Daydreams Undertaken
By Stephen L. Antczak
Marietta Publishing, 2004
Reviewed by William I. Lengeman III
(First published at Tangent Online)

Daydreams Undertaken is Stephen Antczak’s first short story collection. It brings together eleven pieces that have appeared in such anthologies and magazines as Gahan Wilson’s Ultimate Haunted House, Dreams of Decadence and The Third Alternative, over the course of a decade or so, from 1992 to 2003. There are also four stories which are seeing the light of publication for the first time. Antczak also includes a foreword, afterword and an introduction for each story.

Many of the stories lean toward hard SF, but Antczak spans a wide range of styles from Pop Goes the Weasel, a tale of punk rock time travelers, to Virtual Day, a cyberpunk vampire tale, to the swords and sorcery of Be My Hero, to Captain Asimov, a mix of robotics and superheroes that unabashedly pays tribute to classic SF.

Among the four previously unpublished stories are Captain Asimov Saves the Day, a sequel, of sorts, to Captain Asimov. In the sequel, as in the original, the programming of Jeevs, a household robot, becomes scrambled with the classic SF and superhero tales he reads to his young charges. It is a world where Asimov’s Laws of Robotics do not actually exist, but our hero is blissfully unaware of this fact.

In this installment of Captain Asimov’s adventures, he saves a busload of kids hanging from a damaged skyway and winds up in a new home with a robot repairwoman. She claims to have erased the Captain Asimov persona, but in the end the Captain is off on another adventure.

The Mars Trip, which Antczak calls a “backhanded tribute to Ray Bradbury,” finds a trio of colonists attempting to reveal the true nature of Mars to a comrade. An energy bar spiked with a hallucinogen enables them to see that Mars is not a barren, lifeless world at all, but rather a somewhat utopian, inhabited world. Antczak relies perhaps a bit too heavily on references to classic SF and the not so strong ending ultimately feels like something out of a Star Trek episode.

Last Contact is presented as the antithesis to the host of “first contact” stories so popular in science fiction. Hope, a recently settled world one thousand light years from Earth, is home to Lysa, a young girl who undergoes a transformation that will result in her becoming a Xenodiplomat. She will then be able to interact on a one on one basis with a representative of the First Alien Race, also known as the Uglies. Lysa, who is forced to choose between her lover and her career, ultimately fails a test designed to screen out unworthy candidates, but finds an alternate career as a diplomat of a different sort.

The Deity Effect center tells of the inhabitants of the last city on a dying world not unlike Larry Niven’s Ringworld. Dane, a Natural – or someone who has eschewed the genetic modifications made possible by nanotechnology – is chosen by one of a pantheon of artificially intelligent deities, to serve as a proxy of sorts. He then mates with Kitten, a professional celebrity, and the couple give birth to a son, Tama, a Gautama-like being who will ultimately act as savior to his world.

Copyright 2007, William I. Lengeman III