REVIEW: “Hunting the Blue Rim” by R. L. Martinez

Review of R. L. Martinez, “Hunting the Blue Rim”, Luna Station Quarterly 31: Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

The story opens with quite a bit of scene and history setting: We are told much about the geography, and about physical aspects of Spur herself, but what is most interesting are the references to “What Came Before”. It is clear that this is intended to be what we are familiar with today in our ordinary world and lives — oceans, cities, etc. — but what is intriguing is the question that is left unanswered at the start: Before what?

This question is never answered.

There are other aspects of the logic of the story that I find perplexing. “Hunting was not a sport or game,” we are told, but when Spur kills her first quarry, she does so to obtain favor from the Green Lady, not from any need. Though she eats the heart and the liver, she then leaves the rest to be despoiled. As we are told her purpose in searching for her true quarry, we find it is not for any bodily need but a social one — unless she kills her quarry on this, her third attempt, Spur will “spend her life in perpetual childhood and servitude while her magic remained asleep and caged until it shriveled and died inside her”. It is hard to see how this doesn’t make the hunting a game or sport, albeit one with important social consequences; even with these, it is still a game to be played, to be won or lost.

In the end, I felt like I was never quite as invested in Spur and her hunt as I should have been; nor was there any final twist at the end to surprise me in the climax. It was a solid story, but not sparkling.

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REVIEW: “The Watchers” by Shelly Jones

Review of Shelly Jones, “The Watchers”, Luna Station Quarterly 31: Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

The telling of this story has a fairy-tale like quality. No one is named. It is the man, and the woman, and his mother, and her grandfather, and the baker, and the other people of the town. But the story does not involve any of the standard fairy tale tropes; it is, instead, entirely of itself.

The title of the story is not especially explanatory, and even 3/4 of the way in, it is not at all clear who the watchers are. Sometimes, though, reading Jones’s detailed and precise prose — such as the following:

The single bee squatted there, its wings pressed back taut against its body. He could feel each of its legs, thin wisps of muscle, begin to give way as the bee slowly crawled up his leg. It moved methodically, each leg stepping in syncopated intervals, up his thigh and past his waist to his belly.

— one feels like it is the reader themself who is watching.

From start to finish, I had no idea where this story was going or where it would end up. I would love to hear it told aloud, around a flickering campfire on a dark night.

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REVIEW: “All Tales Must End” by Michelle Muenzler

Review of Michelle Muenzler, “All Tales Must End”, Luna Station Quarterly 31: Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

I often find short stories a frustrating length to read, because they are over so quickly. The really good ones I want to last forever, so that I can lose myself in them for hours. It is true that “All tales must end”, as Muenzler and her storytelling narrator tell us, but this one ended far too quickly. It was so good. Can I have another like it, please? Or an entire novel built around this world and these characters? Because — as Muenzler and the narrator also tell us — “every story has a beginning. And a middle”, and I want to hear all of it, the entire story, not just the end, which is all we get in this tale, but the middle and the beginning too.

There are many reasons why we began this website. But finding and reading stories like this one is by far the best reason to do what we do.

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REVIEW: “The Red Tree” by Natasha Suri

Review of Natashi Suri, “The Red Tree”, Luna Station Quarterly 31: Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

One way in which short stories are trickier than longer media is that the author has very little time to catch the reader’s attention and get them involved in the characters. By the end of the fourth paragraph of “The Red Tree”, I am already involved. I do not know why Alder is hiding in a tree, I do not know why the man at the foot of the tree is crying, but Suri paints his anguish and fear so clearly and strongly that one cannot help but want to know the reason for it, and what one can do to comfort him.

But this story is the story of Alder, not of the boy. Alder’s name is, from the very start, a hint to her identity, and I hope it is not too much of a spoiler to say how much I enjoy a dryad story; for whatever reason, of all the well-known creatures in the ordinary human mythological repertoire, dryads (and naiads) feature very infrequently in fantasy and speculative stories. One benefit of this is that there are fewer preconceived notions of who they are and what their relationship to their trees, and thus authors have more freedom to play with these myths. Suri’s take is both poignant and beautifully written. It is a story of hope and vitality — and just a touch of revenge. I think I would’ve liked the story if it had ended up the note of hope, but I can see how the ending Suri wrote is fitting and meet.

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REVIEW: “In the Frozen, Ancient City” by Sarah E. Donnelly

Review of Sarah E. Donnelly, “In the Frozen, Ancient City”, Luna Station Quarterly 31: Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

The short story is a hard length to pull off sometimes. The author has to give the characters enough life and depth for them to be worth the reader investing in them. There has to be enough background to give the illusion of an entire world sprawling out in front of the reader, but not so much that the story is bogged down by information rather than story. There has to something that answers the question “Why this story? Why this narrator?” — there are so many stories that can be told, why was this one chosen? And there has to be some sort of resolution, something that makes the reader feel it was worth their while to have read the story. It’s tough to pull all of these off in one and the same piece.

What this story does well is the characters. Both Nerys and Seika are rounded characters with distinct personalities, and any SFF story where the central characters are women will always get a thumbs up from me. There is also a lot of details about the geography, both natural and artificial, which helps to set the story. However, at times I was left with a desire to have more setting; the little hints that are dropped here and there provide a sketch of the scene but leave more questions than they answer. Where is home? What is the ancient city? Why is it frozen? Is home also frozen? Why are they in the ancient city? Why is it there? None of the answers to these questions is necessary to understand the story, but they do linger and niggle.

