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The artwork for this roundup includes a detail of Madison Brake's cover art for Lightspeed #170. More about the artist at: https://www.madisonbrake.com/.
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The Ecological
Impacts of Resurrection: a Field Study, by Corey Farrenkopf in The
Deadlands
My father was a professor of Ethology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, focusing on the study of death rituals and burial behavior in mammals and their intersections with human traditions. He said he was going to write his next paper on the otters, maybe even his next book.
This story about a father, obsessed with the death rites of wild animals, is dark and strange with an undertow of sadness and grief that makes it cut deep and strike true. I love how the landscape, the family's past, and the science, blend with observations that are so off-kilter and profoundly weird that you can sort of feel reality shift under your feet as your reading.
The
Rerebirth of Slick, by Stephen Kearse in The Deadlands
They buried us in Detroit. The plywood was thick as Aretha’s bosom, but I felt as free as her glorious voice. Wasn’t my fault their overlords and former owners had plundered their homes and retirement funds. Shit, I was the one who warned them the fix was in. But to my annoyance they fixated on me and set their pageant in motion, calling up Swanson Funeral Homes, filing permits, and setting a date. I should have flaked, but curiosity snared me: Surely, they weren’t serious?
Kearse’s story is, in his own words, about “the life, death,
and afterlife of a very special word”, and that word is the N-word. If that
sounds sort of out-there for a short story, I can only say: read this story. It is brilliant, sharp, beautifully crafted, with a voice, a rhythm, a flow that is powerful and devastating. Do not miss this story.
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The
Museum of Cosmic Retribution by Megan Chee in Nightmare
Not many people wanted to visit the park in this weather, it seemed. He paused to look at the first display: King Qinguang raising his fist in judgment as he presided over souls entering the underworld. The virtuous would be sent across the golden and silver bridges into paradise. The evildoers would descend into the Courts of Hell for punishment.
Set in Haw Par Villa, which is a real place in Singapore
where you will find, among other things, the 10 Courts of Hell, this story is a dark,
but not grim, story of a boy who gets a guided tour with a very knowledgeable
caretaker. That's only the setup, because from that point, Chee weaves stories within stories, with tales of aliens and
distant planets, of good deeds and bad, of far-flung space empires, of cruelty and suffering, and also, beneath it all, empathy.
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The
Last Lucid Day by Dominique Dickey in Lightspeed
You hear the beeping of your alarm and you know you’re dreaming, but you can’t wake up any more than you can pull yourself free of your father’s hands. He holds you down and tells you to count the seconds, show him how long you can hold your breath, but the only way to make sense of the numbers is to tally them on your fingers. He pushes you down deeper. He walks away.
It always ends with him walking away.
It always ends with you splashing in the deep end, alone.
Well holy cow, this story crushed me and somehow managed to
uplift me, all at the same time. It’s about a fraught relationship with a
father who is both fragile and frustrating, and it’s about the life his child
has made in the wake of a childhood that was nowhere near perfect. Throw in a
new kind of technology which makes it possible to know when a person is having
their last really good, really lucid day, and you get a story with one heck of
an emotional punch.
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Creature,
by Kelsea Yu in Kaleidotrope
It wasn’t the blood or the pain that took Esther Chen by surprise; it was the waiting. Two full weeks after her chirpy doctor frowned at the ultrasound screen, a dozen test results finally confirmed what Esther had already known. The baby was gone.
After Esther suffers a miscarriage, a strange (hungry) creature
stalks her everywhere. The creature has very sharp teeth, and it wants, needs, something from
her. I love the way Yu tells both Esther's and Esther’s
mother’s story here, and the way terrible, frightening, and destructive
emotions are given both voice and shape.
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The
Barricade by Joyce Ch’ng in IZ Digital
Now birds and solar panels didn’t mix. Or, at least, couldn’t co-exist well enough. Birds hit window panes, the wind fans, and solar panels. The local cells were all trying to find ways to deal with the issue. Shorter solar panels? Flatter solar panels? Solar panel fields? The problem was physical space, a problem their island state was always facing. For a long time, they have tried to solve the problem by going vertical. Up, up, and up.
If you need a bit of sunshine, and a bit of sea, and a bit of hope in your
science fiction, then this story by Ch’ng is the right medicine. It’s a tale of
the future, or at least one possible future, where things have changed, though
not easily, and where people are trying to find new ways to live that don’t
destroy and ravage the Earth as much as our current way of life.
