The first time I registered the byline of John Dalmas was thirty years ago. The cover of the May 1970 issue of Analog bore a wonderful Freas painting–mounted, chainmailed Viking warrior against a backdrop of shattered skyscrapers–to illustrate Dalmas’s "But Mainly by Cunning." I recall nothing of Dalmas’s actual story at this remove, but the conjunction of painting and title and byline seared his name into my cortex.
Over the years, I would occasionally see reference to his subsequent work, and experience a certain niggling desire to re-sample his prose. But time and tide, proclivities and permutations all insured I would not find the opportunity.
Now, thirty years later, Dalmas’s new novel comes into my hands, and I suddenly realized that in a way, his career epitomizes a certain path once common in SF, that of a journeyman worker in the shadows cast by bigger luminaries, a solid, hard-laboring toiler in the SF vineyards who continues to produce readable, entertaining novels more out of love than any desire for riches and fame. It suddenly seemed a shame not to read him.
Dalmas was just beginning his career in 1970, his earliest stories appearing in 1969. Prior to that point, under his real name of John R. Jones, he worked as a research ecologist. Born in 1926, Dalmas was close to fifty when his first book appeared in 1971. Now, of course, he’s hit the three-quarter-of-a-century mark. The inside copy on his new book credits him with eight other novels from his current publisher, Baen Books. All this without significant review coverage or awards hoopla. Now, if this record does not bespeak an uncommon dedication, I’m Edgar Rice Burroughs.
But what of the book at hand? If disposable and ill-wrought, then all this perseverance avails naught. However, such is not the case.
The Puppet Master (mass-market, $6.99, 407 pages, ISBN 067131842X) is really the titular novel of nearly three hundred pages sandwiched between two linked novellas, "A Most Singular Murder" and "The Case of the Duplicate Beauties," the first one previously published. All concern the professional activities of Martti Seppanen, a private investigator in the early twenty-first century of a timeline mildly displaced from ours by certain inventions, mainly a working antigravity device, and by a mass die-off from plague.
The first story focuses on the murder of an astronomer who acquires a lot of enemies by his seeming proof of the validity of astrology. The novel–despite the Heinlein homage of its title–does not involve parasitic alien invaders but rather the disappearance of Ray Christman, the founder of a popular cult that Dalmas models almost exactly on Scientology. And the final contribution tells of a strange series of incidents featuring newly twinned people whose unwitting duplicates are hijacked for illicit purposes.
Dalmas builds believable, rounded characters and sets them in a fairly solid and interesting future, notable mostly for his extrapolation of religious fads. Besides Christman’s New Gnostics, we also encounter the COGS and the Institute for Noetic Technology, all vying against each other in a complicated battle for dominance. Less is made of the changed societal landscape brought on by the plagues and antigravity, and in fact sometimes we can forget we’re not inhabiting our own timeline, as far as institutions and cities and culture goes.
One thing Dalmas does do is to try to open up traditional physics to include psionics and other arcane matters such as astral travel. In fact, this is the main thrust of his narrative. Martti’s wife Tulli is a professional psychic and plays a large part in all three cases, along with an assorted cast of fellow oddballs. This blend of physics and extrasensory talents derives, of course, from Campbell’s heyday, and despite all evidence against such a synthesis, its allure continues to manifest.
Dalmas’s prose is not rife with overblown metaphors in the PI tradition. The wildest he gets is this: "Beneath the typist’s fingers, the keyboard sounded like a popcorn popper having an orgasm." And even such similes are infrequent. In fact, Martti is a rather stolid fellow, ingenious enough, yet most happy when chowing down high-calorie treats. Slow to anger yet deadly when he or his wife is threatened, Martti plays by the rules and exhibits a deep concern for keeping civilization safe, yet still manages to get the job done.
I’m betting John Dalmas himself is a lot like that.
Time now once more for our survey of British SF and Fantasy. Let us swoop down to treetop level and catalog several giant specimens of the old growth forests in the land some know as "The Darkling Isles," to employ Richard Calder’s somewhat jaundiced appellation. (Note that British editions of books not yet published in the USA may be obtained easily and at reasonable costs from amazon.co.uk, who happily ship across the Atlantic.)
