Review: Eggs of American Songbirds by Kenneth L. Clark

"This book is © 2010 by Kenneth L. Clark. It has no ISBN or other official presence in the world. Like all of us and every thing, it will disappear someday with the rest of what we love and remember with fondness."

The cover design for 'Eggs of American Songbirds' is by GUD's layout editor, poetry maven, and Issues #1 and #7 Instigator, Sue Miller. Redneck Press is owned and operated by friend-of-GUD and Night Train editor Rusty Barnes. A free .pdf of the chapbook was provided by the publishers and will be kept by the reviewer. Poet and short-fiction writer Kenneth L. Clark was published in Issue 1 of GUD Magazine.

Now we've got the disclaimers out of the way, on to the poetry.

'Eggs of American Songbirds' is a handsome chapbook of poems drawn from life. In them, Clark clearly enjoys playing with the slipperiness of language and the exploitation of the way we read poems, in order, linearly. If you read this line from 'Still Time' in isolation it tells you one thing:

we make time to forget the laundry

When you move on to the line that follows, what it tells you changes:

list of things to do and ignore today

Similarly:

who fills out an incident report. It’s a crime
to be quiet as a puddle after chrome violence

('Roadside Crosses')

and

At the spillway the red
winged blackbird crouches down

('At the Spillway')

There's fun with and love of language in this chapbook, but at the same time, the poems feel deeply personal. They are about love and loss, grief and intimacy. Clark writes himself and his preoccupations onto the page.

"Don’t say anything else tonight,
put your head in my lap and sleep, forget 25 hours
of news and information, relapse to when sleep came
by the cadence of rain, hard rain. Rain, hard rain."

('Ethics for the New Gulf')

Anything and everything is grist for the poet's mill--anything seen, overheard, everything felt, experienced. It's all here: little slices of life pinned to the page.

...She pulled
photographs from an album while her husband went to walk the dog
and find the cat. "This one is Steven and this one’s an old barn."

('The Body Paused')

Clark's poems can convince you that there is beauty in the mundane, but that it takes a poet to see it and bring it to our attention.

There should be an easier way to speak
about crazy women—it’s not enough to just
change the names or distort the facts,
you have to make the stories believable

even though they aren’t.

('On Returning Home To Find My Things Destroyed')

This self-assumed task permeates the pages.

Some of the poems, of course, are more successful than others. I particularly liked 'The Body Paused' and 'Home and Garden', perhaps because they spoke to me more than the others. That's the secret of literature; everyone brings their own experience to it, and takes it away changed, re-interpreted, perhaps--we hope--better understood. You could do worse than start that process here.

Kenneth L. Clark's work appears in GUD Issue 1: Catholic Girls, A Doorbell, and In Defense of the Boll-Weevil

Review: Cloud Permutations by Lavie Tidhar

I stumbled into a #hashchat on Twitter, where World SF blog creator, GUD contributor, and prolific writer @LavieTidhar was answering questions from the audience. If the Library of Congress was on the ball with their Twitter archive, or I had a better memory, I could amaze you with the brilliance of my question. As it is, I will try to impress you with the brilliance of the book that I won with that lost-to-posterity question.

'Cloud Permutations' is part myth, part science fiction adventure. Its roots are both broad and deep; they nurture a story that is personal, well-defined, and brilliantly textured and contextualized, yet still archetypal.

Tidhar draws from his experience in the remote islands of Melanesia to paint for us one possible permutation of the clouds. Heven is a world populated, centuries ago, by Melanesian settlers from distant Earth. They have been cut off, due to unknown circumstances (a trope Tidhar has pulled off beautifully before), and their day-to-day life has grown to fill those circumstances as /kastom/. There is one rule above all others, core to keeping the peace: you will not fly.

Kalbaben and his best friend, Vira, go against the /kastom/ of Heven and pay a heavy price, Kal's first step towards a prophecy he ill understands. He is banished to the merchant-island Tanna, given to remote relatives. There, he is befriended by an ostentatious and crafty albino, Bani, who takes him under his wing.

The adventure they embark on is not easy, nor just, nor kind, nor innocent, but it is told with a rich brush, in language, in interaction, and in scope. The world of Heven has many histories, touched on lightly in parts, and heavily in others. Tidhar borrows from many standard sfnal tropes, and makes something unique of them: in blend, tone, and setting.

The story that is told most directly, the life of Kalbaben, is sweet or bitter-sweet depending on how you choose to read it. It ends perhaps a touch too simply, except 'Cloud Permutations' has many more stories besides, and Tidhar weaves them in a tapestry worth reading for its many ragged layers.

Review: Storm Warning: Echoes of Conflict by Vanessa Gebbie

This collection of short stories by Vanessa Gebbie is not cozy bed-time reading. Even the most apparently innocent openings--"I'm on a train going to the sea"--only mask for a short time the brutal truth that's about to be revealed. Liesl is on a train, and she's been told she's going to the sea, but the train in 'Red Sandals' has a very different destination.

