"Engrams" by Marc Brutschy
"Mission to Red October" by Leslie Lupien
"Choices" by J. Anne Helgren
"Case Study" by Lawrence M. Schoen
"Bring Me Fire, Ape" by Ursula Pflug
"Viva La Bigass" by Mark A. Mellon

Terra Incognita remains one of the most consistently interesting smaller press magazines in the field. This time around there are several intriguing stories, though none that really hit on all cylinders.

"Engrams" by new writer Marc Brutschy opens the issue. The narrator is a technician at a facility that treats people for psychological problems by recording the state of the brain, the "engrams", and then modifying them subtly so that the problems go away. The narrator seems to be having issues with this practice — and he has begun to "steal" some patients: to make an extra copy of their pre-modified brain state. These can be run on a special computer program, and the "program" simulates the personality of its model perfectly, and can hold conversations. The reader can guess where this is heading when the narrator is tempted to "steal" a woman's brain state: a woman who resembles his old flame.

Brutschy perhaps juggles a few too many items in the story; for instance there is an interlude with one simulated character that seems interesting but goes nowhere. More importantly, the various implications of the story's technology are all interesting, and perhaps too many are explored for the length of the story. And some of the plot developments seem a shade forced. But if these issues weaken the story as a story, it remains very interesting, and in the end quite chilling. A very promising debut.

Leslie Lupien's "Mission to Red October" features a fairly familiar time travel idea: one person traveling to the past to try to right an historical tragedy, and another trying to stop that person from distorting the fabric of history. In this case the story is told from the viewpoint of Joe Serban, a soldier with a controversial history, who is sent back to Petrograd, Russia, in 1917, just before Lenin takes the vital steps that will place him in power. He needs to find and stop a researcher who wishes to prevent the eventual ascendancy of Stalin. And that's pretty much the story. It's well enough told, but it doesn't really do anything new with this particular idea.

Two of the stories in this issue deal with drug users trying to change their lives, to stop using. "Choices" by J. Anne Helgren features Drue, a young woman telepath. She is in a drug treatment program, trying to deal with losing her lover, who has failed at previous treatment efforts. She sneaks out sometimes, using her telepathic ability to "share" other drug users' highs, so that she technically won't violate the terms of her treatment program. Helgren gives us hints of a society with acknowledged psis, who do real work using their powers, but those hints remain in the background, and this story is mainly just about Drue and her personal problems and hope for recovery. It's decent enough, but I confess, in a science fiction story, I'd like to see the science fictional aspects used more pervasively.

The same complaint applies to the other drug user story here, "Bring Me Fire, Ape", by Ursula Pflug. In this case the drug, called Green, seems to mysteriously take people's consciousness back into some sort of resonance with evolutionary history. Once again, the main character is a young woman who seems ready to kick her habit, but whose lover is being destroyed by the drugs. Karen, called Turtle after the animal whose aspect she assumes while using Green, tells of the last months of her relationship with Martin, a sculptor who keeps trying to go deeper and deeper into the Green trance, where he becomes an Orca. The story is very nicely written, and the various characters are well drawn. My only complaint, as I've hinted, is that it seems to me that the science fictional elements of the story could easily be dispensed with without altering the story importantly.

Lawrence M. Schoen is a professor of cognitive psychology, so I suppose he's writing what he knows with "Case Study", about Rupert, a student in an Abnormal Psychology class who finds himself stuck for ideas for his midterm assignment: to create a fictitious case study illustrating an instance of schizophrenia. Then he finds himself the subject of another case study: a student from the future comes back to observe a typical college-age Midwestern male at the end of the 20th century. That might be OK, but when he starts talking to the invisible visitor in public …- he might end up being a real case study in Abnormal Psych! You can see where this is going — and the result is very light but amusing.

The closing story is "Viva La Bigass" by Mark A. Mellon. The setting is the most exotic of the issue: a future Las Vegas, after some sort of catastrophe, inhabited by poor unmodified humans as well as some genetically engineered humans. One of the ruling class rather violently kidnaps Coco, a beautiful young woman, to make her a slave. The story plays out somewhat unexpectedly from there, though perhaps realistically, as Coco becomes a slave, without signs of heroism, until her rather foolish master picks a fight with another of the local ruling class. I found the story colorful, and fun to read, but not especially memorable.

Rich Horton is an eclectic reader in and out of the sf and fantasy genres. He's been reading SF since before the Golden Age (that is, since before he was 13.) Born in Naperville, IL, he lives and works (as a Software Engineer for the proverbial Major Aerospace Company) in the St. Louis area and is a regular contributor to Tangent, as well as to Maelstrom, SF Site, and Locus Online. His home page is at www.sff.net/people/richard.horton.