A Conversation With Pat Cadigan
An interview with Jakob Schmidt
On the evolution of Cyberpunk:
"When Cyberpunk started, the desktop computer was still a fairly new idea. Now everybody's got one. Not only has everybody got one, but everyone either has a palm pilot or a laptop or both. Cyberpunk isn't dead, it's just much more part of everybody's day-to-day existence. So naturally, the way you write about these things changes. You don't go on writing about the impact of the telephone on society. There is no impact of the telephone on society any more. The telephone is part of the standard furniture of our lives. So if you write about the telephone, you don't write about its impact on society as a whole -- unless of course you're writing historical fiction."

Schrödinger's Bookshelf
a column by Michael M Jones
Michael is reading short fiction and young adult titles and he has some thoughts. This time, he looks at Children of Magic edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Kerrie Hughes and Hags, Sirens & Other Bad Girls of Fantasy edited by Denise Little.

Star Wars: Outbound Flight by Timothy Zahn
reviewed by David Maddox
A prequel to 2004's Survivor's Quest, the story takes us back to a post-war Naboo, before the inception of the Clone Army. The reader gets to meet a non-clone Jorus C'baoth and see the beginnings of the Outbound Flight project, which, theoretically, will take Jedi and settlers to the far reaches of the next galaxy.

A Rift in Time by Michael Parziale
reviewed by David Hebblethwaite
When science fiction and fantasy collide, the result can often be a magical fantasy society located on an alien planet or far future Earth. The setting of this début novel (the first of a series), though, is pretty much the opposite: a Fantasyland "gone all sci-fi." The map at the front and the place names would be right at home in an epic fantasy; yet Aldurea is a futuristic world of hover-cars, energy swords and "dark matter" gateways. It's a set-up full of possibility.

Cartomancy by Michael Stackpole
reviewed by Alma A. Hromic
Possibly it's just that this is Book 2 of a series (something that doesn't actually appear anywhere on the FRONT page of the paperback, and which, if Alma had been aware of its nature, she might have thought twice about leaping into mid-stream as it were, trilogies being what they are. But on the whole, she doesn't think that this book would have taken her beyond those initial pages, whatever its birth order was. There were just too many things...

Blade: The Series
a promotion
BLADE: THE SERIES premieres on June 28. Spike TV's two-hour series premiere opens with Blade setting up shop in Detroit, investigating the vampire house of Chthon. Along the way he forms an uneasy alliance with Krista Starr, a former military veteran who becomes entrenched in the world of vampires while investigating the murder of her twin brother.

Enter the contest to visit the set where the series is filmed at http://www.bladetv-contest.com/.

The Ocean and All Its Devices by William Browning Spencer
reviewed by Mario Guslandi
More than ten years after his first collection, the critically acclaimed The Return of Count Electric, William Browning Spencer returns, much to his fans' delight, with a second volume of short fiction. This book assembles nine previously published stories, scattered so far among the pages of a number of genre magazines.

Visionary in Residence by Bruce Sterling
reviewed by Paul Kincaid
It is a curious thing when the cutting edge starts to become blunt, as if the future is no longer what we imagined it might be. Bruce Sterling we remember as the author of "Taklamakan" and "Bicycle Repairman" and a dozen other stories that sliced so deep into the future that they made it bleed. But in this collection, while Sterling remains as hip to new ideas as ever he was, there is nothing that even breaks the skin.

Path of the Bold edited by James Lowder
reviewed by Nathan Brazil
This anthology is the follow up to Path of the Just, although not strictly a sequel as there are no direct continuations among the stories. As with its predecessor, this is an ensemble production, featuring loosely connected stories from fifteen writers, one of whom is also the editor. The loose connection is that all the tales take place in or around Empire City, a twin for Astro City or Gotham. Like those places, it's a locale where super heroes and villains are a common fact of life, with all their attendant glamour and danger.

Banana Sunday by Root Nibot and Colleen Coover
reviewed by Hank Luttrell
Well known for a delightful adults-only comic book series, Small Favors, these creators now offer an equally entertaining all-ages project. Kirby Steinberg is a high school student, but also the guardian of three lower primates. Transferring into a new high school, her wards accompany her. In several student assemblies about the animals, she explains they are the result of secret primate research done by her father. But Nickel, a high school newspaper reporter, suspects that Kirby isn't being candid about the nature of the primates, and tries to uncover the truth.

Babylon 5.1
TV reviews by Rick Norwood
With the 2005-2006 TV season is just about over, Rick has some thoughts on TV on the TV season, what's good, what's not and which will be back next year.

The Complete Chronicles of Conan by Robert E. Howard
reviewed by Steven H Silver
If you only know Conan the Barbarian from the dreary Arnold Schwarzenegger films or from the colorful Marvel Comics version, you don't know Conan. The character created by Robert E. Howard to traverse the breadth of lands during the Hyborian Age is much more complex and nuanced than either of those versions, or of the popular image. All of the stories Howard managed to finish about Conan appear in this edition, published to recognize the hundredth anniversary of Howard's birth.