Planet Scumm: Issue #11: Snake Eyes - I Read It Cover-To-Cover And Loved Everything About It

Planet Scumm: Issue #11: Snake Eyes

I received a review copy of this magazine for free. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

A few days ago, I received an email from Tyler Berd, Managing Editor of Planet Scumm, asking if I would be interested in posting a review. I've since read the issue cover-to-cover and am more than happy to oblige Tyler and his crew.

Overall, Planet Scumm is a Sci-Fi anthology magazine that releases three times a year. It is published by Spark and Fizz Books. On the website, it is explained what the publication's purpose is...

"Born out of reverence for the bizarre science fiction magazines of the pulp era, our short story anthologies showcase collections of original fiction by international authors. We cherish the genre as an open forum for philosophy, anxieties, and thought experiments. We are proud to emphasize the central role of artwork in sci-fi and are committed to working with and supporting independent illustrators."

Issue #11: Snake Eyes is a collection of eight stories with LGBQT+ themes to "highlight voices that have been traditionally underrepresented in science fiction and speculative fiction."

I found all eight stories amazing. There is a good variety of writings, all are entertaining and accessible. When I review an anthology, I usually focus on one story, but in this case, I have no favorites because they are all so different from one another. It is truly an excellent collection of writings.

The artwork included with the entries is also a collection of illustrtions representative of the stories.

All together, Planet Scumm's stories and illustrations remind me of the old Omni Magazine with a feel of pulp fiction anthologies. One bonus of Planet Scumm is how clean it looks. It is truly about the authors, illustrators, and the guest editor. One will not be inundated with a lot of fillers and advertisements.

Planet Scumm is worth a look. Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Visit their website: https://www.planetscumm.space/ for information on the magazine, subscriptions, future issues, and how to contribute. 

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No Way Home Curated By Lucas Bale - Seven Stories Of People Who Are Stranded Away From Where They Want To Be

No Way Home: Stories From Which There Is No Escape Curated By Lucas Bale With A Foreword by Jennifer Foehner Welles

I am not sure how I stumbled on this book, all I can say is that it sat on my Kindle for quite a while before I was finally Able to get to reading it.

No Way Home is a collection of short stories that are well founded in hard science fiction all involving characters that find themselves in situations that leave them stranded far from their homes for one reason or another. The collection contains seven stories that are quite diverse in their settings. Here is a rundown of what the reader will encounter in this collection…

• To Sing of Chaos and Eternal Night by Lucas Bale: A nameless soldier has had his consciousness uploaded into a heavily armored and well armed machine fights in an endless war. He dies over and over again with no hope of ending a conflict that if lost would see the end of human civilization.
• XE, or People Are Crazy by S. Elliot Brandis: A volunteer astronaut is sent to a distant planet to explore and determine that it is suitable for human habitation and colonization. All he has to do is send a signal that is either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ back to Earth and then he will be free to live out the rest of his life in peace and quiet. However, there is nothing peaceful or quiet when he discovers that he is not alone.
• Grist by J.S. Collyer: After a series of war, a once green and living place becomes a place that the protagonist is eager to escape from.
• Revolver by Michael Patrick Hicks: A young woman who has nothing left to live for goes on a bizarre crowdfunding show to raise money for her family. The audience is out for blood in this dystopian story and the young woman delivers, in spades.
• The Happy Place by Harry Manners: A man and his family are relocated to Mars from his home in Nebraska. When the commander of his small colony goes off his rocker, their existence is threatened. In order to keep himself from going insane, he has to make regular visits to The Happy Place where he is grounded in reality.
• Renata by Nadine Matheson: In the year 2049, an assassin is given an assignment to kill someone who has been dead some twenty years. Thanks to a rediscovered time travel project, he is able to travel back to 2014, but if he fails, he will be stranded creating a paradox that might result in his death.
• Cold Witness by A.S. SInclair: A radio engineer working at an abandoned military base finds that as he explores more and more of the facility, be begins suffering from time shifts, and hallucinations to the point that he cannot tell reality from his dreams. What is his actual reality?

