Reviews and Comments

An average issue with interesting stories by Rachael Cupp and Paul Crenshaw.

• "Grey Halls" by Rachael Cupp: in a distant future, humanity lives in a closed-up world with only fragments of the past available. From the fragments, one composer has come up with a composition called "Grey Halls" that earns him a chance to travel to the past. What he discovers there will shake his artistic abilities and leave to wonder whether there is truly anything new to compose.

• "Superbright" by Ryan Row: a growing up tale of a boy who can give off heat and light, in a world where people with super abilities exists. Going through school, forming a super team, fighting evil was all standard until one day, he gets really super abilities - abilities that would bring his whole world crashing down.

• "Tumblebush" by Darby Harn: a rich old woman asks an investigator to find her missing daughter in a world where the climate has changed, a powerful corporation owns the computing servers and people make a living by taking photos for the corporation and hoping to be noticed.

• "P.Q." by James Warner: researchers investigating ant nests discover some nests piling together structures with no apparent purpose. Investigating them would reveal the structures may be related to the way the ants sense the world through scents and chemicals, and perhaps to store knowledge. But the ants would be threatened by approaching fires unless something is done to save them.

• "Throw Caution" by Tim Major: prospectors on Mars converge on an area discovered to have Martian life: a crab that has a jewel embedded in them. But the pickings are few and hard to come by for a new group unless they take a chance during a storm and chase after the crabs and discover their purpose.

• "So Easy" by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam: in a dying country, a mother and child make a final journey to the sea to end it all.

• "Eyes" by Paul Crenshaw: a fascinating tale told by a pair of eyes found in a stream one day by a boy. Gradually, the boy learns the story of the country where the eyes come from, where eyes are passed down from parent to child over generations, gathering knowledge as the eyes see the world.

An entertaining book about a topic that will either be greeted with disgust or with laughter when discussed at the dinner table: does animal X fart?

The authors use the general meaning of fart rather than its stricter scientific meaning, so some animals that pass gas don't actually fart (scientifically), but even then the details are fascinating.

Yes, most of the animals featured in the collection do fart and the reasons they fart are many and varied: at one end (like for fish), farting to get rid of gas can be a matter of life and death. For others (like primates), farting could be a social signal! In between, the authors not only look at whether animals fart, but also how and why they fart and why some animals produce smellier farts than others.

You will also get an interesting education into the various way animals digest food (especially herbivores) that lead them to produce the gases that make up a fart in different proportions (from smelly to very smelly). Some anecdotal information (provided via pet owners) on how to reduce farts from some pets is also provided.

All in all, an entertaining read from beginning to end. Each animal is covered in one or two pages, with entertaining drawings of some farting animals.

An interesting story of discovery and survival set in a system where two small worlds circle each other, and they orbit a sun together. The worlds are cold and covered by ice, but the tidal forces between the worlds ensure their interiors are heated and some heat breaks through the ice in the form of geysers, bringing with it life giving chemicals and material. And there is life living on the worlds.

The story is told in three parts and starts with intelligent life struggling to live on one of the worlds. On that world, no geysers have erupted for ages and the farmers who live on it are struggling to survive. Then one farmer proposes an audacious plan. To grow an ice tower high enough to launch gliders from it and glide to the neighbouring world, where life is known to exist and geysers are still erupting. The first part deals with the farmer struggling to convince the various communities to come together and build the audacious structure, which will take generations.

The second part starts with the completed tower and the first expedition launched to cross the gap and land on the other world. It turns out to be a hospitable place, but with unexpected difficulties when it comes to trying to grow the crops they are used to instead of eating the native plants. Then comes the problem of sending a message back to the people waiting for a signal that the expedition is a success.

The third and last part deals with a return expedition back to the home planet, hoping to find survivors among those that have decided not to emigrate. It will be a bleak world to return to, yet there may still be hope in parts of the planet that cannot be seen from the other world.

While the story is primarily about how the people there survive and make the journey between worlds, Egan does hint that the people aren't human but have an alien physiology. For one thing, all the intelligent people are females. Males are present, but they aren't intelligent (apart from having instinctive behaviour) and the way the males depend on the females isn't revealed until a mating scene is described in the story. It is then that the alien biological nature of the people in the story is revealed.

An interesting story, set in a believable situation about survival on two worlds.

