Aegeon: Science-Fiction Illustrated #9 (2024)

Brace your sphincters for a bevy of bodacious science-fiction, it's time for this crummy review blog that no one reads to venture forth into the world of weird fiction magazines!

I admit, I'm not the best at keeping up with genre fiction periodicals. Even the classic stuff that a fan of adventure, fantasy, horror, or sci-fi should indulge in, whether it's Amazing Stories or Weird Tales, always seemed to slip past my radar in favor of larger anthologies or compilations. However, in recent years we've had an uptick in independently published short fiction magazines celebrating various facets of pulp and genre fiction and I decided it was well past time for me to check some of them out considering the absolute state of mainstream publishing at the present. The first one I gravitated to was the science-fiction magazine Aegeon, mainly because I discovered the editor on X and found his observations on the hell of modern Western civilization to be right up my alley.

So Aegeon #9 is the most recent issue of the magazine as I write this review, and it's quite a breath of fresh air and a welcome respite from mainstream sci-fi. I think the badass 'synthwave Whitesnake music video' front cover probably grabbed my attention first, but the back cover blurb imploring the reader to "put down your soy fiction and your Harry Potterized time-travel stories" was probably what made the sale for me. But does this tome back up all the shit-talking?

Well, they're not all winners. There's a couple of pieces here that are part of ongoing serials, so if you're a dork like me jumping in at issue nine and trying to read them in medias res then you might struggle to understand everything that's going on. (But that's the fault of yours truly, not those stories.) There are one or two pieces that didn't quite grab me all the way - "Fernworld" by Bruce Pendragon for instance - has a plot involving a planet full of... well... ferns and a stranded space traveler. The main character's plight is identifiable by the reader from extremely early on in the story, so much so that I was waiting for an even bigger twist or something wildly unexpected to go down on this weird plant planet... but the twist never came, resulting in what I felt was a muted and flat ending.

However, I ended up enjoying the majority of the short stories featured in this issue of Aegeon. Some of my favorites include the trippy "Mara and Dizzy" by A.J. Bell, which... I'm not sure if it was intended as an anti-drug PSA, but the characters experiencing swift consequences of taking unknown street drugs and then suffering through wild hallucinations that involve living chess pieces in the aftermath sure could pass for an anti-drug PSA. Also, there's a cat in it. Cats are cool.

I also had a lot of fun with "Polybius" by Michael Gallo (who is also credited for a chunk of the interior artwork in this issue too - more on that in a moment). The story focuses on the rather creepy urban legend of the Polybius arcade machine and features an aging Italian pinball wizard and what may or may not be a former member of the 'men in black'. The author is clearly well-versed in arcade machine lore and also has some insight into the myths surrounding Polybius, which adds a nice air of authenticity to the piece. He also manages to convincingly work a Motörhead reference into the narrative, so how could I not give the author his laurels here?

For me, the star of the show is "The Duelists" by C.P. Webster. What starts out as something of a military adventure tale with a German pilot and an American pilot vying for domination of the skies quickly turns into something otherworldly and mysterious as the two pilots whose countries are at war with one another become makeshift allies after crash landing into what appears to be an alien world. It would be a crime to reveal the lovely twist of this story here, so I can go no further with any plot synopsis. But I also liked this story for its brief character studies. One of the characters is clearly more educated than the other and the reader is left wondering if this will pay dividends for him or be his undoing as the story progresses. C.P. Webster's fiction has also been featured in the likes of The Bizarchives and Lovecraftiana, and based on the strength of "The Duelists", I'm definitely going to be seeking out more of this author's works in the future.

Beyond all of the short fiction crammed into this bad boy, there's also a whole lot of black and white artwork to pore over, some non-fiction editorials about the way of the world right now, and a hilarious 'mail bag' section at the end. There's a couple of comics and even a pair of old-school mazes to solve if that's your thing, but neither of these things were really up my alley. Still, there's something for everyone in Aegeon if you're a sci-fi fan - made even sweeter by the fact that it's free of the taint of contemporary social politics. I will very likely be perusing for back issues of this magazine in the near future. Recommended.

Prisoner of Dreams (1989)

Jo-lac is a working woman plying her trade as a small-time cargo hauler on the fringes of space. She's got herself a ship, a badass and sometimes sassy AI as her navigator, and a literal friendly mutant to act as co-pilot, bodyguard, and occasional living sex toy. After getting screwed out of a job, Jo is forced to take the shittiest contract imaginable (and the bane of all video game players) - an escort mission. The live cargo arrives in the form of Lewis, a broken man who Jo soon discovers is a sinister military experiment gone awry. Now the powers-that-be want Lewis and anyone he's come in contact with dead, sending Jo and her crew permanently on the run. It's Steve McQueen in The Getaway... in space!

