REVIEW: “Three Small Sacrifices” by Janna Miller

Review of Janna Miller, “Three Small Sacrifices”, Luna Station Quarterly 40 (2019): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This is the story of a witch who lives deep in the swamps, surrounded by Spanish moss and water running lazily. It’s a traditional fairy tale type story — a man comes to seek a boon off the witch, and in return is charged with three tasks — at times gruesome, at times predictable. The ending disappointed me, though, in that it lacked the satisfying resolution that a fairy tale usually has; instead, it felt like it just ended, abruptly.

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REVIEW: “Song Xiuyun” by A Que

Review of A Que, “Song Xiuyun”, Clarkesworld Issue 157, October (2019): Read Online. Reviewed by Myra Naik.

Clocking in at over 10k words, this is more of a short novella. An arresting take from the very beginning, it drew me in immediately.

The concept in itself is something that has been done before, but not quite in this way. Song Xiuyun loves her son Li Chuan very much, and will believe everything he says to her. Wu Huang drives a remote powered car from the comfort of her home, and picks up Song Xiuyun and Li Chuan as passengers. This is where Song Xiuyun is telling Wu Huang the story, and Wu Huang is often affected by the narrative in a deeply personal way.

The story’s narrative format does increase it’s impact on the reader as well. Both Song Xiuyun and her son Li Chuan try quite hard to make each other happy. The ambiguous ending could go in many ways, but none of the options are perfect. It’s significant because if you think about all the possible options that are presented there, you’ll see that all of them have a tinge of sadness in a certain way.

A lovely tale that is fairly emotional but also about how lies can sometimes be the only thing that can make a loved one happy. A grey area to be sure, but sometimes that’s justified, or at least it can be, if you’re willing to believe in people.

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REVIEW: “National Center for the Preservation of Human Dignity” by Youha Nam

Review of Youha Nam, “National Center for the Preservation of Human Dignity”, Clarkesworld Issue 157, October (2019): Read Online. Reviewed by Myra Naik.

Set in a future dystopian timeline, this story focuses on acceptance, dignity and death. A world where, if you can’t pay survival tax, you’re. In effect, poor people who can’t afford it are taken to the National Center for the Preservation of Human Dignity.

When our protagonist gets the final letter asking for payment, she knows this is it. Her hours, not even days, are now numbered. The story is a peek into how she handles this, knowing her own time and manner of death.

The National Center is a place of mild luxury, for people to her to enjoy their last hours. Everyone handles this news and revelation differently, and our protagonist seeks dignity.

Her dignity is a character of the story in itself, something that she clings onto quite strongly.

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REVIEW: “An Arc of Lightning Across the Eye of God” by P H Lee

Review of P H Lee, “An Arc of Lightning Across the Eye of God”, Clarkesworld Issue 157, October (2019): Read Online. Reviewed by Myra Naik.

An unusual sort of first contact story. Zhou is a young magistrate in a post where he has to do nothing but stay out of trouble. Indeed, his posting was chosen for this exact reason. Nepotism mixed with his inability to actually take decisions is a larger part of this story than you would expect.

The first contact, the girl creature, is not entirely human, but isn’t not human either. She shows a different kind of life, a different way of existence, one that may bring hope but may also be unsettling for many – and not just due to fear of the unknown. Her life, culture and way of communication is something humans have never seen before. Zhou himself is unsure of how to react to something possibly so monumental that he inadvertently doesn’t.

A nice insight into the bureaucratic systems of old as well..but in space.

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REVIEW: “Six Years Stolen” by Damon L. Wakes

Review of Damon L. Wakes, “Six Years Stolen” in Ten Little Astronauts, (Unbound Digital, 2018): 73-104 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

“Six Years Stolen” is another murder mystery — a sniper is picking off policemen, one by one, and Malcolm is co-opted by his superiors to track down the murderer. But this version is a bit more noir than the previous one — set against a grimly dark backdrop that is presumably in the future but at the beginning feels (despite what would be obvious anachronisms) rather like the 1930s. It doesn’t take long for it to take a sharp turn into dystopia, though, when we find out that everyone has been drugged without their knowledge, for more than a century — a drug that prevents people from blacking out each day. I would say more about the drug and the side effects it is intended to prevent, but that would give away too much of the horror… This was a superlative premise, excellently executed.

