REVIEW: “Your Life Unfolds, and Then–” by Barbara A. Barnett

Review of Barbara A. Barnett, “Your Life Unfolds, and Then—”, Daily Science Fiction, Sept 25, 2017: Read Online. Reviewed by Caitlin Levine.

I’m always fascinated by the seeming of consciousness. A good story brings the characters to life, but there’s something special about characters who interact with the writer or reader. In “Your Life Unfolds, and Then—,” we watch the narrator create a character as the story progresses, one aware – if not accepting – of their creation. And of course the narrator is not unaware of the parameters of their own “existence.” Barnett layers this tale with many questions about reality, awareness, and creation.

This is my favorite story from this week because of the interactions between the layers of participants – the character, the narrator, Barnett, and us readers.
The narrator’s sometimes creepy tone highlights the character’s frustration with not having control over their own life and contrasts it with the exuberant feeling of being the protagonist. If you are a fan of the movie “Schenectady, New York” or Tailsteak’s comic “1/0,” you’ll like this.

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REVIEW: “A Whisper in the Weld” by Alix E. Harrow

Review of Alix E. Harrow, “A Whisper in the Weld”, Podcastle 487 — Listen Online. Reviewed by Heather Rose Jones

I have to confess, this story had me good-crying in my car during the commute. Ghosts aren’t supposed to stick around very long unless they have something very important to do. Wartime creates a lot of ghosts, and our usual definition of heroism doesn’t take into account all the terrible things that desperation or simple need drives people to. All Isa wanted to do was to raise her daughters right and see her husband again when the war was over. Working in the steel mill wasn’t about being a hero, it was about surviving. There was nothing heroic in her death, only in the desperate need that kept her lingering on with a mission to fulfill. I loved the voice and imagery in this story as it pieced together Isa’s past and made me believe that her ghost could inhabit the machinery that killed her. The ending was so perfect and fitting. This is a powerful story about how people survive–one way or another–despite the crushing weight of oppression.

(Originally published 2014 in Shimmer.)

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REVIEW: “All Tales Must End” by Michelle Muenzler

Review of Michelle Muenzler, “All Tales Must End”, Luna Station Quarterly 31: Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

I often find short stories a frustrating length to read, because they are over so quickly. The really good ones I want to last forever, so that I can lose myself in them for hours. It is true that “All tales must end”, as Muenzler and her storytelling narrator tell us, but this one ended far too quickly. It was so good. Can I have another like it, please? Or an entire novel built around this world and these characters? Because — as Muenzler and the narrator also tell us — “every story has a beginning. And a middle”, and I want to hear all of it, the entire story, not just the end, which is all we get in this tale, but the middle and the beginning too.

There are many reasons why we began this website. But finding and reading stories like this one is by far the best reason to do what we do.

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REVIEW: “In Search of Stars” by Matthew Bright

Review of Matthew Bright, “In Search of Stars”, Glittership Episode 43 (2017): Read/listen online. Reviewed by Julia K. Patt.

What an unusual, mysterious story.

Our unnamed narrator is a scientist living in Los Angeles; he develops a blue paint that makes people float away into the sky. This is what he does with his one-night stands, the men he takes back to his apartment. He wants these men, sometimes desperately, but doesn’t want to linger with them or see them again. There’s a sense that by releasing them into the atmosphere, our narrator is protecting himself, distancing himself from what he really wants.

Of course, not all of them go quietly or disappear unforgotten. We can understand, perhaps, why the narrator is so uneasy.

Anonymity dominates not only in his life but also in the city itself, a peculiar hybrid of shiny Hollywood glamour and “Good old American filth.” Where all the women are named Marilyn and even laundromats turn into something very different at night. No one is exactly as they seem or as they claim to be, including—especially—the man telling this story.

It’s a story rich in the unspoken, the undeclared, which becomes more than a little unsettling (in the best way). There’s very little dialogue, aside from the narrator’s conversations with Eugene, an old friend from school who works on movies. And even his time with Eugene eventually lapses into silence at the story’s conclusion.