I always try to do at least some level of basic research into the books I review here, but unfortunately for Prisoner of Dreams I couldn't find too much information on author Karen Ripley. Beyond the generic blurb at the back of the book which tries to present the author as a kooky animal lover writing her first novel, all I could really gather is that Ripley was a pen name for Mary Urhausen, a Wisconsin-based writer who sadly passed away in 2018. Her writing career for Ballantine/Del Rey is also fairly brief, running from only 1989 until 1994 and producing five novels in the process. There's hardly any talk of her books in sci-fi forums online today and there were scant few contemporaneous reviews of her novels that I could dig up from the early 90's either. A true enigma we have here.

It's a shame that Karen Ripley isn't more of a known commodity for sci-fi readers, because Prisoner of Dreams is a decent freshman offering if you like your space travel adventures more on the grime and rust colored side. One could argue a novel like Prisoner of Dreams was doing the 'working class stiffs in a quasi-space western setting' long before hacks like Joss Whedon popularized it with stuff like Firefly. The author is also reverent to genre luminaries such as Robert Heinlein (to the point of naming an entire planet after him in her setting) and opts for a more Battletech approach to the far future where humanity conquers space... and finds out they're really all alone in this vast universe. There's a certain kind of existential dread channeled up by the no aliens thing that I always find interesting to explore. In short, there's more than a few things for genre fans to sink their teeth into here.

That said, there were certain moments in Prisoner of Dreams where I got the sense that Ripley was a bit of a leftie, albeit mercifully a milquetoast one with nothing more offensive than some generic 60's hippie politics. A couple of instances of cringe feminist rhetoric shows up, although these are tempered by doses of realism. For instance, in the author's version of the far future, there is a genuine equality between men and women when it comes to lines of work, but it was only brought about because large swathes of the best men died fighting in a series of cataclysmic wars. This novel was written in the late 80's in a time of relative cultural decency, so the reader is spared any hint of trans agenda like a lot of modern science-fiction from the big publishing houses want to ram down your throats nowadays. The author's world is also set in something of a dystopia, with nebulous civilian and military authorities running almost everything and a caste system where the genetically defected are sterilized at a young age to ensure the gene pool becomes strong again.

The main character initially starts out as a tough, salt-of-the-earth kind of tomboy who rails against the planetary authorities trying to stifle out most of her paychecks, but towards the latter half of the novel Jo loses much of her agency and becomes a bit of a wallflower in certain scenes as the inevitable love affair with Lewis begins to play out. However, I found myself accepting of this character arc simply because it was written as a somewhat believable take on the potential chaotic reactions in the human mind while someone is in the process of falling in love. Jo even reflects on her inability to make rational decisions because of how hard she has fallen for Lewis right up until the novel's denouement, when she has enough cognizance to break free of the romantic reverie for long enough to make a smart choice.

(Silly aside: I would like to point out that the used paperback copy of Prisoner of Dreams I was reading was clearly owned by a female reader before me, because the chapter where Jo and Lewis finally get it on was visibly dog-eared with a tiny little heart drawn in with colored biro at the start of the chapter. A favorite section to revisit for the previous reader, huh?)

However, I think my absolute favorite part of the novel is the author's super hi-tech gee whiz prediction for an absolutely groundbreaking piece of future technology only possible hundreds of years from now in the far reaches of outer space is... essentially a bluetooth headset. You see, Jo is also a music lover and in troubled times during space travel when there's little else to do but wait until the ship arrives at the spaceport, Jo likes to pop in one of these newfangled earpiece/computer chips and listen to music that nobody else around her can hear! Reading it now, it's so quaint how the author goes into obsessive detail describing what was only a fantasy in the era it was written and realizing you can now go to virtually any department store and buy at least a generic set of wireless earbuds for relatively cheap. I will say that I related to Jo somewhat in that she has a lot of disdain for current music, listens to a lot of the classics, and appears to be a metalhead. Based, if true.

Despite a few mild cringes and the hints of a Hallmark romance story, I had a good time with Prisoner of Dreams and feel as if it has been unfairly consigned to the dustbin of history. If you run across a copy at your local used bookstore, give it a shot.

