REVIEW: “Conversation, Descending” by Richard Dansky

Review of Richard Dansky, “Conversation, Descending”, Space and Time #130 Winter 2017 pp. 25-28. Purchase here. Review by Ben Serna-Grey.

Reading Richard Dansky’s profile in the magazine, I fully expected to like this story. He’s a veteran video game writer and has seven novels and a story collection under his belt as well. Do I think this is a bad story? Not necessarily. All I can say for sure is this one was a bit of a dud for me, but I’d still recommend reading it yourself and forming your own opinion.

“Conversation, Descending” is a steampunky fantasy that opens with a fellow falling through the sky after he’s ejected from an airship. As tends to (in my opinion, unfortunately) come with the territory there’s a lot of pseudo-Victorian/Romantic era stilted language that in other subgenres might be pegged as thesaurus abuse. The first page is almost all repetition of the fact that our main character is falling and he’s just in his underwear.

There is a conversation with another character further in, as well as a few moments that would have struck me as particularly humorous or clever if the writing style, particularly that of the main character didn’t remind me so much of Harold Lauder from The Stand, chock full of m’lady-ish phraseology that I could all but see this character in a trench coat and fedora, fingerless gloves grasping the edge of his hat as he talked to other damsels along his way.

There is a nice sort of bait-n-switch toward the end but I hate to admit by that point I’d sort of half checked out. I do still recommend checking this one out for yourself, as hopefully you don’t have my hangups. There is humor and wit in here, so I hope you are able to appreciate that more than I was.

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REVIEW: “The End of the World on the Cutting Room Floor” by Fraser Sherman

Review of Fraser Sherman, “The End of the World on the Cutting Room Floor”, Space and Time #130 Winter 2017 pp. 17-23. Purchase here. Review by Ben Serna-Grey.

Remember Who Framed Roger Rabbit? or that one movie with Brad Pitt and the cartoon cat. This story is a lot like that, though definitely better than the Brad Pitt movie. The world has ended and everyone seems to have “come back” as movie characters of some sort or another. There’s some cheesiness involved, but it comes with the territory when some of these realms are straight out of B-movie schlock.

There are black and white B-movie horror characters, blacksploitation nods, film noire, but not so much by way of “modern” cinema nods other than a few name drops. Still if you grew up watching schlocky films, especially if you watched some of those by way of Mystery Science Theater 3000, then you’ll get a few chuckles out of this.

The story is fairly clever and tongue in cheek, though for me personally it doesn’t stand out as much as other Space and Time Magazine stories I’ve read before. However, like everything else put out by this publication, it’s still an interesting and well-written story and I’d still recommend giving it a read.

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REVIEW: “Lines of Growth, Lines of Passage” by Marissa Lingen

Review of Marissa Lingen’s, “Lines of Growth, Lines of Passage”, Uncanny Magazine Volume, 20 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Jodie Baker.

A little like Doreen Green in The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Shuang, the narrator of “Lines of Growth, Lines of Passage” has a creative approach to solving big problems. Trapped in a cherry tree by her faithless apprentice, Shuang escapes by magically encouraging the tree to merge with her human form. Where other sorcerers might have blasted their way out with magic, Shuang chooses a non-violent path because, as a consequence of being encased in the tree, she understands that the cherry tree ‘mattered’, and that even a non-sentient tree can be hurt.

Whether she is escaping from a cherry tree, or trying to defeat iron giants, Shuang works hard to find solutions which are both effective and empathetic. While other people try to barrel through situations with might and entitlement, Shuang absorbs the concerns of those around her, and designs solutions which allow everyone (or everything) to benefit. She, and her story, are a symbol of what can be achieved when people seek to cooperate with nature rather than to conquer or defeat it. And later in the story, this choice allows Shuang to form a successful plan for passing the iron giants who block the northern trade routes; something no one else has managed to achieve.

“Lines of Growth, Lines of Passage” encourages the reader to take a second look at nature; to really think about its value, and its needs. It pushes readers to consider alternative, co-operative solutions to problem solving. It asks readers to think about how solving human problems impacts the environment. And it also critiques the old story trope of humanity conquering nature which I’ve seen crop up in everything from wilderness adventure stories to fantasy novels.

If that makes “Lines of Growth, Lines of Passage” sound super serious, be assured that this story is full of light humour. When trapped in the cherry tree, Shuang remarks that ‘Though fragrant, this was inconvenient’, and her first person narration is often peppered with sarcastic, or naturally ironic remarks. The conversations between her and her new, exasperated apprentice are a tonic, and reminded me very much of certain exchanges in Terry Pratchett’s books. There’s plenty of fun, and plenty of substance, to be found in this story, so check it out asap.

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REVIEW: “Your Slaughterhouse, Your Killing Floor” by Sunny Moraine

Review of Sunny Moraine’s, “Your Slaughterhouse, Your Killing Floor”, Uncanny Magazine Volume, 20 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Jodie Baker.

