REVIEW: “The Ashen Heart of St. Fain” by Dale Carothers

Review of Dale Carothers, “The Ashen Heart of St. Fain”, Space and Time #130 Winter 2017 pp. 35-40. Purchase here. Review by Ben Serna-Grey.

 

A fantasy story about a young, privileged man who wants to basically be his world’s equivalent of Walt Whitman, and write a book for the common people. He seeks to write an account of the city of St. Fain, where a fallen god has left a massive burnt-out crater. Like many would-be “writers” with lofty goals, he finds himself counting more an more days without a page count and ultimately ends up caught in another person’s pain, his own failings, and his family’s expectations. This is a story of healing, but also of shattered dreams, naivete, misplaced hopes. It starts out easy enough, but don’t expect the whole ride to be full of peaceful easy feelings.

Does Nicholas ever pursue writing again and actually get some work done? I don’t know. Maybe Dale Carothers will revisit this young man’s world or it’s been visited before this story. Either way I do recommend this one. While it is refreshing to see a story every once in a while that has a not-so-happy ending, this one did actually bum me out a little. Which is a good thing, believe it or not.

 

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REVIEW: “When You’re Ready” by M. Ian Bell

Review of M. Ian Bell, “When You’re Ready”, Apex Magazine 110 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

A scientist is hard at work, modeling a human life from conception, tweaking variables of upbringing, trying to guide the simulant to a specific outcome. He’s done this many times before, but never gets the results he is looking for. The story follows his current attempt, with reflections on what has gone wrong before.

I enjoyed the way this story plays with memory and experience, and how people are hurt, supported, and otherwise influenced by the people around them and by their own choices. The way it engages with the nature versus nurture question is hardly unique – I think it’s pretty well accepted at this point that both factor into the people we become – but the depth of the reflection is rare, and I found it rewarding. I feel like this mirrors how many of us reflect on our lives, endlessly imagining how different circumstances might have brought us closer to the person we wish we were.

The story deals with so many interesting questions. How much can you change a person before they become unrecognizable to the people who know them? Can undesirable events lead to desirable results? What about an individual is inborn, and how much can be changed through experience? And most importantly, how much can a person will themselves to change, given a set past?

This doesn’t have what I would consider a twist ending, but the ending does color the story that came before, once you get to it. The pieces of the past slowly come together to create a satisfying conclusion. I highly recommend this for anyone who likes reflective, essentially psychological science fiction.

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REVIEW: “The Testimony of Dragon’s Teeth” by Sarah Monette

Review of Sarah Monette, “The Testimony of Dragon’s Teeth”, Uncanny Magazine Volume, 21 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Jodie Baker.

“The Testimony of Dragon’s Teeth” is a slow-burn, literary, magical murder mystery. The narrator, Mr Booth, is placed in charge of papers written by a celebrated literary figure. Among the papers, he finds a poppet, which he believes has been used to murder the author – Geoffrey Usborne Bryant. Concerned that the perpetrator of this magical crime will hurt others, the narrator sets out to discover who put the poppet in Usborne Bryant’s boxes. While engaged in this detective mission, Booth reflects on the troubled, fleeting association he had with Usborne Bryant when they were at school.

Sarah Monette’s story delicately expresses how Booth’s sleuthing allows him to come to terms with the real shape of a relationship long-past. His quest to find the poppet maker is littered with small, stabbing pains of repressed past hurts and old emotions. Booth’s conversations with Usborne Bryant’s friends, as part of his amature detective work, show that he has developed a clear understanding of how people work. However, he has never quite understood the shape of his own past with Usborne Bryant. As he slowly works his way towards the criminal, Booth untangles the small-scale, but complex, web of interactions and emotions left unaddressed since school. This story is as much a work of emotional detective work as it is a detective story.  

“The Testimony of Dragon’s Teeth” is also about the importance of acting morally in the face of difficult personal feelings. In keeping with the tone of the story, Monette expresses this theme without any flashy signposts that her narrator is morally compromised, and yet still manages to strongly convey that doing what is right is not always a lot of fun. From the fact that the narrator ‘fled’ when the criminal faints at the end of the story, and the way that ‘something of my emotions bled through in my voice’ at the end of the story, the reader gets the sense that while the narrator’s quest was a success it did not lead him to any kind of satisfaction (beyond a certain understanding of his past).

Strangely, this story reminded me of a favourite Philip Larkin poem – “Dockery and Son“. There’s the similar subject matter of someone thinking back on their school days. And there’s something about the pace of the story, content to dwell on scraps from the past on its way to its destination, which evokes a similar tone to the poem; as does the simple poignancy of the story’s final line. “The Testimony of Dragon’s Teeth” was weird, and quiet, and slow, and I loved it, readers.

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REVIEW: “I Frequently Hear Music in the Very Heart of Noise” by Sarah Pinsker

Review of Sarah Pinsker’s, “I Frequently Hear Music in the Very Heart of Noise”, Uncanny Magazine Volume, 21 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Jodie Baker.

