REVIEW: “Neon” by M. Raoulee

Review of M. Raoulee, “Neon”, in Broken Metropolis: Queer Tales of the City That Never Was, edited by Dave Ring, (Mason Jar Press, 2018): 7–27 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

This, as they say, is a story with all the feels. Wonder, uncertainty, tugging at heart-strings, strangeness, confusion, delight, tenderness.

“Neon” is the story of motorcycle-builder, combustion-lover, financial-advisor, heretic Quinn, who lives in a realm where electricity has taken over everything, including and most especially motors; few people, any more, care about the old combustion engines, and those that do — the riders — are tarred as misfits and outcasts. His city is filled with Sylphs and Fulminations and Undines and Shades who travel through the aether, and who can be called from the aether to perform services. Quinn’s world is one where enchantment and sorcery is entwined with electricity and salt and heresy. So much of this we can see on the surface of the story; and so much more is hinted beneath. I loved the way that Raoulee built such a detailed picture of the unknown city, and yet so much of the details to the reader to fill in. I loved seeing the way in which Quinn interacted with his friends, associates, and employers, and from the moment he stumbled into Archae and Archae got onto Quinn’s motorcycle behind him, I loved Archae. A stellar start to the anthology!

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REVIEW: Broken Metropolis: Queer Tales of a City That Never Was edited by Dave Ring

Review of Dave Ring, ed., Broken Metropolis: Queer Tales of the City That Never Was (Mason Jar Press, 2018) — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

I first learned of this anthology late fall 2017, when the call for submissions went out. The concept immediately caught my interest:

We are looking for stories that explore the edges of urban fantasy through queer stories. While the city these stories are set in should be vast and unnamed, highly specific neighborhoods and landmarks are encouraged and sought after. We welcome a broad interpretation of the genre that is inclusive of postmodern folk tales, future/ancient noir, and stories that happen both behind closed doors and in plain sight. Throughout, we’re looking for rich, varied and nuanced understandings of gender, family and ethnicity.

I loved the idea of a series of stories that are all connected, but the ways in which they are connected are left to the reader, and not the writer, to specify. So I was extremely delighted to be offered a review copy of the anthology, because now I get to see how that original conception came to fruition.

The 10 stories in this collection spam the gamut of gritty to sweet to sensual to sad. As a whole, they give a sense of a complex and rewarding city, some place I’d like to visit, some place I’d like to set a story of my own in. In his editor’s note, Ring points out the important power of fiction “to bear witness”, and the importance of witnessing queer characters in the forefront of stories, not on the sidelines. These stories come together in a powerful way to bear this witness, and I highly recommend this collection.

As usual, we’ll review each story individually, and link the reviews back here when they are posted:

Sara L. Uckelman10 Comments

REVIEW: “High Hedonistic and Low Fatalistic” by Linda T. Elkins-Tanton

Review of Linda T. Elkins-Tanton, “High Hedonistic and Low Fatalistic”, in Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures, edited by Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich, (Center for Science and Imagination, Arizona State University, 293-296 — Download here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

Why is it so easy to write about disaster, and so hard to write about hope? (p. 293).

This is the question that frames Elkins-Tanton’s essay that concludes the anthology. Writing about pain and disaster and fear and darkness brings with it a certain release, an Aristotelian katharsis, which itself can be beneficial. But what about the light? Some people argue that writing hopeful utopias is to ignore reality, to hide our heads in the sand, or, as Elkins-Tanton puts it, “hawking snake oil” (p. 293). Elkins-Tanton argues the opposite: that it is only by exploring images of a hopeful future that we can make that future a reality.

In a number of reviews from this anthology, I’ve focused on this idea, how we need the imagination of SF writers and stories to provide us with an image of how the future could go. Elkins-Tanton focuses on the flip side, which is how to get people involved in building that future image:

If science was taught as a series of questions—which is truly what it is—then finding the next unanswered question would be easy, and there would be openings for anyone who is interested to participate (p. 294).

The question then, is how do we teach the skill of asking the right questions — something every good educator faces. Here is where, again, fiction can provide a very specific set of distinctive tools, a way to coalesce the “What if?”s into something concrete and real.

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REVIEW: “Dark Clouds & Silver Linings” by Ingrid Garcia

Review of Ingrid Garcia, “Dark Clouds & Silver Linings”, in Aidan Doyle, Rachael K. Jones, and E. Catherine Tobler, Sword and Sonnet (Ate Bit Bear, 2018) — 309-319. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

What a peculiar story. It’s a strange mix of stream of consciousness, name-dropping, song lyrics, and snippets of poems. There are characters, and a narrative driving the main one, Ada, forward, but I found the telling of the narrative very blunt; at times the piece read more like notes for a story than an actual story.