A fun book that looks at what it would take in the real world to have the powers and abilities of superheroes (and the occasional supervillain) that can be found in the various comic universes. From the amount of eggs a real Spider-Man would need to produce all the webbing naturally, to how the Flash could run at super-speed without overheating, the book treats the idea of such super abilities as real and see what it would take to keep and maintain them in real life.

The 'toys' and suits of Batman or Iron Man are also considered in the book; you will get an interesting look at what current material science can do to try to duplicate their abilities. The properties of Captain America's Vibranium shield also get examined to see what combinations of material could duplicate its properties. There is also a chapter on Wonder Woman's Lasso of Truth that comes with a look at how such a lasso could be armed with biological chemicals that could induce people to tell the truth.

Of course, the abilities and materials featured in superhero comics are fictional. Yet, by treating them as real objectives, the writers of the various chapters have been able to let their imagination run wild and imagine how they could have come about, knowing what we know now about the physical, chemical and biological materials that exist in the real world.

Definitely an interesting book to read. Even those who don't really follow the comic books will get an interesting look at what real science has to say about their abilities.

A better than average issue with fun stories by Cassandra Khaw and Jonathan L. Howard, Jeremiah Tolbert, Yukimi Ogawa and Sarina Dorie. Susan Emshwiller's debut story was also interesting and continues her parent's involvement with the magazine.

• "The Memorybox Vultures" by Brian Trent: the story of a future where AI driven memories of dead people live on as 'posts from the dead'. But when one dead person's recorded videos of a politician's younger self abusing animals and others start to surface, it causes all kinds of scary conflicts between the living, the dead and a cult that 'worships' a dead musical group.

• "Shooting Iron" by Cassandra Khaw and Jonathan L. Howard: a fun and interesting story of a girl who possesses a curious and magical gun who had made it her mission to find and kill an evil boss (and his assorted minions). It is told as two separate, inter-related stories. One is set in the present, showing her confronting and hunting down one of the bosses top minions. The other is set in her past with her crashing into a town that is caught in a cursed existence by the boss, and she decides to make it her mission to bring the boss to justice to free the inhabitants.

• "The Men Who Come from Flowers" by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam: a fantasy story about a woman who, as the title says, grows a kind of man from flowers. Flowers that aren't perfect are discarded but one day, she nurses one bruised flower into a man to become her companion, which is against the rules. Life looks good until the day comes when her secret has to be revealed and the final behaviour of all men who grows from flowers is known.

• "Powerless" by Harry Turtledove: an alternate history story where communism has taken over the US and on the West Coast, a family man ekes out a living running a grocery stall while silently grumbling about the state of the crumbling city and run-down economy. But one small act of defiance against the socialist party would lead to others, and to a realization that he may not be powerless in a one-party state. A nice story, but only works with the premise that a socialist state would be much poorer (both economically and politically) compared to a capitalist system.

• "The Gallian Revolt as Seen from the Sama-Sama Laundrobath" by Brenda Kalt: the old owner of a combination laundromat and bath unwillingly gets involved in a revolt on a planet when one of the rebels uses her place for a bath.

• "We Mete Justice with Beak and Talon" by Jeremiah Tolbert: a fascinating and exciting tale of a future where the mind of a bird and a man can 'meld' as they go in pursuit of an airborne drone that has just made an assassination attempt on a city politician.

• "Taste of Opal" by Yukimi Ogawa: an interesting fantasy depiction of a world where a young girl is 'milked' for her blood, which turns out to have strong medicinal (and addictive) properties. The story slowly reveals the details of the girl's world, her relationship with the 'merchants' who take care of her and carry her from client to client who use her blood. Then she is suddenly 'freed' by a stranger whose blood has other properties, and their relationship together in hiding will yield yet more details about this fascinating world. A worthwhile read.

• "Suicide Watch" by Susan Emshwiller: a disturbing, thought-provoking story about a man who enjoys (and gets emotional highs) from watching people commit suicide. He's not the only one, as the company at the heart of things links up suicide watchers like him with people who are committing suicide. But when his line of credit with the company runs out, he signs a new contract to continue his watching, only to learn that the contract ends with his own suicide. But he may have one last desperate plan to evade the company and deny the person watching his suicide from getting pleasure from it. (The author is the daughter of Ed and Carol Emshwiller, both of whom have long associations with the magazine.)

