Tag: lgbtq

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Review

“In Deeper Waters”

F.T. Lukens

I picked this book up from a Pride shelf at a used bookstore—and yes, that’s a bit of a peek into how much of a book backlog1 I have at any given time, given that this is getting published a month before Pride. And really, I grabbed it because it looked kinda cheesy.

And hey, guess what, it kinda was! But in a way that’s exactly what I wanted from it, exactly what I’d hoped it would be. It’s a cheesy little YA romance novel, with a bunch of high fantasy going on as the backdrop, and I’m so, so glad that things like this exist. Because boy, am I ever tired of the plot of an LGBTQ novel being that They Are LGBTQ. Once or twice, that’s an okay plot, but after that, it’s just repetitive. In this, it’s not at all a thing; from the beginning, Tal’s big brother is absolutely accepting of his bisexuality. The only way it appears at all is that it gives him a broader range of options to embarrass his little brother with by asking if they’re his type.

There’s a post somewhere out there where somebody rips into homophobia in fantasy and science fiction. The gist of it is, ‘you can imagine {insert fantasy trope} but you can’t imagine people not being assholes?’

That’s what this is. Someone said “y’know what, I’m making an entirely fictional setting. Why would I bring that aspect of reality into it? How would that make the story better?”

The cover art is very pastel, and so is the book. For all that there is an actual plot to it, I came to the end feeling like I’d had a hug. This book is kind. I loved it. Go read it.2

  1. A booklog, if you will. ↩
  2. 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. ↩
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Review

“Scarlet Odyssey”

C T Rwizi

Pretty much any piece of fantasy I read that has magic in it, I wind up trying to figure out the rules of the magic. Because, sure, it’s magic, but it has to have a system underlying it—otherwise nobody would be able to actually use it for stuff! A lot of the time, for the sake of the story, the rules basically boil down to “magic does whatever the plot needs it to do,” which admittedly isn’t not the case in “Scarlet Odyssey,” but there’s also very clearly a set of rules for how it works.1

But what I really loved about this set of rules, what really captivated me, is that it isn’t magic. It’s a sufficiently advanced technology. And it’s masterfully done. Ra featured a magic system that just is programming, including very clear connections to how *nix works. “Scarlet Odyssey” has hints of how it works that make it feel distantly related—more of the “this is how the abstract concept of computation works” than “this is how most computers on Earth work.” That makes it a lot easier to buy this as not a completely alternate-world history, but actually a far, far distant-future bit of science fiction. (Personally, my theory is that the reason they all worship the moon and regard it as the source of the magic is that it is—a moon is a handy place to put some machinery a couple ticks up the Kardeshev scale that you’re gonna use to customize the laws of physics for a planet.)

So, a couple hundred words in to this review, I’m clearly enamored of the world building. And, wow, I’ve barely scratched the surface; there’s a whole rich history, multiple civilizations, the actual details of how the system of magic works… it feels big and storied. Historic.

Worldbuilding aside, I also really enjoyed the story.2 Salo makes for an interesting protagonist, and the jumping between different characters’ perspectives is well-done, providing their different views of how the journey is going, as well as their own stories. Frankly, by the end of the book, it feels a bit like a D&D campaign group—each of the characters is totally unique, and a fight between them and a big group of Generic Evil Minions Plus One Big Bad feels like it fell right out of the Dungeon Master’s Guidebook. They’ve each got their own story, and while Salo is clearly the main protagonist, the story they’re writing together isn’t just about him.

We’ve also got a really great villain in The Handmaid, though I’ll admit I did spend a bit of time being very confused because I hadn’t realized that The Handmaid and The Enchantress were two different characters. Pay attention to the chapter titles, kids, they’re meaningful!

