Book Review: A Passport to a Nation of Talking Slugs by Andrew Kozma
In all honesty, this should really be called a booklet review, or, to be fancier, a chapbook review, because this is a slight little thing that a person could easily read all the way through while waiting in line at the DMV, still having time to start on another short story collection or anthology before her number was called. Which is to say that A Passport to a Nation of Talking Slugs could actually fit into a passport, as its amusingly apt cover might suggest. But though it be little, it is fierce, is this collection of Kafka-meets-Ionesco-as-Introduced-by-Borges bits. With just four wee stories, Kozma manages to sneak a few emotional wallops among what seems like whimsy, and, to readers like me who have been trained on Gene Wolfe for so long, he’s managed to suggest a degree of intertwined meaning that he might not have intended but feels like it’s there.
Book Review: Mechanical Failure by Joe Zieja
Sergeant R Wilson Rogers, having given up a cushy berth in the make-work peacetime military fleet to try his hand at the profitable world of smuggling, finds himself dragged back into the military when it turns out that interstellar smuggling isn’t as easy as it seems. Fortunately, he can even get back into his old unit, the 331st. The bad news is that, even in the relatively short time since he has been gone, the military has gone even more around the bend. And only Sergeant Rogers seems capable or aware enough to try and stop an interstellar war and a robot uprising at the same time, despite his tendency toward indolent laziness. Like it or not, Rogers is going to have to do some real work for a change. The Two Hundred Years Peace is riding on it.
