Charles Payseur Reviews Short Fiction: GigaNotoSaurus, Flash Fiction Online, and Lightspeed

GigaNotoSaurus 4/23
Flash Fiction Online 4/23
Lightspeed 5/23

May’s GigaNotoSaurus presents a video game-centered tale in Andrew Dana Hudson’s “Any Percent”. In the story, Luckless is a player of a simulation game where in the span of an hour people can live through sometimes multiple lives in-game, sometimes just experiencing life outside of themselves, and sometimes upping the stakes to try and speed-run a rise to the top as the world’s wealthiest person. With his own personal life filled with crushing employment and no real hope of a better life, the game be­comes an escape, then an obsession as Luckless decides he will set the record for fastest ascent to wealthiest. Hudson reveals the depths of the game that Luckless plays, revealing slowly the hollowness of his goal as it takes him further and further into the role of the same people ruthlessly exploiting his labor and life. But for all the grim elements in the setting and Luck­less’s experiences, the story finds a way back toward human connection, spurred through the game itself and finally spilling free in new purpose and energy.

Horror is the name of the game in the May issue of Flash Fiction Online, and “Skin the Teeth” by Sarah Cline certainly sends shivers up the spine through the voice of a presence in a house – indeed, in a string of houses. This presence narrates its demise as its chosen, its victim, has their home torn apart and cleaned after years of hording and rot. Cline unsettles with vivid descriptions of decay and corruption that might have readers itching to wash their hands (or take a shower and then scour their own home). The prose is evocative and chilling, and the feeling of unease lingers well after the story is done.

June’s issue of Lightspeed opens with “Space­ship Joyride” by Dominique Dickey, which delightfully is what it says on the tin – a story about two boys who hot-wire a spaceship and cruise around, all while also navigating their feelings towards each other. Both young men are hesitant, afraid of rejection, and adorably awkward about their crushes on each other, and of course things get a bit pear-shaped when the cops show up. Even so, it’s a lower-stakes adventure with a highly romantic feeling that shines with warm and promise. Things get a little more dire in Ruth Joffre’s “Queen of the Andes”, which finds humans largely abandon­ing Earth for distant planets thanks to climate change having made the surface uninhabitable. Even still, some who are waiting to be evacuated and holdouts uninterested in leaving Earth, live on in underground communities where they largely have time to themselves when not contributing to the upkeep of their habitats. For the narrator, that means plenty of time to try and grow a plant called the Queen of the Andes, the last of its kind, and a piece of Earth she hopes to take to the stars, to keep that part of her history and cultural heritage alive. To do so, though, she’ll have to leave the family she has, and the family she’s found in the habitat, and take her chances in a space that might just be a mirror of the same exploitative system that already destroyed one planet. Joffre infuses the prose with inner conflict and longing, with an impossible decision at its heart. It’s very much worth checking out!

Recommended Stories
“Queen of the Andes”, Ruth Joffre (Lightspeed 6/23)

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

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