Shortsighted US publishers have frozen the prodigious fevermeister Richard Calder out of the domestic market, with the noble exception of Four Walls Eight Windows, who will soon be bringing out the first US editions of Calder’s Frenzetta (1998) and The Twist (1999). But Calder’s latest two books, both among his best, have no US releases set, and there’s a third one on the way, compiling a recent series of stories from Interzone. So let’s catch up.
I found 2000’s Malignos (Earthlight, mass-market, £6.99, 359 pages, ISBN 067103720X) a more thrilling and smoothly flowing book than 2001’s Impakto (Earthlight, mass-market, £6.99, 359 pages, ISBN 0-7434-0895-0). Nonetheless, the latter certainly wins high marks for conceptual audacity and for its knockout opening section.
In Malignos, we once more find the type of star-crossed lovers whom Calder employs so fruitfully. Richard Pike, human warrior and demon-slayer in a far-future world gone rotten with biological monstrosities, has fallen in love with a turncoat female demon named Gala. When his lover’s mind is stolen away by her vengeful subterranean kindred, Pike must journey to the literal center of the wormy earth to find a cure for her condition. His journey (reminiscent of Michael Shea’s The Mines of Behemoth [1997]) is lurid, gripping, and emotionally wrenching. As if Clark Ashton Smith had collaborated with William Hope Hodgson, this book evokes a kind of lusty angst and frenetic ennui that is, ultimately, refreshingly upbeat.
Impakto is a teratoid of a different color, similar to the cosmic parables of A.A. Attanasio, blending the occult with the stefnal. Calder’s first book to be set squarely in the present day (at least in its opening and closing chapters), Impakto benefits from explicit allusions to cinematic, artistic, and literary touchstones that until now in Calder’s work have had to be veiled, out of deference to the verisimilitude required by futuristic narrators. However, our narrator here, Raul Riviera, is a somewhat ineffectual middle-aged man resident in the Philippines who discovers that he is really a kind of spirit creature, an impakto, the revenant of an aborted child. This revelation is delivered to Riviera by a fellow impakto in a scene involving the terror-filled crash of an aircraft in flight, a scene that presciently and forcefully invokes recent national tragedies.
Blithely tossing aside his old life for his new role as avenging warrior fated to harrow the halls of a very real Heaven and Hell that lie just next-door to our universe, Riviera becomes besotted with his own nonhuman paramour, Maximilla Morales. But Maximilla’s absence from much of the action, after her capture by the forces of Heaven, deprives this story of a central pulse. Additionally, as a somewhat stolid fellow, Riviera realistically does not indulge in many of the vivid verbal flourishes Calder’s narrators traditionally employ. And a tiny superfluity of theological talk also undermines the action.
Still, both of these books, appearing so swiftly back to back, stand as a potent achievement in the opening days of the new century’s fantastical fiction. Calder proves that he’s supreme at conveying "the landscape of my imagination where, dreaming, I had encountered dreams not my own, but which, unlike the landscape of home and identity, had never disowned me."
Like Sarah Singleton’s recent The Crow Maiden (2001), Gus Smith’s Feather and Bone (Big Engine, trade, £8.99, 307 pages, ISBN 1-903468-03-5) ventures into what might be termed Robert Holdstock territory, exploring the supernatural marvels and terrors that exist in the English countryside. Exist now, and have existed for uncounted, ignored millennia. All these books convey a sense that immemorial traditions and practices persist among our rural cousins, who are portrayed as having a deeper connection to bygone ways–for both good and evil–than we urban dwellers do. In a sense, then, these books represent a kind of counterforce to the popular vein of "urban fantasy," forming an assertion that only those intimately connected to the soil and nature can deal with the cosmic forces that have preceded mankind and will probably outlive us.
Surely a more primitive existence cannot be imagined than that of the Northumberland family who is the central focus of Smith’s tale. Bessie is a slatternly, ill-tempered mother and wife, whose continual cleaning of the small impoverished cottage her family inhabits is more a sign of mental sickness than of propriety. Her husband Angus is an ineffectual wood-worker and poacher, whose growing feeble-mindedness is eventually explained as a certain medical condition (kept secret here in this review so as not to spoil the mystery). Son Davie is an innocent but cipherish toddler. Finally, daughter Isabel is the linchpin of the family dynamics. Gifted with extrasensory perception and a sensitivity to the otherworldly goings-on in her wild region of the country, Isabel will prove pivotal in dealing with the emergence of an evil spirit known as the Duergar.
