REVIEW: “Words Never Lost” by DaVaun Sanders

Review of DaVaun Sanders, “Words Never Lost”, Podcastle: 504 — Listen Online. Reviewed by Heather Rose Jones

This is a very hard story to review because it feels like it balances uneasily on a knife-edge of how the marginalized identities and their historic experiences are presented, and I don’t share either of the identities in question so I feel completely unqualified to judge whether the balance is successful.

Imala is a bi-racial (Black and Apache) student in a reservation school of the later 19th century who is trying to retain/learn her mother’s language and heritage in the face of the (historically accurate) efforts of the school to erase them. At a crucial confrontation with the school officials, her long-missing father appears leading a company of Buffalo Soldiers (Black regiment in the U.S. Cavalry) who need the assistance of an Apache translator. But both the soldiers and the reason for the translator are not at all what they seem.

Imala takes up the challenge but finds herself impossibly torn between being true to both her heritages, especially in the face of the possibility of losing her father all over again. Both the situation she is put in and the solution she finds are brutal and disturbing, even though she has agency over the choice.

The aspects that made me uneasy were how the set-up of the worldbuilding pitted the Black and Native American characters in hostile opposition to each other (whereas the evil White characters seemed more cardboard background) and the way Imala’s solution (and the background build-up to it) gives the appearance of privileging written language over speech in the context of preserving culture. It was a solution that made sense within the specific constraints set up in the story, but the historic background of attempts to preserve and retain Native American language communities undermine the story’s semi-hopeful outcome.

Several content warnings including racism, threat of rape, murder, and self-mutilation.

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REVIEW: “The Ghost Stories We Tell Around Photon Fires” by Cassandra Khaw

Review of Cassandra Khaw, “The Ghost Stories We Tell Around Photon Fires”, Apex Magazine 104 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

This is a ghost story in space, a ghost story done up with all the creepiness and ambiguity the genre demands. It is also a love story, which seemed surprising to me until I thought about it. But what makes us want to bend the rules of death like love does? To say more – to try to tell you the plot – would require spoilers, and I would hate to deprive you of the experience of putting the pieces together. In the end, this is another story where the plot isn’t the important thing. The mystery, the meditation on love and loss and living, the lyrically sharp language: those were enough to draw me in and keep me hanging on Khaw’s every word.

This is a very human story, despite being set in space. I think the setting serves to highlight how universal the experience of loss and inability to let go really is. It also provides the a way for the main character to escape the inevitability of loss, but I think it’s contribution to the tone is actually more important.

I’ll admit that, when reading this the first time, I worried about how it would end. Would it dissolve into chaos and vagueness? Would the ending be either too firm or too soft to satisfy, after the beautiful mystery that came before? I should have had more faith. The ending delivers exactly what the story needs, not a drop more or a sentence less.

 

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REVIEW: “Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Under the Still Waters” by N.K. Jemisin

Review of N.K. Jemisin, “Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Under the Still Waters”, Podcastle: 503 — Listen Online. Reviewed by Heather Rose Jones

(Note: This is a re-issue of PodCastle 154 originally broadcast in 2011 and first published in Postscripts.)

Once again, Podcastle has a perfect combination of a poetically lyrical story with a strong sense of place, narrated by a voice that brings that place and person to vivid life. There are stories that are well-narrated and then there are stories that I can’t imagine consuming by any means but the specific aural performance through which I came to them, because that performance gives them a life above text on the page. Needless to say, this is one of the latter.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Tookie encounters several strange creatures that complicate his survival and efforts to help others in the flood waters. What really struck me about this story structure is how much of a hero’s-quest story it is. The “ordinary” young man is thrust into taking a champion’s role via encounter with a supernatural creature who may or may not be a force for good. (The eventual answer is “it’s more complicated than good and evil.”) At the end, he emerges with a deeper understanding of himself and a mission to help save the world, or at least his part of it.

But that’s just the symbolic structure. What makes this story great is the immersive voice and language, the way descriptions of everyday surroundings slide easily into the fantastic, and the way the folklore of cities and peoples is woven into a new mythos. This joins my list of favorite Podcastle episodes.

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REVIEW: “Aurelia” by Lisa Mason

Review of Lisa Mason, “Aurelia”, Fantasy & Science Fiction 134, 1-2 (2018): 39-60 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Michael Johnston.

This one surprised me.  The first few paragraphs left me cold, seeming to be headed to a place I don’t like in my fiction.  But the moment the despicable-but-charming Robert meets Aurelia, the story had its hooks in me.

I’m not usually a fan of psychological horror, and this story bridges the gap between “dark fantasy” and “horror” quite deftly, but it’s more of an uneasy Gaiman-esque kind of thing than anything actually horrific.  The disquieting story of Robert and Aurelia seems to march on despite the reader’s uneasy feelings, and it ends up exactly where it needs to.

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REVIEW: “Beauty Mortis” by Jaap Boekestein

Review of Jaap Boekestein, “Beauty Mortis”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 147-164. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The story starts off with a rather uncomfortable scene of a man exploiting a scantily clad young woman for his own purposes, sending her down to lie on the ice of a frozen stream. “What else could she do?” the narrator asks, and that one question encompasses all that is wrong with the power dynamics between men and women in much of modern society. In this story, we see a woman playing along with those dynamics because the alternate, because what would happen if she refuses to, is so much worse. Except it isn’t: Whether she refuses or she obeys, the end result is the same. She still ends up a corpse at the hand of a man.

If I were reading for pleasure, I probably would’ve stopped reading the story at this point; stories like this are simply not stories for me. I want to see stories that push back against these power structures, that criticise these dynamics, that try to subvert them. But I was reading for reviewing, so let’s plow on.

