REVIEW: “The Music of Ghosts” by Paul Jessup

Review of Paul Jessup, “The Music of Ghosts”, Interzone #272: Purchase here. Reviewed by Mark Hepworth

For a short story to take on the story of a generation ship is ambitious, to say the least. This is a tale of several of those generations that interact cleverly with the key being the relationship between the ephemeral biological humans and the permanent uploaded personalities in the ship.

The scope of the story makes for a necessarily spare narrative for each generation presented, creating a rather elegiac effect at times. No character really made a play for my interest though, the closest being the personality Penny, but she is something of a lost soul wandering through the generations.

The ending is bittersweet, as the colonists abandon the tools – the ship, the personalities – that brought them to their new home. You could say that they were callous, but of course they simply didn’t view the personalities as real people. A harsh ending, but I can’t argue with Jessup’s conclusion that humans often act this way.

 

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REVIEW: “The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft” by Nick Mamatas and Tim Pratt

Review of Nick Mamatas and Tim Pratt, “The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft”, Apex Magazine 102: Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

I am a huge fan of the recent trend of people deconstructing Lovecraft’s work to create new stories, particularly when those stories tackle the racism that crept through his oeuvre. “The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft” is an excellent addition to that growing collection.

Jim Payne just wants to sell his great-grandfather’s letters from Lovecraft, get his money, and go home. He has no skin in this game (beyond the desire to get out of debt), and no interest in either his great-grandfather or his famous correspondent. But when he drives down the rutted, unmarked, dirt road dotted with bestial statues, and knocks on the door of a ramshackle house in the hills of New England, it’s no surprise that things get complicated.

Everything about this story fits together nicely. Jim is a wonderful narrator: observant, wry, and with a low tolerance for bullshit, which makes it easy to follow him through his adventure. The plot itself is perfectly compressed without feeling either too big for the word count or too small to be interesting; it’s just right. I thought that the racism – both in Lovecraft’s work and in modern America – was deftly handled, but as a white woman, I defer to the judgment of those who have personally experienced it.

Recommended for fans of Lovecraft, low-key horror, or either The Ballad of Black Tom (Victor LaValle) or Lovecraft Country (Matt Ruff).

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REVIEW: “The Siege of Battle-Station Camelot” by Patrick S. Baker

Review of Patrick S. Baker, “The Siege of Battle-Station Camelot”, in Starward Tales II, edited by CB Droege (Manawaker Studio, 2017): 119-131 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Sometimes, what the myth being retold is is obvious from the title, so it will come as no shocker here that the pin is placed in England and that this is the story of Arthur Pendragon, excuse me, Captain Arturo Penn Dragon, his wife, Lieutenant-Commander Gwen Dragon, maverick fighter pilot Commander Lance Lake, and an omniscient AI named Merlin — plus a huge host of other characters that are not so familiar from traditional Arthurian myths, such as strike leader Mai Kono and merchantship owner Dirk van Doorn.

And that is where part of my issue with the story lies. Half-way into the story, we know more about the ships and the weapons and the battle than we ever know about any of the characters; it sometimes feels as if the author feels he doesn’t need to tell us anything about the characters because they are already known to us — and that works for the ones which are known, but for the ones which are new additions or are not immediately correlatable to someone known, it leaves them mostly flat. (Though not entirely: we learn a little bit about Mai Kono’s backstory, and she develops into a character worth knowing. But it is precisely this development and backstory, so out of place from the standard Arthurian cycle, that makes her insertion puzzling.)

The most peculiar part about the story is the end, and the fact that Camlann is nowhere mentioned. (I’ll say no more, for fear of spoilers).

There are a handful of typos, including one sentence that ended up being utterly unparsable, and it should also be noted that the pagination in the table of contents does not match the actual pagination (given in the header above).

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REVIEW: “Skin Deep” by Nickolas Ozment

Review of Nickolas Ozment, “Skin Deep”, Broadswords and Blasters 1 (2017): 3-10 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Yana Shepard.