Other major players in this game are Allison, a government official dispatched to this community to deal with an outbreak of BSE (also known as mad cow disease); Keith, a nosy reporter out to uncover any dirt; and Rose, a relative newcomer whose white witchery will help save the day.
Smith nails his characters and countryside with precision. All the inbred suspiciousness, as well as the generous openheartedness, of his citizens comes across distinctly. The harshness of this kind of hardscrabble country living is nicely tactile. Additionally, he moves his story along at a smoothly varying clip, alternating slow and suspenseful passages, mimetic and fantastical.
In terms of gore, Smith shows admirable restraint. Two incidents involving the deaths of major characters make the plunge into real gruesomeness. But by the time these passages occur, the reader has been prepped for them and not overwhelmed by earlier gratuitous occurrences. And Smith shows some intriguing dimensions by blending quasi-scientific and supernatural explanations of the Duergar and its astral plane, allowing the reader to chose which explanation suits them best.
All in all, a shivery read, authentic and honest.
Contact Big Engine at www.bigengine.co.uk.
Geoff Ryman’s got big bollocks.
There are certainly very few authors in our field who would be daring enough to structure a giant contemporary urban fantasy novel around casual sex. Fewer still who have the talent to bring off the attempt with grace and compassion and empathy. But that’s just what Ryman does in Lust (Flamingo, trade, £9.99, 400 pages, ISBN 0-00-225987-7), and the result is a class act, as far from sleazy as possible. Thoughtful and erotic, melancholy and comic, despairing and hopeful, Ryman’s book echoes his previous one, 253 (1998), in its unstinting exploration of the wide variety of human behavior.
Resident in London, Michael Blasco is a handsome thirtyish biology researcher (all due irony attaches to this profession) who also happens to be gay. Unhappily partnered to a man named Phil, Michael has sublimated all his unease and discontent (much of which extends back to a traumatic childhood, when he bounced across the Atlantic between divorced parents, an English mother and an American father) into workaholic habits. But his carefully structured cagelike existence is about to explode. One day Michael discovers he’s been granted a unique power by a whimsical universe. Any time he wishes, he can mentally summon up a fully corporeal duplicate of anyone he’s ever lusted after. Male or, more rarely, female; living or dead, these doppelgangers possess all the memories and qualities of the originals, but are totally subservient to Michael’s commands–should he choose to override the autonomy of his "Angels," who exist only so long as he wills.
At first, of course, Michael fears he’s going insane. But his training in logic and experimentation takes over, and by the halfway point of the book he’s convinced himself–through many erotic trials, some awkward, some satisfying–of the reality of his new talent. At this point, his character undergoes a change, as he loses his timidity and caution and plunges into several wild relationships, most notably with a revenant Pablo Picasso. But Michael’s foray into unbridled hedonism eventually proves his undoing, and a denouement finds him struggling to recover from nearly dying, and to assign some meaning to his whole odd experience.
In the tortured yet fey Michael Blasco, Ryman has created a character of astounding depth. Overturning all stereotypes of gay life, Ryman fashions a rich backstory for Michael that leads inevitably to his current condition and quandary. Nor are the subsidiary characters slighted. Just the recreation of the domineering genius of Picasso alone would suffice to earn Ryman much credit. And Ryman’s transparent yet chromatic prose style, replete with striking similes and metaphors on every page ("Everywhere Michael touched him there were little pinpricks of body hair, like mustard on ham."), makes the reading of this novel an easy, fluid joy.
As indicated by its chapter titles, which all come in the form of a question, this book is predicated on mystery–the mystery of "desire, perhaps the biggest miracle of all." Michael’s exploration of his own lusts–lusts we all share–eventually leads him to a kinky physics, a theory of erotogravitics, an extension of his experiences that some might find natural, and some an artificial attempt by the author to transform the personal into the cosmic. But one thing is certain: Michael has gone through the fire and emerged out the other side with new knowledge.
Flavors of the equally innovative work of Thomas Disch and Samuel Delany, of Will Self and Jonathan Carroll, of Phil Dick and Robert Silverberg (specifically the latter’s Dying Inside [1972]) all pepper this tasty carnal banquet served up by Ryman. But only he could have concocted such a tantalizing recipe.