This is one of the longer stories in the anthology, and it pushes stylistic boundaries more than some of the others. The story is told through a series of numbered vignettes, but they are all out of order; as soon as one realises that one has gone from scene 1 to scene 8, and that the next one after is scene 2, one must face the question: Do I read the scenes in numeric order? Or in the order they are printed?

I opted for numeric order, but only got as far as 6 when I couldn’t find scene 7. So then I went back and reread it in printed order, 1, 8, 2, 3, 10, 4, 11, 5, 6. In the end, I liked the story; it was well executed. I just wish the opening scene didn’t have to play upon the horrors that it does.

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REVIEW: “Windhorse” by Zhao Haihong

Review of “Windhorse”, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #36 Early Autumn pp. 47-51. Purchase here. Review by Ben Serna-Grey.

This story has a couple footnotes, but they’re much appreciated, especially if you’re not familiar with everything about Chinese geography or Tibetan culture. The main character is traveling from China to the mountains of Tibet, where they will get windhorse pennants from the monks there in order to help them mourn their deceased lover.

“Windhorse” is short and sweet, a lovely tail about grieving and loss, acceptance, and it’s a great story to finish up this magazine.

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REVIEW: “The Best Friend We Never Had” by Nisi Shawl

Review of Nisi Shawl, “The Best Friend We Never Had”, Apex Magazine 104 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

The story starts with a woman named Josie returning to the space station where she grew up, seeking to recruit her friends for a hazy project on behalf of her employers, ARPA. Josie, is a conflicted, complex woman. She seems to have left home for a reason, after getting into some sort of trouble (though we don’t know what it is), yet here she is coming home. She wants to recruit her friends for this job that she clearly thinks will better their lives economically and socially, but she can’t directly tell them about it. The title itself suggests that she isn’t quite who the people from the past think she is, but that doesn’t make her unsympathetic. She keeps herself at a distance, maybe due to the secrets of her mission, but maybe out of habit. That distance made it difficult for me to get as emotionally invested as a prefer, but also suits her character.

I loved the world-building here. The slang is just different enough from our own to suggest linguistic drift, but rooted enough in current language that it was easy to understand. The important things – the hierarchy of haves and have-not’s, the general social order of the habitat (“hab”) – are well developed, while everything not critical to the plot is simply described for us to accept and get on with the story.

The end is not easy. The future world of this story is rife with capitalism and corporate greed (sound familiar?), and that rarely ends well for the lower classes to which these characters belong. Yet it isn’t without hope. I wouldn’t say that it offer any answers to the present-day issues it explores, but it also doesn’t consign them to inevitability – there is a sense that the struggle against them might someday bear fruit, even if we don’t see it today.

This is a long story. Apex didn’t include a word-count this time, but it took me over half an hour to read it. That isn’t a criticism, simply a warning so that you can give yourself enough time to get through it in one sitting.

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REVIEW: “Zilal and the Many-Folded Puzzle Ship” by Charlotte Ashley

Review of Charlotte Ashley, “Zilal and the Many-Folded Puzzle Ship”, Podcastle: 502 — Listen Online. Reviewed by Heather Rose Jones

I was amused by this clever adventure story about a girl, her ship-building skills, and the lengths she’s willing to go to get some make-out time with the boy she likes. In an early modern, somewhat clock-punky alternate history, a gateway to another world opens on the ocean offshore from Mogadishu. Official powers are interesting in controlling access, but Zilal, whose clever ability to design mechanisms and ships with surprising features has already begun building her reputation, sees it as a useful place to slip away to with the object of her affection. When they find out why those official guards might be a good idea, Zilal’s “foldable” ship comes in very handy for rescue.

A great deal of the narrative sketches out the ship’s features and their mechanics, but it’s done with a light hand and interspersed with bits of romantic comedy. There is an amusing gender-reversal aspect to the story, as Zilal’s boyfriend fills out the role of somewhat naive “damsel” while Zilal is the genius inventor. As the podcast’s framing material indicates, the story is part of the worldbuilding for a shared-world narrative, but it stands alone quite well.

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REVIEW: “Hansel and Gretel in the Wasteland” by Shondra Snodderly

Review of Shondra Snodderly, “Hansel and Gretel in the Wasteland”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 139-142. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This is the first of Snodderly’s three fairy tale retellings in this anthology, and the longest. In this version of Hansel and Gretel, Gretel and her brother are uneasy partners in a post-war world where there were “no free rides. Not even for family” (139). In the end, Gretel happily betrays Hansel to the witch, sacrificing him for her own freedom. “Only the useful survive” (142), and Gretel is dead intent on making herself useful. The only question is, useful to whom?

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REVIEW: “The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future” by Christi Nogle

Review of “The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future”, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #36 Early Autumn pp. 39-46. Purchase here. Review by Ben Serna-Grey.

Another story in this issue that is at least partly written in second-person, but this one works a lot better for me than “Children of Air” did. My instinct is that this is due to the story giving commands on what to visualize versus chronicling what I, the reader, am supposedly doing. There’s not as much of a hurdle to relating with the writing.

“The Best of Our Past” is a coming-of-age story about a young woman who falls in love with her step-cousin, chronicling life as they grow with and apart from each other, and a frightening power comes to light. It commands you to sit down and fall into its imagery, to see everything happening in the lives of these two young people. For me, at least, the command worked.

I wouldn’t say the ending is a happy one, and I’m not sure I’d say it’s a bad ending either. It just simply is, and sometimes that’s all you need. Another winner in a magazine that has so far had no duds. Quite an accomplishment.

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