Berkley, 1987, 221 p.

Gaelian is the eldest of the eldest of the YnTourne family and thus in line to inherit all its privileges, including a seat on the board which runs life on Dinoreos and its dependencies, Adedri and Cahaute. She is also the hottest graduate of her military flying school; the only one always able to land her spaceship on a dit. This last is whence her nickname, Angel, derives. Dinoreos is a thoroughthly class-ridden polity trained up on and bound by the pastime of nerris, a combat sport once a deadly endeavour but now mainly ceremonial. All aspects of Dinorean life are threaded through with the tactics of nerris. As part of Gaelian’s inheritance, for dynastic and political reasons she is engaged to Teazerin YnSetti, an adept in the sporting aspects of nerris.

However, Gaelian spent most of her early life on Cahaute, where her father had been sent on diplomatic business. This, along with her appearance, has led to suspicions she is not wholly aristocratic, that her mother may have been one of Cahaute’s natives. Her father has always warned her to stand up for her rights and to assert that any genetic test would be passed easily. Gaelian knows the truth though and still feels the influence of Cahaute’s Power Clans within her. Her father’s conscience has led to him becoming a drunkard, both unsuitable and unwilling to take over as Head of household when Gaelian’s grandmother dies. The setting is here for a power struggle between Gaelian and her cousin Dobrin, eager to take on the leadership role himself, and who knows he has the Board’s backing, with the possibility of Gaelian’s background being exposed.

To her credit and much more interestingly, Lewitt takes a different tack though. The inheritance crisis is soon upon Gaelian but due to Dobrin’s honourable behaviour and her realisation that her primary wish is to be a pilot she agrees to stand down in his favour (with the proviso that her engagement to Teazerin is dissolved.) Even here we could have ended up with a standard military SF type plot but on her very first real mission (to Adedri) Gaelian’s ship is outpaced and out-manœuvred and she disappears, presumed dead.

On occasion up to then we have been given snippets of life on Cahaute and its belief systems (which seem very much to be derived from Native American customs.) Attention now focuses mainly on the situation on Cahaute, to where Teazerin has been posted and where he exerts a large degree of influence on the base and its actions, and the plans of Gaelian’s captor, Nomis, on Adedri, while occasionally switching back to machinations on Dinoreos. The wisdom and knowledge of the Power Clans are crucial to the unfolding of the subsequent events on Cahaute. In keeping with the preceding chapters the plot’s resolution is also very much against the usual run of SF novels.

Pedant’s corner:- “to betroth her” (betrothe.) “None of them were in use” (None of them was in use.) “He didn’t try follow it” (to follow it,) a pair of end direct speech marks without a preceding opening pair, publically (publicly,) “as she tried to lay down” (lie down,) “did not enter the ledge” (the lodge.)

Thursday’s post brought two more goodies from Interzone. (Well I hope they’re goodies.)

The first was The City We Became by N K Jemisin. Jemisin won the Hugo Award for best novel three times in a row with the components of her Broken Earth series of books.

The second is from a writer new to me, Patrick Edwards. His novel is titled Echo Cycle. The reviews ought to appear in issue 287.

TTA Press, 96 p.

Guest Editorial this time is taken by Andy Dudak (who has a story elsewhere in the issue) and he relates how his experience as a translator and reader of translated fiction has affected his own.
Andy Hedgecock’s Future Interrupted investigates how SF/fantasy/weird writers are responding to the greed, corruption and flagrant abuse of power in the modern-day world. Aliya Whiteley’s Climbing Stories ranges over theme-park rides, maps and films as well as books in contemplating how transporting a story can be and how it’s never the same on each subsequent experience of it.
Book Zone starts with my reviews of Aliya Whiteley’s Skein Island and Menace from Farside^a by Ian McDonald. I had some minor reservations about the first but none about the second. John Howard^b finds the collection of essays on altered History stories Sideways in Time edited by Glyn Morgan and C Palmer-Patel brisk, lively and illuminating. Maureen Kincaid Speller^c welcomes the “long-needed biography” that is John Wyndham: Life, Love, Letters by Amy Binns, which increased her respect for the man and his writing. Stephen Theaker says Bridge 108 by Anne Charnock is interesting and thoughtful, keeping readers engaged throughout, and the review is followed by an interview with the author. Andy Hedgecock^d lauds The Crying Machine by Greg Chivers as an entertaining romp with an unexpected degree of thematic complexity, flawed but promising.

