Alien pregnant by Elvis, edited by Esther M. Friesner and Martin Greenberg, contains 36 stories, specially written for this anthology, dedicated to mocking the noble efforts of those brave men and women who tirelessly labour to bring us the news which those in power would rather keep us ignorant of. It is, however, funny.

• Introduction: Alien Pregnant by Elvis by Esther M. Friesner: Extract: Yes, astounding but true, reading this book may actually help you:
  • Lose unwanted pounds! (If you don't eat anything while reading it.)
  • Firm up that flab! (If you put the book between your knees at least twice a day and squeeze twenty times, rest, repeat.)
  • Improve your sex life! (If you give it as a birthday gift, nicely wrapped, with maybe the keys to a new Porsche tied casually to the ribbon.)
  • Remove unwanted sags and wrinkles! (If you don't mind replacing them with laugh lines.)
  • Raise your IQ! (Or at least give you lots of food for thought.)


• The Source of it All by Dennis McKiernan:
  This is set in a small town where they all live and it all happens: three-headed boy, man with dog's head, man who was trapped inside the Titanic for decades, giant robot which had previously run amok and killed thousands in Leningrad, Nessie, Great Pyramid, alien spaceship ...


• The Bride of Bigfoot by Lawrence Watt-Evans: A man on a long road trip stops to take a leak after having a six-pack of Bud for lunch. When he turns back towards the car, he finds that Bigfoot is standing behind him and wants a lift to Oregon. Bigfoot has learned English from newspapers left by campers. He can't talk but communicates by writing notes. He's seen a report of a sighting of a female Bigfoot in Oregon. In Oregon, the two of them team up with a tabloid reporter to try to track down a female Bigfoot. They support themselves by selling photos of Bigfoot, until the papers won't buy anymore because people are tired of too many Bigfoot stories. Is there to be no happy ending? Could help come from a (perhaps) unexpected quarter?


• Close-Up Photos Reveal JFK Skull on Moon! by Barry N. Malzberg: This consists of several vignettes. It is left to the reader to work out a connection.


• Marilyn, Elvis, and the Reality Blues by James Brunet:
  In a world apparently ruled by silliness, Henry Kizmik is trying to write an article called "The Case for Logic". Having Elvis and Marilyn for neighbours doesn't help.


• Those Rowdy Royals! by Laura Resnick: What journalism was probably like in the 12th century.


• My Husband Became a Zombie and it Saved Our Marriage by Karen Haber: Who would have thought that Girl Scouts would be so scary?


• Rock Band Conjures Satan as Manager—Group Claims "Good Business Move" by Deborah J. Wunder: This is an interview by the New Morning Magazine with the rock band KILL THE SMURFS and their manager, Nick Nichols (actually Satan). Both band and manager are happy with the advantages they get from the contract. For example, Nick: "Since I started managing [the band] I've learned an incredible amount about evil ...".


• 2,437 UFOs Over New Hampshire by Allen Steele: A small town in New Hampshire has been totally bought up by an organisation which promises security from alien abduction, mainly for people who have been through it once and that was enough, but also people who haven't been abducted yet and really don't want to be. We get to watch the security patrols on the ground and by helicopter in action and see the perils they face.


• Pulitzer Kills Publishing Maggot by Mark W. Tiedemann: The importance of flavour in reports and of digestible news items is greater than you think.


• Elvis at the White House by Kristine Kathryn Rusch: A psychic who doesn't like being psychic is working as a psychic investigator, because it's what she can do. An Elvis impersonator has been warned by Elvis that a murder is likely to take place. They find that the probable victim is a young Elvis impersonator, one who has great talent and a remarkable rapport with Elvis. A psychic investigator's lot is not a happy one.


