US--the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific Rim. Some were originally written in English while others have been translated. Among the authors I recognise Jetse de Vries, who is a strong advocate for leavening dystopian SF with something a little more positive on occasion, and Aliette de Bodard, whose story 'As the Wheel Turns' leads GUD Issue 6. Beyond introducing the reader to a tiny amount of what's being written outside the closed, largely white, male world of American SF, the anthology has no theme. Then again, it doesn't need one' there's enough here to amaze and discomfort the reader without making things complicated.

When I first started reading the anthology, I confess, I didn't like it. I couldn't get on with it. Couldn't understand why Tidhar had chosen these particular stories. I had to put the book down, set aside my Western sensibilities--okay, prejudices--and shake up my own ideas of what makes a good story, of where excellence in storytelling lies. It wasn't fun. It did however enable me to come back to the anthology with new eyes, and start to appreciate the stories on their own level. A start is all I made, however; I still find the multiple anthologies in Malaysian author Tunku Halim's story grating. That's not how 'we' write.

Perhaps that only goes to prove that it's one thing to intend not to be a bigot; it's another to manage it.

Thai author S.P. Somtow's 'The Bird Catcher' opens the collection with a disturbing tale of a young boy's friendship with the eponymous boogieman. At first repelled by the bird catcher's diet of raw bird liver, narrator Nicholas slowly finds himself drawn into this means of staving off 'the hunger' that has gnawed at him since his release from a Japanese internment camp. It would be easy to dismiss both the bird catcher and Nicholas as evil, but this story doesn't allow the reader that easy way out. Nicholas has lived through what we might well call evil, has inevitably been shaped by it, and is struggling to find his way out the other side. In the framing story, he takes one of his grandsons to see the boogieman's skeleton, and tries, in a world of McDonalds and Pokemon, to make relevant his personal horror tale.

"The war did that to him. I know. Just like it made Mom into a whore and me into...I don't know...a bird without a nesting place...a lost boy."

The writing is strong, although I'm still in two minds about the opening, which refers the reader to JG Ballard's experiences of internment as fictionalised in Empire of the Sun. On the one hand, this gives the reader a quick-and-dirty background to the story and saves a lot of explanation; on the other, it might leave those who've not read Ballard floundering and confused. It's the sort of approach I'd discourage, but as this story won a World Fantasy Award, it's clearly a gamble that paid off.

In 'Transcendence Express', Jetse de Vries establishes that you can write a story about good things being done by clever people, but that it may not be as satisfying as you'd expect. On the face of it, this is a rock-solid hard SF story, with a young scientist taking her knowledge of quantum computing to a small farming village in Zambia, and enabling local schoolchildren to build their own biological quantum computers, or BIQCO's. These computers, which rely on simple products and skills, are set to transform the villagers' lives. The End.

It rubs me up the wrong way when a story lacks conflict. It's as if someone's taken the flavour out of my ice cream, and all I'm left with is something cold. It's worse, however, when a story deliberately evades conflict. Surely it's not hard to see that by enabling one village to make enormous leaps forward in agricultural productivity, you're setting it up for trouble with its neighbours? We might wish human nature were other than it is, but wishing doesn't make it so, and, in my opinion anyway, a truly positive story would show how obstacles are met and overcome, not pretend they won't happen. Conflict and difficulty and mistakes and things going wrong don't lessen a story; they're part of what can make it great.

Guy Hasson's 'The Levantine Experiments' introduces us to Sarah, a child who's been confined all her life and isolated since the age of two. When a crack appears in one wall of her prison, she begins to fantasise about what might be beyond it. Her imagination has been so starved that, even when exercised to the full, it is woefully limited in what it can achieve. Hasson works hard to get into Sarah's mind, so different from ours as it must be, and his descriptions of her mental wanderings, although repetitive, have their own strange fascination.

"And slowly, in her dreams, she would rise with each breath she took. As the nights continued, she rose higher and higher, halfway up the room. And then she rose even higher. And then, one day, she was almost close enough to reach the darkness."

Yet I have doubts. It's one thing in the Harry Potter books to ignore the damage Harry's upbringing in the cupboard would do; it's another thing to place a character in an experimental situation with clearly-defined parameters without thinking through fully what the consequences would be. I don't believe that the experimenters would be pushing toilet paper through to Sarah; if she's had no contact with another human being since the age of two, they'd be washing her shit off the floor. Even though her eventual release has horrific consequences, they don't feel like the right consequences. Her character is formed not according to her circumstances but according to the needs of the plot. When I'm told that Sarah "understood everything", once it had all been explained, I don't and can't believe it. Even those of us with the best advantages and the broadest education couldn't make that claim. Sarah, with her lack of a frame of reference for what we might consider 'normal' human life, has no chance.