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REVIEW: “Ghosts of Bari” by Wren Wallis

Review of Wren Wallis, “Ghosts of Bari”, Shimmer 46 (2018): 114-124 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Empires rise and empires falls, but against this grand backdrop, “salvage is the only long-term game in the universe” (p. 114). Eli, Mati, and Kin are a team of salvagers who work in the Bari region of the universe — a place that few other salvagers go — harvesting whatever they can from the ghost ships that float through there. They’re well-trained, they’re well-informed, they are good at what they do. But no amount of knowledge or experience can prepare the crew for a ship so old it doesn’t turn up in any of the Oracle’s databases. Not only that — this ship isn’t dead.

The story ultimately circles back to where it starts: The rise and fall of empires, how empires can be remembered and memorialised. There is a sharp pathos to this story that nearly brought tears to my eyes.

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REVIEW: “Murder By Magnetism” by Damon L. Wakes

Review of Damon L. Wakes, “Murder By Magnetism” in Ten Little Astronauts, (Unbound Digital, 2018): 69-71 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This brief non-fiction interlude follows “Ten Little Astronauts” and describes some of the motivation behind the story, as well as the author’s choices concerning how to incorporate the science into the fiction. I found it interesting to read Wakes’ explanation for why he chose a relatively hard SF framework for the story, ensuring that “easy” answers to the whodunit question could be excluded (this despite the fact that briefly the characters entertain the possibility that the killer is an alien).

I myself didn’t know enough of the science to know, while reading the story, how well Wakes accomplished what he set out to do, so I appreciated the chance to read a bit more about the fact behind the fiction. In reading this I also found out that a promotional video for the novella was filmed onboard HMS Alliance. For those of you who are interested, you can view it on youtube here; however, I would recommend reading the story first.

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REVIEW: “The Time Traveler’s Husband” by A. C. Wise

Review of A. C. Wise, “The Time Traveler’s Husband”, Shimmer 46 (2018): 61-68 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Regarding the title, it’s nice to see the man identified purely by his relationship to someone else, for once! (And while it isn’t immediate from the title, that “someone else” is herself a woman.)

But if you came to this story from its title hoping for time-travel, you might end up being disappointed — it really truly is the story of her husband, the story of the one who is left behind and who has to make a life living each moment in time successively. We never know his name, but we learn intimate details of his life, his relationship with his wife, and also his relationship with his father. The time traveling isn’t incidental, but it is definitely the backdrop for the telling of the relationships, not the story itself.

It was a beautifully sad story, and also a beautiful story. Midway through, it felt like it could continue in the vein it opened in without any resolution, but then it looped back on itself coming around full circle. I found the ending satisfying.

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REVIEW: “Ten Little Astronauts” by Damon L. Wakes

Review of Damon L. Wakes, “Ten Little Astronauts” in Ten Little Astronauts, (Unbound Digital, 2018): 1-67 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This story is billed as “Agatha Christie in Space”. I’m not actually a Christie reader myself — somehow, mystery has never made it high enough up my priority queue to read, though I’ve enjoyed TV adaptations of Christie’s stories — so I can’t speak to how well the Christie-style was rendered, but as a mystery it held up well. We got our first body on the first page, and very quickly after that we were given a panoply of possible suspects, each with their own very different and very strong preferences and motivations. The opening pages fairly teemed with conflict. After that, the story was stuffed full of uncertainty, second-guessing, mistakenly drawn conclusions, and even a possibility that would not have been available to Christie — that the murderer might be an alien. All in all, I found it exquisitely composed.

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REVIEW: Ten Little Astronauts by Damon L. Wakes

Review of Damon L. Wakes, Ten Little Astronauts, (Unbound Digital, 2018) — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This collection contains the titular story, “Ten Little Astronauts”, an Agatha Christie-style hard SF/mystery novella; a brief nonfiction interlude, “Murder by Magnetism”; followed another novella, which provides an alternative approach to setting a mystery story in space, “Six Years Stolen”. It’s an unusual combination, but the three pieces ended up making a coherent whole in my opinion.

As usual, we’ll review each individually, and link the reviews back here when they are published:

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