In issue #17 of Postscripts, Birds teach moral lessons in the jungle. Memorably awful family vacations mark an English boy’s summers. A long-lived man marvels at the society he missed. Bitter scientists compete for access to a dead inventor’s secrets. Weird and punnish events occur at the first ever World of Music Beyond Sense festival. Small gods haunt the boozy streets of Soho. During the French Revolution, hidden riches tempt an adventurer for hire. People hire out their brains while they sleep at night. Stories written by AIs outsell those by human authors. Two children have a memorable outing with their uncle. A ghostly visitation mars two siblings’ inheritance of a chest full of beautiful stones.

When reviewing retellings of folktales, my emphasis is always on what is new: what has the author done with this material either to redefine or repurpose it? Or, if the tale has been left largely intact, what new imagery or elements have been brought to bear with the aim of amplifying or supporting a particular interpretation of the original? Jeff VanderMeer’s aim in “Why The Vulture Is Bald” appears to be the latter, rather than the former—not to fracture a fairy tale but to clarify it with the addition of elements familiar to his audience. In this version, Vulture is a producer of cultural works (”he would write in his diary, compose music for forty-piece bird orchestras, and philosophize”), the well-regarded customer of the mynah birds, which keep a cafe that he regularly patronizes. When he loses his feathers and stops visiting, they assist him. The result (thanks to VanderMeer’s interesting handling of the power imbalance) is a thought experiment about the roles of audience and author.

The standout in this issue of Postscripts is Ian R. MacLeod’s “The Camping Wainwrights.” Evocative language and imagery, metaphorical and psychological depth, and a carefully directed though seemingly meandering story thread all demonstrate his skill and thoughtfulness. In the early eighties, Terry (the narrator), his sister, Helen, and their parents live an inescapably British existence, with jolly old Dad planning a series of camping trips into the unreliably hospitable countryside every summer where carefully laid plans can be depended upon ever so quickly to unravel. It starts out as a “what I did every summer” essay, a qualified love letter to growing up British, and grows into an exploration of the darker and more atavistic fears, resentments, and vulnerabilities which crouch in the muddy corners of adolescent psyches. On a second reading, details the reader missed or lacked the context to interpret before make MacLeod’s narrative even richer, which I see reaching in depth if not scope or style for the sort of awful transcendent truths one usually expects from a writer like Flannery O’Connor.

Douglas Smith’s “Doorways” is based on an interesting concept but falls flat due to flawed execution. Jack has lost his job at GenTech, his mentor Rainer has died, and his wife Wendy left him for a coworker, Deak, GenTech’s vice president. Plans and prototypes for many of Rainer’s inventions are inside his house, but he has set its security systems to kill anyone other than Jack, Deak, or Wendy—who attempts to enter. They must solve a complex series of puzzles that hint at his latest project. Although the puzzles and the final invention which they hint at are intriguing, the characters are, but for the protagonist, rather flat. The narrative structure of this story is unoriginal, although Smith ties its denouement’s metaphorical significance in well with the technological concept at the center of the plot. One might argue that Smith’s portrayal of Wendy is not misogynist, merely negative, but her one-dimensionality is troublesome, as is her role as a possession, a servant involved with and promoting the interests of the antagonist or the protagonist, but thoroughly subordinate to both. What we see of her personality draws on centuries of stereotype: fickle, clingy, and weepy. So it makes sense that she chooses an aggressive muscle head almost as one-dimensional as she is for her new mate. Jack’s anger is more realistic and palpable than anything else in the story; he is allowed psychological complexity denied his companions.

For folks familiar with the sort of musical sensibility it celebrates, “The Gala of Implausible Songs” makes up for its disjointed and meandering structure with novelty and humor. People who simply appreciate puns, wordplay, and absurdity would also enjoy it. Saying that it is the story of a singer-songwriter and his friends at an alternative music festival is like saying “Magical Mystery Tour is about The Beatles wandering around in a bus” (although I am not really drawing any comparisons between this piece and that rather unfortunate movie except perhaps that they’re both odd). What Rhys Hughes has invented here is less a narrative than an excuse tying together a variety of related and often quite satisfying little vignettes and jokes (you’ll never look at a piping hot pie the same way again).

