Uploaded March 6, 1997 -- Updated March 6, 1997
Here is the list of stories in this issue. If you have any comments or reviews, send them to jbailey@sff.net. Please indicate which issue and/or story you're referring to in the subject line, and try to keep comments for different stories separate in you letters so I can place them properly.
"Inside Out" by Brian Stableford
"Noble Mold" by Kage Baker
"The Babe, The Iron Horse, and Mr.
McGillicuddy" by Ben Bova & Rick Wilber
"The Undiscovered" by William
Sanders
"After Kerry" by Ian McDonald [3/5/97]
"The Nostalgianauts" by S.N. Dyer
"Tour de Force" by Stephen Dedman [3/5/97]
"Beluthahatchie" by Andy Duncan
Miscellaneous Comments (on the magazine as a whole, editorials, columns, etc.)
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Mark Stackpole: 1/27/97
To reveal the SF gimmick behind "After Kerry" would ruin the story. The plot is about a man who finally buries his mother - for the best - and discovers that his sister has been murdered - perhaps also for the best. McDonald's use of Irish local color is refreshing addition to the standard urban-techno future environment and the motif of birds in flight / souls in migration is well utilized throughout the story.
Rich Horton: 3/5/97
Ian McDonald has written a lot of distinctive short stories and a few well-recieved novels over the past decade or so. This is one of the best I've read. It concerns an Irishman in the early 21st Century whose sister has disappeared. His family is pretty disfunctional, accounting for her original disappearance, but when she doesn't reappear after their (rather awful) mother dies, the brother starts to seriously search for her. His search is complicated by some new ways of looking at the brain and personalities: it seems his sister was involved with a group of voluntarily split personalities, and with a perhaps less than successful psychologist, but eventually he tracks her down, in a sense, but who he finds is, movingly, both not his sister yet maybe the sister he really needs. I feel inadequate describing the story: it is very much a story of character, the very real and interesting SFnal elements serving to help us understand the character of Stephen O'Neill and his sister, and to care for their attempts to adjust to stifling childhoods.
Rich Horton
http://www.sff.net/people/Richard.Horton/
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Rich Horton: 3/5/97
A fun short story about a Canadian-born American of Australian ancestry who joins a team investigating a crashed Alien spaceship in Australia. The spaceship is an object of interest because it is presumed to be of military importance: the story turns, neatly, on the foolishness of the attitude that anything not understood must be a threatening military device.
Rich Horton
http://www.sff.net/people/Richard.Horton/
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