David Garnett (2)Besprekingen

Rather trite story of meeting a childhood nemesis...

A real mixture, some great, some awful

Storm Constantine - Immaculate

Donna can feel computers dreaming, while her colleague, Reeb has just returned from losing half of his body in a work accident..weird.

Paul Di Filipo - Any major dude

The world has been reshaped by nano-technology, starting in North Africa,and people who were lovers meet again after losing touch....

J.D.Gresham - Heat

A woman has to leave a party early as the temperature rises...

Ian MacDonald - Floating dogs

Superb far future tale of a small group 'beings' on a mission...

Kim Newman - Ubermensch!

A Jewish man is on his way to Spandau Prison to meet an infamous prisoner there...

Indetermincy - Jay Summers

New Wave at its most convoluted Seems to be set in the art world ...

Michael Moorcock - Colour

Jack, a gambler, sets of from New Orleans on a ship for a picaresque journey through the Multiverse....

Mathew Dickens - The descent of man

Two men meet in free fall, one sees his mother pass, they discuss the nature of things...a classic.

Simon Ings and Charles Stross - Something sweet

Rather over-hyper slice of cyber punk set in London...

Brian Alldis - FOAM

A strange tale of a technology to move memories, set against a growing war...

A couple visit an un-named country which is run down after a long war and uses English. They are given a record by a garage hand whose dead twin brother made records...

Published twelve years after the demise of New Worlds magazine, this was the first in a series of science fiction anthologies. It contains an introduction by Michael Moorcock who once edited the magazine, a couple of articles about sf and 10 stories all dating from 1991.

My two favourites were:

"Heat" by J. D. Gresham - Heat does strange things to women . . . and men.
"Ubermensch!" by Kim Newman - It gave me a big start when I realised just who it was incarcerated in Spandau Prison in this German Expressionist version of Berlin.

After getting a bit damp in my bag during one of the recent rainstorms, sections started coming away from the spine and then individual pages started falling out. It didn’t even get wet enough to make the pages crinkly, so the binding can’t have been very good quality. Unfortunately it had to be binned.½

Hilarious diatribe on the state of science fiction publishing, set at a convention held during a bizzare war involving weapons that create time distortions.

When I read the blurb on this book from Neil Gaiman, I knew I was going to have to read the book:

Bikini Planet. Just those two words make me think of bikinis. And planets. Er, and David Garnett.

Now we know Neil Gaiman will blurb anything.

So yeah. Bikinis. And planets. The title says it all.½