Review of Gillian Parrish, “City Light”, Luna Station Quarterly 46 (2021): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
Content note: Drug addiction/abuse; death.
I liked the second half of this story, but not the first; I think I was not the target audience for it.
Review of Maeghan Klinker, “Mother Haskell”, Luna Station Quarterly 46 (2021): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
I feel like this story needs a warning, do not read if hungry! Mother Haskell tends an orchard that always bears, and bakes the best apple pies from the fruit; and after reading all the descriptions, now I want pie! Pies so good, you could almost bribe Death with them…and that’s exactly what Mother Haskell tries when her trees start to die.
A fun, yummy, sweet, story. (I was a bit surprised, though, by “the sweet maple syrup she’d collected herself when the maples were vibrant and blushing with fall” — I thought syrup was collected in early spring!)
Review of E. A. Fowler, “Swallows (Or How the Men Lost Their Magic)”, Luna Station Quarterly 46 (2021): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
The parenthetical in the title sums up the gist of the story: But what’s distinctive about it is whose viewpoint Fowler has chosen to portray the events through. The result is raw and powerful and more than a little disturbing. Thumbs up!
Review of J. Byrd, “The Notary of No Republic”, Luna Station Quarterly 46 (2021): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
“Lucy Carvell had a degree-shaped hole in her heart” is a great opening line — it immediately makes Carvell someone I want to know more about. How do you go about filling such a hole? In Carvell’s case, it’s through forgery, and forging her own diploma was the first step into becoming the titular notary: When the government collapses and the state fails, “it turned out people still needed their milestones marked” — even the milestones that haven’t happened yet.
This was such a fun, hopeful, helpful story, which an ending that made me go “awww”. Loved it.
Review of B. Zelkovich, “That Which Illuminates Heaven”, Luna Station Quarterly 46 (2021): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
Are you looking for a very sweet, very cute queer romance set in space with a determined matchmaker AI? Then, oh, my goodness, is this the story for you! It was an utter delight from the first to the last, with just the right ending.
Review of Elizabeth McEntee, “Perihelia”, Luna Station Quarterly 46 (2021): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
It’s not often I read a human-meets-alien story that’s successfully told from the alien’s point of view. Too often, the aliens still feel all too familiar, too like-us. Not so with McEntee’s narrator, living alone on her comet, who is such that when a human arrives, the invader is so foreign, so different, that they are truly the alien. The ending was a bit trite, but the core of the story was solid.
Review of Hesper Leveret, “We Who are Left On This Dying Earth”, Luna Station Quarterly 46 (2021): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
Reading recent climate news, it’s hard to escape the fact that we are already living on a dying earth; Leveret’s story is timely, then, in the sense that it could easily happen in our near future, maybe a generation from now — enough time for people on earth to figured out how to get off it.
Of course, even if that happens, we all know that not everyone is going to get to go, and “We Who Are Left On This Dying Earth” is the story of two who won’t be, one because she is too old, the other because he is too sick. Because of course it is the old and the weak and the poor who will get left behind.
You might think that this story would be an angry, unhappy story; but instead, there was just enough hope to make it happy, but not too much to make it unrealistic.
Review of Ian McDonald, “Proverbs of Hell for Writers”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 181-188 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)
McDonald closes off the anthology by giving us 94 pithy proverbs about reading, writing, and being a writer. Some obvious, some insightful, some humorous, some inspirational, this was a good way to end the collection. Having devoured the entire book over the course of four days, I now feel like maybe, just maybe, I can tackle again that glorious pain which is attempting to put words of fiction onto paper.
Review of Susan Palwick, “Matters of Life and Death”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 175-179 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)
Palwick in her essay extols the virtues of what she calls “slow writing”, and compares the process of writing to that of learning how to spin and weave cloth — not as a metaphor, but as an actual explication of practice, talking about what she learned about how to write while she was learning how to spin: In neither case should you draft too fast.
Review of Hiromi Goto, “*Take As Needed”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 171-174 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)
When Goto asks, “What if you not only lose your imagination, but you also lose faith in your imagination?” (p. 171), it feels as if he’s exactly addressing me. I read this essay with great hunger and hope. More than anything, living through a pandemic has been exhausting, and it’s useful to read yet another reminder (so many of them in this anthology, and yet every one is worthwhile) that it exhaustion isn’t just physical, and it takes time to recover from, and “solace is necessary when you lose faith” (p. 172). What I didn’t expect, and which made the essay all the more impactful, was to find that it was not written by someone who has been through the dry patch and come out the other side; it was written by someone who is in the middle of it.
SFF Reviews