Then the narrator must make a decision: to stay or float away himself and join the men he’s sent into the sky.

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REVIEW: “The Lightning Bird” by Kristi DeMeester

Review of Kristi DeMeester, “The Lightning Bird”,  Apex Magazine 100 (2017): [Read Online]. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

We learn two things from the very first sentence: Gable’s mother has died, and this story features magic. It’s hard to write about mother daughter relationships without being saccharine, and harder still to write about dead mothers without slipping into the maudlin, but DeMeester manages it here. Gable’s grief permeates the page, raw and messy with edges like broken glass.

The magic feels real. By that I mean that it isn’t a metaphor for grief – though it serves as a powerful tool to elucidate that emotion – and it isn’t tacked on. Gable is a tribal healer, diviner, and psychopomp for a community of South African immigrants living in Florida, a role and gift which she inherited from her mother, Uma. It is a part of who she is, part of the world sketched out for us. This is almost as much a story about her stepping into that adult role as it is about grief, but really they weave together, forming the warp and weft of the tale.

DeMeester weaves past and present together in a way that should be confusing, but is actually easy to follow. Gable’s memories of her mother, of growing up, and of one other girl in particular butt up against the main narrative, sometimes with white space as a cue, but often without it. Somehow this is not confusing, a testament to the author’s control.

The end is dark and strange, redolent of cycles and power.

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REVIEW: “The Age of Glass” by Ryan Row

Review of Ryan Row, “The Age of Glass,” Persistent Visions, 18 August 2017 — Read Online. Reviewed by Essence B. Scott.

What does it mean to be human? Ryan Row’s short story “The Age of Glass” responds to this question perfectly. Is being a human having a soul? Being sentient? Being open with your problems? What about having problems?

“The Age of Glass,” according to the blurb at the top of the story, is a “coming-of-age-during-the-apocalypse tale.” Though the growing up is in the nameless female protagonist’s imagination, we see her trying to make sense of the world around her by attempting to appear more grown up than she actually is.

Form—both of humans and of the enemy Stickmen—is a motif throughout the story. In the first paragraph, the protagonist says that her friend, Tracy, is “shorter than me, and her skeleton is less formed” in comparison to her own, which a boy told her via a note in her locker was “’historic’.” Our protagonist is obsessed—much like the way the blurb before the story’s start said—with form, her own and others. Further into the story, she admires Adam while he smokes. “When he inhales on his cigarette… his chest expands just so in the light. And I imagine this movement of his, this angle, this light, has never been seen before by anyone alive.” She romanticizes war and the way it changes people. Later, she describes a picture hanging on Adam’s wall: “In it, he is smiling in a way I have never seen before. Broadly, revealing his teeth to be a little too large for his mouth. A human perfection in him that I have come to love as his only flaw.”

Our protagonist eschews childish behavior, though she is a child herself and has childish thoughts. This smile on the wall is childish to her. She wants so much to be an adult, like most teens do, that she admires Adam’s adulthood. She describes his smile now as “cool and adult.” She practices her smile in the mirror every morning. Her cool, adult smile with no teeth showing.

When she first happens upon Adam smoking hand rolled cigarettes, they remind her, “embarrassingly” of “tiny tampons.” A little later, Adam’s arrival in Falls City is described using sentence fragments. She sees Adam and can only imagine that this is what she wants.

So, she makes herself appealing to Adam in the way that most teenagers who are attracted to someone do: make themselves attractive. For the protagonist, this is through jogging. She wears shorts that “accent[s] the length and curve of [her] tanned legs” and wearing “brightly colored tank-tops cut low, hugging [her] slim chest and stomach like a finer skin.”

When Adam says he’s been thinking about war and the dreams he has surrounding it, all our protagonist can say is, “cool.” She thinks she understands him, but she doesn’t in the least. I think she wants to understand, but she won’t really get it until she’s in the situation herself.

