You know you’ve entered the Sci Fi Zone when the characters in the stories have names like Silas and Behna and Cleo Five, and you encounter expressions like ImageScan, soundex address and the Roads and Plumbing Matrix. To be fair, many of the writers in On Spec seem to have recognized this tendency to use exotic-sounding names and expressions and have compensated. Sometimes they overcompensate and you get names like Chip and Dave and Jason. Maybe the names a writer uses are of minor concern in terms of evaluating a piece of fiction, but how names are used illustrates the great danger in delving into speculative fiction: there’s always that chance of encountering glaring pretentiousness. For the most part, the stories in On Spec are able to overcome this danger. If Charles Dickens had written speculative fiction, you’d get stories like this. Full of melodrama and caricature, much of the time highly entertaining, sometimes even instructive. A sorceress hides in the back of her shop brewing magical potions while a series of “husbands” work the front of the shop confronting the dangers of dissatisfied customers. Charlie has a love affair with a holographic image of Breena, only to discover that the real thing is better than a holograph. Carol and Alfonzo lose control of their car on a trip from Toronto to Ottawa and wind up spending the rest of their lives living on the grassy median of highway 401 near Kingston, Ontario. In the best of these stories, there’s an alarming familiarity to the worlds these writers create, a feeling that the life they project for us in the future might not be far from the real thing. The worst stories (like the one about the family who eats their telekinetic dog) range from mildly entertaining to downright bad. Overall, though, if you’re into speculative fiction, it doesn’t get much better than this. (KS)