Issue 24 of Ian Redman’s science fiction magazine Jupiter begins with “Black Water” by David Conyers. In a future Africa starved of water, Joseph Nuwangi bluffs his way into a wealthy corporation with the intention of stealing some of the pure Grade A stuff. The corporation has dire punishments in store for anyone found to be leaving with an unauthorised increase in body mass, but Joseph think he’s found a way around that; what he didn’t reckon on, though, was that he might start to feel a pang of conscience… Conyers is pretty good at evoking his future, in particular by dropping in telling little details that hint at broader goings-on outside the frame of the narrative. But when it comes to the story itself, he tells too much and shows too little – and the plot is too straightforward to be able to support doing that.

“Every few hundred generations, the inhabitants of the magic Cube manage to break the seals and spew forth, unleashing clattering, smoke-belching monstrosities from the depths of hell on the peace-loving Osca tribesmen of the misty valleys.” This is Gustavo Bondoni’s “Sides of the Coin,” which chronicles the latest iteration of this conflict. It’s a kind of techno-magical warfare reminiscent of computer games, and unfortunately that’s also how it reads. The characters are broad stereotypes (the hot-headed young Earthmage, the healer who’s reluctant to fight but knows it’s necessary), and the story is mostly action all the way – but it’s not especially involving action. In the closing paragraphs, there’s a revelation that poses some moral questions; however, by then, you might well have guessed what it’s going to be, and in any case it doesn’t have enough impact to balance out the tale. The final impression is of a flashy battle with a moral tacked on to the end; rather than, as would have been more effective, a war story imbued with moral considerations.

Much better is the following story, “Our Man in Herrje” by Andrew Knighton. It’s narrated by Julian Atticus, British ambassador on a distant world, who has to deal with a fire at the Challenger Memorial Library; questions from persistent journalists; and aliens who won’t tolerate any kind of falsehood, not even narrative fiction. Atticus leaps off the page as a character, quite cynical but wryly humorous with it (”apparently the sight of a crumpled, sleepless man in a suit stood behind a plywood podium was more interesting to the press than the woven-glass spires of the planet’s greatest translation library melting to slag.”) Knighton also raises laughs by imagining a future which, in some ways, does not seem so far removed from the present (”the Prime Minister [was] at a press conference, explaining that the testing of star-drives was no threat to wildlife in the North Sea.”) And beneath the humour is an interesting examination of the difficulties of relating to cultures very different from our own; and a question for each of us – how much of what we say or think, even to ourselves, is really a lie? All that in seven pages. Good going, I’d say.

A.J. Kirby’s “The Ninth Circle” is an interesting story which I’m not sure I fully understood, but found engaging nonetheless. The setting is a spaceship, one of whose scientists has been murdered; our narrator is the ship’s other scientist, who’s trying desperately to understand who killed his friend and why. He wants to get the truth out of the hot-headed accused, Jack Roget; and the mysterious android Sam, whom Roget attacks at the start of the tale; but has to deal with a crew and captain who view scientists as essentially worthless. Kirby does a nice job of evoking the sense of decay on board a spaceship too advanced for its crew to repair; but the real strength of his story is the characterisation of its narrator. The scientist’s mental framework includes certain touchstones from his discipline to which he keeps returning (such as reminding himself that violence is the result of a chemical reaction in the brain), and to which he clings like life-aids as he struggles to make sense of what he learns – with drastic consequences. I don’t think I could describe to you the truth of what happened in the story; but, as I said, the journey is intriguing.

“If You Can’t Beat Them…” by James McCormick is an amiable bit of fluff about two rival intergalactic crime lords who start the story having augmented their bodies, and grow ever more powerful over time, into the realm of absurdity. McCormick gleefully hams it up and breaks the old “as you know” rule into tiny pieces, producing a story which is lightweight and fun, but nothing more.

Rounding things off is “Dog’s Best Friend” by Gareth D. Jones. This is a very short piece (one page), attached to the universe of Jones’s “Roadmaker” stories, but it stands perfectly well on its own. It is a character study of Alf, who lives in a post-apocalyptic society, and would rather spend time with dogs thank seek out human contact. The story is nicely effective within its limited parameters, and ends the magazine on a poignant and thoughtful note.