Glass is another motif in this story. This story is called “The Age of Glass.” When glass is mishandled, it shatters into a million pieces. Glass is beautiful when it is treated with respect. It takes in light; glitters, shines when one moves it around.

The Stickmen’s skin is “polished and geometric, edged.” While our protagonist has not come face-to-face with a Stickman, she has seen videos of them: “I know this from the shaky, soldier taken videos on websites like ‘Save Sentient Species’ and ‘Snuff Before Bed’.” Stickmen have a simple mean of taking out the enemy. From our protagonist: “One clip showed a Stickman reaching toward a group of soldiers, and thin, blue-white beams came from its fingers like tangling marionette strings. The men fell to pieces like dolls.”

In the next paragraph, she describes the Stickmen as “beautiful and misshapen. Almost human… but thin and with random extra joints or protruding nobs of glassy flesh.” They are “faceless, but not headless. Deformed, but alive. Long limbs like bones without flesh. As translucent as moonlight or handmade glass.” Even Stickmen can’t escape her fantasies of war and fighting to save the world.

Stickmen come from the ground, in the Creator Lands, spreading outwards “like a spill and become Crater Lands after they’re sucked dry.”

In the scene where our protagonist is working to reinvent herself, we also meet her mother. Her mother is vulnerable. After the protagonist’s father’s name is added to the list of other people who have went MIA, her mother “move[s] through life as caught in an undertow, struggling against something invisible and all around her.” Her teen daughter, perhaps? It can’t be easy raising a child without a father, MIA or not.

As the story nears the climax, around page seven or so (I printed this story out; it is easier for me to read), the scenes get shorter. When our protagonist learns about Adam, she gets a lot more than she might have wanted.

This story is a bit on the long side (fourteen printed pages), but I enjoyed reading it. Row uses interesting description, and the story feels original to me. Persistent Visions did a good thing by publishing this story. To read this story and others, go to http://www.persistentvisionsmag.com

 

 

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REVIEW: “Baghdad Syndrome” by Zhraa Alhaboby

Review of Zhraa Alhaboby, Emre Bennett (trans.), “Baghdad Syndrome”, Iraq+100, edited by Hassan Blasim (Comma Press, 2016): 87-106 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This story has so many layers to it, it’s hard to know where to begin. There’s the “future-day” story of a man suffering from Baghdad Syndrome who dreams of a weeping woman. There’s the “present-day” story, set in our present or near past, of two star-crossed lovers whose story was commemorated in a statue in a central square. There’s the “past-day” story, of Scheherazade at the 1001 nights. These stories weave in and out of each other and the thread that ties them all together is names and naming. Some of the characters are not named at all; they are simply placeholders that could be anyone. The narrator’s name depends on who it is that is addressing him, whether he is “Patient Sudra Sen Sumer” or “Architect Sudra Sen Sumer”. Some characters are named, but their names are “new” names, names that have been consciously divorced from history, because:

Old names and surnames became dangerous things to hold onto, and people were allocated new, neutral names, free from any affiliations to religions or sects of the past. The slogan we read about in history was: ‘Leave behind your names and live!’ (p. 102).

In one poignant moment, Sudra Sen Sumer visits the family of his coworker Utu, and the older members of the family go around one by one saying the names of their grandparents and great-grandparents, their names connecting them to their histories. Names encode our history, and when those names are taken away, so too is our access to our history; the playing out of this theme is central to the story, and it is also in the periphery at every step.

And then there’s the name, “Baghdad Syndrome”. It’s a destructive illness, one of the long-term consequences of chemical warfare. The course of symptoms is well-known, and there is no cure; when there is no cure and you know what your fate will be, what point is there in visiting the doctors who will do nothing more than give a name to what it is that ails you?

