Terra Incognita #1
Winter 1996/1997
64 pages, full-size, 4-color cover
Single issue $5.00, 1-year sub (4 issues) $15.00
52 Windermere Avenue #3
Lansdowne, PA 19050-1812
Editor and publisher, Jan Berrien Berends

This is the premier issue of a magazine subtitled "a new generation of science fiction." The name is an appropriate double entendre, in that it refers both to unknown territory and to an unknown Terra--the planet Earth. The guidelines asked for "Earth-centered stories" and implied that the fiction would be a fascinating melange of the futuristic, the sociological, the technological. The first issue lived up to all my expectations, and I'm sorry that, because of the pay rate, it's listed as a semipro market, because it's easily the equal of the large-format magazines in the pro category. Editor Jan Berrien Berends' opening editorial, "The World as We Don't Know It," is an elegant description of the magazine's sensibility, and the contents bear out his contention that speculative fiction can show us a great deal about ourselves without ever having to leave home.

"Ms. Peach Makes a Run for Coffee," by L. Timmel Duchamp, uses an urban dystopia as the backdrop for a quiet teacher's discovery of her own courage and limitations. The story is low-key and haunting, and I found the mother-daughter relationship particularly affecting, although it's not the focus per se.

Eric Sonstroem's "Jukebox City" is "Jesting Pilot" with a jolt of Phil Dick. But it is also more than that: an original vision conveyed with an engaging prose style. One character randomly breaks through the mass hypnosis that makes an intolerable world--where music is used as an instrument of social control--tolerable.

Kandis Elliot's "Judgementality," in which street people begin disappearing and a jaded news editor sets off to find out why, is a pure delight. The narrative voice and eye are fresh and pull no punches. The ending is no surprise, but its message transcends the plot: the subtle irony in the protagonist's point of view gets slammed home by the last line. This was my favorite story in the issue.

"The Monitors," by W. Gregory Stewart, has the quintessential speculative-fiction Cool Idea: two backup clones, created to provide spare parts, spend most of their time living their originals' lives in virtual vicarity, that they might take their place if and when something happens to the original. But in their few moments of spare time, they fall in love--grafting the Cool Idea onto the old girl-meets-boy story, and, when the inevitable things do happen to their originals, taking that relationship story to a fascinating place.

"Believing in the Twentieth Century," by Darrell Schweitzer, provided social commentary with a wry twist in the package of two humans, from so far in our future that they're practically aliens, coming back to this century to test the hypothesis that when people believed strongly enough in magic, there was magic, however chaotic, polluted, and repellent our environment compared with theirs. Neither the idea nor the vehicle for it seemed very new to me, but I figured that was probably intentional, and the pastiche was clever and entertaining.

Michael Ford's "A Striving After Wind" turned out to be exhilarating, and pleased me by avoiding the sappy ending I expected. Two storm-chasers meet and find that their agendas, based on odd experiences with past storms, coincide. The protagonist then becomes the test subject for a missing boy's invention. The informal first-person narration effectively uses wry humor to undercut what might seem ludicrous, and by the end I was sold. The story could have been substantially shortened: I had to start it twice, bogged down in opening extranea and too-detailed descriptions of things not integral to the setup or the plot. But (this is going to hurt) once it got off the ground (told you) it was a wild ride, and I was glad I persevered.

The poetry--"Father of a Bomb," by Nancy Bennett, and "On Bringing Up Shapeshifters," by Jessica J. Frasca --are moving and amusing, respectively, and both use language and imagery to good effect.

The essays are extremely impressive, and if TI continues to snag material of this quality it's going to garner a stellar nonfiction reputation very quickly. Meleney Coit's "e-Samizdat: Building Cyber-Picket Fences" is not just opinion, but analysis of factual data--well documented and researched. Nicola Griffith's "Alien in Our Own Tongue" presents the best argument this copyeditor has ever heard for "they" as a gender-neutral substitute for "he" or "he or she," and in the process provides social commentary that proves feminism to be, at its best and most effective, pure indisputable common sense.

The interview with Octavia Butler is intelligent and engaging. It feels as if you sat down and had a really good talk with a super writer. The selection of books reviewed (including works by Vachss, Egan, Friesner, and Bisson) is wide-ranging, and left me feeling educated about the books I had read as well as those I hadn't. (I have to disagree with Elizabeth Barrette about Friesner's Psalms of Herod, though: she says, "If you are sensitive to violence against women and children, even in fiction, you should probably give this one a miss." I don't think anyone should give that book a miss, although a Disturbing Subject Matter Warning is advisable.) The selection also showcases the interests of TI itself, whether by design or by fate--something I find appropriate for the premier issue of a magazine staking claim to underrepresented territory in the SF genre.

The cover art, "Terraformer II" by Lissane Lake, is thematically perfect and quite lovely. (I said "Hey, cool!" when I first saw it--possibly the best compliment.) The high-quality black-and-white interior art, by Keith Minnion, Alfred R. Klosterman, Christopher Angelucci, GAK, and David Grilla, illustrates each piece of fiction in a satisfying way.

All in all, a terrific first issue. I haven't been this excited about a new publication in a long time.

Copyright © 1996 by Terry McGarry. All Rights Reserved.