REVIEW: “The Signal” by Halli Lilburn

Review of Halli Lilburn, “The Signal”, Starward Tales II, edited by CB Droege (Manawaker Studio, 2017): 135-142 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The pin for this story is placed in Germany (East Germany, I believe). It’s a short story, so there isn’t much time for clues about its fairy tale inspiration to be dropped — in fact, it was on the first page that I had a sudden lightbulb “Oooh, oooh, I know this one!” moment, even though I couldn’t put my finger on exactly which one it was. I just knew that it was one of the Grimms’ grimmer repertoire, and not one apt for Disneyification (though now I am fascinated by the idea that someone would someday try this). The rest of the story was then read enjoyable along two dimensions. On the first, there where the simple pleasures that come from reading about kick-ass female captains, translations of foreign languages, and mysterious signals from the void. On the second, there was the “I know I should recognize this story, I know I should know which one it is, is that another hint, is that another clue?” dimension, which was all the more deliciously satisfying when the ending came — with an amusing twist — and I was hit with the “oh, that’s right, it’s that one“. Someone who recognises the story sooner will alas not have that part of the enjoyment, but it hit the right spot for me.

A few parts that didn’t hit the spot have to do with a few of the liberties taken with reality. Within the span of two sentences we go from a radio signal that, when certain filters were placed on it, morphed “into a woman’s voice speaking an unknown language” to a point at which “the translation proved the message was urgent”. Unless you’ve got a babblefish on hand, this simply isn’t how the decoding of languages works — if the language were truly unknown, I would have wanted to see the decoding of the signal take decades or more, or I would’ve liked to have been told something about the new technology that makes such quick decipherment possible. I also found it rather hard to believe that rigorous checks weren’t in place when evacuating a ship to prevent people from being left behind; it may be a small detail, but even fiction needs enough verisimilitude to be enjoyed.

These are small niggles. Overall, it was a fun read.

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REVIEW: “Steadfast” by R. W. W. Greene

Review of R. W. W. Greene, “Steadfast”, Starward Tales II, edited by CB Droege (Manawaker Studio, 2017): 111-115 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The pin for this story is stuck in the south of Scandinavia, but neither that nor the story itself was sufficient for me to determine which myth or legend it was a retelling of; it must be one of the more obscure ones.

The SF elements are not very clearly specified, but they — unlike in some stories — are integral to the plot and to the character development. Unfortunately, the story was marred midway through by the introduction of the casual degredation (sexual and otherwise) of women, which was both entirely not cool and entirely unnecessary to the rest of the story. If you’re looking for a story that treats women with respect and avoids demeaning them for no purpose, then don’t read this story.

Sara L. Uckelman4 Comments

REVIEW: “All for Beauty and Youth” by Kelly A. Harmon

Review of Kelly A. Harmon, “All for Beauty and Youth”, Starward Tales II, edited by CB Droege (Manawaker Studio, 2017): 41-58 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The story being retold here is “Hansel and Gretel”, as is obvious from the opening line. The retelling follows the traditional storyline but lacks some of the iconic elements, such as Hansel leaving a trail of breadcrumbs so that they can find their way back home.

The sci-fi element of the story is more steampunk than sci-fi; the setting is a context where steam trains are a standard mode of transportation, but where there are clockwork men and clockwork birds, and a very detailed description of a particular machine made out of rubber tubes, bellows, pulleys on pp. 47-48. Sometimes the steampunk setting seemed like a rather thin veneer, rather than being integral to the story, though the resolution (a resolution I didn’t quite understand, for it was not made clear why Hansel and Gretel are able to corner the market on their new product) at the end does rely on clockwork. However, one thing I truly enjoyed about the story was that the elements described as magic in original versions of the story are here explicitly described as science — science is truly magical, and this fact should be exploited more!