Gebbie gives us little slices of insights into people's lives that are often so harsh that you want to look away, but also so honest and intimate that you feel looking away would be a betrayal. From the baker returned from WWI who goes down a tin mine instead of returning to his trade, but finds that even underground he can't hide from what happened to his neighbour and fellow-soldier to the bedridden ex-soldier whose self-conceit never quite catches up with the change in his circumstances, Gebbie shines a spotlight into those places we'd rather not look.

The writing is clean and to the point with few words wasted. "The sky was the deepest blue, over there above the hill. No stars. Security lights at the factories." Thus, the scene is set in 'Background Noise', where Maidie learns there is more to her grandfather's story of a daring escape from a submarine than she previously suspected. "My lips moved against the rubber. Every breath I took filled my chest with bad air. I pulled at it, tugging it back down, trying to keep it. It was mine. I was Bambrick." Like so many of Gebbie's characters, Grampa has something to hide. Out it comes, though, eventually, choking and gasping its way out into the night, as if it simply can't be held back any longer. Then we have it, the raw truth of the character's secret, exposed on the page.

The characters in these stories are ordinary people. They could be us, or our close relatives, our friends, people we meet in the streets. The stories put us into their lives, and make them more real by only offering these slices, by eschewing backstory and long explanations. Characterisation is deftly achieved in a few strokes. "Before the lockers were broken, Takundwa laughed from behind the schoolhouse. Before the tables were burned in the open, the last time he was a naughty little brother and ducked under Hondo's fist and ran away." ('Maiba's Ribbon') "He stands a full head above me and I am considered not short. It is said he has the strength to lift a full barrel and carry it to the slow count of an hundred. His hair it is thick and long, and of reddish colour, and his gaze most impassioned when he speaks of two things: his God and his ale." ('The Ale-Heretic')

With this volume, small but perfectly-formed, both Gebbie and Salt Publishing cement their reputations for producing quality short fiction that demands to be read.

Review: Canterbury 2100, edited by Dirk Flinthart

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
...
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.

Although Chaucer's Canterbury Tales was a mammoth undertaking--and one he never completed--at least he only had himself to deal with. Writer and Andromeda In-Flight Spaceways Magazine Maintenance chief Dirk Flinthart took on an even more difficult task, that of weaving stories by disparate writers into a narrative of a futuristic pilgrimage to Canterbury.

This anthology contains eighteen stories by eighteen Australian writers, all woven together using a framing story consisting of a letter written to his overlord by a Crown agent. If, at times, the conceit stretches at the seams, let us not complain, but rather marvel that the thing was done at all. Just as Chaucer sought to share with his readers the stories his pilgrims shared among themselves, so Flinthart set out to 'depict a fictional future by exploring the stories that the people of that future tell each other'.

These new Canterbury tales are told during a lull in train journey through a post-apocalyptic 'Engelond' of the year 2100, where Canterbury has become the capital city, seat of a King Charles V. (Asking where Charleses III-IV came from is one of those seams we weren't going to pull at, remember? In fact, despite being written from the opposite side of the world, these stories contain very few obvious mistakes. I will just say, though: the A1 is not a motorway.) Climate change and plain old human nastiness have taken their toll, Scotland is under ice, the population is much reduced, and the very fact that the train on which our pilgrims travel is nuclear-powered is a secret. Raising--or laying--the demons of the past is a preoccupation of many of the stories, and, for me, there was a little too much harking back to the past throughout. I preferred the stories that immersed themselves in the future rather than trying to explain how it had come about. YMMV.

The brief for this anthology must have been a tough one to write, and hard to undertake, and all the writers who succeeded in having their stories chosen deserve kudos for even trying. Yet I felt that too many of the stories tried to set the scene rather than being set in the scene. Compare this aspect with Chaucer's tales, and you see the difference: Chaucer's storytellers felt no need to explain their world to the reader. It was their world and they and the prospective reader were in it. Few of the writers in this anthology felt that comfortable with their task; it is after all almost de rigueur for the SF writer to give some explanation for how things came about. In this context--perhaps uniquely--that feels like a mistake.

There's a great selection here of professions from which the tale-tellers are drawn, although my favourite is definitely The Dead Priest, which manages to be funny and intriguing in itself while harking back to Chaucer's Nun's Priest. Who though could resist the Tingler, or the Gnomogist? It's almost worth buying this anthology to find out what the Janus and the Carbon-Knitter actually do. For the most part, these tales are not short on imagination in the telling, although sometimes perhaps a tad predictable in what they tell. The world they build, one of basic survival and growing ignorance, in which rape, murder, and callous exploitation are routine, clashes somewhat with the framing tale of the glossy and somewhat steampunky train. Personally, I'll take that train any day.

