REVIEW: “Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse” by S. B. Divya

Review of S. B. Divya’s, “Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse”, Uncanny Magazine Volume, 20 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Jodie Baker.

“Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse” is set in a dystopian Arizona where abortion has been criminalised. The narrator and their partner, Chula, have stayed in this dangerous territory with their two children in order to help women recieve safe abortions. The couple fully expect to be found by the law one day, and to have to run, but the narrator, who is disabled, does not expect they will make it out alive. All of their scenarios for the future involve Chula, the woman who is ‘a four-time triathlete, perfect eyesight, no injuries’, getting their children to a safe house. However, everything changes when Chula is killed by a bullet aimed at the narrator. From then on, the narrator has to be the one to survive in order to keep their children alive.

I’ve seen several discussions from disabled commentators about disability and dystopia, and “Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse” definitely feels like it’s in conversation with those discussions. This story adopts a multi-layered approach to depicting a disabled person’s life when the world is in crisis and they’re being chased by the authorities. S. B. Divya shows the practical issues of surviving in a dystopia when you have various disabilities. She allows her narrator to voice genuine concerns about their ability to survive, and to be less than positive about their situation. The fact that the narrator never offers up their name, and is never asked for it, is a subtle reminder that disabled people often don’t exist in dystopian stories.

At the same time, Divya challenges this lack of surviving, disabled characters in mainstream dystopian stories (or just the lack of disabled protagonists in mainstream dystopian stories). This story pushes back against the idea that there’s no place for disabled people in this genre by centring a disabled narrator, writing the story in their first person voice, giving them the tools to save their children, and sending them home alive, and a minor resistance hero. “Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse” creates some much needed space for disability while also providing an action-packed story which comments on the erosion of women’s rights. Try it out if you enjoyed Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” or “Flow” by Marissa Lingen.

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REVIEW: “We Are New(s)” by Bentley A. Reese

Review of Bentley A. Reese “We Are New(s)”, Apex Magazine 106 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

It’s always nice to be surprised. Case in point: this is not the sort of story I like. Weird dialects, an ambiguous narrator, creepy levels of social stratification, technological connection taken to the extreme: this is everything that tends to irritate me about cyberpunk. But this story? I love it.

The world is a near future cyberpunk, both strange and recognizably descended from our present day. The plot is meet-cute, with a low-class boy approaching a high-class girl, and making a genuine connection. But the narrator, the POV character, is something outside of them, something almost omniscient, tied to the constant stream of social media and news updates the near-future internet. It has a creepiness and discomfort that kept me reading.

Beyond the plot, this is a great story about how we interact with current events and media. It’s not exactly a cautionary tale, but it holds a dark mirror to our modern day obsessions and interests. It shows us our addiction to outrage and violence and viral content. Recommended for fans of cyberpunk and anyone who likes cutting social observations in their science fiction.

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REVIEW: “The Elements of The Plague” by Julia August

Review of Julia August, “The Elements of The Plague”, Syntax and Salt #5, December 2017: Read Online. Reviewed by Tiffany Crystal

Alright, so this story is confusing. At first, it doesn’t even really seem like a story…it’s more like an instruction manual. Then it’s more like a warning guide. Then you get to the end, and you go “…wait a minute…”

I am a little embarrassed at how long it took me to really understand what’s going on in this little ditty, but once it hit me, I had to give it a slow clap. If you like timey-wimey stuff, give it a read, but pay attention. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

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REVIEW: “When We Sleep, We Kill the World” by Adam Lock

Review of Adam Lock, “When We Sleep, We Kill the World”, Syntax and Salt #5, December 2017: Read Online. Reviewed by Tiffany Crystal

Here’s one that will get you thinking. Artificial Intelligence and the future of robots/robotics can be a bit of a hot button topic, especially with the news story of the robot who opened a door for a “friend.” You have the people who are convinced that robots are going to try and take over the world, and then you have people who will turn it into a debate over what makes a person real. The Turing Test only tests a machine’s ability to mimic human behaviour. What happens when it becomes less of a mimic, and more of a truth? That is – what happens when the emotions are no longer perceived to be fake – to the robot or the human observer? What is it that sets humans apart from an AI that advanced?

“When We Sleep, We Kill the World” hits on that debate like it’s a massive gong at the mouth of a valley – you will feel the questions it brings up in your bones and will stay with you many miles down the road. I cannot recommend it enough.

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REVIEW: “Ratcatcher” by Amy Griswold

Review of Amy Griswold, “Ratcatcher”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2017: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2017): 165-179. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

“Never mind the sodding dead!” someone shouted, firing from beside him, but the only certainty he had in a world full of flying debris and blood was that the souls needed to come out of the corpses, extracted like rotten teeth. He raised his head, and saw the shattergun pointed at him from across the narrow gap between the ships.

This is the first story in the collection that I’ve read (remember, I’m reading them out of order) that is science fiction/steampunk in nature. The story opens with what could be a classic futuristic space setting, with a man with a shattergun and two airships docking together. But before the story starts, we’re told the time and place: “1918, over Portsmouth”. So this shower…isn’t your ordinary futuristic SF, and with that date “airship” takes on a steam-punk interpretation.