Overall, I absolutely loved this book. I feel as if, here at the end, I should be doing some kind of caveat, but it really directly hit everything I want from a book! It’s not even failing the Russo Test!3 I recommend the heck out of “Scarlet Odyssey,” give it a read.4

  1. Said rules aren’t particularly clear, as there’s at least six kinds of magic, but also maybe a seventh, and also that’s only the ones practiced on this continent, and there’s a whole other family of magic in the other continents? There’s a lot going on. ↩
  2. I could’ve done with more than around 1/2 of a plot thread being tied up by the end of the book, but they’ve gotta get me hooked for the remainder of the trilogy somehow. And, to be fair, if things had been cut down enough to fit the whole trilogy’s plot into one book, it would’ve either been a terrifyingly large book, or lost a lot of the detail that I enjoyed. ↩
  3. In point of fact, it passes it with flying colors. Identifiably gay characters? Salo’s subtle, but his uncle and uncle’s husband, less so. Not defined by that character trait? The uncle is a fierce warrior, and Salo’s own queerness is honestly easy to miss if you aren’t paying attention to how he interacts with the guy he’s trying to hide his crush on/from. Integral to the story? Yeah, I’d say the main character is pretty integral to the story! ↩
  4. 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. ↩
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Review

“Capricious: Gender Diverse Pronouns”

ed. A.C. Buchanan

Like I mentioned in my most recent read of an anthology, I’m used to them being centered around a specific theme. In this case, the theme is pretty easy to see, and also pretty vague, overall—I think the core concept was “at least one person in the story uses pronouns other than he/him/his or she/her/hers.”

Which gave the authors a lot of room to play around, and it wound up being a really cool variety of stories! From distant-future sci-fi to swords and sorcery, there’s some interesting things that happened in here.

The one that stands out the most, that I feel I’m going to have to go back and reread once or twice more to really wrap my mind around it, is the story of someone moving to a new country and learning the new language. At first, the pronoun bit is easy to miss, until it becomes important to the story: their home country—and, more importantly, their native language—doesn’t have gender as a concept. The character mentions a total of 9 pronouns in their language, which I believe are I/me/mine, you/you(?)/yours, and they/them/theirs. Which is, itself, already an interesting concept, but to make it even more so, the new country they’ve come to has at least three genders, and a gendered language to boot, bringing them to a total of 45 pronouns. (I didn’t count all of them, but think of things like, several different versions of the second person!)

It’s a really effective story; none of the three genders aligns with the masculine/feminine that we’re used to, and so, as the reader, I wound up latching on to the protagonist’s genderless way of speaking, because it’s more familiar. And we get to be confused and frustrated with them, because what the hell are these three genders? Why are there so many pronouns? Why does this language gender the word “you,” for crying out loud, obviously the second-person pronoun refers to the person you are speaking to… and, hey, actually, now that we’re thinking about this… why do we apply gender to things it doesn’t need to be applied to? Why is it so important to us?

That’s what made that story, to me, the best out of the anthology. It gave me a new way to look at an issue that, frankly, I thought I already had a reasonable grasp on. There’s absolutely value to that.

And hey, there’s a bunch of other stories in there too! Some of them thought-provoking, some of them fun, some of them heartwarming; as I said, a very impressive variety. I heartily recommend it. Check it out.1

  1. This is an Amazon 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 prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩
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Review

“Song of Achilles”

Madeline Miller

It may be possible to read this book without knowing how the story has to end. I suspect it’s not possible for anyone raised in the global West, and even outside of that, by the time you know enough English to read this book, you’ve probably picked up enough cultural background knowledge to have a good idea. The phrase “Achilles heel” isn’t exactly uncommon.

With that foreknowledge, the entire novel feels like a growing weight, the crushing inevitability of that end coming towards you. It’s the sound of rushing water as your paddle-less boat approaches the falls; the growing vibration of the rails you’re tied to as the train approaches.

The rending heartbreak of one of the most beautiful love stories I can remember ever reading. So much of this stories is about Achilles and Patroclus growing up together and falling in love. Their first kiss is another inevitability by the time it arrives, something you’ve been waiting for for what feels like months—that just-out-of-reach realization, the word hovering on the tip of your tongue, and then the satisfaction of grasping it.

Truth be told, I haven’t finished the book yet. I’m nearly to the end, and as I’ve done many times while reading, I have to take a break. Set it down, and give myself time to process the feeling of grief coming in all out of order.

