REVIEW: “The Seafarer” by Ashley Deng

Review of Ashley Deng, “The Seafarer”, in Catherine Lundoff, ed., Scourge of the Seas of Time (and Space) (Queen of Swords Press, 2018): 18-29 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Prior to launching SFFReviews, I actually rarely read short fiction, because most of the time it was either too short for me to become invested in the characters/setting, or it was long enough for that to happen, but then I’d want more, so it was still too short.

Deng’s story manages to fall into the perfect sweet spot: It gives me depth of character and world-building that makes me long for a novel-length story set in the world she has created, but is also self-contained enough to be satisfying.

Both Deng’s story and Drasio, the main character, slip effortlessly back and forth between what is real and what is familiar and what is unknown and what is fantastic. Drasio and his pirate crew sail the Mediterranean, plundering Dutch and Turkish ships; but his home sea is one not of this world. The Karreanan lies on the other side of the barrier.

If there is one thing about this story that I’d complain about, it’s the fact it was written in the present tense. This isn’t something that always bothers me, so I’m not sure what it was here, but I kept tripping up on it. Every few sentences I’d suddenly register a present-tense verb and realise that I’d tense-shifted all the other verbs unconsciously. I don’t object to an author picking the tense they most prefer for each particular story; I’m just sad that I found the tense so obtrusive in this case.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Treasured Island” by Ginn Hale

Review of Ginn Hale, “Treasured Island”, in Catherine Lundoff, ed., Scourge of the Seas of Time (and Space) (Queen of Swords Press, 2018): 7-17 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Pirate Pascoal has found herself marooned on a deserted island surrounded by spider crabs, and how she ended up there “is a matter of some debate” (p. 7). Some might say it was mutiny against the captain, some might say that it was the captain himself that was the mutineer. But none of this changes the fact that Pascoal is now adrift and alone on of the wandering islands of the Laquerla Ocean.

But Pascoal knows what to do with a wandering island, and her first act is to offer it her thanks and her blood, because Pascoal is an Almagua, and her duty above all others is to serve and protect the wandering island.

The fact that this wandering island also happens to have abandoned treasure? Well, that’s just a perk of being a pirate, as well as an Almagua.

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REVIEW: Scourge of the Seas of Time (and Space) edited by Catherine Lundoff

Review of Catherine Lundoff, ed., Scourge of the Seas of Time (and Space), (Queen of Swords Press, 2018) — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

When my sister and I were children, our Lego collections were strictly demarcated. She had the knights and castles, I had the pirates. While my interests have shifted from the piratical to the chivalric, I still hold a soft spot for pirates and all the wonderful stories I enacted with my ships and forbidden treasure and lost islands on my parents’ dining room table. I also am always At Home for feel-good stories that allow me to escape my daily cares and wind down at the end of the day — which basically describes every story in this anthology. Reading this collection was just good fun. There were Viking pirates, ancient Greek pirates, women pirates, queer pirates, space pirates, feminist pirates, and everything in between. The pirate prizes range from treasure to slaves to simply freedom to live and love another day. And while the basic premise of the stories were all the same (those activities which count as piratical are actually rather constrained!), the reading of the stories was in no way monotonous or repetitive. Quite the contrary — these stories are like candies, you can’t stop at just one, you have to pop an entire handful!

One of the things I enjoyed about this collection was the number of new authors it introduced me to; the only one I was familiar with in advance was Lundoff herself. As is usual, we will review each story in turn, and link the reviews back here as they are published:

If there is one negative note that I would raise, it is that many of the stories ended right when I felt like they were just getting started; they seemed episodic rather than full and complete. Such stories always made me a little disappointed, because they ended and left me wanting more.

Sara L. Uckelman15 Comments

REVIEW: “Cracks” by Xen

Review of Xen, “Cracks”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2018: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2018): 113-154 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I’ll admit, I started this story, struggled some ways into it, quit, and moved on to the next one in the anthology, promising myself to revisit it soon. “Soon” ended up being more than a month later, after I’d finished all the other stories, and had only this one left to review.

The second go at it went better, because it was more familiar; I wasn’t constantly double-checking who was who, or trying to compile all the little details of world-building that I was being fed, sometimes too obliquely to really understand how they fit together. But I still struggled; the process of reading it was simply a lot of work and I never felt like I was getting close to the characters. It’s also long — one of the longest, if not the longest in the anthology — and ended up taking me two nights to get through. Finally, by about 3/4 of the way in, I felt like I’d slipped into the rhythm of it, and knew enough of the background/history to be able to follow what was happening.

Ordinarily, it’s not a story I would have finished, but I did, and the ending rewarded my persistence. It has the sort of sweet, hopeful ending that marks out so many of the stories in this anthology, and in the 2017 edition of the same. That sort of happiness in the face of bleak despair is worth reading for.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “A Bouquet of Wonder and Marvel” by Sean Eads

Review of Sean Eads, “A Bouquet of Wonder and Marvel”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2018: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2018): 267-283 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Marvels are constructed — engineered — while wonders happen naturally (p. 270).

So says the Irishman visiting Leadville, CO, to Benson, desperate to find anyone who can help out him and his employer against everything that’s going wrong in Georgetown. And who is the Irishman who’s willing to take Benson’s money when no one else will? Why, Oscar Wilde himself!

