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Dear Bewildering People

I’m spurred to say I appreciate these good stories you’ve offered us lately.

I copied out Colin P. Davies’ “Pestworld” to Word (saves paper) and kept it to read straight through. I always like to see what Colin’s doing and “Pestworld” is another chock-full piece, entertaining and vivid with delightful creatures and some great one-liners in there — look at the writing! Very British in its humour, so I hope it’s travelled well to other readers; more please.

More to enjoy in E. S. Strout’s “Reflection.” Bright, lively, likeable, almost a radio play with textbook-crisp dialogue and some great human relationships. Nice one.

The real Bewildering Stories mission shows most strongly in Bertil Falk’s “Another Way of Doing It.” (No Challenge on this one — perhaps the story is Challenging enough?) I particularly liked the semi-chanted Klorbsor parts, so much that I wished this extraterrestrial (bed)chamber piece had returned to the E-T key at the end. Would the enigmatic K have found some bodily or mental part aching afterwards? Anyway, a good and Bewildering story.

Thanks to all authors and of course you editors who bring us these delights.

Best wishes to all,

David

Copyright © 2007 by David Redd

Thank you for the kind words and lively comments on the stories, David. You do wonders for the morale of our authors, editors, and readers.

You may notice on our Editors’ Choices page that we went from semi-annual Retrospectives to Quarterly Reviews in the middle of Year 4, and that the Christmas-New Year’s Review of 2006 was a two-parter. The increase in quality required more frequent Editors’ Choices.

The day may come when the Quarterly Reviews are superfluous. Even now you can just throw darts, so to speak: open any issue at random and you’re bound to find something you enjoy.

Are we competing with the print magazines? Not really: we publish what print editors can’t or won’t accept. So much the better for our authors and the reading public.

Keep up the good work, David. As long as we can all share in the fun, the world is better off for it.

Don