This may be one of the greatest books I have ever read. For someone who grew up reading Greek mythology, it was entirely predictable, and yet so very new. A breath of fresh air, and the pounding weight of a waterfall, crushing you down into the deep, cold water. I cannot recommend it highly enough; please, read it.1

  1. 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. ↩
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Review

“The Outside”

Ada Hoffmann

Two books in a row that get a lot of use out of the word ‘heresy,’ that’s a bit of an odd coincidence.

I also quite enjoyed this. Midway through I texted a friend of mine that I could very clearly see one of the influences of this book—Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence. I stand by that. It took a bit of hand-waving about the way AI works, but Hoffmann found a reasonable explanation for why AI would bother keeping humanity around. Frankly, it’s one of the good outcomes; sure, we’re basically cattle, but hey, at least we’re wagyu.

And that, right there, was what made the setting so fascinating. Humanity as the tame feedstock for the AIs, which went ahead and declared themselves Gods. (And, yes, they are referred to with the capital ‘G’ throughout.) They are the Gods, and they grant us useful technology like interstellar travel and clean energy, but we’re also kicked back to 1950s computer technology, because anything more modern gets too close to their turf. And that’s where the use of ‘heresy’ comes back into play.

It gets more interesting than that, but that’s also getting into spoiler territory, so I’ll stop there.

One other thing to note that I quite liked about the book was how well it fit in a diverse cast. The protagonist is neuroatypical, and her love interest is a woman—a fact which is, in fact, never remarked upon by anyone. To borrow a meme, this is the future liberals want.1

All in all, I found this to be quite a good read, and do recommend it. Check it out.2

  1. Another thing I’ll stand by. Seriously, go read Superintelligence – being feedstock, after our death, for the AIs is pretty close to the best-case scenario for humanity. ↩
  2. 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. ↩
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Review

“A Fall in Autumn”

Michael G. Williams

One of the reviews I saw for this book called it something along the lines of “a private eye novel without all the toxic masculinity,” and that’s what sold me on reading it. What kept me reading, though, was the absolutely wonderful world building. It’s thousands of years in the future, and there are passing references to legends of space travel, and references to the collapse of our current civilization, lost knowledge of the ancients, all that. But the single line that most sold me on the whole thing was a passing reference to “Arthur Kennedy and the betrayal of Camelot”. Given a couple thousand years, even with written history, it absolutely makes sense that two legendary figures would get merged together.

I really enjoy things like this; I like science fiction where a lot of different things have happened, with one Big Deal technological change that gives us all sorts of implications to explore. If I had to track it down in this one, I’d say there were two things: CRISPR allowing for genetic modification, and a nuclear war that was small enough not to cause nuclear winter, but large enough to EMP everything digital to oblivion.

All in all, this was an excellent read, and I highly recommend it. Check it out.1

  1. 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. ↩
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Review

“Innate Magic”

Shannon Fay

There’s… a lot going on in this book, and having given myself the chance to sleep on it, I’m still not sure how I feel about it. Even trying to make a pros and cons list hasn’t helped much. Pro – interesting system of magic. Con – weird theological angle. Pro – bisexual protagonist, yay for representation! Con – save for a single passing reference in the epilogue, all the homosexual relationships portrayed are various forms of abusive. Pro – several interesting female characters whose stories I’d like to learn more of; con – I can’t recall them, at any point, passing the Bechdel test.1

At very least, though, I can’t say the book wasn’t interesting. It took quite a while to really grip me, but by about halfway through I found myself loathe to put it down. Which, in retrospect, is the same way I tend to feel about Diana Wynne Jones, and she wrote some of my favorite books I’ve ever read, so… I suppose, by that metric at least, I enjoyed it.

A confused little review here, but as I said, it’s at very least an interesting read. Check it out.2

  1. Admittedly, I wasn’t keeping an eye out for it, and am now trying to recall from memory. I suppose there’s a scene where two of the aforementioned interesting female characters discuss one’s past, but it’s mostly in the context of her father, so… ↩
  2. 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. ↩
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Review

“Floodtide”

Heather Rose Jones

The introduction to this book was familiar enough that I did a quick search and found out I’ve read another book in this universe.1 I may go back and reread that one now, in fact, because I think that “Floodtide” did a better job of introducing the system of magic in a way that makes sense to my brain.

