REVIEW: “The Secret History of the Original Line” by T. L. Rodebaugh

Review of T. L. Rodegbaugh, “The Secret History of the Original Line”, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #36 Early Autumn pp. 9-16. Purchase here. Review by Ben Serna-Grey. 

This is an extremely interesting historical piece, with a mix of fantasy. I haven’t been able to tell yet if it also follows in the speculative fiction tradition of alternate history stories. It tells of an expedition sent out by the King to trace and bind a border between Virginia and Carolina in what would otherwise be called the United States of America. The story takes the form of an expedition log, similar to the travel narratives that were popular in the 1800s by writers such as Herman Melville.

The history, cultural differences, and mythology make themselves readily apparent. The narrator speaks of their disgust of their Carolinian workmate, a pompous man who brings two indentured servants with him on the expedition. Our narrator sarcastically calls the man Christian in honor of his pious nature. The writing style reminds me of Melville, Hawthorne, Poe, and Mary Shelley in all the best ways, though the more thickly-written style, combined with the slightly longer length compared to the other stories in this issue made “The Secret History” take a while longer to get through.

The group comes upon a hermit, naked and seemingly savage, especially to Christian, though he quickly shows his nuanced intelligence as he converses with the other men. He explains it’s all well and good the King wants to parse out the land for his commissioners, but it’s owned by no one and changes every day: “If you parcel it out today, you will find it a different matter tomorrow.” The hermit becomes a focal point of the story, as does the aftermath of what happens to the survey team after meeting him.

It’s a skillful piece, though bleak and dreadful with hints at time travel and themes of inevitable war, doom, global climate change, and revenge. For those who think a story straddling the line between the “literary” and the speculative would strike their fancy I recommend this very highly. It’s another standout in this issue of the magazine, along with The Crane Alphabet and a few others. There are a lot of gaps in the story to fill in yourself, and it may take a couple readings to fully grasp everything, but it’s well worth the investment. Congratulations are also in order as this is apparently also Rodebaugh’s first published piece of fiction, and a very accomplished one at that.

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REVIEW: “Confessions of a Con Girl” by Nick Wolven

Review of Nick Wolven, “Confessions of a Con Girl”, Asimov’s Science Fiction November/December (2017): 35-47 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley.

Imposter syndrome turned up to 11.

What if your merit and social worth was not just reliant on your work and outputs, but on how everyone else sees you? Wolven presents a world where all social interaction is managed via Pro/Con votes on your holoscore – visible to everyone. It has resulted in a world of carefully managed interpersonal and online personas and interactions. These are judged and influence your world and professional opportunities as much as your college grades do.

Sophie is in a counselling session at college after she has fallen too far into the red (too many ‘Con’ votes). Wolven uses Sophie’s account of how she got there to discuss the ramification of the Pro/Con system taken to the extreme and how seemingly minor stumbles at different points can ripple outward and elicit negative responses. It also considers what good deeds count and whether the only things that matter are those that are seen and acknowledged by others.

We find out that Sophie has been allowed entry into a select college based on her excellent green holoscore and perceived potential. However this potential is increasingly questioned by herself and fellow students. Does she deserve to be there? Is she a good enough person? Is she capable of it?

I found this story conceptually compelling, but the narrative device of Sophie telling her professor a bit dry and created distance between the reader and the story. An interesting idea, but the story around it could have been more compelling.

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REVIEW: “The Crane Alphabet” by L. M. Davenport

Review of L. M. Davenport, “The Crane Alphabet”, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #36 Early Autumn pp. 7-8. Purchase here. Reviewed by Ben Serna-Grey.

This story is extremely short and sweet, reminding me a lot of Le Guin’s Earthsea, and I say that as a huge compliment.

The Crane Alphabet tells the tale of a novice in some sort of religious, possibly magical, commune, who seems to be mute. The one telling the story explains that another member of the commune, Marin, has been waiting to see if the novice will transform into a bird. The story is so short that to tell more would be giving away too much.

I will say that Davenport has woven a beautiful tale that speaks about fear of the fabled “other,” obsession, and the ways that obsession can transform a person. It’s one of the stand-out stories in this issue of the magazine and I highly, highly recommend it.

Ben Serna-Grey2 Comments

REVIEW: Stories from Daily Science Fiction, October 2-6, 2017

Reviews of stories published in Daily Science Fiction from October 2 through 6, 2017. Reviewed by Caitlin Levine.

