REVIEW: “My Struggle” by Lavie Tidhar

Review of Lavie Tidhar, “My Struggle”, Apex Magazine 101: Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

Time travelers love to kill Hitler. But what if, instead of time travel to kill him, we had an alt history story in which he was ousted from power before he got going? And what if, after that, he fled to Britain to become a down-on-his-luck PI hiding under the name of Wolf? It’s a weird, borderline offensive premise, but it works surprisingly well. Tidhar hits all the right noir notes, from tight sentences and wry observations, to all the twits and turns and foul play you could hope for.

This was an uncomfortable read for me. I found myself empathizing with Wolf just as much as I reveled in his misfortune, a testament to Tidhar’s skill. It feels sacrilegious to make fun of Hitler, of Nazis, of the the SS and their ilk. They seem to too evil, too huge and looming. There is a fear, when reading this, that to laugh at them (or god forbid, sympathize with their struggles in this alternative world where the Holocaust never happened) is to make light of the evils they perpetrated in reality.

It’s the framing story that allows this to work. A former pulp fiction writer named Shomer is living in the ghetto with the rest of the Jewish people, hearing rumors of trains going east and fearing for the lives of his children. He watches a rendition of Dracula, and reflects on how stories – silly stories, fantastic stories, light stories – are all he has left for comfort. The connection between the framing narrative and the main action broke my heart, and gave the story a surprising depth of meaning.

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REVIEW: “Crispin’s Model” by Max Gladstone

Review of Max Gladstone, “Crispin’s Model”, Tor.com (2017): Read Online. Reviewed by Danielle Maurer.

Phrases like “sick galaxies of staring, slitted orbs” and “trails of poison paint” evoke the lush-yet-terrifying quality I associate with H.P. Lovecraft’s mythos. So it’s fitting, then, that these phrases are found in Max Gladstone’s Lovecraftian tale of a painter, his model and the twisted things his twisted paintings produce.

Gladstone’s masterful prose gives the story much of its impact. His style evokes Lovecraft’s without cleaving too closely to it, resulting in a story that feels both thoroughly Lovecraftian and yet also thoroughly modern in its presentation.

It’s a simple premise on the surface, yet Gladstone mines it for every ounce of tension, every dram of cosmic horror he can eke from it. The reader knows from the very beginning that something is off, and we discover the source of that strangeness with a slow build that’s always suspenseful and never boring. The climax itself will raise the hairs on your neck, but Gladstone never gives away too much of the monster, preserving the sense of mystery.

A worthy addition to the genre.

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REVIEW: “All for Beauty and Youth” by Kelly A. Harmon

Review of Kelly A. Harmon, “All for Beauty and Youth”, Starward Tales II, edited by CB Droege (Manawaker Studio, 2017): 41-58 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The story being retold here is “Hansel and Gretel”, as is obvious from the opening line. The retelling follows the traditional storyline but lacks some of the iconic elements, such as Hansel leaving a trail of breadcrumbs so that they can find their way back home.

The sci-fi element of the story is more steampunk than sci-fi; the setting is a context where steam trains are a standard mode of transportation, but where there are clockwork men and clockwork birds, and a very detailed description of a particular machine made out of rubber tubes, bellows, pulleys on pp. 47-48. Sometimes the steampunk setting seemed like a rather thin veneer, rather than being integral to the story, though the resolution (a resolution I didn’t quite understand, for it was not made clear why Hansel and Gretel are able to corner the market on their new product) at the end does rely on clockwork. However, one thing I truly enjoyed about the story was that the elements described as magic in original versions of the story are here explicitly described as science — science is truly magical, and this fact should be exploited more!

The above ends the rather “impersonal” review of the story, in which I try to focus on positive and negative aspects of the story that are accessible to most/many readers, and thus most people can stop here. Below, I’m going to permit myself to indulge in a very personal review of a singular aspect of the story which I suspect will cause no problems whatsoever for most readers (which is why they can all stop with the above and not read any further). But…

…I have to comment on the names. The pin for this story was stuck in Hamburg, and Hansel and Gretel are classic Low German forms of the names, appropriate for the north of Germany — -el is the Low German cognate of the High German diminutive suffix -lein (e.g., Fráulein is “little Frau”, and this word is a specifically High German word). Thus when Hansel calls his sister Gret, he is using a less-diminutized form of the name, rather contrary to how I suspect Harmon used “Gret” vs. “Gretel” in the story. And there is a disconnect between these two proper Low German forms, and the names of characters introduced by Harmon. Britta works fine, but both Fritz and Dietrich are distinctly High — not Low — German forms; I would have loved to have seen Frik and Diderik instead.

It’s a small thing, such a small thing, a thing that probably 99.5% of all the people who read this story will never even notice, much less be bothered by. So why am I mentioning it? Because I’m the one who read the story and am reviewing it, and it does bother me. It’s a useful reminder to authors that (a) you never know what will bother certain readers and not others and (b) what does bother certain readers can be very idiosyncratic to them and just because a reviewer says “this bothered me” doesn’t mean that this is a universal truth that holds for all readers. Reading is a personalised experience, and this happens to be a report of mine.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Dust & Bone” by Michael McGlade

Review of Michael McGlade, “Dust & Bone”, Persistent Visions (4 August 2017). Read online. Reviewed by Essence B. Scott .