• The Number of the Beast by Jeff Hecht: At each end and in the middle of a bar code are pairs on lines, often printed a bit longer than the rest, which don't represent digits but help the reader to recognise the code. In this story, a nutter claims that these lines in fact represent three sixes, i.e. the dreaded number of the Beast. I don't know who had the idea first, but in fact there really are nutters who claim just that. What a pity that the earliest known copies of the Revelation give the number as 616, so that 666 may well be due to an early copyist's mistake.


• De Gustibus ... by Anthony R. Lewis: At a banquet to celebrate the promotion of an executive in a stock broking company, we learn that the penalties of failure may be other than we expected.


• Is Your Coworker a Space Alien? by "Bob" bes Shahar: The narrator works for a small outfit in New York. The publishing related work they do is mostly done by machines these days, so they exist by costing less than machines. People who do this are, well, weird. They get a copy of something that's going around, a questionnaire to identify space aliens: largely pretty vague stuff, and they all score as very alien: unconventional clothes, unconventional eating habits, apparent lack of everyday knowledge. A new worker joins up who is totally different, who satisfies none of the criteria for being an alien. But then, what would a clever alien who knew about the questionnaire do?
  This is one of the best in the book.


• A Beak for Trends by Laura Frankos: Benjamin's grandmother has accumulated quite a bit of money by clever speculation in the stock market. When she dies, she leaves her fortune to be equally divided between her grandchildren and her parrot. As oldest grandchild, Benjamin gets the parrot and its money to look after. Grandma's will makes clear that the parrot is to be well cared for, to have its cage lined with good newspapers changed daily, and the carer must spend time with the parrot and listen to it. This goes well and Benjamin prospers until he dies of a heart attack. The next grandchild is no friend of quality newspapers and the poor bird has to make do with tabloids.


• Hitler Clone in Argentina Plots Falklands Reprise, or Death and Transfiguration by John DeChancie: Basically, the title gives it away: Hitler, JFK, Marilyn, Elvis, Evita and others, or possibly their replicas, are, thanks to secret medical and scientific breakthroughs of the Third Reich, living in a sanatorium in Argentina. Hitler is occasionally overcome by the desire to reveal all, but even tabloid reporters or editors who he contacts refuse to take him seriously. It's a simple idea, but much better told than my synopsis can indicate.


• Group Phenomena by Thomas F. Monteleone: A reporter notices that if some sort of unusual accident occurs, a couple more similar accidents will often occur in the next few days, then no more for ages.
  
  Now we might suppose that there is a mundane explanation for this. All sorts of strange stuff happens all the time, but mostly doesn't get reported because of lack of space. On a slow news day, however, some one apparently unusual accident might get reported. In that case, there will be a slightly enhanced interest in accidents of the same type, so another might well get reported (and, if it wasn't all that similar, the similarities might be exaggerated - do we want to be so cynical?). This increases interest further, so another gets reported. But soon, the public have had enough of these, they are boring again, and another of the same sort won't be reported for years or decades.
  
  Anyway, our reporter takes the clusters as reported to represent the facts as they are, and writes an article about it for a high-paying magazine. Encouraged by this, he decides to write a book. Looking at the pictures he gathers during research, he finds that the same face shows up over and over among the spectators after the accident. Well yes. it's an alien and he is in some sense responsible for the events. There's more. The author tells it better than I do.


• Unextinctions by Bruce Boston & Roger Dutcher: The main virtue of this one is brevity.


• How Alien He Really Was by Bruce Boston: Even shorter than the previous one, but poignant. An alien comes to understand How Alien He Really [Is].


• NASA Sending Addicts to Mars! Giant Government Coverup Revealed! by Alan Dean Foster: It turns out that the best way to survive the physical and emotional stress of prolonged enclosure and weightlessness is adequate dosage of cannabis: with hilarious results for the interview with the unsuspecting president and the members of the successful Mars landing.


• Vole by John Gregory Betancourt: Oh dear. Advances in plastic surgery and genetic engineering make it possible for people to choose to live in animal bodies.


