Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait, by K. A. Bedford, $17.95. Spider is a disgruntled time-machine repairman in Perth, Western Australia. Spider repairs the machines, but he hates time travel, even when he has to use it. Corrupt cops with time machines forced him out of the police department. He’s not a happy man. He’s living in the cheapest of capsule hotels, drinking too much and still pining for the the ex-wife who wants him only to repair broken appliances.
There are rules and regulations around time travel to prevent exploitation and paradox, but silly things always happen. The ideal is to fix the machine and then jump back in time and deliver the repaired device to the owner a few minutes after it is brought in. But the latest job is giving off such dangerous indicators Spider and his partner have to call in the Bat Cave. The Bat Cave will set up a pocket universe that will prevent catastrophe if the time machine explodes.
They find a dead body and it’s obviously a murder. After hearing nothing from the official investigation, Spider starts his own. He is only more determined after he is warned off by a scary future version of himself.
Spider’s boss doesn’t come around much except to bother Spider about production stats and harass the office secretary. Still, he has own grandiose plans beyond his motivational talks and obsession with angels.
Bedford is funny in a crazed, Rudy Rucker kind of way. While Rucker writes of gonzo theorists, Bedford writes of the gonzo mechanics who keep the machines running.
The Age of the Conglomerates, by Thomas Nevins, $14. After the collapse of social security and pensions, the government has been taken over by the conglomerates. Old people are sent to Coot colonies in Arizona. Social and genetic rejects are cast out from society and have formed an underground world of “Dyscards.”
Christine Salter is a Conglomerate administrator at New York Medical Center. The most profitable part of the center is the program to genetically modify the unborn. She is becoming romantically involved with her employee, Gabriel Cruz, and discovers he may be sabotaging the program.
Christine’s grandparents, David and Patsy, have been turned in by her mother. The conglomerates seize their property and ship them west to Arizona. Christine’s mother has also turned Christine’s younger sister over to the authorities to be sent down into the subway tunnels with the Dyscards.
The chairman of the Conglomerates is planning a final surge to end the budget drain of the Coots and Dyscards. He also has a plan to remain chairman indefinitely.
“The Age of Conglomerates” is a black-and- white allegory of mistreatment of those needing help. There are few moral complexities, only stark contrasts. Despite the simplistic politics of the story, it does have a strong anchor in David’s desperate attempts to care for Patsy and her diminishing grasp on reality.
She Murdered Me with Science, by David Boop, $15.95. Noel Glass is a down-and-out scientist earning an occasional living as a private detective. He lives in the Little Osaka area of Industry City, an improbably large metropolis between Denver and Colorado Springs.
Glass has finished the plans for his great invention of a car that runs on water when the roof falls in. At first a wealthy industrialist offers to produce the prototype he needs, but at the cost of bringing back an episode Glass had tried to forget.
A microwave experiment became a disaster, killing the woman he loved and ruining his career. Shocked out of his 14-year daze, Glass sees that it may not have been an accident and could be the reason someone is trying to assassinate him now. He doesn’t know if the masked Mayan warriors were sent by the CIA in addition to their regular agents, but Glass runs away from all of them.
He flees Colorado to Nevada and New Mexico, where he finds a beautiful blues singer and Russian spies. Along the way, he uncovers a conspiracy much larger than his plans for a better car.
Boop goes beyond the usual suspects when the conspiracy is uncovered for an interesting alternative history twist. There’s nonstop action showing a love for private eyes, mad scientists and blues music.
Fred Cleaver write regularly about new science fiction releases.
