REVIEW: “Cloudgazing” by Guy Woods and Sven Kiefer

Review of Guy Woods and Sven Kiefer, “Cloudgazing”, in Around Distant Suns, ed. by Emma Johanna Puranen (Guardbridge Books, 2021): 85-109 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

You’ll probably be as surprised as I that there were not one but two radio plays involving clouds in this — otherwise rather small! — anthology.

And yet, even though both plays featured a scientist who found something radically unexpected in the clouds, the two plays could not be more different. This one feels very slow, and pregnant: In many scenes, not much happens, and it’s what isn’t being said that is important. Whereas in the previous play, the reader was given the discovery in the first few lines, and the rest of the play dealt with the aftermath, here the final reveal was kept underwraps until the very last scene, which sent shivers down my spine. The dramatic build-up was exquisitely crafted.

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REVIEW: “One Cloud at a Time: A Radio Play” by Priyanka Jha and Nanna Bach-Møller

Review of Priyanka Jha and Nanna Bach-Møller, “One Cloud at a Time: A Radio Play”, in Around Distant Suns, ed. by Emma Johanna Puranen (Guardbridge Books, 2021): 21-31. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This play was simply a joy to read. It was written as a dialogue between two scientists, one named Bach, one named Møller, and it moves from the intimate and mundane (trying to create life; trying to decide what to eat for dinner) to the tragic and serious (we try not to think about how often scientists are paid to keep their mouths shut, or the lengths governments will go to shut them up.)

If you’ve ever been bothered at the way conspiracies can take hold in people’s minds, forcing out the understanding that scientific knowledge can bring, this is a piece for you!

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REVIEW: “Soonest Mended” by Honor Hamlet and Till Kaeufer

Review of Honor Hamlet and Till Kaeufer, “Soonest Mended”, in Around Distant Suns, ed. by Emma Johanna Puranen (Guardbridge Books, 2021): 17-20 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I have pretty narrow tastes when it comes to poetry, and I’ll admit this one wasn’t exactly my cup of tea; it was a bit too “post-modern”, I think, for my tastes — unsurprising because Hamlet and Kaeufer’s collaboration is one of the closest, with Kaeufer contributing a machine learning programming that actual wrote a line of the poem! But what I loved, and which makes poems like this such a wonderful contribution to the volume, was what the poet and the scientist said in their collaboration notes: “While writing a poem, you’re constantly asking if the information in the previous line is relevant enough to trigger a reaction in the next line” (p. 20). What I want from my fiction and poetry is something that makes me think about things differently, and I got that.

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REVIEW: “Glossary” by Emma Bussi and Christiane Helling

Review of Emma Bussi and Christiane Helling, “The Stripped Core”, in Around Distant Suns, ed. by Emma Johanna Puranen (Guardbridge Books, 2021): 11-15 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This was a lovely long-form poem full of the struggle of trying to express onself through words that other people will understand — whether this is writing a scientific paper about atmospheres on worlds we can visit only in imagination or it’s writing a poem about trying to express oneself through words that other people will understand. 🙂

I really loved it, and felt a lot of sympathy with both the poet and the scientist.

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REVIEW: “The Stripped Core” by Colin Bramwell and Dominic Samra

Review of Colin Bramwell and Dominic Samra, “The Stripped Core”, in Around Distant Suns, ed. by Emma Johanna Puranen (Guardbridge Books, 2021): 1-10 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The “stripped core” at the center of this story serves a dual purpose: It is both a scientific description of what lies at the center of a gas giant, and an allegory for a model of education used in the boarding school that Alex, the main character, is sent to. I read this story, and its description of “cryoeducation tanks”, wherein students are submerged in a cryogenically-induced unconsciousness in order to absorb learning directly, just a day after reading this opinion piece about a windowless dormatory built for 4,500 students, which comments that “Perhaps in the future students can be cryogenically frozen at night, then efficiently stacked using the storage and retrieval systems of an Amazon distribution centre, before being defrosted in time for their morning slurp of laboratory-made food substitute.” On the one hand, there’s something very macabre and dystopian about this sort of future. On the other hand, the way Bramwell developed the story into something quite cooperative and potentially glorious was really satisfying.

The short commentary pieces by Bramwell and Samra both emphasise the importance of good science communication, and the way that stories can be used to inspire the next generation of scientists. I think this piece did a good job of doing both.