We're meant to be travelling on that train to Canterbury, on pilgrimage, but where do the pilgrims' stories take us?

In Geoffrey Maloney's 'The Tingler's Tale', we hear about "a Hangman and a Scribbler, and a most foul and evil murderer, or two." This tale throws the reader straight into a post-apocalyptic world that's strangely reminiscent of Victorian England. We could have walked one of Leon Garfield's foggy streets to meet the Scribbler who finds himself a little too close to the action when reporting on a hanging. Most of the characters in this story are treated like archetypes; they have signifiers rather than names. The exceptions are the murderers who have been or are to be hanged. With names, they stand out against the background as the only people in this story. Everyone else has their role, and nothing more. This makes for an atmospheric tale, especially as the focus is on the hanging that's to come, and little wordage is spent on scene-setting, but it's hard to care about the Scribbler's ultimate fate.

'The Nun's Tale' by Angela Slatter is one of the more futuristic stories in this anthology. Set in a city "built on a platform and raised high on gigantic metal legs, above the fumes and filth of a diseased earth", it tells of Terminal Six, a human cyborg who has become detached from the Grid that runs the city following a power surge. Half-lost in dreams and shorn of memory, she pretends to be comatose in order to avoid being reduced once again to a component in a machine. At the heart of this story is a betrayal. "I was your wife. I was your lover. But you loved your city more." The story-teller is present in this story, as witness, as participant, as embittered aspirant to the role Terminal Six is desperate to shed. A strong story that overcomes a shaky dream-sequence opening.

Next comes 'The Dead Priest's Tale by Martin Livings, which follows Father Thomas as he travels to Canterbury. The journey keeps taking strange turns as Thomas meets with strangers who, inexplicably, recognise him. "The woman opened her eyes, looked at him. Tears trickled down her cheeks. 'Do ye not know me, Thomas?' she asked. 'Has the Devil taken even that from me?'" The explanation for these encounters involves cloning and a curious plan to reignite public fervour for the Church and enable it to resume power. It's an odd idea, but then religion is perhaps the usual repository for odd ideas. The problem for me was the story didn't make me believe it, and portentous reminders that "Thomas was born to die" tended to awaken the sceptic in me rather than put it to sleep.

'The Veteran's Tale' by Stephen Dedman was probably the least successful story in this anthology. It's set during a period of transition, when warlords in a particular area are trying to move from settling disputes by the use of force to a more structured single-combat style of resolution. The story is hampered by the introduction of a National power that tries to push their society towards a more democratic regime that it's clearly not ready to embrace, thereby taking much of the ability to develop the society out of the hands of the story's characters. Unfortunately, although the National powers are faceless, the warlords too are pretty much ciphers. One's called Odi, and he's bad--odious, in fact--and another's called Edrich, and he's the good guy, and then there are a lot of names with not much else attached to stand for the others. By the time they're all fighting each other again, there's no way to know who to root for, if anyone.

Further, to be honest, Edrich the good guy is only good in a relative sense. He pleads with his rival warlords to check their depredations before "the men raiding the villages are killing their own sons and raping their own daughters" purely for their own sakes. "That's an abomination too, do you think God won't punish us?" Judging by what seems to have been going on in these villages, I'd say God was dragging his feet more than a little on the punishment front.

Perhaps this was simply too big an idea for such a short story--it can't even be three thousand words long. Certainly there are too many characters for the reader to engage.

Shortage of room to develop may also have harmed Laura E Goodin's 'The Miner's Tale', which has a strong voice and convincing characters, but which resolves its central conflict far too easily. The story's nicely told, using the device of having the hero's sidekick, rather than the hero, as the narrator. Thus we learn about Thomas Griffiths, or 'Griff', who has the peculiar but useful ability to detect the stresses in the layers of rock above the heads of miners digging for coal. Forced to take up work with an outfit mining "dirty" and possibly illegal coal, Griff and narrator Mike find themselves at risk not only from their dangerous work, but from a suspicious and secretive management. Griff particularly doesn't like the stabilisers used in the mine; he'd rather rely on his own abilities, which do turn out to be useful in the end. There's a lot to like in this story, but the resolution comes too easily to be satisfying.

Sue Isle's 'The Sky-Chief's Tale' has the feel of developing myth, which is rather fun in itself. A small group of people hidden away in Bath, where the hot springs enable them to survive the man-made Ice Age, discover that a ship from the moon is about to land near them and bring them a new, if semi-crippled, population. The story felt top-heavy to me, perhaps because a lot of time is spent on whether these moon people are going to be accepted, when, frankly, it's a foregone conclusion that they are. This kind of shadow conflict can be a bit irritating, especially when it's being used to disguise set-up. I love the hidden community idea, and Chief Camilla, the community leader, is a strong, pragmatic, and believable character, but is this her story? Or her son Davin's? Or the story of the people from the moon? It's all a little confused. Again, too few words to tell too much story may be to blame.

