I really enjoyed a couple of stories in this issue: "Home Sweet Bi'ome" by Pat MacEwen had a fun science fictional element, and although the plot was pretty predictable in terms of the love interest, there were some good unexpected turns to it. Kate Wilhelm's "The Bird Cage" skillfully used a technique to make the reader feel the same unsettling flashback experience as the characters in the story. Paul DiFilippo's "Plumage from Pegasus" was a fun bit of commentary. I thought Albert Cowdrey's "The Bogle" was an excellent ghost story: marvelously paced -- the reader makes the realization just before the character does. I skipped the Pronzini and Malzberg story because I hadn't liked the one in IASFM published around the same time. I also skipped Matthew Cordrey's "The Ghiling Blade": its setting simply didn't appeal to me. "12:02" by Richard Lupoff was a good time-story, whereas Alan Dean Foster's "Ghost Wind" was just a good-time story. Honestly, even though Wilhelm and Foster have the name recognition, I would place MacEwen's and Cowdrey's stories ahead of them in the ratings.

I found the movie review column to be very good, and I liked the science article as well. Over all, I liked much more of the contents more than some beginning of the year issues of IASFM and definitely more than Lightspeed. ( )