J.G. Ballard - The man who walked on the Moon

A failed journalist sits in a cafe near Copacabana Beach and watches tourists approach a man who used to an astronaut. They buy him drinks and pay him for photographs. The truth is somewhat different, allowing the journalist to become an 'astronaut' himself...

Ian Watson - The people on the precipice

The world is a sheer cliff and people live on plants and small animals. Smear delights an audience with a tale of a flat landscape and how it would be hard to live on. A migration is due to new feeding grounds but discussions about its direction (up, down or sideways) are interrupted by something unexpected...

Peter T. Garratt - If the driver vanishes

Jack Marston is a Congressman in a near future when the USA is increasingly moving towards fundamentalist Christianity while the world has the same old problems of wars, poverty and over-population. His family are committed Christians and believe in the coming Rapture, when they will vanish and go to Heaven. Then some strange satellites appear around the world...There is a nasty twist at the end.

Barrington J. Bayley - Escapist literature

An SF comic reader who is bullied reads a comic story about an outcast at a Pluto base. What happens is anything but escapist.

Don Webb - Rhinestone manifesto

Mrs Fogg's rhinestone glasses are out to get her, to fulfill their manifesto for freedom. Short and funny.

Neil Ferguson - Randy and Alexei go jaw jaw

Superb detective story in which the unusual murder of an arms dealer - 'he died of too many natural causes than is natural' - is solved by a police 'semiotician' who looks for clues not at crime scenes but in the media. Randy and Alexei are two world leaders in town at the time of the murder: everything turns out to be connected. ( )