Aurealis #83, August 2015Reviewed by Jerard Bretts
Tracy Washington’s “Unicorns on Mars” is a story within a story, a teenage patient recounting strange experiences to her analyst in a hospital at the end of a busy day. However, all is not as it seems. Is the patient a teenager after all? The year is 1978 but time does not appear to be obeying its normal rules. This young girl claims to have been abducted by aliens and taken to the planet Mars along with her brother. Surely she is making it up? Washington employs lush poetical prose to tell her story and most of the fun is to just let her rich language flow over you. I’m not sure it makes a lot of sense but I did enjoy it.
“Perfect Kills” by Chris Large, on the other hand, is a more conventional first-person narrative. It gives a futuristic twist to the familiar noir theme of the professional hitman who discovers his humanity. Told in crisp matter-of-fact prose, there are some clever ideas here, as when the narrator says, “implants one hundred and forty two retro-dated points of reference” to his assumed identity into a planet’s datasphere. However, the premise and the dialogue (for example, “You want to impress a dame? I know just the place. I like you fella. I’m gonna look after you real good.”) do not rise above the shop-worn.