REVIEW: “C-a-l-l-a-s” by Katharine Coldiron

Review of Katharine Coldiron, “C-a-l-l-a-s”, Luna Station Quarterly 33 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

“C-a-l-l-a-s” is the story of Solomon’s quest to obtain access to a piece of history that has been fervently suppressed in the wake of a cataclysmic event which we, the readers, simply know of as “the bacteria”. The effects of this bacterial event are pervasive and widespread — society is now quite dystopian and dictatorial — and there appears to be a connection between it and the lack of voice, quite literally, that people have. Communication happens primarily by sign language, or by electronic voice boxes; those who are bred to be able to speak command positions of power as literal mouthpieces for the government.

In such a world, what is it that takes the role of the most sought after, most precious? Why, music of course, and Solomon’s quest is a quest for opera, and in particular, a single opera singer, Callas.

For those who wish to experience a part of what Solomon experienced at the culmination of his quest, I leave you with this.

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REVIEW: “On Your Honor” by Kat Weaver

Review of Kat Weaver, “On Your Honor”, Luna Station Quarterly 33 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

I found this story rather hodgepodge — fanciful titles and clothing and the affected speech of a genteel historical fantasy; heavily Greek names as if (but not actually) from classical myth; bits and bobs of rather generic SF elements. It seemed like it didn’t quite know what genre it was supposed to be, and not in the “genre-transcending” sort of way but in the slightly confused and muddled sort of way. Sadly, this just wasn’t the story for me; but if you like political intrigue combined with parrots, it might be the story for you.

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REVIEW: “Das Steingeschöpf” by G. V. Anderson

Review of G. V. Anderson, “Das Steingeschöpf”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2017: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2017): 13-28. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

A hundred million things to paint, to write, to carve, to compose, all trapped in a body that’s failing. Awareness of a brother come to save them at last, separated only by Ambroise’s skin.

An unexpected commission, a journey in the dark, a hidden treasure in an attic, a stone man already alive and ready to be loved…so begins a sort of Pygmalion-in-reverse story.

The best of stories are the ones you read and wish they were real. Everything about this story was perfect — the level of detail to set the scene, the historical references to set the time, the way in which the creation of the Steingeschöpf’s seems so perfectly natural — every aspect of their construction and composition is exactly what you’d expect it to be, so that even though this should be utterly unfamiliar and new, it is not, it feels familiar and already known.

Part of me wishes the story had a happy ending, but even for that I cannot wish this story other than it is.

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REVIEW: “Adjuva” by Arkady Martine

Review of Arkady Martine, “Adjuva”, Luna Station Quarterly 33 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Since starting SFFReviews, I’ve been paying a lot of attention to first lines of short stories. The first line of this one is excellent:

Michel dreams the dead at Antioch again.

Every single part of this makes me want to know more — who is Michel? What does it mean to “dream the dead”? Is Michel at Antioch, or the dead? And why is Antioch important? And what does it mean, he is doing this again? Has he done it before? What happened then?

A very good way to start a story.

The rest of the story continues good: Is it a time-travel story? Is it a ghost story? It is both, and neither, but in the end what I find mattered most to me was the relationship between Michel and Thomas. Their life clearly hasn’t been either easy or straightforward. But that they are still together after all that they have been through, the sheer amount of time that they have lived through together, I found sweet, and heartwarming. There is a depth of history underpinning the story, a sense of the vastness of time. It is a story that made me glad to have read it.

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REVIEW: “The Astrologer on the Fifth Floor” by Karl Dandenell

Review of Karl Dandenell, “The Astrologer on the Fifth Floor”, in Abandoned Places, edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell (Shohola Press, 2018): 101-116 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I remember reading a few months ago a review of an Asian #ownvoices novel where the reviewer complained that when the MC looked in the mirror, the words they used to describe themself didn’t include any of the typical cue words that white people use to describe Asians, and the bafflement that arose from other people at this curious criticism.

As a white woman myself, I’m not in the best place to raise the following reversal of this criticism, but since it was one of the things that impressed upon me the most at the beginning of the story, I think it’s worth mentioning. Dandenell’s MC, Harrison Leong, is “an Asian businessman” — a fair enough description from an omniscient narrator, though I did find it a bit odd to include the description since the surname should’ve been enough of a cue — and he is up on the fifth floor to meet Mr. Norbu, the titular astrologer. It is this sentence that struck me as strange:

Leong saw a short, middle-aged Asian man with a neat beard and sparkling eyes (p. 102)

I can’t help but think, is that really what Leong saw? Or did Leong see someone like himself, see simply “a short, middle-aged man with a neat beard and sparkling eyes”? Would he have seen Mr. Norbu as Asian, or would that have been the working default, just as my own mental narration never tells me when I’m seeing another white person, it only tells me when I’m seeing something that is not my default, not the norm within the cultural context that I live in.

I otherwise enjoyed the story, which flitted from POV to POV in a way that seemed seamless rather than disjointed. I’m not sure how the story fits the theme of “abandoned places”, but I decided not to let slavish adherence to a topic destroy my pleasure in a good tale.

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REVIEW: “Borrowing Ark Sutherland” by Meghan Cunningham

Review of Meghan Cunningham, “Borrowing Ark Sutherland”, Luna Station Quarterly 33 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

The title of the story is hard to parse, until one reads the first sentence:

Like a rental bike returned with a tire puncture, Ark woke up in a stranger’s apartment.