• "Emissaries from the Skirts of Heaven" by Gregor Hartmann: in a future, a poor girl struggles with her studies to enter a religious-based order to survive. As she rises in the religious hierarchy, we get a fascinating view of a future where a religious schism threatens to split humanity apart but, she believes, only she can prevent by looking for and finding out the truth behind her religious beliefs.

• "Impossible Male Pregnancy: Click to Read Full Story" by Sarina Dorie: a story that starts off with good humour about a man who is somehow pregnant and worried about how it affects his 'manliness'. But as the story develops, and he accepts his condition, the story suddenly turns serious and chilling when people start telling him that the 'baby' he harbours isn't what it seems to be. Now the question is whether the man believes them and what will he do about it. The ending is unexpected and chilling. The ridiculous click-bait sounding headlines that pop-up in the story enhance the plot and slowly reveal the truth.

• "Blessed" by Geoff Ryman: a woman on a pilgrimage to a cave system in Africa is suddenly plunged into a whole different world.

An average issue with interesting stories by Gregor Hartmann, Joanna Berry and Samantha Murray.

• "Inscribed on Dark Water" by Gregor Hartmann: a story set on a world where life is hard, and the colonists are struggling with making the world properly habitable. On an oil refinery, an intern is hard at work with mundane tasks, when an observer group arrives to check on the refinery. She has an opportunity to ingrate herself with the group at the cost of alienating her fellow workers, especially one with a hidden past. But she has to decide where her loyalties lies when she figures out a refinery process that would change the way things are done.

• "The Sea Maker of Darmid Bay" by Shauna O'Meara: a fantasy tale set in a future where much of the natural world is apparently in ecological ruins. A group of fishermen suddenly hook an unusual sea creature whom one believes is able to renew the world. But the needs of the fishermen's families may override his desire to save the creature, unless they are willing to throw themselves into the task to renew the world too.

• "The Analogue of Empathy" by Joanna Berry: an interesting tale of an AI gaining awareness in a time when much of the world is in conflict and the AI project is fighting to stay alive against another project that may well end the world. But the world might be saved if the scientist working on the AI can provide the AI with a form of empathy towards others and pass on its abilities.

• "Territory: Blank" by Aliya Whiteley: disjointed journal entries going back and forth in time about a person who encounters 'creatures' that may have eaten her comrades, but is not believed.

• "Singles' Day" by Samantha Murray: set in a future where China's Singles' Day is the most important shopping day in the world, the story looks at the lives of a few people around the world on that day who have won a lottery to journey to a new world. None were expecting to win, of course, and now they have to prepare, in their own ways, for the journey: like learning to overcome a fear of the outside world, meeting your twin for the last time and really deciding who should go, or how to break the news that you have an unexpected unborn child to bring along for the journey.

An entertaining book on mathematics with, of course, bad drawings (but illuminating ones) that covers several sections of mathematics. Separated into different parts, it can be read at a sitting, but I found that to be an overwhelming read, as it is thick with information that needs time to digest. Digging into its sections at leisure would probably be a better way to digest the entertaining and interesting mathematical information provided in the book.

Part One is on how to think like a mathematician and looks at mathematics from various viewpoints: the teacher, the student, mathematicians and scientists. Each has a different view on mathematics, and probably accounts for why some people learning mathematics have a hard time understanding the relevance of mathematics to their lives until much later.

Part Two looks at geometry and via examples like the design of girders, why the A4 paper has irrational dimensions, the geometric scaling laws and the design of many sided dices, shows how geometry plays a part in our daily lives. He closes with an entertaining example about a fictional Star Wars Imperial Engineer grumbling over the various trade-offs required to design the Death Star to Grand Moff Tarkin's specifications.

Part Three looks at probability and via various examples like the lottery, genetics, telling the odds, the costs of buying (and not buying) certain types of insurance and misunderstanding the odds that an event are independent of other events (the pricing of CDOs [collateralized debt obligations]), show how probabilities can mislead people in thinking that the odds of certain events happening are actually lower or higher than people imagine them to be.

