REVIEW: “Two Tails” by Ransom Noble

Review of Ransom Noble, “Two Tails”, in Abandoned Places, edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell (Shohola Press, 2018): 86-99 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This story relies heavily on the standard tropes about twins (e.g., “their twin connection”, p. 97), unfortunately to its detriment, in my opinion. Landry and Bellamy are twins training to become professional mermaids when an accident befalls Landry, leaving Bellamy — who has always been the follower — behind. I found Bellamy to be rather flat and personless, primarily defined in relation to her twin, who exerts significant (and sometimes problematic) control over her. I’ve read enough twin stories for the tropes to be familiar, but reading them again here it makes me wonder how much is trope and how much is real, and also how much the story needs Landry and Bellamy to be twins — could it have worked if Landry and Bellamy were merely sisters rather than twins? I think it could have.

This was a story that I found, personally, merely “fine”. In the context of this anthology, it seemed a bit out of place; it was not clear to me what was the place that had been abandoned.

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REVIEW: “Mark Twain’s Daughter” by Cath Schaff-Stump

Review of Cath Schaff-Stump, “Mark Twain’s Daughter”, in Abandoned Places, edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell (Shohola Press, 2018): 117-125 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The first thing the snarky, sarcastic, rather rude commentary in my head had to say about this story was, “Oh, look! It’s a story about a woman whose identity is defined by her relationship to a man!” But it’s unfair to judge a story by its title, and Susy’s story is so much more interesting than her relationship to her father. As I read it, I kept thinking, “She could be anyone’s daughter, and I would still read her story.” The appearance of Mark Twain and other members of the Clemens family in the story is almost entirely incidental.

For awhile I also wondered whether this would be another story where the central theme of the anthology — abandoned places — would not be entirely clear. But in the end, the story fit. Places become abandoned when people are abandoned in them — that is how Susy’s story fits the anthology brief.

(Originally appeared in Curcubital 3, 2012.)

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REVIEW: “The Parthian Shot” by Dashiell Hammett

Review of Dashiell Hammett, “The Parthian Shot”, in Abandoned Places, edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell (Shohola Press, 2018): 275 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I’m not sure if I should confess the following ignorance of not, but fears of what random people on the internet think of me have never really plagued me much, so: I’d never heard of Dashiell Hammett before reading this piece of flash fic, now nearly 100 years old.

It’s hard to evaluate a story that’s only a paragraph, but as a parent myself, I can sympathise with Paulette, and admire her courage as she does what probably every parent considers doing at least once during their tenure.

But I am not sure why this story is in this anthology. It is the final story in the collection, one which I would expect would cap it off, solidify the experience, that it would match well the way in which the collection opened. But while it is a good little story, it lacks an abandoned place. It just doesn’t seem to fit with the rest of the collection (that I’ve read so far).

(Originally published in Smart Shot, 1922)

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REVIEW: “The Money Book” by Lara Kristin Herndon

Review of Lara Kristin Herndon, “The Money Book”, in Abandoned Places, edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell (Shohola Press, 2018): 239-249 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The setting for this story is a vague, unsettling, unpleasant future: After the bombs, after the wars, after the virus, after so many people have died. It is a time when so many things that used to have intrinsic value — like money — are now worthless in themselves, worthful only in so far as they can be used to create something of value, something like paper. Paper to record the past, to provide a foundation for the future.

Herndon’s story comes with a heavy weight of significance, palpable in every action on every page. Yet, I was never quite sure what it was that was significant; and for that reason, this story just didn’t quite work for me.

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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: “Making Friends” by Steve Kopka

Review of Steve Kopka, “Making Friends”, in Abandoned Places, edited by George R. Galuschak and Chris Cornell (Shohola Press, 2018): 39-56 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I’m very bad at genres, especially all the finely-sliced sub-categories that are out there nowadays. But the beginning of this story made me go, “Oh! That’s what ‘urban fantasy’ is (when it’s not vampire and werewolf romance).” Everything is ordinary and real and familiar, except everything that is extraordinary and fantastic and strange. The lines between two the are blurred, and the result is unsettling — unsettling enough that I decided in the end to also classified it as ‘horror’. Horror isn’t my cup of tea, but the story was compelling nevertheless.

For me, though, this story was let down by the quality of its writing. The prose didn’t feel as finely crafted, and I kept tripping up on little things — small grammatical errors, a word occurring in two sentences in a row, the feeling that I was being given a recitation of facts — that detracted from my enjoyment.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Angel, Monster, Man” by Sam J. Miller

Review of Sam J. Miller, “Angel, Monster, Man”, in Steve Berman, ed., Wilde Stories 2017: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press, 2017): 123-151. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Because to succeed as myth, Tom had to be dead. Otherwise the charade became too complicated to maintain. And who would know, in this city where the dying stacked up faster than firewood, that this one particular name in the long litany had never been an actual person?

A thought occurred to me, while reading the title of this piece, that while women have the threefold “Maiden/Mother/Crone” division, there isn’t really anything equivalent for men. What would such a tripartite characterisation of men look like? What types of myths and history could such a division tap into, in the way that the one for women does?

Miller’s story doesn’t actually address this question, but these were the thoughts playing in the back of my mind as I read it. I really enjoyed the complex narrative structure: Three parts, one for each portion of the title, one for each of three named narrators, the three that gave birth to Tom.

