REVIEW: “In Search of Stars” by Matthew Bright

Review of Matthew Bright, “In Search of Stars”, Glittership Episode 43 (2017): Read/listen online. Reviewed by Julia K. Patt.

What an unusual, mysterious story.

Our unnamed narrator is a scientist living in Los Angeles; he develops a blue paint that makes people float away into the sky. This is what he does with his one-night stands, the men he takes back to his apartment. He wants these men, sometimes desperately, but doesn’t want to linger with them or see them again. There’s a sense that by releasing them into the atmosphere, our narrator is protecting himself, distancing himself from what he really wants.

Of course, not all of them go quietly or disappear unforgotten. We can understand, perhaps, why the narrator is so uneasy.

Anonymity dominates not only in his life but also in the city itself, a peculiar hybrid of shiny Hollywood glamour and “Good old American filth.” Where all the women are named Marilyn and even laundromats turn into something very different at night. No one is exactly as they seem or as they claim to be, including—especially—the man telling this story.

It’s a story rich in the unspoken, the undeclared, which becomes more than a little unsettling (in the best way). There’s very little dialogue, aside from the narrator’s conversations with Eugene, an old friend from school who works on movies. And even his time with Eugene eventually lapses into silence at the story’s conclusion.

Then the narrator must make a decision: to stay or float away himself and join the men he’s sent into the sky.

JuliaLeave a comment

REVIEW: “The Lightning Bird” by Kristi DeMeester

Review of Kristi DeMeester, “The Lightning Bird”,  Apex Magazine 100 (2017): [Read Online]. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

We learn two things from the very first sentence: Gable’s mother has died, and this story features magic. It’s hard to write about mother daughter relationships without being saccharine, and harder still to write about dead mothers without slipping into the maudlin, but DeMeester manages it here. Gable’s grief permeates the page, raw and messy with edges like broken glass.

The magic feels real. By that I mean that it isn’t a metaphor for grief – though it serves as a powerful tool to elucidate that emotion – and it isn’t tacked on. Gable is a tribal healer, diviner, and psychopomp for a community of South African immigrants living in Florida, a role and gift which she inherited from her mother, Uma. It is a part of who she is, part of the world sketched out for us. This is almost as much a story about her stepping into that adult role as it is about grief, but really they weave together, forming the warp and weft of the tale.

DeMeester weaves past and present together in a way that should be confusing, but is actually easy to follow. Gable’s memories of her mother, of growing up, and of one other girl in particular butt up against the main narrative, sometimes with white space as a cue, but often without it. Somehow this is not confusing, a testament to the author’s control.

The end is dark and strange, redolent of cycles and power.

J.Z. Weston1 Comment

REVIEW: “The Age of Glass” by Ryan Row

Review of Ryan Row, “The Age of Glass,” Persistent Visions, 18 August 2017 — Read Online. Reviewed by Essence B. Scott.

What does it mean to be human? Ryan Row’s short story “The Age of Glass” responds to this question perfectly. Is being a human having a soul? Being sentient? Being open with your problems? What about having problems?

“The Age of Glass,” according to the blurb at the top of the story, is a “coming-of-age-during-the-apocalypse tale.” Though the growing up is in the nameless female protagonist’s imagination, we see her trying to make sense of the world around her by attempting to appear more grown up than she actually is.

Form—both of humans and of the enemy Stickmen—is a motif throughout the story. In the first paragraph, the protagonist says that her friend, Tracy, is “shorter than me, and her skeleton is less formed” in comparison to her own, which a boy told her via a note in her locker was “’historic’.” Our protagonist is obsessed—much like the way the blurb before the story’s start said—with form, her own and others. Further into the story, she admires Adam while he smokes. “When he inhales on his cigarette… his chest expands just so in the light. And I imagine this movement of his, this angle, this light, has never been seen before by anyone alive.” She romanticizes war and the way it changes people. Later, she describes a picture hanging on Adam’s wall: “In it, he is smiling in a way I have never seen before. Broadly, revealing his teeth to be a little too large for his mouth. A human perfection in him that I have come to love as his only flaw.”

