Illumined Black and Other Adventures [first edition]

With little more than small-press exposure to his credit, 20-year-old Tonnies makes an early bid for greater recognition with his first collection of short fiction, an uneven but always absorbing assortment of sketches that reveals a surprisingly mature craftsman at home with the vernacular of contemporary sf. In "Alchemist's Planet," a transformed human recalls, decades after the crash of an extraterrestrial spacecraft near Roswell, New Mexico, his previous identity as one of the aliens. In "Doing Time," a killer's sentence in a virtual reality prison is only five seconds long but subjectively lasts 500 years. In the title story, a neuroscientist's brain becomes the unwitting cargo of a space probe launched as a gift to an alien species. Tonnies' only major shortcoming is his inability to satisfactorily develop the plots of intriguing scenarios; he sometimes leaves the reader asking for more. His command of language, however, is indisputable. With a little more seasoning, Tonnies may become a major sf author. Carl Hays