I’m going to do something a little different here. I usually give short reviews of four of the week’s Daily SF stories and pick one to look at in length in a separate review. This week I had trouble limiting my wordiness to just one story, so I’m going to run a little long here…

“The Seven Deadly Genes” by Candice Lim, Oct 2, 2017: Read Online.

Lim creates a futuristic feel right off the bat with vibrant images of a world-of-tomorrow, while her characters’ actions and emotions feel just like our world today. She creates an interesting juxtaposition of the strange and the familiar, the advanced and the never-gonna-change. Our shifty narrator takes a quick turn for the honorable, leading us into an enthralling race against the clock.

For a society concerned with law and justice, we sure love the story of the honorable thief. Jean Valjean, who steals to feed his family; Robbin Hood and Zorro who steal to save their people. But Lim gives us a world where there is no justice, per say. No courts or judges to grant leniency. Laws are encoded into a person’s very body, and breaking a one of them means death. But for the honorable thief, there are worst things than falling prey to Greed.

“The Eternal Army” by M. K. Hutchins, Oct 3, 2017: Read Online.

Future meets past in a heartfelt tale of ancient roman soldiers and a future Rome. Mythology is layered with the worst of the modern world. Hutchins uses vibrant characters and clever dialogue to explore the theme of valor and the idea that “eternal” is not some characteristic of a place, but something that is created through hard work by those who refuse to let a place die.

I loved how Hutchins gave her roman character some old sensibilities but also made him completely accepting of how the world had changed.

This story makes me cry every time I read it – in a good way.

“The Interrogation” by Kelly Jennings, Oct 4, 2017: Read Online.

How would you handle it if you wanted to build a slave labor force that could never rebel? Assume that you have access to all that futuristic bio-engineering but you still have to use humans as your base. Give it a thought for a moment.

In Jennings’s story, they take the tack of keeping them cute and helpless. Jennings tells this tale as one side of a recorded interrogation, and does a fabulous job of making it understandable. The narrator manages to strike a tone that is both belligerent and helpless.

Now, the science in here actually works pretty well. Heads up for some light Spoilers: What this story is talking about is called horizontal gene transfer, and biologists think it has happened multiple times throughout the history of life on Earth. It is usually facilitated by a bacterium or a virus. Bacteria are always exchanging small gene packets with each other (it’s one of the ways that immunity to an antibiotic can spread so quickly), and viruses insert their own genes into a host’s chromosomes so that the host will replicate the virus. Because of this capability, modified viruses are often used as a tool in genetic engineering to insert the desired DNA into a new organism. Both of these mechanisms could end up inserting a piece of DNA from one host into another. It doesn’t happen often to multi-cellular organisms, but the possibility is there. Now, add to that a set of genes that are designed to mesh with the human genome, and have perhaps already been transferred by virus once? This isn’t looking improbably to me at all.

“Automaton” by Matt Handle, Oct 5, 2017: Read Online.

How do you tell a human from a robot? Or, a better question – how does a human tell whether they are a human or a robot? What, really, is the difference between the complicated programming of an advanced neural network and a human brain? Perhaps it is morality, emotion, and responsibility. And wouldn’t it be nice if you could give those up? Or maybe you just never had them in the first place.

Handle combines all of the philosophical debates surrounding otherkin with themes of personal responsibility and how we rationalize our actions.

“Glass” by Adam Dean, Oct 6, 2017: Read Online.

There area a lot of stories out there that take a look at Cinderella’s life after her marriage, but this is the first I’ve read that doesn’t deal with the short term. Instead of seeing Cinderella’s initial disappointment or delight, we jump forward years to see a Cinderella who has spent most of her life in an unhappy marriage. How could she leave, as a literal trophy wife? How bad do things have to get before she’ll try?

Dean’s story creates the same trapped feeling that comes with the fairy tale of Cinderella, told in an older and more world-weary voice.

This is Dean’s debut story, and a promising sign of work to come.

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REVIEW: “The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine” by Greg Egan

Review of Greg Egan, “The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine”, Asimov’s Science Fiction November/December (2017): 14-34 — Read Excerpt Online or Purchase Here. Reviewed by Kiera Lesley.

“…surely the planet still needed more than one person with the same skills?” (p.21).

Increasing automation and issues of basic income are contemporary big ticket speculative fiction fodder. Writers are looking at what effects these changes will have and what society will look like after the changes have taken place – what comes next?

Egan takes a refreshingly close and human angle to these themes in this novelette, focusing on the time period just as the situation begins to tip away from meaningful employment for everyone, but just before good solutions have been found. It’s a transitional period and nothing is quite working right.