Part Four is related to Part Three but looks at statistics. It starts with a look at the terms used by statistics (like mean, median, etc.) and show how each of them can lead or mislead people into understanding statistical results if you don't know what they show (and don't show). The next part on baseball statistics may bore or interest you and covers the history of the various baseball statistics. Next, the P-value used in scientific statistics is covered and shows how and why it can mislead scientists into believing that an experimental finding is 'statistically significant' when it is not. Going closer to the author's field (teaching), he looks at the measures used to score schools and asks whether such scores are used as a window on a school's performance or as a score to show how good or bad a school is, both of which produce different outcomes for the schools concerned. The final section of statistics looks at the interesting field of determining authorship based on the statistics of words and sentences used by various authors over time.

Part Five is a bit of a mixture with the theme of how small changes can have large effects. He first looks at the misunderstanding over marginal tax rates and tax brackets and how they affect your actual income and tax rates. The issue of voting, voting boundaries and gerrymandering is then looked at, followed by chaos theory and a look at fractal dimensions.

All in all, an interesting book that is best read part by part as and when you feel a need to learn or refresh your memory of some aspects of mathematics covered in the book.

An above average issue with interesting stories by Y.M. Pang, Hanuš Seiner (translated by Julie Novakova), Nina Kiriki Hoffman and Bo Balder.

• "Thanksgiving" by Jeffrey Ford: a Thanksgiving dinner takes a strange turn when the members begin to realize that one of their visiting relatives isn't really known by anybody there at all. Various hypotheses are provided for his presence, but it all comes to a head when he appears at the next Thanksgiving and their probing questions begin to reveal that all is not what it seems.

• "The Lady of Butterflies" by Y.M. Pang: an interesting story about a lady who suddenly appears in the garden of an Emperor with little memory of who she is or how she got there. The viewpoint character is the Emperor's swordperson, who is assign the task of educating the lady. When a violent confrontation occurs after a foreign king appears, more is revealed about the origins of the strange lady and the apparent attraction of butterflies to her. In the end, the swordperson must decide where her loyalties lie: with the Emperor whom she is to protect or with the lady with whom she had developed at attachment to.

• "Extreme" by Sean Mcmullen: a man who likes to push himself to extremes meets an unknown, possibly very rich woman, who offers him an extreme assassination job. But that would only prove to be a test, for the woman wanted to see if he was a fit candidate for a coming change to the world where his skills at surviving in extreme conditions would be needed.

• "The Iconoclasma" by Hanuš Seiner, translated by Julie Novakova: a fascinating tale of a future where a geometric form of life can be summoned into existence. With their help, mankind can leap for the stars. But with the lifeform comes danger in the form of a predator of that lifeform that would now also like to devour humanity. In the end, humanity has to decide whether the ability to travel to the stars is worth the danger.

• "Overwintering Habits of the North American Mermaid" by Abra Staffin-Wiebe: flash fiction about mermaids in winter.

• "Every Color of Invisible" by Robert Reed: set in a future with other Reed stories where a young Native American boy is getting an education while remaining 'hidden' from the rest of the world. In this one, the repercussions of the rescue of a rich man's children in another story would be revealed when the boy learns that his hiding days may be over.

• "This Constant Narrowing" by Geoff Ryman: an uncomfortable tale of a time when women have vanished, leaving behind men, some of who unleash sexual-tinged violence on the remaining men. In this tale, the protagonist is injured by a sexual predator as a 'trophy'. As he recovers and tries to avoid the predator's attention, he reflects on his life without women, with other men, and with a world where other groups of people are gradually vanishing unpredictably. One odd thing about the story is how the rest of the world seems to go on much as it is, despite huge numbers of people vanishing without a trace.

• "Other People's Dreams" by Nina Kiriki Hoffman: an interesting tale about an artist and apprentice whose job is to weave together dreams made up of threads and 'living dream energy' for their customers. Then an unusual job with a high payoff arrives involving a person from the artist's past arrives, and we get a deeper look into the world of dreams and what it is capable of doing to the living. A nice tale with a background that bears revisiting with more stories in the future.

• "The Baron and His Floating Daughter" by Nick Dichario: the usual fairy tale setting where a Prince sets out to woo the daughter of a Baron. The daughter really floats, and the Prince has made it his goal to find a cure for her condition. But when time runs out, the tale takes a twist and subsequent events show that this story's happily ever after may not involve the Prince at all, or a cure for the daughter.