• In Search of the Perfect Orgasm or Doing It with a Big Lizard Can Be Fun by Dean Wesley Smith: Here we get the exciting countdown to a violent encounter between friendly (to us) aliens and Godzilla, towards whom they are less friendly. It is, however, interspersed with a detailed account of the perfectly ordinary behaviour of a pair of teenagers before school in a car parked in the school car park, from hands under pullover and bra-unhooking to orgasm.


• Saving Sam's Used UFOs by Kate Daniel: Suppose you are a space alien and want to move among Earthlings to investigate their ways, rather than just gather physical data by abducting a few and probing their butts. Then your UFO isn't much use, but a car would be good. This is where used-car dealer Saving Sam can be useful to you. And again when you want to fly away home.


• Danny's Excellent Adventure! by Greg Cox: "I didn't live in this century." — J. Danforth Quayle. (Remember him?) So what century did he live in?


• Royal Tiff Yields Face of Jesus! by Esther M. Friesner: This is the main editor's own contribution to the anthology. The background of the story is that Prince Charles has become king and made Druidism the state religion. (This is not as far-fetched as somebody unfamiliar with the British royal family might suppose. Charles is the strongest argument against monarchy that has been seen for quite a while: show him a crank cause or a nutty superstition and he will like it.) His wife, however, has refused to abandon the religion she was born into and is to be sacrificed by being drowned in a bog, like other dissenters. She escapes and is given shelter by an old women who lives by herself in an isolated cottage because her social life in the town she previously lived in was ruined by the density in her vicinity of manifestations of the faces of the famous dead (including Elvis, of course). The king and his priests catch up with her, but more powerful help is at hand.


• Magnetic Personality Triggers Nail-biter's Near-death Ordeal! by t. Winter-Damon: Eating metal can be dangerous.


• They'd Never— by Harry Turtledove: Suppose you are a tabloid reporter and you have the chance to write up an incredible but true story while furthering your love life. Can this go wrong?


• Loch Ness Monster Found—In the Bermuda Triangle! by David Vierling: Nestor McLochlan, tired of Scottish weather, goes on holiday.


• Racehorse Predicts the Future! by Josepha Sherman: Straight from the horse's mouth!


• Printer's Devils by Gregory Feeley: Software problems in a newspaper office. This story is more substantial than most of the others.


• Cannibal Plants From Heck by David Drake: This is a creepy story about a man who moves to a house in a small town with his nine-year-old daughter, where he hopes to indulge his passion for gardening. He pretty much neglects his daughter in favour of plants, leaving little space in the house and none in the garden for her. His other mistake is to refuse to buy plants from the local supplier, to whom eventually the child turns for help.


• Psychic Bats 1000 for Accuracy! by Jody Lynn Nye: Year by year predictions and news reports that bear them out, from 2001 to 2010, but a surprise in 2011.


• Caveat Atlantis by Richard Gilliam: A story about unpopular predictions and a way to increase supermarket egg sales.


• Frozen Hitler Found in Atlantean Love Nest by G———r G———n: This is less than four full pages and I am truly not too fussy about what I read, but I could not get through this drivel. YMMV?


• Those Eyes by David Brin: This is good. Some of it is transcript of a skeptic doing a late night radio phone in program, but we get the reactions of the crew of a UFO who are busy creating corn circles, revealing themselves to people in isolated places etc.


• Stop Press by Mike Resnick: This takes the form of an exchange of letters between descendants of Mike Resnick and Esther Friesner. Resnick is a struggling tabloid reporter and Friesner a hard-hearted editor in the 24th century. Resnik offers stories cheaper and cheaper, with no success. They also disagree on the literary significance of their respective ancestors. But eventually Resnick comes up with a real doozy of a story.


• Martian Memorial to Elvis Sighted by George Alec Effinger: This is a good story to end the anthology with. To understand it, it helps to know something of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom series (and the story would be even better if Effinger didn't get some details of Barsoom wrong). The Martians have appealed to the US government for help getting John Carter back, but due to government incompetence they get Elvis instead.