Another niggle comes from the resolution. So many short stories end in or involve death, in part because death provides a good resolution; it is, in many ways, easy. It is easier to die than to live. It is easier to tell a story of death than a story of life, because death is neat and simple and final, and life is messy and complex and unbounded. This observation should not be taken as a criticism of this story; but it is perhaps a criticism of the genre and length in general: Why aren’t there more happy endings?

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REVIEW: “You and Me and Mars” by Sandy Parsons

Review of Sandy Parsons, “You and Me and Mars”, Luna Station Quarterly 31: Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Reading a story is a very situated act: Who you are and what you bring to the story will affect not only how you read the story but also the story itself. “You and Me and Mars” is a story told by an “I” to a “you”, and neither the “you” nor the “I” are given any gender in the opening lines. Yet when I read the line:

Or maybe you could have consulted me when you started to design the drones, considering that was my idea.

I, being a woman working in academia (and, further, a science-oriented part of it), immediately read the “I” as being female and the “you” as being male. It is strange how the set-up of the story makes me identify with the narrator instead of the narrator’s “you”. I am not sure why it is, but it provides an interesting experience reading the story. The narrator’s lack of understanding of what is happening bleeds over into my own lack of understanding. I am not quite sure where we are going, or why, or why I have been chosen for the journey.

The feeling persists throughout reading the story, the wonder of why the narrator is where she is and why her story is a story to tell. I reach the end, and I am still uncertain whether this story is supposed to be optimistic or not.

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REVIEW: “Beacon of Truth” by Charity West

Review of Charity West, “Beacon of Truth”, Luna Station Quarterly 31: Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

The writing, reading, and possession of fiction a subversive act. Fiction is the glorification of lies.

This quote sums up West’s story, which weaves together a number of common dystopian tropes — the forbidden nature of books, technology that prevents people from lying, the one person who can lie and will teach others how to.

The middle part of the story reminds me of China Mieville’s Embassytown, in the way it highlights how difficult it is to use language when it can only be used literally and truthfully. Every single analogy or metaphor or hyperbole that the Glib uses, in his conversation so ordinary, is almost unfathomable to the narrator.

But the real punch comes in the final paragraphs. As a parent of a young daughter myself, I found the lead-up to the ending difficult to read, and the very end brought tears to my eyes — but they were tears of happiness, not despair. It was a brilliant finish.

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REVIEW: “The Mercenary” by Beth McCabe

Review of Beth McCabe, “The Mercenary”, Luna Station Quarterly 31: Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

“The Mercenary” is a classic story of boy-ditches-girl, girl-becomes-a-time-traveller. Oh, wait, that isn’t actually one of the classic story lines? Well, there are worse reasons to become a time-traveller than being ditched for another girl.

On the other hand, there are plenty of other reasons why a girl might join a guild of time travellers, and sometimes it pays to extend beyond the standard tropes whereby the heroine needs to be thwarted in love before she can assume her agency as a heroine. When a narrator tells me

But I had never let go of my heartbreak – or my obsession.

my first thought is “Well, here’s a character who’s got a long arc ahead of her.”

Unfortunately, much of the early part of the story is spent rehearsing the past, rather than actually traversing that needed arc. When we do start moving forward, it doesn’t take long until we reach the “ahah” moment — the moment at which I go, “I bet I know how this is going to end.” I do like moments like that because then I can spend the rest of the story feeling smug, either to have that smugness confirmed when I am proven right or to have the delightful surprise when I am proven wrong. [Spoiler: In this case, I was right!]

On the other hand again, what I really want is a story that doesn’t have any of those moments, where every step is a surprise, where I have no idea where things are going to end up. Familiarity is comforting, but this story could have made me a bit more uncomfortable.

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REVIEW: “Led Astray” by Anna Novitzky

Review of Anna Novitzky, “Led Astray”, Luna Station Quarterly 31: Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

The problem with surreptitiously reading stories when you’re ostensibly at an academic conference and supposedly paying attention to the speaker is that when you get a story like “Led Astray”, people start looking at you when you giggle and the speaker has said nothing amusing. But I challenge anyone to read this story without laughing. It is self-consciously meta but that is part of what makes it so funny. The best part, though, is the view of AI/SF/robots that it gives us. Too many stories take the “robots will be the death of us, when they get too smart” path; this one goes down on a different path, the path of “any sufficiently intelligent being will develop a sense of humor.” I simply loved it.

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REVIEW: “Seven Kinds of Baked Goods” by Maria Haskins

Review of Maria Haskins, “Seven Kinds of Baked Goods”, Luna Station Quarterly 31: Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This is the second story is as many issues of Luna Station Quarterly that should not be read without some sort of homemade baked good on hand. Sadly, I had none, and spent the entire story feeling hungry.

First-person present-tense narration is a difficult combination to pull off well, even though it seems like such an easy voice when you’re writing, so when the story opened up with that, I was immediately leery. The story isn’t entirely told in the present-tense, though; the narrator quickly shifts into a retelling of her past, a past so delightful that I was immediately drawn in. But when it shifted back, I was (and now I am incredibly conscious of the fact that I myself am narrating in the first person shifting between past and present tense. Do you like my glass house?) left with the feeling I often get with FPPT — just who is the narrator speaking to, and why is she wasting her time telling her story instead of figuring out how to get out of the pickle she’s in?

And yet, my qualms about the narrative choices end up not seriously detracting from the story. Haskins manages to work in an impressive amount of world-building in a short amount of space, and her story does what I want any story to do: It left me wanting to read more.

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