“Your Slaughterhouse, Your Killing Floor” is a visceral story about love, betrayal, and revenge, which unspools from the opening of a joke – ‘A girl walks into a bar.’ The story’s structure jumps around between a series of close up scenes, and introspective sections; often returning to the joke and its opening line. This anchors the story, which is often deliberately chaotic, by providing a repeating line and theme. By using this repetition, the story allows the reader to collect themselves after another bout of zinging, explosive imagery, and encounters with a timeline which rarely allows the reader to gain a firm grip on reality.   

Sunny Moraine’s story follows its unnamed female narrator as she careens through a messy, passionate love affair with another woman. Both of the women have extraordinary powers. Their relationship begins with a fistfight and ends with an apocalyptic collapse. In other words, it’s complicated. Moraine uses intensely physicality, and often violent, imagery to build a poetic language which emphasises the intense emotion the two characters feel. It is a joy to see this kind of language used to show the female leads active in the creation of violence and passion, rather than static objects on which violence and sex are visited.

As in her story “Eyes I Dare Not Meet In Dreams” Moraine brings a strong feminist line to “Your Slaughterhouse, Your Killing Floor”, particularly in passages like:

They teach us not to be angry, she says. Y’know? Heard it in a Women’s Studies class in college, and yeah, there was some bullshit in there, but that rang so true, like a fucking bell in my fucking head. They teach us not to be angry. No one likes a bitch.

However, through the narrator’s interior monologue, the story shows how a single person’s conception of feminism and justice can be multi-layered, conflicted, and difficult to articulate; especially when feminism intersects with violence and romance.  

“Your Slaughterhouse, Your Killing Floor” is yet another valuable addition to the ‘monstrous women of SFF’ feminist sub-genre. And it’s a complex story of what happens when love is damaged by revenge and manipulation, but still somehow persists. Read it alongside “Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies” by Brooke Bolander and “A Fist of Permutations and Wildflowers” by Alyssa Wong.

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REVIEW: “Hideous Flowerpots” by Susan Palwick

“Hideous Flowerpots,” by Susan Palwick. Fantasy & Science Fiction 135, 3-4 (2018): [[pages]] — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Standback.

In “Hideous Flowerpots,” Palwick imagines a supernatural cure for cynicism and jadedness – particularly when those are fused to toxic shame and self-criticism. The focus is less the cure itself, and much more who a person needs to be in order to submit to it.

This reviewer can identify all too easily with the portrayal of criticism as distancing, isolating; the sense of growing ever more bitter about the creation you’re ostensibly there to celebrate.  The way this arc develops, the steps towards remedy, and the respect and admiration for people who soldier on even absent perfection, ring true to me.

At the same time, the story is very clear on not being just about jaded criticism. That’s what protagonist Lauren is dealing with, but every woman she meets has had her own travails and traumas. Cynicism works nicely here, because it turns the process into something very adversarial — but this applies to other moments of despair and doubt just as well.

A quietly powerful story.

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REVIEW: “Women of White Water” by Helen Kenwright

Review of Helen Kenwright, “Women of White Water”, in Glass and Gardens: Solar Punk Summers, edited by Sarena Ulibarri, (World Weaver Press, 2018): 235-249 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

This story ticks one of my buttons right from the start: Berta, the heroine, is in her fifties and “she knew a great many things. It was her job, after all” (p. 235). I am constantly looking for stories that give me models for how to be the heroine in my own future life, and Berta from the start shapes up to be a good one. But this is speculative fiction, not autobiography, and what Berta knows is something more than books and facts; her knowledge comes from her gifts, gifts that other people fear.

Kenwright’s story explores head-on a dimension of mind-reading which is often addressed only sideways and slantways: The notion of consent. When you Know everyone’s inner secrets, how do you navigate your life so as to intrude as little as possible? Berta has created a set of rules that she follows, that dictate when she allows herself to act upon the information she has gleaned without permission, and this is part of the craft that she tries to teach her apprentice, Andrea: The difference between knowledge and wisdom.

With that as the focus of the story, everything else fades into the background. It is not clear how Berta and Andrea are able to know things the way they do, whether this is innate or learned; the specifics of place and time are left vague; we are introduced to a whole panoply of people with no more than a name and a detail or two; even the story itself is told in a series of short scenes, which the reader must stitch together herself. In some stories, this might feel irritatingly lacking; in this story, however, I thought it provided an excellent framework for exploring these questions.

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REVIEW: “The Satyr of Brandenburg” by Charlotte Ashley

“The Satyr of Brandenburg,” by Charlotte Ashley. Fantasy & Science Fiction 135, 3-4 (2018): 8-30 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Standback.

Ashley continues to make creative use of duelists and swashbucklers. In a previous story, Ashley introduced La Héron and Alex, making their way through successive stages of a fairy duel. In this story, Héron enters an exhibition duel – seemingly a far safer, more straightforward situation. But one of her opponent has a reputation for “winning without setting foot in the arena,” which he does by manipulating others and making puppets of them. Héron’s first duel is a sordid affair, threatening to cast her as more of an executioner than a duelist.

