REVIEW: “Töpflein, Stehe” by G. Deyke

Review of G. Deyke, “Töpflein, Stehe”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 144-145. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Barely a page and a half, this is one of the shortest stories in the anthology, and as such, it is more a vignette than a story. We never know who the narrator is, or how they have found themself in the situation they have. One expects there to be a clue to the details missing from the story in the title, but alas, that title sheds little light on any of these shadowed facts.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Sin” by Karl Egerton

Review of Karl Egerton, “Sin”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 108-118. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

It’s astonishing how often SFF stories don’t seem to have any form of religion in them, given how major an influence that has been on pretty much the entire history of human culture. Without religion there really isn’t any kind of concept of “Sin”, so going into this story the question for me was: What kind of religion is it going to be?

Never did I expect it would centered around the goddess Perchta (whom I’d recently been reading up on, so to see her name was a sudden delight!), rather than classic Christian tropes. There is a visceral — no pun intended — delight in reading of the school children chanting:

“But we know that she was a Sinner because…?”

Albert and the rest of the class, in unison, practically sang the response.

“Because Perchta came and sliced up her guts!”

The teacher gestured to Albert.

“And then?”

“She filled her with rocks!” he chanted.

The children let out an excited giggle.

“And why did Perchta’s righteous knife disembowel her?”

“To save us all from Sin!”

Because when I read that, I know I’m in for something different, something fun.

Egerton’s story is an investigation of childhood, of sin, where it comes from, and how we rationalise it. “What sort of thing is a sin, really?” Albert asks the priest, and that question encapsulates the entire story. “It was absolutely necessary for actions to have consequences,” the narrator tells us, and in the end, we see that Sin and Perchta, transgression and punishment, are two sides of the same coin. We cannot have one without the other.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Breach” by Niki Kools

Review of Niki Kools, “Breach”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 122-133. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I love stories where the main characters are not like us, and where this is fed into the story in little bits and pieces. At the start, there is no indication that Vivion is other than human, until then, a few sentences in, we read “The air outside, swarming with little summer seeds, has hardened her scales on her way here.” Ooooh! I am now instantly intrigued.

And the story just keeps getting stranger, full of bits that are unlike anything I’ve ever read before, and there are so many beautiful little details. Thoroughly enjoyable.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Symphony to a City under the Stars” by Armando Saldaña

Review of Armando Saldaña, “Symphony to a city under the stars”, Apex Magazine 104 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

This is a richly layered world, where dimensions and universes unfurl from the sky, and you can travel through them by song and ships, and where virtual reality has almost eclipsed physical life, at least on earth. The plot is simple enough: boy loves girl, girl travels the stars, girl returns. But the strangeness of the world, the structure, and the deftly lyrical language elevate it to something more.

The plot is a little hazy at times, but not unpleasantly so. I don’t think that precise details are the point of this piece, anyway. Like music itself, this story is more emotion than plot. Love and longing, the yearning to be with someone, but the equally strong need to explore the world and see distant sights, suffuse this piece with all the beautiful sorrow of a minor chord. The music of the language carries you through to the other side, and the neat echoes between the opening and closing images serve as prelude and finale.

Strongly recommended for anyone who loves rich imagery and lyrical language.

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REVIEW: “What Lies in the Ice” by C. A. Harland

Review of C. A. Harland, “What Lies in the Ice”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 103-106. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I always knew mining was dangerous. But…

This story is told through a series of logs, or snippets of logs (we do not know if the entries we’ve been given are excerpts or complete). In fact, there is much we do not know. We never know the narrator, their name, their age, their background (other than that they have previous mining experience), there is nothing to make them feel similar or foreign or familiar or strange. The entire story rides on this narrative anonymity.

What lies beneath the ice? It would probably be no surprise that it wasn’t something happy and cuddly. But the obvious answer isn’t always the right one…

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Sea of Dreams” by Cixin Liu

Review of Cixin Liu (Translated by John Chu), “Sea of Dreams”, Asimov’s Science Fiction January/February (2018): 75-93 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley.

This is a beautiful, strange story.

An alien being interrupts an ice and snow art exhibition and wants to create its own work on earth, using the earth’s seas as its medium. Yan Dong, the artist whose work the alien liked most out of the exhibition, strikes up a connection with the alien which changes as the alien’s artistic vision is realised and the earth has to live with the aftermath of its creation.

This is really a story about art and the place art has in a society. Through conversations between the alien and Yan Dong, Cixin Liu considers whether art is the most important thing for a society to be doing, whether society exists solely for the purposes of allowing art to be created, and whether sometimes there are more important things than art.

The alien’s artwork and the challenges it poses for the earth are original and compelling. This novelette covers a lot of ground in the short amount of words it’s working with – space travel, planet-wide experiences, and events that take place over decades. I liked Yan Dong as an emotional voice for humanity, too – his reactions and decisions felt satisfying and correct and happened in the right way at the right times. The science elements of the story are smart, too, and support the fictional story rather than driving it.

There’s a lot to think about here and it’s wonderfully told with images I’m certain will stick with me.

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REVIEW: “The Heaven-Moving Way” by Chi Hui

Review of Chi Hui, “The Heaven-Moving Way”, Apex Magazine 104: Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

This gem of a story starts with Zhang Xuan stealing a spaceship to track down her missing twin brother. Her quest to find him is interspersed with scenes from their childhood, adolescence, and adulthood – right up to the circumstances that led to his disappearance – and the sibling relationship is lovingly and realistically written, neither too perfect nor too fraught. If this had been a simple quest to find a missing loved one, it would have been a fine story. But Hui didn’t stop there; this is a story about the limits of human dreaming and exploration, one of my personal favorite modes of science fiction.

