REVIEW: “Riding the Signal” by Gary Kloster

Review of Gary Kloster, “Riding the Signal”, Apex Magazine 114 (2018): Read Online. Originally published in InterGalactic Medicine Show, 29 (2012). Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

Alec Chu is a member of an elite squad of remote control mercenaries, who pilot bots to carry out private battles in relative safety. He’s good at the work, and it’s a solid paycheck, until one day his base comes under attack.

This is a solid story about the difference between a soldier and someone who simply fights for a living. Alec (as well as his team leader, a true veteran) struggles with the fact that his team, while highly competent, lacks the unity, trust, and focus that true soldiers possess. As the story goes on, he has to see if he can find that kind of dedication within himself.

This is a more action-heavy story than I usually find in Apex, which I’m sure will please some people, and disappoint others. It’s well-written, so if lengthy action sequences appeal to you, then you will likely enjoy this departure from their usual fare.

J.Z. WestonLeave a comment

REVIEW: “Master Brahms” by Storm Humbert

Review of Storm Humbert, “Master Brahms”, Apex Magazine 114 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

Seven versions of Master Brahms live together – six synths, or clones, and the original. Synths don’t like to think about being synths, so the original allows them each the illusion of such as much as possible. Things come to a head when six Brahms find that the seventh has been murdered by one of the remaining six, and the house computer has been compromised by whichever is the killer.

This is a satisfying closed room murder mystery. The murder is intriguing, but is also not the main point. No, the real question of this story is: which Brahms is the original? Deep down, that is the only question that matters to any of them, and the murder is just a way to bring that question into the foreground for them. I’ve read plenty of stories about clones, but I don’t recall ever seeing one about how a clone would psychologically cope with being a clone before. This is fresh, fascinating territory.

J.Z. WestonLeave a comment

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!

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

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: “Godzilla vs Buster Keaton, Or: I Didn’t Even Need a Map” by Gary A. Braunbeck

Review of Gary A. Braunbeck, “Godzilla vs Buster Keaton, Or: I Didn’t Even Need a Map”, Apex Magazine 114 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

Glenn’s sister, Janice is dying of AIDS. She is raunchy and funny and loud, and refuses to sanitize her experience for anyone’s else’s comfort. Glenn is withdrawn and hurting and really, truly trying his best, but he doesn’t think it’s good enough. Before she goes, she arranges for him to receive a gift that she hopes will help him.

This story is a poignant, realistic depiction of people dealing with death in all of the messy, ugly, ways that real people do. And yet, in the end, the story circles around to a kind of peace that defies expectation. If I give you too many hints into how we get there, it might deprive you of fully experiencing the journey, and that would be a shame.

J.Z. WestonLeave a comment

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.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

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

REVIEW: “The Mothership” by K. Bannerman

Review of K. Bannerman, “The Mothership”, Luna Station Quarterly 35 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content note: Miscarriage/stillbirth, violent labor.

Fifty sleeping women set off for Titan, populating a mothership whose purpose is both figurative and literal. The problem is that only one of the women managed to become, and stay, pregnant. For all the other forty-nine, either the procedure didn’t work or they awoke before the end of nine months, miscarrying. Now Kyana is awake…and the news is not good.

It’s a rather horrific story, not because it is gruesome or gory or particularly vivid, but just because of the strength of the sadness that comes with that much loss of life and hope. It’s much easier to deal with the abstract notion of the end of the human race, when the last adult dies and there are no new babies left to be born. It’s another when those babies die before they have even had a chance to live. There is a twist of hope at the end, but it’s hardly enough to offset all the bleakness.

Sara L. UckelmanLeave a comment