It’s also, largely, a much more human-scale story. The protagonist isn’t changing the world, she’s just trying to get through life, finding a little bit of happiness along the way. Sure, she has friends changing the world, living a grand, romantic life, and she’s determined to help them do that as best she can, but she’s still… a regular person. Sometimes, it’s nice to read things like that — it’s what got me watching Agents of SHIELD back when it first aired, after all.2

It reminds me, a little, of the idea of a space opera. There’s all sorts of large-scale things happening in the backdrop, but the actual core of the story is about the characters and how they’re doing, why they make the choices they do, that sort of thing.

I’m not certain how well I’m selling this book, but I did quite like it. Give it a go.

  1. That was more than three years ago, now? Somehow, in my head, none of my ongoing projects have actually been ongoing that long, and yet, here I am, several years into writing little book reviews. ↩
  2. And, y’know, once Agents started being about saving the whole world instead of just, y’know, regular people trying to exist in a world with superheroes, I gave up on it. ↩
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Review

“Catfish Lullaby”

A.C. Wise

About 2/3 of the way through this book, I wound up texting a friend, “I didn’t want t get invested in this book, because it’s creepy, but here I am, queueing up the nightmares.”

And, really, that’s a great summary of the book. It’s definitely creepy, but it’s also enrapturing. Think of… a swamp. It’s a place of decay, and death – but also, full of so much life. Beautiful, and terrible; ancient, but always changing. That’s how the story feels, all the way through.

In short, it’s excellent. Not too long a read, so not too long a review, but I quite liked it. Check it out.

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Review

“Wayward Son”

Rainbow Rowell

I enjoyed “Carry On” so much that I immediately picked up the sequel and read through it. “Wayward Son” is also a fun read, but not nearly as strong as “Carry On” was; “Carry On” is a conclusion and a beginning, while “Wayward Son” is… the middle book.1 It feels like it’s trying to progress the arc of the story, while still leaving enough un-finished for there to be a properly conclusive sequel — to the degree that the “ending on a cliffhanger” doesn’t actually add much more “well, guess I need to read the next one to see how this ends” than the book already had.

Still, there’s a lot of fun worldbuilding going on — an actual proper treatment of what the United States is like in this magical world, unlike Rowling’s utter disregard for… our entire culture, really.2 It honestly leaves me wanting to see other countries in this world, as well. Anglocentrism fits something that started as a Harry Potter parody, but now that we’ve established that Magical Britain is Britain and Magical America is “America, but more libertarian”, I’d love to see, like, Magical Brazil. Magical China. Fill out the world a bit more — what sort of international laws are there governing magic? How does the rest of the world deal with the fact that the Magical United States has no government, and the only thing keeping magic from going viral is that all the magic-users are secretive by nature? Lord knows that won’t last.

I’ll wrap up my rambling here, though. It’s an alright book; I think my main issue with it is timing. If I’d been able to go through all three in the series in a row, I suspect I would’ve enjoyed it a bit more — there’s a lot of set-up for the next book, but now, instead of getting to carry right on to the pay-off, I’m just stuck waiting. So, y’know, maybe wait until next year, but then read it.

  1. Literally so: there’s a third book in the series, scheduled to be released next year, which is explicitly billed as “the third and final book in the Simon Snow series.” ↩
  2. The Fantastic Beasts film actually did an alright job of portraying my country, it feels like, but every aspect of the magical school she tried to describe as our equivalent to Hogwarts is extremely “I don’t get America.” We don’t do school houses, and you really think we’d have a single school? (I must admit, I really love watching Europeans be utterly unable to grasp just how big the US is.) ↩
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Review

“Carry On”

Rainbow Rowell

I keep going back and forth on whether or not I think this book is a parody of the Harry Potter series. On the one hand, it really obviously is – magic school in Britain, Chosen One, mysterious villain, rival from Old Money.1 But it’s doing so much more than just poking fun at these things that have become tropes; it has its own story to tell, and a system of magic that honestly makes more sense than anything Rowling ever accomplished.2

