Only standout was Henry Lien's Pearl Rehabilitation Colony for Ungrateful Daughters. ( )

I'll just briefly address the story content of the issue, which consists of three novelettes and five short stories. Overall I mildly liked this issue for the variety of stories and some good ones, but it is a mixed bag with some very weak ones. I expect better. The stories are:

• Pearl Rehabilitative Colony for Ungrateful Daughters • by Henry Lien
• Dignity • by Jay O'Connell
• The Fitter • by Timons Esaias
• Vox ex Machina • by William Preston
• Bloom • by Gregory Norman Bossert
• Grainers • by R. Neube
• Frog Watch • by Nancy Kress
• Entangled • by Ian R. MacLeod

There is a small bit of offbeat humor/charm to Henry Lien's sword and kung-fu fighting on ice skates yarn “Pearl Rehabilitative Colony for Ungrateful Daughters.”

"Make me die of laughing!"
"Piss me off to death!"

OK, that was it. Well, not true. There's a funny bit at the end too. Unfortunately it wasn't enough to make me really like this legendary story of a bullying, snotty uber-obnoxious stuck-up teen sent to a very strange reform school.

Jay O’Connell's "Dignity" followed and shows us a scary future. If you don't think about what is going on it is mildly amusing as the young girl Melissa works hard to outwit her parents and do something she is not supposed to. I thought it was very well written and in only a few pages it really made vivid a scary future of haves vs. "the hopeless." This was a good one.

An amusing satirical piece on aliens enhancing the sale of women's underwear is about all I'll say about "The Fitter" by Timons Esaias.

For me, “Vox ex Machina,” by William Preston really failed to deliver an interesting story when it started with such potential. A flight attendant finds the head of a robot or android left in an overhead compartment of a plane. This could have gone somewhere but it didn't.

I think Greg Bossert's "Bloom" is the standout piece in the issue. Set on an alien planet a man and two women find themselves caught out at night amidst an alien growth that could violently consume them within seconds. The tension of this situation is handled well as they hope for a slight chance of rescue before the dawn comes.

R. Neube’s “Grainers” is told in an unusual manner - we switch back and forth between two first person characters that a time or two had me wondering who was who and what was what. It isn't a bad story but I didn't really warm to it - a refugee ship has sent a false signal that they need immediate rescue and the real reason is to con the rescuer out of some goods. I picked up some "Firefly" vibes.

I enjoyed "Frog Watch” by Nancy Kress. A young woman who is trying to recover from the death of her husband has semi-isolated herself by moving to a swampy rural area. She lives in a one room cabin and reads books from the library in town. More importantly, she monitors five types of frogs in the swamp for Frog Watch. This was an activity she had done with her husband but she has rededicated herself to the effort of documenting the population declines and deformities that are taking place worldwide. Her reports show far healthier and active populations of all kinds of frogs. Things get very weird when she tries to meet her neighbor.

I'm not quite sure what to make of Ian MacLeod’s “Entangled.” The premise was really preposterous to me once I started to understand what had supposedly happened to the world, now post-collapse from a viral encephalitic plague that had entangled people's minds into something vaguely like a hive mind, but not. Martha, our late middle-aged protagonist is different, unaffected by this because of a brain injury suffered earlier in life. There is however a very interesting story within this dystopian setting as Martha tries to find and make her way in this world, alone amongst the communal humanity around her. A good story. ( )