Charles Payseur Reviews Short Fiction: GigaNotoSaurus, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Diabolical Plots
GigaNotoSaurus 3/24
Beneath Ceaseless Skies 3/7/24, 3/21/24
Diabolical Plots 2/24
The March GigaNotoSaurus is Amy Johnson’s nested narrative “The Fake Birdhouses of Springville”, which unfolds in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and features an aid delivery worker listening to a story about birdhouses that are not birdhouses over the course of many visits to an older woman on the route. The story is split between the story of the driver and the pandemic, and the nested story of Worm, – “a woman who cares for animals and tries to help even roadkill” – and Leah, an artist who tried to help Worm but who ended up doing harm instead. Johnson balances the two layers of story expertly, teasing out the strange tale of Worm and Leah over time and letting the themes of care and harm linger. For me, the piece examines the ways that people can turn doing a good deed into something mostly selfish, forgetting the desires and importance of the person they are trying to “help.” Featuring the pandemic underlines those themes nicely, separating out performative care from a deeper, more considerate act and process.
The March Beneath Ceaseless Skies kicks off with a jailbreak story that turns out to be more of a heist in Rich Larson’s “A Magician Did It”. In it, Olaf is the supposed organizer of a mission to free an imprisoned mage with the help of the mage’s cockroach familiar and Nords, a recently freed thief risking prison again out of a sense of adventure and friendship – or so he says at first. Larson builds a tale where nothing is quite as it seems, however, and betrayals and counter-betrayals are common (and a bit slapdash). But through it all there is a charm and energy that makes for a thoroughly entertaining experience, even (and perhaps especially) when everything is going spectacularly wrong. Adam Breckenridge, meanwhile, builds a stark and rather startling world in “The Dust Eater”, where people universally revile a historical poet whose crime was so terrible it was never actually recorded. That doesn’t stop people from hating and punishing all those who might be reincarnations of that poet, and for the young narrator, that means them, because especially during times of stress or joy, bits of poems slip into their mind, inspiring them even while damning them. It’s a terrible situation that draws them to a fellow outcast, a young man who was mutilated by his father. Together, the two find love and meaning and something like acceptance… until it all comes crashing down on them. Breckenridge doesn’t pull any emotional punches here, exploring the terrible punishments handed down on the characters who only wanted to love and feel the poetry in their hearts. It’s a desolate and haunting piece, but beautiful all the same, and though it’s a bit devastating, it’s still definitely worth spending some time with.
Diabolical Plots closes their March issue with Renan Bernardo’s “The Offer of Peace Between Two Worlds”, a story of Alia and Offy, a captain and ship who are joined spiritually when they are very young. They both grow and, as they do, they discover the fates meant for them: Offy the ship, to be an offering of peace between two peoples; Alia the human, to facilitate that offering and then be discarded. Only both find that they want nothing to do with those futures – and they also find they have the means to resist. Bernardo tells an aching tale of two people who are also one person, as they struggle separately and as they bound together through the universe, traversing galaxies, fiercely protecting their freedom and each other. There is a vibrant joy that infuses the work even as there is a heartbreaking sadness, recognizing that time will do the job that fleets of enemy ships could not in separating one being back into two, and then into one who can never be whole.
Recommended Stories
“The Fake Birds of Springville”, Amy Johnson (GigaNotoSaurus 3/24)
“The Offer of Peace Between Two Worlds”, Renan Bernardo (Diabolical Plots 3/24)
Charles Payseur is an avid reader, writer, and reviewer of speculative fiction. His works have appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Lightspeed Magazine, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among others, and many are included in his debut collection, The Burning Day and Other Strange Stories (Lethe Press 2021). He is the series editor of We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction (Neon Hemlock Press) and a multiple-time Hugo and Ignyte Award finalist for his work at Quick Sip Reviews. When not drunkenly discussing Goosebumps, X-Men comic books, and his cats on his Patreon (/quicksipreviews) and Twitter (@ClowderofTwo), he can probably found raising a beer with his husband, Matt, in their home in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
This review and more like it in the May 2024 issue of Locus.
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