REVIEW: “Mother Haskell” by Maeghan Klinker

Review of Maeghan Klinker, “Mother Haskell”, Luna Station Quarterly 46 (2021): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

I feel like this story needs a warning, do not read if hungry! Mother Haskell tends an orchard that always bears, and bakes the best apple pies from the fruit; and after reading all the descriptions, now I want pie! Pies so good, you could almost bribe Death with them…and that’s exactly what Mother Haskell tries when her trees start to die.

A fun, yummy, sweet, story. (I was a bit surprised, though, by “the sweet maple syrup she’d collected herself when the maples were vibrant and blushing with fall” — I thought syrup was collected in early spring!)

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REVIEW: “Swallows (Or How the Men Lost Their Magic)” by E. A. Fowler

Review of E. A. Fowler, “Swallows (Or How the Men Lost Their Magic)”, Luna Station Quarterly 46 (2021): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

The parenthetical in the title sums up the gist of the story: But what’s distinctive about it is whose viewpoint Fowler has chosen to portray the events through. The result is raw and powerful and more than a little disturbing. Thumbs up!

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REVIEW: “The Notary of No Republic” by J. Byrd

Review of J. Byrd, “The Notary of No Republic”, Luna Station Quarterly 46 (2021): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

“Lucy Carvell had a degree-shaped hole in her heart” is a great opening line — it immediately makes Carvell someone I want to know more about. How do you go about filling such a hole? In Carvell’s case, it’s through forgery, and forging her own diploma was the first step into becoming the titular notary: When the government collapses and the state fails, “it turned out people still needed their milestones marked” — even the milestones that haven’t happened yet.

This was such a fun, hopeful, helpful story, which an ending that made me go “awww”. Loved it.

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REVIEW: “Perihelia” by Elizabeth McEntee

Review of Elizabeth McEntee, “Perihelia”, Luna Station Quarterly 46 (2021): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

It’s not often I read a human-meets-alien story that’s successfully told from the alien’s point of view. Too often, the aliens still feel all too familiar, too like-us. Not so with McEntee’s narrator, living alone on her comet, who is such that when a human arrives, the invader is so foreign, so different, that they are truly the alien. The ending was a bit trite, but the core of the story was solid.

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REVIEW: “We Who Are Left On This Dying Earth” by Hesper Leveret

Review of Hesper Leveret, “We Who are Left On This Dying Earth”, Luna Station Quarterly 46 (2021): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Reading recent climate news, it’s hard to escape the fact that we are already living on a dying earth; Leveret’s story is timely, then, in the sense that it could easily happen in our near future, maybe a generation from now — enough time for people on earth to figured out how to get off it.

Of course, even if that happens, we all know that not everyone is going to get to go, and “We Who Are Left On This Dying Earth” is the story of two who won’t be, one because she is too old, the other because he is too sick. Because of course it is the old and the weak and the poor who will get left behind.

You might think that this story would be an angry, unhappy story; but instead, there was just enough hope to make it happy, but not too much to make it unrealistic.

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REVIEW: “Traffic Circle of Old Connecticut” by Susan Jane Bigelow

Review of Susan Jane Bigelow, “Traffic Circle of Old Connecticut”, Luna Station Quarterly 24 (2015): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Ever since the Kalo invasion, Tian has practiced forgetting — forgetting her younger sister, Asan, left with her grandmother back in the village; forgetting that she is Zaluat; forgetting that her Zaluat ancestors passed down their circle magic to her. But when her grandmother dies and Asan is put into the Training Institute, Tian can forget no longer. She attempts a daring rescue of her sister, and in their escape they both learn the truth of their ancestor’s circle power, in a very clever allusion to the title.

This was a story rich in magic, history, oppression, and strength, and was a very satisfying read.

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REVIEW: “A Funnel of Time” by Kris Faatz

Review of Kris Faatz, “A Funnel of Time”, Luna Station Quarterly 24 (2015): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content note: Attempted suicide.

This story hops between 2005 and 1934, and the experiences of two women, otherwise entirely unconnected from each other, each undergoing electro-convulsive therapy to fix them, to make them forget. One woman is schizophrenic; the other, bi-polar. At least, that’s what the husband or the brother says, the one who committed them in the first place. Whether or not it’s true doesn’t matter, though; what matters is that somehow these two women manage to find each other and support each other, and help each other survive the abuse: “Through a funnel of time, two women hold each other up.”

This was not a typical LSQ story, and the use of real-world people in it (see note at the end of the story) was a bit off-putting for me; but I really liked the premise of women supporting women across time.

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REVIEW: “Turning Song” by Fey Karvaly

Review of Fay Karvaly, “Turning Song”, Luna Station Quarterly 24 (2015): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content warning: Underage rape.

The Minstrel is in love with a girl who has become a tree — it’s the sort of premise that you’d expect to find in a fairy tale, and maybe this story is a fairy tale at heart, though on the surface it is something rather odder than that. I didn’t care overmuch for the Minstrel, but I found Plum’s existence fascinating (if the story of how she got there horrifying), and Miss Ursula who is old enough to call a snow-bearded minstrel “young” was equally charming. Best of all was the very satisfying revenge and comeuppance that Plum wrecked on the god that raped her as a child.

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REVIEW: “Inspector 36” by Kristin Hooker

Review of Kristin Hooker, “Inspector 36”, Luna Station Quarterly 45 (2021): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

No one really worries about the arrival of our Robot Overlords, not seriously, not in real life. What worries 21st C first-world residents is the arrival of our Robot Colleagues, the self-checkout machines, the automations that will turn the working class into the unemployed class. Hooker’s story plays on that fear, giving us a world of bots “a quarter of which, which by law, had to represent a real person receiving a real paycheck” — but even those real people aren’t necessarily doing the work themselves, most of them just rent another bot to do the work for them. Short, but sweet, this was an excellent story.

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