REVIEW: “The Great Train Robbery” by Lavie Tidhar

Review of Lavie Tidhar, “The Great Train Robbery”, Apex Magazine 116 (2019): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

Train robberies are a staple of the movie western, a genre most people are at least passingly familiar with, and so sometimes they find they way into speculative fiction, warped and changed when divorced from their original context. This is a particularly trippy example.

On one level, this is about two gunslingers –one older and grizzled, the other young and reckless – on a train that’s about to be robbed. That part of the story is normal. Beyond that, we have a mysterious drug that gives people glimpses into parallel lives in another world – our world. We have monsters and thieving acrobats and a war between unexplained factions warping their world.

Reading this, I was tempted to ask which world was real – the fantastical one that contains most of the plot or the simulacrum of our mundane reality – but I suspect that is missing the point. My interpretation is that reality is fluid within this story, and can not pinned down by logic. Both worlds are real. Maybe differently real, but real all the same.

Highly recommended for anyone who likes their fiction on the mind-bending side.

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REVIEW: “The Summer Mask” by Karin Lowachee

Review of Karin Lowachee, “The Summer Mask”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2018: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2018): 47-60 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This was a beautiful, tender story written with a delicate sense of trauma and recovery, and a level of archaity (is that a word? or is it ‘archaicity’? Or neither — what I mean is “that which makes something feel archaic”). You can certainly read it as a horror story, as I think it was originally intended to be, but to me it had no more horror in it than you find embedded in every love story ever.

(Originally published in Nightmare Magazine, no. 62, 2017.)

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Pan and Hook” by Adam McOmber

Review of Adam McOmber, “Pan and Hook”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2018: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2018): 41-45 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This short little story mixes old myths with modern ones, and gives a twist to both. I loved the idea of re-envisioning Pan as the god of non-toxic masculinity; he is the perfect choice for that. So perfect, I wished he could’ve gotten a happy story instead of the sad one this was.

(Originally published in Vestiges:Mimesis, Winter 2017.)

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “The Luck of Pitsey Hall” by L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace

Review of L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace, “The Luck of Pitsey Hall” in A Brilliant Void: A Selection of Classic Irish Science Fiction, edited by Jack Fennell (Tramp Press, 2018): 151-176 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

This is a pretty classic Gothic story, leaning more towards psychological horror than to science fiction, though there are elements of the uncertain and unknown that stem from a possibly scientific origin. The key figure in the story is the mysterious Madame Koluchy, renowed physician and healer who is able to effect miraculous cures, though scientific tests performed upon her drugs and medicines show them to be no different than those used by other doctors.

Mysterious Madame Koluchy may be, but she is also rather nefarious. Shortly into the story she is implicated in a murder, and other secrets and possible crimes come to light. By the end, we are still left with a veil of uncertainty; who killed Delacour, and why?

(Originally published in 1899).

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Some Kind of Wonderland” by Richard Bowes

Review of Richard Bowes, “Some Kind of Wonderland”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2018: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2018): 23-40 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

“Some Kind of Wonderland” is the story of a 50th anniversary rescreening of an Alice in Wonderland movie filmed in the desolate spaces of New York City.

I’ve never liked Alice in Wonderland. As a child watching the movie, I always felt like I was missing something because there was no story, just disconnected scenes, and it was so frustrating. When I was older, I tried reading the book, and couldn’t stand it; I don’t think I’ve ever succeeded in finishing an unabridged version of it. It always seemed like there could have — should have — been so much more to the story than there actually was.

Bowes’ story recounts the scenes in the movie one by one, spliced with the reactions of the audience and with memories of the filming fifty years earlier. It’s hard to describe a film in words; yet Bowes describes it so carefully and so beautiful you’d think the movie he writes about was real. I wish it were real: I want to see it.

One thing that struck me about this story was how minimal the speculative content was; in fact, it’s difficult to pick out any detail that is clearly speculative. But another thing that struck me was that I didn’t even realise this lack until almost all the way through the story, it was that good, and that gripping. Two thumbs up. Even if I’m not sure why it’s in this particular anthology, I’m glad it was because otherwise I’m not sure I would’ve ever come across it and read it.

(Originally published in Mad Hatters and March Hares, Tor Books, 2017.)

