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

 
"The Motorman's Coat", by John Kessel (F&SF, June/July 2009)

This little Twilight Zone-esque parable is set in the Czech republic, where an antique dealer is presented with the opportunity to buy the eponymous coat, an artifact of an earlier age of Czech history for which he has to pay a huge amount but has expectations that he can turn it around for a substantially higher price, solving all his financial problems.  Things don't quite work out the way he expected, and in the end he has nothing at all to show for his efforts.  And that's about it, Kessel gets just the right tone to go along with the plot, somewhere between a Gogol story and one of Grimm's fairy tales, with that eastern European feeling to the characters and the background.  There's nothing wrong with this story, but I don't find much in it that would make me want to recommend it either, this is a bit atypical of Kessel's other work, unless it's the start of a new trend, since this follows on from last year's mash-up of Frankenstein with Jane Austen.  But there's no paranormal romance here, so in the end I'm at a bit of a loss to appreciate what was the point.

"Blocked",  by Geoff Ryman (F&SF, October/November 2009)
This longish short story is presented as a dream by the middle aged narrator living in Southeast Asia, and certainly is told in a dream-like state. He describes how he married a woman with four young children and how they are in the process of evacuating Singapore because of an imminent alien invasion.  The marriage was a result of reaching a station in life where he needed to have responsibility for something, but the evacuation brings all that into question, and he's torn between his obligations and his instinct to just walk away and take his chances.  The details of the invasion aren't really Ryman's area of interest, in fact the narrator at one point questions whether there even really are aliens at all, which seems to upset the people around him.  But the author brings together some vivid imagery of his Asian setting, which he seems to have gravitated towards in a few recent stories now.  The title seems to refer to the narrator's sense of needing to move forward in life, but not necessarily in a linear path or the path that is expected of him.  Lots to take in from this story, although it's not at all difficult to follow, Ryman is one of the best at using prose that propels the reader forward, but with plenty of detail and a detached, retrospective tone that adds up to a compelling overall package.

"Excellence", by Richard A. Lovett (Analog, January/February 2009)
This modern retelling of Flowers for Algernon tries to head off any comparisons by referencing its famous predecessor outright, or at least the movie version, although not by name.  But the parallels are loose enough that this take stands on its own.  Lovett has updated the protagonist to a middle-aged long distance runner who never could quite compete at the highest level in his younger days and always regretted it, never really making anything else out of his life.  He knows what he is getting into, and unlike with Keyes's story it's not intelligence he's offered but the opportunity to test a drug that can restructure his muscles to what they were in college.  In theory with the amount of additional experience he now has plus the body of a much younger man, he should be able to clean up in competition and achieve his unrealized dream of making the Olympics.  He also knows that the process is temporary and ultimately debilitating, but he goes ahead with it anyway.  Needless to say it doesn't quite all work out the way he expected, and along the way he re-evaluates just what those goals were about, and sees that maybe he didn't have it so bad after all to do even as well as he did the first time.  I can't say there's anything revelatory in that realization, and for an Analog story I'm surprised that the science required to achieve this transformation isn't really focused on that much, but I think there's a nice complementary relation here between the subject and the subtext, with enough food for thought to make the story worth reading.
posted by Mark at 7:51 PM