• "When We Flew Together Through the Ice" by J.R. Dawson: a gritty story of a mother who escapes into space with her daughters for a life among the stars. But this life may not all be sweet as the daughters rebel in their own ways, when fitted out with an AI control who whispers commands to her consciousness. As time goes on and their lives change, it becomes harder to tell which actions are by the daughters and which by her controller, leading to a final action that will change their lives.

• "The Island And Its Boy" by Bo Balder: a fascinating tale about a village that lives on an island that can actually move, react and communicate with its inhabitants. The island circles the world near the arctic north, giving the people an Inuit like culture. But change comes when a 'baby' island is spotted, signalling that the current island has grown too big and will move south with the currents, and the people make plans to move to the new island. But one boy, in this culture where women are dominant, has other plans as he has grown used to the big island and wants to stay there as it goes south. The story looks at his secret plans to stay put along with other followers while his ruling mother plans the move to the baby island. Secrets, traps and counter plans pile up until the moving day arrives.

A not very interesting issue of Interzone, mainly because the stories appear to be on the theme of conflicts (mainly military related) and not of much interest to me. Natalia Theodoridou's story about unusual genetically engineered soldiers is probably the most interesting.

• "Soldier's Things" by Tim Lees: a soldier returns home, injured from a war, to discover that many things have changed: from the way people treat him to his own memories of life and the war.

• "Doomed Youth" by Fiona Moore: a story that mixes together a student's attempt to learn when and where giant ants started appearing with suspicions about 'foreigners' in an alternate world where conflict is more widespread and a terror attack is about to happen.

• "The Path to War" by Louise Hughes: a storyteller wanders through the land, telling stories about peaceful times for food and shelter, as the surrounding country prepares for conflict. But when he is caught by an enemy scout and interrogated for information on a camp he had just left, it would be his storytelling and other abilities that might save him.

• "Heart of an Awl" by Eliza Ruslander: a strange story about the AI of a car that has been transplanted into the body of a deceased man and is now living with the widow. Lots of meandering passages as they travel around together.

• "Zero Day" by Sheldon J. Pacotti: a hacker for the military is on his off day when he meets what he thinks is the girl of his dreams. But his actions to find her and show off to her gets interrupted when various zero-day vulnerabilities are used on that day.

• "Birnam Platoon" by Natalia Theodoridou: a story about the aftermath of a military trial of a doctor who was part of an attempt to use unusual genetically engineered soldiers in conflicts; soldiers that finally decided that peace was better than war at the wrong time.

An interesting introduction to climate change: what it is, why is it happening, what are its effects and what could we do about it. Worth a read to get an overview of the science, politics and economics of climate change.

Chapter 1 looks at the history of climate change: the greenhouse effect, how we know how the climate was in the past and what are the current sources of greenhouse gases.

Chapter 2 looks at the debate around the science of climate change: the history of research into climate change, the mistakes made at the early stage of the science that lead to the conclusion that we were entering a cooling climate stage, the role of the media in reporting climate change and the growing sense that we were causing the current changes in climate.

Chapter 3 looks at the evidence for climate change: from temperature, precipitation and sea level readings and the challenges in making different ways in making the readings compatible. Methods used to measure have changed over the decades, so the data must be adjusted, otherwise the recording methods would bias the conclusions made from the data.

Chapter 4 looks at how the global climate is modelled and how the modelling has grown in sophistication and how scientists use the models to simulate the climate (past, present and future) to come to a confident conclusion that global warming is happening.

Chapter 5 looks at the impact climate change will have, from changes in weather patterns, sea level rise to the effect of more frequent and violent storms, floods and heatwaves. The effects on human health, food and biodiversity are outlined.

Chapter 6 looks at what possible surprises might be in store with global warming, depending on how the global climate reacts (slowly or suddenly) to global warming. Melting ice sheets, changes in ocean circulation patterns and the release of cold methane are some of the consequences.

Chapter 7 looks at the politics around climate change, with a history of the various attempts at coming to agreements about cutting out (or down) on carbon dioxide emissions. Carbon trading and REDD (Reduced Emissions and Deforestation and Forest Degradation) are also covered.

Chapter 8 looks at possible solutions to global warming, from adaptation and mitigation to alternative sources of clean energy. Geoengineering is also mentioned.

Chapter 9 looks to the future of the earth and which 'red lines' have been crossed or could be (like loss of biodiversity), what actions can still be taken and what solutions are possible.