REVIEW: “No Man of Woman Born” by Ana Mardoll

Review of Ana Mardoll, “No Man of Woman Born”, in No Man of Woman Born (Acacia Moon Publishing, 2018): 133-149 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

Content note: Governmental oppression, mention of emergency C-section and rape.

When Mardoll said in the introduction that the characters inside “break, subvert, and fulfil the same gendered prophecies” that cis characters get in other stories, we were meant to take this quite literally, as is clear in the number of overt prophecies and oracles that occur in the stories. “No Man of Woman Born” opens with a prophecy, that no man of woman born can harm Fearghas. The prophecy was “unambiguous” and had “independent verification” (p. 139). So of course, nothing could possibly go wrong…But of course not. What is human nature but to exploit constraints, to try to find the loopholes? Schools for training women, children, or animals to fight sprang up all over, all headed by someone seeking to harm the king.

This story is centered around the prophecy, and the way it has shaped the lives of the people it does or could apply to. But even as the prophecy dictated the actions of so many, one thing I loved was the recognition that one did not need to have a prophecy to be heroic: “I’m choosing to believe I have the capacity to become the hero until proven otherwise,” Sìne tells Innes (p. 138) when a new prophecy is published that would seem to exclude her.

There are many aspects of this story that I suspect would speak directly to many people whose life experiences are very different from my own. Not having had those experiences, this story did not speak to me as much as some of the others in the anthology, but that doesn’t really matter, because I’m not the intended audience. For the intended audience — people who are coming to terms with their own gender, or newly coming to terms with the gender of a close friend or loved one — there is a lot in this story that provides models for how to react and to behave.

It’s also where we get our third set of neopronouns in the collection: “kie”/”kir”. Strangely, I didn’t find them as difficult as “nee”/”ner”, which makes me wonder about the linguistic psychology of these new words, and why some of them work so easily as pronouns while others are more cognitively difficult. (Someone do a study on this! And then do a follow-up study on how the cognitive load is lessened after repeated exposure, so that we can do things like have cis people read these stories and thereby up the amount of passive absorption of a variety of pronouns!)

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Night Shift” by Eileen Gunn

Review of Eileen Gunn, “Night Shift”, in Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures, edited by Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich, (Center for Science and Imagination, Arizona State University, 2017): 175-190 — Download here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

2032: An interplanetary gold rush has begun, and the prize is water, not gold. The miners are robots, with human intelligence and superhuman survivability.

The opening premise of this story resembles that of the previous one, “The Use of Things” (read the review), with a focus on the mining of asteroids by robots for water.

2032 no longer feels like that far in the future. When the author rehearses what has gone on in the 2020s, it all of a sudden has this uncomfortable feeling like this is right around the corner, except — and here I sort of slip into an uncanny valley — given how the world actually is, now, in 2018, I cannot quite fathom how it could be as Gunn describes in the 2020s. We’ve got a long way to go if we want to be populating near-Earth space with sophisticated mining technology by the end of the next decade.

This is all backdrop for what is a pretty ordinary story of coders and mining and slime mold (a lot of slime mold) which was enjoyable but unfortunately marred by one story thread that was probably thoughtless rather than intentionally hurtful, and yet is still problematic. When Tanisha, the manager, refers to Seth as “she”, and the narrator, Sina, one of the coders, “rolled my eyes. Tanisha thinks Seth is a girl”, my first thought was “if Tanisha is misgendering one of her staff, then I wish Sina would do more than just roll her eyes, but would speak up and correct her. But then it turns out that Seth isn’t trans, he’s an AI, and I found that deeply disappointing. What could’ve been the first instance of an openly queer character in this anthology instead became an example of the very problematic trope of othering trans people to the point where they are — literally — not even human.

I guess I had hoped that an anthology about visions of space and space exploration for the future would do better than that.

Sara L. Uckelman2 Comments

REVIEW: “Early to Rise” by Ana Mardoll

Review of Ana Mardoll, “Early to Rise”, in No Man of Woman Born (Acacia Moon Publishing, 2018): 104-132 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

Content note: Magical curses, non-consensual kissing, mention of self-harm.

Retold fairy tales are tricky to pull off — so when one is done as masterfully as this retelling of “Sleeping Beauty” is, it is a triumph. The best retold fairy tales are ones where the story is not only told again but it’s transformed in a way that makes it entirely new.

There is so much to love about this story — Claude growing up not isolated in a forest cottage, deprived of parents, but kept close within the comfort and love of family, both parents and siblings. The issue of the pressure of finding one’s True Love being addressed head on: When one’s future depends on one finding it, finding it seems inescapably hard. And my personal favorite part, how magic is finally satisfied not through emotion but through logic, and still there is a happy ending.

If you like retold fairy tales, this version of Sleeping Beauty is totally for you.

