REVIEW: “If We Live to be Giants” by Allison Mulder

Review of Allison Mulder, “If We Live to be Giants,” Small Wonders no. 4 (October 2023): 25-28 — Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content note: Domestic abuse.

This was a shudderingly sad story of two girls’ escape — and their mother’s escape — from an abusive grandfather. It’s the kind of story that makes you think there must be something behind it, a reason why the author chose to wrote this story rather than another one. I hope the exorcism of writing it helped.

(First published in Fireside Magazine 47, 2017).

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REVIEW: “The Crisis” by M. John Harrison

Review of M. John Harrison, “The Crisis”, in Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020, with a foreword by Jennifer Hodgson (Comma Press, 2020): 257-271. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

And here we come to the final story in the anthology. Despite being one of the more recent ones, it has the feel of his earlier work, from the 70s and 80s, more gritty SF less vague speculative fic. But even Harrison with all his skill can’t make me like 2nd person POV narration.

(Originally published in You Should Come With Me Now, 2017.)

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REVIEW: “Yummie” by M. John Harrison

Review of M. John Harrison, “Yummie”, in Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020, with a foreword by Jennifer Hodgson (Comma Press, 2020): 99-108 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the Review of the anthology.

What a strange combination of banal and surreal this was! It reminded me of a Kafka story, where you get pulled along with this growing sense of horror as everything that should be normal goes sideways.

(Originally published in The Weight of Words, 2017.)

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REVIEW: “The Novelist in the Attic” by Shen Dacheng

Review of Shen Dacheng, Jack Hargreaves (trans.), “The Novelist in the Attic”, in Jin Li and Dai Congrong, ed., The Book of Shanghai, (Comma Press, 2020): 61-77 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

This story was the one that intrigued me the most when I read a one-sentence blurb of it on the back. I thought we’d find out, at the start, how the novelist gets into the attic, but the story actually opens on him when he’s already been up there for years.

Part of the premise of the story is extremely attractive to any writer — a quiet space where one can write uninterrupted, without any cares of housekeeping. But the flip side of it — a writer effectively squatting in his publisher’s attic, toiling away without ever producing his third book — is kind of chilling. For awhile, the reader seems to suffocate along with the writer, until one day the publishing house’s previous director retires and a new, reforming, one takes over. The abrupt change shocks the entire system, including the author, and the story takes a sudden, dramatic twist.

The one thing that struck me about this story is how indistinct it was, in the sense that it could have happened anywhere, to anyone. Only the references to the wutong trees outside the building locate the story in any particular place.

(First published in The Ones in Remembrance, 2017).

Sara L. Uckelman3 Comments

REVIEW: “Wind-Lashed Vehicles of Bone” by Bogi Takács

Review of Bogi Takács, “Wind-Lashed Vehicles of Bone” in The Trans Space Octopus Congregation Stories, (Lethe Press, Inc., 2019): 235-239 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Content warning: Pain exchange, scarification, mention of death and suicide.

Araana is a dreamer, who dreams distant and unknown futures. He’s not sure why — is it magic? Or is it a much more mundane explanation? — but the glimpses he sees appeal to the engineer inside him. Maybe, with the help of Ujabir the town mage, maybe he can make that distant future become present.

This story had almost a steam-punk feel to it, atypical for the other stories in this collection, but entirely suited to this story. The story is full of fierce joy and hope, and I really enjoyed it.

(First published in 2017 on Patreon.)

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REVIEW: “To Rebalance the Body” by Bogi Takács

Review of Bogi Takács, “To Rebalance the Body” in The Trans Space Octopus Congregation Stories, (Lethe Press, Inc., 2019): 199-212 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I was a bit surprised that this story didn’t come with a content note, so I’ll add one of my own — if body-modification or vampirism isn’t your thing, avoid this story.

Ordinary vampires are generally neither my thing nor not my thing, but Master Viiren in this story is no ordinary vampire. With all their usual skill, Takács takes a character type and turns it into something on the border between creepy and unsettling. Master Viiren has an illness for which they take medicine, a medicine which they receive from vesicles on the skin of their servant, Biruyan. There is a deep physical intimacy between the two, and the narrators obsequiousness to their master makes it almost uncomfortable to witness.

What was not so uncomfortable, for me at least, was the direct way in which both Biruyan and Master Viiren confront the problematic consequences of adherence to a gender binary and a sex binary. While issues of gender and sex are threaded throughout the stories in this volume, only a few of the stories explicitly revolve around the topic, and its strongest in this one. It’s one of the thins that I’ve loved about this collection as a whole: How much gender matters, but how much also it doesn’t have to be central, but (on the third hand) how much it also can be the central guiding force of a story, and also how gender and sex are intertwined.

(First published in Nerve Endings, ed. T. Hill-Meyer, 2017).

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REVIEW: “The Size of a Barleycorn, Encased in Lead” by Bogi Takács

Review of Bogi Takács, “The Size of a Barleycorn, Encased in Lead” in The Trans Space Octopus Congregation Stories, (Lethe Press, Inc., 2019): 195-198 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Content warning: Mentions of nuclear warfare.

The story itself reflects its title, being small, compact, and feeling almost as if it is made up out of little kernels itself. Much of the story is constructed out of quotes drawn from other sources, primarily from the Old Testament and the Talmud, translated by Takács and then woven together into a beautiful whole. It’s just so well-crafted and constructed, there is aesthetic pleasure alone from that level, on top of the enjoyment deriving from the actual story. I just loved this one, possibly my favorite of the volume.

(First published in Uncanny Magazine 15, 2017).

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REVIEW: “A Superordinate Set of Principles” by Bogi Takács

Review of Bogi Takács, “A Superordinate Set of Principles”, in The Trans Space Octopus Congregation Stories, (Lethe Press, Inc., 2019): 39-52 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Content warning: body horror.

Superficially, this is an aliens-in-a-living-spaceship story — but to characterise it as that would miss the deftness with which Takács takes something alien, strange, foreign, and makes it seem utterly normal. Since the story is told in a first-person POV, we only get bits and pieces of what makes the alien alien, all offered up so ordinarily that it takes a question like

“What could conceivably be wrong with humans?” (p. 40)

to jolt me away from a sense of familiarity to a sense of otherness. I tend to be quite picky about aliens in my SF, because so often they are all too human. But Takács’s narrator Ishtirh-Dunan is not human at all, and delightfully so.

The second aspect that I especially liked about this story was the way unfamiliar language was handled — another tricky thing to do well, especially in a written media. How does one represent in language things that one cannot even conceive of? Again, I found Takács’s execution of this [hmmm, I’d like to say “masterful” but that has problematic gender connotations; and “mistressful” is certain no better. Imagine this long excursus as a placeholder for the right non-gendered synonym].

This story was exceptionally well done.

(First published in Ride the Star Wind: Cthulhu, Space Opera, and the Cosmic Weird, edited by C. Dombrowski and Scott Gable, Broken Eye Books, 2017.)

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