REVIEW: “A Good Egg” by Shawn Proctor

Review of Shawn Proctor, A Good Egg, Podcastle: 499c — Listen Online. Reviewed by Heather Rose Jones

A brief heartbreaking fairy tale exploration, riffing off of the Humpty Dumpty rhyme, with a brief allusion to Cinderella in passing. What if Humpty Dumpty’s great fall was falling in love with the king? I liked how the author played with the clash of the structural absurdity of the Humpty Dumpty nickname and the bodily egg imagery (both shape and fragility) in combination with the understated pathos of the rhyme’s outcome, mapped onto a rejected lover. Not a happy story but an exquisite one.

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REVIEW: “National Geographic on Assignment: The Unicorn Enclosure” by Sarah Monette

Review of Sarah Monette, National Geographic on Assignment: The Unicorn Enclosure, Podcastle: Miniature 101 — Listen Online. Reviewed by Heather Rose Jones

Flash fiction is really hard to write reviews for! This is a bit of a world-building sketch, developing one possible version of the natural history of unicorns–a slightly more sinister version than is typical. A nice exploration of how to expand a mythic concept into a complex natural phenomenon.

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REVIEW: “Have This Wish I Wish Tonight” by Katherine Kendig

Review of Katherine Kendig, Have This WIsh I Wish Tonight, Podcastle: 499b — Listen Online. Reviewed by Heather Rose Jones

A flash story in the romantic mode about falling in love with a constellation, though the primary themes are more about communication with the perils of things left unsaid, and the experience of feeling outshone by one’s beloved and inadequate.

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REVIEW: “Pipecleaner Sculptures and Other Necessary Work” by Tina Connolly

Review of Tina Connolly’s, “Pipecleaner Sculptures and Other Necessary Work”, Uncanny Magazine Volume, 19 (2017): Read Online. Reviewed by Jodie Baker.

“Pipecleaner Sculptures and Other Necessary Work” takes place aboard a generation ship where every resource must be carefully hoarded, and recycled, in order to ensure survival. In the midst of this scarcity, one robot caretaker has fought for the importance of art. Her name is Ninah, and you’re going to be heartbroken by the end of her simple, economically told story.

Ninah has gathered together pipecleaners, beads, and other scant resources so that the children she looks after can make sculptures and other artwork. While some on board the ship see these art projects as a trivial luxury she considers it a necessity: ‘Everyone needed work. Humans, children—androids.’ This line reflects the fact that ‘work’ can be defined as the need for a personal purpose as well as a type of production. Ninah has made sure that the children are stimulated and given the chance to be more than just a ship grown generation of colonists or soldiers. And in doing so, she has turned a mandatory care taking assignment into her own purpose.

Although the reader spends a very short time with Ninah, the story quickly builds a vivid sense of her history and her character. So, it is gutting to learn that when the ship lands in three months, Ninah, like the art projects the children make, will be re-purposed. It is even more heart-wrenching because caring, vibrant Ninah will become a military bot, and ‘she would not care. They would still call her Ninah, and she would still love her work.’ Ninah’s fate is an example of what happens when an identity is overridden by the practicalities of the state.

Tina Connolly’s story does soften this devastating blow slightly. In the end, a desire for a legacy, a sense of permanence, however small, wins out. And, while the ending is undeniably tragic, as there is no reprieve for Ninah, there is at least a bittersweet sense of triumph and defiance. Ninah will resonate with anyone caught in the grip of a society that values people for what, and how much, they produce rather than who they are. Or, y’know readers who just love crying about robots. They’ll like this story too. Definitely recommended to everyone who loved “Fandom for Robots“, for example.

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REVIEW: “Three Cats at the End of the World” by Aimee Ogden

Review of Aimee Ogden, Three Cats at the End of the World, Podcastle: 499a — Listen Online. Reviewed by Heather Rose Jones

A flash piece using cat personalities and behaviors as metaphors/representations of the experience of past, present, and future. Evocative and somewhat creepy, with an intriguingly open-ended closing scene. I really enjoy stories that lead me to speculate on how to interpret endings–not talking about vague ones, but ones where it feels like the author had a clear interpretation in mind, but it’s ok if you see a different one.

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REVIEW: “Chasing Flowers” by L. Chan

Review of L. Chan, Chasing Flowers, Podcastle: 498 — Listen Online. Reviewed by Heather Rose Jones

A ghost story and a love story–that is, a story of love between ghosts, trying to find a path to reunion in the face of the rules of the Chinese afterlife. In the initial exposition we are given a sketch of those rules, how they tore the two women apart after death, and the doomed circumstances of their love in life that locked them into a cycle of seeking. But one is truly a ghost while the other has been doomed(?) to cycles of rebirth, never entirely knowing why her life is full of emptiness and pain. This psychic connection is tied symbolically in the story to depression and self-harm, with a repeating motif of cutting echoing the harvesting of sap from rubber trees, as well as themes of the harm that women do themselves or allow to be done to them in the name of conformity and tradition. There’s a lot of darkness in this story but a hopeful ending–or as hopeful as a love story can be when one of the two is a ghost.

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REVIEW: “Nine Lattices of Sargasso” by Jason Sanford

Review of Jason Sanford, “Nine Lattices of Sargasso”, Asimov’s Science Fiction November/December (2017): 126-149 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley.

I now know, my maybe on-day love, that memories aren’t reality. But I still hope the memories I’ve shared hold true. If only for a little while.

