Charles Payseur Reviews Short Fiction: Escape Pod, Fusion Fragment, Strange Horizons, and Flash Fiction Online

Escape Pod 1/25/24, 2/8/24, 2/22/24, 2/29/24
Fusion Fragment 2/24
Strange Horizons 2/19/24, 2/26/24, 3/4/24, 3/11/24
Flash Fiction Online 2/24, 3/24

Catching up with Escape Pod, their Janu­ary original “The Ballad of Starburst Smith” by David Marino finds a mostly failed musician visiting a special service called a Winnower in order to see a possible future where her music career is more than just disappointing. The downside of using a Winnower, though, is that any possible future glimpsed using it will be forever after impossible, cut off from the current timeline. For Starburst, it’s meant to be a swan song before she gets a less adventurous career and becomes self-sufficient, but the power of the vision is more than she anticipated. Marino digs into the creative impulse through Starburst, and specifically explores what success and meaning can look like for a person driven by their creativity but not exactly appreciated in terms of popular­ity or income. Whether Starburst’s own creative journey should be considered a success or failure, though, is left somewhat unanswered as Marino weighs the realities of earning money through creative work against the equally real needs of some people to express themselves and reach an audience with their art. It’s a complex work that’s worth spending some time with.

The February Fusion Fragment has a lot to recom­mend it, including a stunning take on second acts in Louis Evans’s “Show Goes On”, which takes on a world of superheroes and villains through the slightly (but not really) mundane lens of Nicky Tremaine, child actor turned adult mess. Nicky is nursing what might be the last dregs of an acting career with a one-man show in a church base­ment that no one is attending – that is, until the most powerful supervillain in the world, Doctor Apocalypse, materializes in the audience. It’s an act that ends up changing Nicky’s life, though not because he becomes a superhero or anything so foolish. Rather, it alters the trajectory of his act­ing career, and the story goes on to follow his life after this moment, through its highs and lows, its marriages, divorces, projects, and retirements. Evans keeps the spotlight on Nicky, even as the world of superheroes and powers spins around him, as, for instance, when Doctor Apocalypse tries to kill God for the third time. Amid that and more, the importance of one person and his art is not under- or overstated, but rather is given room to be as chaotic, moving, and beautiful as it is. And readers are confronted with the very hu­man ways that Nicky succeeds and fails, even as it might seem like the world of the superhumans is more important and compelling. It’s a fantastic use of scale and expectation, and provides an en­tertaining journey for Nicky as well as a poignant picture of a life. Definitely make time to check this one out!

Staying in the same issue, Ende Mac tells a vivid and slightly surreal story of human expansion and loneliness in “Last Landing”. In it, Claire Smotherman, 87571 (not actually the name of the protagonist but rather their next of kin and zip code, following the naming conventions of people traveling outside of Earth), is on a world being prepared for permanent human habita­tion, tasked with cataloguing a rare species the construction will impact. Rather than focusing on the job at hand, though, they get a little lost in their own feelings, in their memories of loss, and in the strange companionship of a tour guide robot. It’s a weird piece, but Mac turns that into a fascinating study of a character in an increasingly chaotic downward spiral into an emotional and physical disaster.

Strange Horizons has some wonderful work in February, including Kathy Chao’s “The Three-Jeweled”, a novelette about three adopted daugh­ters of a Ming-era eunuch strategist who builds a flying ship for them to explore the world – and perhaps to work into his own ambitions of power and empire. The story unfolds from the daughters’ joint perspective, detailing their training and up­bringing and eventual freedom of the skies, even as they become targets of their father’s political rivals. Where a lack of a singular voice might im­ply a weakness on their part, though, Chao finds a great deal of strength and defiance as the girls must decide for themselves what course to plot, and what futures to chase. It’s lovely. Jay Gomez’s poem “Experiography Set RW”, meanwhile, ex­plores through art a process that is not designed to be artistic – not exactly. Experiography, as defined in the poem, is supposed to be more about recreation, about capturing a real experi­ence, and yet the narrator runs again and again into the impossibility of that kind of objectivity. When faced with a lack of context and content, as is the case for those whom history has been sup­pressed and erased, there is no remedy that can bring back a voice other than imagination and art. That the medium for this message is art in itself is a further delicious complication, giving readers a lot to digest and enjoy in this beauti­fully realized poem. Toby MacNutt also looks at the inadequacies of a sterilized history in the March poem “You Are Entitled to Your Pain”.In it, a narrator recognizes the ways that people are pressured to hide and erase the painful parts of themselves in order to spare other people the unease and discomfort of seeing it. That pressure frames feeling empathy as a kind of attack, and MacNutt counters that mentality soundly, show­ing how that pressure prevents people from con­necting, from solving problems, from easing or healing pains, and that the only ones who benefit from that situation are the ones most likely to be responsible for the pains in the first place. It’s a moving, hopeful piece about the power not just of empathy, but genuine expression.

After a February devoted to literary stories fea­turing relationships in honor of Valentine’s Day, Flash Fiction Online returns in March with its regular mix of genres, including an intriguing science fiction story by Jennifer Mace. “Sparsely Populated with Stars” finds a narrator kept frozen and immortal, their dreams used by a mysterious power to search out the various incarnations of someone linked to the narrator. Someone they can feel across realities and dis­tance – someone they keep seeing being chased by the same kind of technology that keeps them in their frozen prison. While the story offers no answers to the mysteries it introduces, Mace does a wonderful job capturing both the wonder and magic of the connection between the characters, and the horror of what that connection has been used for. Whatever comes next, the piece boasts gripping prose and an evocative style.

Recommended Stories
“The Ballad of Starburst Smith”, David Marino (Escape Pod 1/25/24)
“Show Goes On”, Louis Evans  (Fusion Fragment 2/24)
“The Three-Jeweled”, Kathy Chao  (Strange Horizons 2/24)

This review and more like it in the May 2024 issue of Locus.

While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely on reader donations to keep the magazine and site going, and would like to keep the site paywall free, but WE NEED YOUR FINANCIAL SUPPORT to continue quality coverage of the science fiction and fantasy field.

©Locus Magazine. Copyrighted material may not be republished without permission of LSFF.