REVIEW: “The Ghost Stories We Tell Around Photon Fires” by Cassandra Khaw

Review of Cassandra Khaw, “The Ghost Stories We Tell Around Photon Fires”, Apex Magazine 104 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

This is a ghost story in space, a ghost story done up with all the creepiness and ambiguity the genre demands. It is also a love story, which seemed surprising to me until I thought about it. But what makes us want to bend the rules of death like love does? To say more – to try to tell you the plot – would require spoilers, and I would hate to deprive you of the experience of putting the pieces together. In the end, this is another story where the plot isn’t the important thing. The mystery, the meditation on love and loss and living, the lyrically sharp language: those were enough to draw me in and keep me hanging on Khaw’s every word.

This is a very human story, despite being set in space. I think the setting serves to highlight how universal the experience of loss and inability to let go really is. It also provides the a way for the main character to escape the inevitability of loss, but I think it’s contribution to the tone is actually more important.

I’ll admit that, when reading this the first time, I worried about how it would end. Would it dissolve into chaos and vagueness? Would the ending be either too firm or too soft to satisfy, after the beautiful mystery that came before? I should have had more faith. The ending delivers exactly what the story needs, not a drop more or a sentence less.

 

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REVIEW: “Aurelia” by Lisa Mason

Review of Lisa Mason, “Aurelia”, Fantasy & Science Fiction 134, 1-2 (2018): 39-60 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Michael Johnston.

This one surprised me.  The first few paragraphs left me cold, seeming to be headed to a place I don’t like in my fiction.  But the moment the despicable-but-charming Robert meets Aurelia, the story had its hooks in me.

I’m not usually a fan of psychological horror, and this story bridges the gap between “dark fantasy” and “horror” quite deftly, but it’s more of an uneasy Gaiman-esque kind of thing than anything actually horrific.  The disquieting story of Robert and Aurelia seems to march on despite the reader’s uneasy feelings, and it ends up exactly where it needs to.

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REVIEW: “The Best Friend We Never Had” by Nisi Shawl

Review of Nisi Shawl, “The Best Friend We Never Had”, Apex Magazine 104 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

The story starts with a woman named Josie returning to the space station where she grew up, seeking to recruit her friends for a hazy project on behalf of her employers, ARPA. Josie, is a conflicted, complex woman. She seems to have left home for a reason, after getting into some sort of trouble (though we don’t know what it is), yet here she is coming home. She wants to recruit her friends for this job that she clearly thinks will better their lives economically and socially, but she can’t directly tell them about it. The title itself suggests that she isn’t quite who the people from the past think she is, but that doesn’t make her unsympathetic. She keeps herself at a distance, maybe due to the secrets of her mission, but maybe out of habit. That distance made it difficult for me to get as emotionally invested as a prefer, but also suits her character.

I loved the world-building here. The slang is just different enough from our own to suggest linguistic drift, but rooted enough in current language that it was easy to understand. The important things – the hierarchy of haves and have-not’s, the general social order of the habitat (“hab”) – are well developed, while everything not critical to the plot is simply described for us to accept and get on with the story.

The end is not easy. The future world of this story is rife with capitalism and corporate greed (sound familiar?), and that rarely ends well for the lower classes to which these characters belong. Yet it isn’t without hope. I wouldn’t say that it offer any answers to the present-day issues it explores, but it also doesn’t consign them to inevitability – there is a sense that the struggle against them might someday bear fruit, even if we don’t see it today.

This is a long story. Apex didn’t include a word-count this time, but it took me over half an hour to read it. That isn’t a criticism, simply a warning so that you can give yourself enough time to get through it in one sitting.

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REVIEW: “Symphony to a City under the Stars” by Armando Saldaña

Review of Armando Saldaña, “Symphony to a city under the stars”, Apex Magazine 104 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

This is a richly layered world, where dimensions and universes unfurl from the sky, and you can travel through them by song and ships, and where virtual reality has almost eclipsed physical life, at least on earth. The plot is simple enough: boy loves girl, girl travels the stars, girl returns. But the strangeness of the world, the structure, and the deftly lyrical language elevate it to something more.