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REVIEW: “Daughter of Kings” by Ana Mardoll

Review of Ana Mardoll, “Daughter of Kings”, in No Man of Woman Born (Acacia Moon Publishing, 2018): 74-103 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

Content note: Misgendering, parental bigotry, mention of parental death.

Long ago when dragons roamed the lands, Ásdís and her golden sword united the clans and brought peace to the land and became queen. But peace did not last long, as her three sons fell to quarreling and war, and when Ásdís died she sheathed the golden sword in a stone and a wand-witch prophesied that one day a daughter of Ásdís’s line would draw the sword and bring peace again to the land.

Oh, how I loved this story too. It has elements of a fairy tale — dragons, witches, enchanted swords, prophesies — but the characters that inhabit the story are not the flat charicatures of fairy tales, they are real and living and breathing, giving the story more the quality of myth than of fairy tale.

There are far too few stories with truly happy endings, but the story of Finndís, king’s daughter and queen’s granddaughter, and how she came into the birthright that had been prophesied two generations earlier made me cry with gladness.

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REVIEW: “His Father’s Son” by Ana Mardoll

Review of Ana Mardoll, “His Father’s Son”, in No Man of Woman Born (Acacia Moon Publishing, 2018): 47-73 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

Content note: Violence and sexualized violence, bloodshed, death of family and children.

Oh, this story I loved! It is fiercely, surgingly, triumphantly joyful, and though it is predicated on violence, bloodshed, and death, it is permeated with love — love and acceptance that shines out of the characters and gets you right in the gut.

More stories like this, please, kthanx.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “King’s Favor” by Ana Mardoll

Review of Ana Mardoll, “King’s Favor”, in No Man of Woman Born (Acacia Moon Publishing, 2018): 22-46 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

Content note: border walls, population purges, violence, mention of self-harm.

I have to admit, my feelings towards this story of Caran the hedge-mage who is sent as a spy into the kingdom of Northnesse with a view towards overthrowing their witch-queen are…ambivalent.

I actually started the story once, broke down a few pages in, and had to start it again from the beginning a few days later. The primary issue the first time around was linguistic: I found the neopronouns ‘nee’ and ‘ner’ difficult to read, because I’d never been exposed to them before. Even uncapitalized, they read like proper names rather than pronouns to me, and when they occurred capitalized, this was even more pronounced.

This is more a matter of familiarity than anything, but given that the neopronouns in the previous story, xie and xer, were different, I did wonder what the utility of having multiple neoppronouns was. Do they carry with them some subtle distinction? I don’t know, but while I feel like I should know, I don’t know how to find out. It’s quite a minor point, but it made me feel I was missing out on an aspect of the story and had no way to reach it.

On second attempt, I found it easier to read the pronouns, though occasionally my brain still wanted to supply ‘nee’s’ as the possessive of ‘nee’ rather than ‘ner’. This time, though, I kept being distracted from the story by all the world-building I was being fed. I felt that the story read more like notes for a novel (and what a glorious novel it would be!), for the author’s own consumption, than something that we, external readers, were meant to be reading.

All the same, these “notes for a novel” were more enjoyable and more satisfying to read than many short stories I’ve reviewed for this site, and the ending made me smile. I also found that the story forced me to push back against the limits of my own authorial imagination — something which is unfortunately still all to parochial for my liking sometimes — and make me grapple with why I, as an author, still find it a struggle to move beyond centering my own cisness. I want to read stories like this, even if I find them a struggle, because I learn something from doing so and come away from them just a little bit edified, as both a writer and a person.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Toward Asteroid Exploration” by Roland Lehoucq

Review of Roland Lehoucq, “Toward Asteroid Exploration”, in Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures, edited by Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich, (Center for Science and Imagination, Arizona State University, 2017): 165-172 — Download here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

Mars is usually the destination that captures our collective imagination in the context of human-possible space exploration. Asteroids are, if anything, objects of destruction of humanity, not objects of their preservation. And yet, as Ramez Naam explored in his story “The Use of Things” (read the review), asteroids may in fact provide us with the crucial stepping stones humanity needs. In the nonfiction companion piece to Naam’s story, Lehoucq explores the conditions under which asteroid exploration can be undertaken.

First, there is the paradox that any asteroid to be close enough to be of use may also be, potentially, close enough to be of danger. To determine which are threats and which are not, we “must be able to…accurately predict their flight path” (p. 165). Only the “near-earth asteroids” (NEA) are suitable for the type of exploration that Naam writes about; but there are plenty of options within that subset: “As of 2016, around 15,000 NEAs are known” (p. 166), and it is quite likely that there are many, many more, especially ones of smaller size which are harder to detect.

In addition to knowing where they are and how big they are (and how fast they are rotating!) we also need to know their geological make-up — what kinds of minerals are present, how dense is the asteroid, how porous, how much water does it (possibly) contain? The difficulty here is that “this kind of information is very difficult to accurately determine using Earth-based surveys; it will require physical sampling” (p. 166). Because of their near-earth status, however, it is possible to send surveying equipment to the asteroids and back, and a handful of such missions have already been successful.