Doctor Who: Warriors' Gate and Beyond (2023)

The Doctor, Romana, K-9, and Adric find themselves drawn into a transcendental void alongside the crew of a slave ship and their lion-esque time sensitive slaves. There are no roads in the void, but if there were, they would all invariably point towards the mysterious arch and the hall filled with cobweb coated mirrors inside. What mysteries lie within the eponymous Warriors' Gate and can they be exploited to get this misfit band of time and space castaways out of the void and back home? Hunker down, boys - it's a Tom Baker in the maroon coat episode!

Warriors' Gate ranks fairly high on my list of all-time great Doctor Who serials. For me, it's the highlight of a criminally underrated season of the show. Say what you will about John Nathan-Turner's run as producer and his obsession with the question mark motif, the Fourth Doctor's cosmetic changes, the departure of some of the regular cast members, and the sometimes uncomfortable on-screen friction between then-lovers Tom Baker and Lalla Ward, season 18 of Doctor Who with its overriding theme of entropy carrying through all the stories like a precursor to more contemporary plot arcs in television is really what set the show up to have darker, more mature, and I daresay more adherent to the science-fiction genre based stories throughout the rest of the 1980's. Warriors' Gate - with its weird and surreal edge, trippy visuals, and hints of black comedy sprinkled throughout - has won me over every time I've watched it.

So here we have the original screenwriter (and author of the original Target novelization) Stephen Gallagher doing an updated version of his own work on Warriors' Gate. The original text from the 1982 novel is purported to be 'expanded' (although I'd have to read them back to back to tell you if that claim is true or not), but this 2023 version becomes an anthology by including two linked short stories after the conclusion of the main story. More on those short stories in a moment.

Right away, fans of the show will notice a number of alterations from the televised version of this story. Apparently, the novelization is based in part upon earlier drafts of what would become the shooting scripts, so things that were changed or abandoned entirely when it came time to film are included here in the novel, including a completely different introduction to the slaver spaceship and how it ends up trapped in the void where the majority of the story takes place. The way in which Romana is written out of the story at the conclusion is also handled differently, first with a touch of foreshadowing, and then with a more drawn-out and emotional farewell scene. I personally prefer how it was handled on-screen, which opted for a quick Douglas Adams-style goodbye, the Doctor paraphrasing Shakespeare, and then end scene. Obviously, your mileage may vary here.

Warriors' Gate and Beyond also loses a lot of the wonderfully weird stuff in its adaptation to print. Despite his best efforts, Gallagher's descriptive language simply cannot capture the strangeness of how the void looks on-screen, nor does he come close to echoing the trippy proto-MTV music video visuals of the Tharils phasing in and out of time. We also sadly lose the slightly unsettling and bizarre black and white photograph backdrops of the world beyond the mirrors. Instead of trying to rival the show in terms of flavor then, Gallagher takes the novel in a different direction, focusing more on the petty class warfare that seems to be a constant for the crew aboard the Privateer slaver ship. He also spends a fair amount of time devoted to the insipid and sometimes impotent authoritarianism of the captain Rorvik. And without spoiling anything, the crew's rather ghastly fate at the end of the novel is a lot more disturbing than what was allowed on BBC television at the time. The author certainly had an axe to grind when it came to middle-management bureaucracy.

This all still makes for an intriguing science-fiction story, but it's one more grounded in our own reality than the otherworldly nature of the television adaption.

After the main story of Warriors' Gate wraps up, we have two short stories. "The Kairos Ring" sees Romana and her Tharil companion Lazlo riding the 'time winds' in much the same way the Doctor uses his TARDIS to catapult themselves backwards and forwards through time to different battlefield eras as they combat an alien parasite collecting soldiers of living dead to create an unstoppable army. In the process of battling this enemy, Romana and Lazlo put together their own little mostly scholarly fighting force comprised of refugees of time. A lot of readers seem to enjoy this story, but it feels a bit twee for my liking, and has all the breakneck pacing of the awful post 2005 NuWho series that I have come to despise.

Meanwhile, "The Little Book of Fate" sees the Eighth Doctor bump into Lazlo and a regenerated Romana hiding in plain sight as a troupe of carnival freaks at a traveling show. I'm going to sound like a major league nerd here, but while this story doesn't specifically contradict other stories, the implication that the Doctor and Romana haven't seen each other possibly since she left in Warriors' Gate does gently ignore the Virgin-era novel Blood Harvest where the Seventh Doctor collects Romana from E-Space. Either way, I found this story as equally unnecessary as the prior short with that same bad hint of NuWho ick in the vicinity with allusions to the Time War wankery. The last thing I want is any whiff of the new series polluting classic Who, so I would say both short stories are mediocre desserts after a satisfying main course.

Mostly recommended.