Kaaron Warren's 'The Census-Taker's Tale' is two tales sandwiched together: the tale of the Census-Taker's parents and their role in immunizing the population against the Great Plague, and the more interesting tale of the Census-Taker's work taking a full census of the English population, both living and dead. This is a man who not only can see dead people, but who counts them, and finds out how they died. "Yet here was a whole brood of boys, killed by their mothers away from home. I needed to know their number." Whether or not the story that he learns is true is up to the reader to decide; if interviewing ghosts is possible, then perhaps boys who can raise fire from their fingers can be a true tale, too. A good story, even though it meanders a little at the start.

Another story involving ghosts is 'The Mathematician's Tale' by Durand Welsh. It's the better story, perhaps because it focuses on one tale and tells it well. The Knot Man, last of his trade, is approached by a Jailor to untie the ghosts of prisoners left to die on an icebound ship. Old and still puzzling over a knot left him by his last apprentice, who was imprisoned on that ship, the Knot Man is reluctant. "He didn't miss the rapists, murderers and thieves in their rusty, water locked tomb; he only missed the children." Go he must, however, or allow his apprentice to continue his tortures even after death.

This story builds strongly towards a satisfying conclusion. Although it works well in context, it's also complete in itself. Great stuff.

'The Doctor's Tale' by Ben Bastian returns to one of this anthology's preoccupations: brutal men who run small communities through violence and, especially, the abuse of women. It doesn't make for comfortable reading. The narrator, a doctor, arrives in a small town run by a thug named Ripley and his henchmen where the doctor's old friend Virgil is trying to protect his adolescent daughter from the gang-rapings that have befallen more than one woman in this 'community'. It's an unpleasant set-up that borders on caricature (surely some aggrieved relative would simply stab Ripley in his sleep?), but perhaps what's most offensive is the idea that all that needs to be done is rescue this young woman. She matters because her father is the doctor's friend. As for the rest of the women--well, what about them? The story doesn't say.

Misdirection in stories is great; I love misdirection. There's a fine line however between misdirection and cheating. This story doesn't just cross that line; it takes a run-up and then leaps merrily over it and is gone far into the distance. Don't cheat. It will make the reader hate you.

Talking of cheating makes me wonder if 'The Hunter's Tale' by Grant Watson cheats as well. On the face of it, it's a straightforward tale about a hunter who comes into conflict with a wolf that he believes has murdered his daughter. "It was winter that brought the wolf close to the village, I suppose." Unable to kill the wolf itself, he takes his revenge on its mate and their cubs. Only then does he discover that the wolf may not have been guilty after all.

The problem for me is that the story drops absolutely no hints that might point to the identity of the true perpetrator. It's one thing to bury clues so subtly that the reader becomes aware of them only afterwards, the 'oh of course!' moment; it's another not to plant any clues at all. Then again, there is a strong hint before the killing even happens that the hunter should not tangle with the wolf. "Something made me to [sic] say it again: 'You don't want to hunt this wolf.'" So the jury's out. Read the story and decide for yourselves whether I'm too harsh.

I'm honestly not sure whether Thoraiya Dyer's 'The Peat-Digger's Tale' is meant to be funny. On the face of it, it can't be; it deals with a woman dying of bird flu and her husband's and son's desperate attempts to save her, attempts that result in the son's death. Yet it has a rollicking feel that suggests the reader is meant to laugh here and there. "If the needle was an awful great needle, so was the haystack an awful great haystack." When the narrator mounts a handy nuclear-powered robot horse and goes in search of a cure for his wife, it's hard to continue to take the story seriously.

Despite the sadness wound through it, this one's a great romp. It does make a bit of a hole in the framing story, though--presuming you believe a word the narrator says. I get the impression this story may be the one that gave the editor the greatest headache when he was trying to make it fit with the narrative arc.

"What a place I find myself in. A rich man flavours his meats with herbs and spices, and tells such lies in the name of selling dog as pork, and he meets with nothing but favour and success." So speaks the Metawhore of Lee Battersby's 'The Metawhore's Tale' (or 'Love Story' if you go by the page headers), in riposte to a merchant who has insulted her profession.

The Metawhore seems to be similar to Ray Bradbury's tattooed man; she is a mass of scars and each evokes a different story, for which she is paid. She describes her work as mere rote learning and recall, yet you wonder what there is in that to bring down upon her such disdain. And why whore, anyway? This story succeeded in presenting a set of social mores that are familiar (one constant being of course that women are always wrong) but nonetheless baffling to outsiders. The narrator--a young novice on pilgrimage--is surprisingly sympathetic towards the Metawhore, but we discover towards the end of the story that he has his own reasons for empathising.