I really enjoyed this one. Told in a series of nine ‘Lattices’ – memory experiences that are able to be live-streamed or uploaded to the greater mind web – Sanford tells the story of Amali, her family, and Mareena a girl who washes up on their home Lifeboat Merkosa – a massive floating island for refugees of a technological crash caused by a rogue AI.

This has one tough opening sequence. I struggled with the first two ‘Lattices’ – the world-building, the technology, who my main character was and generally what was going on was all dense difficult to grasp. But Lattice 3 gives the world and characters context and it romps home from there. I went back and re-read the first two Lattices after finishing the piece and they made much more sense after the fact. Readers should stick with this one to at least Lattice 3 to give this novelette a proper chance.

Though it takes a while for all of it to become comprehensible, readers are rewarded with a story that includes issues of refugees and nationless-ness, piracy and exploitation of the vulnerable, and characters who are morally ambiguous at best all tied up into an action story set in a surreal post-apocalypse with smaller, human moments at its heart.

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REVIEW: “A Night Out at a Nice Place” by Nick Mamatas

Review of Nick Mamatas, “A Night Out at a Nice Place”, Apex Magazine 104: Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

An incorporeal intelligence embodies itself for fun (“downlowing into a limbsuit”), and then goes on a blind date with a human being. Fortunately, human beings are space faring at this point, so they do have something to talk about. Mostly, this is a far-future, philosophical dialogue about the nature of reality. It’s short, sharp, and surprisingly light, given the density of the subject matter.

I don’t think I was the ideal audience for this story. Either it was written for somebody much smarter than I am, and it went over my head, or else it was going for a sort of humor that just didn’t hit my personal funny bone. Maybe both. The futuristic slang and mathematical equations made it hard to understand at times and the narrator was a little too alien and superior for my taste (they joked about. destroying the star they were orbiting and wiping out the whole planet after their date made a tedious joke, and refrained because they liked her smile).

All that being said, the ending made me smirk, and I think that the narrator is supposed to be irritating – by the end, it’s clear that they are not as superior to humans as they think they are. The story is short enough that it’s definitely worth checking out, to see if it is to your liking.

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REVIEW: “Love and Dearth and the Star that Shall Not Be Named: Kom’s Story” by James Gunn

Review of James Gunn, “Love and Dearth and the Star that Shall Not Be Named: Kom’s Story”, Asimov’s Science Fiction November/December (2017): 118-125 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley.

This story is part of a series of tie-in pieces for James Gunn’s Transcendental trilogy of novels. Each tells the backstory of one character in the novels and how they came to seek the Transcendental Machine central to the novels.

A nice angle on a first contact story. Kom, a Sirian, encounters a human named Sam floating in an escape capsule near the star that his people hold to be the place where paradise for the dead is located. In learning to communicate with Sam, Kom describes the history, creation myths, culture and procreating practices of his planet and species. These conversations with Sam prompt Kom to think differently about these things and reconsider his life trajectory.

I really liked the mythology of this piece. Kom’s tales of the star that shall not be named and the beliefs attached to it by his people – the Ranians – are beautiful. I also enjoyed Kom and Sam’s conversations and the internal revelations this invoked in Kom. The shifts between recollections, current events, and creation myths are handled well, too.

However, as someone not familiar with the Transcendental novels I found the turn the story takes at the end to tie-in to the novel universe a bit abrupt. Where Kom was being sent to, why this was important, and Kom’s motivations for his quest for transcendence and the Transcendental Machine happened fast – within paragraphs – and weren’t clear to me. This left me unsatisfied with the ending. I suspect this is unlikely to be the case for a reader familiar with Gunn’s novels, but it did detract from this piece’s ability to stand on its own for me.

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REVIEW: “Afloat Above a Floor of Stars” by Tom Purdom

Review of Tom Purdom, “Afloat Above a Floor of Stars”, Asimov’s Science Fiction November/December (2017): 106-117 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley. 

You’ve been selecting women with the traits you like, whether you know it or not… Independent legacy women join our branch. Legacy men keep joining the male branch. You belong to a dying species. 

A strange story that considers gender and long-distance space travel. Revali and Kemen are to be the sole human occupants on a voyage outside the galaxy. Along the way they will undertake their own research projects and participate in a long-term research project that seeks to answer one of humanity’s most pressing questions: is the splintering of the human race inevitable with the ability to create companions with genetics and personalities compatible to the other gender? Can men only cohabit successfully with women who have been designed to please them? And vice versa? Will ‘legacy’ humans die out because they are unable to coexist successfully long-term with other genders, or because they keep ‘defecting’ to cohabit with the kind of gender partners designed for them? Will the two legacy genders just give up trying to work out relationships with their legacy counterparts as just too hard?

The trip will take them thirty-six years and involve periods of hibernation and waking, as well as gender swaps for both of them across the journey. At the end Kemen and Revali have committed to undertake a ceremony in one last ditch attempt to show humanity that, from outside the galaxy their differences are minuscule and that unity between the two factions is possible. 

The approach to gender here is an interesting one – essentially considering the question of whether men and women can ever really understand each other or cohabit for long periods of time, or if there are fundamental personality differences and tendencies that both work together and don’t. But I found it a bit binary and limited. While there is gender changing here the gender roles being considered are between ‘legacy’ men who want compliant women and legacy women who are not suitable to work with legacy men long term and have instead also created partners they can work with. In short, I would have liked a more nuanced look at gender and cross-gender relations that the premise could have provided than was covered here. Despite this, the stated conflict has been fully thought through and Purdom explores it well, using the length of the trip and the discussions between Kemen and Revali as they move through their different physical bodies to cover the problem’s intricacies.  

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