“Skin Deep” was a fun read. It was well written and easy to follow along. That being said, the only problem I have with it was the fact that it’s easy to figure out once the plot is introduced. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however.

He wanted to behold such beauty, nothing more.

This quote allowed me to find the main character likable. He wasn’t a creep, wasn’t focused on lust or prizes to be gained. He had his own reason for this adventure, and I appreciated that. Although, I’d be lying if I said the ending didn’t contradict the above quote in an indirect fashion. It’s hard to describe without spoiling, and I would rather not do that. Don’t you just hate spoilers in reviews?

All in all, I enjoyed “Skin Deep”. I recommend this if you like action-oriented fiction.

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REVIEW: “This World Is Full of Monsters” by Jeff VanderMeer

Review of Jeff VanderMeer, “This World Is Full of Monsters, Tor.com (2017): Read Online. Reviewed by Danielle Maurer.

Well, this story certainly gave new meaning to the word “face-plant.”

This odyssey of a short story (or possibly a novella–it’s rather long) follows our narrator as he is taken over by a “story-creature,” some kind of alien being that takes over the Earth and transforms our narrator bit by bit into something more like itself.

VanderMeer has a wondrous mastery of description, and the tale reads like a vivid nightmare or hallucination. His word choices paint an exquisite picture of a world gone mad and a narrator struggling through a metamorphosis he does not comprehend until the very end.

It also contains beautifully poetic moments, such as when the narrator remembers that he used to write obituaries; in a sense, this story is the narrator’s own obituary for his past life. There’s a sense of loss buried here, but also a sense of wonder and joy and potential in this new world. Indeed, the narrator wonders if he had slept a century and returned to a still-human world, would he have recognized it any better?

This weird tale manages to take what should be frightening body horror and alien invasion and turn it into something oddly uplifting by the end. It’s well worth your time to read.

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REVIEW: “The Suited Prince” by CB Droege

Review of CB Droege, “The Suited Prince”, in Starward Tales II, edited by CB Droege (Manawaker Studio, 2017): 189-190 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This story is the shortest in the collection, barely two pages. The pin for its inspiration is stuck somewhere in Germany, but because the story is so short it is hard to tell what the root tale is — after all, there are many German fairy tales and folk tales that involve giant chickens!

The story was good for a laugh, in a way that many of the other tales in the book don’t seemed designed to be for. Sometimes, it’s good to read something whose only goal is entertainment.

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REVIEW: “The Last Dance” by Jack McDevitt

Review of Jack McDevitt, “The Last Dance”, Asimov’s Science Fiction November/December (2017): 68-74 – Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley.

The Last Dance refers to contemporary technology and social developments such as Facebook pages as memorials for those who have died, or chat bots created from data from text conversations had while a person was alive.

Ethan’s wife, Olivia, died in a car accident and as part of his grieving process he orders a replacement AI program from a company called Celestial. AI “Olivia” has her voice, mannerisms and memories and allows Ethan to live with her makes it as if she never left. Almost.

The story premise is a bit “Black Mirror” but not quite so grim. It explores grief, the difficulties of letting someone go, how the echoes of people we love and miss haunt us, and how this can handled in ways that are both healthy… and not.

I found the core idea and themes were expanded on well, if a little overtly. Ethan’s unwillingness to move on was honest and Olivia’s actions in the end fitted with her motivations through the story, (though I found the final beat a bit flippant). Ethan’s daughter’s reaction to the whole thing was a particularly nice touch.

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REVIEW: “And No Torment Shall Touch Them” by James Patrick Kelly

Review of James Patrick Kelly, “And No Torment Shall Touch Them”, Asimov’s Science Fiction November/December (2017): 75-85 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley.

What happens when a loved one uploads themselves after death and hang around the family affairs afterwards like a bad smell?

We open with Carli’s Nonno interrupting his own, very formal and religious, funeral. Carli’s Nonno’s consciousness from just before he died has been uploaded and is able to manifest as a hologram at will to continue to observe and comment on his family’s lives and decisions. After a lifetime of running the family, Nonno’s uploaded ghost continues on to continue commenting. And he’s not restricted to observing only when he’s visible. He’s there, always, omnipotent – in some ways more controlling and present than in life.

