Cirsova “Flight From Reckoning” by Michael Tierney (Serial, not reviewed)
“The American Dream” by Rodica Bretin (part of series, story not standalone, not reviewed)
“Salt Roses” by Jim Breyfogle
“Waegnwyrhta” by William Suboski
“The Siege of Verisa” by Richard Rubin
“Void Railway” by J.D. Cowan
“The Demacron” by Gary K. Shepherd
“Machine Dreams for Wired People” by Jaime Faye Torkelson
“Cracking the Cyber Ziggurat” by Kevan Larson
“Paying the Doctor’s Due” by William Drell
Reviewed by Geoff Houghton
The first stand-alone story is “Salt Roses” by Jim Breyfogle. This is a novella-length sword and sandal fantasy set in the decaying ruins of a fallen Empire.
The protagonist is an ex-sponge diver now turned warrior-medic. She has fled from her home village after her fellow divers died due to an honest mistake on her part that has, nevertheless, left her guilt and angst-ridden.
Her adventures are fast-paced and exciting, although somewhat dependent on various villains behaving in just the right way at just the right time. You may consider that a plot weakness or the result of the mysterious workings of an ancient prophesy as you prefer!
Our protagionist’s heroic efforts to redeem herself by single-handedly restoring the glories, certainties and firm laws of the old Empire do not go exactly as she planned. The hard-won magical artefact that should have restored the greatest and most powerful Emperor back to life fails to work as advertised in the ancient prophesy. Her “Plan B” comes as an unexpected revelation to her, but is sufficiently foreshadowed by the author that it is likely that the reader will not be equally surprised.
The second piece: “Waegnwyrhta” by William Suboski is set in an SF future where an over-bureaucratic oligarchy rules a sprawling human star-empire. The Governance’s outermost edges are the only place where free-enterprise and individualism can just barely survive the stifling regulations of the central administration. Now, a particularly busy-body Administrator is spreading the Governance’s unbending rules outwards to even those last enclaves of freedom and self-reliance.
The freewheeling lesbian crew of the mining vessel “Rockhound” receives an unlooked for opportunity to push back against the bureaucracy when Principal Administrator Waegnwyrhta’s Governance vessel suffers an unexpected breakdown far from its home station. They deliver a clever and apposite lesson to the Oligarch, but that timely lesson is surprisingly well-received and has a profoundly beneficial impact on its recipient and on the future relationship between the ruler and the ruled.
The next tale is “The Seige of Verisa” by Richard Rubin. This mixed SF/fantasy story combines a sword and sorcery world of alchemy and magic with atmospheric flyers and ray guns. The simultaneous existence of medieval siege engines and plasma-beam handguns can be slightly disorientating but those improbable anachronisms conceal a rapid-paced tale of unwilling heroes pitted against foul villainy. When the male protagonist’s alchemist wife is kidnapped by a bloodthirsty cult of devil-worshippers their action precipitates a deadly three-cornered struggle in which our free-booting protagonist must simultaneously prevail against an archetypal cruel baron and the even more evil cult that worships and serves a nest of real and potent demons.
The fourth tale is “Void Railway” by J.D. Cowan. This SF story with apparently supernatural elements is set aboard a most unusual space conveyance, a city-sized carriage of the Void Railway. Although a plethora of more mundane spacecraft exist in this universe, this distinctive machine is considered to be more secure against detection and boarding as it hurtles through dimensions unknown to us between planetary stations that could be galaxies apart.
The supposed security of the Void Railway is the reason that this particular carriage has been commissioned by a super-rich merchant and collector who is carrying a valuable and irreplaceable treasure between two of the far-flung outposts of this advanced human civilisation. Our protagonist is one of a very mixed crew of guards, mercenaries and security forces who have been tasked to protect the trader and his prize.
It becomes rapidly evident that multiple factions have varied and overlapping interests in this valuable item, for good reasons and bad, and the guards are beset by both natural and apparently supernatural threats summoned from our own and other dimensions. Not all of the apparent villains are bad and not all of the apparent guardians are good in this complex and rapidly shifting story, but there is a satisfactory resolution along with a clever explanation for some of the apparent anomalies in the storyline.
Next is “The Demacron” by Gary K. Shepherd. This is an SF story that takes place within a 100km sized asteroid habitat. Centuries before the date of this story, changes in interstellar travel technology caused this habitat to lose its original purpose as an interstellar waystation. Now the Demacron is home to a dwindling population made up of multiple species imprisoned by poverty or other circumstances in this fading slum-habitat.
Our protagonist is a human Peacekeeper, tasked with maintaining the brittle truce between the sometimes antagonistic species trapped together in this fragile and slowly failing environment. He is set the task of finding a missing maintenance engineer and must use a combination of authority, force and bluff to succeed in this apparently routine mission that suddenly and unexpectedly becomes critical to the immediate short-term survival of the entire habitat.
“Machine Dreams for Wired People” by Jaime Faye Torkelson is a novelette set in a near-future, deeply unpleasant USA where the friendless and helpless may be removed to facilities where their bodies and even brains can be used as bio-components for the greater profit of powerful but amoral cyber-corporations. The POV character is the patriarch of a tight knit family group of mercenary assassins who have been paid to rescue the drug addict daughter of a rich businessman from just such a fate. The family group ranges from young adults to underage teenage children and are, at best, entirely amoral. They are uniformly not only willing but eager to murder armed guards and the corporation’s unarmed workers, not from any righteous revulsion at their acts but solely for the cash reward.
This is a well-written SF cyber-thriller with no moral compass. It is both a reflection on the true awfulness of this dysfunctional corporate America, as well as a tribute to the author’s skill at character development, that you may find yourself siding with this murderous family in spite of their willingness to slaughter any corporate worker who gets in their way, as well as many who do not.
The second novelette is “Cracking the Cyber Ziggurat” by Kevan Larson. This is set in a distant future where a gigantic computer simulation, as advanced and as complex as that portrayed in The Matrix, is controlled, not by passionless machines, but by only too human oligarchs.
In common with The Matrix, most of humanity is trapped in life-pods that feed the simulation. However, the few humans who exist outside the simulation are not the hard-pressed freedom-fighters of Zion. They are the super-rich oligarchs, their most favoured children and most useful servants who hold the rest of humanity in thrall.
The first person narrator is one of the many hundreds of biological children descended from one of the most powerful Oligarchs who believes himself to have been rejected and abandoned within the Web by his progenitor. He willingly joins a scheme to loot his father’s cyber-vault, but this proves to be yet another test set by his devious father in his ongoing efforts to select a worthy heir. When our protagonist removes the current heir-apparent and succeeds even more completely in that near-impossible robbery than his father had originally intended, he finds that his father’s coveted power is within his grasp. But how can such supreme authority be wielded by a fallible human, and to what end?
The final offering is “Paying the Doctor’s Due” by William Drell. This classic storyline could have come directly from the Golden Age of pulp SF magazines, but is enhanced with a more morally ambiguous hero and up-to-date technology. It retains the historic pulp-fiction pace, the hero handily out-thinks the more lavishly equipped but gullible villain and gets his just reward from the good-looking female doctor of the title. A cheerful end to a well-chosen and varied compilation.
Geoff Houghton lives in a leafy village in rural England. He is a retired Healthcare Professional with a love of SF and a jackdaw-like appetite for gibbets of medical, scientific and historical knowledge. He still remembers the Golden Age with nostalgia!