Sarah Pinsker’s “I Frequently Hear Music in the Very Heart of Noise” uses subtle, repeating images, colours, or references to emphasise the connection between the lives and work of different American artists, writers, and musicians. For the reader to be able to engage with the story, they needs to be familiar with the cultural references Pinsker includes. Unfortunately I don’t know enough about the American 1920s art scene, or the works which were mentioned, to grasp the full significance of most of the references. I didn’t understand this story, and couldn’t really connect with it. And, because I wasn’t sure what had happened in real life, and how each section related to the whole, I had trouble working out what made this story science fiction, fantasy or speculative fiction.

What I can say, is that Pinsker’s writing style is very elegant and it’s easy to get swept up in the rhythm of her prose. The device of using references to connect each section is intriguing. And the selection of scenes that the story presents are detailed and interesting. I’d encourage anyone who knows about the 1920s American art scene to give it a try, because I’m sure that someone who can spot all the references, and understand how story fits together as a whole, will find a lot to delve into. This story wasn’t for me, but it’s bound to be a better fit for other readers.

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REVIEW: “A Different Kind of Place” by Tobias Buckell

Review of Tobias Buckell, “A Different Kind of Place”, Apex Magazine 109 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

Zadie just wants to distract herself from the zombies. She goes to the salon to escape from the news stories, but the subject just keeps following her as she deals with the residents of her upper class small town who don’t trust the new vaccine or see the need for any sort of zombie protection. After all, Chester isn’t that kind of town.

I think zombies work best as an allegory, and they work particularly well in this story about the early days of a zombie apocalypse. This is a sharp commentary on how people, especially the well-off, assume that bad things only happen somewhere else, whether that’s another town or another country.

The undercurrent of racism serves to both ground the story in reality and further define the sort of town Chester is. As a brown-skinned school teacher in a mostly white town, Zadie is never sure if she can trust the intentions behind the smiling faces she sees everywhere. These aren’t the sort of people to express overt racism, but they express themselves in small, subtle ways that neither she nor the reader can mistake.

All in all, this is a thoughtful zombie story whose themes are highly relevant to our times.

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REVIEW: “Time and Space” by Laine Perez

Review of Lane Perez, “Time and Space”, Luna Station Quarterly 34 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This story starts off with a contradiction:

When Mira sees the library for the first time, it is exactly as she remembers it.

How can one remember what one has never seen before? But such contradictions are to be expected in a story where one character can see the future.

For all that this is a story about pushing the boundaries of time and space, this isn’t SF. Rather, it has a quiet, almost fairy-tale like quality, and what is at the forefront is Mira and Cy and how they navigate a relationship together: Not just how to fit together when one person sees the future and the other moves unexpectedly through space, but how to build a life within those confines that doesn’t end up feeling utterly fatalistic. The lack of free will or free choice that is apparently entailed by foreknowledge of the future — a problem that has been vexing not only science fiction authors but philosophers for millenia — is deftly handled here by Perez in this satisfying story.

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REVIEW: “Suzie Q” by Jacqueline Carey

Review of Jacqueline Carey, “Suzie Q”, Apex Magazine 109 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

Suzanne thought she’d escaped her painful past when she passed the summoning exam and was accepted into Holyfields, where she’d learn to summon angels. But when the story starts, she’s living on the streets of the neighboring city, dodging shadows that will eat her and bad people who will feed her to those shadows. Slowly, we learn how she got expelled from Holyfields and why she has a demon inside her. In the end, that demon proves itself to be a surprising strength.

This is a story that works as well as a metaphor as it does as a literal story, and I appreciate that. I can’t say that this is exactly an enjoyable read, dealing as it does with sexual trauma and coercion, followed by betrayal, but it is an absorbing one. The lingering effects of abuse and bullying are realistically portrayed in the character of Suzanne, and the world is tantalizingly sketched out. When she finally finds her power, I nearly cheered. She’s able to find the ways that suffering has made her stronger, and learns to use that for herself. The ending avoids the sin of romanticizing suffering, of making it seem that trauma and abuse were somehow worthwhile, by making it clear that her strength is born not just of the bad things that happened to her, but also her own choices.

This isn’t an easy story, but it is a powerful one, though it could be triggering to people who’ve experienced sexual trauma.

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REVIEW: “Morph” by Sarah Pfleiderer

Review of Sarah Pfleiderer, “Morph”, Luna Station Quarterly 34 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This is in essence a first-contact story; although contact with the Phytomorphs was actually made some 30 years prior to when this story starts, this is the first time that humans and Phytomorphs have attempted to live together. It is also, the further you read, increasingly a horror story.

There was a lot I liked about this story, particularly the clever, educated, older, female protagonist. When we are introduced to Dr. Audra Grissom in the opening paragraphs, I was quite pleased to see what I don’t often see in stories — someone like me!