“The Plot” is a brief, wry shot at formulaic bestsellers, set in a world where specially trained artificial intelligences are best-selling novelists. Its protagonist, Dave, is frustrated by their market dominance. Much of the narrative takes the form of a philosophical dialogue between Dave and his friend, Scott, who frustrates his arguments against the AI-thors at every turn. Justin Cartaginese’s treatment of literary innovation as some sort of arms race is less than convincing, however. Does mere complexity or literary fireworks, like writing a chapter “from the point of view of a dragon,” make a good novel? And are novels only about building as complex an intellectual argument as possible? Although its ending is less than satisfying, this is an amusing piece.

“A Prison Term of A Thousand Years” is an experiment in pacing. An impatient reader might wear out his interest in discovering what crime might earn one a term of over a thousand years before he finishes reading, but, pacing aside, the absurdity of the notion at the heart of this story is its strength. However, it aims at depth, and it sadly falls short, perhaps because the complexity of its denouement and construction and the way Adam Roberts hoards information seem more for the sake of the exercise itself than for any reason intrinsic to his argument in the plot.

Behind “Sohoitis” are the ghosts of Neverwhere and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. On the beery, unwashed side of London, the sordid and the squalid are masks for transcendent, ancient, and powerful characters walking straight out of the mythos of Britain’s old gods, with winks to influences as diverse as the Canterbury Tales and Julian Maclaren-Ross. It isn’t particularly original, and the main character, for all that we hear his inner thoughts, is hard to read, but Al Robertson transforms the mysterious reasons for addiction (for example) from a death warrant hiding in our DNA to the essence of a mysterious deity drawing itself to itself. He uses descriptive language well, and although the plot is loopy at times and hard to follow, in this context, that confusion is justifiable.

Whatever I may have expected to read in the pages of PostScripts, it certainly wasn’t a good old-fashioned mystery, but in “Enquête Incisive,” that is exactly what I found—a piece which wouldn’t be out of place in the Mammoth Book of Historical Detective Stories. Set during the early 1790s, during the Reign of Terror, M. Giradot is something very like a fixer or a PI, and he receives an assignment he cannot refuse from one of his frequent customers—to find the hidden wealth of the executed noble François Houdart. Although the conundrum at its heart has a solution which seems to have loose scientific roots, our protagonist and the world he moves in are engaging and well described, the dialogue realistic, the denouement original enough to amuse, and the historical setting effectively used. I look forward to seeing more from Tara Kolden.

“The Stars In Her Eyes” is a jumble of interesting ideas loosely tied together—in this case with the string of a manipulative and unattainable woman—the sort of chick at the heart of too many stories I’ve read by male SF writers. Lenora is looking for a message from aliens, scanning the skies with her ears and in her dreams, and she intrigues our narrator, Jerome, into getting involved. Renting out your brain while you’re asleep is an interesting idea, and aliens communicating via dance steps also. But for some reason, Vaughan Stanger’s execution ultimately doesn’t gel, for although the interpersonal parts of the plot were meant to ground it, mostly they feel as if they came from a different and far less interesting universe than the cosmic ideas at its heart.

“Where I Went On My Holidays” doesn’t have the atavistic magic of “The Camping Wainwrights,” but Ian Hunter does manage to liven up what might otherwise have been an uninspiring wander around the fringes of mythos with hints of gleeful violence, well-realized characters, and a solid grounding in psychological reality. The unnamed narrator, his younger sister, Ellie, and their Uncle Jack go on a seaside holiday but end up in the sort of town where, although there’s neither a fair nor much of a beach, there’s a few odd things to tempt the interest of curious children. But this story ultimately frustrates, not because it is mysterious but because it is inconclusive; the hints and snippets don’t seem to go anywhere or add up to anything except a low background level of Cthuloid witchiness. Sometimes authors skillfully leave things out, and sometimes they cut themselves short. This story feels cut short, as if it were merely a teaser for a collection.

In “Rain Flower Pebbles,” Marly Youmans weaves together ghosts and legends from China with family life in modern New York state. Susanna and her children, Beatrice, James, and Francis, inherit a box of yuhua stones—rain flower pebbles—from a Great Aunt, who herself inherited them from an ancestor whose husband had been a missionary in China and died in the Boxer Rebellion. A neighbor, elderly Catherine, finds the situation intriguing. Although the family vignettes are charming and realistic, their uncritical analysis of the provenance and their right to the stones is unappealing, and small slips like Susanna describing a stone as having the image of a geisha on it (geishas are from Japanese culture) don’t help matters. At times, Youmans’s lovely descriptive language also dips into purple prose.