But a good part of my enjoyment of the book is also in the contrast with Harry Potter. What if Harry and Draco had been roommates? (And yes, it’s magic, so we do get to say “they can’t just strangle each other, the school has magically-enforced rules about that.”) What was Draco thinking when Harry was doing the “I have to keep an eye on him at all times” thing in their whichever-th year?3

The opening couple chapters are a delight to read. It’s the start of the school year, which makes for a very clear narrative beginning point… except it’s the start of Simon’s final school year, and he’s been a Protagonist all along, so we’re coming in very much in medias res. The amount of “as you know, Bob” is kept very low, which makes it a fun puzzle of “what all Insane Bullshit has he survived so far?”, and I’ve always enjoyed a game of “what’s the setting.”

Suffice it to say, I heartily recommend this – I’ve been trying to reduce the number of books in my to-read pile, but the moment I finished the book I immediately ordered the sequel, so here we are. If you at all like Harry Potter, and want something without the… tainted association of Rowling, please do read this delightful book.

  1. For reference, the titular character, and all the adventures that he went through prior to “Carry On,” made their original appearance in a novel centered around someone’s enjoyment of We Can’t Call It Harry Potter Because Rowling Has Lawyers For That, so it’s no surprise that there’s a lot of clear similarities. ↩
  2. There’s rules! Actual rules, explicitly stated, about how spells are created! And they aren’t “yeah there’s an insane AI somewhere running things, it thinks making us make those noises are funny and rewards us with making stuff happen.” It’s all I ever wanted. ↩
  3. For reference, here’s how I summarized that to my friend, while I was reading: “Harry is over there like ‘he’s gotta be up to something!’ Draco, meanwhile, is like ‘please, I am a fifteen year old boy, I need five minutes of Alone Time to deal with a… personal matter.’” ↩
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Review

“The Hollow History of Professor Perfectus”

Ginn Hale

I remain a complete sucker for good worldbuilding, and this is a very fun world that Hale has built. Gilded Age America, but with magic around, things went a bit differently – not least of which being that a magical war cracked the continent in half, leaving California an ocean away. In the meantime, magic has been severely regulated, and oh, don’t forget the automatons everywhere. It’s an interesting place.

And that’s without touching on the protagonists, who have an astonishing amount of backstory for such a short book.

It’s a short read – took me less than an hour, once I’d gotten invested – and I heartily recommend it. Give it a read.

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Review

“Red, White, and Royal Blue,” or, “I was wrong about which genre this book was”

Casey McQuiston
I put off reading this one for a while, because it seemed like it was going to be dumb and fluffy, the sort of thing I like to save for when I’m stressed and need something easy and happy. And I’m quite happy to have been wrong about it, in part: while it’s certainly fluffy, it’s less dumb than I was expecting. Sure, the protagonist spends a bit too long not quite grasping what’s going on, but that actually gets turned around pretty well later on. And it’s a surprisingly good political novel, too — the backdrop of “being the son of the President” isn’t left as window-dressing, instead becoming a significant driver of the plot.
The cast is delightful — there’s a good deal of family drama going on, and it feels real, and rough at times.
All in all, I loved this book — stayed up too late reading it, laughed the way through, and would happily read it again. I can heartily recommend it.

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Review

“Openly Straight,” or, “just let this idiot be happy”

