REVIEW: “The Rocket Farmer” by Julie C. Day

Review of Julie C. Day, “The Rocket Farmer”, Podcastle: 507 — Listen Online. Reviewed by Heather Rose Jones

What raises a story above simply being entertaining to being a “good story” is often the layering in of multiple themes or meanings. On its surface, “The Rocket Farmer” is a fantasy about rocket ships as an agricultural crop: their natural history, the complexities of crop management, the inevitable tragedies of failure. But on a different level, the story concerns the more mundane and eternal struggle of one generation to understand and communicate with another. Sarnai is pulled between the bottomless pit of neediness that is her father’s struggling rocket farm, and the growing suspicion that she has failed to protect her daughter from the lure of the family profession.

The story is told in three voices: Sarnai, her daughter Sophie, and one of the rockets, waiting to fulfil its destiny. The result is a delightfully unexpected and–dare I say heartwarming?–tale of communication failures and eventual success. If the story had focused only on the clever conceit of rocket farming, it would have fallen flat for me, mired in a vast array of technical detail. But as a medium for a story of human interactions, it worked beyond any of my initial expectations.

(Originally published in Interzone #271)

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REVIEW: “Origin Story” by T. Kingfisher

Review of T. Kingfisher “Origin Story”, Apex Magazine 104 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

This is a remarkably beautiful story, for one so gruesome. But I think that is at least half the point – there is grace in the blood and the guts, as in everything else, and when you start a story that reads “[t]he last of the fairies worked in a charnel house,” then you have no right to expect something different.

Of course, the fairy doesn’t just do the work the foreman asks of her; she does her own work, as well. After the human employees go home, she uses the scraps of meat and bone and skin to make her own creatures. Mostly, they are small monsters, and are not the subject of this story. No, this story is about her greatest creation.

The fairy in question is explicitly not a good fairy, but I don’t think she is evil, either. Just dark. Different. Her creations are described as frightening, but not harmful. And in this story, she is motivated by a desire for justice. Her actions are not pretty, but they come from a sense of rightness and a desire to bring some justice to one who she perceives died unfairly.

Whether writing as T. Kingfisher or under her own name, Ursula Vernon has a way of combining the magic of fairy tales with an earthy practicality. It shouldn’t surprise me that she could take a story rife with death and fill it with life and the spice of good humor, but somehow, it does. Like fairy magic, her voice transforms what sound like a deeply disturbing tale into something dark but not at all heavy.

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REVIEW: “Penumbra” by Chris Brecheen

Review of Chris Brecheen, “Penumbra”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 168-177. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Brecheen’s story is urban fantasy, set in San Francisco, as we can tell from references to BART stations and other familiar aspects of the city. It’s a first-person story, and unlike many first-person stories which start off with a bunch of introspective maundering, here we were immediately introduced both to the personality quirks of the narrator (rather bitter and a bit sarcastic) and of the people the narrator interacts with, such as Dr. Cienica, who “pays lots of attention to how dirty her glasses are whenever she lies” (168).

I really enjoyed Brecheen’s use of language; there were turns of phrase every paragraph or so that made me smile. If you read for enjoyment, then this is a good story for you. If you read for a creepy feeling of displacement, and the sense that the setting of the story is shifted from our own reality by only a fraction, then this is also a story for you. It doesn’t take much imagination to wonder what it would take for people to be able to see the Penumbra here, in our own world.

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REVIEW: “Words Never Lost” by DaVaun Sanders

Review of DaVaun Sanders, “Words Never Lost”, Podcastle: 504 — Listen Online. Reviewed by Heather Rose Jones

This is a very hard story to review because it feels like it balances uneasily on a knife-edge of how the marginalized identities and their historic experiences are presented, and I don’t share either of the identities in question so I feel completely unqualified to judge whether the balance is successful.

Imala is a bi-racial (Black and Apache) student in a reservation school of the later 19th century who is trying to retain/learn her mother’s language and heritage in the face of the (historically accurate) efforts of the school to erase them. At a crucial confrontation with the school officials, her long-missing father appears leading a company of Buffalo Soldiers (Black regiment in the U.S. Cavalry) who need the assistance of an Apache translator. But both the soldiers and the reason for the translator are not at all what they seem.

Imala takes up the challenge but finds herself impossibly torn between being true to both her heritages, especially in the face of the possibility of losing her father all over again. Both the situation she is put in and the solution she finds are brutal and disturbing, even though she has agency over the choice.

The aspects that made me uneasy were how the set-up of the worldbuilding pitted the Black and Native American characters in hostile opposition to each other (whereas the evil White characters seemed more cardboard background) and the way Imala’s solution (and the background build-up to it) gives the appearance of privileging written language over speech in the context of preserving culture. It was a solution that made sense within the specific constraints set up in the story, but the historic background of attempts to preserve and retain Native American language communities undermine the story’s semi-hopeful outcome.

