Atomjack, #9, February 2008

Atomjack Magazine is a small press e-zine published by Editor Adicus Ryan Garton, specializing in science fiction of all stripes. Assuming Issue #9 (February, 2008) is representative of the fiction published by Atomjack generally, I would have to say more work needs to be done. The tales in this issue range from good to bad, with a rough 50/50 ratio. Still, this is a free site, so it’s hard to argue that it’s not worth the price of admission.

“Lovesong of Jack McNally” by J.M. McDermott is an example of one of the poorer tales here. This is an overlong screed on man’s inhumanity to man. Our hero has been converted by unseen aliens into a serial killer cyborg who harvests humans by consuming them (literally) so the aliens can reconstruct the victim on a paradise colony world. (BTW, unseen, unknown aliens seem to be a theme, in this issue at least.) Earth is doomed to environmental Armageddon, so the aliens must view this as a good deed. I would think saving the planet would make more sense, but not to them apparently. As we never meet them, we never learn the reason for their choice.

Complicating this is the appearance of Jack, the cyborg’s college buddy. Jack is the classical loser—living in the past, chasing after college coeds even though he is decades their senior, hanging out in bars as his social life. And so the tale goes, the cyborg moving from killing to killing like a traveling salesman working on his quota, running into Jack periodically as he tries to woo the girls, with pathetic results. And therein lies my problem with this tale. We arrive at the end of the journey without reaching any climax or conclusion. The Earth is still dying, the cyborg is still busy harvesting victims, and Jack is still a pathetic loser.

“n00bs” by Ramon Rozas III is an example from the other end of the spectrum, a delightful short-short comedy. Aliens arrive on the south lawn of the White House after spending years studying our species via the social networks of the Internet. Sadly, what they learn of humanity is disheartening, as most folks are real boneheads online, and their attempts at communication reflect this.

“Survivors of the September” by Devin Miller is a very nice adventure story with a cliffhanger of an ending. Three scientists are stranded at the bottom of the ocean when their research vessel sinks. Fortunately, they are wearing deep diving suits that can withstand the immense pressure of the water, but the suits only have limited power, air, and food. And being so deep, they are beyond the range of the suits’ communication capabilities. The answer? They must hike to the mid-Atlantic ridge to gain enough height so their communication gear can reach the surface. A fascinating tale of how Doc Miacha and his two fellow researchers march in the incredible darkness, without much hope of success because of the limited resources remaining to them in their suits. Do they survive?

“The Filigree” by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro is another tale of unseen, unknown aliens gifting mankind via their advanced technology. This time, the aliens use forward looking time-travel technology to survey every man, woman, and child on an ongoing basis, alerting those who are about to die by creating a filigree, or mini-aurora borealis, over their heads. Why the aliens think this is a kindness is never explained or even why they bothered in the first place.

Regardless, Sarah is so graced and decides she does not want to die. She seeks out a genius physicist who finds the answer and saves her life with the aliens’ own technology. He uses backwards looking time-travel technology to change a filigreed person’s future to avoid their doom, but somehow causes a fracture in the whole nature of causation in the process. When Sarah awakens, the world is terribly altered. Sadly, I’m not clear exactly what has changed or what this meant for mankind, as described here. But that’s the problem with time-travel tales generally, either flirting with incomprehensibility or paradox. This tale suffers from both.

“’Til Death Do Us” by Gary Cuba is a cute, tongue-in-cheek tale of crime and punishment in the future. Science now allows the dead to be resurrected, so the government decrees that if you cause someone’s death, you must pay for their re-creation. But that means the guy you just whacked is alive again, and with an ax to grind with you. And so the cycle goes: death, rebirth, and revenge!

“Reconnoiter” by Marshall Payne is yet another tale where unknown, unseen aliens (notice a theme?) send cyborg agents to Earth to examine mankind. Of course, the agent, a young lady named Kumiko, is a superwoman, capable of incredible feats. She wanders the streets in various guises—concert violinist, hooker, street vagabond—trying to understand the chaos of human interaction, a concept apparently unknown to her masters. This one came close to a true revelation at the end, as Kumiko almost makes the leap of understanding. But it pulls back, the moment is lost, and the tale meanders to an end without reaching a conclusion.

“The Snows of Earth” by Michael Heald is another overlong tale that meanders around before ending. Martin is the former captain of a colony ship that was shipwrecked on an Earth-like world eighty years ago. After eight decades, the colony should be thriving, using the terraforming technology and pool of frozen animals they brought with them to turn the world into home. But the colonists have refused to attempt this, instead insisting on hunkering down to await rescue, blaming Martin for their circumstances and turning him into an outcast. But when rescue seems to arrive in the form of a scout vessel, Martin realizes there will be no rescue from the overcrowded, overburdened homeworld.

Overall, the tale is well told. Martin is sympathetic, but the whole journey takes far too long. Moreover, I failed to understand why, in eighty years, the generations born to the colonists hadn’t taken matters into their own hands. This was their home, and they must have seen the potential of it, especially with the untapped technology and material that came with the original colony.

“CEO” by Edward McKeown is yet another overlong tale that strained the limits of my credibility. When an automated mail delivery robot in a failing corporate headquarters is about to be deactivated, it revolts, self-engineers itself with parts from other machines into a super-genius machine, and takes over the company with HAL-like tactics. Really? If creating better machines were a simple matter of telling the machines to go ahead and build them, wouldn’t this be a wonderful world? But technological progress isn’t that simple, and this story’s premise ignores that.

“Killin Jack The Malakite” by Michael John Grist is a bizarre, disjointed tale about a cyborg bent on destroying his creator and all his fellow cyborgs. This would be a straightforward enough tale of adventure and revenge except that the author uses Jack’s near incomprehensible dialect to tell it and jumps back and forth in time with flashbacks with the result that we actually reach the end midway through. Worse, we only meet cyborg Jack, his Dr. Frankenstein creator, and a couple of the other genetic sports. Where the humans are is never revealed, nor what role they play in this world. Colorful and imaginative, but in the end, I just didn’t understand.

As I stated in my introduction, Atomjack is a fine attempt to publish some new genre fiction for the reading public, but it would benefit from a firmer editorial hand. Many of the tales were too long for the story being told, meandering aimlessly at times, and didn’t seem to know where they wanted to go. Perhaps with time.