The story focuses more on the Satyr’s mocking manipulations than on Héron and Alex as substantial protagonists. While the situations Héron is thrust into are compelling, it’s also fairly evident that she’s tackling matters in a very ineffective way — the structure is almost that of a horror story, with circumstances becoming increasingly, inevitably dire, with no real expectation that the protagonist can affect anything. That being said, it’s a very entertaining story, and there’s enough character here to make further outings with this duo an appealing prospect.

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REVIEW: “Iron Aria” by A. Merc Rustad

Review of A. Merc Rustad, “Iron Aria”, Podcastle: 518 — Listen Online. Reviewed by Heather Rose Jones

A fantasy of ecological catastrophe and the need for skills and approaches outside the default to heal the land. Kyru has a talent for speaking with metals. He might have spent his life simply as an excellent blacksmith, except for the part where flaws in a dam threaten to destroy his entire community when it fails and no one else can sense the looming peril the way he can. Both the problem and its solution are conveyed in the impressionistic experiences of the protagonist–although told in the third person, it has a very first-person feel to the point of view. I loved the imaginative worldbuilding and poetic language used to describe it.

This next bit is more of a meta-commentary on storytelling within our particular present moment and is only slightly relevant to the content of the story. There’s another entire layer to this work, separate from the functional man-against-nature plot, involving non-default identities and negotiating how to exist in a world not designed for you.

Two central characters are trans and their recognition of each other’s experience is a key part of their bond. The protagonist is also neuro-atypical, which is tied in with–though not equated with–his unusual metal-sensing/healing skills. The ways in which these aspects are integrated into the story point up some of the awkwardness of our current balance point with regard to representing non-default identities in fiction. We aren’t yet at a stage where representation can be successful simply by casual and neutral inclusion because–to many observers–that approach can feel a bit too similar to erasure. It’s perfectly possible to write a story featuring a trans character where their transness is never explicitly addressed because it’s not relevant to the plot, but at our current moment in the cultural timeline, it’s hard to count that as representation.

All of this is to say that, within the context of the storytelling, it felt to me that the communication of both trans identity and neuro-atypicality were over-telegraphed within the story and that the over-telegraphing interrupted the flow of the storyline. But at the same time, I recognize that dialing those narrative aspects back to a level that wouldn’t have felt overdone would have made it possible (perhaps even likely) for a majority of readers/listeners to miss them entirely. I see what the author is trying to do, and I appreciate the approach, and at the same time I would have loved to see how this story could be told in a context where the potential presence of those aspects of character identity could be more taken for granted rather than needing to be fronted in the way they were here.

Originally published in Fireside Fiction.

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REVIEW: “A Fine Balance” by Charlotte Ashley

Review of Charlotte Ashley, “A Fine Balance”, Podcastle: 517 — Listen Online. Reviewed by Heather Rose Jones

In an early-modern secondary world setting that gave me an Ottoman Empire feel, the social and political balance between two ethnic groups is maintained in part by an elaborate system of ritual dueling and economic forfeiture. But the power differentials that underlie the superficially “fair” system come to a head when one side is willing to cheat to claim permanent advantage. The story is told from the point of view of an apprentice duelist who witnesses and participates in the crucial confrontations.

I really enjoyed the worldbuilding in this story and how the listener’s understanding of the social conflicts and function of the dueling rituals builds gradually to support the main conflict. The one flaw for me was that the play-by-play of some of the duels themselves got tedious, but I know this is a feature that people with more direct familiarity with martial arts may instead find a plus.

I particularly enjoyed how women were given pride of place in the narrative without needing to erase the underlying patriarchal nature of the cultural setting.

Originally published in Fantasy & Science Fiction

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REVIEW: 10th Anniversary Special by multiple authors

Review of multiple authors, 10th Anniversary Special, Podcastle: 516 — Listen Online . Reviewed by Heather Rose Jones

To celebrate their 10th anniversary of publication, Podcastle ran a poll to choose people’s five favorite episodes and then re-broadcast them. I won’t be doing individual reviews of these stories, but you might want to check out why people chose these from the entire set of 500+ options:

516a: “Without Faith, WIthout Law, Without Joy” by Saladin Ahmed – A retelling of an Arthurian tale from the point of view of one of the many Saracen characters from the greater Arthurian mythos.

516b: “In the Stacks” by Scott Lynch – When graduate school involves a self-aware magical library, returning a book to the stacks is no trivial task. (full cast narration)

516c: “Saints, Sinners, Dragons, and Haints in the City beneath the Still Waters” by N.K. Jemisin – Dangerous things lurk in the flood waters left by Hurricane Katrina. This was re-aired fairly recently and I reviewed it here.

516d: “Makeisha in Time” by Rachael K. Jones – A woman who involuntarily slips back and forth through time turns her fate into a struggle and triumph for women throughout the ages. There’s a reason this story has been regularly celebrated and praised since it first came out.

516e: “The Paper Menagerie” by Ken Liu – Everyday magic and the difficult journey of the son of a “mail-order bride” to properly appreciate his mother’s love and sacrifice.

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