But the illness is only superficial. It is not the real Baghdad Syndrome. For:

You see, if you’re a sufferer of Baghdad Syndrome, you know that nothing has ever driven us, or our ancestors, quite as much as the syndrome of loving Bahgdad (p. 106).

There is so much love in this story. So much love and so much heart. I think it’s probably my favorite in the entire anthology.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “The Secret Life of Bots” by Suzanne Palmer

Review of Suzanne Palmer, “The Secret Life of Bots”, Clarkesworld 132: Read online. Reviewed by Kerstin Hall.

Bot 9 has been in storage for a while. It’s a dated model with a reputation for instability, but when the ship runs into a crisis, even temperamental old multibots are called to assist. 9 is to deal with a pest problem –something is chewing through the walls– and while it would prefer a more important job, it dutifully sets about hunting down vermin.

This story is warm and funny and endearing. The narrative is well-constructed, and balances humour and tension throughout. The narrative voice is especially appealing when 9 is the focaliser. The newer bots and the ship are dismissive of 9’s limited functionality, so there’s something thoroughly charming about our hero’s gung-ho attitude. It might not have access to the newfangled ‘botnet’, but it never doubts its ability to get the job done.

The situation onboard the ship escalates. In between fighting off the pest (which is a bit like a bug, and a bit like a rat, or perhaps more like a “Snake-Earwig-Weasel”), 9 decides to fix the humans’ rather more life-threatening problems too.

If you are looking for something amusing, satisfying and easily digestible, “The Secret Life of Bots” won’t disappoint.

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REVIEW: “The Red Tree” by Natasha Suri

Review of Natashi Suri, “The Red Tree”, Luna Station Quarterly 31: Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

One way in which short stories are trickier than longer media is that the author has very little time to catch the reader’s attention and get them involved in the characters. By the end of the fourth paragraph of “The Red Tree”, I am already involved. I do not know why Alder is hiding in a tree, I do not know why the man at the foot of the tree is crying, but Suri paints his anguish and fear so clearly and strongly that one cannot help but want to know the reason for it, and what one can do to comfort him.

But this story is the story of Alder, not of the boy. Alder’s name is, from the very start, a hint to her identity, and I hope it is not too much of a spoiler to say how much I enjoy a dryad story; for whatever reason, of all the well-known creatures in the ordinary human mythological repertoire, dryads (and naiads) feature very infrequently in fantasy and speculative stories. One benefit of this is that there are fewer preconceived notions of who they are and what their relationship to their trees, and thus authors have more freedom to play with these myths. Suri’s take is both poignant and beautifully written. It is a story of hope and vitality — and just a touch of revenge. I think I would’ve liked the story if it had ended up the note of hope, but I can see how the ending Suri wrote is fitting and meet.

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REVIEW: “The Spice Portrait” by J. M. Evenson

Review of J.M. Evenson, “The Spice Portrait”, Escape Pod 594: Listen and read online. Reviewed by Duke Kimball.

“They said my love for my daughter was excessive, that I made her weak by kissing her and singing in her ear at night.

They also said I killed her.”

With these opening lines, “The Spice Portrait” introduces the fear and self-doubt of every mother who has had her parenting corrected into a world of oppression and brutal scarcity. It is a visceral story of love and loss set in a sparse post-apocalypse, within a rigid society motivated almost entirely by lack. All the while the question looms: in a world in which only the strongest can survive, can there be room for a mother’s love to blossom? 

I like that Evenson shows us a section of this society with no direct masculine influence, (including merely oblique and ominous references,) and instead lets us live through the women of this future world. Naz and her mother endure backbreaking labor, petty squabbles, and ever-present hunger- only to face the greatest loss possible. I found the tale tempered with moments of incredible humanity and compassion throughout. The world is nuanced and effortlessly grounded, from the faith to the food to the daily chores- and while a difficult place, it was easy to find myself immersed in it. 

With resonant notes of Atwood and Le Guin, Evenson’s heart-wrenching story is one that is worth tasting.

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