Michael McGlade’s “Dust & Bone” was a difficult read; it felt to me that the story was romanticizing impending death and drug use, though the drugs are supernatural. The blurb says that this story about a guy who “lives a hard life on the edges of society and his relationship with his supernatural supplier and love interest Dust is beautiful, poignant, and, as it goes in many love stories, tragic.” I personally did not find this story to be tragic. I felt distant from the characters and their lives. Bone was too clingy to Dust. I understand that Dust is his love interest, but it’s tragic to see Bone feel like he’s nothing without Dust. Is that what love is like? If so, It is not something I’d want.

Having said that, there are some good bits in this story. The beginning, though it feels thin, is decent. Bone is angry and grieving. This story feels retrospective in that it takes us back through the middle-ground of their relationship—before Dust’s death, before her grip (so to speak) on Earth began to weaken when she discovered lumps on her body. Still, though, she will do anything for Bone, and that feels unhealthy to me also. Shouldn’t there be a limit to what you’ll do for a person before you put yourself at risk? I guess this feels unhealthy because I see that I do the same thing in my own life and know it is unhealthy, but still do what I do.

“Dust & Bone” was slow-paced for eight printed pages. The end made everything neatly packaged, but this story felt very thin and heavy on destructive behaviors. I barely highlighted anything on my printed copy because nothing made me curious; McGlade told us everything that happened, as though he was in the room watching. There was no distance.

Overall, this story was not one of Persistent Vision’s best. I hope to read more immersive stories in the future.

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REVIEW: “The Gates of Balawat” by Maria Haskins

Review of Maria Haskins, “The Gates of Balawat”, Strange Horizons (Samovar) 25 Sept. 2017: Read online. Reviewed by Danielle Maurer.

Set in a post-apocalyptic future, this story follows its nameless main character into the ruins of the British Museum. The main character and his team have been tasked with scanning the artifacts so limited edition replicas can be produced and sold to wealthy collectors. The originals will then be destroyed to preserve the company’s license. During the course of this job, the main character encounters one of the titular Gates of Balawat.

On the outset, this seemed like a story I would enjoy. Museums are some of my favorite places, and I’ve made an amateur’s hobby of learning about archaeology. The twist of setting it in the future addresses the old question of so many archaeologists: what will the archaeologists of the future think of us when they dredge through our ruins? Haskins touches on this throughout the story, and the bits and pieces of her larger world that leak through make the reader curious to learn more.

However, I found the execution lacking in places. Haskins makes it clear that the doors, the Gates of Balawat, have some special significance for the main character; they cause a “dream” that stirs within him throughout the novel. Yet the story never satisfactorily answers what, precisely, that significance is. We learn so little of the character’s past that we cannot guess at why the doors affect him so, or why he should dream of them so often. Ultimately, it causes the climax to fall short of what it could have been.

Despite that, there are still moments of beauty in the translated prose, filtered through a message about how meaningless our remnants will be once we are gone, that make this story worth reading.

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REVIEW: “Evil Opposite” by Naomi Kritzer

Review of Naomi Kritzer, “Evil Opposite”, Fantasy & Science Fiction 133, 3-4 (2017): 8-19 — Purchase Here. Reviewed by Michael Johnston.

As a man who fled from graduate school only a couple of semesters in, and as someone who has spent perhaps too much time worrying about past mistakes, I fell right into this story of a graduate student in Physics who builds a machine that allows him to look into alternate realities where he made different choices.

As he peeks in at each life, he sees some of the mistakes he’s made in his past, but Kritzer deftly avoids making him mawkish at the opportunities he’s missed. However, there’s a cost to using the machine, which our protagonist eventually realizes, and a moment where I wonder if the professor whose notes he used to build the machine maybe wasn’t as ignorant of it as he seemed.

The Moment of Truth is a good one, and while Kritzer could easily have built a novel around this concept, I think her choice of where to end and how to do it was the best option. She has, however, left a door open for a linked story if she ever chooses to pick up this story again.

Michael R. Johnston2 Comments

REVIEW: “The Here and Now Prison” by Jalal Hasan

Review of Jalal Hassan, Max Weiss (trans.), “The Here and Now Prison”, Iraq+100, edited by Hassan Blasim (Comma Press, 2016): 139-153 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

If I had to sum up the theme of this story in one line, it would be the question “How do we deal with continuity in the face of radical discontinuity, before and after?” Or perhaps, “How do we understand the present as history from the point of view of a radically different future?” This is, in a sense, the question that shapes the entire anthology, but it is more clear in this story than in some of the others, and Hassan makes it clear how our language is simply not up to the task. In the opening scenes, a teacher tells his students:

We call it the world whether it is our own world or that which we no longer know, the way it was before the year 2021. As if nothing changed.