As I read this collection, I found that I was really enjoying the stories because of their complexity in such a short time to flesh out a complete story. The above listed authors are very skillful at cramming so much into so few words that if one blinks, one might miss some important thread of the story. When I was forced to put a story aside, I found that I had to re-read a great deal because of the detail contained within. These stories are not a casual read and will require the full attention of the reader.

I think my favorite of the stories was Revolver because of its utter absurdity to what things should be like but actually are like. The young woman is someone who has made many mistakes in her life and is expected to simply kill herself on live television. While this is happening, people are pledging money to egg her on and there are some very horrible people sending comments over the internet that include some very nasty name calling. The absurd thing is that the reader might be horrified at what is contained in this story, but on the other hand, being involved in social media myself, I can completely see the story being far closer to reality today than the fiction that is intended by the author. It is disturbing in that Hicks, seems to be holding up a mirror to our society and it has a filter that shows the ugliest parts of modern social interaction full of bigotry, hatred, and indifference.

While that one may be my favorite of the collection, the rest are equally compelling. I would recommend that this book is worth a look for serious Sci-Fi readers that are looking for a real roller coaster of a read.

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Starbound: Eleven Tales Of Interstellar Adventure - Stories Compiled by Audrey Faye - Just Excellent

Starbound: An Anthology Gathered by Audrey Faye

Not long ago, Golden Age of the Solar Clipper author Nathan Lowell posted in his Facebook feed that he was included in an anthology along with a number of other authors that had written some good Sci-Fi stories. If Nathan says it’s good, it most likely is and Starbound delivers in spades. I have always enjoyed short story collections and loved this one.

Audrey Faye asked the authors included in this volume to contribute stories that centered on strong female characters. Most of the stories included are prequels to works that also include, in the author’s words “dragons, smugglers, vampires, aliens, a street ruffian mathematical genius, a princess desperate to save Earth, and more.”

Here is a rundown of the stories included:

Passage Out by Anthea Sharp: A young woman and her friend have given up hope of escaping Earth, but thanks to her talents of observation, she finds a better life.

Blood Ties by Christine Pope: Just trying to make a living, Miala and her father take commissions from shady customers for computer software, this latest one has some surprising consequences.

Raising The Dragon by Sara Reine: Aja Skytoucher takes an alien refugee home with her and soon learns that raising a dragon can be both difficult and rewarding.

Exile by Nathan Lowell: Set in his Golden Clipper universe, Nathan writes about a two young women that are on the run almost before their Academy graduation party is finished.

Arcturus 5 by Debra Dunbar: Xella finds herself in a life threatening situation while trying to mediate a trade dispute that goes terribly wrong.

A Tale Of Two Ships by Audrey Faye: A newborn baby and her mother crash on an out of the way planet, later another ship also crashes and a woman discovers her purpose in life.

Carl Sagan’s Hunt For Intelligent Life In The Universe by C. Gockel: In this story, a young girl grows and is watched over an alien intelligence for her entire life without knowing it.

Blue Light by Phaedra M Weldon: An investigator stumbles into a situation that could leave her burned.

Treason’s Course by LJ Cohen: A soldier finds herself in a quandary when treason might save an entire civilization.

Silent Witness by Colleen Vanderlinden: Aria is set to become the ruler of her people who Witness and record events of other beings. When a planet that she has been Witnessing is about to be obliterated, she faces a difficult choice.

The Final Sunrise by Shawntelle Madison: When her spaceship is invaded by thieves, a single vampire is faced with saving her ship and surviving.

All of the stories are short enough to read in a single sitting, the longest, as I recall, is just a little over an hour of reading time. All are well written and for me were quite compelling. Every story in the collection is annotated with a bit of information on where to locate further stories in the series that follow.

If my recommendation is not enough, the price of .99 cents on Amazon for the Kindle edition should be even more of a motivation to give this collection a look.