The plot is a little hazy at times, but not unpleasantly so. I don’t think that precise details are the point of this piece, anyway. Like music itself, this story is more emotion than plot. Love and longing, the yearning to be with someone, but the equally strong need to explore the world and see distant sights, suffuse this piece with all the beautiful sorrow of a minor chord. The music of the language carries you through to the other side, and the neat echoes between the opening and closing images serve as prelude and finale.

Strongly recommended for anyone who loves rich imagery and lyrical language.

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REVIEW: “Sea of Dreams” by Cixin Liu

Review of Cixin Liu (Translated by John Chu), “Sea of Dreams”, Asimov’s Science Fiction January/February (2018): 75-93 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley.

This is a beautiful, strange story.

An alien being interrupts an ice and snow art exhibition and wants to create its own work on earth, using the earth’s seas as its medium. Yan Dong, the artist whose work the alien liked most out of the exhibition, strikes up a connection with the alien which changes as the alien’s artistic vision is realised and the earth has to live with the aftermath of its creation.

This is really a story about art and the place art has in a society. Through conversations between the alien and Yan Dong, Cixin Liu considers whether art is the most important thing for a society to be doing, whether society exists solely for the purposes of allowing art to be created, and whether sometimes there are more important things than art.

The alien’s artwork and the challenges it poses for the earth are original and compelling. This novelette covers a lot of ground in the short amount of words it’s working with – space travel, planet-wide experiences, and events that take place over decades. I liked Yan Dong as an emotional voice for humanity, too – his reactions and decisions felt satisfying and correct and happened in the right way at the right times. The science elements of the story are smart, too, and support the fictional story rather than driving it.

There’s a lot to think about here and it’s wonderfully told with images I’m certain will stick with me.

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REVIEW: “The Heaven-Moving Way” by Chi Hui

Review of Chi Hui, “The Heaven-Moving Way”, Apex Magazine 104: Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

This gem of a story starts with Zhang Xuan stealing a spaceship to track down her missing twin brother. Her quest to find him is interspersed with scenes from their childhood, adolescence, and adulthood – right up to the circumstances that led to his disappearance – and the sibling relationship is lovingly and realistically written, neither too perfect nor too fraught. If this had been a simple quest to find a missing loved one, it would have been a fine story. But Hui didn’t stop there; this is a story about the limits of human dreaming and exploration, one of my personal favorite modes of science fiction.

To me, this feels like a fresh take on that classic SF theme: humans exploring space and figuring out their place in the galaxy. It’s good to see characters of color, hailing from a non-Western culture, getting to star in that tale.

There are some stories that make me want to just pack up my word processor and give up, because I will surely never write something as exquisite, as original, as human, as the story I just read. This is one of those stories. The characters, the world, and the story that results from the combination of the two hit all the right notes for me.

If you like your science fiction with well-drawn characters and hope for an expansive future, then I highly recommend checking this out!

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REVIEW: “The Rescue of the Renegat” by Kristine Katherine Rusch

Review of Kristine Katherine Rusch, “The Rescue of the Renegat”, Asimov’s Science Fiction January/February (2018): 154-192 — Read Excerpt Online or Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley.

This was a fun read and a highlight for me this issue. I read it in one sitting because I didn’t want to put it down. It’s like a solid episode of a sci-fi TV show you didn’t know you wanted to be watching.

The crew of the Aizsargs are in charge of closing off a Sector Base no longer in use by the Fleet – a giant flotilla of ships traversing space together (“always forward”). The Fleet takes 500 years to pass over any given point from start to finish, so they often occupy or associate with bases for a long time before shutting them down. Mid-closure, however, a strange ship – the Renegat – appears out of foldspace in distress. It looks to be over a hundred years old with questionable signs of life on board and the crew of the Aizsargs sets up a rescue mission, despite not knowing where or when the Renegat came from, who’s on board, or even how to conduct the rescue mission on a ship that old.

This novella is set in Rusch’s established Diving Universe, but even for someone not familiar with it Rusch sets up a world that feels full and established despite the short word length.