In the fiction:
Each Cell a Throne¹ by Gregor Hartmann contains a fair bit of intrusive information dumping. The story concerns an off-duty cop who has been hired to persuade an old man not to let his personality be uploaded into a datasphere.
Flyover Country² by Julie C Day is a love story in which the caretaker of an extremely little used airfield falls for one of the operatives of the firm AeroFix (which to British eyes looks very like a miniature modelling kit manufacturer,) which sprays cures for logic illnesses.
In Frankie³ by Daniel Bennett the titular character never appears though some of the posts from his popular website, written as reflections on his terminal illness and which always end in -ah death followed by the date, do. His brother has come back from the front in the (unspecified) country’s ongoing war to visit the shack where they lived in their youth. The shack is now all-but besieged by Frankie’s followers.
Since the expansion of the universe is caused by it being observed, a millennium ago all humans bar those travelling through space were turned inward (frozen in time) by aliens in Salvage⁴ by Andy Dudak. Aristy Safewither is a soul salvager, illegally extracting the thoughts of the frozen on the planet New Ce. This all gets mixed up with the tale of the planet’s dictator at the time of turning inward.
The Dead Man’s Coffee⁵ by John Possidente is an odd piece where a journalist on a small space habitat learns (at least second-hand) from a conversation in a coffee bar about a planet where photovores – humans who can photosynthsesise – fall foul of a mandatory fasting-during-day-time rule.

Pedant’s corner- ^a“is a novella is set in a” (quite where that extraneous ‘is’ crept in I have no idea. I have checked all three files in which I keep my Iz reviews [the original, the one for sending and the one where I stack them to be posted here] and it appears in none of them.) ^bAldiss’ (Aldiss’s,) “silences and onmissions that … marginalises many” (marginalise – it was a quote from the original text though,) Sales’ (Sales’s.) ^cParkes’ (Parkes’s,) Binns’ (Binns’s.) ^dChivers’ (Chivers’s.)
¹Written in USian. ²convey (convoy,) “both stylus and table” (stylus and tablet.) ³None of us have the time (none of us has the time.) ⁴personal affects (effects,) “opened hellish geothermal maws” (a maw is a stomach, not a mouth.) ⁵Written in USian.

Interzone 286 arived today.

This one contains my reviews of Re-Coil by J T Nicholas and Sixteenth Watch by Myke Cole.

The cover to this issue looks like some sort of homage to 1950s SF magazines with its many eyed, many tentacled alien apparently in a struggle with a spacesuited human. I didn’t know they made them like that any more.

Macmillan, 2019, 573 p.

This, the third of this year’s BSFA Award nominees for best novel I have read, is not exactly a sequel but does follow on from Children of Time, Tchaikovsky’s big hit from 2018.

The story is told mostly in two strands, Past and Present. Past describes the landing on an alien planet (soon designated Nod) of an expedition from Earth sent to terraform it for future colonies. There is life there already (of strange radially symmetric organisms) and so the leader decides not to terraform Nod but to utilise another water bound world (Damascus) in the same system for that purpose. One of the expedition’s members, Disra Senkovi, has for a long time been working with octopuses to increase their intelligence and usefulness and so this compromise suits all parties. (Senkovi knows the plural ‘octopi’ – as opposed to octopuses – is incorrect but prefers it because he likes its sound and so, annoyingly, Tchaikovsky uses it in all the sections relating to him. At one point, though, Senkovi states ‘octopi’ is “even more incorrect” than ‘octopodes’ – which his boss prefers. ‘Octopodes’ is not incorrect at all, though. It is the Greek plural.) While in the system all communication from Earth ceases as a result of a devastating nuclear war and the expedition is left to itself. After a few years one of the expedition’s members is ‘infected’ by an organism from Nod, which encodes genetic information by the placement of individual atoms on ‘cell’ walls. This swiftly takes over the members on Nod and in orbit around it and sets out for Damascus where Senkovi’s insatiably curious octopuses have spread in its ocean. The vessel is shot down but lands in the ocean. Senkovi invokes a strict prohibition on the crash site, and on Nod itself. Many years down the line the octopuses have utilised the whole sea-bed and one of them ignores the prohibition. The infection spreads once more and the remnant octopuses are reduced to living in orbitals and spaceships.