The perspective shifts in this keep the pacing quick and allow the constraints that having Nonno around in perpetuity as they apply to each family member contrast and reveal themselves slowly. This is a story driven by layered internal conflicts – interpersonal, inter-generational, and individual. The religious and family themes here are deliberate and used effectively. The idea of consciousness uploading after death is not new, but the angle Kelly has chosen here of inter-generational family bonds and restrictions prevented from progressing in the natural order – some emerging and some breaking down – is very clever and took a second read for me to really appreciate.

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REVIEW: “Untilted” by K. A. Teryna

Review of K. A. Teryna, “Untilted”, Apex Magazine 102: Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

This is an intriguing bite of the slightly surreal, translated from Russian. It begins with a strangely written letter, full of deliberate misspellings and random asides. We quickly learn that the note (and the boy who wrote it — Marcus) are more than they seem. He gives the note to a stranger, a woman named Dahlia, and claims it is a contract. We only find out what the contract is about slowly, as the night progresses, growing ever stranger and more nonsensical.

While this isn’t a strongly “fantasy” story, it is every bit as weird as one. Because the tone is so sensible, and the world so very much our own, the strangeness stands out in stark contrast, even if most of the oddness could be explained as the actions of an imaginative child. This is the opposite of the traditional fantasy or science fiction story, where the narrative has to convince us that wizards or faster than light travel are not only possible, but plausible. It’s even different from that type of story where the main character discovers that the world is full of secret magic. There’s no curtain drawn back to reveal a hidden world, just a constant reminder that this child — Marcus — is behaving very strangely. And when he turns out to have access to real magic, that’s probably the most normal thing to happen in the whole story.

Marcus and the Dahlia take turns narrating, sharing quick spurts of both the present narrative and their pasts. There’s a mixture of wisdom and naivete to be found in both of them, which is the source of much of the story’s charm. Though it delves into heavy themes — mostly coping with grief — it never becomes heavy or self-important.

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REVIEW: “The First Witch of Damansara” by Zen Cho

Review of Zen Cho’s, “The First Witch of Damansara”, Uncanny Magazine Volume, 19 (2017): Read Online. Reviewed by Jodie Baker.

When Vivian’s grandmother dies, Vivian’s family ask her to return to Malaysia for the funeral. Her grandmother was a witch of some renown, while Vivian ‘in contrast, had a mind like a hi-tech blender.’ On returning to her family home, she finds troubled spirits in the shape of her grandmother’s wandering ghost, and her magical sister, Wei Yi, who is trying to work out how to honour her grandmother properly so she doesn’t become a kuang shi, or vampire.

I didn’t notice until I’d finished “The First Witch of Damansara” that Zen Cho presents an entirely female family story. There’s a fiance ‘beautiful, supportive, and cast in an appropriately self-effacing role—just off-screen,’ and Vivian’s dead Yeh Yeh plays a role in the story, but otherwise men are entirely absent from this family tale. The important conflicts, and relationships, all play out between women.

A significant part of Vivian’s story revolves around how she fits into her magical, Malaysian family’s life now when she has been apart from them for so long. In order to find her place she has to interact with her sister, mother, and even her grandmother’s spirit in ways that are often infuriating, but nevertheless help her to find a significant role in their lives again. I’m always excited to see family stories that allow women to develop strong, and complex, bonds with each other. And “The First Witch of Damansara” certainly brings the importance of female relationships to the fore.

The story whizzes by because it’s so well-paced. The conversations between the characters read with the naturalness found when people have known each other for a long time but still don’t always understand each other. And there’s a character here to capture the imagination of every reader: practical, fish out of water Vivian; tricksy, smart Nai Nai; argumentative, determined Wei Yi. I was already a big fan of Cho’s novel Sorcerer to the Crown, but after reading “The First Witch of Damansara” I’m eager to try out more of her short fiction too.

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