REVIEW: “We Head for the Horizon and Return with Bloodshot Eyes” by Eleanna Castroianni

Review of Eleanna Castroianni, “We Head for the Horizon and Return with Bloodshot Eyes”, Podcastle: 513 — Listen Online. Reviewed by Heather Rose Jones

Somehow Greece–in this case, the Greek civil war shortly after WWII–seems the most appropriate setting for a tale of haruspicy (the divining of omens by the study of entrails). Nafsika has a talent for divining futures and presents in the bones and organs of the dead–a talent that her commanding officer begrudgingly values except when the fate that Nafsika sees contradicts her strategy and plans. The war provides the peril and hazards that make hard choices necessary, but as the author’s notes indicate, this is in some ways a symbolic exploration of the real-history hardships and consequences of the setting. Intertwined in the exploration of Nafsika’s talents is the dangerous love she shares with her female comrade and Nafsika’s desperate attempt to use her talents to find a path to survival for her squad.

For all the gruesome opening and looming disaster, I was riveted from beginning to end. This is a powerful story with an intense sense of place and time. The horrors are both supernatural and historical, and the framing story of the protagonist writing the events as a diary (based on actual historic examples) leaves the audience in suspense as to the outcome. I can’t say that I’d be eager to experience it again, but I’m glad to have listened the once.

Content warning for body horror and wartime violence.

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REVIEW: “C-a-l-l-a-s” by Katharine Coldiron

Review of Katharine Coldiron, “C-a-l-l-a-s”, Luna Station Quarterly 33 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

“C-a-l-l-a-s” is the story of Solomon’s quest to obtain access to a piece of history that has been fervently suppressed in the wake of a cataclysmic event which we, the readers, simply know of as “the bacteria”. The effects of this bacterial event are pervasive and widespread — society is now quite dystopian and dictatorial — and there appears to be a connection between it and the lack of voice, quite literally, that people have. Communication happens primarily by sign language, or by electronic voice boxes; those who are bred to be able to speak command positions of power as literal mouthpieces for the government.

In such a world, what is it that takes the role of the most sought after, most precious? Why, music of course, and Solomon’s quest is a quest for opera, and in particular, a single opera singer, Callas.

For those who wish to experience a part of what Solomon experienced at the culmination of his quest, I leave you with this.

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REVIEW: “The Donner Party” by Dale Bailey

Review of Dale Bailey, “The Donner Party,” Fantasy & Science Fiction 134, 1-2 (2018): 228-256 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Standback.

“The Donner Party” is amply clear about its subject material from its title, and from its first line:

Lady Donner was in ascendance the first time Mrs. Breen tasted human flesh.

In this dark Victorian story, those at the apex of high society, at the most elevated of occasions, will eat human meat — “ensouled flesh” — and thus celebrate “the divinely ordained social order.” The horror of the story is far less in the gore of genteel cannibalism itself, although that’s definitely there too. Far more, it’s in the readiness with which Mrs. Breen, and others trying to touch that apex, are willing to accept, pursue and defend the practice — assuming themselves, of course, to be considered among the cannibals, and not the cannibalized.

This is definitely not a story for the squeamish. But if you’d like to read something that will make you squirm uncontrollably, “The Donner Party” is sharp and powerful. Its tone and characters are spot on; plausibly unconscionable, resplendent in their cruel self-aggrandizement.

The story’s conclusion is not unexpected; I don’t think it’s meant to be. Rather, it’s expertly built up to — and then served alongside a final twist of the knife. Recommended.

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REVIEW: “Mother Tongues” by S. Qiouyi Lu

Review of S. Qiouyi Lu, “Mother Tongues”, Asimov’s Science Fiction January/February (2018): 147-153 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley.

“I bet she bought her Mandarin…”

What if you could buy and sell languages? Excise or implant the knowledge into your brain? Go in for day surgery and wake up fluent in a new language – lifted straight from a native speaker?

Jiawen Liu wants to sell her second language, English, to pay for her daughter’s education at Stanford. But when her English is assessed as less than top quality and she is unable to afford the necessary accent-reduction courses to improve the value of it she has to consider other, more drastic, options.

A beautiful and thought-provoking piece and a highlight of this issue. Lu’s piece does a beautiful job of depicting the bilingual experience and exploring the connection between languages and our sense of self.

There’s a lot going on in this quite short piece. There’s commentary on migrant experiences, assimilation, and how these differ between generations. Consideration of the large and small interactions and use of different languages to get through a day, including code switching.

