REVIEW: “Frost” by C. L. Spillard

Review of C. L. Spillard, “Frost”, Luna Station Quarterly 34 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This is the first time I’ve reviewed a story with a repeat title (cf. “Frost” by ‘Nathan Burgoine). But this is a very different sort of story than Burgoine’s fairy tale. This story is told in sparse, spare sentences with a tight, quick structure that reflects not only the tension and anxiety that Hu Tao wears on her sleeve but the same nerves that the unnamed narrator seeks to mask with a calm clarity of purpose.

The entire story is so short that it feels like a handful pebbles. But they are exquisite pebbles, and the way the author shifts POV partway through the story illustrates the old adage that rules are made to be broken, and Spillard breaks some canonical rules in the most perfect and necessary way. I enjoyed this short story very much.

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REVIEW: “Conversation, Descending” by Richard Dansky

Review of Richard Dansky, “Conversation, Descending”, Space and Time #130 Winter 2017 pp. 25-28. Purchase here. Review by Ben Serna-Grey.

Reading Richard Dansky’s profile in the magazine, I fully expected to like this story. He’s a veteran video game writer and has seven novels and a story collection under his belt as well. Do I think this is a bad story? Not necessarily. All I can say for sure is this one was a bit of a dud for me, but I’d still recommend reading it yourself and forming your own opinion.

“Conversation, Descending” is a steampunky fantasy that opens with a fellow falling through the sky after he’s ejected from an airship. As tends to (in my opinion, unfortunately) come with the territory there’s a lot of pseudo-Victorian/Romantic era stilted language that in other subgenres might be pegged as thesaurus abuse. The first page is almost all repetition of the fact that our main character is falling and he’s just in his underwear.

There is a conversation with another character further in, as well as a few moments that would have struck me as particularly humorous or clever if the writing style, particularly that of the main character didn’t remind me so much of Harold Lauder from The Stand, chock full of m’lady-ish phraseology that I could all but see this character in a trench coat and fedora, fingerless gloves grasping the edge of his hat as he talked to other damsels along his way.

There is a nice sort of bait-n-switch toward the end but I hate to admit by that point I’d sort of half checked out. I do still recommend checking this one out for yourself, as hopefully you don’t have my hangups. There is humor and wit in here, so I hope you are able to appreciate that more than I was.

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REVIEW: “Mother Jones and the Nasty Eclipse” by Cherie Priest

Review of Cherie Priest, “Mother Jones and the Nasty Eclipse”, Apex Magazine 108 (2018): Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

I love political fiction. I particularly love when it’s well-written and thoughtfully constructed, tying past and present together with real human emotion and nuanced sentiment. “Mother Jones and the Nasty Eclipse” is somehow both vague and direct. The speaker is never named beyond the title, and the listener not at all, though it’s pretty clear from context that Mother Jones (the historical figure, not the magazine) is speaking to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

There isn’t much of a plot here, in the traditional sense. It’s more a story of the legacy of one woman, who fought and struggled and endured insults from her enemies, speaking to another such woman still in the midst of her own story. It’s a call to action for all of us, to not give up even in defeat, to stand up, brush ourselves off, and continue with whatever long, slow fight we’ve committed ourselves to in this life. It’s refreshingly lacking the cliches and saccharine sentiments usually present in such stories, and more inspiring than most (at least to me).

Depending on your political leanings, this story might not land as well for you as it did for me, but I thought it was timely and well-done.

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REVIEW: Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities edited by Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich

Review of Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich, eds., Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures (Center for Science and Imagination, Arizona State University, 2017) — Download here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

When I’m not reading and reviewing speculative fiction, I can be found writing it. But that’s only at night — by day, I am an academic logician, devoting my time to research and teaching. When I took the step a few years ago to start devoting serious time to my fiction writing, I found myself in a bit of a vocabularistic bind: If I distinguish my writing between “fiction” and “not fiction”, that’s as if I’m distinguishing it into “fiction” and “fact”, and if there is one thing any good scientist knows, it’s that today’s “facts” are tomorrow’s “fictions” — and “today’s fictions” are tomorrow’s “facts”. (So instead I try to contrast my fiction writing with my academic writing, which hopefully doesn’t carry the connotation that everything I say in my academic work is true. I try. I regularly fail.)

