TransVersions #4
$4.95 from
Island Specialty Reports
1019 Colville Rd., Victoria, BC Canada V9A 4P5
Edited by Sally McBride and Dale L. Sproule

This 72-page Canadian digest is packed with a half dozen dark fantasy and SF tales that range from somewhat experimental prose styles to straightforward campfire storytelling. This issue leads off with Sean Stewart's "Monsters Contemplate the Revolution," an odd piece that falls into the former category. "Monsters" takes place in the same world as Stewart's popular Resurrection Man novel of last year, and perhaps that book is necessary reading for grasping the import of this short, which seems to be a collection of oblique conversations between archetypical objects named generically The Duct Weasel, the Girl, the Elevator and the Window Washer. Maybe I'm just dense, but I finished reading the story without grasping a plot.

Charles M. Saplak's "Visanna," on the other hand, is a nice bit of surreal fantasy centering around birthdays and Visanna's disturbing ability to see the faces of the past and the future strung out behind and ahead of people.

Mark Leiren-Young contributes "The Muse," a bittersweet and sexy fantasy about an artist who gets to know his Muse in the Biblical sense, and finds that too much knowledge can be a curse. It's a deftly told story about the slippery slopes of inspiration.

Stepan Chapman's "The Brain Ruby" is a more comical fantasy which opens with a young narrator explaining how lousy his life used to be growing up with his retarded sister and family in the nowhere town of Endeavor. The thing about Endeavor is, every so often, The Brain Ruby pops into town and grants the inhabitants wishes. Unfortunately, the ruby's presence is rarely known until people have walked near its hidden resting place and been turned into whatever they happened to be thinking of at the time. For example, Mr. Ikegama, the local laundromat owner, is turned into a plate of chicken and potatoes; obviously he'd been thinking about his favorite dinner while locking up his laundromat, unaware of the nearby presence of the ruby. Ikegama's untimely (and savory) demise signals to the townspeople that the ruby is back in town, and people begin searching for its whereabouts with carefully guarded thoughts before it disappears again. Suffice it to say that everyone gets their just desserts.

Dark SF turns up in Lesley Morrison's "Virtual Casualties," which revolves around the use of virtual reality for mental tampering. Amanda agrees to follow her brother to the moon to be used as a subject in his virtual tests. But in the end, as reality shifts turn her world (and the reader's) upside down, Amanda chooses a chilling solution to the search for what is real in her life.

The issue closes with Robert J. Levy's "Creche," a black bit of SF about an alien nursery and the human servants who must administer to the whims of the powerful Kirbypoo and Williwoo, among others. Wicked nursery prose here.

All of the fiction in TransVersions is extremely well-written; the editors have truly put together a pro magazine between a small press cover.

Copyright © 1996 by John Everson. All Rights Reserved.