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Serving Fish” by Christopher Caldwell

Review of Christopher Caldwell, “Serving Fish”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2018: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2018): 7-22 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This story I loved, this wonderful retelling of an unlikely choice of fairy tale, littered with lines that made me snort with laughter. More fairy tale retellings like this one, please!

I also enjoyed reading it for the perspective that it gave me through its drag queen main character. Reading Eric’s growth and development into Mahogany Eternique I found interesting and also useful. Authors who write these stories have no obligation to educate people — they are not beholden to people like me to do so. But I am beholden to them for the education I get from reading them; and that’s something that I appreciate not only about this story but about this anthology as a whole: reading it stretches me and makes me grow, and I value that.

(Originally published in People of Color Take Over Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Positronic Publishing, 2017).

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Ghost Sex” by Joseph Keckler

Review of Joseph Keckler, “Ghost Sex”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2018: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2018): 1-5 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Part horror, part humor, this story was very short and a bit odd. It seemed only incidentally gay, but I’m also not sure that I’m the sort of person who should be the one to make that sort of comment. Though it wasn’t really the story for me, it was neatly written and competently done, and I’ve no doubt that it’s the story for someone else!

(First published in Dragon At the Edge of a Flat World, Turtle Point Press, 2017).

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: Wilde Stories 2018 edited by Steve Berman

Review of Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2018: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction, (Lethe Press, 2018) — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Last year, I reviewed the 2017 edition of this anthology (read the review) with a bit of trepidation, as it’s not exactly my place as a het woman to be offering my opinions on gay male fic. But I loved so many of the stories in that anthology so much that when pre-orders for the 2018 volume went up, I immediately signed up.

With the same caveats as last year in place, I decided to review this volume as well, and it did not disappoint. The breadth of stories is amazing, which means that there were a few that didn’t tick my buttons, but that’s okay — many, many more did, and I am sure that other readers will find the stories that didn’t speak to me do speak to them. Overall, what struck me about the stories in last year’s anthology struck me about these as well: And that is how beautiful they were. Beautiful stories, told in beautiful words. These are like a pile of precious gems, to be treasured and kept close. I’m only sorry that Berman has announced that this will be the final year that he edits these anthologies; though perhaps this means next year I’ll have to start working through the back catalogue.

As usual, I’ll review each story separately, and link them back here when the review is posted:

(I also adore the cover, which is just gorgeous. Many kudos to Inkspiral Design, who designed it.)

Sara L. Uckelman15 Comments

REVIEW: “An Advance Sheet” by Jane Barlow

Review of Jane Barlow, “An Advance Sheet” in A Brilliant Void: A Selection of Classic Irish Science Fiction, edited by Jack Fennell (Tramp Press, 2018): 127-148 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

What a marvelous story. Reading it, it was hard to keep in mind that it was written more than a hundred years ago, how unexpectedly timeless, prescient, and modern it was. We are quickly introduced to the main characters in the first page, Dr. Warden and Dr. Thomas Harlowe (the 1st person POV), two medical doctors who work in a mental institution, and a patient of theirs, John Lynn, who ended up in the institution after a nervous breakdown caused by anxiety over his university exams, a story all too familiar in the early 21st C. The focus of the story is Lynn, and a strange encounter that he relates to Harlowe. The trope involved is not an uncommon one in early SF: Travel to another time or another world via mental projection alone.

But what really took me with this story was the detailed explanation that Lynn gives Harlowe not about how such travel is possible, but about why we should even think these other worlds and times exist. Barlow’s explanation is uncanny: First, she articulates a version of the many-worlds interpretation of the universe:

“I refer to the fact that such a limitless atomic universe necessarily involves the existence, the simultaneous existence, of innumerable solar systems absolutely similar to our own…” (p. 129).

But not content to start there, she has Lynn immediately make the analogical step from the existence of different worlds to the existence of our own world at different times — and all of these different worlds being causally isolated from each other.