Once the likely candidates have been identified, they must in fact be mined — for water, for gold, for nickel-iron alloys. Lehoucq is optimistic about the technological possibilities here:

Such ambitious plans may seem like the mirage of a far-distant future, but the groundwork for a realistic implementation of asteroid mining is already being laid. In 2012, NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts announced the Robotic Asteroid Prospector project, which will examine and evaluate the feasibility of asteroid mining in terms of means, methods, and systems (p. 168).

The mining activity will have to be run by robots, programmed not only to run the mining equipment but also to separate the output, and to box it up for use elsewhere. All of this activity requires energy, which raises the next issue: How to provide that energy. Lehoucq offers two feasible options: solar power, for below 100 kilowatts (p. 170), and small fission nuclear reactors, for more efficient energy production (p. 170).

The remaining question, then, is what to do with the materials once mined: Do they get sent back to earth (probably the more likely, at least in initial stages), or are they processed on the asteroid to provide the materials for further space exploration (as in Naam’s story)? That question is one only the future can answer.

This may seem a tall task: But the point of Lehoucq’s article is that each individual step is not only feasible, but we already have been taking steps towards achieving it. When it comes to asteroids, mankind needn’t make one giant leap all in one go, but can many small steps, one by one.

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REVIEW: “The Auteur” by Mike Thorn

Review of Mike Thorn, “The Auteur”, Darkest Hours (Unnerving, 2017): 98-115 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

Simon, Cate, and Edwin all work in a movie rental place, and Cate — self-described “in-house horror specialist” (p. 99) — spends a lot of time rehearsing the merits and demerits of various horror movies to her co-worker Simon. None of them are what he really wants to watch: What he wants access to are the movies Cate, “world-changing auteur of pure horror” (also self-described, p. 101), makes.

It’s difficult to describe a movie in words, and even more difficult with a movie that relies so much on timing, pacing, angles, and sounds, as horror movies do. But that’s what we get in this story when Simon finally gets a chance to see one of Cate’s movies, alternating description of the movie, recounting of dialogue in the movie, and Simon’s reactions to it. In the end, this story felt much more like a clinical description of horror than actually horror itself.

(Originally published in Turn to Ash, 2016).

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REVIEW: “Mired” by Mike Thorn

Review of Mike Thorn, “Mired”, Darkest Hours (Unnerving, 2017): 82-96 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

Unlike some of the other stories in this collection, which go more for the grisly and the gory, this story opens with a nightmare scenario so parody-like it’s more amusing than horrifying: A researcher confronts a neon green blob in his closet, while the blob eats his research. (What kind of research? you might ask. Apparently Randolph is the type of pretentious guy who reads Derrida, Hegel, and Nietzsche. He is also the type of guy who when confronted with a neon green blob panics and calls a woman (whose name he doesn’t even remember correctly) to come and sort things out for him — but he’s not even got enough courage to go through with that!)

I sort of feel like I should’ve come away from this story with some great weighty reflections about man’s relationship to his work, and the weight of ideas that are never read or grappled with, or even some sort of sense of kinship to Randolph, an academic philosopher like myself; but he was never really sympathetic enough for me to be all that bothered by what ended up happening to him.

(Originally published in Double Feature Magazine 2016).

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “The Use of Things” by Ramez Naam

Review of Ramez Naam, “The Use of Things”, in Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures, edited by Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich, (Center for Science and Imagination, Arizona State University, 2017): 151-163 — Download here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

[Ryan] was going to die in this ripped space suit, die thinking of Beth Wu, a hundred million miles away, and how right she’d been (p. 151).

I’ve never wanted to be an astronaut. The combination of a space suit and the expanse of space was both too claustrophobic and too agoraphobic for me to ever comfortably consider this as an option. Everything that I find scary about this is encapsulated in the opening scene of Naam’s story. Nevertheless, there is still a fascination about what would it be like, and Naam taps into that as well: The very different physical experience of being in space comes across clearly in this story, and even though I wouldn’t want to be in Ryan’s shoes myself, I really enjoyed reading about him being in them.

I also enjoyed the more theoretical thread of the story, which explores what use human beings are, or can be, in a future of increasing automation. We aim for the stars because it is human nature to explore — but increasingly our best means of exploration involve leaving ourselves behind on earth and sending automated explorers out instead. As Naam points out in the story, it’s just too expensive to send out the humans: “Humans have to go quickly, or not at all” (p. 159), and quickly means expensively. So where does that leave us? Building better and better means of exploration to satisfy a specifically human need and in doing so making it increasingly impossible that we will ever get to explore ourselves.

You might think, given all this, that this is a depressing story. It isn’t. It’s a hopeful, happy one.

Sara L. Uckelman4 Comments