It is from this position that I find the present anthology, funded by NASA, so fascinating. The spring point of the anthology is Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1992 novel Red Mars, because Robinson’s “visions of the future…have helped to shape our broader cultural imaginary for human endeavors in space, both in science fiction and technical communities” (p. xv). In their editorial, “The Flag and the Garden”, Finn and Eschrich ask “Why should we go to space?” It’s a question whose answers have changed significantly over the past 70 years, as both the methods of space-travel and the means for funding those methods have changed. It would be to quick and facile to say that two generations ago our reaching for the stars was a cultural goal that we reached for collectively and that now, with the fragmentation of space-travel funding devolving from government bodies to private corporations, it is an individualistic pursuit, but this the former is the “flag” and the latter is the “garden” of the editorial’s title. What Finn and Eschrich argue is that we need to incorporate both the public and the private aspects of space travel into a “new collective understanding” (p. xx) of why we should go to space:

Until enough people buy into a public and private narrative of space, commerce can only take place in a very limited way (p. xx).

The goal of the collection is to rise to that challenge of melding the public and the private. As the editors describe it, the anthology is the result of “the act of putting writers, natural scientists, engineers, and social scientists into dialogue around the near future of space”, an act which “has effects on those collaborators themselves, who have grappled with—and we hope, learned something useful from—the exercise of working across disciplinary and creative boundaries” (p. xxi). This is not so much a book of authors trying to imagine future science but of scientists trying to imagine the future. The result integrates narratives and nonfiction, so that science and fiction are so closely blended that it’s hard to see where one begins and the other stops. While ordinarily the focus of this site is on reviewing SFF fiction, we don’t feel we’re going out on too much of a limb when we assume that readers of SFF fiction are also interested in SFF fact. As a result, I will be reviewing all the chapters of this anthology, both the narrative ones and the science ones.

It’s not clear from the editorial introduction how stories were solicited for this collection, but whatever method they used, they ended up with a disappointingly low score on the “non-male author” metric. (At least the collection does better on the “non-white” metric.) The book is divided into six sections: The editorial frontmatter, which includes an editorial as well as a non-fiction piece “Human Exploration of Mars: Fact from Fiction?” by Jim Bell (which we review in a post of its own), and then stories grouped under the headings of “Low Earth Orbit”, “Mars”, “Asteroids”, “Exoplanets”, and “Concluding Thoughts”, which includes an interview with Robinson. (There is also an 8 page bibliography, and if there is one thing that I love more than an informative footnote, it’s a bibliography.) Each section is prefaced by a brief excerpt from Red Mars, providing a framework for the entire book. The book is beautifully illustrated throughout by Maciej Rebisz.

Below is the table of contents; each chapter will be reviewed individually, with links added to this post as the individual reviews are published.

Sara L. Uckelman20 Comments

REVIEW: “A Field of Sapphires and Sunshine” by Jaymee Goh

Review of Jaymee Goh, “A Field of Sapphires and sunshine”, in Glass and Gardens: Solar Punk Summers, edited by Sarena Ulibarri, (World Weaver Press, 2018): 105-116 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology).

They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, and I suppose the relevant adage for a short story is that you shouldn’t judge it by its title. But I’m too avid a follower of Your YA Fantasy Series on twitter for the title of this one not to make me smirk (in fact, the day I wrote this review, the most recent tweet suggested the title A Bungalow of Sapphires and Earthquakes).

Snark and smirks aside, parts of the story I really enjoyed, with its eclectic mix of steampunk elements, with their slight sense of antiquation, and rather more traditional futuristic sci fi. On the one hand, there’s almost-entirely-electronically-conducted business, while on the other hand there are airships that take a week to cross the Pacific and are kitted out with suraus for Muslim passengers, and which farm their own fuel so that they never need touch the ground. Parts of the story, I found a bit didactic — there was a lot of “history” being rehearsed in a way that felt rather dry and detached, backstory being added for the sake of backstory rather than for the sake of the actual story, and we are informed rather bluntly that Alina’s mother “knew she was bisexual, of course”. In the end, I felt the story was a little let down by the delivery — and the title ended up not having that much to do with the story itself.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Fishing Village of the Damned” by George R. Galuschak

Review of George R. Galuschak, “Fishing Village of the Damned”, in Abandoned Places, edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell (Shohola Press, 2018): 251-266 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from watching SFF TV from the 90s on, it’s that things never go well for the Chosen One — and it doesn’t go any better for Astraea in this story, on assignment with Fred the Burning Skeleton, Sadako the evil spirit, and Dave. It’s supposed to be a charity mission, rescue the provincial Spanish fishing village from Big-Dick Howie, but Astraea — none of them — expected to find a village that didn’t want to be rescued.

This was a light comedy of errors, quick to read and amusing.

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REVIEW: Glass and Gardens: Solar Punk Summers edited by Sarena Ulibarri

Review of Sarena Ulibarri, ed., Glass and Gardens: Solar Punk Summers (World Weaver Press, 2018) — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

I was extremely pleased to be offered an ARC of this book as my exposure to the solarpunk genre has so far been rather limited and I’ve wanted to change that. I read enough depressing stuff, fiction and nonfiction, that the prospect of reading a collection of stories all of “a type of optimistic science fiction that imagines a future founded on renewable energies” (back cover) is enormously tantalising.