Bill Konigsberg
I was genuinely surprised to find this book on my Kindle; I knew it was one I’d been wanting for a while, but I didn’t remember actually buying it. Still, I’m on vacation, trying to work my way through the backlog of books a bit, so I shrugged and started to read.
Here’s the concept, containing no more spoilers than the Amazon blurb: Rafe is an openly gay young man living in Boulder, Colorado. And by ‘openly gay,’ I mean very; he came out in middle school, his parents threw a coming out party, his mom became president of the local PFLAG chapter, and he’s got, like, an internship kind of thing being a speaker at other high schools in the area. Not bad for a sophomore in high school.
That’s where the book starts, and it quickly leaves that point, because Rafe isn’t happy with this life. Sure, everyone accepts him as The Gay Kid, but that’s all he is. He scores the winning goal in a soccer game, and the local newspaper runs a story: “Gay Student Wins Game!” And who really likes being boiled down to one aspect of their personality?
So he leaves; gets himself accepted to an Ivy-prep boarding high school over on the East Coast somewhere. Not mentioned to the very-supporting parents and friends? The fact that he’s not going to be gay there; he’s going to let the ‘straight until proven gay’ aspect of heterosexism1 take over and get to experience life from the other side.2
Which is, honestly, a very interesting concept, but in execution, I didn’t enjoy it all that much. It felt, to me, like the book was trying to be two different things at once, and as a result, failing at both. The beginning and end are in a more literary bent, exploring some of the stuff I’d mentioned earlier. Which is a valid topic to be explored, and the way it’s handled is sufficient that, at the end of this point, I’m still going to recommend the book. Where it falls apart is in the middle; the book gets a bit distracted from that literary style and turns into a bit of a teenage romance fluff pile.
Again, not a bad thing, but the two aspects don’t work well together; the conflict of the book should be either the literary ‘man versus society’ kind of thing, or the romance ‘man versus his own idiotic self being mad at romance’ deal. Instead it’s ‘literary aspirations versus the plot arc of a romance novel,’ and both portions lose out for it. The romance novel falls apart because that’s what the literary aspect demands, and the meaning of the literary component feels cheapened by the collapsing romance.
I wish I could’ve liked this book more, but oh well. Still, it does have some valuable things to say, and I’m going to go ahead and recommend it.3 Give it a read, and maybe do a slightly better job than I did at engaging with the more thought-provoking portions.4

  1. If you don’t know what the word means, read the book, it does a better job explaining it than I can. ↩
  2. The first few chapters of this are actually very anxiety-inducing; minority stress is a real thing, and imagining going through it without a support network is a stressful concept. ↩
  3. Because, y’know, this has been such a glowing review. ↩
  4. Part of the issue for me, I suppose, is that all the thoughts it’s trying to provoke are conclusions I arrived at a while ago; I’m not really the target audience, I suppose. ↩
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Review

Lightspeed Magazine: Queers Destroy Science Fiction

Oh man, I am excited about this one. I’ve been wanting to get it since they first announced they were accepting submissions for it, but it wasn’t until the Humble LGBTQ Bundle that I had an excuse to do it.
Now, as this is a big ol’ anthology, I’m going to split it up into a series of mini-reviews, which, unlike how I’ve done anthology reviews in the past, I’ll be writing after reading each story. Without further ado:

Original Short Fiction

There’s rather a lot of short stories in this one, so I’m going to break the organization up the same way the magazine itself does.

勢孤取和 (Influence Isolated, Make Peace)

I’ll admit to Googling the author of this one and the four english words so that I could copy and paste in the other characters above.
I did enjoy that I share a name with one of the characters. That’s about all we’ve got in common, though:

Gray was too hard, too buff, and too tall all at once to truly look human. However, no human ever noticed. Blond haired with intense blue eyes and an irrepressible smile, he and his lightly pink, freckled skin invoked the heartland, middle America, and the Things That Made Us Great. Granted, this would be some sort of middle America where everyone changed the tires on their pick-up trucks by lifting them to chest height with one hand while loosening lug nuts with the other. He’d always been the squad’s candidate for Cyborg Poster Boy.

Anyhow, it’s a short story, and a sweet one at that. Basically, exactly what I wanted from this anthology, so props to the editors for putting it first.
It’s set in the aftermath of some big war – I’d assume against China, but it’s hard to say – where the primary weapons the US used were, apparently, some seriously advanced cyborgs. Who, as a result of the peace treaty, are to be decommissioned – maybe. It’s a whole bit thing, and figuring that out is the core plot point of the story. Or rather, the setting against which it’s built – the core plot point, I’d say, is more of a short, sweet little love story. A good start.

Emergency Repair

Let’s be honest, we all know that the most likely apocalypse at this point is going to be a superintelligence coming out of the Bay Area.1

The work isn’t its own reward, not to me. I wanted the world to see what I could do. I wanted to be the next Einstein, the next Marie Curie. I never thought I’d end up being Oppenheimer instead.