In Present, Humans (as distinct from pre-uplift humans) and the uplifted spiders from the Kern’s World of Children of Time have detected radio signals from Past’s system and a mission has been sent to investigate. Much of this strand is devoted to the initial contact between Humans-and-spiders and octopuses, the clash between them over approaching whatever it is on the module left orbiting Nod and what is in Damascus’s ocean, the problems of interspecies communication, and the nature of the infecting organism.

Too much is told, however, not shown and Tchaikovsky doesn’t really inhabit the minds of his characters. (Okay, the mindset of spiders and octopuses, not to mention the Nod creature, may be a bit of a stretch but SF readers are used to alienness. It shouldn’t be a problem. In Children of Time the spiders weren’t.) While Children of Ruin does contain some interesting stuff the chunks of exposition and internal monologues can be hard going. Far from not being able to put this down I had difficulty in staying awake while reading it. And it is not short. I fear others have been swayed in their considerations of Children of Ruin’s merits by the relatively novel nature of its aliens.

Pedant’s corner:- “sixty-one degrees centigrade” (sixty-one degrees Celsius,) miniscule (x2, minuscule,) ‘his subjet species’ world view’ (species singular, so, species’s.) “None of them were” (none of them was,) “polarised Calcium ions” (calcium is not a proper noun, no capital C required,) “hoves onto view” (hove is past tense; ‘heaves into view’.) “A string …. rip through her hull” “a string … rips,) “how authentic the simulacra is” (‘simulacra’ is plural, the singular is simulacrum,) “reacted to different stimulus” (‘to a different stimulus’, or, ‘to different stimuli’,) sung (sang.) “None of the entities … are real” (None … is real.) “”Both of them tries to recruit him.” (Both try to recruit him,) childrens’ (children’s,) “the colours stabilize and compliment each other” (complement, and while we’re at it, stabilise. Please,) “And his are a passionate, mercurial people” (his is a passionate, mercurial people,) “anathema to their mind” (minds,) “a living compliment of one hundred and seventeen” (complement,) “a severe under-compliment” (under-complement,) “materials-salvaging” (was split over two lines despite materials being the first word on its line,) octopusus’s (octopuses’.) “Six-eighths of his cerebral capacity … are bent towards that one end” (six-eighths is less than one and hence takes a singular verb form, is bent.) “Two-eighths … remains” ([on the very next page!] does indeed, correctly, have a singular verb form,) “the females have found the thing containment” (????) “one faction has worked themselves up” (‘have worked themselves up,’ would be internally consistent with ‘themselves’ but ‘faction’ is singular so, ‘has worked itself up,) condusive (conducive.) “None of them pay any attention” (None … pays attention,) smidgeon (smidgin, or smidgen.) “The warship faction are making a” (is making.) “The science faction are singing” (is singing.) “The science faction are going to test” (is going,) “fit around” (fitted.)

Ace, 2019, 312 p.

This is the second of this year’s BSFA Award nominees for best novel I have read. It is set on a starship called Atlas 2, heading out on a twenty-year voyage to join a colony on another planet (in the wake of someone called the Pathfinder who I assume appeared in an earlier novel in Newman’s Planetfall sequence.) Just as well; Earth has been devastated by a nuclear war.

Our narrator is named Deanna, on board Atlas 2 after her indentured debt had been paid off by her friend. Carl, who likes nothing better than to get his teeth into a real murder (or unexplained death) mystery. Or, I should say, because his indentureship trained/programmed him for that. Deanna – and I suppose everyone else in this scenario – has a link to an internal personal assistant. (This last is getting to be a fixture of SF novels these days.) There is also a system called MyPhys which monitors people’s health and bodily responses while the relaxation activity of choice is the use of mersives, highly detailed, virtual reality role-playing games.

Very early on Newman, through Deanna, puts the boot into fundamentalism of the self-styled Christian variety. In this story, what had been the USA has fractured and non-believers in Christianity kicked out. Deanna had had to fake belief in order to get onto the largely American funded ship, trading on relative ignorance of and assumptions about trans-Atlantic – here called Noropean – norms.

Up till now apparently footloose and fancy-free with all needs catered for Deanna is invited to do an analysis job on some data and discovers a previously hidden (at least to her and her acquaintances) hierarchy on the ship. Rich and with far from mean living spaces the elite also has access to a money economy Deanna had been unaware of.

