William Gibson - The winter market

Lise is a street girl dying of a congenital disease, which confines her to an exo-skeleton to get around, and from an addiction to wizz. A recording of her terminal state of mind becomes a bestseller.Set in a dark and depressing Vancouver of the near future, it is packed with Gibsonian observations on style and junk (aka kipple).

John Brosnan - The one and only tale from The White Horse

The standard "pub encounter for resident barfly scenario", in which he meets a cataloguer from the "Prime Reality", who visits other realities to find their distinguishing feature e.g. no Australia. This pub was chosen as it was near to the British Museum/Library, thus handy for 'reality research'. Develops idea well but final twist is weak.

[Personal note: story mentions the original Forbidden Planet bookshop in Denmark Street, which I used at the time the story is set as I was working at the nearby British Library.]

Garry Kilworth - The vivarium

The narrator is the only son of a divorced couple. He is told his father has disappeared at sea. He locks his mother in her house and flees to the family estate on Cyprus, to try and find the truth about his father. He knows he must not enter a large, locked vivarium on the estate...A very neatly constructed story.

Diana Reed - A multiplication of lives

Michael Cohen tried to invent a matter transmitter. What he got was an 'Ident' duplicator, which creates a duplicate of a person. There are six versions of the narrator for example on Earth. Space travel is possible, but it leads to yet more copies of people. Atmospheric but slightly non-sensical.

S.W. Widdowson - The IBIS Experiment

The 'Experiment' involves using an FTL drive in combination with a black hole to allow time travel. The narrator seems to have been the pilot and is being debriefed in a country house. Yet nothing seems to be fixed...very Dickian. ( )