It was a strange, beautiful, and sweet story, but also one which was never entirely explained. In particular, the reader is left to guess at what the title is meant to mean. I can think of a number of interpretations, but I am hesitant to articulate any of them, because they seem to be nothing more than idle guesses or speculation.

There are a handful of minor typographical/editing errors: missing commas on p. 143 and p. 146, an extra “the” on p. 152, and one occurrence of “effected” on p. 149 which I am pretty sure should have been “affected” (although there is a reading of the sentence in which “effected” works.)

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: Stories from Daily Science Fiction, September 25-29, 2017

Reviews of stories published in Daily Science Fiction from September 25 through 29, 2017. Reviewed by Caitlin Levine.

“Your Life Unfolds, and Then–” by Barbara A. Barnett, Sept 25, 2017: Read Online.

My favorite story from this week! Check out the full review here.

“A Cost-Effective Analysis for the De-Extinction of the Woolly Mammoth” by Ronald D Ferguson, Sept 26, 2017: Read Online.

Ferguson gives us the dialogue from a short lecture on the costs of bringing back an extinct species, with a humorous ending. This is one of those stories that seems mostly a set-up for the twist at the end, but it is short enough to work well.

“Progress” by John Nadas, Sept 27, 2017: Read Online.

Nadas looks at a world where “units” – which sound a lot like humans – are being created as manual labor in a society of “superior” creatures – which could possibly be robots. The dialogue reads clearly as one side of an interview with a biologist who champions the use of these units, using arguments reminiscent of those favoring robots and AIs. I’m ambivalent about this story: it made me think without providing easy answers or resolutions, but I found it somewhat bland.

“When He Saw Her” by Cory Josiah Easley, Sept 28, 2017: Read Online.

Easley describes a typical romance between a boy and a girl, with a twist: They both live in a society where heterosexual relationships are treated with the disdain and discrimination society often deals to homosexual couples.

I thought this story had a lot of potential for complicated critical thinking that didn’t get fully explored. But it seems to me a great tool for those struggling to overcome their own prejudices: an inside look at these experiences using characters that resonate with a straight reader.

“Astronauts Can’t Touch You” by Carlie St. George, Sept 29, 2017: Read Online.

A well-written, engaging look at the personal nature of grief and its relation to emotional distance. St. George evokes strong emotions that will be recognizable to anyone who has lost a loved one. In a word: tragic. The metaphor of astronauts is played against the story’s plot of an alien attack. I liked how this story explored the complex ravages of grief through metaphor, but I found it unrelentingly, devastatingly sad.

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REVIEW: “Your Life Unfolds, and Then–” by Barbara A. Barnett

Review of Barbara A. Barnett, “Your Life Unfolds, and Then—”, Daily Science Fiction, Sept 25, 2017: Read Online. Reviewed by Caitlin Levine.

I’m always fascinated by the seeming of consciousness. A good story brings the characters to life, but there’s something special about characters who interact with the writer or reader. In “Your Life Unfolds, and Then—,” we watch the narrator create a character as the story progresses, one aware – if not accepting – of their creation. And of course the narrator is not unaware of the parameters of their own “existence.” Barnett layers this tale with many questions about reality, awareness, and creation.

This is my favorite story from this week because of the interactions between the layers of participants – the character, the narrator, Barnett, and us readers.
The narrator’s sometimes creepy tone highlights the character’s frustration with not having control over their own life and contrasts it with the exuberant feeling of being the protagonist. If you are a fan of the movie “Schenectady, New York” or Tailsteak’s comic “1/0,” you’ll like this.

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REVIEW: “In Search of Stars” by Matthew Bright

Review of Matthew Bright, “In Search of Stars”, Glittership Episode 43 (2017): Read/listen online. Reviewed by Julia K. Patt.

What an unusual, mysterious story.

Our unnamed narrator is a scientist living in Los Angeles; he develops a blue paint that makes people float away into the sky. This is what he does with his one-night stands, the men he takes back to his apartment. He wants these men, sometimes desperately, but doesn’t want to linger with them or see them again. There’s a sense that by releasing them into the atmosphere, our narrator is protecting himself, distancing himself from what he really wants.

Of course, not all of them go quietly or disappear unforgotten. We can understand, perhaps, why the narrator is so uneasy.

Anonymity dominates not only in his life but also in the city itself, a peculiar hybrid of shiny Hollywood glamour and “Good old American filth.” Where all the women are named Marilyn and even laundromats turn into something very different at night. No one is exactly as they seem or as they claim to be, including—especially—the man telling this story.

It’s a story rich in the unspoken, the undeclared, which becomes more than a little unsettling (in the best way). There’s very little dialogue, aside from the narrator’s conversations with Eugene, an old friend from school who works on movies. And even his time with Eugene eventually lapses into silence at the story’s conclusion.

Then the narrator must make a decision: to stay or float away himself and join the men he’s sent into the sky.

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