Hub #24-26

Ian McHugh’s poetically titled “Requiem in D-Minor (for prions, whale and burning bush)” in Hub #24 elegantly connects all these elements and more. However, long-time readers and viewers of science fiction will find most of the tropes already familiar and may not be surprised by the outcome to which their interconnections eventually lead. The rapid changes of scene keep the story moving briskly, and the economy with which McHugh writes makes the story lean rather than thin, but his more thoroughly fleshing out the story’s ideas would have provided a greater scope for a fresh take on the material.

Eric Brown’s striking “Venus Macabre” in issue #25 centers on Jean-Philipe Devereaux, a performance artist of a sort that can only exist in an age of posthuman technology. In its references to Venusian jungles, the piece seems to hark back to old-fashioned pulp. The dark secrets, deadly grudges, and astonishing coincidences that come to a head at the story’s climax, the touches of life glimpsed from the very bottom and the very top, however, give it the feel of something Alfred Bester might have written. In this very concentrated form (the entire story comes to eight and a half pages), it packs quite a punch.

In issue #26, Eugie Foster’s* “The Music Company,” despite the title, is more reminiscent of Brown’s piece than McHugh’s. “The Music Company” features the density of detail, technologically upgraded bodies, and gritty street life of cyberpunk, but there is a touch of “post” as well here, given the centrality of a family drama. Wilson, an unemployed “joe” returns home to find that his two-year-old son, Taro, is gone. His wife, Lidi, it turns out, has indentured him to the titular music company. Suspecting that there is more to the matter than the company lets on, he searches for Taro, leading him to the horrific reality. A final twist takes the story in an unexpected but not inconceivable direction that does not diminish the impact of what went before. Like Brown’s story, this one also had me thinking of Bester.

[*Disclosure notice: Eugie Foster is the managing editor of The Fix.]