REVIEW: “To Bethany, With Teeth,” by Kelli Dianne Rule

Review of Kelli Dianne Rule, “To Bethany, With Teeth,” Luna Station Quarterly 61 (2025): 349-359 — Purchase online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This story was one of my favorite kinds of speculative fiction: Ordinary world, ordinary life, except everything has just been shifted sideways slightly, so that everything is wrong, is weird, and as a reader you have know idea how or why or where the next weirdness is going to come it. It’s a story that keeps you on your toes. It’s also a little bit creepy and more than a little bit disturbing.

And I gotta say, I would totally watch the hell out of “DIY Me, Bro”!

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REVIEW: “When to Choose the Snake God” by Jennifer Jeanne McArdle

Review of Jennifer Jeanne McArdle, “When to Choose the Snake God,” Luna Station Quarterly 61 (2025): 15-31 — Purchase online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content note: child slavery.

I found this story intriguing because it rejects a lot of tenets that we might ordinarily take for granted — that a captured child might prefer a life of servitude in the empire than the life in the provinces that they’d left behind; that given a choice to return home, that choice might not be worth making; that sometimes it is better to die for a god than to live for it.

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REVIEW: “Solve for X” by Kristen Koopman

Review of Kristen Koopman, “Solve for X,” Luna Station Quarterly 61 (2025): 203-231 — Purchase online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content note: Lots of misogyny and low level sexual harassment.

This is a story for any academic who has ever walked into the room and been the only one of their kind in the room — for the women, for the minorities, for the people in the “wrong” field for their gender, for all the people in the intersections.

It’s a — quite long for LSQ — complex and complicated story of the difficulties of being a woman, and a minority woman at that, in academia, and in a science field at that. It’s at times hard reading, but rightfully so, because that’s not an easy position to navigate, a fact both Julia, newly-appointed member of faculty, and her PhD student, Mercedes, must face; but it’s also at times rather cathartic. And while the way they face the issues is what makes this story speculative, an intriguing example of SF, it’s not the main focus of the story, just an elegant allegory.

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REVIEW: “Wind Whisperers” by Anna O’Brien

Review of Anna O’Brien, “Wind Whisperers,” Luna Station Quarterly 61 (2025): 233-247 — Purchase online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Noma’s job is to whisper to the wind, the trick it into no longer agitating the skyscrapers and their inhabitants. Her job is not to mentor new wind whisperers, but Bryce, her newly assigned mentee, isn’t going to let that stop him.

Noma may find Bryce intensely irritating, but his earnestness is just sincere enough that I found him highly entertaining. This story made me laugh many times, and made me glad to have read it when I reached the end.

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REVIEW: “Intent of Form and Function” by Erin Stubbe

Review of Erin Stubbe, “Intent of Form and Function,” Luna Station Quarterly 61 (2025): 127-153 — Purchase online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content note: Unwanted pregnancy, abortion.

As I started reading this story, something in its essence felt very much like it was a modern-day Rumpelstiltskin retelling, which I was enjoying very much — and when this was confirmed, I enjoyed it even more. But at the same time, it’s also so much more than that, it’s a story of redemption.

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REVIEW: “Roil” by A.C. Luke

Review of A.C. Luke, “Roil,” Luna Station Quarterly 61 (2025): 113-119 — Purchase online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

As a child, Alsea was marked out as special, taught the songs that only few know how to sing in order to calm the ghosts and put them to rest. Now that she’s an adult, she spends her days waiting for ghosts to cross through the wall, to find them and sing to them.

What kept this story from being just another ordinary/run-of-the-mill ghost-exorcism story was the breathless hints of what lies on the other side of that wall — what, and who, and how did they come to be there, and how did they all die.

It was a curious little story.

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REVIEW: “The Ferryman Makes His Morning Crossing” by Corey Davis

Review of Corey Davis, “The Ferryman Makes His Morning Crossing,” Luna Station Quarterly 61 (2025): 175-194 — Purchase online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This was a superlative story, made even better by how effortlessly it was done. I hardly know what to say of it, because to describe it as “climate fiction” or “political commentary” is to completely drain it of that magical thing that only some stories have. Though it’s one of the longer stories in this issue of LSQ, it’s definitely one of the ones most worth reading.

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REVIEW: “The Climacteric” by Caren Gussoff Sumption

Review of Caren Gussoff Sumption, “The Climacteric,” Luna Station Quarterly 61 (2025): 167-172 — Purchase online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This is a story that probably all too many women will identify with — a story of how women are taught to make themselves small, to not ask for too much. For me, it was the sort of story that leaves me feeling worse off after having read it, weighed down by a sad, heavy depression. I did like the cat, though.

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REVIEW: “Peace” by Phoenix Mendoza

Review of Phoenix Mendoza, “Peace,” Luna Station Quarterly 61 (2025): 197-201 — Purchase online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content warning: War.

The narrator (who’s name we never learn) and her partner, Lorna, are trapped in a war that seems unwinnable, fighting ever since the aliens arrived, three years ago. Despite this, Lorna still believes in peace, and tells the narrator that one day, she will too.

Reading such a story in the present climate, where there is so much war but the participants involved are ourselves and not aliens, was a strange experience. There’s something that feels almost safe about imagining battling against aliens: They are alien, after all, it’s okay for us to read about fighting them, killing them, murdering them. But the very fact that this feels okay, just because they are aliens, is a deeply uncomfortable feeling, because that’s exactly the same excuse people use for making war against other people.

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