REVIEW: “We are Turning on a Spindle” by Joanna Parypinski

Review of Joanna Parypinski, “We are Turning on a Spindle”, Nightmare Magazine 61: Read Online. Reviewed by Winnie Ramler.

Time marches ever on. It pays no attention to the desires of us mortals, and it certainly doesn’t stop for anything. One of the fun aspects of science fiction is that it gives us a chance to imagine how the future might appear. Some choose to go not too far into the future, but Joanna Parypinski goes so far that there is hardly anything left. You can’t even be sure if this was Earth or if it’s some other planet where beings like us may have existed.

In this retelling of Sleeping Beauty, the main character traverses a long distance in the far off future in order to find the greatest beauty in the universe. The world is so changed that it is alien and ancient and falling a part. His obsession with his quest is what drives him- the strength of the legends he’s heard and the strength of his own convictions.

I love the descriptions in this story. The details were gorgeous (even when they were describing things that were less so). It was a very visceral read.

I really appreciated the introspective tone of the tale. Possession is a tenuous concept, and this story examines what exactly this term means and the consequences that can come with it. Be careful what you wish for.

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REVIEW: “Tree of the Forest Seven Bells Turns the World Round Midnight” by Sheree Renée Thomas

Review of Sheree Renée Thomas, “Tree of the Forest Seven Bells Turns the World Round Midnight”, Apex Magazine 101: Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

The main action is simple: Wilder is hiking through the Tennessee woods at night with his lover, Thistle, in order to meet her mother. The language is dense and lyrical, dripping with portent. In order to get the most of this one, you have to be willing to let yourself sink into that language without worrying too much about the plot. The narrative follows a meandering path though the present and the past, dipping into Wilder’s attempts to woo Thistle, into their relationship, and occasionally into his life before her, before returning to the present day. The point of this story is not the plot (though it’s a fine, well-developed plot). The point of this story is the characters, mood, and feeling. It is the dawning realization that all is not as it seems to the narrator, and the inevitable resolution.

While I admire the luscious language and the the languid journey, I personally found that this story moved too slowly for me, towards a resolution that I guessed at shortly after the opening lines. An inevitable ending isn’t necessarily a bad thing – sometimes it can allow the reader to focus on the journey over the destination – but it didn’t entirely work for me in this case. I kept thinking about how the details and diversions might come together in the end, when they were the point in and of themselves. Each memory, each observation, feeds the mood, giving it depth and weight. That is the point: to be fully immersed in the world, so that ending, once it arrives, has a gravity to it.

I want to emphasize that I didn’t dislike this story – I think it’s expertly written and executed – I just wasn’t able to sink into as fully as I wanted to. If you love to linger over dense prose, lyrical descriptions, and a beautifully meandering narrative, then this may well be the story for you.

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REVIEW: “So Sings the Siren” by Annie Neugebauer

Review of Annie Neugebauer, “So Sings the Siren”, Apex Magazine 101: Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

This story sneaks up on you, which is impressive for a 1000 word piece of flash fiction.

A young girl waits with her mother outside the hall where she is going to hear a siren sing for the first time. She asks all sorts of questions, as children are wont to do, and twirls out her excess energy in an innocent scene. That facade crumbles as we learn more about the details of how a musician plays a siren.

There is a beauty that can be born from suffering sometimes, if one is willing to work for it and lucky enough to find it. I believe that this is a story about how best to honor that choice, and whether it is better to turn away from the horror of the source in order to focus on the outcome, or whether we need to acknowledge both. It’s not an easy read, but it is powerful.

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REVIEW: “Möbius Continuum” by Gu Shi

Review of Gu Shi, “Möbius Continuum”, Clarkesworld 132: Read online. Reviewed by Kerstin Hall.

This one didn’t work for me, and it may be the case that I was simply the wrong audience. As it stands, I found “Möbius Continuum” to be amongst the weaker pieces published in this issue of Clarkesworld. I believe that readers with a taste for the philosophical may find more to admire – that’s not what floats my boat.

In part, the story functions as a thought experiment, a sort of mental repositioning. It is interesting, but there’s little more I can say without giving major spoilers. And even though I anticipated the ending, I still didn’t quite buy it. The conclusion necessitated a kind of tidiness which I experienced as anti-climactic.

Early in the narrative, the protagonist crashes his car over a cliff. Both he and his passenger survive, but the protagonist is left paralysed from the neck down. His enigmatic companion urges him not to despair, and to see his injuries as an opportunity.

