REVIEW: “Bull of Heaven” by Gabriel Murray

Review of Gabriel Murray, “Bull of Heaven”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2017: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2017): 83-99. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

So much calculation had gone into giving Francis realistic human coloration: olive skin, brown eyes, brown hair a little lighter than the eyes, striated and naturalistic. No one had done the same with the android Moses: they’d just painted him in tones they found beautiful, which occurred on no living man, which Francis found garish.

This is another story of automata, religious automata programmed and constructed so that they are “born” already knowing all the catechism, already capable of experiencing “the mystery of the faith” (p. 85). It is easy, in this story, to slip into the uncanny valley; it is only in consciously self-reflective narration that we are reminded that Brother Francis is no ordinary temple cleric. Moses, too, is an android, and what I find most fascinating in this story is watching Brother Francis go through his own uncanny valley, to see the automaton respond to the not-quite-right, the too-almost-organic android. “The humans might not have noticed, but Francis did” (p. 86). But there remain many things that Francis does not notice, not until he is confronted with them, not until it is almost too late.

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REVIEW: “Bury Me in the Rainbow” by Bill Johnson

Review of Bill Johnson, “Bury Me in the Rainbow”, Asimov’s Science Fiction March/April (2018): 140-196 — Read Excerpt Online or Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley.

The walls of the chapel, from top to bottom, on all sides, were made of thousands of little medicine bottles, test tubes, small glass containers. A rare few were clear, but most were red or rose or orange or yellow or green or blue or indigo or violet. Sunlight streamed through the windows, and through the bottles and into the chapel, in arcs and bands and mixtures and spilled across the floor and the altar and the pews and us.

Johnson returns to the world from his Hugo Award-winning novelette We Will Drink a Fish Together to present this sequel novella.

An unknown alien assassin dies in Summit, trying to kill the alien ambassador, Foremost. Tony, the new mayor, must manage the politics between the different lodges making up Summit to determine the fate of his people: how should they deal with the assassin’s body? How long can their way of life last? Should they take the ambassador’s offer and join the Ship? And will Summit and the individual lodges survive the transition if they do?

At the centre of this story is the idea and motif of the Rainbow – the central resting place a small piece of everyone who has ever died in Summit. Through this Johnson looks at history, ancestry and connection with a place and people over time, something which is valuable to everyone in Summit and challenged by the Ship’s arrival and offer.

The world is full and Johnson’s experiences from living on Lake Traverse Indian Reservation in South Dakota permeate the piece’s perceptions of community, independence and land.

This novella is small and thoughtful rather than action-packed. It spends a lot of time developing a sense of place and people, rather than pushing the narrative forward which made it feel like it ran a bit long in places. Where the story could have focused on the ambassadorial interactions happening between the ground and the Ship, Johnson instead looks at the different communities within Summit and Tony’s frustrated attempts and negotiations to get them all agreeing on the Ship issue.

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REVIEW: “Of All Possible Worlds” by Eneasz Brodski

Review of Eneasz Brodski, “Of All Possible Worlds”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2017: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2017): 223-236. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Warning: This story contains a rape.

Ehud. I had slept with him years ago. I had loved him for awhile. I should have known he would be found out. A stone flew from the crowd and tore his ear open. It bled black.

This story was a feast of detail — Romans and Jews, slaves and centurions, Colosseum fights, monstrous grotesque animals, a wizened wizard. To every animal, human or beast, that Marad sends into the Colosseum, he offers the following apology: “You must die so that I may live. I don’t ask your forgiveness; this is the way of life. But know I wish this world was different” (p. 225).

All the stories in this anthology make my heart ache, from sadness, from gladness, from a desire that the world is other than how it is. This one left me with a feeling of sadness and fear too complex to be articulated. The horror in it is shattering.

(This story was originally published in 2016 in Swords vs. Chthulhu, Jesse Bullington & Molly Tanzer, eds.)

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REVIEW: “Heart Proof” by Holly Schofield

Review of Holly Schofield, “Heart Proof”, Luna Station Quarterly 33 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

There is a lot of world-building that has gone into this story — always a plus — but the flip side of it is that I’m not sure I got the details I needed to get when I needed to get them.

The story opens with a strong sense of anger and antagonism between the two main characters, Kamik and Techan. The tension is palpable, but I found it difficult to figure out where it came from. I feel like I’ve been dumped into the story a bit too precipitously and so I don’t know enough of their history to understand why their tempers are so short and why they are so angry with each other, because it is also clear that they have known each other for a long time and were, at least once, friends. It is only later that one very oblique comment makes me realise that they are — or at least once were — lovers.

