REVIEW: “Making Friends” by Steve Kopka

Review of Steve Kopka, “Making Friends”, in Abandoned Places, edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell (Shohola Press, 2018): 39-56 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I’m very bad at genres, especially all the finely-sliced sub-categories that are out there nowadays. But the beginning of this story made me go, “Oh! That’s what ‘urban fantasy’ is (when it’s not vampire and werewolf romance).” Everything is ordinary and real and familiar, except everything that is extraordinary and fantastic and strange. The lines between two the are blurred, and the result is unsettling — unsettling enough that I decided in the end to also classified it as ‘horror’. Horror isn’t my cup of tea, but the story was compelling nevertheless.

For me, though, this story was let down by the quality of its writing. The prose didn’t feel as finely crafted, and I kept tripping up on little things — small grammatical errors, a word occurring in two sentences in a row, the feeling that I was being given a recitation of facts — that detracted from my enjoyment.

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REVIEW: “Notes from an Unpublished Interview with Mme. Delave, Fairy” by Brittany Pladek

Review of Brittany Pladek, “Notes from an Unpublished Interview with Mme. Delave, Fairy”, Luna Station Quarterly 33 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

When I first skimmed the table of contents for issue 33, I saw “Notes from an Unpublished Interview…” right after the editorial and figured it was a non-fiction piece and that I wouldn’t review it here. Only after I’d read a few other stories in the issue did I take a closer look at the title and go “Ooooh!” Because all it takes is that final word to hook me in and make me want to read this story.

The story opens with a little editorial note explaining the circumstances of this present piece taken from the archives. The note ends with a sentence that I could give my philosophy students to analyse: “Because unsubstantiated does not mean impossible.”

This was an absolutely lovely and engaging story, chock full of myth and history. “As Europe has history, so Faerie has change,” Mme. Delave tells her interviewer. But Faerie died. It did not fade, as Mme. Delave reprimands her interviewer for saying, but rather, it thickened. It became solid. It ceased to change. And as Aristotle tells us, “time is the number of motion in respect of before and after”, that is, with respect to change. Where there is no change, there is no motion, there is no movement, there is no time. And where there is no time, there is no life, only death.

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REVIEW: “Nothing Save His Anger” by Chris Bauer

Review of Chris Bauer, “Nothing Save His Anger”, in Abandoned Places, edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell (Shohola Press, 2018): 163-177 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Warning: Avoid if you don’t wish to read about child abuse.

Haunted houses are perhaps the quintessential “abandoned place”, but this is no ordinary ghost story. The main character, Frank, is too complex to be an easily likeable hero. There is a deep thread of control and power running through Frank, his relationship with his parents, and his relationship with the haunted house.

Sometimes people haunt houses, sometimes houses haunt people. It is only when Frank finally confronts the house that has been his touchstone since childhood, that we find out which it is.

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REVIEW: “Dix” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Review of Kristine Kathryn Rusch, “Dix”, Asimov’s Science Fiction March/April (2018): 13-46 — Read Excerpt Online or Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley.

We’re trained to make the most of the situation we’re in, not to wish we were somewhere else.

Set in Rusch’s wider Diving universe, after an ill-fated rescue mission the crew of the Ivoire find themselves 5,000 years in the future far from the rest of the Fleet and everyone they’ve ever known or understands who they are, with no way of getting back. The crew are coping in different ways with the loss – both productive and destructive.

Without giving too much of the plot away, the story here is tightly told and, despite dealing with an established universe and technologies, Rusch leads those unfamiliar through the intricacies and risks being handled without bogging down in exposition.

I did find some of the more tense moments didn’t quite come across as stressful as they could have – for example, the threats, despite being tricky to diffuse, never really came across as particularly likely to me. Perhaps knowing where this piece sat between the other works in the series also made me feel the characters were less at risk.

Overall, though, this was a fun, self-contained adventure sci-fi story that didn’t require awareness of the related material to enjoy.

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REVIEW: “The Last Light” by Miranda Suri

Review of Miranda Suri, “The Last Light”, in Abandoned Places, edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell (Shohola Press, 2018): 147-162 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

“Piracy” has had a variety of connotations and meanings over the years, from armed hijackers sailing the seas to Robin-Hood-esque hackers who redistribute music from the rich to the poor. Suri’s story taps into an intersective version of piracy, one in which hackers can hijack space-ship computers and take them wherever they want in the universe, wherever they can then put the most pressure on those who carry priceless cargo — in space, there are many abandoned places.

One thing about the “Robin Hood” pirates is that they always think what they are doing is morally superior. We praise the historical Robin Hood as all the tales are told from his perspective as he fights against the evil, conniving, and greedy Sheriff of Nottingham and Prince John. The Robin Hood in this story is the antagonist, though, and what I enjoyed most about the story was watching the main character, Miss Song, slowly realise that maybe, just maybe, she was one of the bad guys.

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REVIEW: “The Last Shaper at The Witch City’s Waypoint” by Emily Lundgren

Review of Emily Lundgren, “The Last Shaper at The Witch City’s Waypoint”, Luna Station Quarterly 33 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This story has a gorgeous opening line:

Ess sang he found me in the reeds in the heat of summer, my mother a crow lying dead.

(Even if every time I read it, my eyes see “cow” instead of “crow”, and I can’t help but think that that would also work, and perhaps be even more interesting.)