The novelette’s protagonist, Dan, is made redundant from his job at a debt purchasing and consolidation firm, despite being good at his work. He begins to suspect that the company has outsourced his job to a machine.

The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine is less about Dan’s situation, though, and more a thoughtful exploration of how people would be affected by mass automation and related changes in various labour markets. How do you respond to large-scale change in a labour market when there are no viable alternatives yet and the old responses don’t work the way they used to? What happens if the services aren’t as good as they were previously, but are good enough? What employment prospects are left and how do you get them? What changes do you have to make to your lifestyle to cope with your new situation? What’s your least bad outcome? And how would corporations plan for and respond to the inevitable fallout of their ultimate end game?

Egan considers these questions through glimpses into the lives and experiences of different people in contact with Dan and going through similar employment problems. Seeing how these people respond to the circumstances – conspiracy theories, self-disillusionment, seeking frustrated justice – gives depth to the complexity of the situation at play. Policy makers often talk about a ‘primordial soup’ of solutions to a problem – this piece is all about showing that soup before the answers have been lifted out of it. The problems and solutions move around and opportunities are there to be taken, but not everything is necessarily viable and no-one knows what will work long-term.

The pacing is steady rather than quick, taking the time to consider all the elements of the premise being explored. I found the opening sequence a bit disorienting as well, but the narrative stabilised fairly quickly.

Importantly, the piece ends on a hopeful note, presenting the only sane path through uncertainty – focusing on what one person can do to help themselves.

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REVIEW: “The Darwinist” by Diaa Jubaili

Review of Diaa Jubaili, “The Darwinist”, Strange Horizons 30 Oct. 2017: Read online. Reviewed by Danielle Maurer.

It’s inevitable when writing regular reviews of a publication that a reviewer will find a story that doesn’t resonate with her. “The Darwinist” is one of those stories for me.

Set in 20th century Iraq, the story tells of the birth of Shafiq, a boy with a furry, banana-shaped birthmark and the son of a reviled Darwinist. After leaping back in time to discuss the boy’s father, the story then tells of Shafiq’s adulthood, searching for a banana to give his pregnant wife, and how that search ends in tragedy.

When I say “the story tells,” I do mean tells. “The Darwinist” has a distinctly newspaper-like quality to it as it lays out the events of Shafiq’s life. It maintains a birds-eye view, never taking the time to deeply explore any of the characters or moments it discusses. There’s little dialogue or opportunity to show the story. Instead, it reads like a synopsis of a novel without much plot (save for the banana search that takes up the last third).

It’s entirely possible that this story is meant as an allegory, and I’m missing some political or cultural connotations that would give it greater emotional depth (it is told in translation from Arabic). But as it is, the narrative distance from the characters and the lack of a clear direction for the early plot kept me from fully engaging with the story.

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REVIEW: “The Case of the Mysterious Meat” by Kate Ingram

Review of Kate Ingram, “The Case of the Mysterious Meat”, Apex Magazine 101: Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

This light noir tale won a high school literary competition, with the prize of publication in Apex Magazine. You might expect me to comment on the youth of the author, or to make qualified remarks about the quality of the work. Honestly, the constraints of the competition are even more interesting than the age of the writer! Yes, Ms. Ingram is currently a high school junior. But this piece was written for a competition in which the participants were given a prompt and had only one hour to write flash fiction in response. An hour, from inspiration to completion! I marvel at the audacity of the task. And yet, despite these limitations, Ms. Ingram put together a story that made me literally laugh out loud more than once (and let me tell you, that’s tough; I am easily amused, but it takes a lot to get more than a smirk out of me)

Recommended for those who enjoy noir stories with more than a touch of the ridiculous, and for anyone who is curious how the next generation of writers is coming along.

J.Z. Weston1 Comment

REVIEW: “Children of Air” by Gabriela Santiago

Review of Gabriela Santiago, “Children of Air”, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #36 Early Autumn: pp. 2-8. Purchase here. Reviewed by Ben Serna-Grey.

 

Second-person narrative is something that can be a bit of a barrier for me in terms of really getting into a piece. This story is opened up with a lovely little selection from Robert Lois Stevenson, then jumps right into second-person narration, which admittedly raised my hackles a little bit.

The saving grace of this work is that the narration is fairly loose; it reads more like guidelines as opposed to a sequence of actions and thoughts you’re supposedly taking.

The story tells, in a sequence of vignettes, about the Children of St. Paul, aka the children of air, who are ghost-like figures.

