REVIEW: “Rising Tides” by Mary Alexandra Agner

Review of Mary Alexandra Agner, “Rising Tides”, in Liane Tsui and Grace Seybold, eds., A Quiet Afternoon (Grace & Victory Publictions, 2020): 17-26 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This story totally nailed the brief of the anthology. A simple plot: A magical robot has been left, leg broken off so it cannot move, on the shores of a beach in the face of the rising tide. But it’s amazing how easy it is to empathise with a left-behind robot, and my heart was in my throat the whole time I read this, anxious that it would have a happy ending. (Of course it did. This is a book of happy endings. And this was a very happy ending!)

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REVIEW: A Quiet Afternoon edited by Liane Tsui and Grace Seybold

Review of Liane Tsui and Grace Seybold, eds., A Quiet Afternoon (Grace & Victory Publictions, 2020) — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

When I was offered a review copy of this anthology, it was described to me as a collection of “gentle SFF stories with satisfying endings, for readers who wanted something cozy and non-stressful” — that is, perfect for reading in the midst of a global pandemic, when sometimes all you want to do is escape from everything and read something happy and satisfying and low-stakes and so completely separated from the current dystopia we live in.

Does that describe you? Then this is totally the anthology for you! I read the stories while Covid-19 deaths were rising at an alarming rate in my adopted homeland, while facing down the reality of a new lockdown, in the aftermath of an attempted coup in the country of my birth. Every single one was a moment of peace and calm: The anthology delivered exactly what it said it would. I can’t wait to read volume 2, though I hope that 2021 will — eventually — be a year that doesn’t need it as much as 2020 needed volume 1.

As is usual, we review each story individually, linking back here when the reviews are published:

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REVIEW: “Flightcraft” by Iona Sharma

Review of Iona Sharma, “Flightcraft”, Luna Station Quarterly 25 (2016): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

There was a lot I liked about this story — the central idea of lexical engineering, wherein words once written down must become true, meaning a trained lexical engineer can make a plane fly simply by using the right words — but a lot that also didn’t quite work for me. There were abrupt shifts in focus from one character to another, and also inexplicable shifts in tense. In the end, I was left with a feeling that it was a great idea that could have been better.

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REVIEW: “The Lottery Winner” by Margrét Helgadóttir

Review of Margrét Helgadóttir, “The Lottery Winner”, Luna Station Quarterly 25 (2016): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This is a quick read which is very satisfying. There is a point in this story — near the beginning — where I broke into a sudden grin. Most people living on earth believe that humans are the only sentient life in the universe; but one lucky man knows that aliens exist — he’s won the lottery!

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REVIEW: “The Crisis” by M. John Harrison

Review of M. John Harrison, “The Crisis”, in Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020, with a foreword by Jennifer Hodgson (Comma Press, 2020): 257-271. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

And here we come to the final story in the anthology. Despite being one of the more recent ones, it has the feel of his earlier work, from the 70s and 80s, more gritty SF less vague speculative fic. But even Harrison with all his skill can’t make me like 2nd person POV narration.

(Originally published in You Should Come With Me Now, 2017.)

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REVIEW: “Prelude” by Sian M. Jones

Review of Sian M. Jones, “Prelude”, Luna Station Quarterly 25 (2016): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

I love stories that play around with what personal technology will be like in the future — instead of laptops and mobile phones, there’ll be personal robots and chip implants and holo-vision. Yet these sorts of stories can often struggle to say or do anything new. Jones managed to hit the sweet spot, combining realistic technological developments with a unique twist, with the added bonus of really, really likeable characters, and a bit at the end that made me gasp and then made me cry. Thumbs up!

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REVIEW: “Science & the Arts” by M. John Harrison

Review of M. John Harrison, “Science & the Arts”, in Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020, with a foreword by Jennifer Hodgson (Comma Press, 2020): 165-171 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.

In this story, Harrison’s mastery of character creation is on full display. He understands how to select details that turn words on a page into real persons; this is the first story I’ve read that features as a central character a woman with chronic pain that had — two years previously — landed her in a mental institution until they realised that, oh, wait, it wasn’t all in her head, it was the result of a botched surgery. The story opens introducing us to her (her name is Mona), and reading this was both a sucker punch and a validation. Here is someone who knows that this happens to women, and isn’t going to pretend it doesn’t. Mona is an artist, one half of the titular pair. The other, the scientist, is the narrator, and Harrison gets him bang on the money too — “I said that I had got around that in the 1970s by presenting my own opinions as quotations from other people which seemed to authorise them for me until I had enough confidence to present them as my own” (p. 168) so neatly encapsulates a trick that I’m sure many an early career scientist will either recognise or read and be like “oh, wow, that’s a great idea.” There’s nothing terribly flashy or daring in this story, and that’s what gives it so much of its charm.

(Originally published in the Times Literary Supplement, 2003.)

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REVIEW: “The Machine in Shaft Ten” by M. John Harrison

Review of M. John Harrison, “The Machine in Shaft Ten”, in Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020, with a foreword by Jennifer Hodgson (Comma Press, 2020): 127-139 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the Review of the anthology.

This anthology is a master-class in how to nail opening sentences. Just look at this:

Although I was later to become intimately involved with Professor Nicholas Bruton and the final, fatal events at the base of Shaft ten, I was prevented by a series of personal disasters from taking much interest in the original announcement of his curious discovery at the centre of the earth (p. 127)

Every single thing about this sentence is perfection. It’s pretty much an entire story in itself! Between this and the title, I’m already hooked: But when on the second page we are presented with the “what if” question underlying this story — what if humans found out they were being used as resources in exactly the same way they use the rest of the planet — there’s no escape. This is an excellent story, and every page of it will remind you of that fact. This is classic SF at its best.

(Originally published in New Worlds Quarterly, 1972, under the pseudonym Joyce Churchill.)

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REVIEW: “Colonising the Future” by M. John Harrison

Review of M. John Harrison, “Colonising the Future”, in Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020, with a foreword by Jennifer Hodgson (Comma Press, 2020): 123-126 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the Review of the anthology.

This piece (I hesitate to even call it a “story”) was a bit to “literary” for my tastes. It is interesting to see how Harrison’s style developed and evolved over time; I have come to the conclusion that his earlier work is less pretentious than his later work, and hence I like the early stuff better.

(First published in Visions 2020.)

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