This one is distinctly less happy than the last one, if the quote didn’t tip you off. Less happy sweet, but still sweet.2 And hopeful, in a way. You get the feeling that this could be a movie, if the author wanted it to be- it’d work well as a large-scale cinematic, though this would only be one scene of many.

Trickier With Each Translation

I’m going to leave this one short: time travel is weird, and the time traveller in this one is a creepy, slightly rapacious dude. Grade-A misuse of superpowers, there.

The Astrakhan, the Homburg, and the Red Red Coal

“When bad Americans die, they go to America.”

Personally, I don’t feel like steampunk fits precisely into the category of science fiction, but evidently Lightspeed‘s editors do, as that’s what this is. Sort of a cross between Jamestown and… well, I don’t know what, really.
All I’ve got left to say is that I found this one funnier than I should’ve, mostly because a key plot point boiled down to “the waiter has slept with all but two of the people in the room.”

The Tip of the Tongue

Okay, the love story in this one is cute but oh god is the setting a nightmare. There’s a couple references in there that made me check the date to make sure it wasn’t a riff on Trump’s presidential campaign, but the part that was really scary was the forced illiteracy. The government of this world apparently decided that being able to read was too much power for people.3 So, with some worryingly inaccurate nanotechnology, they erased the ability read from almost their entire population. And ugh, that’s just a nightmare to me. agh.

How to Remember to Forget to Remember the Old War

I’m unclear on where in the timeline this falls. It could easily be right now, and the characters just happen to be extraterrestrials who were shipped off to Northern California for some reason after a war, or it’s a thousand years in the future and the Bay Area is just resolutely remaining the Bay Area. Hard to say.

Plant Children

What Ah Meng loved most, even more than urban myths and fried garlic, was telling Qiyan to bear children. This was Ah Meng’s hobby. At least it kept her busy, Qiyan’s mother said whenever Qiyan got fed up – as if being busy were enough to keep this ancient relic alive to the point of vampirism.

File this one under “okay, maybe I read too much superhero stuff” because I was really expecting a small apocalypse to happen and everyone to be running around trying to fight a bunch of overly-devoted plants.
Instead it was just a sweet little family story. So happy.

Nothing is Pixels Here

The setting for this one is a bit strange – I’m unclear on how the economics of the VR in this world work. Apparently it’s cheaper to keep people’s bodies in medical sedation and let their minds run around separately, doing work on contract? Rather confusing.
But the characters are nice, and a bit sad, but it’s still sweet.

Madeleine

Oh, this was fun. Modern-day setting, with just a hint of science fiction in the results of an experimental Alzheimer’s drug. The main character has to deal with a rather unhelpful psychologist, and it kinda made me think of Sense8,4 what Nomi had to deal with early in the first season.5 Not quite the same, as the protagonist in this one is a cisgender female, but still. Similar disbelief in what she’s going through.

Two By Two

I’m just… not a fan of apocalyptic stories, folks. The universe is already a terrible place,6 so I don’t really see why people feel the need to add to that. And this one had an added bonus of “the friggin’ South turned back into the CSA,” although, to be fair, they did very lightly pretend it wasn’t about being the Confederacy, they’re the Christian States of America. Sigh.

Die, Sophie, Die

“Like what? This ate my life. And for what?” I looked up at her, trying and failing to keep the hopelessness out of my voice. “It was a snarky article about sexism in a video game. That’s it. I’m not an activist, I’m not like Anita or any of them, I just . . . I just wanted to poke fun at these dudes and get my damn check. That’s all. I don’t even know why this blew up so bad. And I hate that nobody cares anymore. It’s just become normal for this to happen.” I sighed. “I should have known better.”

Like I said. The universe is a terrible place, because this is completely realistic.

“You’re crazy,” the guy said.
“Maybe!” I said. “I mean, after being harassed and stalked and sent pictures of my own dead, mutilated body every day for weeks? Because I wrote an article about sexism in a game? Yeah! I’m probably crazy! I’m fine with that.”

Despite the amount of hatred present in this story, it was surprisingly sweet, and happy. Kindness amidst the hatred.

