Lonely Souls

Many science fiction writers view the novella as the optimal length—short enough to be read in one sitting, but long enough to build a world. And what better world can we build and examine, than the landscape of our lonely souls? Gordon Van Gelder, longtime editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science fiction, has brought together a set of four novellas that dig deeper into the recesses of our beings. In "Goliath of Gath," Jan Lars Jensen offers us a look at figure of legend not usually Goliath. One of the last of his people, the giants, in a changing social and political landscape. A pacifist manipulated into death with the promise of peace. A man whose story is rarely examined in favor of David, the plucky hero of the Bible. Then Eric Carl Wolf brings us to a grassy, cowboy-country, beef-herding planet as barren as the Old West in "Demands of Ghosts," where we meet a former assassin seeking anonymity and redemption. In "One Day at the Zoo" by Rand B. Lee a young girl with special powers is "saved" from being experimented on by the closest person to her, her mother, who seeks instead to destroy her. In a strange, violent, debauched future, an assassin confronts a new technology that enables immortality, destroying the value of death, and he begins a quest for oblivion, so goes "Final Kill" by Chris DeVito.