The Metawhore is an enigmatic and intriguing character, one who makes and takes her own way; she insists on leaving the train to make the 'proper', Chaucerian pilgrimage from the Tabard Inn, or, at least, "a ruin I can pretend is the right place." Yet the story is bitty and fragmented, and the youthful narrator's decision at the end not well developed. Rough but readable.

I got a little lost in the course of Penelope Love's 'The Janus Tale' as I wasn't sure at first whether the "veiled woman" was the same person as "the girl". It was also a tad confusing that this apparently naive character turned out to be on her third lifetime. Some aspects of this story didn't gel for me. However, once it gets going properly, this develops as a great tale with a fascinating central conceit: that God keeps sending the Janus' component parts back to Earth after they die, horribly and together. "So when the husband and wife appear before God, so mixed up and muddled that neither can be told apart, God throws up hands and sends them back to the world, to have another chance. 'Don't mess things up this time,' God warns them. So here my story starts again."

It's an intriguing conceit, this "divine mistake", so much more so than the mundane idea that the Janus is 'just' a clone built on peculiar lines. Here again we see myth being created right before our eyes.

Trent Jamieson's 'The Lighterman's Tale' is perhaps the most Chauceresque in this anthology, not just for the subject matter but also for its free, confident, and unabashed use of language. It's a solid tale of love and how one mistake may cost you everything...or will it? "I've seen things come post-storm, out of the mist, drifting dead and serene down the Stour. I've seen 'em, as I wait for my cargo, and blessed am I that I'm still to drift myself...because I know there'll be tears all the way along to Canterbury proper, because the ships are the lifeblood of this island." This story summons familiar myth without making the reader conscious of harking back to 'our' past, perhaps because it's part of a collective past, something we and the storytelling Lighterman share despite the distance between us. A job well done.

In 'The Carbon-Knitter's Tale', Rita de Heer tells us of failing technology, and the lengths to which people will go to keep it--or a semblance of it--going, whatever the cost. There are gorgeous hints here, again, of myth emerging from ignorance, or perhaps reforging ignorance into a new, useful kind of knowledge. "The red angel takes with war. The black angel with ash." It's a shame that this is confined to the opening, and the rest of the story takes a more conventional turn.

Ram is thought to be safe from the recruiters for the gameshell at Stoke because he is a 'yellow-angel-addled child'. Times change, however, and soon Stoke needs him--and others--to stand in for the avatars and computer-generated monsters that no longer work. It's pitiful work. A knight standing by a boy who's trying to fight another boy while under the knight's direction is no training for knighthood, nor even for fighting. It's fascinating and more than a little sad to see the people of Stoke trying to hold together their one asset in this fashion. Who would believe it could work? Only the desperate.

I felt Ram was a little too-good-to-be-true in this story, although that perhaps is meant to come of his addling. He'd rather starve than kill the monster he's replacing, yet he has a quest to fulfill, and how can he fulfill it if he's dead? The story strains credulity with its determination to make Ram the really good guy, who's prepared only to sacrifice himself. A thought-provoking tale that might have worked better without the character of Juttie, who doesn't really do much, and keeps obtruding at unexpected moments.

LL Hannett's 'The Evangelist's Tale' brings two crazed individuals into direct conflict. Oule is a perfectly ordinary hunter until he wanders into 'Mother--' and encounters a surviving sales pitch broadcast on myriads of tiny screens.

"I've seen a message of hope my friends, written in electric light."

Unable to make sense of what he's seeing in the context of his own life up until then, he becomes fired with Belief. Poor fellow. Trying to spread his Belief brings him into conflict with, well, just about everybody, until he meets Lilah, who has gathered around herself a group of misfits and lost souls who help guard a warehouse with mysterious contents. Lilah, it turns out, is a similarly-crazed evangelist with a quest of her own.

This story relied a bit too much on telling rather than showing, which is a shame, as the writing is strong enough to work without that. There are definitely moments when Hannett tells us something they have already shown us. Overall, although it's a good tale, Oule seems a bit out of place as an evangelist. He doesn't take nearly enough pleasure in nobody listening to him at all.

'The Gnomogist's Tale' by Matthew Chrulew is, by a narrow margin, my favourite of this anthology. It's a rambunctious, shameless, romp of a tale, an entire world's mythology all by itself.

"In those days Mamont ranged through not only the park but all of Beria. And Mamont re-formed Aerth again: he pushed down trees and trampled shrubs; he cleared the snow and tore up the mosses. Wherever Mamont grassed, there grasses grew. And though Aerth was still angry, and the waters still rose, wherever Mamont ranged, the boggy ground became firm again, and the hollow scenery was once more plentiful."

