Charles Payseur Reviews Short Fiction: Escape Pod, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, and Strange Horizons

Escape Pod 3/21/24, 3/28/24
Three-Lobed Burning Eye 3/24
Strange Horizons 3/18/24, 3/25/24, 4/1/24, 4/8/24

March’s Escape Pod features a unique post-catastrophe world in Pragathi Bala’s “Summitting the Moon”, which unfolds on an Earth that has experienced the Landing of the Moon, where an asteroid impact has pushed the Moon’s orbit so close to the planet that it has created a Rut and altered not only the world’s oceans but its entire geography. Before the Landing, Ghis and her wife Max were clos­ing in on their dreams – good jobs and the start of a family. But after the Landing, everything fell apart, and what they were left with were the reminders. Years later, Max is desperate to move on and move away, to start over somewhere new, while Ghis is still chasing something as she builds vehicles that might race up and over the Moon. Bala does an excellent job showing the way that the unexpected can destroy and change plans and dreams, and the strain that can put on people and relationships. At the same time, the story reveals characters who are trying to avoid self-destructing in the face of the hardships they’ve endured, and reaching for each other, and hope for the future, despite how they’ve been burned before. It’s wonderful!

The latest from Three-Lobed Burning Eye in­cludes four stories to unsettle and delight, in­cluding Ann LeBlanc’s strange and suffocating “Memories Held Against a Hungry Mouth”, in which Iris is a researcher who investigates a phenomenon on campus – an area of blankness, or nothing, where things can enter and exit but in which something is always lost. And while the losses might seem on one level like simple lapses in memory, the blankness actually seems to draw the omissions out into the real world – when Iris forgets the name of the animal that a kind of meat comes from, it’s the animal that goes missing from everywhere in the world, rather than just PAYSEUR

her memories of it. For all the danger involved, though, Iris returns again and again, puts herself inside, invites her partner, M, to lose their gender, which for M has always been uncomfortable and wrong. LeBlanc draws readers to consider a force that can only be defined by tracing absences, and it’s a fascinating look at compulsion, yearn­ing, and nothingness. Even as it draws towards heartbreak and dissolution, the story manages to capture Iris’s draw to the phenomenon, even as it takes and takes.

Strange Horizons closed out March with Elisha Oluyemi’s intriguing “Another Beauty of Dark­ness”. The poem focuses on a mother and the nar­rator, presumably her child. The narrator seems to be part computer, and the mother inputs ques­tions to prompt answers. The narrator uses the wisdom of their elders to try and answer why the moon shines at night. Is it to give succor to the evil things that cannot stand the daytime, or are there other explanations – other reasons – why the moon gives light to the darkness? Oluyemi finds something beautiful and hopeful in the examination of darkness and night, providing a lovely and moving answer to the question that the poem revolves around. Opening up April, E.N. Díaz’s “Voyeur | Voyeur” provides a bilingual look at a narrator planting a rather intimate part of himself and growing another him. The piece is sensual, this new version of the narrator an object to be placed and posed while the narrator waits and, given the title, watches events unfold. The poem, without being too explicit, reveals the narrator and second self preparing for something likely sexual but also complex, dissociative as it treats with desire and pain, the narrator becom­ing both spectator and participant. Díaz plays with desire and distance in remarkable ways, and there is a solid sense of anticipation, fear, and ful­fillment as narrator and mirror interact, while the reader becomes a second audience for them both, suddenly involved in ways that are well worth un­packing. Moving to fiction, Stephen Granade’s “The Jaxicans’ Authentic Reconstruction of Taco Tuesday #37” imagines a future where alien researchers have applied for and been awarded grant funding to bring back certain humans to learn more about… fast food. Only a very small number of humans can be brought back to life, however, and so instead of Dave Thomas or some other fast food icon, they end up with Mike, who worked for a time in a Taco Tuesday restaurant. It’s not the afterlife that Mike imagined, just like it wasn’t really the life he’d imagined, working a dead-end job at a crappy Taco Tuesday. And yet his resurrection reinforces the ways that he’s valued most as the exploited taco drone, which is a rather crushing thought. Granade really interrogates what it means to be authentic in a space where “authenticity” is only a gimmick, a thin veneer without depth or actual connection to people or traditions. And yet even in such an artificial space, the human element can never be fully erased, and people like Mike can still find ways towards genuine connection, joy, and love.

Recommended Stories

“Summitting the Moon”, Pragathi Bala (Escape Pod 3/24)
“Memories Held Against a Hungry Mouth”, Ann LeBlanc (Three-Lobed Burning Eye 3/24)
“The Jaxicans’ Authentic Reconstruction of Taco Tuesday #37”, Stephen Granade (Strange Horizons 4/24)

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

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