REVIEW: “Down in the Kettle Bog, or: Julian and the Frogman” by Josie Nuñez

Review of Josie Nuñez, “Down in the Kettle Bog, or: Julian and the Frogman”, Luna Station Quarterly 41 (2020): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

What do you do when a frogman comes to down, settling into the kettle bog and threatening the local kittens and babies?

Why, bring in the witches of course. A coven of them — twelve now, not thirteen as they once had been — including Julian who has been isolated from the rest for the last six months and still in the grip of an active spell that prevents her from speaking. The problem is, the last time the coven had to deal with a frogman, they were twenty witches strong and still barely managed to defeat it; and the other problem is, Julian is an oratory witch, one whose power is strongest when she speaks.

The rest I’ll leave to the reader to find out for themself, but it involves a panoply of witches with different powers and abilities all picked out with humor hunting down the frogman, and an explanation of why Julian placed the silence-spell on herself in the first place.

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REVIEW: “Salt” by Rosemary Melchior

Review of Rosemary Melchior, “Salt”, Luna Station Quarterly 41 (2020): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

The story opens on Sigga arriving on a deserted island populated by criminals, the ship bearing her and others condemned to exile. Her crimes might not be as bad as some, but they have earned her the label “witch”, and that’s bad enough.

The settlers already there seem remarkably straight-laced and law-abiding given their reason for being there, criminals all — it’s as if whatever drove them to crime in their previous life has been removed or rehabilitated on this island. But a safe place in a peaceful settlement is no lure for Sigga, who opts for a life lived alone and untrusted.

It’s a powerful story of a man’s word against a woman’s, and how easy it is to damage a reputation forever, a story of how women must be punished — “There are many ways to punish a girl.” In the end, we see only a glimpse of Sigga’s vengeance for the wrongs that have been done to her.

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REVIEW: “A Unicorn in the Time of Dinosaurs” by L. C. Street

Review of L. C. Street, “A Unicorn in the Time of Dinosaurs”, in David G. Clark, Callum Colback, Joe Butler, and Alex Hareland, eds., Beneath Strange Stars, (TL;DR Press, 2020): 263-274 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Trek lives in a post-apocalyptic society ravaged by global warming and dinosaurs. Most cities lie abandoned, and much modern tech no longer exists or works. Trek herself makes a living as a messenger, running routes between the isolated civilisations. Keeping to the same route, the same pace, every day is what keeps her safe — any deviation can result in eventual death. So when she drops her canteen one day, she should have left it for lost; but instead, she turns around to retrieve it. A slight pause in her routine, a moment for something to start tracking her, and she ends up in an abandoned village to keep safe overnight. The unicorn she meets that night is not all that it seems…

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REVIEW: “Callia” by Justin M. Siebert

Review of Justin M. Siebert, “Callia”, in David G. Clark, Callum Colback, Joe Butler, and Alex Hareland, eds., Beneath Strange Stars, (TL;DR Press, 2020): 249-262 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Content warning: attempted suicide.

This is a story of two interwining threads, of Melissa who is being abused and tortured by a monster she calls Callia (and who only learned how to tell time in 5th grade!), and of Tom, who see this happening when no one else does (and who is a hypochondriac). It takes me awhile to realise exactly who, or what, Callia is (or who they are…) It’s a dark take on the topic (can’t say more without spoilers), but it ends on a hopeful, if not happy, note.

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REVIEW: “Radio, Out By Pluto” by Lydia Pauly

Review of Lydia Pauly, “Radio, Out By Pluto”, Luna Station Quarterly 41 (2020): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This was a very sciencey-fiction story, with a mostly-robot protagonist collecting data in a satellite above Pluto. If sciencey stories are your jam, you’ll probably enjoy this. If you’re looking more for character development and personal relationships, then pass on, there are other stories better for you.