I think my largest problem with “Möbius Continuum” is that I never received a strong enough impression of the protagonist’s character. I found it difficult to care about him, and thus the stakes of failures never raised my heart rate. I can see how this nebulousness served an ultimate thematic purpose, but I experienced it as a structural problem. Why should I be invested in this story, what is there to keep me reading? The answer is probably intellectual curiosity, but I wanted emotion on top of that.

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REVIEW: “I’m Your One-Way Street” by Naomi Libicki

Review of Naomi Libicki, “I’m Your One-Way Street”, Persistent Visions (7 July 2017): Read online. Reviewed by Essence B. Scott.

After the slog that was the last couple of stories from Persistent Visions, I was definitely looking forward to reading the next story in the queue (working backwards from the most recent story): Naomi Libicki’s “I’m Your One-Way Street.”

This story, though a little shorter than the previous ones, did not disappoint. I was immediately drawn into the world established for the reader. It also was a bonus that this is a love story and I don’t read many love stories. However, the header photo and the title got me curious to see what this story was about.

“I’m Your One-Way Street” reads like a stream of consciousness; the reader becomes one with the story and, much like a something caught in the river, flows along with it, which I think was what Libicki was trying to go for. If so, a job well done. Libicki uses her human protagonist, Josephine’s (or “Jos,” as friends call her) drunkenness to start the story. But, the reader wonders, is Jos so drunk? Is her supernatural lover, Via, real? Is this all happening in her head? Could the story just very well be a dream? I personally don’t think the entire story is a dream; it feels very much real to me. Could it be a premonition? I don’t think so. No matter which way you cut it, Via is real to Jos, and vice-versa.

In the beginning of the story, the lovemaking scene is beautifully written. As my mom would put it, “sexy, but not dirty.” I felt the connection that Jos and Via made and was actively rooting for them to hopefully get back together. I won’t spoil the rest of the story for you. Give it a read…

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REVIEW: “My Struggle” by Lavie Tidhar

Review of Lavie Tidhar, “My Struggle”, Apex Magazine 101: Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

Time travelers love to kill Hitler. But what if, instead of time travel to kill him, we had an alt history story in which he was ousted from power before he got going? And what if, after that, he fled to Britain to become a down-on-his-luck PI hiding under the name of Wolf? It’s a weird, borderline offensive premise, but it works surprisingly well. Tidhar hits all the right noir notes, from tight sentences and wry observations, to all the twits and turns and foul play you could hope for.

This was an uncomfortable read for me. I found myself empathizing with Wolf just as much as I reveled in his misfortune, a testament to Tidhar’s skill. It feels sacrilegious to make fun of Hitler, of Nazis, of the the SS and their ilk. They seem to too evil, too huge and looming. There is a fear, when reading this, that to laugh at them (or god forbid, sympathize with their struggles in this alternative world where the Holocaust never happened) is to make light of the evils they perpetrated in reality.

It’s the framing story that allows this to work. A former pulp fiction writer named Shomer is living in the ghetto with the rest of the Jewish people, hearing rumors of trains going east and fearing for the lives of his children. He watches a rendition of Dracula, and reflects on how stories – silly stories, fantastic stories, light stories – are all he has left for comfort. The connection between the framing narrative and the main action broke my heart, and gave the story a surprising depth of meaning.

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REVIEW: “Click” by Brian Evenson

Review of Brian Evenson, “Click”, Nightmare Magazine Issue 61: Read Online. Reviewed by Winnie Ramler.

In a word- creepy. What do you do when you can’t trust your own memory- when you have no memories to trust? When we forget something, we search for clues and cues- something to help everything “click”, but what if that thing never comes?

More than just a story of how frightening memory loss can be, Evenson’s story made me reflect on the nature of hospitals, care from doctors, and the ways in which we can be mislead by those we are supposed to trust. The main character has no concrete memories to hold on to; he must accept what those around him are telling him. He is given conflicting information and finds it hard to trust even the things he sees with his own two eyes. The nature of reality is fickle, and our grasp on it even more so.

I enjoyed the ways this story moved. We keep moving even when we have questions and things don’t make sense. There is no space to pause and try and ruminate. What would be the point anyways? The reader has as little information as the main character which forces us to experience things as he does with only the barest glimmer of hope that we will get some answers. But what if we never do?

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REVIEW: “Crispin’s Model” by Max Gladstone

Review of Max Gladstone, “Crispin’s Model”, Tor.com (2017): Read Online. Reviewed by Danielle Maurer.

Phrases like “sick galaxies of staring, slitted orbs” and “trails of poison paint” evoke the lush-yet-terrifying quality I associate with H.P. Lovecraft’s mythos. So it’s fitting, then, that these phrases are found in Max Gladstone’s Lovecraftian tale of a painter, his model and the twisted things his twisted paintings produce.