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Within the
Seed Lives the Fruit by Leah Andelsmith in Reckoning
Morning dawns and Lou has exactly nothing left to give. She goes out to the garden anyway because that’s the way she was taught, and she waters as the heavy hose drags behind her and threatens to knock down tomato plants or flatten the sweet potatoes. Between her tee shirt sleeves and leather work gloves are bare brown forearms and dark elbows. Her short Afro is salt and pepper all over, except at the temples, where it has begun to come in white. Her knees creak as she hefts the hose, and she stops for a moment to wipe sweat from her brow. That’s when she notices the mint. The bindweed is wrapped around the stalk.
This story made me cry and it made me smile. It holds within it a whole life, and the life of a farm and the plants grown on that farm, and it also holds life itself, growing and sprouting in weeds and vegetables alike. The prose shimmers and the story weaves itself into magic as Lou finds old buried treasures in the garden, as grief comes, and as Lou herself changes into something new, while still staying connected to the land she loves. A luminous story.
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Joanna’s
Bodies by Eugenia Triantafyllou in Psychopomp
The woman whose body Joanna is renting has a nosebleed. Joanna is about to get evicted again and she’s cranky about it. She screams at Eleni in another woman’s voice.
“Hey, this shit’s burning!”
This is an absolutely devastating and thoroughly compelling novelette about two friends, possession, resurrection, guilt, and grief. I have a thing for stories about complicated, twisted friendships, and this most certainly qualifies. Eleni has been bringing her dead friend Joanna back to life into different bodies ever since Joanna died, but life after death isn’t easy and does not get any easier with time. Woven through the fiction is Eleni’s reflections on what used to be her favourite movie: Jennifer’s Body, and I loved the way the story ties all its threads into a weave without forcing the pattern.
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Linden
Honey, Blackcurrant Wine by M.R. Robinson in Beneath Ceaseless Skies
The girl wore a marvelous gown as pale as winter butter and a wreath of bluebells crowned her golden curls. Her features were sharp and proud; she was as slight as a willow branch. The air around her shimmered like light on the water. She looked like no woman Irena had ever seen, and Irena knew immediately that she was no woman at all.
What a gorgeous, tender love story. Robinson’s prose
gleams and shimmers as she tells us the tale of Irena, who is now an old woman, who goes back to see the love of her youth: a woodmaiden living among the birches. It’s a story of love and regret, but also
of hope and joy, and every detail is bright and sparkling with life.
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Our
Father by K.J. Khan in Clarkesworld
Lila asks questions about the Horizon every time she visits. She plays games about being aboard it, where the food comes in tiny, dehydrated cubes, and the beds are lofted on top each other, so that every night is “like camping.” She doesn’t believe we could ever be bored, in such a paradise.
I love stories that tell a small, intimate tale while also giving you a much bigger, wider story that hovers around the edges of the smaller tale. Khan tells us such a story here. You can feel the presence of that larger world, and you feel its impact and its resonance in the smaller story, a story where we glimpse the bigger tale of space travel, generation ships, and the colonization of new planets through the tender, quiet moments of a family growing up, growing together, in an unusual place and under unusual circumstances.
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The
Scientist Does Not Look Back by Kristen Koopman at Escape Pod (narrated by Ant
Bacon, Valerie Valdes and Adam Pracht)
The technician at the morgue hesitated when releasing him to me. I’m not surprised, with the tone that took hold of my voice as I corrected her Mr. to Dr. as she took down my details. When I gave her my name, her pen stalled over the paper—a giveaway that his parents had called before I arrived. I should be grateful that she released him to me anyway, honoring my legal right to the body. I should be grateful for so much, I suppose, even if it doesn’t feel like it, to have this opportunity to—to not let his story end in tragedy.
According to the Escape Pod's story notes, Koopman describes this as an “unbury your gays” story and it is most certainly that. It is Frankenstein, but as a
queer romance, where a determined/obsessed doctor works to bring back his lost
love. There’s so much dark humour here, so much grief and love, as our
protagonist deals with all the people, all the forces, who would rather see him
give up and let the love of his life die. It’s a wonderful audio adaptation
by Escape Pod.
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My bonus pick this time around is a terrific interview:
A
Conversation with Sheree Renée Thomas - August 2, 2024
Sheree Renée Thomas is an award-winning fiction writer and poet, editor of the historic Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy and the groundbreaking anthology Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora. And she currently lives right here in her hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. George Larrimore hosts A Conversation with Sheree Renee Thomas.