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REVIEW: “The Einsteiners” by J. Askew

Review of J. Askew, “The Einsteiners”, in David G. Clark, Callum Colback, Joe Butler, and Alex Hareland, eds., Beneath Strange Stars, (TL;DR Press, 2020): 237-247 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I appreciate a novel take on time-travel, and that’s what Askew’s “skimming” is, liking skipping a stone across a flat pond, but instead of a rock and a flat space of water, it’s a person and a black hole.

Esther, the narrator, is one of the Einsteiners, one of the few people who has a legal license to skim. All she hopes is that she’ll get through to the other side of the black hole known as Lilith — a hundred years into the future — at the same time as her girlfriend, Andee, and before humanity makes first contact with an alien civilisation. Unfortunately, only one of those hopes will be realised…

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REVIEW: “Blind Charity” by Lyle Enright

Review of Lyle Enright, “Blind Charity”, in David G. Clark, Callum Colback, Joe Butler, and Alex Hareland, eds., Beneath Strange Stars, (TL;DR Press, 2020): 227-235 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I did not understand this story — too may obscure references to unknown gods and unspeakable heresies. I didn’t grow up in this world, so I didn’t understand all the cultural references, or even what, exactly happened. And though the Huntress, Viorica Zelgathi had a revelation at the end of the story, the reader, unfortunately, was not party to the same revelation, so I was just left in darkness.

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REVIEW: “Perennial” by Laura Duerr

Review of Laura Duerr, “Perennial”, in David G. Clark, Callum Colback, Joe Butler, and Alex Hareland, eds., Beneath Strange Stars, (TL;DR Press, 2020): 221-226 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The best near-future/dystopia is the sort that seems so plausible, you half expect it to already be true. Even though we don’t currently have body mods like MalibuGlow or enlarged irises or GentleTone arms, they’re all plausible enough, and once you entertain the idea of cosmetic body mods then it’s an easy hop, skip, and a jump to government-required, industrial mods for manual labor, the sort you get when your “parents were either critically ill, dead, absent, or in so much debt that their only solution was to enroll their daughter in a government work program and have her transformed into a machine” (p. 223). A scarily realistic story, softened by some really likeable characters.

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REVIEW: “Kaitlin’s Unicorns” by L. L. Asher

Review of L. L. Asher, “Kaitlin’s Unicorns”, in David G. Clark, Callum Colback, Joe Butler, and Alex Hareland, eds., Beneath Strange Stars, (TL;DR Press, 2020): 211-220 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Content note: death of a child, death of a disabled person, cruelty to animals, contemplation of suicide, ableism.

I kept adding new items to the content note while reading the story — never a very good sign. In a nutshell, Margret is mourning the recent-ish death of her daughter, Kaitlin, by escaping into the nearby forest that Kaitlin always imagined one day she’d meet a unicorn in. Well, Margret meets the unicorn, and what happens afterwards is not pleasant. I get that Margret is hurting, but despite the obvious pain she’s in, she is not a sympathetic character: Pain and sorrow is never an excuse for violence. Add to this the “twist” that after Kaitlin’s death the “unicorn fixed everything” (p. 220) — i.e., Kaitlin is alive and no longer wheelchair bound — and, well, there was just so much about this story I didn’t like, unfortunately. This is not the disability rep I want to be seeing.

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REVIEW: “Gliese 581g” by John C. Mannone

Review of John C. Mannone, “Gliese 581g”, in David G. Clark, Callum Colback, Joe Butler, and Alex Hareland, eds., Beneath Strange Stars, (TL;DR Press, 2020): 191-193 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This poem comes with an informative note! “The exoplanet, Gliese 581g is a highly contested planet about twice Earth’s mass in the middle of the habitable zone” (p. 193), and it is also the subject of the poem…or rather, it’s the objective of the space crew that are en route to colonise it. But of course, we never know what might greet us when we finally do make it to another planet…

The poem itself is written with a repetitive structure — not quite a rondelle, not quite a villanelle, but picking up a phrase from one stanza and reusing or adapting it in the next. I love this sort of poetry, but I felt that this one would have benefited from have a slightly more defined structure — the repetitions felt repetitive, rather than structured, at times. Still, Mannone’s poems remain one of the highlights of the volume.

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