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Summary: Electric Velocipede, 2005
John Klima's Electric Velocipede continues to appear twice a year. This year saw issues 8 and 9. I said last year that 2004 was the best year for this continually improving magazine -- I can say that it is still improving, and 2005 was better still. There were a total of 16 stories, one a shortish novelette, the other short stories, only one a "short-short" (and that a long one at some 1400 words). Total word count 55,000.
From the Spring issue I especially liked Liz Williams' "Serpent's Tooth", a fairly traditional SF story about alien lifecycles. There's nothing terribly new here -- the story of the Terran scientist unfortunately misunderstanding a key detail of alien reproduction has been a staple of the genre since at least the 50s. But Williams does a good job with this familiar material. This issue also featured a very strange Charles Coleman Finlay piece, and some good poetry by Sonya Taaffe.
I thought the Fall issue was particularly good. Hal Duncan's "The Chiaroscurist" was the novelette, a fine piece set in an alternate Renaissance, with hobbit-analogues (who also work as Jew-analogues), and Elf-analogues, and so on. The story concerns a painter and his years-long Michelangelo-like project, controversial because he choose a "hobben" as his model for God. I also quite liked Mark Tiedemann's "Hard Time", about a very different quasi-reality series, an actor portraying a man serving a long jail sentence. And Jason Erik Lundberg's "Solipsister" is a good "solipsism" story. Mark Rich, Anna Tambour, and Neil Williamson also contributed solid work to this issue.
This is definitely one of the best of the large crop of saddle-stitched small 'zines in our field, and it is refreshingly ready to publish lots of true Science Fiction. (As opposed to Dark Fantasy/Horror or Slipstream, the more usual foci of such 'zines.)
