Albedo One From Aeon Press
Issue # 35 of Ireland's Leading Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror Magazine
Albedo One has been Ireland's premier speculative fiction magazine since 1993, publishing two --at best three-- issues a year. Now available in an electronic version, the small editorial team concentrate on quality above quantity, and on bringing a distinctive tone to the contents.
Alastair Reynolds
Each issue leads with interviews with major or emerging genre figures, and the currentt issue leaads off with Alastair Reynolds, author of the bestselling Revelation Space. Reynolds comes across as a hardworking author who is thoroughly grounded in the genre.
Editor of the horror section of the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror for over two decades, Ellen Datlow has also edited two of the genre's most influential magazines, Omni and Sci-Fi.com. As such, she has had a major influence on the field, without being familiar to the majority of readers.
Steve Rasnic Tem
International Horror Guild and Bram Stoker award winner Steve Rasnic Tem leads the fiction section with 'Off The Map,' a wonderfully elliptical allegory on international politics under the guise of a family vacation.
Two stories short listed for the 2006-7 Aeon Award appear next. In Sean Day's 'Partial Recall' the semi-zombified survivors of an unspecified apocalypse are revived by robot dogs. 'Partial Recall' would probably benefit from being read with the rest of the author's 'Dead Seattle' stories, but as it is doesn'treally work in isolation. Better is Micahel Furlong's 'Dress Rehearsal,' in which a young girl prepares for her grandmother's funeral, innocent of the dark secrets surrounding her family. An excellent story.
In "Larry's Shrine" by Kim McDougall a photographic artist unable to compose finds a kind of equilibrium at last.
Fred Johnston
Fred Johnston is a Belfast writer who nowadays writes mostly in French, but for this issue, he has not only translated Claude Seignolle's "The Man Who Could Not Die" but also provided the stand-out "Beauty." A British expatriate settles in Brittany, and develops an interest in Breton folklore that eventually becomes an obsession, particularly when he tells his doctor friend that he has met a little girl looking for her father.
Dermot Ryan's "Gladstone" runs "Beauty" a close second as the best story in the magazine, and tells of a writer, a children's birthday party, and a very unusual magician and his bag.
Noted without comment is Colin Harvey's novellette "On The Rock."
Juliet E. McKenna
Juliet E. McKenna rounds off the contents with reviews of a number of new anthologies.
With it's unusual and evocative cover by French artist Rolando Cyril, Albedo One has a truly international perspective; the contributors are American, Canadian, British, Irish and French and it gives the magazine a very distinctive feel.
Save Our Souls by Rolando Cyril
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