The classic fantasy story involves a quest, and the quest in this story is one of pilgrimage — pilgrimage to make sacrifice, “a sacrifice to a god I no longer believe in!” (so says Kamik). We learn that the pilgrimage is one that every member of the village one makes, but it takes a long while to find out why Kamik and Techan are making the pilgrimage now, so late in their lives — it is nearly half-way through that I find out that the pilgrimage isn’t a one-time thing, but something that is done every time the god Welmit eats the moon.

So the story took me awhile to suck me in. But when Kamik reaches the edge of Welmit’s Maw and begins to contemplate heresy, then I was hooked. My only complaint by the end is that I wished the heresy had been a bit more heretical, a bit less orthodox.

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REVIEW: “There’s No Need to Fear the Darkness” by Heather Morris

Review of Heather Morris, “There’s No Need to Fear the Darkness”, Luna Station Quarterly 33 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Brenda is one of those characters where a few paragraphs in, already I’m thinking, I like her. I want to get a beer with her sometime and hear stories about her job. She wouldn’t bore me with small talk, and I bet she has had some interesting adventures. And I bet she wouldn’t mind if I whittered on about my job; she strikes me as someone who both gives and takes. Morris describes Brenda as “petty and mean-spirited”, but I’d call her “honest” rather.

I like her no-nonsense approach to her work and to the stupidity of humanity, and I love the casual and easy love and friendship that flows between her and the other two “Lazes” (short for “Lazaruses”; I did make the mistake of mentally mispronouncing the word the first time it was used, not (yet) knowing it’s origin). I love the humor that Brenda, Cade, and Aage have — I laughed out loud more than once reading this story.

I like reading stories like this because I wish there were more people like this in the world, and since there aren’t, I just have to settle with reading stories about them instead.

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REVIEW: “We Head for the Horizon and Return with Bloodshot Eyes” by Eleanna Castroianni

Review of Eleanna Castroianni, “We Head for the Horizon and Return with Bloodshot Eyes”, Podcastle: 513 — Listen Online. Reviewed by Heather Rose Jones

Somehow Greece–in this case, the Greek civil war shortly after WWII–seems the most appropriate setting for a tale of haruspicy (the divining of omens by the study of entrails). Nafsika has a talent for divining futures and presents in the bones and organs of the dead–a talent that her commanding officer begrudgingly values except when the fate that Nafsika sees contradicts her strategy and plans. The war provides the peril and hazards that make hard choices necessary, but as the author’s notes indicate, this is in some ways a symbolic exploration of the real-history hardships and consequences of the setting. Intertwined in the exploration of Nafsika’s talents is the dangerous love she shares with her female comrade and Nafsika’s desperate attempt to use her talents to find a path to survival for her squad.

For all the gruesome opening and looming disaster, I was riveted from beginning to end. This is a powerful story with an intense sense of place and time. The horrors are both supernatural and historical, and the framing story of the protagonist writing the events as a diary (based on actual historic examples) leaves the audience in suspense as to the outcome. I can’t say that I’d be eager to experience it again, but I’m glad to have listened the once.

Content warning for body horror and wartime violence.

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REVIEW: “C-a-l-l-a-s” by Katharine Coldiron

Review of Katharine Coldiron, “C-a-l-l-a-s”, Luna Station Quarterly 33 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

“C-a-l-l-a-s” is the story of Solomon’s quest to obtain access to a piece of history that has been fervently suppressed in the wake of a cataclysmic event which we, the readers, simply know of as “the bacteria”. The effects of this bacterial event are pervasive and widespread — society is now quite dystopian and dictatorial — and there appears to be a connection between it and the lack of voice, quite literally, that people have. Communication happens primarily by sign language, or by electronic voice boxes; those who are bred to be able to speak command positions of power as literal mouthpieces for the government.

In such a world, what is it that takes the role of the most sought after, most precious? Why, music of course, and Solomon’s quest is a quest for opera, and in particular, a single opera singer, Callas.

For those who wish to experience a part of what Solomon experienced at the culmination of his quest, I leave you with this.

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REVIEW: “The Donner Party” by Dale Bailey

Review of Dale Bailey, “The Donner Party,” Fantasy & Science Fiction 134, 1-2 (2018): 228-256 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Standback.

“The Donner Party” is amply clear about its subject material from its title, and from its first line:

Lady Donner was in ascendance the first time Mrs. Breen tasted human flesh.