Our protagonist eschews childish behavior, though she is a child herself and has childish thoughts. This smile on the wall is childish to her. She wants so much to be an adult, like most teens do, that she admires Adam’s adulthood. She describes his smile now as “cool and adult.” She practices her smile in the mirror every morning. Her cool, adult smile with no teeth showing.

When she first happens upon Adam smoking hand rolled cigarettes, they remind her, “embarrassingly” of “tiny tampons.” A little later, Adam’s arrival in Falls City is described using sentence fragments. She sees Adam and can only imagine that this is what she wants.

So, she makes herself appealing to Adam in the way that most teenagers who are attracted to someone do: make themselves attractive. For the protagonist, this is through jogging. She wears shorts that “accent[s] the length and curve of [her] tanned legs” and wearing “brightly colored tank-tops cut low, hugging [her] slim chest and stomach like a finer skin.”

When Adam says he’s been thinking about war and the dreams he has surrounding it, all our protagonist can say is, “cool.” She thinks she understands him, but she doesn’t in the least. I think she wants to understand, but she won’t really get it until she’s in the situation herself.

Glass is another motif in this story. This story is called “The Age of Glass.” When glass is mishandled, it shatters into a million pieces. Glass is beautiful when it is treated with respect. It takes in light; glitters, shines when one moves it around.

The Stickmen’s skin is “polished and geometric, edged.” While our protagonist has not come face-to-face with a Stickman, she has seen videos of them: “I know this from the shaky, soldier taken videos on websites like ‘Save Sentient Species’ and ‘Snuff Before Bed’.” Stickmen have a simple mean of taking out the enemy. From our protagonist: “One clip showed a Stickman reaching toward a group of soldiers, and thin, blue-white beams came from its fingers like tangling marionette strings. The men fell to pieces like dolls.”

In the next paragraph, she describes the Stickmen as “beautiful and misshapen. Almost human… but thin and with random extra joints or protruding nobs of glassy flesh.” They are “faceless, but not headless. Deformed, but alive. Long limbs like bones without flesh. As translucent as moonlight or handmade glass.” Even Stickmen can’t escape her fantasies of war and fighting to save the world.

Stickmen come from the ground, in the Creator Lands, spreading outwards “like a spill and become Crater Lands after they’re sucked dry.”

In the scene where our protagonist is working to reinvent herself, we also meet her mother. Her mother is vulnerable. After the protagonist’s father’s name is added to the list of other people who have went MIA, her mother “move[s] through life as caught in an undertow, struggling against something invisible and all around her.” Her teen daughter, perhaps? It can’t be easy raising a child without a father, MIA or not.

As the story nears the climax, around page seven or so (I printed this story out; it is easier for me to read), the scenes get shorter. When our protagonist learns about Adam, she gets a lot more than she might have wanted.

This story is a bit on the long side (fourteen printed pages), but I enjoyed reading it. Row uses interesting description, and the story feels original to me. Persistent Visions did a good thing by publishing this story. To read this story and others, go to http://www.persistentvisionsmag.com

 

 

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REVIEW: “Baghdad Syndrome” by Zhraa Alhaboby

Review of Zhraa Alhaboby, Emre Bennett (trans.), “Baghdad Syndrome”, Iraq+100, edited by Hassan Blasim (Comma Press, 2016): 87-106 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This story has so many layers to it, it’s hard to know where to begin. There’s the “future-day” story of a man suffering from Baghdad Syndrome who dreams of a weeping woman. There’s the “present-day” story, set in our present or near past, of two star-crossed lovers whose story was commemorated in a statue in a central square. There’s the “past-day” story, of Scheherazade at the 1001 nights. These stories weave in and out of each other and the thread that ties them all together is names and naming. Some of the characters are not named at all; they are simply placeholders that could be anyone. The narrator’s name depends on who it is that is addressing him, whether he is “Patient Sudra Sen Sumer” or “Architect Sudra Sen Sumer”. Some characters are named, but their names are “new” names, names that have been consciously divorced from history, because:

Old names and surnames became dangerous things to hold onto, and people were allocated new, neutral names, free from any affiliations to religions or sects of the past. The slogan we read about in history was: ‘Leave behind your names and live!’ (p. 102).

