mataglap -- an Indonesian word meaning "dark eye" or, probably, "dilated eye." It is an indication that someone is about to go berserk and start killing people at random. Used in Walter Jon Williams' novel Aristoi as the name of a berserk form of nanotechnology that devoured the planet.

You can e-mail Mataglap SF at mataglap@yahoo.com

 
"Catalog", by Eugene Mirabelli (F&SF, February 2009)

This story makes an attempt at straddling both SF and fantasy, starting with the latter, in a somewhat typical seemingly random series of improbably occurrences in centered around John, who suddenly finds himself taken out of his normal life and confronted with people and situations who don't quite seem real, starting with a woman trying to sell him a fancy sports car.  Things get more confusing for him as he starts to correlate his new surroundings with his long-suppressed desire for a model he's only seen in an L.L. Bean catalog.  He meets up with a brother and sister named after characters from Poe, who help him out until he sets out to find the catalog woman by moving to Maine.  Told in a series of 10 short scenes, the fantasy element is juxtaposed with the characters speculating on whether John is in fact from a parallel world, not quite bridging the gap to SF since none of this is ever explained, but still it's an intriguing combination and something out of the ordinary, and even with a happy ending.

"A Story, With Beans", by Steven Gould (Analog, May 2009)

I'm not quite sure what to make of this story.  The eponymous beans are something cooked up by Kimball, something of a mountain tour guide who sits around the proverbial campfire with three young campers telling stories.  The hiking area is inside a zone that is infested with some kind of metal-eating nanotech bugs, which  are perfectly harmless to people as long as you aren't between them and anything metal.  Fully half the story is taken up by the tale of "Left-for-Dead", who stole his girlfriend away from her family.  The family sought revenge by dropping metal shavings from a plane into his town to attract the bugs and destroy everything that got in the way.  At the end you discover the relationship between this story and the guide, but beyond that I'm not quite sure what the point is, the story is so short there isn't much room to expand on anything, and it took me a couple of readings to figure out what to pay attention to.  It's a little slice of life, a tale within a tale, but not enough to sink your teeth into.

"Donovan Sent Us", by Gene Wolfe (Other Earths, ed. Nick Gevers & Jay Lake)

This seems like an untypical Gene Wolfe story, from an alternate history anthology and taking place in a post-World War 2 reality where the US never entered the war and Germany overran all of Europe.  Needless to say our non-interventionist policy didn't work out too well for the UK, and in occupied England an American agent von Steigerwald is infiltrating an SS camp looking for a fugitive Winston Churchill, who may have been captured or may be in hiding.  Wolfe spends a seemingly inordinate amount of time with this agent alternately threatening and cajoling the Nazi's, with a lot of his transliterated phony German accent that gets a bit tiresome after a while.  When Churchill finally turns up, von Steigerwald relays a proposition from the US government, the Donovan of the title who may have some analog in our reality but I'm not enough of a WW2 buff to know for sure.  Churchill has his own ideas, evincing that unwavering British "carrying on" that served them well in the real war, but apparently that's not what the Americans had in mind.  The story is basically one extended scene, very powerfully told, what holds it back for  me is my usual "so what" attitude to alternate history stories.  But my prejudice is overcome somewhat by Wolfe's use of characters taken from our reality, and a vivid portrayal of a scarily possible alternative.
posted by Mark at 11:30 PM