Charles Payseur Reviews Short Fiction: Diabolical Plots, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Kaleidotrope

Diabolical Plots 4/24
Beneath Ceaseless Skies 4/4/24, 4/18/24
Kaleidotrope 4/24

Anne Liberton’s “Six-Month Assessment on Miracle Fresh” anchors the April Diabolical Plots, and for marketing fans (or soft drink fans) it’s a rather delightful and sharp look at capital­ism, religion, and corporate interests. Framed as an internal document in a soft drink company that produces Miracle Fresh, which contains blood of the Messiah, the assessment looks at different demographic groups central to the success of the brand as well as others who have been impacted by the beverage. And Liberton really captures the tone and feel of corporate culture that does not stop to consider the harm of a product so much as it considers liability and sales. The story shows a keen insight and sense of humor both as it reveals the effects and side effects of Miracle Fresh, and lays out just how the company intends to proceed in order to maximize profits. It’s fun and rather refreshing, and left me thirsty for more!

The first of Beneath Ceaseless Skies’s April is­sues focuses on magic that can alter a person’s mind – stealing their memories or, in the case of Jonathan Edelstein’s “The Speech That God Understands”, a person’s very language. The sto­ry finds Isaac, a blind magician, Jewish scholar, and maker of wine, pulled into a dispute sur­rounding not just a scientist who is a woman in a historical setting where that brought a certain amount of pushback, but also the entrenched and heated debates about language and divinity. For Isaac, Hebrew allows him to access magic through the use of numbers and letters and con­cepts. And when his language is taken from him by a strange and contagious magical affliction, it’s perhaps more of a shock than when he lost his sight. Edelstein does a masterful job of building up the characters, setting, and situation for this historical fantasy mystery, placing Isaac as an increasingly desperate investigator needing to get to the bottom of what’s happening in order to reconnect with his language, faith, and magic. The second issue of April shifs to feature beings bound to water and faced with the aftermaths of injustice and death. In “Katya Vasilievna and the Second Drowning of Baba Rechka” by Christine Hanolsy, Baba Rechka is a Rusalka – a woman drowned and bound to the river she died in so she can take her revenge against the man who killed her and any unwary enough to come near. But mostly she just watches those women who come to bathe, especially Katya, who stirs something in her that cannot be denied. The two meet, and grow close, creating a community among the various spirits and beings of the river and forest. At least until Katya’s family decides to marry her off to a wealthy man. Hanolsy does a fine job using folklore to create a story that is tense and teeters on the edge of sorrow, but ultimately refuses to be tragic and grim. Which is wonderful to read.

The April Kaleidotrope contains an abundance of speculative stories and poetry, including “Charybdis” by Julia August, which opens on a receptionist, Cherry/Charis/Charybdis, trying to get by and maybe find a little love. Something that doesn’t happen when, as Cherry, she meets a man at her work at a legal advice non-profit. Nor when, at a bar later, that same man, who turns out to be a bear-shifter, comes crashing through the window. For all that her romantic life is a mess, though, as Charybdis she certainly knows how to take care of dangerous business, and that might at least open some doors for her in her pro­fessional life. August does a great job maintain­ing forward momentum in the story, keeping the worldbuilding light but implying a much larger and complex system of magic and supernatural beings. It’s a romp of a misadventure, though, and manages the different personas of the main character with style and skill. Zoe Kaplan keeps the fun going with “The Witch Who Lives Next Door”, which follows a girl as she decides she wants to be a witch (despite the slight resistance from her parents). But witches are needed rather than wanted, and that distinction pulls at her, and brings her into a kind of apprenticeship to the local witch. The piece explores the ways that witches are powerful but also how they try and use that power for justice, trying to leverage out of magic something closer to fairness than the world tends to provide. Her growth and educa­tion are captured by Kaplan with warmth and hope that despite the difficulties and isolation that being a witch can bring, there are still con­nections to be made, and a wide world in need of some help. It’s a lovely read. Moving to the issue’s poetry, Alexis Renata’s “An Introduc­tion” tracks the progression of AI (with that nice nod in the title) as the technology advances. As it goes from being something rather unusable and awful to showing a great deal of potential to being corrupted by greed and becoming something awful in an entirely different sense. I like the ways the piece lays out the potential for AI to make certain things easier and better, to help people – and showing instead how it’s been leveraged to make money, to make human exploitation worse instead of better. The narra­tor of the piece seems to ask if it’s worth it – if the benefits still outweigh the damages. But wedged into that question is the thorny mess of human agency, and the truth that for all AI can and is being used corruptly, it’s up to humans to regulate and use technology justly. Which is a good thing to remember.

Recommended Stories

“The Speech That God Understands”, Jonathan Edelstein (Beneath Ceaseless Skies 4/24)
“Katya Vasilievna and the Second Drowning of Baba Rechka”, Christine Hanolsy (Beneath Ceaseless Skies 4/24)
“The Witch Who Lives Next Door”, Zoe Kaplan (Kaleidotrope 4/24)

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

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