"Necropolis" by Robert Hood
"Melisende on My Mind" by Cyril Simsa
"Among the Cedars" by Hannah Wolf Bowen
"Death and the Woman" by Gertrude Atherton

Originally posted at Ideomancer on March 1st, 2003.

As I've said before, I really appreciate Ideomancer's attention to design and accessibility. In terms of visual appeal (good illustrations, intelligent design) and functional organization (stories available in several formats), I prefer Ideomancer to all other online publications. What's more, they seem to have a clear editorial vision of what they want.

"Necropolis" by Robert Hood

Robert Hood's story "Necropolis" was well-written and unified, but it never really grabbed me. I think this is more due to my tastes than to any failing on Hood's part. It's tightly written, told in the first person with a close focus on dialogue and spare descriptions that suggest a world coming into being. The main character Susie – perhaps the only real character – feels real to me, as do her interactions with long time friend Berry and the other characters encountered in the pub. There's an element of the supernatural – of second sight that is weird in the purest sense of the word – and the issues upon which Susie turns that vision are important and stylishly rendered. However, the whole piece feels more like a meditation on darkness and on living with death than a story. It feels suspended and a touch distant. I think all of these are intentional, but it made the story interesting rather than moving.

"Melisende on My Mind" by Cyril Simsa

By contrast, Cyril Simsa hooked me right away. It's another story told in the first person, but this narrator brings a lively energy to the story. And it opens quickly with its speculative premise laid out in its very first lines. This is a first contact story – or rather, a first contact almost story because the journalist narrator is going to Melisende to report on the first archeological discovery of alien remains. Nothing was especially new here, but it was well-executed; I enjoyed the sketches of future reporting and archeology and the hypotheses regarding what the aliens were like and why they aren't there any longer. There's a plot twist that I don't want to expose here, but there's an authorial choice related to it that I must address. Simsa chooses to have the narrator not be present for one discovery so he has to decide its meaning at a distance. On one hand, this puts the narrator closer to the position of the reader, but on the other, the emotional impact dropped off immensely. The power in this story came from good description and the character being actively there to respond to the setting. Moving him away abstracts things.

"Among the Cedars" by Hannah Wolf Bowen

Ideomancer regularly publishes flash fiction. "Among the Cedars" isn't as short as some, which have been 500 words and under, but at less than 1000 words, Bowen's piece is by far the shortest in this issue. For my money, it is also far and away the best. It opens with a direct, almost challenging introduction of the fantastic: "You see the unicorn again this morning…" Bowen goes on to craft a story that is quietly beautiful. "Among the Cedars" is about magic and wonder and how important they are in the world. All sentences are well-shaped and some are striking, and I heartily recommend you stop reading this review and go read this story. Thanks, Hannah.

Each issue Ideomancer reprints an older story. In some cases, I'm not sure this is necessary (as when they reprint stories by authors like Dunsany). This issue, however, they've reprinted "Death and the Woman" by Gertrude Atherton, which was first published in 1892. As a reprint, it's outside Tangent's focus, but I applaud their choice to draw attention to lesser known but deserving authors from the past.

Greg Beatty was most of the way through a PhD in English at the University of Iowa when his advisors agreed that letting him go to Clarion West 2000 would be a good idea. Bad idea. He finished his dissertation on serial killer novels, then gave up on traditional academia and returned to his original dream of writing fiction. He's had a number of stories accepted since then, with acceptances by SCI FICTION, 3SF, Palace of Reason, The Fortean Bureau, Would That It Were, deathlings.com, and several anthologies. Greg's non-fiction has appeared in the Raleigh News and Observer, Future Orbits, Audiofile, Science-Fiction Studies, Strange Horizons, the New York Review of Science Fiction and numerous other venues.