That being said, all the SF/SP/SPEC elements fade to the background in this wonderfully personal story, which focuses on the nature of death and the intimacies of life. It’s a story where the queer element only turns up in the final sentences, but it fits so perfectly and feels so natural that there is no question at all that this story belongs in this anthology.

There was ONE oddity of language in the story that tripped me up because it occurred so soon, and I feel compelled to mention. In the second paragraph, we’re introduced to a character via the rather clunky description “woman airman”. “Woman” isn’t an adjective; this construction doesn’t make much sense and only serves to emphasise the over gendering of the English language.

(Originally published in Mothership Zeta, 2016).

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REVIEW: “Dix” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Review of Kristine Kathryn Rusch, “Dix”, Asimov’s Science Fiction March/April (2018): 13-46 — Read Excerpt Online or Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley.

We’re trained to make the most of the situation we’re in, not to wish we were somewhere else.

Set in Rusch’s wider Diving universe, after an ill-fated rescue mission the crew of the Ivoire find themselves 5,000 years in the future far from the rest of the Fleet and everyone they’ve ever known or understands who they are, with no way of getting back. The crew are coping in different ways with the loss – both productive and destructive.

Without giving too much of the plot away, the story here is tightly told and, despite dealing with an established universe and technologies, Rusch leads those unfamiliar through the intricacies and risks being handled without bogging down in exposition.

I did find some of the more tense moments didn’t quite come across as stressful as they could have – for example, the threats, despite being tricky to diffuse, never really came across as particularly likely to me. Perhaps knowing where this piece sat between the other works in the series also made me feel the characters were less at risk.

Overall, though, this was a fun, self-contained adventure sci-fi story that didn’t require awareness of the related material to enjoy.

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REVIEW: “The Last Light” by Miranda Suri

Review of Miranda Suri, “The Last Light”, in Abandoned Places, edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell (Shohola Press, 2018): 147-162 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

“Piracy” has had a variety of connotations and meanings over the years, from armed hijackers sailing the seas to Robin-Hood-esque hackers who redistribute music from the rich to the poor. Suri’s story taps into an intersective version of piracy, one in which hackers can hijack space-ship computers and take them wherever they want in the universe, wherever they can then put the most pressure on those who carry priceless cargo — in space, there are many abandoned places.

One thing about the “Robin Hood” pirates is that they always think what they are doing is morally superior. We praise the historical Robin Hood as all the tales are told from his perspective as he fights against the evil, conniving, and greedy Sheriff of Nottingham and Prince John. The Robin Hood in this story is the antagonist, though, and what I enjoyed most about the story was watching the main character, Miss Song, slowly realise that maybe, just maybe, she was one of the bad guys.

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REVIEW: “The Last Shaper at The Witch City’s Waypoint” by Emily Lundgren

Review of Emily Lundgren, “The Last Shaper at The Witch City’s Waypoint”, Luna Station Quarterly 33 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This story has a gorgeous opening line:

Ess sang he found me in the reeds in the heat of summer, my mother a crow lying dead.

(Even if every time I read it, my eyes see “cow” instead of “crow”, and I can’t help but think that that would also work, and perhaps be even more interesting.)

The rest of the story was as beautifully crafted, full of lovely language like a song itself, and the rhythm and pacing and descriptive imagery of a fairy tale. Except part-way through it shifts from a fairy tale into something more akin to science fiction. The story transcends boundaries and classification, and is just really good.

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REVIEW: “Irregularity” by Rachel Harrison

Review of Rachel Harrison “Irregularity”, Apex Magazine 106 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

After nearly perishing in an alien invasion, humanity decided that computers were not reliable enough to watch the void of space for threats. Now, specially trained humans work at outposts, watching the data for inconsistencies. Nyle is one of those observers. It’s a lonely job – he only sees his one human co-worker for a few minutes a day, and otherwise interacts only with the station itself and the endless data stream. This makes for a quiet, character driven story, focused almost entirely on Nyle.

In addition to the impeccably well-crafted character of Nyle, this story also has a well-built, interesting world. We mostly get hints of it from his memories, but so much of the story takes place in Nyle’s head, that still gives us a good look at the stratification of this society.

I enjoyed the quiet, introspective story telling in this piece, and recommend it for anybody who enjoys space stories that are less action and more reflection, with a strong, emotional ending.

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REVIEW: “Bull of Heaven” by Gabriel Murray

Review of Gabriel Murray, “Bull of Heaven”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2017: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2017): 83-99. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

So much calculation had gone into giving Francis realistic human coloration: olive skin, brown eyes, brown hair a little lighter than the eyes, striated and naturalistic. No one had done the same with the android Moses: they’d just painted him in tones they found beautiful, which occurred on no living man, which Francis found garish.

This is another story of automata, religious automata programmed and constructed so that they are “born” already knowing all the catechism, already capable of experiencing “the mystery of the faith” (p. 85). It is easy, in this story, to slip into the uncanny valley; it is only in consciously self-reflective narration that we are reminded that Brother Francis is no ordinary temple cleric. Moses, too, is an android, and what I find most fascinating in this story is watching Brother Francis go through his own uncanny valley, to see the automaton respond to the not-quite-right, the too-almost-organic android. “The humans might not have noticed, but Francis did” (p. 86). But there remain many things that Francis does not notice, not until he is confronted with them, not until it is almost too late.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment