REVIEW: “Silver Noir” by Ariel Ptak

Review of Ariel Ptak, “Silver Noir”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 166-167. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This story is a little vignette about werewolf hunting, centered around the expense of silver bullets and one man who uses up all seven of his in one night. There’s a big cost to pay if you are too profligate with your bullets, but the cost that the unnamed narrator has to pay is greater than the cost of any amount of silver. The story is quite short, but tightly written.

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REVIEW: “Penumbra” by Chris Brecheen

Review of Chris Brecheen, “Penumbra”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 168-177. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Brecheen’s story is urban fantasy, set in San Francisco, as we can tell from references to BART stations and other familiar aspects of the city. It’s a first-person story, and unlike many first-person stories which start off with a bunch of introspective maundering, here we were immediately introduced both to the personality quirks of the narrator (rather bitter and a bit sarcastic) and of the people the narrator interacts with, such as Dr. Cienica, who “pays lots of attention to how dirty her glasses are whenever she lies” (168).

I really enjoyed Brecheen’s use of language; there were turns of phrase every paragraph or so that made me smile. If you read for enjoyment, then this is a good story for you. If you read for a creepy feeling of displacement, and the sense that the setting of the story is shifted from our own reality by only a fraction, then this is also a story for you. It doesn’t take much imagination to wonder what it would take for people to be able to see the Penumbra here, in our own world.

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REVIEW: “Windhorse” by Zhao Haihong

Review of “Windhorse”, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #36 Early Autumn pp. 47-51. Purchase here. Review by Ben Serna-Grey.

This story has a couple footnotes, but they’re much appreciated, especially if you’re not familiar with everything about Chinese geography or Tibetan culture. The main character is traveling from China to the mountains of Tibet, where they will get windhorse pennants from the monks there in order to help them mourn their deceased lover.

“Windhorse” is short and sweet, a lovely tail about grieving and loss, acceptance, and it’s a great story to finish up this magazine.

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REVIEW: “Hansel and Gretel in the Wasteland” by Shondra Snodderly

Review of Shondra Snodderly, “Hansel and Gretel in the Wasteland”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 139-142. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This is the first of Snodderly’s three fairy tale retellings in this anthology, and the longest. In this version of Hansel and Gretel, Gretel and her brother are uneasy partners in a post-war world where there were “no free rides. Not even for family” (139). In the end, Gretel happily betrays Hansel to the witch, sacrificing him for her own freedom. “Only the useful survive” (142), and Gretel is dead intent on making herself useful. The only question is, useful to whom?

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REVIEW: “The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future” by Christi Nogle

Review of “The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future”, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #36 Early Autumn pp. 39-46. Purchase here. Review by Ben Serna-Grey.

Another story in this issue that is at least partly written in second-person, but this one works a lot better for me than “Children of Air” did. My instinct is that this is due to the story giving commands on what to visualize versus chronicling what I, the reader, am supposedly doing. There’s not as much of a hurdle to relating with the writing.

“The Best of Our Past” is a coming-of-age story about a young woman who falls in love with her step-cousin, chronicling life as they grow with and apart from each other, and a frightening power comes to light. It commands you to sit down and fall into its imagery, to see everything happening in the lives of these two young people. For me, at least, the command worked.

I wouldn’t say the ending is a happy one, and I’m not sure I’d say it’s a bad ending either. It just simply is, and sometimes that’s all you need. Another winner in a magazine that has so far had no duds. Quite an accomplishment.

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REVIEW: “The Nanny Bubble” by Norman Spinrad

Review of Norman Spinrad, “The Nanny Bubble”, Asimov’s Science Fiction November/December (2017): 160-166 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley.

Aunty Nanny knows when you are creeping

She knows when you’re a snake

She’ll keep you in her Bubble

Never gonna let you escape

Ted – who does not like being called Teddy – loves playing baseball and he’s pretty good at it. Or so he thinks. See, he’s only ever played structured Little League games in real time – everything else is simulations. He lives in a Nanny Bubble – a complete smartphone, 3D audio and Heads-Up Glasses system that monitors where he is and keeps him confined to a four-block radius. This doesn’t seem like such a constraint to Ted – he can go wherever he wants in virtual reality, unlike the poor kids. Except one day, when he accidentally ends up on the wrong side of the park he sees the poor kids playing a type of baseball he’s never seen before, played in real time. Ted sees an opportunity to test out whether he’s really good at baseball, if he could ever really think about playing the Major Leagues, and hatches a plan to find out.

This is a pretty simple story speculating on one idea – what if kids were so monitored that they couldn’t wander off, meet other kids, stay out close to dusk and make their own fun? Does that experience still have value in a technology-driven world? And if we don’t watch our kids every second of the day, what’s the worst that could happen?

I enjoyed this one. It’s got a nice nostalgia to it, despite the 20 minutes into the future setting. Spinrad really manages to capture that ‘late-summer hanging out at the park with your friends’ atmosphere. There’s also some nice food for thought about independence and the importance of being given room to figure things out for yourself. The parental villains fell a bit flat for me, but that element didn’t overly get in the way of a light, fun read.