Gladstone’s masterful prose gives the story much of its impact. His style evokes Lovecraft’s without cleaving too closely to it, resulting in a story that feels both thoroughly Lovecraftian and yet also thoroughly modern in its presentation.

It’s a simple premise on the surface, yet Gladstone mines it for every ounce of tension, every dram of cosmic horror he can eke from it. The reader knows from the very beginning that something is off, and we discover the source of that strangeness with a slow build that’s always suspenseful and never boring. The climax itself will raise the hairs on your neck, but Gladstone never gives away too much of the monster, preserving the sense of mystery.

A worthy addition to the genre.

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REVIEW: “Fandom for Robots” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad

Review of Vina Jie Min Prasad’s, “Fandom for Robots”, Uncanny Magazine Volume, 18 (2017): Read Online. Reviewed by Jodie Baker.

“Fandom for Robots” is a sweet story about a robot finding a friend, and a voice, in the fandom community. It’s often a funny story, and its humour will resonate with anyone who has ever been really into a TV show:

‘Computron feels no emotion towards the animated television show titled Hyperdimension Warp Record (超次元 ワープ レコード). After all, Computron does not have any emotion circuits installed, and is thus constitutionally incapable of experiencing “excitement,” “hatred,” or “frustration.” It is completely impossible for Computron to experience emotions such as “excitement about the seventh episode of HyperWarp,” “hatred of the anime’s short episode length” or “frustration that Friday is so far away.”’

Computron, ‘The only known sentient robot’, resides in the Simak Robotics Museum. While considered a marvel when originally built in 1954, Computron’s design is now regarded as outdated. He is brought out as ‘a quaint artefact’ in the Museum’s Then And Now show, but no one really engages with him as a sentient being.

One day, a girl asks whether Computron has ever watched Hyperdimension Warp Record, and this launches Computron on a journey of discovery about fandom, friendship, and his own life. As Computron learns more about the anime show, and meets bjornruffian (a fellow fan, robot enthusiast, and fandom illustrator) on fanficarchive.org he begins to develop a wider sense of self.

“Fandom for Robots” is a great look at how empowering fanwork can be. In the museum, Computron is told not to talk too much but fandom allows him to have a voice. Computron provides helpful criticism of bjornruffian’s drawings of Cyro; the robot character on the show, and he writes his own fanfic.

Computron is also able to assert his identity through fanwork by helping to shape the robot bodies and storylines that appear in fanfic. Hyperdimension Warp Record gives him a way to process difficult memories. His friendship with bjornruffian gives Computron a reason to make his own decisions, and determine his own path, when he has so far lived quite a passive life. He makes a real connection with bjornruffian, and he ‘goes into sleep mode less’ which sounds a lot like a robot escaping from depression. It’s really lovely to go on this journey of personal development with Computron, and to see fans enjoying his and bjornruffians slash comic collab.

Vina Jie-Min Prasad’s “Fandom for Robots” is perfect for fans of Merc A. Rustard’s “How to Become a Robot in 12 Easy Steps”, Naomi Kritzer’s “Cat Pictures Please”, and Martha Wells All Systems Red. If you like robots, fandom, internet culture, or if you got emotional about that XCDC Mars rover comic, then this is the story for you.

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REVIEW: “The Names of the Sky” by Matthew Claxton

Review of Matthew Claxton, “The Names of the Sky”, Podcastle: 490 — Listen Online. Reviewed by Heather Rose Jones

It may seem odd that the first description that comes to me for a story set in wartime is “lovely” but the language of this one just flowed over me. It hit my exposition sweet spot in laying out the setting with casual description and character interaction, rather than feeling the need to tell the listener where they are and what’s going on. (But I’ll tell you anyway, so the review makes sense.) Zoya, a Russian fighter pilot in WWII has come down in a rural area behind the front and needs to survive, find shelter, and figure out how to get her plane in the air again, in that order. An encounter in a nearly-deserted village leaves her saddled with a responsibility that threatens those goals, but the seemingly senile old woman isn’t what she seems. A familiarity with Russian folklore will aid the listener in keeping up, given the aforementioned oblique approach to exposition. I loved the casually feminist (or maybe woman-centered is a better term) underlayer of the story that grew organically out of the themes and the historic-folklore roots. (Though now I find myself hungry for a story of “Grandma” and her sisters in their youth–and I wonder how much of that reference is based on the original folklore as opposed to being invention.)

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