Escape Velocity takes off.

ESCAPE VELOCITY Volume 1 Number 1
The Magazine of Science Fact and Fiction.
Published by Adventure Books of Seattle

Co-managing editors Geoff Nelder of Great Britain and Robert Blevins bringing together an excellent collection of 20 stories, 1 poem, 9 feature articles, and loads of photographs and drawings into a 9"x14" softcover volume. Only 4 typos in the whole 165 pages?

Let's take a brief look at these delicious offerings that Nelder and Blevins (their homelands curiously identified at different geographic scales: Blevins' "Seattle", Nelder's "Great Britain") present us in Escape Velocity. So briefly, however, that you, reader, gain but a passing but tantalizing scent of each story whisked past you.

Following the Table of Contents, which conveniently demarcates fiction and non fiction with different types, About the Magazine gives a quick resume of Escape Velocity, and its producer Adventure Books of Seattle, offers sincere thanks to nine people, organizations and websites, and lays out the copyrights of works in the magazine.

Then come the stories, fact and fiction:

Dear Father by A.W. Gifford painfully warns that disaster doubled is still disaster...Dangerous Observations by Alex S. Weinle gives a convincing argument against puking in Elf habitat, given the fickleness of the little people.

Maria Ayres' The Next Generation Space Telescope gives Hubble history from the eyes of a NASA accountant working at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. Ayres describes the next gen James Webb Telescope, a fresh set of techno-eyes for our our species to train upon the greater universe.

Ubiquitous by Geoff Nelder: When debt collection becomes highstakes digital punk art. Unsettling despite its ending.

This is followed by A Home for the Future in which Robert Blevins wecomes you to the 21st century, an era wherein mass decentralization may occur, abruptly or slowly, from climate shift to and shares ten ways to be part of the transition without abandoning the best fruits of human technology (bricks, I fear, don't make the cut). But even while enjoying the reviving planetery ecology that springs back replendent once freed of the foul excreta of petroleum combustion, organochlorines and other biocides that centralized civilization brought to all corners of the world, even then, keep a watch out for unthinkables!

Emoti-con-doms by Yvonne Eve Walus: If emotions lead to war and other excesses, are they diseases of the mind? Should their spread be prevented? First Class by Barbara Krasnoff predicts that when encountering the Aliens on their turf, you won't know what their likes and dislikes are, but they'll let you find out.

The Retrofreak , by Gideon Kane Cross, finds the past addictively prologue. Even in the future....Sentient by Michael Anderson follows, answering the question: if you can only clone one person - one hominid of the entire past of our planet - who must you pick?

Mars in Black and White. Photo essay collected by the staff of Adventure Books of Seattle. Groan, I thought; B&W pictures? Ah, but like deep sea videography, details of terrain and environment often emerge in black and white that are not apparent in color vid. Or stills. Seeing a partly cloudy day on Mars from the vantage point of the ground - Wow. Mars just came alive for me.

Bright Future by Vincent F.A. Golphin. When it comes to artificial intelligence, as the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám asks, “Who is the Potter... and who the Pot?”

Dive to Destruction by Paul A. Freeman. Ouroboros striking again, again. What price deification?

Heaven as Iron - Earth as Brass by Richard J. Goldstein predicts that even with a galactic civilization, when true believers clash; its always over the same old thing, and the results are, too.

Eight Likely and Unlikely Ways Life on Earth Could End. Pick your favorite Götterdämmerung. I'll take Door number 2, please.

Home in Time for Breakfast by Clyde Andrews. What if changing the past DOESN'T change the future? A tale of sibling rivalry. Then Human Transfer by Lawrence R. Dagstine, depicting a murderous Mall-citian future: when finally even the scientists fail, what then?

Losing the Cliches in Science Fiction — a report on the Jon Courtenay Grimwood mini-course by EV staff editor Geoff Nelder. A slip in time, saves nine. SF writin' for the compleat.. err...enthusiast. 10 smart steps to getting your outpourings noticed and published.

One Way Trip by Rick Novy, When all is said and done, it's finally a crashing bore of a universe, isn't it? Sometimes you just want to jump down a black hole. But what if you ARE the black hole?

Eddie French's Shooting Star is a touching "you CAN go home again" sort of story. It is followed by the very-well-carried off 19th century period piece, Scream Quietly, by Sheila Crosby, which peers into the future from a vantage point untainted by the fumes and cruel logics of the 20th century, yet destined to shape those tumultous years.

In Ten Things Someone Should Invent by 2020, ten rather modest futurist proposals are rolled out, but then, it's for 12 years from now. "Should invent" may not be strong enough language. We NEED these things, now!

Tenth Orbit by Gustavo Bondoni. An eerie look at our local universe from Another's perspective, judged by Another's values.

In Test of Wills by Matthew Spence, when wetware-turned-software seeks hardware, watch your back! Then Jaine Fen's poignant, plaintive The Prettiest Star makes one want to agree: no matter how battered, there's no place like home...This is followed by Suicide Mission, in which T.J. McIntyre takes one through a lightly futuristic sort of Walter Mitty prequel.

Apollo 11 Pictures You Probably Haven't Seen. Great shots courtesy of NASA! Neil Armstrong partying down. Buzz Aldrin classic shot, but without his gold on. The LEM and its surroundings. The "extreme close-up" of a lunar rock brought home to earth by Appollo 11 isn't THAT extremely close up, though.

Mother Tongue by Carmelo Rafala. A slice of life & death illustrating cruel cold humanifest destiny, one planet at a time. One is relieved by Magdalena Ball's poem Galactic Collision Ball's reaction to Hubble's image of the Eagle Nebula's Fairy Tower.

Film Review: 'Robinson Crusoe on Mars — Restored DVD version. In praise of Criterion Video's bangup job of restoring footage of this SF classic take-off of Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel. the DVD includes stills, and memorabilia of the original release including the movie trailer and an interview of the film's director Byron Haskin

Last, The Last Word in which editors Geoff Nelder and Robert Blevins hold forth on their raisons d'etre for publishing Escape Velocity. Helping fledgling talented SF (and S) writers both of both prose and poetry achieve...escape velocity!

A very few but still annoying typos, lads:
Home in Time for Breakfast has two : (pg 78) "I begins in my lab..." and (pg 85) "I don't suppose there's a chance of a re-trail" (shd be re-trial); Tenth Orbit has one on page 127 "...fling myself in direction of third orbit.." Missing a "the" before direction?; and Suicide Mission's Graiken Armada locked their "sights" at his ship not their "sites" on page 139.

Summed up, Escape Velocity is an excellent set of reads that make one optimistic over the future of the genre, and optimistic that writers within the science community will keep revealing more and more to speculate about, from quanti-cosm to macro-cosm, and all the glorious things between. Keep it up.