Things ramp up when a mysterious person with incredible powers of access and concealment intrudes into the mersive area she calls her office space and entices her into a mersive which seems to have all sorts of information about her past life and homes. In it she finds clues to the nature of those running the show; leaders from the CSA (not the CSA I first thought of, but the Christian States of America) and that they were responsible for the destruction of all those sinners back on Earth. On meeting one of them in the mersive she takes the opportunity to kill him there, knowing he will experience the pain of it back in meatspace. On returning to real life she is startled to find that despite safeguards against crossover (not to mention MyPhys) that person has indeed died while immersed. Carl, a dog that won’t let a bone go, has been assigned to find out what happened to him. Thereafter she is forced to prevaricate with Carl while still plotting revenge on those in charge who are intent on preserving the indentured system she and all the less privileged on board thought they’d escaped from. In the course of this we come to realise that Deanna is indeed, in her own words, “A cold collection of responses, pretending to be a person.” When the identity of her mysterious helper is revealed she comes round to planning her act of retribution very quickly, almost without thought, but also without compunction.

That the major part of this novel is spent with Deanna in mersive environments is a bit off-putting. It’s too close to “it was all a dream.” Granted within them Deanna is revealed certain clues to help her unravel her circumstances but the overlap between mersive and meatspace is a step too far. The other characters in the book are little more than attributes rather than real people – unless Newman is making the point that spending too much time in game-playing is detrimental to human relationships, which the text does not really support. Then again we are seeing this from the viewpoint of a cold collection of responses pretending to be a person; perhaps not the best reader of people. Deanna is not an exemplary human (not that characters in books necessarily have to be) but Newman lets her off her actions lightly, leaving an unsavoury taste.

Newman’s invented expletive JeeMuh is still as irritating as in Before Mars, the previous book of hers I have read, but at least this time she gives it a provenance. Yet why use it at all when the ‘f’ word is liberally sprinkled across the text?

Pedant’s corner:- It was an ARC. Many of the following may have been corrected in the published edition: hangry (is this meant to be a portmanteau word – hungry/angry – or is it just a misprint for hungry? In context the misprint is far more likely.) “‘And it’s going kill you’” (‘going to kill you’,) n00b (x2, noob?) “the smell had alerted the neighbours, the body removed” (the body had been removed,) “a couple of specs on my throat” (neither speculations nor spectacles; it was blood, so, specks,) “‘you’ve got another thing coming,’” (another think,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech. “As long as I know what I want and know how to get, that’s all that matters” (how to get it,) hung (hanging,) “while I patched up her” (that reads very differently from ‘while I patched her up’,) “ a variety of ways … quickly float through my mind” (a variety …floats,) grills (USian? ‘grilles’,) “the same as what I can in meatspace” (the ‘what’ is superfluous,) “none of them live on deck five” (none of them lives on deck five.) None of the Circle are working” (None … is working,) “‘who were genuinely were’” (omit one ‘were’.)

Titan, 2019, 401 p.

As last year, Powell’s is the first of this year’s BSFA Award nominees for best novel that I have read. Like the previous instalment in Powell’s projected trilogy (see link above) it is again a multi-viewpoint narrative. Most of these are familiar from Embers of War; war criminal turned poet turned condemned prisoner Ona Sendak, ship’s captain Sal Konstanz, his ship Trouble Dog’s AI brain, its Druff engineer Nod – now accompanied by thirteen offspring. There is a new viewpoint character called Johnny Schultz, (“lucky” Johnny Schultz,) captain of a trading vessel on the shady side of things, plus a sole chapter from the viewpoint of Trouble Dog’s sister ship, Adalwolf.

The Marble Armada which our motley crew liberated from five thousand years of confinement in the trilogy’s previous instalment causes Sendak to be rescued at the point of her execution by a Conglomeration army detachment. For some reason the Armada needs a biological identity to authorise their actions. It is in this scene that the first of many gratuitous acts of violence in the book occurs.

Schultz’s ship, Lucy’s Ghost, is about to sweep out of the hypervoid to “salvage” a derelict Nymtoq ship, the Restless Itch, when it is attacked by an entity invisible to the ship’s sensors, causing it to crash into the Itch on reentering real space. Schultz’s crew is forced to board the Itch for shelter and await rescue. Konstanz and Trouble Dog’s crew respond to the distress call.

Meantime the Armada launches an attack on any armed vessel or military outpost everywhere in the Human Generality apparently in the name of preventing any further war and killing. There is an attempt at some moralistic justification for this orgy of destruction (“‘We act to preserve life…. By destroying the means to wage war. Only when war is impossible will life be safe,’”) but any such is of necessity tenuous. In any case it seems the Armada – by now dubbed the Fleet of Knives of the book’s title – fears that widespread war may bring down the unwelcome attention of aliens from the higher dimensions. (Some cognitive dissonance here, surely?)