So much thought and work has gone into this story that it's a smooth pleasure to read. Only at one point did it jar on me. We learn about Sapien-Ape, the people of this apocalyptic world, then in only three words the author betrays that all along he's been writing about men, not people. It's a slight flaw, but one that could easily have been avoided. Still, it's worth buying this anthology just to read this one story and learn about Mamont and his dead children. It would also be worth seeking out what else Chrulew has had published.

The anthology concludes with 'The Conductor's Tale' by Lyn Battersby, the story of a man whose very self-effacement is his means of keeping control of the passengers on his train. He's a driven, haunted man, and his story is Faustian in concept. With his story, we arrive at last in Canterbury, despite an attack by raiders from Londistan--whose story is hinted at, but not told here--and an attempt to destroy the locomotive, and Battersby takes us on a brief tour of that city.

"I, I want to make the pilgrimage, but I don't know what God requires of me."

The Conductor is seeking an expiation beyond the norm; walking through the Buttermarket to the Cathedral simply doesn't feel like enough. Is he perhaps doomed to doubt God's forgiveness even while he desperately yearns for it? We don't know, but at least this time he does manage to get off the train. A sad, sad story on which to conclude.

The amount of work that's gone into this anthology is impressive. Almost every story is worth reading. It is sometimes hard to reconcile the worlds of the storytellers with that of the shiny nuclear train, but the stories themselves work together surprisingly well, and that's no mean achievement. There's also enough imagination here to fill several novels, and it's possible that some of the stories would work (even) better at a longer length.

Even the handsome cover art seems to wink and invite you in.

Worth buying.

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....

Have you been naughty? Scary? Daring? Get your GUD Treats (100 pages of horror!) here: http://tr.im/gudhalloween halloween (LIMITED TIME)

GUD Reviews: Midnight Picnic by Nick Antosca

Midnight Picnic
by Nick Antosca
Word Riot Press, 2009
Paperback, 182 pages

ISBN: 0977934330 (Amazon.com)
9780977934331 (Book Depository)

$15.95 / £9.72

Midnight Picnic is GUD contributor Nick Antosca's second novel, but is written with such assurance and skill that it might more easily be his twenty-second. On the first page, Antosca draws the reader in to unwilling protagonist Bram's world, which is about to get uncannily strange.

Bram's living a mundane, drab existence over a bar called Moms until the night he comes home tired and accidentally runs over the bar's dog, Baby. His attempts to succour the injured animal show him to be basically decent, but ineffectual. He wants to do the right thing, yet gives up when it becomes too difficult. This is the issue Bram will have to face up to as the story continues.

The skeleton of a young boy is found, and his spirit makes a connection with Bram that takes him on a nightmare journey into the land of the dead. Here, he learns far more about himself--and the dead and living--than he ever thought possible. However, at heart, Midnight Picnic is not a ghost story. It's a tale of redemption and the healing effects of time.

The central premise is that, given time to reflect, we can all come to a realisation of where we have gone wrong in our lives. No matter how despicable our crimes, redemption is possible, but it comes not from outside, but from the person themselves, from their changed relationship with themselves and the other dead. It's a powerful message in a book that refuses to label anyone as evil.

Only Adam is depicted as incapable of this process, perhaps because he died too young. For him, time to reflect has only bred hatred; he is locked into childish ideas of right, wrong, and punisment.

All Antosca's characters are vividly realised, from Bram's lost soul of an on-off girlfriend to the old man who lives in the woods, and has, in the past, done whatever it took to stay hidden there. Before vengeance comes for him, he seems to have already learnt his lesson, telling another intruder on his solitude, "I wouldn't do anything to you...".

This book is relatively short, but the reader needn't feel short-changed. There's a complete story here, one that compels as well as entertains. It's fascinating to travel with Bram and Adam into the lands of the dead, a place into which the living often stray, unawares, a land that's depicted as chillingly as the dead landscape of Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

An excellent book to read on Halloween, with your head under the covers and a heavy flashlight handy.

Nick Antosca's story 'Soon You Will be Gone and Possibly Eaten' appears in GUD Issue 3.

Original review, pics, comments:
http://ping.fm/BpCUa

Banned Books Week: Thoughts from Lisa Grabenstetter

GUD contributor Lisa Grabenstetter writes: The American Library Association's 'Banned Books Week' was September 26th through October 3rd this year. As you can see, I'm a little late coming to it. Nevertheless, I think it an important topic to arrive at--no matter how tardily.

The vast majority of banned books are children's books, and they're challenged for the very fact of being written for children. Somewhere, somewhen, some people came up with the idea that children's brains are infinitely malleable. Yet, furthermore, every single impression worked into a child is unchanging and indelible. That's right. You, reader, who were afraid at age five that flying skull monsters would come out of the toilet to eat you every time you flushed*: you still leave the door unlocked for a swift getaway. We know it. Time, age, experience? They are nothing to the fact that you read about toilet monsters once!

This is how many book banners would appear to think.