I suspect others will enjoy the experimental nature of this piece more than I did; I kept wanting more to sink my teeth in to than I got. But I applaud the inclusion of it in this anthology, because it was distinctive from all the other stories in both form and content, and helps demonstrate the diversity of ways a single theme can be interpreted.

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REVIEW: “The Practical Economics of Space” by Clark A. Miller

Review of Clark A. Miller, “The Practical Economics of Space”, in Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures, edited by Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich, (Center for Science and Imagination, Arizona State University, 2017): 275-290 — Download here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

The concluding pieces of the anthology focus on practicalities and pragmatics. Miller’s contribution addresses two questions:

  • “how human activities in space will get paid for” (p. 275).
  • “What—and who—will we value in the human future in space?” (p. 275).

And it does so in two ways: One, by focusing on the specifics of the economic aspects that go into space and space-travel. The way Miller goes about addressing the questions assumes no background competencies in economics in the reader, and yet manages to present the basic mechanisms underpinnning human financial transactions in a way accessible. Two, by showing how each of the stories in the anthology highlights different aspects of these factors, in a lovely summing up way.

The important take-home message is that if we are going to be able to fund near-earth space travel, and travel beyond, then we need to find things in space that people value, and are willing to give money to obtain. The stories in this book already offer a wide variety of options: Space-tourism, water and minerals, safety leaving behind a planet that has been destroyed, intellectual curiosity, satellites and communication infrastructure; planetary defense systems; souvenirs. Miller’s discussion of all the aspects that feed into the economics of space and space travel itself reads like a laundry list of ideas for SF authors to explore in future stories.

One of the “great strengths” of science fiction, Miller claims, is that it “reminds us that all kinds of people inhabit the future, not just those with a job to do” (p. 287). It’s not just the scientists and the governments, and the rich business owners. It’s the bakers, the cleaners, the AiIs, the people who look to the stars and dream. “Let’s make sure we write them, and all of humanity, into our future plans” (p. 290).

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Negotiating the Values of Space Exploration” by Emma Frow

Review of Emma Frow, “Negotiating the Values of Space Exploration”, in Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures, edited by Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich, (Center for Science and Imagination, Arizona State University, 2017): 253-259 — Download here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

In this second non-fiction companion piece to Vandana Singh’s “Shikasta” (read the review), Frow focuses on the ways in which which personal narratives are essentially intertwined with the “facts” of science, even when these narratives tend to be lost in the academic (or journalistic) presentation of these scientific findings. This is where collections like the present one can play such an important role: Fiction is always eternally, inescapably personal.

Frow argues that recognising the central role that personal narratives play in science shines a line on a “critical topic” for future science:

how to orient our scientific investigations and expeditions so as to further our social and cultural values, alongside our scientific priorities (p. 253).

The desire to learn more about the universe, the desire to determine whether we are alone in it, the desire to find resources to exploit, the desire to build or augment a position of military power — these are all priorities that one might have in space exploration, and they are, quite naturally, often competing. One of the things Frow is keen to point out is that it isn’t enough to recognise that these end goals may be in conflict with each other; we must also understand that the ways in which we reach these goals can end up orthogonal. For instance:

Because the 2035 space mission being run by Chirag, Kranti, and Annie is motivated by a different set of core values from the space science establishment, they turn to a different model for funding their work: crowdfunding (p. 254)

On the flip side, the reasons we have for pursuing certain goals can in themselves shape those goals; and in discussing this we see Frow picking up a similar theme as Walker (read the review), namely, that how we search for life depends on how we define life.

Frow covers a lot of ground in this quite short article, but each point she makes is one worth making.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “The New Science of Astrobiology” by Sara Imari Walker

Review of Sara Imari Walker, “The New Science of Astrobiology”, in Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures, edited by Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich, (Center for Science and Imagination, Arizona State University, 2017): 243-250 — Download here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

I love the title of this piece. “Astrobiology” by itself is a fascinating word full of potential; when you put “science” in front of it, you get something tangible and concrete, not merely imagination. When you add “new” to the front of that, then you’re back in the border between fiction and fact again, forging a way from what we can imagine to what we can actually know.

Astrobiology seeks to address one of the most difficult open questions in
science: Are we alone? (243)

Walker cuts right to the chase: The reason this question is hard to answer is not merely because of the technological complications involved, but because it requires us to first answer another, more fundamental, and much more difficult question:

What is life? (243)

Scientists have no answer to this question; even philosophers stumble when they attempt to; but are we surprised that it is the tellers of stories, the fiction authors amongst us that have the best attempts? Waker analyses how Singh in “Shikasta” (read the review) manages to present a fictional planet which is both exotic i>and realistic, where the concepts of ‘living’ and ‘life’ are realised in ways radically different from how they are realised on earth.