Everything blends together into a dream-like blur as the story goes on. It starts out telling you about the park, and the plaque there dedicated to the Children of St. Paul, and how the park isn’t so suited to living children. Then the “you” addressed in the story falls asleep, falls into a surreal dream, wakes up and take seven of the children home for a sleepover. Meanwhile the weight of the children begins to weigh heavily on your emotions, and you’re urged over and over to drink milk to help with that burden. I don’t want to give away spoilers for anyone interested in the story, so I’ll just say the ending does come with an implied message.

I enjoyed the surreal aspects of this story, and the overall arc and message of it. The only thing that still ended up keeping me from really connecting was the second-person narration. Even still, I’d recommend a read, as it’s still skillfully made with a nice blend of melancholy, surrealism, and wit.

 

 

Ben Serna-Grey2 Comments

REVIEW: Poetry in Starward Tales II

Review of poetry in Starward Tales II, edited by CB Droege (Manawaker Studio, 2017). — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I decided to tackle all the poetry in the anthology in one go because poetry can be wicked hard to review and it made sense, in the context of a themed anthology like this, to discuss all the poems together.

“Penelope Longing for Odysseus” by Vonnie Winslow Crist (p. 141)

One of the hallmarks of a classic story is that it transcends both time and genre. In this poem, Crist has transposed the story of Odysseus to far into the future, with Penelope waiting at home for her space-ship captain to return. Whether told in epic poetry and set in ancient Greece, or told in short blank verse form and set far in the future, the story of Penelope’s patience, love, and dissatisfaction with her wandering husband remains a powerful one. (The poem also reads aloud nicely, and rated an “It was good” from my 6 year old.)

“Chained” by Vonnie Winslow Crist (p. 39)

Like Crist’s other poem in the anthology, this one also draws upon a foundation of Greek myth, but it is not a straightforward retelling of a known tale. Instead, Crist uses the familiar elements of mythology to couch an unfamiliar future, when humanity has been awoken from cryo-state on a foreign planet. Will we find ourselves in the underworld, in purgatory, or in paradise?

“Girl in the Red Hood” by Richard King Perkins II (p. 97)

The inspiring story for this poem is obvious from the title. The first four stanzas follow the traditional story for the most part, with embellishments and details that make it a distinctive and not generic re-telling. The final stanza is where the dramatic climax is reached; unfortunately, there was not quite enough in it for me to understand the import of the ending. It wasn’t clear who the narrator of the poem was, nor what memories it was that the girl in the red hood forgot before the wolf devoured her.

“Icarus” by María Castro Domínguez (p. 117)

(Note that the table of contents puts this poem on p. 115).

The story of Icarus is one of my favorites, so I was immediately drawn to this poem from its title. The poem did not disappoint — Castro Domínguez paints some vivid pictures with her words — but I am not sure what connects the story of the poem to the story of Icarus.

“Beauty, Sleeping” by Marsheila Rockwell (p. 173)

This brief (10-line) poem takes the story of sleeping beauty and turns it upside down — what happens if when the prince comes to wake the princess instead of giving her his animative power, he takes hers instead?

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “I’m Your One-Way Street” by Naomi Libicki

Review of Naomi Libicki, “I’m Your One-Way Street”, Persistent Visions (7 July 2017): Read online. Reviewed by Essence B. Scott.

After the slog that was the last couple of stories from Persistent Visions, I was definitely looking forward to reading the next story in the queue (working backwards from the most recent story): Naomi Libicki’s “I’m Your One-Way Street.”

This story, though a little shorter than the previous ones, did not disappoint. I was immediately drawn into the world established for the reader. It also was a bonus that this is a love story and I don’t read many love stories. However, the header photo and the title got me curious to see what this story was about.

“I’m Your One-Way Street” reads like a stream of consciousness; the reader becomes one with the story and, much like a something caught in the river, flows along with it, which I think was what Libicki was trying to go for. If so, a job well done. Libicki uses her human protagonist, Josephine’s (or “Jos,” as friends call her) drunkenness to start the story. But, the reader wonders, is Jos so drunk? Is her supernatural lover, Via, real? Is this all happening in her head? Could the story just very well be a dream? I personally don’t think the entire story is a dream; it feels very much real to me. Could it be a premonition? I don’t think so. No matter which way you cut it, Via is real to Jos, and vice-versa.

In the beginning of the story, the lovemaking scene is beautifully written. As my mom would put it, “sexy, but not dirty.” I felt the connection that Jos and Via made and was actively rooting for them to hopefully get back together. I won’t spoil the rest of the story for you. Give it a read…

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