In this dark Victorian story, those at the apex of high society, at the most elevated of occasions, will eat human meat — “ensouled flesh” — and thus celebrate “the divinely ordained social order.” The horror of the story is far less in the gore of genteel cannibalism itself, although that’s definitely there too. Far more, it’s in the readiness with which Mrs. Breen, and others trying to touch that apex, are willing to accept, pursue and defend the practice — assuming themselves, of course, to be considered among the cannibals, and not the cannibalized.

This is definitely not a story for the squeamish. But if you’d like to read something that will make you squirm uncontrollably, “The Donner Party” is sharp and powerful. Its tone and characters are spot on; plausibly unconscionable, resplendent in their cruel self-aggrandizement.

The story’s conclusion is not unexpected; I don’t think it’s meant to be. Rather, it’s expertly built up to — and then served alongside a final twist of the knife. Recommended.

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REVIEW: “Mother Tongues” by S. Qiouyi Lu

Review of S. Qiouyi Lu, “Mother Tongues”, Asimov’s Science Fiction January/February (2018): 147-153 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley.

“I bet she bought her Mandarin…”

What if you could buy and sell languages? Excise or implant the knowledge into your brain? Go in for day surgery and wake up fluent in a new language – lifted straight from a native speaker?

Jiawen Liu wants to sell her second language, English, to pay for her daughter’s education at Stanford. But when her English is assessed as less than top quality and she is unable to afford the necessary accent-reduction courses to improve the value of it she has to consider other, more drastic, options.

A beautiful and thought-provoking piece and a highlight of this issue. Lu’s piece does a beautiful job of depicting the bilingual experience and exploring the connection between languages and our sense of self.

There’s a lot going on in this quite short piece. There’s commentary on migrant experiences, assimilation, and how these differ between generations. Consideration of the large and small interactions and use of different languages to get through a day, including code switching.

There’s sly commentary here, too, about authenticity, appropriation and exploitation of minority groups. Is it ok to steal someone else’s authentic voice and use it yourself? Is your learned integration ever going to be as acceptable as everyone else’s and will it forever be worth less? And is something really a choice when other options are not realistically available to you? And is it worth giving up your own voice so that someone else can keep and train theirs?

Lu’s prose on the whole here is tight and lovely. They set up the characters fast and the interactions pack emotional wallops along the way. Their inclusion of multilingual text and other representative prose elements in particular do an excellent job showing the confusion and disorientation of not having the right words to hand – quite literally showing rather than telling the reader the experience.

 

 

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REVIEW: “The Equalizers” by Ian Creasey

Review of Ian Creasey, “The Equalizers”, Asimov’s Science Fiction January/February (2018): 66-74 —  Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley.

“If everyone wore the Equalizers, it wouldn’t matter what I looked like, Pamela thought. I could waltz back into the office in yesterday’s outfit, without any makeup, and no one would know.”

Pamela’s workplace is trialing Equalizers – glasses which augment what the wearer sees, hears and smells to remove personal characteristics from whomever they are interacting with. People instead look like humanoid shapes in colours reflective of their work unit, and labelled with their job title. No names. The rationale is that a fair environment improves employee morale… and saves on compensation claims. Pamela finds herself starving for real human contact after spending all day interacting with faceless, inhuman shapes and has been dating hard to get over a bad breakup. Her friend, Vonda, dares her to try the Equalizers as a kind of blind date. Could she be attracted to someone based on their intellect and conversation alone?

This piece hits on some hot-button themes. How far can or should we reasonably take anti-discrimination practices? What would we need to do to overcome our bodies’ natural snap-judgements based on social conditioning and personal, inherent bias? What happens to our interactions and instincts when you take away all of the cues we normally rely on to guide us?

As such, there’s a lot of speculative fodder in this one idea of technologically removing all bias indicators from interactions with others. I liked that the contrast between judgement calls and discriminatory behaviour in the workplace and in online dating, too, showing two different realms of interaction where first impressions matter. There’s an underlying theme here about what you can see of people – in Pamela’s workplace she can’t ‘see’ people at all, and in her dating she doesn’t really see the people beyond their features. It’s polar opposite ends of a spectrum.

However, I didn’t find Pamela’s character development particularly strong – she never really had to confront her own biases and perceptions, or make any particularly big choices. There didn’t seem to be anything at stake for her personally or professionally and I found this weakened the piece, the ending in particular.

Ultimately, a great premise and idea for technology, but I felt it could have had a stronger narrative to meet the concepts and themes it was playing with.

 

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