The above ends the rather “impersonal” review of the story, in which I try to focus on positive and negative aspects of the story that are accessible to most/many readers, and thus most people can stop here. Below, I’m going to permit myself to indulge in a very personal review of a singular aspect of the story which I suspect will cause no problems whatsoever for most readers (which is why they can all stop with the above and not read any further). But…

…I have to comment on the names. The pin for this story was stuck in Hamburg, and Hansel and Gretel are classic Low German forms of the names, appropriate for the north of Germany — -el is the Low German cognate of the High German diminutive suffix -lein (e.g., Fráulein is “little Frau”, and this word is a specifically High German word). Thus when Hansel calls his sister Gret, he is using a less-diminutized form of the name, rather contrary to how I suspect Harmon used “Gret” vs. “Gretel” in the story. And there is a disconnect between these two proper Low German forms, and the names of characters introduced by Harmon. Britta works fine, but both Fritz and Dietrich are distinctly High — not Low — German forms; I would have loved to have seen Frik and Diderik instead.

It’s a small thing, such a small thing, a thing that probably 99.5% of all the people who read this story will never even notice, much less be bothered by. So why am I mentioning it? Because I’m the one who read the story and am reviewing it, and it does bother me. It’s a useful reminder to authors that (a) you never know what will bother certain readers and not others and (b) what does bother certain readers can be very idiosyncratic to them and just because a reviewer says “this bothered me” doesn’t mean that this is a universal truth that holds for all readers. Reading is a personalised experience, and this happens to be a report of mine.

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REVIEW: Starward Tales II, edited by CB Droege

Review of CB Droege, ed., Starward Tales II (Manawaker Studio, 2017). Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This anthology, the second in Manawaker Studio’s “Starward Tales” series, is a collection of “speculative legends”, retellings of legends, myths, and fairy tales as science fiction stories. Each story is accompanied by a map with a pin on it,

showing the approximate location of the origin of the story that inspired the work. However, many story origins are in dispute, and often an arbitrary line must be drawn to say where in history a story became the story we know today.

In addition to stories, the collection also features poetry and artwork, some newly commissioned pieces, some out-of-copyright pieces from the previous centuries, all wrapped up in a cover beautifully illustrated by Monica Rose Song. If I have one complaint about the production of the book, it is the use of straight quotes rather than “smart” quotes throughout. It’s a minor point to raise, but it detracts from the aesthetic of reading the stories, and given contemporary typesetting tools, it is not difficult to avoid. There are also a handful of places throughout where the book could have benefited from more thorough proof-reading — a missing period on p. 113, the misspelling of “pseudo” as “psuedo” on p. 114, the wrong type of dash on p. 136, extraneous capitalization on p. 241, some incorrect page references in the table of contents. Any one of these is minor, but too many of them and the result becomes less professional.

Below is a list of the contents; I will review each story individually and when the reviews are published, link to them from this post.

Fiction

Poetry

All the poetry is reviewed in one post.

  • “Chained”, by Vonnie Winslow Crist
  • “Girl in the Red Hood”, by Richard King Perkins II
  • “Icarus”, by María Castro Domínguez
  • “Penelope Longing for Odysseus”, by Vonnie Winslow Crist
  • “Beauty, Sleeping”, by Marsheila Rockwell

Sara L. Uckelman15 Comments

REVIEW: “Najufa” by Ibrahim al-Marashi

Review of Ibrahim al-Marashi, “Najufa”, Iraq+100, edited by Hassan Blasim (Comma Press, 2016): 155-173 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The dominant theme of this story is memory — memory and history — making it a fitting capstone for the entire anthology. Muhammad, the narrator, and his grandfather, Isa, have gone on pilgrimage to Najufa, the city that was once the two separate cities of Najaf and Kufa. It is a pilgrimage that Isa has never made before, but it is the last in a long line of pilgrimages that his ancestors have made. We are told the stories of Hassan in the 1920s; of his son, Mortaza, who was Isa’s grandfather; and of Isa’s father, Ibrahim, who accompanied Mortaza on his final pilgrimage to the shrine of Iman Ali in 2010. Now, while Muhammad is on pilgrimage with his grandfather, Isa, Isa recounts the final pilgrimage of his own grandfather, the stories of all of these men twining and intertwining. “That trip was their story, not yours!” Muhammad tells his grandfather at one point, but what is left unspoken is Muhammad’s story himself. There is a point in the story point where suddenly one is hit the with the realisation that of six generations of men, we are missing one — Muhammad’s father is never named, though once they arrive in Najufa, Isa is continually advising his grandson, “Call your father”.

