onspec 55 Winter 2003

onspec #55 Winter 2003 - website

I had hoped to review Canadian magazine onspec on a regular basis, but two years since the last review it's crystal clear that that isn't going to happen! Rather than consigning the review copy which has winged its way across the Atlantic to the bookshelves, I thought I'd have a quick read of a couple of stories and put this mini-review up.

A quick read is made easier by the fact that onspec invariable manages to squeeze in a dozen or so stories in each issue of c100 pages, by dint of making those stories of the short story variety - as opposed to novellas or novellettes. This tends to be a bit of a problem for me, as I find the end result is too 'bitty' and insubstantial overall, and that where the stories are good I invariably feel that there hasn't been enought space given to give them full rein.

One such case in question is the first story, Jay Lake's 'The Oxygen Man' which postulates a near future where the Earth is an ecological fuck-up, and in the way that in the past we have had newspapers and milk delivered to our doorsteps (still do in England!), the Oxygen Man comes around to ensure that each hermetically sealed house has enough oxygen to keep the inhabitants alive. The story features a young man, now head of the house, who is faced with a unpalatable fate - signing himself over to the Oxygen Man to ensure that what remains of his family are kept alive through the Oxygen Man's service. It's an interesting setting, and, as I say, leaves me feeling that only the barest justice has been done, and that Lake could easily have put much more into the story.

The other story which took my fancy was Jean-Claude Dunyach's 'What the Dead Know', primarily on account of the author having providing a couple of notable short stories in the recent past. Translated from the French, there is a lyrical tone to the story which pleases, although the tale of a young man on a strange Mediterranean island, from the waves on the beaches of which crawl the dead, is a tad too straightforward horror genre for moi.