Despite the simple premise of the story, the pacing is fast and Rusch manages to give it a lot of character and emotional depth. There were multiple perspective characters throughout and each one, despite some of them only getting two or so scenes, had an arc and a place in the story. The cast felt full, with histories and futures that extended beyond the edges of the story told here. Fantastic stuff.

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REVIEW: “A Night Out at a Nice Place” by Nick Mamatas

Review of Nick Mamatas, “A Night Out at a Nice Place”, Apex Magazine 104: Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

An incorporeal intelligence embodies itself for fun (“downlowing into a limbsuit”), and then goes on a blind date with a human being. Fortunately, human beings are space faring at this point, so they do have something to talk about. Mostly, this is a far-future, philosophical dialogue about the nature of reality. It’s short, sharp, and surprisingly light, given the density of the subject matter.

I don’t think I was the ideal audience for this story. Either it was written for somebody much smarter than I am, and it went over my head, or else it was going for a sort of humor that just didn’t hit my personal funny bone. Maybe both. The futuristic slang and mathematical equations made it hard to understand at times and the narrator was a little too alien and superior for my taste (they joked about. destroying the star they were orbiting and wiping out the whole planet after their date made a tedious joke, and refrained because they liked her smile).

All that being said, the ending made me smirk, and I think that the narrator is supposed to be irritating – by the end, it’s clear that they are not as superior to humans as they think they are. The story is short enough that it’s definitely worth checking out, to see if it is to your liking.

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REVIEW: “Refugee; or, a Nine-Item Representative Inventory of a Better World” by Iona Sharma

Review of Iona Sharma, “Refugee; or, a Nine-Item Representative Inventory of a Better World”, Strange Horizons 8 Jan. 2018: Read online. Reviewed by Danielle Maurer.

Some stories only work because of their fascinating concepts, and that is the case for this particular story. “Refugee; or, a Nine-Item Representative Inventory of a Better World” is told by an old woman who runs a sort of mystical shelter for those who are on the run. Some brand of magic, never fully explained, brings people across time to her door and the doors of her people. The strangers can rest for a brief time and recover their strength before they return to their world.

As I said above, it’s a fascinating concept, and the story is couched in an inventive format that reveals it piece by piece. There’s a sense of history and a large world behind it, in the one-off comments made by the narrator and the hints of her lost love. Moreover, it’s clearly tied to our world somehow; the narrator mentions a Starbucks early on.

Without the novelty of that central idea, however, this story is a lot less engaging. There’s not really a plot here; ostensibly, it’s the appearance of the boy Corbie and the narrator’s interactions with him until he leaves, but these are covered only in brief sketches. We have the narrator’s presumably tragic love story with Kiran, but this too does not truly create any forward momentum. I’m left wishing for a full story featuring this old woman and the refugees she aids, something that introduces a conflict and grows toward a resolution.

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REVIEW: “Big Mother” by Anya Ow

Review of Anya Ow, “Big Mother”, Strange Horizons 1 Jan. 2018: Read online. Reviewed by Danielle Maurer.

There’s something both horrific and beautiful about the story Anya Ow narrates in “Big Mother.” It effortlessly combines the terror of meeting something strange in the dark with a childhood nostalgia and sense of loss for the wild places of the world.

In “Big Mother,” the narrator recounts an experience she had as a young girl with her brother and three neighbor children. The children go fishing in the dark, searching for a snakehead, and accidentally hook something more dangerous. When the lure proves too strong for the oldest boy, the narrator must lead the other children to his rescue.

The story has something of the feel of Stranger Things to it, in that its climax revolves around one child going missing and his friends searching for him. It’s got a creepy creature too: the eponymous Big Mother, which the children dredge out of the canal. Though it starts a little slow, the horror element pulses strongly in the story’s middle and through the climax. It will keep you on the edge of your seat.

Our heroine is exactly what you would want in a horror story, bold and brave despite her fear. It is she and she alone that walks into the water to meet Big Mother, and she rescues the oldest boy by talking the monster down. The story concludes with a present-day epilogue, where we see how this childhood event resonated down through the narrator’s life and how sad she is that the modern world is swallowing the spaces where magic once dwelt.

It’s a beautiful tale, well-told and memorable in its execution from start to finish.

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