Inside Itch, Schultz and his crew (now accompanied by Lucy, an avatar of the ship’s human-derived brain housed in a cloned body appearing twelve years old) are beset by a horde of implacable metallic-carapaced creatures which resemble crayfish, and thus have to flee for their lives. The arrival of Trouble Dog is swiftly followed by Sendak and three Armada ships demanding surrender.

Konstanz and Schultz reflect on the inevitable deaths within their crews with regret but these and other attempts at humanising them are unconvincing, appearing bolted on, almost as a chore for the author to pay lip service to. As characters they do not breathe.

The book is riddled with other infelicities. The crayfish provide their interval of conflict and then the narrative seems to forget them. We are (twice) told Trouble Dog displaces ten thousand tons. I could not have quibbled with ‘massed ten thousand tons’ (mass does not depend on environment) but how can a spaceship displace anything? Its working environment is a vacuum in which, by definition, there is nothing to displace. ‘Normal’ ships of course displace their equivalent tonnage of water. Restless Itch has a number of convenient parallel tunnels for Trouble Dog to hide in and then escape through, Trouble Dog itelf refers to Sendak’s Armada ship as 88,573 but had not at that point been told its name. There are also too many references to things familiar to twenty-first century readers which would most likely have no meaning for the inhabitants of this book – and therefore jar as part of their story – for disbelief to remain suspended. And remorseless metallic, cannibalistic crustacean lookalikes? Come on, guys.

This novel will not get my vote.

Pedant’s corner:- milleniums (millenia,) momentarily (means ‘for a moment’, not ‘in a moment’,) maw (x3 it’s not a mouth,) “if worse came to worst” (does make more logical sense but in the past this phrase was always, ‘if the worst came to the worst’,) crawfish (previously ‘crayfish’, but ‘crawfish’ from hereon in,) “I fancied I could almost hear the ‘whoosh’ as the entangled wreckage of both ships passed scant metres from our bows” (it was in space, there would have been no ‘whoosh’, and only one bow,) epicentre (centre.)

Orbit, 2018, 393 p.

Rosewater was a nominee for the BSFA Award last year and won the Clarke Award. Its successor The Rosewater Insurrection is on this year’s BSFA Award short list. As I hope to get round to reading that before voting I thought I’d better look at this first.

Rosewater is a doughnut-shaped city that surrounds the biodome, an alien outcropping in Nigeria. The biodome opens once every year for twenty or thirty minutes and everyone in the vicinity is cured of all physical ailments. Even dead people can be reanimated, but the results tend to be soulless and mindless, and have to be killed again.

Narrator Kaaro is a sensitive, able to discern the thoughts of others by accessing the xenosphere, strands of alien fungi-like filaments and neurotransmitters, which link with the natural fungi on human skin and penetrate the nervous system. His abilities have made him useful to S45, a branch of the Nigerian security services. He is also a finder, and a thief. Later his abilities are referred to as those of a quantum extrapolator. He is also a misogynist and sexist, notwithstanding his entering a relationship with a woman called Aminat. Not that strong women are missing in the book, his initial S45 boss, Femi Alaagomeji, and Aminat being cases in point.

The novel is structured into scenes taking place in Kaaro’s Now of 2066, the Then of when the biodome first appeared and its subsequent evolution, and interludes describing his previous missions for S45. This tends to render the reading experience as bitty. Just when getting into the swing of things in one timeline we are jarred out of it, often with a cliffhanger. Coming across in the background we find that the thing humans call Wormwood was an amœbic blob of alien organic matter that fell to Earth in 2012 in Hyde Park, London. Unlike previous such incursions, Wormwood survived and (apparently) tunnelled its way to Nigeria.

Not that it has any real connection to any part of Kaaro’s story, but we are informed that in this world, as a response to the alien incursions, the US has withdrawn into itself, letting nothing in or out, not even information.

At the start of the book Kaaro has a job protecting a bank’s customers from the attentions of other sensitives out to steal their information. This is one of the hares Thompson sets running but never quite catches. There is the biodome itself, the appearance of a character known as Bicycle Girl or Oyin Da, and, in an apparent signal to a thriller subplot that never arrives, sensitives are dying. In the wider xenosphere, where reality is very distorted, Kaaro uses a gryphon as an avatar. Aminat’s brother, Layi, is kept chained in her flat to prevent him burning things using his own xenospheric power.