I loved the way the story operated at two levels, at one, just a story, at the other, an interrogation of the limits and boundaries of lies, fiction, and myth. Above all that, I loved the beauty of the story, with fine, delicate, ugly language. (The story is so full of lines I’d like to quote that if I quoted them all, I’d just be reproducing the entire story. “Adulterous toad-priests”. “Being a criminal is not so different from being an artist.” “Because of course it will hurt, because the things we need most always do.” “Love is the disease.” Ah! So many beautiful words.)

There is a rawness to the stories in this anthology that is unlike anything in any of the other anthologies I’ve reviewed for SFFReviews. It is hard to read these stories, Miller’s included especially, and not be moved. I also think I will be hard pressed to find a more powerful story in the collection than this astonishing one.

(This story first appeared in Nightmare, 2016).

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REVIEW: “There’s No Need to Fear the Darkness” by Heather Morris

Review of Heather Morris, “There’s No Need to Fear the Darkness”, Luna Station Quarterly 33 (2018): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Brenda is one of those characters where a few paragraphs in, already I’m thinking, I like her. I want to get a beer with her sometime and hear stories about her job. She wouldn’t bore me with small talk, and I bet she has had some interesting adventures. And I bet she wouldn’t mind if I whittered on about my job; she strikes me as someone who both gives and takes. Morris describes Brenda as “petty and mean-spirited”, but I’d call her “honest” rather.

I like her no-nonsense approach to her work and to the stupidity of humanity, and I love the casual and easy love and friendship that flows between her and the other two “Lazes” (short for “Lazaruses”; I did make the mistake of mentally mispronouncing the word the first time it was used, not (yet) knowing it’s origin). I love the humor that Brenda, Cade, and Aage have — I laughed out loud more than once reading this story.

I like reading stories like this because I wish there were more people like this in the world, and since there aren’t, I just have to settle with reading stories about them instead.

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REVIEW: “Mother Tongues” by S. Qiouyi Lu

Review of S. Qiouyi Lu, “Mother Tongues”, Asimov’s Science Fiction January/February (2018): 147-153 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley.

“I bet she bought her Mandarin…”

What if you could buy and sell languages? Excise or implant the knowledge into your brain? Go in for day surgery and wake up fluent in a new language – lifted straight from a native speaker?

Jiawen Liu wants to sell her second language, English, to pay for her daughter’s education at Stanford. But when her English is assessed as less than top quality and she is unable to afford the necessary accent-reduction courses to improve the value of it she has to consider other, more drastic, options.

A beautiful and thought-provoking piece and a highlight of this issue. Lu’s piece does a beautiful job of depicting the bilingual experience and exploring the connection between languages and our sense of self.

There’s a lot going on in this quite short piece. There’s commentary on migrant experiences, assimilation, and how these differ between generations. Consideration of the large and small interactions and use of different languages to get through a day, including code switching.

There’s sly commentary here, too, about authenticity, appropriation and exploitation of minority groups. Is it ok to steal someone else’s authentic voice and use it yourself? Is your learned integration ever going to be as acceptable as everyone else’s and will it forever be worth less? And is something really a choice when other options are not realistically available to you? And is it worth giving up your own voice so that someone else can keep and train theirs?

Lu’s prose on the whole here is tight and lovely. They set up the characters fast and the interactions pack emotional wallops along the way. Their inclusion of multilingual text and other representative prose elements in particular do an excellent job showing the confusion and disorientation of not having the right words to hand – quite literally showing rather than telling the reader the experience.

 

 

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REVIEW: “The Equalizers” by Ian Creasey

Review of Ian Creasey, “The Equalizers”, Asimov’s Science Fiction January/February (2018): 66-74 —  Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley.

“If everyone wore the Equalizers, it wouldn’t matter what I looked like, Pamela thought. I could waltz back into the office in yesterday’s outfit, without any makeup, and no one would know.”

Pamela’s workplace is trialing Equalizers – glasses which augment what the wearer sees, hears and smells to remove personal characteristics from whomever they are interacting with. People instead look like humanoid shapes in colours reflective of their work unit, and labelled with their job title. No names. The rationale is that a fair environment improves employee morale… and saves on compensation claims. Pamela finds herself starving for real human contact after spending all day interacting with faceless, inhuman shapes and has been dating hard to get over a bad breakup. Her friend, Vonda, dares her to try the Equalizers as a kind of blind date. Could she be attracted to someone based on their intellect and conversation alone?

This piece hits on some hot-button themes. How far can or should we reasonably take anti-discrimination practices? What would we need to do to overcome our bodies’ natural snap-judgements based on social conditioning and personal, inherent bias? What happens to our interactions and instincts when you take away all of the cues we normally rely on to guide us?

As such, there’s a lot of speculative fodder in this one idea of technologically removing all bias indicators from interactions with others. I liked that the contrast between judgement calls and discriminatory behaviour in the workplace and in online dating, too, showing two different realms of interaction where first impressions matter. There’s an underlying theme here about what you can see of people – in Pamela’s workplace she can’t ‘see’ people at all, and in her dating she doesn’t really see the people beyond their features. It’s polar opposite ends of a spectrum.

However, I didn’t find Pamela’s character development particularly strong – she never really had to confront her own biases and perceptions, or make any particularly big choices. There didn’t seem to be anything at stake for her personally or professionally and I found this weakened the piece, the ending in particular.

Ultimately, a great premise and idea for technology, but I felt it could have had a stronger narrative to meet the concepts and themes it was playing with.

 

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