Talebones #2, January 1996
Patrick Swenson, Editor/Publisher
$16 per year from 12205 1st Ave. S.
Seattle, Wa 98168
email:Talebones@aol.com

The second issue of this promising new digest offers a couple of improvements over last fall's impressive debut: The glossy cover now uses a second color (blue and black, for this issue) and the contents are heavier -- more pages, more story for your buck.

This issue includes a strong SF piece of robot melancholia in Robert Krawiec's "This Bedlam Electric," which postulates a society that has used robots, allowed them (grudgingly) to be seen as equals after a civil rights crusade, and then, when mechanical entropy turns up, promptly ghettoizes them. If you say that sounds like an allegorical reading of how we treat our elderly, or our minority populations, I would say you're right on -- and so is Krawiec.

J.C. Hendee, who also pens a good column on Web-surfing for the 'zine offers an SF piece about (again) mistreated, enslaved cyborgs. Leslie What turns in one of the zine's stronger stories in "Things The Mirror Sees," a fun look at how a mirror sees US. David R. Addleman provides the magazine with a straight short horror tale that left me grinning and cringing. In "Pillow Beasts," an uncle tells a young boy to always beat up his pillow before bed so the pillow beast doesn't hide out and get him. You know that this could only have dire consequences when the boy embraces the lie fully...but it's fun to grit your teeth and watch as they occur anyway.

Mike Brotherton closes out the fiction of the issue with "Rusted Roots," an SF piece about a human and alien survivor of a spaceship crash, and how the alien manages to even a score with the idiotic human. The human is a completely flat character, but the concept of the plantlike alien and the nasty endtwist make it worth a read. The other three SF/horror stories by Mark Rich, Bruce Taylor and Diane de Avalle-Arce didn't do much for me. Rich and Taylor's stories are somewhat experimental, and de Avalle-Arce's hinges on a plot twist we've seen a million times before. There's also poetry by J.W. Donnelly, Geoff Stevens, Mark McLaughlin, Sandy Raschke, and a wonderfully dark series of "Fairytales" by Jessica K. Szczepaniak-Gillece (who needs to shorten her byline, methinks!)

Overall, this issue is a very good read -- Talebones ably fills the shoes of the oft-lamented magazine it takes its inspiration from -- Figment.

--John Everson

Copyright © 1996 by John Everson. All Rights Reserved.