Charles Payseur Reviews Short Fiction: Diabolical Plots, GigaNotoSaurus, Fusion Fragment, 3LBE, and Baffling

Diabolical Plots 4/23
GigaNotoSaurus 4/23
Fusion Fragment 4/23
3LBE 4/23
Baffling 4/23

Guan Un drags Sisyphus into the modern world in April’s Diabolical Plots with ‘‘Re: Your Stone’’, a story framed as a series of emails between the unfortunate Sisyphus and the bu­reaucratic nightmare that is Hades Corp. The story deftly captures the tone and excruciating layers of automation and pointed ineptitude of working with many corporate structures when something goes wrong, letting readers find the rich humor at work even if it’s a bit lost on the suffering protagonist. Un packs in humor without ever breaking the verisimilitude of the piece, reimagining a Sisyphus just as cursed as the original but with a fresh spin for contem­porary audiences. It’s delightful!

April’s GigaNotoSaurus story is ‘‘Sea Wolf’’ by Claire Scherzinger, in which Odette is a pho­tojournalist made famous for the images she captured of the first alien to visit Earth. Or, at least, the first alien who was loud about it. Cuz­wast lived in the forests of tribal land in Canada in the shape of a wolf, and his death at the hands of a white hunter was a bitter and devastating loss felt across the world. It’s still something of a raw wound when Odette is approached by the government with an urgent mission – to guide Cuzwast’s children through the forests that were his home, and help them perform a ritual that will allow them to better understand him and the forms he took on Earth. Odette has to navigate the forest and the minefield of memo­ries and emotions she hasn’t processed, all while confronting the strange and at times dangerous natures of the aliens, who have a few surprises of their own. Scherzinger tells a complex and lovely story of family, belonging, and loss.

The latest from Fusion Fragment includes Spen­cer Nitkey’s aching ‘‘The Song, Its Singers, and the End of the World’’, which follows a group of friends facing the destruction of Earth and the limited and limiting choices open to them. For some, escape is a ship off-planet, while others hope to upload their consciousness into a digital environment. Others are going to wait out the end and see what comes, and Jupiter, the narrator, has decided to embrace the strange phenomenon that is destroying the planet – a kind of song that breaks people down, that dis­solves them into itself. What happens to them after that is a mystery, and most of Jupiter’s friends recoil from their decision. Nitkey looks at how different people face something as big as armageddon with insight and compassion, and it makes for a fascinating experience. In ‘‘The Maskmaker’’, Dana Floberg casts forward to a future where women must cover sixty percent of their faces with rather generic masks made by a government-subsidized company until a small boutique maskmaker decides to enter the scene and gets people, including the journalist cover­ing the events, to re-examine these masks and their full implications. The piece explores the ways that bodies, especially women’s bodies, are policed in the face of misogynist violence, and how that policing can become internalized and complicated by safety, identity, and intimacy. Floberg does sharp work revealing the world and its characters, and selling the direction this dystopian setting developed from the real trends at work today.

April’s 3LBE includes A.M. Guay’s ‘‘Exquisite Corpses’’, a story about a camp for dead girls who have been brought back to be perfect. Prop­er. Exactly what their parents want them to be. The problem being that despite the attempts to make these girls ‘‘better’’ versions of themselves, the girls aren’t about to waste a second chance on life bowing under the weight of expectations. The premise and the action are grim, but Guay captures a defiance and a yearning for freedom that even death has not erased. And despite the heavy elements, there is a sense of fun and release, these girls finding in each other a fam­ily that accepts them rather than trying to turn them into something they aren’t.

April’s Baffling Magazine continues the pub­lication’s focus on queer-centered speculative fiction, opening with ‘‘The Little Free Guide to Dronewatching, Abridged & Annotated’’ by Ann LeBlanc. It’s a beautiful and almost heartbreaking story about a woman alone after her partner was arrested and jailed in a future America where climate change and authoritar­ian rule has made life a hell for many. Trans­gender and isolated, the narrator stays busy annotating their partner’s guide for caring for drones that have been ‘‘infected’’ with a virus that frees them from governmental or corporate control – that might even have given them a form of will. The piece is grim, emotionally aching, but also undefeated and unbroken despite the pressure, fear, and danger the narrator faces. Sharang Biswas explores desire, prejudice, and the supernatural in ‘‘’Sup, Handsome?’’ The story blends text and image as the first part of the story unfolds as images of a chat between two men inside a hookup site. One of them turns out to be a vampire, but open about it, and lonely in a world where people are (perhaps understand­ably) hesitant to hook up with vampires. But the chat shows the careful (and horny) negotiation between the men in a way that is warm and rather adorable. Of course, Biswas shifts things hard as the story moves from the chat to the preparations the non-vampire is making to get ready for the arranged rendezvous. It takes the warmth and complicates it; not showing readers what happens next but making them navigate the tricky lines of deception, attraction, and predation at play in the situation.

This review and more like it in the June 2023 issue of Locus.

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