Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine #34

With its determinedly pulpy focus on humorous science fiction, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine isn’t going to be mistaken for Granta very often. But that’s okay—sometimes one prefers a beer to a Bordeaux.

There are always a few stories in ASIM that are serious in tone, so each issue has more in the way of contrast than their publicity might suggest. The two shortest pieces demonstrate different non-humorous approaches.

Nigel Stones’s “Drinking From the Saucer” is told in the second person singular. When you awake, a voice starts to explain what has happened to you. You have been kidnapped and are now being held captive in a flying saucer. The voice also belongs to a captive human, and he is telling you exactly why the aliens capture humans (and, believe me, it’s much, much worse than receiving an anal probe). Your only hope for survival is to listen carefully. Subtle it isn’t, and Stones’s main task is to get the readers to the payoff before they realise what is happening. He succeeds and delivers a nasty little horror story that’ll put teeth on edge.

The title of the second flash piece, “This is Not a Love Song,” comes from a Public Image Limited single from the mid-eighties. One suspects that Lyn Battersby may share the same love for new wave and punk music that one of her characters has, but the title does misdirect the reader somewhat. Battersby keeps her cards very close to her chest in order to keep the twist from the reader but then fails to display them properly at the end. Carl is surreptitiously watching his wife, Diane, from outside her house. It soon becomes apparent that Carl has travelled six years back in time to just before he first met her. What is he planning to do? What part does his younger self have in all of this? It’s a poignant and intriguing story, but the reader might have to go back to the start to check what exactly is going on.

The rest of the fiction is mixed in tone. The lead story, R J Astruc’s “The Flying Woman,” is suffused with humour and is a wonderfully warm and moving tale that reflects its protanganist’s worldview. If you were a millennia-old Persian djinn who now lives in a working class housing estate in London, you’d probably have a pretty dry take on humanity as well. Even Zeem is perturbed by the nonstop screaming that has started permeating the flats, though. The other residents manage to cope by drowning it out and blaming the pipes, but he is determined to get to the bottom of it. Then one of his neighbours, wide-boy Johnny, reveals that he can see a flying woman outside the flats. It turns out that Zeem is not the only supernatural entity in the vicinity. You can almost smell Astruc’s London, such is the sense of place, and the tumble of characters rings true as well. It’s easily the highlight of this issue.

Wade Albert White’s “The Assassin’s Gentleman” is also pretty funny but comes at you from another angle entirely. Imagine Jane Austin writing cyberpunk and you’ll have a pretty good grasp of it. Ashleigh Yamamoto Wackrill is an assassin. Naturally, someone in her position requires a butler, but she is annoyed when a robot turns up to fill the vacancy. She hates robots, but never mind. She has to dispatch a victim who is hosting a fancy dress party, and the staff issues will have to wait until later. Problems of etiquette have to be circumvented as the body count grows. It’s a delight. Occasionally toward the end, the voice starts to slip, and we get dashes of Edwardian English as well as Southern belle, but I’m nit-picking now.

The voice in “Bitter Elsie May” is much less assured but starts to improve as the story progresses. Tessa Kum has chosen to frame her sea-faring tale a little like “The Rime of The Ancient Mariner,” and there is a touch of Moby-Dick about the plot, but it captures the reader after a page or so. A west country sailor is press-ganged into serving on the Bitter. The thing is, he recognises the sailing ship as the Elsie May; he used to serve on it under its previous captain. The new officers refuse to supply answers, but the ship itself soon starts to take a gruesome revenge on the crew. The very annoying opening section could easy have been sacrificed and we would have had a much more immediate story that loses nothing. In contrast to White, Kum’s narrative voice seems to strengthen as her story progresses.

M P Ericson’s “Blood Debt” (the cover story) is a dark, serious tale that nevertheless manages to entertain. It’s set in a harsh generic fantasy world that is analogous to our Dark Ages. There appears to be no supernatural element in this world, but it necessitates the use of a fantasy world due to its social structure. It’s a very violent place, and a skilled fighter can make a living by duelling in the pits. When Drysi’s father is killed in the pits, she decides to go after the killer, Karla, another woman fighter. There is a touch of Hamlet’s syndrome when Drysi joins Karla in her journey south as she realises that it will be little more than suicide to fight her, since Karla is a much stronger and more experienced fighter. Honour, however, leaves her little room for manoeuvre. Also confusing her judgement is her involvement with her lover, a guardsman, who disagrees with her quest for vengeance. I’ve got another little niggle about the use of language here. Yes, I realise that what we’re reading is a translation from whatever language the adventurers speak in their world, but the word “Crap” still comes across as anachronistic. I doubt that this is a world with an inventor called Thomas Crapper.

“The Witchmaiden and the Dragon: A Riff” is a very self-aware story, but in a commendable way. As the title suggests, it’s a traditional fairy-tale setting—two poor sons, a kingdom, a king, a princess, a dragon to slay, and a jealous witchmaiden. Ellie Tupper has served up a dollop of James Branch Cabell for us, with double entendres about quarterstaffs and the like, and her story is another of the high points of the issue.

The tropes in “Murphy’s Law” are those of space opera. The narrator is a cynical engineer on a beat-up cargo ship with a multispecies crew. They are transporting Alkan Slime-beasts when engine failure lands them in what appears to be an uninhabited system. Luckily, a hostile planet reveals signs of previous crashes, and so there is the possibility of spare parts. But are there survivors? While it’s hardly the most original story you’ll read (it wouldn’t look out of place in a 1950s issue of Galaxy), you should have fun with it. Shana Lear gives the impression that there’s much more to this universe than this story, and I’ll be looking out for more of her work. She does great oddball characters.

This issue also has a poem, “Ride Away” by Elizabeth Barrette, an interview with Jackie Kessler, an article by Tehani Wessely on the relevance of fantasy worlds, an editorial from Joanne Anderton, and a few book reviews.