The rest of the story was as beautifully crafted, full of lovely language like a song itself, and the rhythm and pacing and descriptive imagery of a fairy tale. Except part-way through it shifts from a fairy tale into something more akin to science fiction. The story transcends boundaries and classification, and is just really good.

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REVIEW: “Irregularity” by Rachel Harrison

Review of Rachel Harrison “Irregularity”, Apex Magazine 106 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

After nearly perishing in an alien invasion, humanity decided that computers were not reliable enough to watch the void of space for threats. Now, specially trained humans work at outposts, watching the data for inconsistencies. Nyle is one of those observers. It’s a lonely job – he only sees his one human co-worker for a few minutes a day, and otherwise interacts only with the station itself and the endless data stream. This makes for a quiet, character driven story, focused almost entirely on Nyle.

In addition to the impeccably well-crafted character of Nyle, this story also has a well-built, interesting world. We mostly get hints of it from his memories, but so much of the story takes place in Nyle’s head, that still gives us a good look at the stratification of this society.

I enjoyed the quiet, introspective story telling in this piece, and recommend it for anybody who enjoys space stories that are less action and more reflection, with a strong, emotional ending.

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REVIEW: “Bury Me in the Rainbow” by Bill Johnson

Review of Bill Johnson, “Bury Me in the Rainbow”, Asimov’s Science Fiction March/April (2018): 140-196 — Read Excerpt Online or Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley.

The walls of the chapel, from top to bottom, on all sides, were made of thousands of little medicine bottles, test tubes, small glass containers. A rare few were clear, but most were red or rose or orange or yellow or green or blue or indigo or violet. Sunlight streamed through the windows, and through the bottles and into the chapel, in arcs and bands and mixtures and spilled across the floor and the altar and the pews and us.

Johnson returns to the world from his Hugo Award-winning novelette We Will Drink a Fish Together to present this sequel novella.

An unknown alien assassin dies in Summit, trying to kill the alien ambassador, Foremost. Tony, the new mayor, must manage the politics between the different lodges making up Summit to determine the fate of his people: how should they deal with the assassin’s body? How long can their way of life last? Should they take the ambassador’s offer and join the Ship? And will Summit and the individual lodges survive the transition if they do?

At the centre of this story is the idea and motif of the Rainbow – the central resting place a small piece of everyone who has ever died in Summit. Through this Johnson looks at history, ancestry and connection with a place and people over time, something which is valuable to everyone in Summit and challenged by the Ship’s arrival and offer.

The world is full and Johnson’s experiences from living on Lake Traverse Indian Reservation in South Dakota permeate the piece’s perceptions of community, independence and land.

This novella is small and thoughtful rather than action-packed. It spends a lot of time developing a sense of place and people, rather than pushing the narrative forward which made it feel like it ran a bit long in places. Where the story could have focused on the ambassadorial interactions happening between the ground and the Ship, Johnson instead looks at the different communities within Summit and Tony’s frustrated attempts and negotiations to get them all agreeing on the Ship issue.

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REVIEW: “Heart Proof” by Holly Schofield

Review of Holly Schofield, “Heart Proof”, Luna Station Quarterly 33 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

There is a lot of world-building that has gone into this story — always a plus — but the flip side of it is that I’m not sure I got the details I needed to get when I needed to get them.

The story opens with a strong sense of anger and antagonism between the two main characters, Kamik and Techan. The tension is palpable, but I found it difficult to figure out where it came from. I feel like I’ve been dumped into the story a bit too precipitously and so I don’t know enough of their history to understand why their tempers are so short and why they are so angry with each other, because it is also clear that they have known each other for a long time and were, at least once, friends. It is only later that one very oblique comment makes me realise that they are — or at least once were — lovers.

The classic fantasy story involves a quest, and the quest in this story is one of pilgrimage — pilgrimage to make sacrifice, “a sacrifice to a god I no longer believe in!” (so says Kamik). We learn that the pilgrimage is one that every member of the village one makes, but it takes a long while to find out why Kamik and Techan are making the pilgrimage now, so late in their lives — it is nearly half-way through that I find out that the pilgrimage isn’t a one-time thing, but something that is done every time the god Welmit eats the moon.

So the story took me awhile to suck me in. But when Kamik reaches the edge of Welmit’s Maw and begins to contemplate heresy, then I was hooked. My only complaint by the end is that I wished the heresy had been a bit more heretical, a bit less orthodox.

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REVIEW: “There’s No Need to Fear the Darkness” by Heather Morris

Review of Heather Morris, “There’s No Need to Fear the Darkness”, Luna Station Quarterly 33 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Brenda is one of those characters where a few paragraphs in, already I’m thinking, I like her. I want to get a beer with her sometime and hear stories about her job. She wouldn’t bore me with small talk, and I bet she has had some interesting adventures. And I bet she wouldn’t mind if I whittered on about my job; she strikes me as someone who both gives and takes. Morris describes Brenda as “petty and mean-spirited”, but I’d call her “honest” rather.

I like her no-nonsense approach to her work and to the stupidity of humanity, and I love the casual and easy love and friendship that flows between her and the other two “Lazes” (short for “Lazaruses”; I did make the mistake of mentally mispronouncing the word the first time it was used, not (yet) knowing it’s origin). I love the humor that Brenda, Cade, and Aage have — I laughed out loud more than once reading this story.

I like reading stories like this because I wish there were more people like this in the world, and since there aren’t, I just have to settle with reading stories about them instead.

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