So, permanently scarred by The Toilet Monster Compendium, you are now lobbying to get it removed from your local library. It is simply not enough that you advise all of your friends not to read it, and tell them not to let their children read it. Not enough that you let nary a copy cross the threshold of your own home. No, you must prevent all those innocents who may ever want to check it out from your local library from doing so, too!

Banning alone, though, is an ineffective strategy. It may cover all those who have no other recourse but to borrow the book from the library, but it leaves all other options for acquiring the book wide open. How will you prevent impressionable children (or their well-meaning relatives) buying The Toilet Monster Compendium? Or borrowing it from a friend? How about that big-budget Hollywood adaptation with Crispin Glover in the title role? Worse, controversy is a more surefire way to make a book (or movie, or picture) skyrocket in popularity.

So what is a budding mind-controller to do?

Find a group of people who can be led into being equally offended by The Toilet Monster Compendium, and gain their support. Even if none of them have ever read it, and the reason they're offended has absolutely nothing to do with the reasons you're still terrified of brightly-gleaming porcelain, this can be an effective strategy. Not only will you be more likely to get the book banned, due to sheer force of numbers, but the involvement of more people means you can cover more fronts. While you're campaigning to get Toilet Monster removed from the public library, someone else can be working on the second-grade curriculum, and the local bookstores. You can hold midnight book-burnings in protest, gaining media attention and encouraging other branches of the group to challenge the book as well.

A friend of mine actually removed his kid from the religious school she was attending over a scenario quite similar to this. Now, he was of the religion this school represented... hence having his child attend in the first place. But then the school voted to unilaterally ban the book The Golden Compass (aka Northern Lights) by Phillip Pullman from school grounds. They sent home notices with students, warning parents not to allow their children to read the book or see the movie. When my friend asked the principal whether he had ever read the book himself, the principal responded that he had not. He was having it banned because of a protest within his religion against the book, timed to coincide with the release of the movie, and due to some anti-religious content they had told him the book contained. My friend asked around, and found that none of the school's deciding board had read the book: they'd written the notice and instated the ban entirely on the word of some other members of their religion. My friend did the logical thing: he bought several dozen copies of the book, and handed them to those in charge. When they upheld the ban, he pulled his daughter out and sent her to a secular school. Also, he took her to see a movie.

But there you go! Look how much trouble my friend had to go through to try and defend a book he loved from the ignorance of an entire elementary school. Adhere your Toilet Monster-banning agenda to that of a populous group like a religion, and otherwise rational people will avoid the book like the plague--out of sheer laziness. Probably the only human trait that can trump curiosity.

A person is told vociferously and often that, if they were only to read this book they will be offended--truly, deeply, heartrendingly offended. There is no possible way they could enjoy anything about this book... they will only be offended! Easy to just take that message away with them without going to the trouble of reading the book, or even just looking up relevant quotes in context. So when someone else asks them how they feel about the book, well... they are offended! Truly.

And there you have your strategy. Get people so pumped up that they will defend banning a book solely on hearsay.

Now, you might encounter some people who suggest to you that many things will happen to you in the course of your life. These people will tell you that a single book read as a child is usually pretty inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, and that if you really didn't like The Toilet Monster Compendium, you should move on and read other books--not try and prevent everyone reading the book ever again, for any reason. Humans change and develop, they will tell you, learning to measure the world and forming opinions based on a multitude of stimuli.

Basically, they are telling you that most people grow up.

So that is my take on book banning. Happy belated Banned Book Week, and may your quest for knowledge take you to many surprising, controversial, and fascinating places!

*The librarian at the school I attended in first grade told my class that, when she was our age, she had been afraid of monsters coming out of the toilet when she flushed. Thinking this was funny, I told my little sister the story when I got home. She took it seriously, and the fear of monsters (or monstrous ghosts) rising from the toilet when she flushed plagued her for years. Yet another of my siblings' childhood traumas that was actually my fault!

(Editor's note: And no books involved!)

Lisa Grabenstetter's artworks Writing the Harvest and The Catoblepas appeared in GUD Issue 4.

More GUD Love (and some miscounting) ~ awards, noms, ... http://ping.fm/9Sesw

More GUD Love (and some miscounting)

GUD has just nominated Ian McHugh's Stiletto (Issue 4) for an Aurealis Award. You may remember Kirstyn McDermott's Painlessness (Issue 2) won the Best Horror Short story for 2008. Ian's story has been nominated in the Science Fiction category, and we think it stands a good chance :).

This seems therefore like a good time to share with you more of the love that's out there for our eclectic genre/literary magazine.

In Gardner Dozois's 'The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection'*, GUD received two Honorable Mentions. At first, when we thought we'd got one, we were as happy as clams. When it emerged we had two, we were as happy as...well, a whole bed of clams. It's tough for a small, relatively-young magazine to get its name out there, and we're grateful for all the great help we get.