There’s sly commentary here, too, about authenticity, appropriation and exploitation of minority groups. Is it ok to steal someone else’s authentic voice and use it yourself? Is your learned integration ever going to be as acceptable as everyone else’s and will it forever be worth less? And is something really a choice when other options are not realistically available to you? And is it worth giving up your own voice so that someone else can keep and train theirs?

Lu’s prose on the whole here is tight and lovely. They set up the characters fast and the interactions pack emotional wallops along the way. Their inclusion of multilingual text and other representative prose elements in particular do an excellent job showing the confusion and disorientation of not having the right words to hand – quite literally showing rather than telling the reader the experience.

 

 

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REVIEW: “The Equalizers” by Ian Creasey

Review of Ian Creasey, “The Equalizers”, Asimov’s Science Fiction January/February (2018): 66-74 —  Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley.

“If everyone wore the Equalizers, it wouldn’t matter what I looked like, Pamela thought. I could waltz back into the office in yesterday’s outfit, without any makeup, and no one would know.”

Pamela’s workplace is trialing Equalizers – glasses which augment what the wearer sees, hears and smells to remove personal characteristics from whomever they are interacting with. People instead look like humanoid shapes in colours reflective of their work unit, and labelled with their job title. No names. The rationale is that a fair environment improves employee morale… and saves on compensation claims. Pamela finds herself starving for real human contact after spending all day interacting with faceless, inhuman shapes and has been dating hard to get over a bad breakup. Her friend, Vonda, dares her to try the Equalizers as a kind of blind date. Could she be attracted to someone based on their intellect and conversation alone?

This piece hits on some hot-button themes. How far can or should we reasonably take anti-discrimination practices? What would we need to do to overcome our bodies’ natural snap-judgements based on social conditioning and personal, inherent bias? What happens to our interactions and instincts when you take away all of the cues we normally rely on to guide us?

As such, there’s a lot of speculative fodder in this one idea of technologically removing all bias indicators from interactions with others. I liked that the contrast between judgement calls and discriminatory behaviour in the workplace and in online dating, too, showing two different realms of interaction where first impressions matter. There’s an underlying theme here about what you can see of people – in Pamela’s workplace she can’t ‘see’ people at all, and in her dating she doesn’t really see the people beyond their features. It’s polar opposite ends of a spectrum.

However, I didn’t find Pamela’s character development particularly strong – she never really had to confront her own biases and perceptions, or make any particularly big choices. There didn’t seem to be anything at stake for her personally or professionally and I found this weakened the piece, the ending in particular.

Ultimately, a great premise and idea for technology, but I felt it could have had a stronger narrative to meet the concepts and themes it was playing with.

 

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REVIEW: “The Final Commandment: Trey’s Story” by James Gunn

Review of James Gunn, “The Final Commandment: Trey’s Story”, Asimov’s Science Fiction January/February (2018): 26-32 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley.

A cautionary tale and a twist on a rampaging AI story.

In Trey’s world – Ourworld – humans evolved along similar physical and technological lines as humans on Earth. This included the creation of increasingly intelligent machines, which eventually achieved sapience. Except, that access to this supreme intelligence does not guarantee human happiness or peace on land or in the sea.

This piece was more speculative than the previous stories in this series by Gunn. I particularly liked the machines’ co-dependent relationship with humans in this piece. Often AIs are depicted as free to run and be themselves as soon as they achieve sentience, with humans only an annoyance or something that’s getting in the way. Not the case here. Trey and the other machines have helped and been used by humans in different ways across their combined history.

The image of Trey with the two lovers coiled safe inside is a lovely one. There’s a nice symbology there about human-created machines carrying their creators, womb-like, into the stars.

The layered inevitable tragedies leading up to the conclusion also built quite well, though I found it slowed through the middle around the evolution of the sea people.

However, as with most of Gunn’s tie-in stories I find the lack of context around key elements of the world found in the novel, particularly what the Transcendental Machine is and why all of these species think it can do the things they want. Because of this I found the ending a little less satisfying and uplifting than it could have been for a stand-alone piece.

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REVIEW: “Scar Clan” by Carrow Narby

Review of Carrow Narby, “Scar Clan”, Podcastle: 512 — Listen Online. Reviewed by Heather Rose Jones

It isn’t often that a shapeshifter story comes up with twists I haven’t seen before. “Scar Clan” tackles the point of view of a veterinarian’s assistant in a clinic that reaches out to an unusual clientele, with the secondary task of keeping that clientele out of public knowledge. One of the unusual twists in this story’s version of werewolves is a resistance to death that goes well beyond issues of silver bullets. This is demonstrated in an extended opening scene that involves significant gruesome horror. But the meat of the story (if you’ll forgive the expression) is an exploration of the protagonist’s history of trauma and how it brought her to this particular job, with a consideration of the nature of monstrosity and personhood.

