Gregory Benford - As big as the Ritz

Clayton Donner, son of an asteroid-belt mining family, gets sent to Earth for university. At UCLA he befriends Slvia Rollan, only child of rich, reclusive, inventor Dr Ludwig Rollan, and is invited to stay at his home on the Hoop, an Earth-like space habitat powered by a black hole. On Hoop Clayton discovers Dr Rollan's strange experiments in creating a new human society, but all is not what it seems....A good story with too much packed into it.

Ramsay Campbell - Boiled Alive

Boiled Alive is a horror film, which Mee, a rather colourless accountant, who only knows his client through three-letter codes, gets involved with, first by strange phone calls to his home, which feature in the film and then by an escalating series of happenings.

Simon Ounsley - Paths of dying

Two deaths occur in places that are not our world but like it. Both end differently..

Peter Lamborne Wilson - Fountain of Time

The Fountain of Youth is a mythical source of immortality supposedly located in what is now Florida. In a run down bar, the owner drinks all night with a strange customer who says he is Ponce De Leon, commander of a Spanish expedition to find the Fountain. Atmospheric.

Greg Egan - Mind vampires

A narrator who suffers memory lapses is taken on by a girls school suffering a plague of vampirism, as a vampire killer. However, all is not as it seems as, on his rounds, he sees, but does not confront, three men using a device to feed images into the eyes of a sleeping girl. Things come to a head. A very un-Egan-like story.

Ian Watson - When Jesus comes down the chimney

An amusing tale in which Jesus and Santa change roles, the latter being crucified by the Romans for giving away food to the poor from his magic sack, the former using the now unmagical sack as a potent symbol to spread dialectical materialism. ( )