But there were also a number of things which I didn’t like so much. The way Dr. Grissom was set up to us made me optimistic for both her and the society in which she operated, which is why I felt even more caught out than I might have been when I read this:

She had started graying in her 30s, but had given up trying to dye it back to its original brown once she hit her 40s. She had no husband or children to keep up appearances for anyway.

That second sentence — what a strange justification to add! It just goes to show that no matter how hard we try to write stories centering women and leaving behind the problematic social structures of reality, it’s hard to escape persistent and invasive ideas about how and why women should act the way they do. (Why should it make any difference to her hair color if Dr. Grissom is married or not? I’m married, with a kid, started greying in my 20s, and the only color I dye my hair is purple. I have no need to “keep up appearances” for anyone other than myself.) The upshot of this one single sentence is that I come away from the story pitying Dr. Grissom, knowing that the freedom and authority it seems that she has is only seeming, and not, yet, real.

I also felt vaguely uncomfortable about a lot of the colonial overtones that were present in this story. When Dr. Grissom meets the Phytomorph that she has corresponded with the most, we find out that she doesn’t know their name, but has given them a nickname of her choosing; the Phytomorph, on the other hand, addresses her by name. Why? Why did she give her name to them, at some point in their communication, but never ask theirs? Similarly, when she is confronted with the possibility that this co-habitation is harming the Phytomorphs, her first response is to protect the science, rather than put the objects of her study first.

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REVIEW: “And Yet” by A. T. Greenblatt

Review of A. T. Greenblatt’s, “And Yet”, Uncanny Magazine Volume, 21 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Jodie Baker.

“And Yet” is an original, creeptastic take on the haunted house story. The protagonist returns to the haunted house of their childhood determined to investigate parallel universes. Aware that the house really is haunted, and that it hates visitors, this is, as the narrative admits, ‘a terrible idea’. This story is full of dread, and anticipation, right from the first section.  

Told in the second person, and focused on an unnamed protagonist, the narrative feels reminiscent of the ‘choose your own adventure’ genre. The main character moves through the house choosing doors, and unlocking scenarios. Each room shows a new nightmare vision of the past, or a possible past which they have thankfully never had to experience. The narrative refers to the protagonist as ‘you’ which means the reader can easily insert themselves into the story, and this makes the horror of the story feel all the more immediate and effective.

At the same time, “And Yet” relates an intensely personal, specific story about the main character’s loss, personal growth, and disability. The house draws on their pain, and fear, as it attempts to push them into leaving, and the protagonist’s journey through the house allows A. T. Greenblatt to slowly construct a picture of her protagonist’s life for the reader. It’s a young life that was dogged by abusive, difficult family members, bullies, and tragedy. However, the story shows that the main character has largely escaped that past, and built a new life, with hard work, the support of new roommates, and a personal trainer. Still, one formative incident has irrevocably shaped their present, and their current scientific work.

“And Yet” is a real gut-punch of a story on multiple levels, partly due to the smartly built structure of the piece. The horror of being forced to repeat traumatic incidents will resonate with just about every reader, as will the idea of parallel universes which contain a poor imitation of a much happier life. The main character’s past is so tough it hits hard. And all of this is carefully layered into a claustrophobic, slowly ratcheting piece of horror through the device of the inescapable house. The story culminates with a a poignant heart-breaker of an ending which will wreck you in the best way. Run, don’t walk, to this house of horrors.

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REVIEW: “Three Meetings of the Pregnant Man Support Group” by James Beamon

Review of James Beamon, “Three Meetings of the Pregnant Man Support Group”, Apex Magazine 109 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

Imagine, if you will, aliens who come to earth after deciding that humans make excellent hosts to incubate their offspring. Imagine that this has become a known – if still controversial – aspect of every day life. What might that experience be like for the men so impregnated? The result might be this surprisingly thoughtful story.

I’m going to be honest with you – the premise of this story did not sit well with me. Growing alien fetuses in men’s appendixes seemed too weird, too gross. But the concept is grounded in strong writing, nuanced world-building, and a group of well-developed characters. This is a story that had to work to win me over, but it did a good job.

The world-building starts with the left-handed student desks that the men sit at in their support group, that identifies the group to anyone at a glance, even before the men walk in. See, the alien fetuses grow in their appendixes, so the pregnant men develop huge bulges on the right, rendering them off balance. The desks give them an opening for their side bellies, and something to lean against to counter the unbalanced weight. Every detail in the story is that well thought out.

This is a very human story. Yes, there are aliens, and we have to assume they have spaceships and a planet, but none of that matters here. This is about relationships – between the narrator and his sister, the support group, and his own body. It’s also about choice, as the men struggle to understand why they were picked for this role, what it means.

The problem in this story lies in the gender essentialism, which I did not pick up on the first time through, but which I saw discussed elsewhere and feel the need to address here. It presents the concept of pregnant men as a science fiction oddity, when there are real transmen who can, and sometimes do, carry children. This story does those men a disservice and could be hurtful to certain people, so be warned.

I still  believe this is a good story for people who like human-sized, thoughtful SF, but with some reservations.

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