In one poignant moment, Sudra Sen Sumer visits the family of his coworker Utu, and the older members of the family go around one by one saying the names of their grandparents and great-grandparents, their names connecting them to their histories. Names encode our history, and when those names are taken away, so too is our access to our history; the playing out of this theme is central to the story, and it is also in the periphery at every step.

And then there’s the name, “Baghdad Syndrome”. It’s a destructive illness, one of the long-term consequences of chemical warfare. The course of symptoms is well-known, and there is no cure; when there is no cure and you know what your fate will be, what point is there in visiting the doctors who will do nothing more than give a name to what it is that ails you?

But the illness is only superficial. It is not the real Baghdad Syndrome. For:

You see, if you’re a sufferer of Baghdad Syndrome, you know that nothing has ever driven us, or our ancestors, quite as much as the syndrome of loving Bahgdad (p. 106).

There is so much love in this story. So much love and so much heart. I think it’s probably my favorite in the entire anthology.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “The Secret Life of Bots” by Suzanne Palmer

Review of Suzanne Palmer, “The Secret Life of Bots”, Clarkesworld 132: Read online. Reviewed by Kerstin Hall.

Bot 9 has been in storage for a while. It’s a dated model with a reputation for instability, but when the ship runs into a crisis, even temperamental old multibots are called to assist. 9 is to deal with a pest problem –something is chewing through the walls– and while it would prefer a more important job, it dutifully sets about hunting down vermin.

This story is warm and funny and endearing. The narrative is well-constructed, and balances humour and tension throughout. The narrative voice is especially appealing when 9 is the focaliser. The newer bots and the ship are dismissive of 9’s limited functionality, so there’s something thoroughly charming about our hero’s gung-ho attitude. It might not have access to the newfangled ‘botnet’, but it never doubts its ability to get the job done.

The situation onboard the ship escalates. In between fighting off the pest (which is a bit like a bug, and a bit like a rat, or perhaps more like a “Snake-Earwig-Weasel”), 9 decides to fix the humans’ rather more life-threatening problems too.

If you are looking for something amusing, satisfying and easily digestible, “The Secret Life of Bots” won’t disappoint.

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REVIEW: “The Red Tree” by Natasha Suri

Review of Natashi Suri, “The Red Tree”, Luna Station Quarterly 31: Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

One way in which short stories are trickier than longer media is that the author has very little time to catch the reader’s attention and get them involved in the characters. By the end of the fourth paragraph of “The Red Tree”, I am already involved. I do not know why Alder is hiding in a tree, I do not know why the man at the foot of the tree is crying, but Suri paints his anguish and fear so clearly and strongly that one cannot help but want to know the reason for it, and what one can do to comfort him.

But this story is the story of Alder, not of the boy. Alder’s name is, from the very start, a hint to her identity, and I hope it is not too much of a spoiler to say how much I enjoy a dryad story; for whatever reason, of all the well-known creatures in the ordinary human mythological repertoire, dryads (and naiads) feature very infrequently in fantasy and speculative stories. One benefit of this is that there are fewer preconceived notions of who they are and what their relationship to their trees, and thus authors have more freedom to play with these myths. Suri’s take is both poignant and beautifully written. It is a story of hope and vitality — and just a touch of revenge. I think I would’ve liked the story if it had ended up the note of hope, but I can see how the ending Suri wrote is fitting and meet.

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REVIEW: “The Spice Portrait” by J. M. Evenson

Review of J.M. Evenson, “The Spice Portrait”, Escape Pod 594: Listen and read online. Reviewed by Duke Kimball.

“They said my love for my daughter was excessive, that I made her weak by kissing her and singing in her ear at night.

They also said I killed her.”

With these opening lines, “The Spice Portrait” introduces the fear and self-doubt of every mother who has had her parenting corrected into a world of oppression and brutal scarcity. It is a visceral story of love and loss set in a sparse post-apocalypse, within a rigid society motivated almost entirely by lack. All the while the question looms: in a world in which only the strongest can survive, can there be room for a mother’s love to blossom? 