Everyone knows that Michael Moorcock, though resident in Texas these days, is still in love with London. The eternal city on the Thames has afforded him with characters, themes and settings aplenty, and his latest collection, London Bone (Scribner UK, trade, £10.00, 248 pages, ISBN 0-684-86142-9), conveys his vast affection in eight stories and one essay, with several of the fictional pieces centering around his eccentric von Bek/Begg clan.
"London Blood" is cast as the rambling memoirs of an old actress, a seemingly innocent account, yet one that harbors dark depths of old child abuse. "Doves in the Circle," an Avram Davidson-style excursion into the quirks of history, actually takes place in New York City, but replicates a London ambiance in the New World. "Furniture" depicts how the past may come to the rescue during present trials. And the closing essay, "Lost London Writers," serves as an excellent Baedeker to the literary tradition Moorcock seeks to continue.
But the three core stories here are "London Bone," "The Clapham Antichrist" and "The Cairene Purse."
"London Bone" is a wry and mordant satire on commerce and fads. Narrated by the irrepressibly mercantile Raymond Gold, this piece recounts the great vogue for London Bone in the early years of the twenty-first century. Semi-fossilized skeletal shards, the Bone becomes highly collectible once Gold and his partners enlist some archaeology grad students to insure a steady supply from a secret construction site. But Bone is more than it seems, and events quickly snowball to global proportions, while Gold finds himself riding a tiger all the way to rueful wealth.
The finest story here, "The Clapham Antichrist," provides the definitive distillation of Moorcock’s romantic sentiments about London. With its portrait of the apocryphal Sporting Club Square and the Square’s most famous resident, Edwin Begg, a renegade visionary ex-holyman, this story succeeds in conjuring up an otherwordly city that comes into focus only for those with eyes unjaded enough to see it.
And although "The Cairene Purse" takes place in Egypt, it too conveys a similar sense of precious antiquities forsaken, and ways of life driven into the dust due to greed and rapacity. As Paul von Bek searches across a landscape transformed by near-future events for his lost sister Bea, who has fallen into strange company–Sufis, nomads and possibly UFO aliens–we learn that being exiled from Paradise is the inevitable sentient condition.
Moorcock’s deep wisdom and polished story-telling skills, honed though five decades of writing, evoke the terrors and beauties of our oft-ignored urban infrastructures in a way both retrospective and proleptic.
The byline of Melvin Burgess is too-little known in the USA–despite his having penned the novel Billy Elliot, transformed recently into a big-screen feature–although he’s a prize-winning, critically acclaimed author in the UK. Certainly his novel Bloodtide (Tor, hardcover, $24.95, 371 pages, ISBN 0-765-30048-6) marks his most high-profile appearance yet to the eyes of genre readers. And if this book is any indication, Burgess is a writer to admire and pursue further.
Imagine conflating Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980), John Crowley’s Beasts (1976), Poul Anderson’s Hrolf Kraki’s Saga (1973), and Delany’s The Einstein Intersection (1967), then tossing in a dash of Mark Geston and Cordwainer Smith. The result is a brutal, mythic stew, alternately surreal and naturalistic, veering from pure fantasy to quasi-cyberpunk SF. Miraculously, the whole package forms a cohesive, entrancing whole, compulsively readable from start to finish.
Roughly one hundred years from now, the city of London has been cordoned off from the rest of the world, after sinking into a kind of contagious barbarism. Surrounding the city is a ring of land ceded to the halfmen, bioengineered and cyborged human-animal hybrids. Beyond lies a tantalizing high-tech civilization that the captive Londoners long to reach, as half-conquerors, half-supplicants. Inside the city, a feudal, quasi-primitive, quasi-technological existence continues, with dominion divided between two families. One empire is headed by Val Volson and his four children. The other is ruled by a young scion named Conor. Val Volson’s plan: to unite the two warring camps by marrying his fourteen-year-old daughter Signy to Conor. This simple tactical decision sets off a course of violent events that will cascade down the next decade, ending only in the bloody martial tsunami of the title. Signy and her twin brother Siggy are the main players (with intermittent chapters told from their POVs), but a large cast of supporting characters–including two halfwomen, Melanie the Pig and Cherry the Cat–expand our perspectives.