Ark is a person, and one in very curious circumstances indeed.

The circumstances under which Ark has become someone — something — that can be borrowed are not very pleasant. Cunningham’s story is a future-set SF story, and it’s not a hopeful future, but rather one rife with segregation, destruction of nature, and sordid hook-ups.

There was a lot going on in the story that I found difficult to keep track of or to hang together in a sensible story; I often felt like I was missing a necessary piece or two, trying to figure out who the various characters were and what exactly was going on — is Ark the one borrowing or the one who is being borrowed? Half-way through the story, I was still unsure, though by the — rather abrupt — end I had figured some things out. Certainly the complexities of the story merit reading it more than once, although both times through felt more edifying than educational.

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REVIEW: “Glitch” by Lauren C. Teffeau

Review of Lauren C. Teffeau, “Glitch”, in Abandoned Places, edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell (Shohola Press, 2018): 27-37 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The abandoned place in this story is not a real one but a virtual one — a desolate landscape built out of lines of code composed by many hands. But when the hands of the most important coder, Razor, are abruptly lost, so too are the lands that Razor constructed, and it becomes twice abandoned.

The unnamed narrator’s story is the story of why Razor killed himself, and what it was he sought to hide by doing so. Part sci fi, part horror, all just a bit too close to reality — and with an unexpected twist at the end.

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REVIEW: “Frost” by ‘Nathan Burgoine

Review of ‘Nathan Burgoine, “Frost”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2017: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2017): 69-79. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

To have a man like this, a man like his father, and his brothers, who would look at him and respect him and—yes—love him, even though he was small, and narrow, and gentle. What that might be like.

Flipping through the book to pick the next story to read and review, I opened to the page that had this opening quote, and knew immediately that this was the story I wanted to read. So much hope and sadness in those two sentences, and also a hint of something more.

“Frost” is in essence a classic fairy tale, with the clever youngest son hero, magic to mend a broken heart, and what should be a happily ever after. The man Frost is “born of magic and a longing for love,” and though he seems everything that Little Jay, with the gift of magic in his hands, desires and needs, as often happens when magic is involved, not everything is as it seems. Before my eyes I see the happily ever after melts away as the frost melts in the sun, and my heart ached for the unhappiness that threads through the entire story.

But,

Anything broken might never be what it was, but in the right hands, with enough heart, it could always be something else (p. 79).

There is hope at the end of the story, but I’m not quite sure it’s enough to make it a happy story.

(Originally published in 2016 on ‘Nathan Burgoine’s blog.)

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REVIEW: “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury

Review of Ray Bradbury, “There Will Come Soft Rains”, in Abandoned Places, edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell (Shohola Press, 2018): 19-25 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I confess that my Bradbury exposure to date has been relatively little. I tried to read Fahrenheit 450 in high school, and never succeeded in finishing it. It’s now sat on my shelf for too long for me to pause in front of it, when I’m looking for something new to read, and think “Oh, I should give that another go.” Reading this story certainly piques my interest to go back and revisit Bradbury.

The theme of abandoned places is at the fore of this story. There are no characters, except for one lonesome dog who is too pathetic to be a true agent, there is only place, the place to which the soft rains will come, a place that used to be full of people but which is now empty and forsaken.

It’s not often that an inanimate object can successfully be the protagonist in a story, but Bradbury makes it work here.

(Originally published in 1950 in Collier’s.)

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REVIEW: “Turing Test” by Eric Scheller

Review of Eric Scheller, “Turing Test”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2017: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2017): 215-220. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The interior of the case is decorated like a florid setting room, wallpapered, the floor spread with a rug of oriental design. There are three automata and all three are instantly recognizable…

A spec fic story about Alan Turing and automata? Oh, my heart, yes, please! One thing that sometimes frustrates me about science fiction as a genre (painting with very broad brush strokes here), is how narrowly “science” is often interpreted. As a scientist myself, I am often longing to find representation of my kind of science in traditional SF stories. But the laws of logic are desperately hard to play with, almost more so in fiction than in real life, where logicians think nothing of speaking of true contradictions and impossible worlds. So I had high hopes for this story as being “close enough”, not my science but close enough to it.

When one says “automata” in the context of SF, many readers probably think first of dumb robots moving mindlessly — something embodied. The automata that I know and love (and sometimes hate) from my days in grad school are much more abstract: They are (sometimes deterministic, sometimes not) (sometimes finite, sometimes not) state-machines that take as input strings of symbols and after a (possibly unique) computation (or “run”) of the machine either gets into an infinite loop, or accepts or rejects the string (Deterministic finite state-machines will never cycle infinitely, and will always accept or reject the input.) The most general class of automata is the class of Turing machines — and here we circle back to the content of the story as opposed to a mini lesson in computation.

Alan, who “loves permutations and crossword puzzles” (p. 215), enters the Ashmolean Museum and asks to see the automata the curator has in storage. But the automata that he is shown are not Turing machines but the embodied type, three versions of Oscar Wilde each in a different guise and a different pose. I am disappointed that the automata are not the ones I wanted them to be, but this lessens my enjoyment of the story only in passing. Scheller takes us through a story that is both history and fantasy, and captures all of the aching sadness that surrounds Turing and his life. For all that so much of him differs from me, there is so much of him that I can see in myself, and for that, I am satisfied.

(Originally published in Meet Me in the Middle of the Air, Undertow Publications, 2016).

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