I like that Evenson shows us a section of this society with no direct masculine influence, (including merely oblique and ominous references,) and instead lets us live through the women of this future world. Naz and her mother endure backbreaking labor, petty squabbles, and ever-present hunger- only to face the greatest loss possible. I found the tale tempered with moments of incredible humanity and compassion throughout. The world is nuanced and effortlessly grounded, from the faith to the food to the daily chores- and while a difficult place, it was easy to find myself immersed in it. 

With resonant notes of Atwood and Le Guin, Evenson’s heart-wrenching story is one that is worth tasting.

DukeLeave a comment

REVIEW: “The Worker” by Diaa Jubaili

Review of Diaa Jubaili, Andrew Leber (trans.), “The Worker”, Iraq+100, edited by Hassan Blasim (Comma Press, 2016): 61-80 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This story is two distinct halves stitched together into one story by their shared narrator. In the first half, our unidentified narrator tells us about what life is like, 100 years into the future, and it is a strange collection of facts. Measles has not yet been eradicated, and AIDS is still prevalent — but antibiotics are still viable. At some point in the past automata replaced many ordinary workers, but these automata are now broken and nonviable. World War Three happened about 20 years previously, and the fall-out of climate change and war has wreaked havoc on society. There is slavery. There is cannibalism. But there is also the Governor, who employs clerks to search through history to provide him with examples of calamaties, atrocities, horrors, tragedies, and catastrophes. From these he composes his sermons which indulge in the very strange sort of reasoning that is often known as the ‘Pain Olympics’ — surely his people cannot be that badly off, since many other people in history have had it much, much worse.

In this first half, we have no idea who the narrator is, nor who the titular worker is. This is addressed in the second half, where it turns out that they are one and the same. But the worker is no ordinary worker, and it is only towards the end of the story that we find out that he is not just a worker but The Worker, the essence of the ordinary every day working man captures in concrete and made into a statue. His history is recounted, as well as his present context, until the story ends, quite abruptly, without any clear resolution.

Tales told from the point of view inanimate objects are often listed on journal wish-lists. But they are hard to write without unduly anthropomorphising the object, or having to tell some tortuous story about how it is this unconscious, inanimate thing can even have a point of view. This story simply entirely ignores the question of how the statue is a position to be able to tell us a story, and also simply cares nothing at all about whether it is being too anthropomorphic. This blithe disregard is noteworthy because it is perhaps the clearest speculative element of the story: It is just taken for granted that this type of narrator and narration is possible without feeling any need to explain or justify this possibility.

The story is well-populated with informative footnotes (you know how much I love an informative footnote — especially when one of them is such that I can feel very smug because I didn’t need it, I know who ibn Khaldun is, thank you very much). There was one moment of frustration though: Footnote 5 appears on p. 65. Footnote 7 appears on p. 72. When one flips to the end of the story, one finds that there are only 6 footnotes: And the content of footnote 6 does not match the sentence footnoted 7. Footnote 6 actually turns up on p. 77, but we are left forever in the dark as to what footnote 7 was intended to be.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: Flash Fiction Online, October 2017, edited by Suzanne W. Vincent

Review of Flash Fiction Online, ed. Suzanne W. Vincent, October 2017 — Read Online . Reviewed by Meryl Stenhouse.

Stories in this issue:

A Siren Song for Two by Steven Fischer

Claire Weinraub’s Top Five Sea Monster Stories (For Allie) by Evan Berkow

Fluency by Matt Mikalatos

Monsters by Edward Ashton

Editorial by Suzanne W. Vincent

Editorial by Suzanne W. Vincent

October’s issue is monster-themed in recognition of Halloween. As someone from a country that doesn’t celebrate this event, I was surprised at the focus on family, not something I would associate with Halloween at all. But as I said, we don’t celebrate it here, so what do I know?

Monsters, however, are something we can all appreciate. What I liked about this collection was turning the concept of ‘monster’ on its head in interesting ways. Rather than four stories of ‘person vs monster’, the stories challenged the reader to reconsider what is monstrous.