This is a queer story, in the very most old-fashioned sense of “queer”. At times it is a gunslinging romp; at other times, it is a commentary on magic vs. science; while at still others it turns almost didactic.

But for all it’s uncertainty as to what type of story it was, the tale makes a good ending, not only to the anthology but to the Wilde Stories series. Oscar Wilde will always be the patron saint of gay literature, and having lent his name to the series for a decade, it’s only fair that he got a starring role in the final story.

(Originally published in Georgetown Haunts and Mysteries, 2017).

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REVIEW: “The Secret of Flight” by A. C. Wise

Review of A. C. Wise, “The Secret of Flight”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2018: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2018): 249-266 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Wise’s story was a step out of sync with the other stories in this anthology — quite firmly falling under the horror umbrella, as opposed to SF, fantasy, or weird fairy tales. It’s also narratively distinctive, being told through a series of snapshots — play scripts, letters, newspaper clippings, drafts, etc. I don’t often see that sort of structure (more usually found in “literary” circles) deployed in spec fic, and I wish I did see it more. Everything all came together into a wonderfully deliciously creepy story, whose incidental queerness (almost entirely incidental to the plot) only enhanced it.

(Originally published in Black Feather, 2017).

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REVIEW: “There Used to be Olive Trees” by Rich Larson

Review of Rich Larson, “There Used to be Olive Trees”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2018: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2018): 225-247 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Warning: minor spoilers.

Valentin is one of the Town’s two prophets, fitted with an implant so that he can talk to the gods. The only problem is: He can’t. Three times he has tried, and three times he has failed, when no one else has ever required more than two times. Once more he will be given the opportunity to try — but “anything was better” (p. 224) than trying and failing again, so the story opens with Valentin scaling the wall that separates the Town from outside, where the wilders are.

Once Valentin gets over the wall, the story goes pretty much as one would expect: He meets someone, and runs into difficulties, he must do what that someone requires of him before he can claim his freedom, and eventually, out in the wilds beyond the Town he learns how to finally speak so that the gods will listen. But by this time, he no longer has any desire to return to the Town to be their prophet; instead, he and Pepe are striking out on their own.

Nothing was especially surprising about the story, but there were little bits that I really appreciated. The tech was novel, and exceedingly believable (can I have my own nanoshadow, plz kthanx?); and there was a poignancy to the story that left it ending on a hopeful, rather than sour, note.

(Originally published in Fantasy & Science Fiction, 2017).

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Love Pressed in Vinyl” by Devon Wong

Review of Devon Wong, “Love Pressed in Vinyl”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2018: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2018): 209-224 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This was quite a creepy little story, of Malik and his childhood friend Josh, and of Josh and his boyfriend’s death, and of a vinyl record that was left behind. The title of the story says that it is love that was pressed into vinyl, but what sort of love would be so heartless and destructive?

This sort of story isn’t particularly my kind, but even so I enjoyed the artistry with which it was written.

(Originally published in Strange Horizons, 2017.)

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REVIEW: “Uncanny Valley” by Greg Egan

Review of Greg Egan, “Uncanny Valley”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2018: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2018): 173-208 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Warning: minor spoilers.

The original Uncanny Valley is the “the proposed relation between the human likeness of an entity and the perceiver’s affinity for it” [1], the gap between things which appear to be human but not quite human enough. All the baggage that Mori’s original definition and paper have given rise to feeds into Egan’s story, a lot of baggage for it to carry, even before one begins to read. What would be populating this uncanny valley, and why? This will depend on the reader. What falls into that valley, and why, depends on the individual, precisely because it is about the discrepancy between perception and representation, both of which are individual.

For me, it actually took awhile before I realised who I was supposed to be putting into the valley; but even after it was explicit that Adam was not a man but a robot, he stubbornly refused to go into the valley, for me. It’s not so much that highly-enough developed robots are indistinguishable from humans to me; but that I find it a lot easier to interact with humans if I think of them as a bunch of highly-enough developed automata. So, robot or human, for the most part, it doesn’t make any difference.

But only for the most part: Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the story was the moment Adam did something that did dump me into the uncanny valley — and that was the moment Egan made it clear that a robot could experience sexual arousal and desire.

I have no idea how many other people will share that experience with me, or if they’ll find their own methods of populating the uncanny valley. I certainly recommend that everyone read the story and try it for themselves.

[1] Masahiro Mori, Karl F. MacDorman (trans.), and Norri Kageki (trans.), “The Uncanny Valley”, IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine 2012: 98-100.

(Originally published at Tor.com, 2017.)

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “The Future of Hunger in the Age of Programmable Matter” by Sam J. Miller

Review of Sam J. Miller, “The Future of Hunger in the Age of Programmable Matter”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2018: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2018): 155-171 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Content note: drug addiction and abuse.

Reading this story put me through the ringer. It is raw, and hard, and harsh, and dark. It is so masterfully put together that as a writer myself, I read it and despaired of ever writing anything ever again, because it was so good, and I could never do anything that good. At the same time, reading it made me want to write, because it was so good, and that means people can write things so good, and maybe I could too, someday.

But what amazed me most about it was not its depths, not the quality of the writing, but the way in which Miller took such a sad story that could have been sordid and turned it into something beautifully redemptive. The moment of hope at the end left me in tears.

(Originally published on Tor.com, 2017.)

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