Nothing like a revamped old standby magazine to get you suckered in. Standing in the bookstore waiting for Realms of Fantasy to pop in I see Amazing Stories. Spider-Man adorns the cover but that can be forgiven. Realms of Fantasy as a horrible track record of using over exposed commercial crap trap for cover subjects, helps raise interest I guess. But on to Amazing Stories. Lower right is a yellow splotch touting the mag as the "First Issue of the 21st Century. Guess that's real important stuff you know. So it's a revamped variation of Amazing Stories which died off years ago and anyone telling you thee are mysteriously descended from it are lying or marketers. Also it has a big splotch of Spider man on the front a movie that has been covered in numerous other medias. Spider-Man may be an ok movie for all I know but overexposure tends to dull my enthusiasm. So far two strikes and it's going for $5.99. Now I hate to be crass but for that amount of money I do expect more then just eighty-six pages. I buy it anyway thought because I'm a sucker for new short stories. Nice short stories I can read with little investment in time and concentration.

So I guess its stories we go to first. "The Spider's Amazement" by Bruce Sterling will be the first speak out since it hit me the strongest. A strange dictator type of person is somehow stored over the centuries. He was on the run from political enemies and needs a good century to wall up in you know. So he's sleeping whatever sort of sleep he has been chemically blessed with and wakes up in a far ahead future where the human race has annulled itself. Yippee no more humans our nameless time traveler calls himself ruler of the world and celebrates.

That was the point of the story and it sticks to me. It sticks to me because it was told with suck explicit detail of the unnamed dictator's body rotting from disuse. It sticks to me because the mind of an egotistical lunatic is explored with the grace and poetry of a noble character. It sticks to me because even though the formula of the story is old Mr. Sterling has found a way to storytell it in a unique gem.