Future Orbits, short Science Fiction for the digital world

This month's Wizard Site award goes to Future Orbits, who are using the Adobe PDF format (among others) to produce a new SF magazine you actually have to pay to download.

Roderick S. MacDonald brings you the inside scoop on this brave new venture.

‘Future Orbits’ is about the same value, word for word per issue, as the on-line version of ‘Magazine Of Fantasy & Science Fiction’. If you have to pay for a magazine then you'd expect to get paid for published work: this they do at the rate of 6 to 10 cents per word.

Each issue has six short stories, one third of which are written by women. There's also a science commentary and an editorial. All authors have a history of publications elsewhere and the quality is more or less comparable with other established magazines.

However, no articles about Science Fiction appear. Tom Vander Neut's aim is for a publication which is Science Fiction rather than one which is about Science Fiction. Fair enough, he's set out his stall in the market place on this basis and it should be judged accordingly.

I reviewed the first two issues. Happily, none of the stories could be classed as rubbish or downright bad. There were some I couldn't get my head around - either they've lost the plot or I have. Fortunately, most of the fiction was absorbing, rewarding to read and also well-written. I've selected a few for comment:

'Blues for Amy' by K.D. Wentworth. Intriguing story of a hit-and-run drunk driver who pushed a family off the road into a ravine, killing them all except for Amy, a pregnant woman, now a broken, childless paraplegic. His gnawing guilt is accompanied, in more ways than one, by aliens called shaemsa.

These strange creatures, the first extraterrestrial visitors to Earth, have defied expectations by being useless, pesky blobs, intent on playing the blues to morbid, maudlin characters. Our drunk has first one alien following him but this turns into an entourage by the end of the story. Are the aliens real or are they a figment of a tortured mind? I liked this one. Wentworth's description of a person losing his mind, going out of control, was convincing enough to make me wonder if she had run someone off the road at some time herself.

Her invention of the aliens, in such an unlikely and ludicrous form, adds a touch of originality to a story which could have also been told without them, albeit without the same mystery.

'The Minch Maneuver' by Fiona Curnow. The women pilots flying around Jupiter's satellites are all lesbians because the men have had their testicles tandooried by the deadly Jovian radiation. Moreover, the chief lesbian, the owner and controller of the spaceships, has them over a barrel.

In order to get spare organs to replace those frequently damaged by the rigours of space flight, the pilots seem to be constantly in debt to her and have to perform more and more missions just to keep body and soul together. An old girl has an affair with a new girl and then the pair go for a difficult feat of flying - the above mentioned manoeuvre. This seems to be the gist of a rather pointless story. I seem to remember tales of organs being transplanted willy-nilly some years ago. It seems they're still at it.

Each issue has a piece of commentary. In the first issue, Geoffrey A. Landis takes a rather pedestrian tour around the Solar system. Much of this stuff is old hat. We've seen it all before on TV programmes. However, in the second issue, Gregory E. Pence discusses the clone in Science Fiction.

This well-researched article points to the many misconceptions and inaccuracies that have appeared over the years in this genre. My only small criticism is that he spends a great deal of time discussing what cloning isn't and little on what it is.

In issue 2 there was 'Babushka for Sale' by Andrew Burt. An interesting story about capitalism in modem Russia. There was also 'Keeping Lalande Station' from Richard Parks, a curious but compelling tale of a man alone on a planet for fifty years. Mary Soon Lee's 'The Strangers' told of a soldier of the future with things on his mind, a story that made you want turn the pages.

We don't really find out who the strangers are until later in the story. The main character, Jesper, seems to be a half-man/half-machine soldier directed to receive reports from colonists. Guilt wells up within him - the previous mission saw him involved in the genocide of a rebellious colony.

This lot, though, are clean living folk who have left technology behind. When reading this story, you wonder about this soldier. Who is he? What's he feeling about another possible genocide on the agenda? The author gradually let's out a little bit at a time, keeping you hooked until the revelation comes.

I would say that there was definitely an improvement from issue 1 to issue 2. There's many Science Fiction magazines to be found on the Net. Some, of course, are junk but others like this one, isn't bad at all. Why choose ‘Future Orbits’? The quality is certainly there. Maybe the format is somewhat conventional.

Being new, it doesn't have an identity as yet and we need to read more issues to become familiar with the style. It needs to have something unique, something to separate itself from other magazines. What this is, I don't know. If I did, I'd be out there doing it myself, making dollars and euros in the process. Overall, I found ‘Future Orbits’ a magazine which would make me want to read more and buy a subscription. I did just that!

Will ‘Future Orbits’ survive? I would like to think so but realistically, as with all new magazines, it's odds against survival beyond a year or two. It has good artwork, quality stories and a dedicated editor and publisher. I think the latter, in conjunction with other facts, may help it to survive and become successful.

These facts? Well, at $7.95 a year, you're not breaking the bank to subscribe. This isn't a facet of cheapness, it's a facet of electronic publication technology. For the price of one paper magazine you can have several electronic magazines and the publisher can still make money. The recipient of this literature won't have a room full of dusty paperbacks - they'll be neatly stored away on a disk.

Since I began to read electronic books, I've experienced a reawakening to literature. For someone like myself who has problems with hands that can't turn pages very well, this innovation is tremendous, but more and more people are familiar with screens, the quality of which has improved greatly over the years. Those unable to read from an old computer screen have no difficulty with modem versions.

There are also portable electronic readers. You can now take a pile of books anywhere with you, all in a small rectangular device that can be read with ease. Something like ‘Star Trek’, isn't it? There is a misconception amongst the general public that somehow, electronic readers and electronic publications are cheap and of low quality.

The major difference between a conventional book and an electronic book is that with the latter, the purchaser isn't paying for a load of useless paper which, given the quality and endurance of its modem manufacture, will be a brown disintegrating mass within a decade anyway.

People equate books with paper. This isn't the case. Books are words. Once the general public cotton on to this, electronic literature will expand exponentially.

Roderick S. MacDonald
January 2002

[Editor note: Rod not only bought a subscription for the above publication but sold them an article that is appearing in # 3. Both of us want to indicate that the review was written first.]

Visit the 'Future Orbits' site over here

Future Orbits, short Science Fiction for the digital world: Editor/Publisher Tom Vander Neut. (bimonthly. ISSN 1536 - 3651. Subscription $7.95 for 6 issues at www.futureorbits.com)

'Future Orbits' supports the following electronic book readers: Adobe Acrobat PDF Reader, Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader, Microsoft Reader, Mobipocket Reader, Rocket eBook and Gemstar's REB 1100].