To me, this feels like a fresh take on that classic SF theme: humans exploring space and figuring out their place in the galaxy. It’s good to see characters of color, hailing from a non-Western culture, getting to star in that tale.

There are some stories that make me want to just pack up my word processor and give up, because I will surely never write something as exquisite, as original, as human, as the story I just read. This is one of those stories. The characters, the world, and the story that results from the combination of the two hit all the right notes for me.

If you like your science fiction with well-drawn characters and hope for an expansive future, then I highly recommend checking this out!

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REVIEW: “Katabasis” by Petter Skult

Review of Petter Skult, “Katabasis”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 120-121. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The story is a mishmash of elements from a variety of sources — Biblical references to Lazarus, contemporary SF in the form of integrated human-machines, a sprinkling of Greek gods — providing a sense of familiarity and also a sense of a much wider scope than can actually be given in a two page story. This is generally quite an effective technique to use in flash fic, in that one can omit many details knowing that the reader will be able to fill them in themselves from other stories they have read. (This is what the philosopher David Lewis calls `interfictional carryover’. Interfictional carry-over occurs when readers import knowledge of certain types of tropes into a story where those tropes are not explicitly mentioned. [1, p. 45]) But predicating a story on the assumption that readers can all fill in certain gaps is a dangerous gamble to take; for if you’ve got a reader who, like me, doesn’t know who Adrestia is, all the import of the ending is lost.

Note

[1] Lewis, David. 1978. “Truth in Fiction”, American Philosophical Quarterly 15, no. 1: 37–46.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “The Rescue of the Renegat” by Kristine Katherine Rusch

Review of Kristine Katherine Rusch, “The Rescue of the Renegat”, Asimov’s Science Fiction January/February (2018): 154-192 — Read Excerpt Online or Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley.

This was a fun read and a highlight for me this issue. I read it in one sitting because I didn’t want to put it down. It’s like a solid episode of a sci-fi TV show you didn’t know you wanted to be watching.

The crew of the Aizsargs are in charge of closing off a Sector Base no longer in use by the Fleet – a giant flotilla of ships traversing space together (“always forward”). The Fleet takes 500 years to pass over any given point from start to finish, so they often occupy or associate with bases for a long time before shutting them down. Mid-closure, however, a strange ship – the Renegat – appears out of foldspace in distress. It looks to be over a hundred years old with questionable signs of life on board and the crew of the Aizsargs sets up a rescue mission, despite not knowing where or when the Renegat came from, who’s on board, or even how to conduct the rescue mission on a ship that old.

This novella is set in Rusch’s established Diving Universe, but even for someone not familiar with it Rusch sets up a world that feels full and established despite the short word length.

Despite the simple premise of the story, the pacing is fast and Rusch manages to give it a lot of character and emotional depth. There were multiple perspective characters throughout and each one, despite some of them only getting two or so scenes, had an arc and a place in the story. The cast felt full, with histories and futures that extended beyond the edges of the story told here. Fantastic stuff.

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REVIEW: “How to Survive an Epic Journey” by Tansy Rayner Roberts

Review of Tansy Rayner Robert’s, “How to Survive an Epic Journey”, Uncanny Magazine Volume, 19 (2017): Read Online. Reviewed by Jodie Baker.

“How to Survive an Epic Journey” is a wonderful example of why I am always down for a female focused take on Greek mythology. In this story, Tansy Rayner Roberts provides a rousing, subversive tale of the Argonaut’s adventures, told by Atalanta; a female member of the crew. From the opening framing device of a tavern tale, told by a woman confidently calling for wine and honey cakes, Atalanta’s energetic, cutting voice rings out loud and true. Straightaway, it is clear that the reader can expect excellent storytelling from a woman who is not afraid to upend the precious legends of heroes.

This story is packed full of so much interesting feminist detail that it’s hard to know what to focus on. Let’s start with the fact that one of Atalanta’s main intentions is to correct the prevalent versions of the Argonaut’s tales:

Jason ruined everything for his crew: the quest, the prize, even the legend that followed. We hoped to do great deeds, and be remembered as…

Yes, all right, I’ll say it. Heroes.

Instead we ended up as supporting characters in Jason’s tragic romance with himself.

Atalanta aims to reclaim her rightful place in the tales, expose the shortcomings of some of the ‘heroes’, and dispel certain myths about another big female player; Medea

However, Roberts’ retelling also concentrates on bringing Atalanta to life; giving her a distinct personality, and making her more than a device for correcting past tales. With her love of the Argo, practical feelings for her married lover Meleager, and thirst for adventure, Atalanta is a vibrant character. And the same can be said of Medea; a quick thinking, ruthless, ‘monster’ of a woman. The friendship between the two women adds another feminist dimension to the story, although I wished a little that this relationship had been more firmly established earlier. And the fact that their stories extends past the boundaries of Jason’s and Meleager’s lives on the Argo pushes against the idea that Ancient women’s stories must be tied to men, and wink out when the men disappear.

“How to Survive an Epic Journey” is a strong example of how myths, legends, and Ancient stories can be rewritten with women in mind. Pair this with stories like “Daughter of Necessity” by Marie Brennan if you need more of the women of Ancient Greece.

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