Somewhat belatedly I've got my hands on the last issue of Postscripts....

Joe Hill. Bobby Conroy Comes Back From The Dead.

The fiction is started with this neat story from Hill, following on from his similarly well handled 'Best New Horror' in #3. A horror story, but only in that the setting is that of the filming of George Romero's 'Dawn of the Dead' zombie film. Bobby is an extra, goried up for a mass zombie scene, and it is in this unusual setting that he comes rotting-face to rotting-face with an ex-girlfriend. With a touch of the Stephen King's in its style, he and his ex-girl have to overcome their own personal daemons and past decisions in order to come together.

Stephen Baxter. A Signal from Earth.

Baxter frequently writes short 'pendants' to his longer works, and this follows the AIs from his novel 'Sunstorm' (not one I've read). He takes yet another look at how life can thrive in difficult circumstances, but takes a personal look at the impact on climate change on a race of seal-like creatures. Knowing that their race is doomed due to inevitable climate change, the race takes a very calculated action to reduce the pain of the annhilation that will come in generations to come : reduce the birthrate so that eventually only a very small number will actually perish. And it is the very last of the line, suitably named Witness, who will be the last of her kind to die.

However, a chance to survive, to follow the AIs, in a form alien to the one she knows, that is offered to her.

The Collected Short Stories of Stephen Baxter is going to be an enormous book when it's eventually produced. Best not to have it on the same shelf as The Collected Short Stories of Robert Reed.

Zoran Zivkovic. The Hospital Room.

Strangely enough, whilst I can quite happily accept Baxter's multiple 'pendants' and the 'variations on a theme' which he produces, I really can't extent the same hospitality to Zivkovic's multiple short stories. Obviously others like these stories, (previous editor of Interzone David Pringle, and Postscript's editor Peter Crowther), but with only a limited time for reading, I do need the kind of inventiveness that Baxter brings, and find ZZ's gentler stories don't justify the reading.

Chris Roberson. Gold Mountain.

Roberson's 'Companions to Owls' (Asimovs March 2006) is a cracker of a story, and 'Red Hands, Black Hands' (Dec 2004) (online at InfinityPlus was a finalist of the Sidewise Alternate History Award.

This is a follow-up to the latter, and for me provides a bit more oomph. The earlier story was a tale of courtly intrigue in a China which has global domination. Here the tale of the construction on an orbital elevator is told, through the story of an elderly American who was part of the construction team in his youth. We learn of the sacrifices he has made, leaving the States with his brother, and how love came between the pair which led to his brother's fatal fall from high up the elevator.

Julie McKenna. Win Some, Lose Some.

A prequel to her book 'The Thief's Gamble'. I do eschew fantasy for the most-part, especially cod(piece)-fantasy, and a story which starts in a smoky taverns is just generally going to turn me off very quickly. Interestingly, Larry Niven's Draco's Tavern turns me off as well, so it can't just be the fantasy element - probably just the fact that I find such stories fairly difficult to distinguish between. I've just been reading Michael Swanwick's 'The Iron Dragon's Daughter' - now that is fantasy, which more invention in a single page than the majority of cod-fantasy has in an entire fat trilogy.

Matthew Rossie. Palenque.

A series of letters with interlinking commentary which relate to Palenque wikipedia, knowledge about which I had was absolutely zero before reading the piece. It's no higher after reading about the piece, but relates to all that silliness about spaceships and aliens and Erich von Daniken.

Lawrence Person. Starving Africans.

The horrors of civil war in Africa are as nothing to the horrors in the mind which they feed.

Conclusion.

A broad spectrum of horror, SF, fantasy and speculative, with Baxter and Roberson, being sfnal, being the pick for me.