The book promises stories that are uplifting and optimistic, and the seventeen stories in this anthology are speculative in the very best sense of the word: They speculate on how our future could be, rather than how it must be, and provide an optimistic view which somehow manages to escape being escapism. Reading these stories, there is still a sense that these speculations could turn out to be true. The red thread that runs through all of them and ties them together into a lovely whole is the thread of hope: Sometimes the hope that survives in the face of adversity, sometimes the hope that thrives in the seat of comfort. I came away from reading these uplifted.

As is usual with our reviews of anthologies, we’ll review each story individually, and link to the reviews in the contents list below as the reviews are published:

All of the authors are new to me but one; Julia K. Patt’s story in Luna Station Quarterly was one of the first I reviewed for this site. But this is what I love about anthologies: A chance to be exposed to new genres and new authors.

The book itself is a lovely one, with attractive typesetting, impeccable proofreading, and a colorful and enticing cover. Having reading this anthology, I’m now quite interested in seeing what else World Weaver Press has to offer.

Sara L. Uckelman17 Comments

REVIEW: “The Death of Paul Bunyan” by Charles Payseur

Review of Charles Payseur, “The Death of Paul Bunyan”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2017: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2017): 279-286 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The suits pass a glance amongst themselves like it’s weed at a folk rock concert and Johnny wishes he ad brought something to take the edge off. H remembers smoking with Paul and Babe, during a summer they spent in the northwest once. Bigfoot hunting, they said, though in the summer of 1944 draft dodgin was probably more accurate.

For me, this was the perfect piece to finish off the anthology with, which is why I left it for last. The title alone evoked both nostalgia — memories of the Paul Bunyan murals at the Memorial Union at UW-Madison where did my BA and MA — and also a bit of embarrassment when I realised I’ve left Wisconsin behind long enough ago that I do not remember the details of Paul and Babe’s story.
So of course I did what any self-respecting academic would do, and read up on them before reading Payseur’s story. (While utterly irrelevant to Payseur’s story, I feel honor-bound to inform all of you that Disney did an animated musical Paul Bunyan, featuring the voice of Tony the Tiger.) What surprised me — most likely because I never knew this in the first place — was the status of the Bunyan tales as “fake-lore”, that is, stories that were made up to be like folk tales but without the long oral history that folk tales have. But this is supposed to be a review of Payseur’s story and not a discourse on Paul Bunyan, so let’s go see what happens when Bunyan dies, because that is when this story begins:

Paul Bunyan has died. Paul Bunyan has died and Johnny Appleseed is heading north (p. 279).

Both Bunyan and Appleseed are men out of American myth, but their status as myths doesn’t prevent them from still being men. (Reading the story I had a strange sense that I was reading a superhero story.) But how one can be both myth and man is the pole around which this story pivots, and in turn the story — stories — are that which make Paul and Johnny who they are:

They’re all made of stories, people like Johnny, people like Paul (p. 283).

But does the story die because Paul does, or does Paul die because the story does? That ambiguity, dear reader, is why you should read this story for yourself.

(Originally published in Lightspeed, 2016.)

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Deleted Scences” by Chris Cornell

Review of Chris Cornell, “Deleted Scenes”, in Abandoned Places, edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell (Shohola Press, 2018): 73-85 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

There are many ways in which a place can become abandoned — there can be a specific reason, a conscious decision, a particular action; or it can merely the slow ebbing away of any reason, decision, or action that one might have or take to go there. The town of Shetlerville has been abandoned both by choice and by inaction, and this illustrates the central theme of the story, how our choices affect our futures.

I really enjoyed this story-within-a-story-within-a-story, a story that balances upon the precipice between romance and horror. It is only the deleted scenes that determine which it is.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “The Drowning Line” by Haralambi Markov

Review of Haralambi Markov, “The Drowning Line”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2017: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2017): 183-195 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I drive on the way back and tell my husband everything he needs to hear — slowly and with conviction, a recital of sweet nothings. What I really do is think about the man in the water, my family’s legacy and undoing.

The story opens with a man being woken by the ringing of a cell phone, and in the exchange that follows between the first-person POV narrator and the man who has called him, I found I had to flip pages back and forth and reread the scene two or three times until I figured it what was happening and who was saying which words.

But that is pretty much my only complaint about the story. It is breathlessly beautiful and full of love and it caught me up in its wake and made my heart weep and bleed. It is both ordinary — the queer aspect is both foregrounded but utterly mundane — and extraordinary — with the speculative elements providing a framework that blend fantasy and reality seamlessly. Reading this story makes me so glad I bought this anthology, despite my misgivings about my suitability to review it.

(Originally published in Uncanny Magazine, 2016.)

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