"Sonny Boy" by Steve Mohn
"A Slope So Slippery" by Keith Scott
"The Echo of Bones" by Rebecca M. Senese
"Corrective Surgery" by J. S. Lyster
"Squat" by Donna McMahon
"Sonata in Weapons" by Linda J. Dunn
"Alien Intents" by Marianne O. Nelson
"Nor Iron Bars a Cage" by Leslie Brown

This issue of the Canadian Speculative Fiction magazine On Spec is themed "Future Crime". The seven short stories and one novelet included sometimes address "new" crimes, sometimes "new" punishments, sometimes "new" detection methodologies, and sometimes "new" motivations. For the most part the speculative thinking about crime and punishment is pretty interesting, but unfortunately the stories qua stories aren't always as good as the ideas at their core.

The opening piece is "Sonny Boy" by Steve Mohn. The viewpoint character is a well-off man, suddenly faced with an unauthorized adult clone. At first the "crime" seems to be the creation of the clone, and the subsequent extortion of the "parent", but Mohn's story takes a slightly different tack at the end. The real crime as revealed is sordid, and familiar but also a new result of the cloning technology. This is a middling work, a bit strained in setup, not really terribly original, but competently done.

The late Keith Scott, an On Spec regular, is eulogized in this issue. Unless there is another posthumous story or two in the pipeline, "A Slope So Slippery" will be his last appearance. The PoV character, Kaz Simic, a fashion photographer, faces a difficult decision. His wife is dying of cancer, and a match has been found for a bone marrow transplant. But the match wants $1,000,000 to be a donor. Kaz doesn't have $1,000,000, but a sleazy TV producer offers him the money if he will accept a camera implant and spy on his friend, a leader of the fashion industry. I don't think this story works: the characters are uniformly despicable, the ideas are old hat, and the story dances around the potentially wrenching issues and settles for easy answers.

My problem with Rebecca M. Senese's "The Echo of Bones" lies simply in a complete inability to suspend my disbelief. The lead character is a policewoman who "listens" to the bones of dead people. This allows her to experience the last few moments of their lives: possibly identifying the murderer. OK, that's completely implausible, but might just be allowable in a fantasy story. But Senese piles on absurdities, not only involving this basic idea, but also involving the plot and the characters. We are presented with an unrationalized means for sort of "erasing" the bones, and a still more absurd means of reversing the erasure. Then the plot turns on an out of the blue coincidence, and the resolution involves understanding the motives of characters whom we never really get to know. A very weak effort.

J. S. Lyster's "Corrective Surgery" posits a pretty original and scary method of rehabilitation for "stalkers". The main character couldn't recover from his breakup with his girlfriend, and kept after her. Part of the court protection order she got involved a surgical treatment which made it impossible for him to remember anything about her. The story shows him confusedly following woman after woman, thinking for brief moments that they might be "her" (but he doesn't even remember her name). Then he gets a lead … This is a solid bit of speculation, focusing on a simple, limited, technological advance, and its effect on one problem and one person. That's the recipe for a rather pure variety of "social science fiction", a la the 1950s, and it's still a worthwhile if small slice of the field.

"Squat" by Donna McMahon also presented me with suspension of disbelief problems, but she redeems her story with characters that really involve the reader, and a moving, if perhaps a bit sentimental and forced, conclusion. Mike Olmstead is a Peacekeeper working on a Space Station. One job is to be a witness to executions, and during the scheduled execution of a boy his son's age, he snaps and refuses to witness. Rather implausibly, it turns out the boy is innocent, but that the bureaucracy won't acknowledge this in time, and the wheels of justice continue to grind. Can Mike find a solution to the boy's problem? (He's a stateless refugee, with no skills, and no place to go, and no way to afford a lawyer or an education.) The solution is just barely believable, and as I said, it seems a bit forced. But somehow McMahon's characters were involving enough to make me swallow my disbeliefs and to move me quite a bit. A flawed but still interesting story.

Once again I found the core premise of Linda J. Dunn's "Sonata in Weapons" a bit farfetched. Somehow "original" music has been identified as the cause of society's ills, and the government now controls all musicians, forcing them to produce only "approved" work. (This is vaguely reminiscent of Orson Scott Card's "Unaccompanied Sonata", though the goals of the two stories are quite different.) Luci is a very talented composer and musician, about ready to graduate from the government's quasi-military music academy. But one of her best fellow students commits suicide, and Luci finds that someone has caused her closing competition piece to be attributed to the dead man: thus she is accused of plagiarism. All is resolved as she is able to convince her superiors that she didn't steal the work, and that something more sinister is going on, which she helps solve. The execution is competent and their are various clever bits (like the reason for the title) but the story doesn't cohere or make much sense.

Marianne O. Nelson contributes "Alien Intents", a sequel to an earlier story about a professor named Oland who is one of the few humans to understand the birdlike and carnivorous Kohoet. In the earlier story, Dr. Oland helped humans and the Kohoet to a rapprochement after the Kohoet killed two human teenagers. Now the Kohoet have a problem: yet another alien race has murdered two of the Kohoet. Can Dr. Oland understand the motives, which may be the key to preventing further problems and resolving this problem? This is the sort of earnest alien/human problem story that Analog often publishes, and it's of similar, middling, quality to most of the Analog samples. The aliens are moderately interesting, if obviously constructed to create the problem, and the solution is moderately interesting.

The issue closes with Leslie Brown's "Nor Iron Bars a Cage". This story features a future variety of punishment: a murderer named Celia Rasmulah is sentenced to 1000 years in isolation on a primitive planet. She can use suspended animation technology, but the nature of the tech means that practically speaking she has three choices: stay in suspended animation for the whole time and suffer severe physical damage, wake up for a year or so every so often and serve an equivalent sentence of about 50 years, after which she can return to a wholly changed home planet, or just live out her life on the prison planet. The whole setup is one of those obviously contorted to help the author make her point, which is annoying, and the characterization of the main character, who after all is a mass murderer, is also annoying (she's presented as just an unthinking silly kid who made a mistake). But the core of the story is effective and moving, as Celia by happenstance meets a primitive man on the planet and grows to love him. She's faced with the choice of life in primitive conditions with love, or trying to wait out a return to "civilization". Somewhat in the same fashion as "Squat", I found this a flawed, unconvincing story in many ways, which nonetheless was interesting and effective.

In toto, I can't regard this issue of On Spec as very successful. There are a few decent middle-range stories, a couple of interesting efforts with deep flaws, a couple unmemorable minor efforts, and one quite poor story.

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. His home page is at http://www.sff.net/people/richard.horton.