Hub Magazine, Issues #63-69

Featured in Hub #63, gun-for-hire Ivy Flowers travels back in time to recover a hijacked train in Alasdair Stuart’s “Ivy and the Pirate Queen.” It gets more colorful: the train is a time machine on a sightseeing trip on the Moon 4,000 years ago, and the hijacker is a holographic AI of Ivy’s notorious grandmother (the Pirate Queen of the title).

Stuart gives us plenty of action and snappy dialog, but the settings and characters are too thinly realized to provide anything but a bare-bones reading experience. Nor does the plot stand up to close inspection: grandma has her motives for hijacking the train, but why does she try to get her granddaughter killed (by dinosaurs, no less)? With more attention to these details, “Ivy and the Pirate Queen” could have been zany fun.

“Lovers Sleeping” by M P Ericson (Hub #64) is a well-written, engaging tale about a warrior and his sword. The intimacy of the relationship brings to mind Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné, although the interaction between man and sword couldn’t be more different. Where Elric’s sword is capricious, this narrator’s sword is faithful—fickle only at the moment she chose him as her master. The narrator tells the story of that first encounter and closes with a plea for the sword which is poignant and believable in its intensity.

According to Literature.org: “Dracula’s Guest” by Bram Stoker (Hub #65) was “excised from the original Dracula mss by his publisher because of the length of the original book mss. It was published as a short story in 1914, two years after Stoker’s death.” The excision is understandable; “Dracula’s Guest” adds little depth to Harker’s character and seems a lengthy digression from the story’s main arc. En route to Dracula’s castle in the Carpathian Mountains, Harker is traveling by coach on Walpurgisnacht when he decides to take a side road. The fact that his German-speaking coachmen is well and thoroughly freaked doesn’t faze Harker one bit. At least Stoker was consistent in developing Harker’s character: as with the rest of Dracula, Harker is TSTL (too stupid to live). Still, Stoker fans will appreciate this short story, with its richly drawn setting and frantic, nightmarish action. Just don’t expect much of an appearance from your favorite count.

Dave Hoing’s “We. They.” (Hub #66) gives a haunting look at a community troubled with plague but destroyed by fear. The disease strikes only children at first, slowly turning them into statues. Meanwhile, “they” wait beyond the village, a dreaded other whom “we” hate and wish to exclude with a wall. As an extended metaphor about the hazards of isolationism, “We. They.” packs considerable punch—and relevance.

The Golden Age of science fiction was ripe for what might be called “idea stories”—tales that showcased a concept but featured little else in the way of plot, character development, conflict, or action. Penelope Friday’s “Life from Mars” (Hub #67) is just such a story. There’s a clever idea buried here about the origins of life, but Friday trips up by inserting her Creation Story at the fall of the Age of Dinosaurs. Sorry, Ms. Friday, but the evolutionary lineage of mankind can be traced back much farther than that. I suspect many hard SF fans will not forgive that sort of error.

In “A Box of Spoons” (Hub #68), Eugie Foster* front-loads the story with elements which, combined, promise an imaginative fantasy. There’s Missy, daughter of the goddess Aphrodite; there’s Aunt Serenity, who makes nagging phone calls from the beyond the grave; and there are a host of silver trading spoons, whose magical effects can transform lives—and more. Foster’s characters are three-dimensional and sympathetic, and her writing lacks no polish, so I was eager to see where her confident hand would lead me. Gradually, the story slips the moorings of reality and veers into deep water where there are no rules; there is no logic. I wasn’t sure what to make of the perplexing ending. Is this a cautionary tale warning us to be content with our lives and not wish for better, or has something more profound transpired? I’m still scratching my head.

Good, solid storytelling makes “Fusion Heart, Automatic Swan” by James Targett (Hub #69) the star of this group. In a world that is both Victorian and futuristic, a mixed group of socialites take an airship to the island of super-wealthy Alexander Worth for a weekend of hunting and fishing. The roguish Rudyard wants to court young, beautiful Aramathea Willoughby, but her dowager aunt stands in the way. All is not as it seems, though, and before long there’s bloodshed, and a conspiracy threatens to blossom with disastrous consequences. This is an ambitious story which largely succeeds in being both exciting and poignant.

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