I’d classify this as a dark story, despite the central characters managing to escape perils great and small. It’s a story that assumes the world is a dark and dangerous place and that the best you can hope for is to have allies chance by at the right time. In technical terms, t’s a good story, though not really to my personal taste.

Content warning for violent dismemberment and sexual peril.

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REVIEW: “On Your Honor” by Kat Weaver

Review of Kat Weaver, “On Your Honor”, Luna Station Quarterly 33 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

I found this story rather hodgepodge — fanciful titles and clothing and the affected speech of a genteel historical fantasy; heavily Greek names as if (but not actually) from classical myth; bits and bobs of rather generic SF elements. It seemed like it didn’t quite know what genre it was supposed to be, and not in the “genre-transcending” sort of way but in the slightly confused and muddled sort of way. Sadly, this just wasn’t the story for me; but if you like political intrigue combined with parrots, it might be the story for you.

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REVIEW: “The Seeds of Consciousness: 4107’s Story” by James Gunn

Review of James Gunn, “The Seeds of Consciousness: 4107’s Story”, Asimov’s Science Fiction January/February (2018): 19-32 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley.

As a species, Floran dreams were rooted to the soil; their nightmares were filled with the dread of being separated from it. But their will was stronger than their fears…

Up there as my favourite of Gunn’s series of tie-in stories for his novel Transcendental.

4107 is a Floran, a sentient plant species. The Florans have evolved over generations, growing from blissful cycles of growing in the sun and dying back to the soil, to overcoming both native and insterstellar threats, and finally reaching out to the stars on their own.

I really enjoyed the mythological feel of this piece. It feels like a creation story, except it goes far beyond creation. The long, collective memories of the Florans, reaching back to the first sprouting, and the generally long cycles Floran history has taken allows for this gradual unfolding of the Floran’s evolution. And an evolution it is! Responding to different adverse circumstances which force them to adapt and respond in order to survive which, in turn, drives their advancement in thought, technology and perspective. All the while the Florans retain a unique perspective, intelligence and problem-solving approach built from their worldview and cultural priorities. This is an alternate evolution trajectory, in some ways familiar and in other ways quite alien to a human (‘meat’) perspective and it is fascinating to watch.

As this is a background story to an existing novel, universe and character this piece may be a bit “infodumpy” or lacking in story for some. It does have an alternate history feel to it and, while I didn’t find that this hindered my enjoyment of it, it might not work for some readers.

Novel tie-ins can be tough to pull off, I think in part because you don’t want to give away the novel’s trajectory, but there needs to be enough of a conclusion to be satisfying to the reader. This story achieved that, bringing us a full history of Floran civilisation up to a set point before showing them boldly heading towards their next era. I liked that the story wrapped up in the middle of the Floran’s full story, showing us where they wanted to go, but leaving it to the reader (perhaps in the novel) to find out whether they achieved this. The ending scene was a particular highlight for me, bringing us back to a familiar cultural perspective and environment with humour and hinting at the next steps for 4107 and the Florans’ journey in the universe.

 

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REVIEW: “Barren Isle” by Allen M. Steele

Review of Allen M. Steele, “Barren Isle”, Asimov’s Science Fiction January/February (2018): 130-146 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley.

A team of Corps of Exploration soliders are tasked with a search and rescue operation on the Barren Isle – a remote location on the planet Coyote inhabited by often dangerous native tribes and members of a fanatical religious cult. The team’s mission is to find and retrieve two children who are believed to have made their way to the Barren Isle while running away from New Salem and the Book and Candle cult.

This is a pretty fun military scifi short. The team have good banter and personalities. The setting and stakes are drawn up fast, mostly through conversation with a few necessary blocks of historical information and context.

I found the The Book and Candle and Fletcher a bit two-dimensional as villains, though, and the protagonists were straight-up ‘good guys’ saving misguided people back to where they belonged. It was a bit simplistic in morality and character depth for my tastes. I also never felt that the danger was particularly real – our heroes never seemed challenged or threatened, which I found undermined the stakes. On the whole, however, this story delivered what it said it would on the tin and came to a neat conclusion.

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