As Burgess informs us in an afternote, his novel is modeled on Iceland’s Volsunga Saga, and this ancient tale of berserker rage, godly intervention and familial honor transplants perfectly to Burgess’s postapocalyptic setting. The motivations of the characters are painted in broad, archaic strokes, yet with surprising streaks of subtlety. For instance, when Siggy realizes that Melanie the Pig has been starving herself to give him the food he needs to recover from his wounds suffered under Conor’s torture, Siggy’s sense of the halfmen as worthless animals undergoes a sharp reversal. His relationship thereafter with his porcine savior is one of the highlights of the tale.
Burgess employs a prose style that’s hard-edged, colloquial, vivid and straightforward, yet capable of surprising spasms of poetry. Bardic, I suppose, would sum it up. And although sometimes Signy comes off like Britney Spears starring in a remake of the middle, post-catastrophe segment of H. G. Wells’s Things to Come (1936), overall the compulsions that drive the actors and the moral decisions they make are totally believable in context.
With its themes of incomprehension leading to disaster, species prejudice, and the reptilian triumph of the id over superego, Bloodtide brilliantly illustrates that atavism lurks just a millimeter below our civilized façade.
Tales that focus on strange environments form a fascinating subsection of SF. Larry Niven’s The Integral Trees (1984), Stephen Baxter’s Raft (1991), Christopher Priest’s Inverted World (1974), Robert Forward’s Dragon’s Egg (1981), and Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity (1954) are just the top titles that leap to mind. Such novels–of places where quirks of physics, chemistry, or cosmology create venues in which all our assumptions about daily life go out the window–often provide the best kind of cognitive estrangement that SF has to offer.
To this illustrious roster must now be added Adam Roberts’s smashingly weird On (Gollancz, trade, £10.99, 388 pages, ISBN 0-575-07177-X), which features an Earth trapped in an anomaly that causes gravity to act at a difference of ninety degrees to its normal operation. What this means is at first hard to apprehend, but soon made quite vivid. Picture our current Earth as a basically flat tabletop with a slightly variable topography, with ourselves firmly planted atop. Now tilt that surface ninety degrees, so there’s a top and bottom to it. Everything from oceans to people slides off, except where a precarious foothold can be obtained on the slopes of the new ledges that were once hillsides or mountainsides. Our world is now the Wall.
This catastrophic upheaval occurred over one hundred years before our story opens, and the pitiful remnant of mankind has adapted as best they can, digging shelters into the Wall, always dreading death by falling off their world, and moving about only where ledges, ladders and makeshift stairways permit. Most survivors live a simple village life. This segment includes our young hero, Tighe. Born with an inquisitive mind (Tighe’s mother complains, "This boy will drive us all over the ledge, will he never stop with his questions? Will he smash my head apart with all his questions? On and on and on . . ."), Tighe finds his cloistered peasant life confining. But no frontier beckons–until Tighe falls off the Wall.
Plummeting Downwall for miles, Tighe is saved from death only by collision with a hot-air balloon. The superior empire he now finds himself co-opted into is at war with a neighbor. And that war will provide Tighe with a swift and brutal maturation. (Tighe’s dark skin and his experiences as a helpless pawn of forces larger than himself make explicit Roberts’s intended parallels with the savage African wars of our own period, which have seen innumerable teenagers used as cannon fodder, and this segment of the novel forms a strong indictment of recent barbarism.) But even this brush with "civilization" cannot prepare Tighe for his ultimate confrontation with the secret masters of the Wall, a confrontation that undermines everything Tighe has come to know.
Tighe’s biography is a sad one, and Roberts’s delivers it with merciless precision, yet not without empathy. Some scenes are absolutely harrowing, especially when Tighe and his fellow juvenile soldiers flee through the perilous Meshwood. But although Tighe’s character bends and deforms, his native optimism and verve propel him ever onward. Roberts skill at composing Vancian societies and languages (I’m sure Vance’s "The Men Return" was an influence here, as indeed must have been Keith Roberts’s Kiteworld [1985]) is admirable. I have some reservations about the literal deus ex machina ending–does it presage a sequel, or merely the end of all hope?–but will accept it gladly for all the marvels that have gone before.
Adam Roberts, whose Salt (2000) was a spectacular debut, has now demolished any possible talk of sophomore slump with this book, which is radically different both from its predecessor and from most of its peers.
And what of the climate for shorter fiction in the Darkling Isles? A number of flourishing magazines provide shelter and sustenance for both British and American short-story writers. Here we’ll take a look at only four.