Several content warnings including racism, threat of rape, murder, and self-mutilation.

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REVIEW: “Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Under the Still Waters” by N.K. Jemisin

Review of N.K. Jemisin, “Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Under the Still Waters”, Podcastle: 503 — Listen Online. Reviewed by Heather Rose Jones

(Note: This is a re-issue of PodCastle 154 originally broadcast in 2011 and first published in Postscripts.)

Once again, Podcastle has a perfect combination of a poetically lyrical story with a strong sense of place, narrated by a voice that brings that place and person to vivid life. There are stories that are well-narrated and then there are stories that I can’t imagine consuming by any means but the specific aural performance through which I came to them, because that performance gives them a life above text on the page. Needless to say, this is one of the latter.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Tookie encounters several strange creatures that complicate his survival and efforts to help others in the flood waters. What really struck me about this story structure is how much of a hero’s-quest story it is. The “ordinary” young man is thrust into taking a champion’s role via encounter with a supernatural creature who may or may not be a force for good. (The eventual answer is “it’s more complicated than good and evil.”) At the end, he emerges with a deeper understanding of himself and a mission to help save the world, or at least his part of it.

But that’s just the symbolic structure. What makes this story great is the immersive voice and language, the way descriptions of everyday surroundings slide easily into the fantastic, and the way the folklore of cities and peoples is woven into a new mythos. This joins my list of favorite Podcastle episodes.

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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: “Windhorse” by Zhao Haihong

Review of “Windhorse”, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #36 Early Autumn pp. 47-51. Purchase here. Review by Ben Serna-Grey.

This story has a couple footnotes, but they’re much appreciated, especially if you’re not familiar with everything about Chinese geography or Tibetan culture. The main character is traveling from China to the mountains of Tibet, where they will get windhorse pennants from the monks there in order to help them mourn their deceased lover.

“Windhorse” is short and sweet, a lovely tail about grieving and loss, acceptance, and it’s a great story to finish up this magazine.

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REVIEW: “Zilal and the Many-Folded Puzzle Ship” by Charlotte Ashley

Review of Charlotte Ashley, “Zilal and the Many-Folded Puzzle Ship”, Podcastle: 502 — Listen Online. Reviewed by Heather Rose Jones

I was amused by this clever adventure story about a girl, her ship-building skills, and the lengths she’s willing to go to get some make-out time with the boy she likes. In an early modern, somewhat clock-punky alternate history, a gateway to another world opens on the ocean offshore from Mogadishu. Official powers are interesting in controlling access, but Zilal, whose clever ability to design mechanisms and ships with surprising features has already begun building her reputation, sees it as a useful place to slip away to with the object of her affection. When they find out why those official guards might be a good idea, Zilal’s “foldable” ship comes in very handy for rescue.

A great deal of the narrative sketches out the ship’s features and their mechanics, but it’s done with a light hand and interspersed with bits of romantic comedy. There is an amusing gender-reversal aspect to the story, as Zilal’s boyfriend fills out the role of somewhat naive “damsel” while Zilal is the genius inventor. As the podcast’s framing material indicates, the story is part of the worldbuilding for a shared-world narrative, but it stands alone quite well.

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REVIEW: “The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future” by Christi Nogle

Review of “The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future”, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #36 Early Autumn pp. 39-46. Purchase here. Review by Ben Serna-Grey.

Another story in this issue that is at least partly written in second-person, but this one works a lot better for me than “Children of Air” did. My instinct is that this is due to the story giving commands on what to visualize versus chronicling what I, the reader, am supposedly doing. There’s not as much of a hurdle to relating with the writing.

“The Best of Our Past” is a coming-of-age story about a young woman who falls in love with her step-cousin, chronicling life as they grow with and apart from each other, and a frightening power comes to light. It commands you to sit down and fall into its imagery, to see everything happening in the lives of these two young people. For me, at least, the command worked.

I wouldn’t say the ending is a happy one, and I’m not sure I’d say it’s a bad ending either. It just simply is, and sometimes that’s all you need. Another winner in a magazine that has so far had no duds. Quite an accomplishment.

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REVIEW: “Töpflein, Stehe” by G. Deyke

Review of G. Deyke, “Töpflein, Stehe”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 144-145. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Barely a page and a half, this is one of the shortest stories in the anthology, and as such, it is more a vignette than a story. We never know who the narrator is, or how they have found themself in the situation they have. One expects there to be a clue to the details missing from the story in the title, but alas, that title sheds little light on any of these shadowed facts.

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