Soul Survivors (Lee Harding)

Elliot Westerman's family are all dead but he can relive moments from the past with them, thanks to a computer system called Home Memories. The memories start to malfunction though and no technical issues can be found with the system that could be causing the ghostly apparitions of his wife and children to keep materialising at random.

This is very much a ghost story with sci-fi trimmings and its certainly effective in a quiet thoughtful way. Annoyingly there are some glaring typos, with persaged (instead of presaged), smooth oily ace (instead of smooth oily face), rimed with dust (instead of rimmed with dust) and sussurrus (instead of susurrus, which is a rubbish word whatever way its spelt). It might be unfair to blame Australian author Lee Harding for these errors, but they've cost his story half a mark in my strict scoring system.

Overall:- 6/10

Included in:-
New Writings in SF-17 edited by John Carnell (24 pages)

Aspect of Environment (L. Davison)

A spaceship with three crew, intercepts a signal and traces it to a small planet. The captain and one crew member go to investigate, despite hostility from the navigator who remains aboard. On the planet a deep chasm is discovered, but after descending, the captain realises that one of their oxygen bottles has been tampered with.

Story appears to be a thriller, but shifts into more thought provoking territory and there are some positives here, but the unsatisfying ending and general naivety of style bring things back to earth with a bump and make this a filler at best.

Overall:- 5/10

Included in:-
New Writings in SF-17 edited by John Carnell (20 pages)