As can perhaps be gleaned from the previous paragraph there is too much going on in the novel which, as a result, fails to achieve focus. Thompson can undoubtedly write but hasn’t yet found the virtue of economy. Quite why Rosewater has been accorded the accolades it has is therefore a bit obscure.

Pedant’s corner:- “crimes perpetuated in the xenosphere” (crimes perpetrated,) “Ascomytes xenophericus” (elsewhere Ascomytes xenosphericus,) smoothes (smooths,) “amuses me to no end” (‘to no end’ means ‘without purpose’, ‘amuses me no end’ [‘no end’ = infinitely] was meant,) aircrafts “OK it was in dialogue but the plural of aircraft is aircraft.) “None of the people around me are harmed” (None …is harmed.) “None of them want to live in the refugee camps” (None of them wants to live….)

Hodder, 2019, 292 p.

Roanhorse is something of a rarity as an SF author. She may not be the first writer of Native American heritage to write SF and Fantasy but I confess if she isn’t I can’t recall reading any others. That heritage infuses Trail of Lightning, the first in a series of tales.

Narrator Maggie Hoskie is a Navajo, or Diné as they call themselves. Their former reservation is now a bastion against an outside world devastated by an environmental catastrophe referred to as the Big Water. Known to its inhabitants as Dinétah, the Diné’s land is protected by a Wall and there are few incomers. Despite the outer world being largely drowned, Dinétah is suffering from a prolonged drought. Water is one of the many scarcities, coffee an almost impossible luxury.

We first meet Maggie when her help is enlisted by a family whose daughter has been abducted by a monster. Somewhat reluctantly, Maggie, who has what the book calls clan powers – one of hers is to be taken over at times of stress by K’aahanáanii, a source of speed in movement, liable to be useful in a fight – takes on the task of finding the abducted girl. She reaches her too late, though, as she has already been infected by the monster and cannot be returned to her parents intact. The killings of the monster and the girl are only the first of many in the book.

Maggie’s training in the ways of her powers had been undertaken by a man called Neizghání, said to be an immortal (as opposed to the ‘five-fingered’ normal humans.) Maggie may still be in love with him. She is certainly tormented by his disappearance after an earlier incident.

Maggie’s only other friend, a medicine man called Tah, introduces her to his grandson, Kai Arviso, (who is Big Medicine, with healing powers – and silvery eyes.) Reluctantly Maggie takes him along on her quest to defeat the monsters and find Neizghání. Along the way we are treated to what is in effect a supercharged cage fight – to the death.

One of the story’s fantastical apparitions, Coyote, is a familiar figure in Native American folklore. He met Maggie, “before the end of the Fifth World, when my kind still lived mostly in the dreams of the five-fingered people,” and persists in annoying her by calling her Magdalena. Always dressed like one of those be-suited gents in cowboy films, Coyote is one of the book’s more intriguing, if elusive, characters but his interest in Maggie is for purposes of his own.

Some authorial hand-waving is evident when Coyote, also known to the Diné as Ma’ii, at one point says, “This last flood, the one you call the Big Water, ended the Fifth World and began the Sixth. It opened the passage for those like myself to return to the world.” Any rationale for monsters and clan powers is otherwise absent but it is The Sixth World which gives Roanhorse’s sequence of novels its overall title.

While the Native American background makes for an unusual and welcome twist on the norm of SF and fantasy the novel’s apparent relish in weaponry and killing is more by the book and sadly typical of many practitioners of the form.

Roanhorse can write though and, relish in weaponry aside, Maggie is an engaging enough narrator.

Pedant’s corner:- there were several instances of the formulation “time interval” later. Othewise; a missing comma before a piece of direct speech (many times,) “that soak up the hot” (the heat,) “the evil deeds every man and woman leaves behind” (leave.) “All that ugly, the sickness, the loss and unhappiness” (is missing a noun after ugly it would seem.) “Viscera pools at his feet” (viscera pool,) “it will portent something bad” (portent is a noun, the verb is portend.) “His smiles fades” (fade,) diced chiles (chilis,) later we had ‘chilé’ (again, chili.) “None of them even look back” (None of them even looks back,) “and set in on the bar” (set it on the bar,) chamisa (chamiso.)

TTA Press, 96 p.

