I like ‘Albedo One’ –
they send the friendliest rejections. It’s a nice looking magazine too with a
colour cover and clear interior layout. The majority of space is given over to
the fiction with just a few book reviews at the end and an interview at the
beginning. It’s an interesting interview with Greg Egan, an author whose work I
always enjoy. A generous seven stories pack out the rest of the pages.
Robert Reed’s opening story ‘Safe’ deals with the
multiverse idea in a new light. There’s no physics and maths here, but the
discovery of a myriad parallel universes has given rise to the practice of
transplanting unwanted foetuses from this world into empty wombs elsewhere. The
bizarre morality and philosophy that stems from this form an intriguing idea
that Robert Reed expounds skilfully to develop a number of possibilities. A
thoughtful start to the magazine.
A gloomy post-apocalyptic future is the setting for Sarah
Joan Berniker’s uncompromising story ‘Sing A Seller’s Song’. A young boy is
obliged to engage in a most distasteful business in order to help his family
survive, but the threat of something even worse is always round the corner. The
boy’s reaction to his harrowing existence makes this an effectively-told if
unpleasant tale.
Richard Alan Scott takes us back a century or so for ‘Stoker’s
Benefactor’, a tale of theatres and vampires. Most of the characters are
British, though the setting is mostly in Dublin, but I wasn’t entirely
convinced by the voices used for most of them. The story is told through diary entries
and letters, but reads like a straight-forward narrative. While the story
itself is interesting and even suspenseful, the structure just didn’t ring
true.
‘Creepdoll’
is Gareth Stack’s first published story and revolves around a young man’s attempts to live like a single
father by purchasing an artificial child. His reasons start off selfish, but
there is a slow and effective development of his feelings throughout the story
that transform him from creepy to sympathetic. His ever more complex cover-ups
and the difficult decisions he is faced with lead up to a shocking but
satisfying conclusion.
In a future where everybody and everything is connected to
the web, one woman is forced to go it alone in ‘Offline’ by Gustavo Bondini.
There are two extrapolations that make up the core of this story – the consequences
of all technology being linked together centrally, and the results of an
extreme backlash against apartheid and colonialism in Africa. The story that
emerges is touching and realistic.
D.T. Neal’s story ‘Aegis’ starts off interestingly enough
as a young artist meets a legendary sculptor in the hope of learning something
from her. Just as I was wondering where the story was going there was a sudden
shift. First, briefly, a scene of unnecessary titillation that I thought was
going to go downhill into seediness. This was averted by another change from
the mundane to the fantastical that initially left me dissatisfied. D.T Neal skilfully
ties the whole story up at the end though, sculpting a story that is ultimately
both intriguing and pleasing.
‘A Most Notorious Woman’ is recruited to captain a pirate
ship in T.D. Edge’s story that mixes fantasy and science fiction, time-travel,
piracy and artificial intelligence. By the time I reached the conclusion I had
the feeling that rather too many ingredients had been thrown together for this
story. Nonetheless it was an entertaining adventure to conclude the magazine.
The selection of stories on offer in this issue of ‘Albedo
One’ is certainly varied. They all have one thing in common though – none of
them can be easily defined. They all mix SF with fantasy or horror, or they
present what is basically an SF concept from an entirely unusual point of view
– ‘Safe’ being a prime example of this. For the eclectic speculative fiction
reader ‘Albedo One’ is an excellent choice.
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