Review of Amy Mills Klipstine, “Face,” Luna Station Quarterly 49 (2022): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
After intriguing opening paragraphs (which made me wonder if the story was intended to be a metaphor for plastic surgery), I found this story slow to get started and actually go anywhere. There was a lot of description and repetition; and overall, I think this just wasn’t the story for me.
Review of Brenda Cooper, “Paper of Elephants”, Clarkesworld Issue 181, October (2021): Read Online. Reviewed by Myra Naik.
A heartfelt, touching story of two siblings running an elephant sanctuary in Zimbabwe.
David is the finance guy, and Eleanor guides the tours. Siaal, a young elephant, paints, and David decides to sell his artwork as NFTs in order to raise funds to save the sanctuary.
The piece develops and flows beautifully, and we can feel Eleanor’s helplessness and frustration – why should it be so hard to save these beautiful creatures?
Art is the focus, and in a different yet startlingly beautiful and raw way, art saves the day. The ending made my heart happy.
Review of Timons Esaias, “Excerpts from the Text of an Explanatory Stele Erected for Our Edification by the Scholars of the Outer Orion Tendril”, Clarkesworld Issue 180, September (2021): Read Online. Reviewed by Myra Naik.
The story is presented as a combination of personal narratives, transcripts, reports, and police and military conversation and decisions.
The Purple Tide is a cognizant entity who chooses what to and what not to destroy. As the story proceeds, we learn more about the Tide’s personality. Comic relief comes in the form of how humans take themselves way too seriously and try to enforce human rules on what is a blob of seemingly sentient slime.
An example – “The slime destroyed the tollbooths on the north bridge ramps and did not pay any tolls.”
The Purple Tide is an entity made of trash: main component – jelly. Human-made trash was responsible for the creation of the Tide, and slowly, humans are being destroyed by it. The gravity of the situation increases quickly as you go through the story.
An improbable piece of fiction, but nonetheless one that makes you really think about human excesses and callousness.
Review of Gregory Feeley, “In a Net I Seek to Hold the Wind”, Clarkesworld Issue 180, September (2021): Read Online. Reviewed by Myra Naik.
An unsettling story that was equal parts hopeful and strange. One of those stories you need to read slowly. It’s full of subtleties and the knowledge that humans don’t necessarily know everything.
But Minds are likely to know a lot more, and their relationship isn’t so much symbiotic as coexisting on the planet. Figments transport people to different places and experiences, all in their imagination.
Throw in some speculative fiction and a folk tale narrative sort of Figment experiences, and you get this unsettling, slow paced, Neptune-based tale.
Review of Thomas Webster, “Standard”, Analog Science Fiction and Fact March/April (2022): 153–156 (Kindle) – Purchase Here. Reviewed by John Atom.
A tech repairman helps a young woman maintain and enhance her artificial implants that enable her do her job. She keeps asking for more regardless of the dangers involved.
I always appreciate stories that are able to pack a lot of meaning in small amounts, and Webster’s story certainly fits into that category. The subjective narration has an unruly quality about it that helps get across the psychology of the narrator as he sees his younger self in his client and her inevitable demise. There’s an interesting contrast between a highly technological world and a simple life, and to what extend either path is a choice. Overall, an excellent and thought-provoking short story.
Review of Monica Joyce Evans, “Philanderer”, Analog Science Fiction and Fact March/April (2022): 120–121 (Kindle) – Purchase Here. Reviewed by John Atom.
The main character explores one of the methane lakes of Titan using a powerful AI suit. Not everything goes as planned.
A very short story with a nice twist at the end, though everything is a bit too vague for my taste. The tight first person narration (along with the brevity of the story), while evocative, makes the prose somewhat hard to decipher. We’re never given a good explanation for what happens. Still, an enjoyable story.
Review of Michael Swanwick, “Nirvana or Bust”, Analog Science Fiction and Fact March/April (2022): 49–53 (Kindle) – Purchase Here. Reviewed by John Atom.
Huiling is a woman on the run wearing a sentient exoskeleton she calls Nirvana or Bust. One day she meets her old advisor, Catherine, who informs her that her assassin is on the way. Huiling must protect her revolutionary discovery from bother her human and AI pursuers.
In Nirvana or Bust, the author presents a highly automated world where the joining of natural and artificial intelligence is a massive leap forward – even though neither humans nor AI see it that way. This is by no means a new idea, and I’m not sure if the story adds anything new to it. Still, it is presented well and with immersive prose (particularly the dialogue), even if the ending is perhaps a bit too convenient.
Review of Mercurio D. Rivera, “The Four Spider-Societies of Proxima Centauri 33G”, Analog Science Fiction and Fact March/April (2022): 42–48 (Kindle) – Purchase Here. Reviewed by John Atom.
On planet 33G of Proxima Centauri, an earth crew is trying to establish a trade relationship with any of the four local spider-like communities: the Rantulaharans, the Manti’ti’ti’tropicans, Kl’kryopolaishans, and the Zilli-tik-nesians. Things don’t go as planned.
This was a funny and well-written short story about the incompetence of the crew trying to accomplish its mission. Rivera takes the old trope about human-alien (mis)communication and turns it on its head by presenting it through the lens of a business transaction. The political commentary is a bit heavy-handed, though it occupies a mostly minor role in the story. The focus (and humor) remains in the clueless protagonist.
Review of Sarah Dropek, “Swallow It Down,” Luna Station Quarterly 49 (2022): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
This was a vivid, powerful story of a woman caring for her mother as she watches her die. I have not yet had to shepherd a parent through their final days yet, but I have watched friends do it and there is a ring of truth in the way Dropek takes this and turns it into something bleakly horrorful. A tough, but good, read.
Review of Sarah Salcedo, “Experiment Ninety-Four,” Luna Station Quarterly 49 (2022): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
Caspian lives “decommissioned space station which orbited a nebula in a remote quadrant of space”, abandoned or forgotten by his parents, he doesn’t know which. During years of trying to stave off boredom and loneliness, Caspian has taken apart almost every instrument on the station, learning how they were made, and how to make his own things, continually experimenting.
Experiment Ninety-Four was the most experiment of all, and neither Caspian nor the reader could ever have imagined the outcome of it. Took me by surprise and resulted in a very satisfying — if slightly horrific and unsettling — story, with the added bonus of the lovely accompanying artwork, courtesy of the author.
(First published in Collective Realms Magazine, January 2021)
SFF Reviews