“The Space Sphinx” by Edward Rodosek
“The Octagon” by David Conyers
“Cold Pressure” by Rosie Oliver
“The Shadows of Hemera” by Will Styler

Reviewed by Nader Elhefnawy

The October 2009 issue of Jupiter magazine contains four short stories, the first two of them novelette length.

The title of the first piece, Edward Rodosek‘s “The Space Sphinx,” suggested an archaeological mystery to me, but the mystery is of a different sort: a journalist for the “Space Cosmopolitan” comes to the recently colonized planet of Cetus and interviews a hunter named Kirk Reuben whose job is to protect the settlers from local predators.  Her main interest is a rumored “Sphinx” inhabiting the planet.

The low-tech, rural, frontier setting (with only minor changes, this could probably have been written as a historical fantasy) and plainness of prose style makes the story feel old-fashioned rather than consciously retro.  However, a bigger problem is the combination of the story’s length (sixteen of the issue’s fifty-six pages) with a twist that is all too obvious from early on.

David Conyers‘ “The Octagon,” like many a science fiction satire before it, takes a contemporary bit of idiocy, insanity or vileness (or sometimes all three) to the kind of essence-revealing extreme that only speculative fiction permits–with the idiocy, insanity and vileness in question here the reality programming that in our time already threatens to swallow up the whole of television.

Here, in a version of 2280 in which humanity is spreading among the stars and bumping into the debris of other civilizations, the sleazy, ratings-obsessed Plantagenet Skynes has conceived the ultimate reality show around the titular “Octagon,” an apparently uninhabited alien city which, true to the tradition of such “Big Dumb Objects,” is immense, forbidding and mysterious–as well as dangerous, being scoured by “geoshades” which “disappear” the human entrants.  Into this Octagon Skynes plunges his contestants, generally recruited from the harshest of Earth’s colonies where life tends to be short, nasty and brutish, with the object of the game simply to be the last one in the party alive, enabling them to claim the prize–enough money to resettle in comfort on a much more pleasant planet than the one they came from.

Taken separately, many of the concepts are well-worn, and the final twist falls flat, so that it struck me as a closing to the story rather than the cap it could have been.  However, Conyers managed to hold my interest despite that, and at the end I felt that despite “Octagon” being the longest story in the issue (running roughly at the magazine’s maximum submission length, about 10,000 words), it was actually underwritten–feeling like a novella-length work edited down for the sake of greater publishability.  That’s a shame because in this case the deepening of the characters, the broadening of our glimpse of the world in which they live, and the further development of a real sense of ambience could have produced a really robust story.

Closer to present-day Earth is Rosie Oliver‘s “Cold Pressure,” in which the owner and designer of a high-tech passenger trimaran ferrying passengers across the North Sea a couple of decades from now falls overboard from her ship.  The story covers the undersea adventure that follows.  While it is a colorful episode containing some moments of feeling and drama, and competent at handling its central implausibility, it lacks that key central conflict or final twist that would have made it hold together as a narrative.

Returning to space is Will Styler in “The Shadows of Hemera,” in which a young girl visiting the Baikonur Museum of Kosmonautic History with her class finds her way to an exhibit presenting the log of one Jim Hill, the lone pilot on a twelve-year mission out to Pluto not too far from now.  In the course of telling his story, Hill ends up revealing why he took on the assignment in the first place, which ends up being the real story here.  Again, seasoned readers of the genre will not find any big surprises, but for the most part Styler succeeds in his handling of the tragedy at the tale’s core.