It is a small point, but it is one that becomes very big at the end. For the majority of it, the story wears its SF genre like veneer. There are droids, synthetic foods, Tau beams, but nothing that is integral to the story itself — to the point where in the notes I took while reading, I was all prepared to say in this review that the story was “just speculative/futuristic, no SF”. But then the very last paragraphs come with a twist that could only occur in an SF story, to kick you in the gut and make you cry.

At the very end, “I stepped outside, and tapped my forehead: ‘Call Dad’,” Muhammad tells the reader, and this final act seems to encapsulate the entire anthology. No one knows where we are going, what the future might hold (whether China will be the rulers of the Middle East; whether there will ever be a “CAKA”, the Christian Assembly of Kansas and Arkansas; whether glucose will become a substance as highly regulated as hard drugs are today); but equally so we can never truly know where we have come from. Yet both our history and our future are integral to who we are, and what we can do. We cannot disregard either if we hope to understand the other.

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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: “The Here and Now Prison” by Jalal Hasan

Review of Jalal Hassan, Max Weiss (trans.), “The Here and Now Prison”, Iraq+100, edited by Hassan Blasim (Comma Press, 2016): 139-153 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

If I had to sum up the theme of this story in one line, it would be the question “How do we deal with continuity in the face of radical discontinuity, before and after?” Or perhaps, “How do we understand the present as history from the point of view of a radically different future?” This is, in a sense, the question that shapes the entire anthology, but it is more clear in this story than in some of the others, and Hassan makes it clear how our language is simply not up to the task. In the opening scenes, a teacher tells his students:

We call it the world whether it is our own world or that which we no longer know, the way it was before the year 2021. As if nothing changed.

It was a strange, beautiful, and sweet story, but also one which was never entirely explained. In particular, the reader is left to guess at what the title is meant to mean. I can think of a number of interpretations, but I am hesitant to articulate any of them, because they seem to be nothing more than idle guesses or speculation.

There are a handful of minor typographical/editing errors: missing commas on p. 143 and p. 146, an extra “the” on p. 152, and one occurrence of “effected” on p. 149 which I am pretty sure should have been “affected” (although there is a reading of the sentence in which “effected” works.)

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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: “Baghdad Syndrome” by Zhraa Alhaboby

Review of Zhraa Alhaboby, Emre Bennett (trans.), “Baghdad Syndrome”, Iraq+100, edited by Hassan Blasim (Comma Press, 2016): 87-106 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This story has so many layers to it, it’s hard to know where to begin. There’s the “future-day” story of a man suffering from Baghdad Syndrome who dreams of a weeping woman. There’s the “present-day” story, set in our present or near past, of two star-crossed lovers whose story was commemorated in a statue in a central square. There’s the “past-day” story, of Scheherazade at the 1001 nights. These stories weave in and out of each other and the thread that ties them all together is names and naming. Some of the characters are not named at all; they are simply placeholders that could be anyone. The narrator’s name depends on who it is that is addressing him, whether he is “Patient Sudra Sen Sumer” or “Architect Sudra Sen Sumer”. Some characters are named, but their names are “new” names, names that have been consciously divorced from history, because:

Old names and surnames became dangerous things to hold onto, and people were allocated new, neutral names, free from any affiliations to religions or sects of the past. The slogan we read about in history was: ‘Leave behind your names and live!’ (p. 102).

In one poignant moment, Sudra Sen Sumer visits the family of his coworker Utu, and the older members of the family go around one by one saying the names of their grandparents and great-grandparents, their names connecting them to their histories. Names encode our history, and when those names are taken away, so too is our access to our history; the playing out of this theme is central to the story, and it is also in the periphery at every step.

And then there’s the name, “Baghdad Syndrome”. It’s a destructive illness, one of the long-term consequences of chemical warfare. The course of symptoms is well-known, and there is no cure; when there is no cure and you know what your fate will be, what point is there in visiting the doctors who will do nothing more than give a name to what it is that ails you?

But the illness is only superficial. It is not the real Baghdad Syndrome. For:

You see, if you’re a sufferer of Baghdad Syndrome, you know that nothing has ever driven us, or our ancestors, quite as much as the syndrome of loving Bahgdad (p. 106).

There is so much love in this story. So much love and so much heart. I think it’s probably my favorite in the entire anthology.

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