Electric Velocipede: Issue 10: Spring 2006
Edited By John Kilma

Electric Velocipede has a wide spectrum of story type, from spine chilling terror to completely weird, with plenty of SF thrown in. This is issue ten, so twice a year publication without fail makes it the fifth year it’s been running, which is quite an achievement.

Comprising of an eye catching, yet simple, black and white, bold front cover, it is fifty-five pages long with two novelettes and four short stories.

Novelettes
A Walking Of Crows: Tim Akers
A strange, yet enticing story of a young man who tries to discover the truth behind his father’s death. Contain’s some great imagery of man and clockwork metal fused. It’s a tale of someone searching for truth, but doesn’t degenerate into tears.

Jacket Jackson: Richard Bowes and Mark Rich
Blimey, talk about smokin’ something. It’s a jacket, a sentient jacket, a sentient jacket which travels around time, utilising people as it goes; and it’s made of leather. This is weird; I had to read it a couple of times just to see if there were multiple layers. Like I said, I think the author(s) were smokin’ something. Seems to include time travel. Possibly. And it’s surreal, and messes with metaphysics. Overall, it seemed to jump from one scene to another without links throughout, so it was somewhat difficult to work out what happened when. Probably intential to add to its weirdness.

Short Stories
The Way He Does It: Jeffrey Ford
Ah yes, my kind of story. Minimal, in the sense that the narrator goes a long way to explain the way he does it, but never actually says what the it is. A fascinating read.

Il Duca di Cesena: Alistair Rennie
This piece read like a letter to a sixteenth century priest (which I believe it is), but even so I found it difficult to complete, simply because I find this style of writing annoying. That said, once I did complete it, I appreciated the story as a whole. Philosophical and somewhat disturbing.

The Naval Of The Universe: Andre Oosterman
A simple, short story, which is somewhat predictable. The protagonist is a researcher for a drugs company, looking into old wives tales, or mystic treatments for staying alive longer, staying younger. He ends up travelling to a distant country to track down an elixir of life. And he does.

Travels Along An Unfurling Circular Path: Robert Freeman Wexler
Another of my favourite kinds of stories. A story of a lead character who journeys through various states of emotion, only to come back to his original emotion, mirrored by his location. Neat piece which resonates deeper interrigation.

Overall
With only a few adverts and just one page of non-fiction (which is the contributors page), it is an excellent ‘zine of stories, most of them strong, all worth reading.

Subscriptions and information (including some excerpts of stories) are available at Electric Velocipede.

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