Joanna Berry takes over the guest editor role and asks how much of themselves players take into decision making when playing video games. Andy Hedgecock’s Future Interrupted^a makes a plea for stories to tackle the threats of the subtle and pervasive surveillance and tracking technologies rampant in the modern world. In Climbing Stories Aliya Whiteley seeks solace from the news in films. Speedy Sci-Fi adventure won’t do but conspiracy thrillers will. She now wants to go back to the source books. In Book Zone I review Rokurō Inui’s Automatic Eve and Wole Talabi’s Incomplete Solutions welcoming both, Val Nolan^b finds Duncan Lunan’s collection of stories and articles From the Moon to the Stars too fond of “rigorous maths” and primarily of interest to those who enjoyed them at time they were written, Maureen Kincaid Speller engages in hand-to-hand fighting with concepts of language and meaning in the ‘very strange’ novel Vita Nostra by Marina & Sergey Dyachenko but concludes that is only a good thing, Jo L Walton^c heartily recommends The New Voices of Science Fiction edited by Hannu Rajaniemi and Jacob Weisman, though thinks some of the stories might be a bit too polished, Graham Sleight appreciates the quality of Ted Chiang’s stories in Exhalation (and Chiang’s previous collection) as being worth the price of their scarcity, Stephen Theaker praises the “grown-up, fiercely feminist” The Sea Inside Me by Sarah Dobbs, warns against the cover and blurb of Earwig by B Catling though he recommends it to “some readers” and says Stephen Palmer’s collection Tales from the Spired Inn is pretty much the ideal small press SF title, Ian Hunter^d laments the passing of Dianne Wynne Jones as he considers her Poems while Duncan Lunan discusses the history of Dyson spheres in SF as his take on the stories in Around Alien Stars by G David Nordley.

As to the fiction;
In The Kindest God is Light by Joanna Berry a poet is engaged to provide an embodiment of humanity – warts and all – to aliens. Typographically unusual in that it involves a lot of glossed over (crossed out) inner thoughts.
She and I and We¹ by Timothy Mudie is a time travel story. Poet (yes, another one) Nathaly Evariste is stalked by someone from the future who says she has come back to save her from being killed. This is no All You Zombies… or even By His Bootstraps but there’s a neat twist to the ending.
Dent-De-Lion² by Natalia Theodorou is set on a planet to where Thomae has been sent to find a silicon plant-based cure for an endemic sickness back home. She finds it – and more.
In Parasite Art³ by David Tallerman our narrator is an artist who has gone to the planet of Culcifa to find one of the Zobe, an alien race which has appeared there and can merge with people who can then experience the Zobe’s dreams.
The Duchess of Drink Street⁴ by Tim Chawaga on its surface charts the relationship between a cupcake seller on the eponymous street and the food reviewer who damns those cupcakes with one word, inauthentic. With a globally flooded background featuring floating cities it is about fads, gentrification and its reverse and the elusiveness of memory.
Against a background of the end of the world in which the rich are sending samples of their hair skin and semen into space to save the species, Dream of the High Mountain⁵ by Daniel Bennett relates the experience of a poet (yes, a poet again) who goes on a retreat.

Pedant’s corner:- ^aCastells’ (Castells’s,) Aldiss’ (Aldiss’s.) ^b“are a series” (is a series.) ^c“None of the stories feel out of place” (None feels,) hijinks (high jinks.) “Much as I stan Luce, social and economic consequences of technological developments are never inevitable” (???) ^dJones’ (Jones’s,)
¹Written in USian, “neither of you react” (neither … reacts.) ²Written in USian. ³“soon be discarded” (soon to be discarded,) “she must recognise as her and I” (as her and me.) “Conceivably we were one of its ancestors. Seeing it, my muscle memory recalls what it’s like to make those spasmodic movements” (‘descendants’ for ‘ancestors’ is the only way to make sense of this, and it would be ancestral rather than muscle memory,) canvasses (canvases?) ⁴Written in USian, at first I read ‘chicest part of the city’ as a misprint for ‘choicest’, but they’re much the same in meaning. “The difference in textures … work well together” (the difference works well,) “New Lagos’ greed” (New Lagos’s.) ⁵“‘This the survival of’” (This is the survival.) “Upon the fourth floor” (Either, ‘On the fourth floor,’ or, ‘Up on the fourth floor’,) “inside of him” (inside him, no need for an ‘of’.) “His group were among the last” (his group was among the last.)