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The Weekly Magazine of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Sword and Sorcery

ISSN: 1206-8691

Titles Beginning With W


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  • "Watchers on the Nerves"
  • Patricia Salisbury
  • Issue #77 February 19 1999
  • Winner of The Readers' Choice Award 1999
  • It is the future and Big Brother is Watching. U.S. citizens have voted in a nation wide security camera system. The cameras are everywhere and what they record, audio and video, is all the evidence needed to convict anyone of anything. Unless you're rich and an executive officer in the company which builds the cameras. Playing a deadly game, he picks up a street walker, has sex with her and strangles her during the act. All in front of the bedroom camera. Two detectives are set to lock the guy up for life, when strings are pulled and they are told it was an accident, let the nice man go. To add insult to injury, they are told to give him a ride home. The gloating exec notes that the camera on their dash board isn't working; especially after one detective insults him. His anger rises and he is threatening to destroy both of them. Another problem with the future is the sad state of repair, or lack of it, of the streets. The detective driving expertly times hitting a monster pothole which knocks her car out of control. In a valiant effort to protect the citizens in cars and on foot, she battles the car for control, impacting a telephone pole. The impact drives the exec through the windshield; in disregard of the law, again, he was not wearing his seatbelt. A cautionary tale about how things we think will help us, actually end up being worse than the problem they were meant to cure.

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  • "Watchman of the Sands"
  • Thomas Claburn
  • Issue #108 September 24 1999
  • Once again we join Sarah (Issue #87 "Splendour In The Desert") as she continues her journey to the Oracle. This time, she is caught in the desert by blood-thirsty raiders. When she takes refuge in a tower, she finds that the raiders are not her only problem; she becomes caught in a struggle involving the goddess of water and the god of the sun and fire. In the end, with her skill and wit for negotiation, she manages to appease the various gods and escape with her life intact.

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  • "The Watering Hole"
  • Andrew Burt
  • Issue #38 May 22 1998
  • An excellent character story about Jennifer Stoakes, a member of a linguistics team attempting to establish communications with an alien race.

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  • "Whale Song"
  • Dr. Lawrence M. Schoen
  • Issue #156 August 25 2000
  • A scientist finally decodes the whale song. But she's reluctant to publish her findings, for it turns out that the whales are not the intelligent species they have been portrayed as. Instead, their songs are more akin to the wordless hummings of three year olds. They are intelligent, but incredibly stupid.

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  • "What Mary Saw"
  • Kenneth Burke
  • Issue #167 November 10 2000
  • An agent is sent into a small town to investigate the disappearance of two other agents. He meets a nice young woman named Mary who has one of those truly scary, jealous, dead-beat, red-neck type boyfriends. It turns out that when the boyfriend notice the two agents nosing around Mary's place, while questioning her about her story about seeing a UFO, he assumes that they are secret lovers and kills both of them. When the agent confronts the boyfriend and gets a confession, he kills him. He quietly cleans up the mess and leaves town, knowing that noone will miss the boyfriend. He simply regrets that he won't be able to help that nice Mary once his people begin their invasion.

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  • "What Price A Friendly Freep"
  • Joy V. Smith
  • Issue #140 May 5 2000
  • A ship exploring around in space finds an odd little life form, kind of like a puff ball on legs. The crew takes them in and they quickly become favoured pets. The freeps become even more favoured when the little ship is boarded by pirates and the crew is on the verge of being spaced. One of the pirates off-handedly kills one of the freeps. The rest of the freeps gather together and counter-attack, killing the pirates.

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  • "What's In A Word?"
  • Magee Gilks
  • Issue #157 September 1 2000
  • Winner of The Readers' Choice Award 2000
  • Two young girls meet; one, Tam, is growing up in the Down Under, the infrastructure of the world spanning city. The other, Persephone, lives up above in the city. When Persephone ventures into the underworld and meets Tam, they scare each other witless. They slowly figure out that all of the things their parents had said about the other half of society may not be true. One thing Tam learns is that the Topsiders are not forcing the Trogs to remain below; it is the Trogs themselves who keep themselves down below. So Tam dares to embark on a daring journey, a journey to the Topside, to see how she might like life up there.

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  • "Why Endings Matter"
  • Paula Fleming
  • Issue #160 September 22 2000
  • A human woman and an elf woman are on a search for historical information concerning the coming of the elves to this land. They are searching through some caves when the tunnel collapses behind them. As they lay in the cave, waiting to die, they discuss the differences in human and elf beliefs regarding the end of life.

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  • "Will Fight Evil For Food"
  • Atk. Butterfly
  • Issue #111 October 15 1999
  • It's terrible what a detective has to do to earn a living. Especially since aliens with super powers have moved onto the planet and taken up crime fighting. So now he finds himself climbing a tree, trying to retrieve a rich woman's missing prize cat.

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  • "Wings"
  • Patricia Salisbury
  • Issue #84 April 9 1999
  • Winner of The Readers' Choice Award 1999
  • Mary is an aging farmer. She only has one old cow left and a few chickens. One winter, she dreams of wings flapping in the night. While shovelling out her cow's shed, she discovers an egg. Not any kind of egg she's ever seen. She considers having it for breakfast, but then she tucks it into the manure pile. She's amazed, the next time she notices the egg, that it's keeping warm with nothing sitting on it. For week's she puzzles over the nature of the egg. Then, one morning, she hears pecking. She watches in amazement as the little hatchling breaks free. Picking it, she notices that the head is deformed and that she should probably kill the poor thing immediately. Then she rubs some of the down off and discovers not skin, but scales. She notices that the wings are webbed fingers and the pointed beak, when it gapes open is lined with needle like teeth. The little, long toed feet in end in claws. Mary thinks back to the wings in her dream; perhaps it wasn't a dream after all. For here was a little creature which should not exist, and yet it did. Deciding that the old farm would last long enough to get one more life off to a good start, she takes the little hatchling inside to feed it.

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  • "Within The Harshest Light"
  • Joe Murphy
  • Issue #59 October 16 1998
  • Winner of The Readers' Choice Award 1998
  • A story told from the viewpoint of a small alien on a distant world and its contact with a human. The human convinces the alien that it should join him on an adventure. Unknown to the alien, the human ingests his kind as a powerful drug.

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  • "Witness Protection"
  • Atk. Butterfly
  • Issue #89 May 14 1999
  • The police have a new crime fighting method. "Witnesses" go into tanks which enable them to project themselves somewhere else in the city. In fact, they can project four separate copies of themselves. This ghostly copies move around and watch. Crime is down because the witnesses cannot be touched or harmed and their testimony is legal in court. It's hard to get away with a crime when someone is standing there watching your! But then a witness gets killed while she's in her tank. The police figure out that someone has built an illegal tank and discovered a way to attack a witness's projections with their own, and kill the witness in the process.

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  • "The Wrong Door"
  • Frank Fedishaw
  • Issue #32 April 10 1998
  • In a woods called Lombard, a little family has pretty much hit bottom. The husband has been bed ridden with fever, the winter has wiped out almost all of the food, their cabin is full of holes and the temperatures are dropping. Suddenly, a wolf appears and tries to break through the door, seeking food. A terrified wife battles him with her broom. Suddenly, a larger wolf appears and the two sit together for a moment. Then the smaller wolf returns to the door and starts to apologize to the woman. His boss tells him that he's at the wrong house, that these people are going to have an early spring, the husband recovers, they inherit a fortune and live happily ever after. With that, the wolves depart.

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SpaceWays Weekly, ISSN 1206-8691, was a weekly publication of:

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