A Siren Song for Two by Steven Fischer

I struggled to connect with this story, for a couple of reasons. The science was incorrect; ice does not expand in the heat and contract in the cold. Also, spacesuits made of metal would be heavy and impractical. I never had a clear idea of what the workers were there for, other than to make money so they could go somewhere else. And I did not understand how, if they knew about the song, they didn’t take precautions to prevent the appalling number of deaths. So perhaps, because I was already doubting the authenticity of the story, the finale didn’t resonate with me.

Claire Weinraub’s Top Five Sea Monster Stories (For Allie) by Evan Berkow

A lovely story about loss and how we remember people. Claire’s relationship with Allie is defined by their mutual love of books and particularly Allie’s love of sea monster stories. I enjoyed the way the list carried on past the end of Allie’s life and became part of Claire’s healing. The two characters were well drawn for such a short piece.

Fluency by Matt Mikalatos

Fluency is a challenging story. An alien race start a war with Earth purely for the purpose of uniting the fractured governments. The protagonist, through their life, learns alien words, but it is only at the finale, on the alien planet, that they fully understand them.

While the personal journey drawn in the story is fulfilling and well-developed, it’s impossible to ignore the background of death and destruction which is barely mentioned in the story. What a horrific crime, to force people to go to war to protect their planet, for the sake of unification. And how would a global war unify a planet? The more likely outcome is that the stronger cultural groups will survive, and the weaker would be assimilated or destroyed. You cannot predict a rosy outcome to such an action without first considering history.

Monsters by Edward Ashton

Niko’s love is dying, and the monsters circle. They want to take her away from him, but Niko won’t let them. I’ve read stories like this before, and there was nothing new here, but it fit neatly into the theme of this issue and was a good ending for those who might not have seen this trope before.

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REVIEW: “Dire Wolf” by Michael J. DeLuca

Review of Michael J. DeLuca, “Dire Wolf,” Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issue #234, September 14, 2017: Read online. Reviewed by Elora Gatts.

In a world resembling the United States circa Prohibition—judging from the prevalence of logging/trapping, the stark disconnect between city and “wilderness,” and the mention of a speakeasy—a man named Staggerlee is always on the lookout for a fight. One day, trouble finds him in the form of a massive wolf, and a beautiful woman from his past…

Brimming with authentic sensory detail, “Dire Wolf” thoroughly embraces the grit, dirt, and violence that defines protagonist Staggerlee’s existence. He is an exile from “the city,” a wanderer whose many regrets lead him to drink profusely and go toe-to-toe with anyone who might be willing. Unfortunately, these regrets are kept vague—the few hints afforded us do little to flesh out a satisfactory backstory for Staggerlee. I personally conjured the image of the brooding “hero” from one of the old westerns that helped my father start learning English as a child in Japan; the same ones he sometimes still watches, basking in the glow of nostalgia. But like many of those characters, there is a sense that Staggerlee’s foundations are firmly grounded in toxic masculinity. After all, the first thing we learn about him is that he feels compelled to react with physical displays and self-destructive behavior. I feel like this could have been an interesting angle, but it seems to have been played straight, with Staggerlee being “the baddest mother around.” (Incidentally, this is given as one of the reasons he is “exiled” from the city).

The women play secondary roles, though it’s obvious that Delia—a beautiful former singer from one of the city’s speakeasies—is one of Staggerlee’s regrets. Why? He loved her. It’s also explained in a few brief lines that a certain woman (or girl?) “froze to death,” and for this, Delia desires revenge. She now hunts him with a massive, man-eating she-wolf in tow (a little on the nose thematically, but it’s the primary speculative element). If we fully accept that this wolf is a metaphor for Staggerlee’s desired death, the ending becomes much more interesting; even if it does, however, I’m not sure it really changes anything for Staggerlee.

And this then is the sense I take away from “Dire Wolf”—for all its action, we never learn enough, about the world or its characters. To end on a positive note, while I may not be the ideal audience for this type of story, I appreciate the many technical merits of the prose. I was particularly impressed with how grounded I felt in the action.

Elora GattsLeave a comment