That said, there's a lot to interest and disturb the reader in this story. As a thought experiment, it's perhaps more painful than successful, and some reference at least to Bowlby's theory of attachment might have helped, but it does force the reader to think about how a child in that situation might develop, and how strange their thinking might be.

I loved Han Song's 'The Wheel of Samsara', a short tale in which Western curiosity and Eastern fatalism meet to...ah, no, read it for yourselves! It's short, but the right length. The characters are not fully-rounded; instead, they are developed just enough to fulfil their roles. A beautifully-crafted work.

'Ghost Jail' by Kaaron Warren is set in Fiji, where a child can be "trapped in a closed circle of gravestones, whimpering." Beggar Rashmilla, with the aid of the ghost of her sister, forever wrapped around her neck, can see and, to an extent, control ghosts, and is therefore hired for obscure purposes at Cewa Flats. The flats are supposed to be being cleared for redevelopment, but ghosts aren't easy to evict. This story is frightening on a visceral level. A ghost attacks another character, Lisa, who is powerless to defend herself. "He thrust the fist into her mouth and out, so fast all she felt was a mouthful then nothing but the taste of anchovies left behind." A visible, tangible, aggressive ghost against whom there's no apparent defence--and Cewa Flats is full of such. Once driven to the flats by the regime they tried to speak out against, Lisa and Keith are unable to leave. It seems they've been effectively silenced--but there is a way out.

This story weaves a large and disparate group of characters together to great effect. There's the charming but unscrupulous police chief, the well-meaning outsiders, and even an agitator who perilously walks both sides of the tracks. More than archetypes, however, they are people, too.

Yang Ping's award-winning 'Wizard World' was one of the less successful stories for me. I've always had difficulty in engaging with stories set in virtual worlds, but I can't help feeling this one in particular needed to work harder to make me care about the world that's suddenly and ruthlessly snatched away from the protagonist here. Or, if not that, to make me care about him, because, alas, from beginning to end I never did. It's a common failing of male writing--in my experience--that the need to make the reader empathise with the central character is often overlooked. So when 'Xingxing' dies in Wizard World, and loses his account, and this turns out to be only the start of a hacker conspiracy to destroy the whole MUD, we have only the potential for an exciting story. Add to that some surprisingly easy and unexplained changes of behaviour and of intent, and the story feels somewhat empty. Character is serving plot, rather than plot arising from character. Or perhaps its my narrowness of thought holding me back again.

'The Kite of Stars' by Dean Francis Alfar is a fairy tale with a bittersweet ending. When Maria Isabella Du'l Cielo falls in love with astronomer Lorenzo, she convinces herself that he will only ever notice her if he sees her among the stars. So begins her quest to find the materials needed for a kite that will carry her to the heavens: "...acquiring the dowel by planting a langka seed at the foot of the grove of a kindly diuata (and waiting the seven years it took to grow, unable to leave), winning the lower spreader in a drinking match against the three oldest brothers of Duma'Alon, assembling the pieces of the lower edge connector whilst fleeing a war party of the Sumaliq..." The quest is bizarre, yet entered into heart and soul by both Maria and her ever-faithful companion, a butcher's boy who first named Lorenzo to her. The language is lyrical and beautiful, and carries the reader along despite the protests of the rational side of the brain that this is fantastic, ridiculous, that nobody would do this, not even for love.

Perhaps the story's greatest strength is that, although Maria's quest seems ludicrous and her dedication woefully misapplied, the writing never loses respect and affection for her. It would have been so easy to beat her with the stick of her own foolishness, but the author's fondness for her won't let harsh judgements in.

I wasn't sure what to make of Nir Yaniv's 'Cinderers', which seems to be about multiple personalities, or possession, or possibly Donald Duck's nephews. It makes effective use of repetition, a shtick that's always difficult to pull off, managing to keep it at the level where it's amusing but not irritating. It's the sort of story anthologists love; you can put it anywhere and it'll calm the readers down or cheer them up or do whatever might be the opposite of what the last story did.

Part Two of this review will appear next week.

Important: GUD Revives Reviews

After a break of almost a year, GUD is now in a position to resume reviewing books. We're tremendously excited to be restoring this valuable service to our readers, and hope you are too.

Reviews will be published on the site and syndicated across Amazon, BookRabbit, Goodreads, Facebook, and other major book sites. We've had a lot of review requests while our reviews have been in abeyance, and I've spent much of today going through them in order to see what's on offer.

There's an amazing selection of books out there, from GUD contributor Kristine Ong Muslim's poetry collection A Roomful of Machines to Drama Queens With Love Scenes, a tale of unrequited gay love in the afterlife by Kevin Klehr.