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REVIEW: Around Distant Suns edited by Emma Johanna Puranen

Review of Emma Johanna Puranen, ed., Around Distant Suns (Guardbridge Books, 2021) — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

The premise of this anthology is “what would happen if the creators of science fiction had dedicated science consultants that they could go to with all their scientific questions?” The scientists in question are based at St Andrews Centre for Exoplanet Science, and the writers in the School of English at St Andrews University, and Emma Johanna Puranen, science consultant and member of the Centre, is the one who brought the pairs together and edited the collection. The result is nine stories that emphasise both how important it can be to “get the science right” (even if not all the science needs to be right in fiction) and how similar the scientific and creative processes are, especially in science fiction: Both the scientist and the author are making models of how the world could be.

Each scientist/author pair met multiple times over the course of the creation of the stories that are published here. The stories were intended to be science driven — initial meetings were for the scientists to speak to the authors about their own research, to collectively and collaboratively find ideas that lend themselves to fictional exploration — but the goal was not to cloak science communication in a fictive guise, but instead to use the power of fiction to explore new ideas, new questions, new lands. The result is this anthology of stories, poetry, and plays, each of which is accompanied by reflections on the creation of the piece by both the writer and the scientist. A fantastic collection representing the very best of collaboration, this is the sort of book that makes me go “I want to do that” — I want to read stories like this, write stories like this, edit collections like this. I hope Puranen does another volume next year!

As is usual, we’ll review each story individually and link the reviews back here as they are published.

Sara L. Uckelman9 Comments

REVIEW: “Sowing Rubies for Brides (Or the Graveyard at the Edge of Faeryland)” by Suzanne J. Willis

Review of Suzanne J. Willis, “Sowing Rubies for Brides (Or the Graveyard at the Edge of Faeryland),” Luna Station Quarterly 23 (2015): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

There was a lot of world-building stuffed into this story; so much so, I almost didn’t see the story itself at times. The story itself is rather gruesome, laced with misogyny, full of murder and the hunting of faery brides. At the end of the massacre of the faeries that happened when Tirra was just a girl, an agreement was made between the human world and the faery world “for faery brides to be reborn from dead fae” and this agreement “had been the only chance at mending the wounds between this world and Faeryland” — but the piece that I was missing is why would Faeryland ever want to mend those wounds that had been inflicted upon them, unprompted and premeditated? If I were a faery and this had happened to my people, I would have had nothing to do with humans ever again: A man’s loneliness is never an excuse to kill someone.

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REVIEW: “Exalted Guests (Or, How Malka Raised a Dybbuk Army)” by Rena Rossner

Review of Rena Rossner, “Exalted Guests (Or, How Malka Raised a Dybbuk Army),” Luna Station Quarterly 23 (2015): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

LSQ over the years has been one of my most reliable sources of Jewish speculative fiction, and Rossner’s story of young Malka leaving her family’s Sukkot celebration to the village cemetary, only to find herself calling out “the kabbalistic incantations she was supposed to only hear, not speak” and speaking in languages she does not know to call up the dead, is another tick in that box. It’s a wild, frenzied story, leaving the reader uncertain whether the dybbuk army is a blessing or a scourge.

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REVIEW: “Ingebjorg Unspelled” by Jessamy Dalton

Review of Jessamy Dalton, “Ingebjorg Unspelled,” Luna Station Quarterly 23 (2015): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Oh, I absolutely loved this story. Ingebjorg is the daughter of the king of the Northlands, taking after her boisterous, raw-boned father rather than her cultivated, educated mother. Her character comes through in the very first lines of the story and it is engaging and distinctive. Dalton paints her relationship to her parents, and her parents relationship with each other, with great deftness; every word rings true, every one is sympathetic. It’s hard not to feel for Fridesweide, who has to grow old and grey and fretful that she will lose everything her husband has loved in her; it’s not hard to understand how Ingebjorg can love her mother but get along better with her the further they are apart; it’s extremely easy to feel the same revulsion for Klovass the alchemy professor that Ingebjorg feels. And when a Delphic oracle is cast upon Ingebjorg’s life, I could not wait to see how it would resolve itself. I just really enjoyed reading this.

(First published in Lorelei Signal 2011.)

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