(In our defence, the Dozois anthology got Blaikie's forename wrong, listing him as 'Moal'.)

The Honorable Mentions were for Neal Blaikie's Offworld Friends are Best (Issue 2) and Night Bird Soaring by T.L. Morganfield (Issue 3). Night Bird Soaring is still in the running for Nebula recommendations, and so is available to read in full, free, here on our site, by kind permission of the author.

Then, when details of Ellen Datlow's long-awaited anthology Best Horror of the Year Volume 1 came out, we are delighted to see we had three Honorable Mentions.

Except once again we were doing ourselves down. We didn't have three. We had six. We really must pay more attention when the love's being dished out.

Ellen Datlow singled out for Honorable Mention:

* Think Fast by Michael Greenhut (Issue 3)
* The Festival of Colour by Paul Richard Haines (Issue 2)
* Hepatocellular Carcinoma. Stage IV by Samantha Henderson (Issue 2)
* Painlessness by Kirstyn McDermott (Issue 2)
* Dolls by Kristin Ong Muslim (Issue 2)
* Closer in my Heart to Thee by Jeffrey Somers (Issue 2)

Sometimes it's interesting to go back and look at the staff comments on stories that went on to be singled out for praise. I see that on Painlessness I wrote, "Well. At last, a decent story. I'd begun to give up hope." Kaolin, on the other hand, had this to say, "I love where it goes, what it does, but FUCK. Intense. I was squirming through bits of it." Sal thought the story "awesome" when he chose it for his issue. And so it is!

It's also wonderful to see the poetry in GUD receiving the attention it deserves--all too often it gets overlooked by the critics.

Remember: you can buy a single .pdf of any story, poem, art, comic, script, or report that appears in any issue of GUD Magazine. Or buy whole issues in either print or .pdf. Treat yourself today and find out what Gardner Dozois and Ellen Datlow think we're doing right!

* Published in the UK as 'The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 22'.

See original page for all the proper links and such: http://ping.fm/iJkwb :)

Garbage Man by Joseph D'Lacey, reviewed by Debbie Moorhouse: http://ping.fm/lbXA7

Garbage Man by Joseph D'Lacey, reviewed by Debbie Moorhouse

After the success of Joseph D'Lacey's disturbing debut MEAT (reviewed by GUD here), his second novel, Garbage Man, was bound to come out to high expectations. So high, perhaps, that no book could live up to them.

The people living near the RefuSec Waste Management landfill don't pay it much attention. After all, they have their own problems to wrestle with--frustrated ambition, a damaged connection with the Earth, sexual deviancy. But is the landfill as indifferent? Or is it churning humanity's waste into a strange new form of life?

Garbage Man has strong plot elements--a mysterious, shaman-like figure called Mason Brand who communes with the local landfill, a young woman prepared to do anything to escape her "boring, boring, boring" life, another woman tormented by dreams of a "razor-baby" that endlessly searches, endlessly suffers, and is endlessly silent, and, brooding over all, the filth and waste of the dump.

D'Lacey is clearly determined to eschew the errors made by so many Horror novels that offer the mutilation and death of characters we know nothing about and care for less. Half of Garbage Man is dedicated to introducing its characters, to inviting the reader to learn their failings and their flaws, to sympathise with their attempts to overcome the sheer dull nastiness of their lives. Yet somehow it doesn't work. The characters don't come alive on the page.

This despite some solidly creepy writing, especially in the dream sequences.

"The knives enter the baby's body easily, as though it were made of fresh cake. They slide in deep. Deep enough to stay. The baby pauses, turns. Some of the longer knives have passed right through it. She sees the points poking downward from its chest as it screams. She can't hear the screaming. She only feels it, deep inside, her spirit being murdered by the baby's pain."

The first half of the book disappoints. There's almost too much introduction, too much following the characters around while they prepare, unwittingly, for their own annihilation. After a while, even the tormented baby loses its impact. If it's going to go on its agonizing search forever, the reader has to distance themselves, has to put up barriers to interminable, hopeless pain.

When the landfill comes unexpectedly, vehemently alive, the novel picks up as if this is what it's been waiting for. There are daring escapes across rooftops. There are people trapped in buildings, trembling as they await their fate. And there are some of the strangest monsters Horror has ever brought forth.

"She didn't know what it was. It had no name. It had five 'arms' which it used as legs. It was fashioned of junk and animal parts and filth. It dragged a long fat body and left a wet trail of excrement on her carpet. A long-bodied spider without enough legs to move properly...its eyes were the loops from the handles of scissors. Its teeth were the ends of dozens of knitting needles."

Gratifyingly, Garbage Man turns into an exciting, scary, highly-imaginative Horror novel about halfway through. It's worth reading the first part to get to the second. D'Lacey has the chops to scare and disgust the reader, whether they care about the characters or not.