In the past, we've tried to review almost everything we're offered, but unfortunately this didn't work out all that well, with our staff suffocating under piles of unread books. So, we've introduced a new system that will come into force this month.

Requests for review should still be sent to reviews@gudmagazine.com. Put the title of your book in the subject line. The decision whether or not to invite you to submit your book for review will be based on the information you provide in this email, so it's vital to consider carefully what you want us to know.

The least you should tell us will be the title of your book, its ISBN (where appropriate), the name of the publisher, and a brief summary of the book's plot and/or contents, and the formats in which it's available. Please note that we will only consider reviewing self-published or vanity books under special circumstances, eg if you are a GUD contributor.

Once we receive your review request, we'll add it to our list of books available for review, and see if anyone on staff grabs it. If, after a month, nobody's chosen the book, then, regrettably, we're not going to be able to review it. If your book is selected for review, you'll be asked to make a copy available to our reviewer in the format of their choosing.

We'll be keeping track of books offered for review using a Goodreads shelf entitled, imaginatively, 'offered_for_review'. Only GUD could have thought of it.

A final note. We've gone through our inbox and added books offered for review from September 2010 to date, but I regret we're not able to go back any further than that. So, if you asked us to review a book before September 1st and/or you sent in your request after September 1st, but your book's not on our 'offered for review' shelf, by all means get in touch again. Meanwhile, watch this space.

GUD Issue 6 On Sale Now

GUD #6 has stories by Aliette de Bodard, Lou Antonelli, Caroline Yoachim, and Lavie Tidhar (and more). GUD #6 has poetry from Jennifer Jerome, Tara Deal, and Jim Pascual Agustin (and more). GUD #6 has Aunia Kahn and Andy B. Clarkson's art (and more). GUD #6 has 200 pages of art, fiction, and poetry. Not to mention that every issue comes with @littlefluffycat.

Order a print copy of GUD Magazine Issue 6 today. It's human-powered, won't break if you drop it, and is guaranteed never to be deleted from your brain.

See the TOC and previews.

$12 for one issue--or save a few bucks and get a two-issue or four-issue subscription!

Subscribe now.

* if you're not a fan of hardcopy or PDF we're also going to be offering epub directly with this issue! Just need a few more tweaks to make the issue instigator happy!

GUD Issue 5--is ALIVE!

What's not to love???

Issue 5

... WRAPS A SCIENTIFIC CORE WITH OUR MOST ECLECTIC SELECTION TO DATE—including two "mini graphic novels", and a script that will have you bubbling over with mirth.

We open with Rose Lemberg's "Imperfect Verse", a tale of poetry, deception, and warring gods; then span the years to Andrew N. Tisbert's "Getting Yourself On", which sees mankind taken to the stars but suffering new forms of wage-slavery.

There's science fiction that stretches to the fantastic, science that once stretched the fantastic and has now become brilliantly pervasive, and dollops of science in otherwise mundane lives (see "The Prettiest Crayon in the Box").

Of course, we've got fantasy, psychological horror, humor and drama; poetry serious, sublime, and satirical; and art that stretches from the real, to the surreal, to the violently semi-abstract.

read some teasers! or just buy it, hey? ;)

GUD is looking for more Other to round out Issue 7. Do you have it? http://is.gd/6I4Op

Preditors + Editors Readers' Poll

We're a little late to the game (still doing everything we can to get Issue 5 spick and span and out to print), but with just another day or less in the readers' poll, we thought we'd give you a nudge you and put our name in the hat.

We'd most appreciate help in the categories of "Best Fiction Magazine" and "Best Poetry Magazine", but anywhere you felt like giving us a nod would be most appreciated! I can personally vouch for the Preditors + Editors folks, as far as filling out the readers' poll--they won't spam you, and won't keep your email address beyond verifying it and limiting you to one vote per category.

Best Fiction Zine (ignore the "e-zine" bit)
* http://ping.fm/zI0Yw

Best Poetry Zine (ditto)
* http://ping.fm/zmagw

Best Zine Art (GUD Magazine -- The Strangers are Tuning, Jesse Lindsay)
* http://ping.fm/45OBQ

Best Zine Editor (Julia Bernd -- GUD Magazine Issue 4)
* http://ping.fm/1SHHY

There's plenty more to vote for, and it's truly a readers' poll--you can just write in anything for any category if that's your mind. Everything on that list has been put there by someone writing it in, to start with.

And no worries if you feel there's another magazine more deserving of your vote, or if you simply don't have the time or interest. We understand. And on that note, we're back to the grindstone to get out the best magazine we can....