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REVIEW: “Nephilia clavata” by G. Grim

Review of G. Grim, “Nephilia clavata“, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 70-71. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Oh, this story was deliciously creepy! From the very first line —

So back in the day, there was this hipster trend for living tattoos.

to the very end, and through all the riot of complications and consequences of sharing your skin with someone else. The story is only a page and a half, and unlike many stories that length, it is perfectly complete as it is, and extremely well crafted.

Warning: If you’re not a huge fan of spiders, don’t do as I did, and look up nephila clavata in wikipedia. Utterly gorgeous, but they’re as creepy as their namesake story.

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REVIEW: “Flesh and Code” by Johanna Arbaiza

Review of Johanna Arbaiza, “Flesh and Code”, in Myths, Monsters, and Mutations, edited by Jessica Augustsson (JayHenge Publications, 2017): 276-305. — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I’m always a bit worried when a story starts with a person standing alone, thinking to themselves, because most people tend to think pretty boring thoughts, and if that’s all that’s going to happen, I’m going to be bored — even if the person thinking these thoughts is the intriguely named Deathgleaner. In the end, I wasn’t bored, but I certainly was a bit confused.

It’s a slow building story. The initial world-building is done via a conversation that the Deathgleaner overhears, but there is little enough context to that conversation that the details that are provided are hard to make sense of; I felt as though I was being told quite a bit but that I had no way of understanding what any of it meant. There is (or was? or will be?) a war. There is (definitely is) a shortage of clean water. Probably these two things are connected.

Many of these questions are never answered, which I found frustrating — all the more frustrating because the characters are rich and complex, and excessively intriguing, and I wish that I could fully know and grasp their story.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Afloat Above a Floor of Stars” by Tom Purdom

Review of Tom Purdom, “Afloat Above a Floor of Stars”, Asimov’s Science Fiction November/December (2017): 106-117 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley. 

You’ve been selecting women with the traits you like, whether you know it or not… Independent legacy women join our branch. Legacy men keep joining the male branch. You belong to a dying species. 

A strange story that considers gender and long-distance space travel. Revali and Kemen are to be the sole human occupants on a voyage outside the galaxy. Along the way they will undertake their own research projects and participate in a long-term research project that seeks to answer one of humanity’s most pressing questions: is the splintering of the human race inevitable with the ability to create companions with genetics and personalities compatible to the other gender? Can men only cohabit successfully with women who have been designed to please them? And vice versa? Will ‘legacy’ humans die out because they are unable to coexist successfully long-term with other genders, or because they keep ‘defecting’ to cohabit with the kind of gender partners designed for them? Will the two legacy genders just give up trying to work out relationships with their legacy counterparts as just too hard?

The trip will take them thirty-six years and involve periods of hibernation and waking, as well as gender swaps for both of them across the journey. At the end Kemen and Revali have committed to undertake a ceremony in one last ditch attempt to show humanity that, from outside the galaxy their differences are minuscule and that unity between the two factions is possible. 

The approach to gender here is an interesting one – essentially considering the question of whether men and women can ever really understand each other or cohabit for long periods of time, or if there are fundamental personality differences and tendencies that both work together and don’t. But I found it a bit binary and limited. While there is gender changing here the gender roles being considered are between ‘legacy’ men who want compliant women and legacy women who are not suitable to work with legacy men long term and have instead also created partners they can work with. In short, I would have liked a more nuanced look at gender and cross-gender relations that the premise could have provided than was covered here. Despite this, the stated conflict has been fully thought through and Purdom explores it well, using the length of the trip and the discussions between Kemen and Revali as they move through their different physical bodies to cover the problem’s intricacies.  

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REVIEW: “Refugee; or, a Nine-Item Representative Inventory of a Better World” by Iona Sharma

Review of Iona Sharma, “Refugee; or, a Nine-Item Representative Inventory of a Better World”, Strange Horizons 8 Jan. 2018: Read online. Reviewed by Danielle Maurer.

Some stories only work because of their fascinating concepts, and that is the case for this particular story. “Refugee; or, a Nine-Item Representative Inventory of a Better World” is told by an old woman who runs a sort of mystical shelter for those who are on the run. Some brand of magic, never fully explained, brings people across time to her door and the doors of her people. The strangers can rest for a brief time and recover their strength before they return to their world.

As I said above, it’s a fascinating concept, and the story is couched in an inventive format that reveals it piece by piece. There’s a sense of history and a large world behind it, in the one-off comments made by the narrator and the hints of her lost love. Moreover, it’s clearly tied to our world somehow; the narrator mentions a Starbucks early on.

Without the novelty of that central idea, however, this story is a lot less engaging. There’s not really a plot here; ostensibly, it’s the appearance of the boy Corbie and the narrator’s interactions with him until he leaves, but these are covered only in brief sketches. We have the narrator’s presumably tragic love story with Kiran, but this too does not truly create any forward momentum. I’m left wishing for a full story featuring this old woman and the refugees she aids, something that introduces a conflict and grows toward a resolution.

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