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Pangaea: Edited By Michael Jan Friedman - 13 Amazing Stories By 14 Superior Authors - A Must Read

Pangaea Edited By Michael Jan Friedman (2015)

Many scientists subscribe to a theory that 300 million years ago, there was only one super-continent as opposed to the seven that now exist. That super-continent was called Pangaea by the scientist that put forth this theory in his treatise called The Origin of the Continents by Alfred Wegener, published in 1912. Wegener further claimed that the continents began to break up and drift about 175 million years ago and slowly came to their present positions.

Much more recently, author Michael Jan Friedman began speculating on what the world might be like if continental drift stopped with the formation of the super-continent Pangaea all those millennia ago and stayed in that form into present day. Earlier this year, Mike announced a Kickstarter project that, if funded, promised to be an impressive project that would involve not only himself, but numerous other authors with impressive credentials coming together to produce a short story anthology the likes of which would be unique.

Well, the project was funded beyond what was needed to start work on the book and it is now available to the general public in all the usual formats from all of the usual sources.

Mike brought fourteen authors together to write thirteen great short stories that will sometimes make you laugh, sometimes feel saddened, and always make you think about how this alternate world that was created seems far too much like our own, but at the same time it is very different. The list of contributors to this volume, along with Friedman himself, include: Michael Burstein, Adam-Troy Castro, Russ Colchamiro, Peter David, Robert Greenberger, Glenn Hauman, Paul Kupperberg, Kelly Meding, Aaron Rosenberg, Lawrence M. Schoen, Geoffrey Thorne, Dayton Ward, and Kevin Dilmore. All are accomplished writers and highly respected in their chosen genres. It you want to learn more about this distinguished bullpen of word-slingers, follow the link to the Kickstarter page where there are brief bios on each one.

Pangaea is a collection of thirteen stories that begin with Michael Jan Friedman's story of an energy producing facility that is sabotaged just as it is about to come online. There is an interesting twist at the end of this one, as well as the last story in the book, written by Peter David who follows on from where Mike leaves off and adds yet another twist and a wide open ending that absolutely howls for a sequel. In between Friedeman's and David's brackets are eleven more stories that range from cop stories to tales of revenge; land grabbing schemes to the freeing of slaves; sibling rivalries and love gone wrong.

I would be hard pressed to choose a favorite story among the choices offered. Each one is an imaginative self contained tale that are in all different styles and voice. All are easily read with some terminology that is easily understood in context. The longest story is about an hour of reading time with the shortest coming in at about 20 minutes, most can be read in the span of an average lunch break of a half an hour. I found myself reading two or three stories at a time not wanting to put the book down because each was like unwrapping a gift that was not like any of the others.

The world of Pangaea takes place in many different settings including heavily populated city-states near the inland ocean to vast open plains and mountains. A great variety of settings are offered that well describes the world created in this volume. There is also a variety of people, but two of the main groups are the humans and a race called Brows, which seemed to me to be evolved Neanderthal-like people that have wide noses and heavy brow ridges as well as possessing superhuman strength. The Brows are often oppressed, but are also valued for abilities their human counterparts lack. The people of Pangaea are much the same as those that exist in our world, but unlike our reality, everyone has to exist and cohabitate on a single landmass which often causes tensions, but also promotes cooperation among peoples.  Much of what happens in Pangaea will be familiar to readers while much will also be very thought provoking. As I see it, we may not live on a super-continent, but in our modern world with the technology we possess, the planet would appear to be shrinking. As it is in today's society, it is in Pangaea; there is much prejudice, paranoia, and many other very recognizable characteristics that are prevalent. By reading the stories of this imagined world, there will be much to think about as one proceeds through the stories. But the biggest value in Pangaea, along with the variety of stories, is the entertainment value. Many of the tropes contained therein are not all that new, but their treatment in the book is unique owing to the environment in which they are set.

At any rate, I give Pangaea my highest recommendations as great reading material with an interesting variety of stories every bit as tasty as a box of good chocolates.

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