Interzone <www.sfsite.com/interzone> is the vigorous granddaddy of UK SF zines, and, in its twentieth anniversary year, continuing under the capable hands of editor David Pringle, it has never looked stronger or been more at the forefront of introducing new writers and nurturing established ones. Running like a well-oiled machine, Interzone continues to experiment, most recently by increasing its media coverage. In fact, the hefty amount of non-fiction that Interzone publishes–essays by Gary Westfahl, interviews by Nick Gevers, reviews by Paul McAuley and others–offers a sense of family identity that the ofttimes heterogenous fiction–testament to editor Pringle’s catholic tastes–might otherwise not. The November 2001 issue, to hand as I write, features satire from Dominic Green reminiscent of a twenty-first century Edmund Cooper; sophisticated cultural exegesis from Thomas Disch; a Sheckleyan cybersex extrapolation from Greg Benford; cross-dimensional hijinks from newcomer Chris Beckett; and a translated fable from Yugoslavia’s Zoran Zivkovic. All in all, a superb issue of the last true monthly periodical in the field.
Next most established in our selection is The 3rd Alternative <www.ttapress.com>, helmed by Andy Cox. This oversized banquet of fiction and features–Number 28 is to hand–shows a sophisticated design sense, with an inviting layout and some gorgeous artwork. A story by Tim Lees conjures up a fusion of the work of Kathe Koja and Christopher Priest; Martin Simpson’s piece riffs inventively on Heinlein’s "Lifeline"; James Van Pelt amuses with a slice of life from a fast-food joint; Pras Stillman’s alien-in-disguise tale brings to mind classic Silverberg; the fabled Burning Man experience is interpreted askew by Ryan van Cleave; and the aftermath of childhood weirdness is chronicled by Alexander Glass. Additionally, an interview with Graham Joyce, film and book reviews and commentary by Allen Ashley round out the feast. Glossily attractive yet firmly grounded in the best genre values, The 3rd Alternative should be a first choice for anyone with an interest in fine writing attractively presented.
With its seventh installment, Spectrum SF <www.spectrumsf.co.uk> makes a quantum jump in size (now boasting an awesome192 pages) and amps up its already high quality level. Under the earnest and keen-witted direction of editor Paul Fraser, this digest-sized zine features the opening half of Charles Stross’s first novel, The Atrocity Archive, a wild blend of Poul Anderson, Ian Fleming, and Lovecraft, plus an emotionally touching novelette by Eric Brown and accomplished stories by Mary Soon Lee, Josh Lacey, and David Redd, the latter of whom wrote several knockout pieces in the sixties, then more or less disappeared. (Fans of Redd’s work might also consult back issues of Asimov’s itself, specifically the Mid-December 1993 and March 1995 issues, for more of Redd’s unique tales.) Fraser’s coaxing of new stories from Redd–this one is a stylistically innovative tale of the clash of two economic systems and philosophies–is the kind of tactic typical of Fraser’s desire to make his magazine go the extra mile. A very special publication, much in the classy manner of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
The newest entrant in the ranks of British zines comes from D.F. Lewis, better known as a fiction writer himself than a publisher, and his brainchild is a singular one. First off, Nemonymous <www.nemonymous.com> is published in a unique, handsome, perfect-bound format roughly as big as an auto-owner manual. But more importantly, all the stories in Issue One are printed without bylines. "The authors of these sixteen stories will have their by-lines published in Issue Two of Nemonymous, together with a new selection of stories the by-lines of which will in turn be published in Issue Three." This gimmick seeks to free the stories from all judgment-provoking attributes of race, gender, nationality, reputation, or age, placing them squarely in a Zen-style neutral zone where, ideally, your reactions should derive only from the texts themselves. As if encouraged by this experimentation, the stories are mostly sophisticated slipstream fantasy, with only a rare foray into more rigid genre material. I found all the selections of a uniformly good quality, although admittedly they did tend to blur into a homogeneous mass by the end. I tried playing the expected guessing game a little, venturing so far as to imagine that perhaps Lisa Tuttle wrote "Breaking Rules," about two women engaged in a plate-breaking contest. But on the whole, I was content to let the stories ride on their own anonymity. If Lewis’s stunt succeeds, I expect it will be, as with all zines, due to the sheer quality of the fiction, rather than to any buzz generated by its eccentric presentation.
