Charles Payseur – Grey Patterson

edited by Rhiannon Rasmussen and Dave Ring

And here I am again, reading yet another anthology.¹ I think this is the last one in my queue for a while. Ending on a pretty good note, though; while nothing leapt out at me quite as much as with Power to Yield, there’s also the benefit that nothing leapt out at me quite as much as with Power to Yield. Nothing extremely good, nothing deep and depressing.

The choice of “mecha” as a theme was interesting, and while most of them stuck with the classic Big Robot approach, I think every story did something interesting with it, and a few pulled the concept of mecha into a fantasy setting. Quite fun to read through all these different bite-sized pieces of worlds, wondering each time what they’re going to do to differentiate themselves. Delightfully, they all did.

I think my favorite goes to the one that felt the least “mecha” to me—Charles Payseur’s “The Demolition of Trucko Brahe”. There’s a bit of hinting at some giant robot fights, but the mecha here is a truck. A sentient alien truck, but a truck. This reminded me of Animorphs, really, though from a different angle. It’s a world that was clearly built around being a children’s show, but we’re looking at the aftermath. What happens after the war was won by heroic sacrifice, and the saviors of the galaxy get dropped back into the unaware world from which they came. It was sad, melancholy, and hopeful, all at once.

Overall, an enjoyable read; here’s your link.²

Two in a row is already a lot, but it was, in point of fact, three; I just disliked the third one and so didn’t write a review. ↩
This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩

“We’re Here”

edited by L.D. Lewis & Charles Payseur

Anthologies are always an interesting thing to read; they offer more variability than a single book by a single author, and tend to be a lot easier to read in bursts. This one made for some great vacation reading — get through one story, go for a dip in the pool, read another while drying off in the sun.¹ That said, it’s not a guarantee it’ll be good; sometimes the focus area is too depressing, or the editors made a succession of bad choices.

This, delightfully, was not one of those. “Queer speculative fiction” is a fairly safe topic area to begin with, as it basically pins a single character trait of one or more characters in the story, and a delightfully diverse character trait it is. The title, as well, adds a certain amount of hopeful tinge to it, and the stories almost universally delivered on that.

Favorites include:

A rural Oregonian woman having a big fight with her ex-girlfriend, exclusively in the form of flower language.
A woman trapped in a three-day time loop before the space station she’s on explodes, using it to sample every restaurant the station has to offer.
A lesbian couple running a magic shop together. The story opens with them having a charcuterie board for dinner, and the vibes stay immaculate from there on out; I want to read an entire series of this one.
A POV story of the protagonist in a videogame, learning some things about themselves when the player installs a mod.

This collection was a delight; for any one of the above stories, I’d call it worth it, and it includes all of them and more. Give it a go!²

And getting a little sunburned, but oh well. ↩
This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