Original Flash Fiction

These are a good bit shorter, so they get shorter reviews.

Melioration

Another one of those “surprise brain surgery” type things, only in this one it’s removing specific words. Which is horribly creepy.

Rubbing is Racing

Advanced technology doesn’t mean advanced tactics; the alien superpowers of this story apparently think it’s worth it to write off an entire civilization to kill some sort of bacteria or something that grows deep in the oceans of the planet. Rather rude, if you ask me.

Helping Hand

Think Gravity but even more alone, and with a quicker ending.

The Lamb Chops

Is… is that one of the Lizard-People?

Mama

I’m still laughing at “Trojan Whores”

Bucket List Found in the Locker of Maddie Price, Age 13, Written Two Weeks Before the Great Uplifting of All Mankind

Man that is one smart 13-year-old.

Deep/Dark Space

I… kinda want this one to be made into an animated horror movie.

A Brief History of Whaling with Remarks Upon Ancient Practices

In names there is found whimsy and poetry enough to betray the human heart.

I really liked this one. My favorite, so far, of the flash fiction section, and anything after it is going to have to work hard to surpass it.

Nothing Goes to Waste

Impostor syndrome?

In the Dawns Between Hours

Folks, history is important.

Increasing Police Visibility

Get it? The joke is that the TSA doesn’t work.

Letter From an Artist to a Thousand Future Versions of Her Wife

Y’know, I feel like there were ways to test out the ansible technology before thousands of people got left without a lifeline because it failed. Just a thought.

Reprint Fiction

Some slightly longer stories, this time.

Black Holes

Across the Atlantic Ocean and underground, Jean-Michel Gregory was speaking to Dr. Benedicta Goeppert about the end of the universe. She felt very strongly about the nature of existence being cyclical, that all matter would eventually return to the state that stimulated the beginning of the universe as we know it – long after humans were extinct and our sun was dead, expanding space would shrink until it was conducive to a big bang and everything that ever was would be again in its earliest, most basic form.

This one was sad, but I’m glad it included that little blurb there, because that’s the sort of thing I think about a lot. It’s what I hope for- because otherwise, it means that the universe will come to an end and that will be it. I hate that idea.

Red Run

This one was pretty sad. Depression is a rough thing.7

CyberFruit Swamp

Y’know, this one probably should’ve been tagged as NSFW, editors.

The Sound of His Wings

I am so confused, folks. But… I think I liked it? Huh.

O Happy Day!

This was… absolutely not what I needed to pick myself up from the terrible mood the news out of Orlando has me in. Agh.

Excerpt: Skin Folk

In this guy’s defense, I also find humans weird and strange. Seriously, biology is weird.

Author Spotlights

Definitely some interesting stuff to read in here, but nothing that I’m going to break down like I have been the stories above.

Nonfiction

A nice little artist’s gallery to start off. I might have to go get the PDF, instead of just the AZW, so I can see some of it in color.
That said, I’m going to stop this review here: It’s more than 2,000 words long, and I never have as much fun writing about nonfiction as I do fiction.8
Even through the bad mood I’m in, though, I can recognize how much I enjoyed this one. You can pick it up on Amazon.

  1. Okay, no, technically I think first place goes to global warming and second place goes to “Cold War defense system triggers itself due to lack of maintenance and we all nuke ourselves to death,” but THIRD place goes to the AI. ↩
  2. And now I’ve got “Piano Man” stuck in my head. “It’s sad and it’s sweet and I knew it complete…” ↩
  3. This after they’d already banned art in all its forms, so really just a matter of time once things get that bad. ↩
  4. Which I haven’t finished, actually, so no spoilers. ↩
  5. Is the second season out? I’m bad at following TV shows. ↩
  6. Citation ↩
  7. The whole “sad mood” was really compounded by the fact that, right before I started reading this one, I got an email from TIME’s Breaking News department saying that 50 people had died and 53 were injured in a mass shooting at a gay club in Orlando. So, yeah, the world remains an awful place. ↩
  8. Plus, I’ve spent too long reading the news today, so I’ve got a headache and a deep hatred for mankind, so I shouldn’t really be doing much writing anyways. ↩