Reviews for Vol. 1
Reviews for Unfit Magazine, Vol. 1
Top reviews
MR CHRISTOPHER FIELDEN
5.0 out of 5 stars
I bought this on Smashwords. Being a lover of sci-fi and fantasy, I felt I had to check it out, simply due to the calibre of authors that are featured in the magazine. A couple of the stories are reprints, dating back as far as the 60s, but most are contemporary, published for the first time. I enjoyed all of them. There is a timeless quality to the magazine and I'll be interested to see how it develops as more issues are published.
Ann F
5.0 out of 5 stars
These stories are all solid science fiction, with clever concepts and appealing characters. Not all of them have original concepts, but the writing is professional and atmospheric.
one-five-one
5.0 out of 5 stars
Like a lot of people, I grew up with Star Trek (the original series) and Star Wars (1977 wow factor!) so I love science fiction in all its forms however it does all feel rather 'samey' and constrained by our concept of science at present and how we think something might work so I love the concept of Quantum Fiction and the Unfit Magazine does not disappoint in this regard. I expect great things...
Chris Padar
5.0 out of 5 stars
I love alternate universe stories and this did not disappoint. Granted I liked some stories better than others, it was a great read all the way through. Looking forward to more of these.
MHV
5.0 out of 5 stars
More than ever, reality has a stronghold over the hearts and minds of authors, publishers and readers alike. Imagination continues to suffer heavy losses now that the main event is no longer fiction itself, but any possible thread to reality. More and more readers seem to need threads that connect the book and its author to reality. Myths are more likely to be busted—as in the popular show Myth Busters—than cherished. Tolkien is now famous for New Zealand locations, when in fact he made it all up. Soon, an author will be forbidden to write about a country he has never visited, or a person he has not actually been or known. Bestsellers like The Da Vinci Code are debated for their verisimilitude rather than their imagination. Houellebecq’s Possibility of an Island is probably more famous for its supposed scientific accuracy than for its imaginative qualities. In this era of fading imagination, it is a relief to come upon a magazine that severs as many connections to reality as possible and returns to the pure imagination. Perhaps you would think that this magazine, UNFIT, might float in the clouds as a result, but the opposite turns out to be true: editor Daniel Scott White has made some razor-sharp choices for this first edition and this pays off very well; the selection of authors is exquisite and the stories themselves are stretching beyond... well, beyond. There are stories where the very rules of science have to be revised to match new events—all this without losing me as a reader. On the contrary, I enjoyed the flexibility of the stories and the flexibility they require of me. They were surprising, so going along wasn’t difficult. The rule for any story (be it in a book or on the big screen) is the suspension of disbelief. The quality of the new UNFIT magazine is that it brings back this suspension in a serious way, in the form of well-crafted stories. We should thank authors David Brin, Robert Silverberg, Eric Del Carlo, L.J. Cohen, Jerry Oltion, David R. Grigg, Joe Taylor, Emily Devenport and Bruce Golden for their freedom of thinking, and Daniel Scott White for UNFIT Vol. 1. See what you think! As far as I’m concerned: keep it coming.
David
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Let me stretch your mind to speculate a whole lot more. Consider the possibilities of quantum fiction..."
So says the editor in his "Overture" to this fine collection of stories; and stretch your mind he will. Each of these stories make us reconsider what reality is like, or to consider what it could be like with just a little twist, one little step away from the normal.
Daniel Scott White has encouraged some very well-known authors to contribute stories which fit these themes. David Brin, for example, asks us to imagine co-existing but competing timeframes, each running at a radically different rate in his story "The River of Time".
Robert Silverberg's classic "To See the Invisible Man", on the other hand, takes a humane look at a society which can exclude wrongdoers utterly from participation in the community, from normal life. What would it be like to suffer such exclusion? Though written some years ago, long before 'social media' was a thing, Silverberg's story seems particularly relevant today in our hyper-connected society.
Of the several other stories in the book, I particularly liked Emily Davenport's "Alternate Universe Ernies" in which the protagonist, a talk-radio host, begins to regularly encounter a weird twist in spacetime when she goes to pick up her husband from the school where he teaches. Every so often, she ends up somewhere... different.
I also liked Jerry Olton's "In the Garden, a Late Flower Blooms", a nice exploration of alternate realities. In this case a woman gets lost in her own garden, her retired husband's pride and joy. Instead of finding him, to her consternation she ends up in a world just slightly different from her own.
The term "quantum leap" is often misunderstood. It does not mean making a huge jump from one thing to another very different thing. Rather it means the opposite: it is the smallest possible change which can be made in the state of an atom. The key point is that it is a sudden jump (of an electron, say) from one location to another without passing through any intermediate location or state. Properly understood, then, the term "quantum leap" could apply to many of the stories in this collection as they tease us with minor but highly consequential shifts in our view of reality.
I'm looking forward to seeing what future issues of this new magazine have to offer.
*This edition features:
David Brin, Robert Silverberg, Jerry Oltion, David R. Grigg,
Emily Devenport, Eric Del Carlo, Joe Taylor, and Bruce Golden.
David Brin, Robert Silverberg, Jerry Oltion, David R. Grigg,
Emily Devenport, Eric Del Carlo, Joe Taylor, and Bruce Golden.
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