See, when I’m not writing, reading, and reviewing speculation fiction, I’m a philosopher who focuses on questions of modality and time. One of the most important developments in the logic and metaphysics of modality during the 20th C was David Lewis’s developments of modal realism, the idea that there are other “possible worlds” that are of exactly the same type as ours, but which are causally inaccessible to us. Lewis himself took time to be represented by different “stages” of these possible worlds; but it is also possible to take the possible worlds model further and identify times with worlds themselves, speaking of “possible times” instead of “possible worlds”. For Lewis, these worlds are out there, fully developed, and independent of ourselves; while we cannot access them through spatio-temporal relations, we can think of them, and, with a bit of a loose metaphor speak of looking through a telescope to these worlds to see what is occurring in them. Lynn adopts a very similar metaphor, as a means of explaining clairvoyance:

For, if what I have said is factually true, the explanation is simply this: the clairvoyant has somehow got a glimpse into one of these facsimile worlds, which happens to be a few years ahead of ours in point of time, and has seen how things are going there” (p. 1310)

The parallels in the views are remarkable, and even more remarkable that Barlow as writing 75 years before Lewis, and without the benefit of the philosophical and educational context that Lewis had in the 1950s and 1960s. Having read Barlow’s story, I’m now totally convinced I need to read more by Barlow, and write up a paper on this curious 19th-C Irish female precursor to one of the most important developments in contemporary analytic philosophy.

(Originally published in 1898.)

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: A Brilliant Void edited by Jack Fennell

Review of Jack Fennell, ed., A Brilliant Void: A Selection of Classic Irish Science Fiction (Tramp Press, 2018) — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

A while back I had time to kill in Belfast airport so I ended up in WH Smith’s hoping to find the newest Rivers of London book. I failed at that, but what I did find was a book that touted itself as being “a selection of classic Irish science fiction”. Classic science fiction, you say? Some people might think that’s an oxymoron, that SF is an inherently modern genre. In his introduction to the collection, “The Green Lacuna”, the editor Jack Fennell addresses precisely the issue of genre, as well as whether it makes sense to speak of a specifically Irish tradition in SF.

Fennell kicks off his introduction with a brief rehearsal of the fantastical elements that can be found in the history of Irish storytelling, arguing that many of the recurring tropes in medieval Irish mythology and literature are the same tropes that one finds in contemporary science fiction — from Balor of the Evil Eye, villain of the 11th C Book of Invasions who “was basically a mutant with laser-vision” (p. vii) to stories in the “Christian fantasy-voyage” genre with encounters with creatures that should “be read as forerunners of modern sci-fi aliens and mutants” (p. viii). Now, these examples might seem a bit far stretched — more fantasy than sci fi as there isn’t any “science” that is being invoked to underpin or explain the fantastical elements of these medieval myths. But they are part of a continuous tradition that directly fed into modern sci fi, mediated by, among other things, the classic Gothic literature of the 19th century, of which “Ireland was home to one of the most celebrated varieties” (p. viii), Ascendancy Gothic, feature “paradigm-shifting encounters with the other” (p. viii). This strand of gothic literature, Fennell argues, combined with the scientific romances of Verne, Wells, and others to become the direct parents of pulp SF in the early 20th century. A second specifically Irish influence on the development of modern SF, Fennell argues, is the Irish “desire to see the future” (p. xi), which is manifest in the central role that prophecy has always played in Irish literary tradition, and in particular in the aisling or ‘dream vision’ poetry.

Despite this, Irish science fiction has often been relegated to the “marginalia” (p. x) of Irish literature, Fennell argues. This anthology is an attempt to right this, and to bring to light stories and authors that have been sidelined. Reading classic science fiction not only allows us to “look at the commonplace from a hypothetical remove” (p. ix), it allows us a glimpse into what people of the past thought their future would, or could, be like.

This focus on the future is the red thread that ties all the stories together, even more than the cultural background of the authors. The stories in the anthology cover the period 1837-1960, and are both standalone stories and excerpts from larger works. I was super pleased to see that more than half of the authors included were women (8 women, 6 men). (Wait, you didn’t know there were female SF writers before the 1960s? Now you know!) As is usual, we will review each story individually and link the reviews back to this post when they are posted:

There are so many things to love about this collection — Fennell’s lucid and informative introduction, the variety of the stories, the coherence of the whole. I highly recommend it for classic SF lovers, people with an interest in Irish literature, people who want to read more early SF by women, or those who just want to curl up with a good story. This collection has it all.

Sara L. Uckelman15 Comments