This is the key point that Walker makes in her paper: When astrobiologists team up with space exploration projects to find signs of life in the universe — so-called “biosignatures” — they are looking for biosignatures like ours (Walker goes into a lovely amount of detail in the biochemistry of earht-like biosignatures, for those who are interested). How can we even know what a biosignature not like ours would looke like? This is where the imaginists, the authors, the speculators come in. Stories like Singh’s, Walker argues, provide us a means for conceptualising a different approach to what it means to be alive, and hence different paths to answering the questions “are we alone?”, and, more fundamentally, “who are we?”

Sara L. Uckelman2 Comments

REVIEW: “Shikasta” by Vandana Singh

Review of Vandana Singh, “Shikasta”, in Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures, edited by Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich, (Center for Science and Imagination, Arizona State University, 2017): 207-240 — Download here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

This was one of the longest stories in the anthology, and it has one of the most distinct voices. It opens in the 2nd person — a narrative mode I often struggle with, but which works here because the reader is explicitly cued in to the fact that we are not the addressee, but rather Chirag’s dead cousin:

This is the first time I am speaking to you, aloud, since you died (207).

The narrative switches between Chirag, Kranti, and Annie, the three friends that remain of the four that met at university at Delhi and imagined what it would be like to crowdfound a space exploration project. Chirag’s cousin, though dead, is as present as anyone else in this story, as the narrative keeps circling back to a central question: What is life? What does it mean to be alive?

Like “Death of Mars”, earlier in the anthology (read the review), this is first and foremost a story about people, and only secondarily a story of space exploration; it reads more like a memoir than anything else. This is not to say that the science is in any way incidental, but rather that Singh focuses on the human aspects, and highlights that the human and the scientific need not be opposed to each other:

You taught me that a scientist could also be a poet (208).

This story, more than any of the others in the anthology, merges fiction and science in a way that shows how truly intertwined they are; how we cannot escape the need to create stories in order to understand facts. All of these factors came together so that this story really spoke to me.

Sara L. Uckelman3 Comments

REVIEW: “This Lexicon of Bone and Feathers” by Carlie St. George

Review of Carlie St. George, “This Lexicon of Bone and Feathers”, in Aidan Doyle, Rachael K. Jones, and E. Catherine Tobler, Sword and Sonnet (Ate Bit Bear, 2018) — 291-307. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This is a peculiar little story that I enjoyed very much and have a hard time describing or summarising. Where to begin? There are so many little bits and pieces and aspects of it that if I try to highlight one of them I’d be leaving out crucial others. Shall I start with the difficulties facing inter-species academic conferences? Or how everything changes when the unthinkable happens? Or perhaps the very distinct characters, each drawn from very distinct species, with distinct modes of communication, not just in their languages but in the way they interact with the world. Any one of these things that I could choose to talk about wouldn’t begin to give a proper picture of the complexity that went into this story.

Perhaps if there is one thing that sums up the story it is this: The poetry made from teeth. Wanna know more? Read the story.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Siren” by Alex Acks

Review of Alex Acks, “Siren”, in Aidan Doyle, Rachael K. Jones, and E. Catherine Tobler, Sword and Sonnet (Ate Bit Bear, 2018) — 271-288. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I started this story, got interrupted, and then had to restart it a week later, because the initial paragraphs are complicated enough that I need to reread them in order to make sense of what followed.

This is due, in part, to the fact that the first page is in 2nd person narration (which regular readers of my reviews will know…I don’t really like). When the narrator tells me “your species thinks that space is silent”, it’s hard for me to know who/what is being talked about, or who it is that is talking.

A page later, things flip to 1st person POV. The “I” there seems to be the “You” of the previous page; and yet another page later, the “I” becomes “We”. That “We” is an angel of intergalactic death, whom we learn is on a self-imposed exile from their home, “a small planet, blue with oceans, utterly unremarkable” (p. 275). But when they decide to go back home, and they return home, suddenly it is not clear what home means or what their purpose is, at home.

In the end, the angel finds its purpose and its use, and simultaneously I made my way into the story. It’s hard to do alien minds well, and I found Acks’s account distinctive and convincing. And there were space pirates, so, you know, all around: an A+ story, despite my slight wobbles at the beginning.

This story has a particularly interesting author’s note; I have enjoyed the extra dimensions these notes have lent to many of the stories in the anthology, and would love to see more collected volumes start doing this!

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment