Flash Fiction Online, Strange Horizons, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies: Short Fiction Reviews by Charles Payseur

Flash Fiction Online 6/24
Strange Horizons 6/9/24, 6/24/24
Beneath Ceaseless Skies 6/27/24, 7/11/24

The June Flash Fiction Online features a range of rather grim stories about char­acters caught in oppressive situations. Perhaps the most surprising is Kurt Pankau’s “A Pin Drops”, which imagines bowling tech­nology advancing to the point where pins are made intelligent and sentient in order for them to protect one another and form familial bonds to better reduce wear, damage, and replacement. Except that human technology has advanced as well, and these new pins must face the specter of cyborg enhancements that can give people the strength to decimate the pins, a fate that has already happened to the narrator-pin’s first family. Now put among relative strangers, the pin is pushed to the front again and again thanks to the pin’s outsider status, though it doesn’t prevent the pin from developing feelings for its new family, and especially another pin displaced by tragedy. Pankau captures an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty, a tension that can only be released as the story moves towards a literally and emotionally shattering conclusion.

June and July saw the successful Kickstarter campaign of Strange Horizons, and a special fund drive issue full of poetry, fiction, and more, including Bree Wernicke’s “A Tour of the Blue Palace”, a poem that takes the voice of a tour guide showing a small group around a famous site in a war-torn city. The site acts as both testament to the resilience of the people of the city and a reminder of the ongoing violence ripping it all apart. The tour guide becomes both patriot extolling the hope for their city and refugee desperate to escape the scarcity, death, and destruction they have so far survived. Capturing all that in rhyme is no easy task, but is accomplished brilliantly by Wernicke in this PAYSEUR

must-read piece. In the same issue, Premee Mohamed makes a great case for supporting the kinds of work Strange Horizons publishes with the novelette “By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars”. In it, Firion, a famous wizard, and Cane, her latest apprentice, arrive at a momentous but precarious time. Bouldus, a gargantuan sea dragon, is expected to threaten the city under Firion’s protection, and Firion, despite having handled the beast many times in the past, finds her own magic blocked from her, a truth she in turn doesn’t reveal to anyone, even Cane. Mohamed does an amazing job of showing the determined and messy characters at the heart of the drama: Firion, unwilling to fully trust but willing to risk everything on Cane, who has his own reasons for being desperate to succeed. It’s a story about imperfect people making at times very selfish decisions, but shows that those decisions are not always wrong, and it’s a fascinating and rewarding line the story walks well. Definitely worth checking out!

And back in Strange Horizons’ regular is­sues, R. Christopher Aversa’s poem “Gold Foil Experiment” combines physics, logic, and humanity in some interesting ways, pointing out that humans are mostly water, and water mostly empty space. Humans, then, can seem inconsequential next to the vastness of space and time, the entropy that many people are trying to push back against, to create lasting change, to be a positive force in a chaotic universe. But just because humans might be mostly empty space doesn’t mean they can’t do things, can’t affect their world and beyond. Aversa frames humans as perhaps lacking context in imagining our place in the cosmos, but ultimately seems to hint that it’s that lack that makes us significant, finding hope instead of despair in the physical limitations of humanity and, in the face of that, our unlikely but nearly unlimited potential to explore, create, interact, and inspire.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies closed out June with an issue centered on powerful magic users be­ing controlled by corrupt governments. In J.C. Snow’s “The Institute of Harmony”, the magic user is Dathin, whose land was conquered by an empire and the deadly Swords who wield magic to further its colonial ambitions. Dathin is intended to either become one of those Swords, co-opted to further the empire that hurt her, or else perish in the attempt. No one really expects that she’ll form a close bond with an empire-raised student and unlock secrets that could bring the empire to its knees, but Snow handles the world building and character work deftly, revealing the power of selflessness, love, and defiance in the face of tyranny. It’s an exhila­rating read! Moving in July, M.R. Robinson’s “Linden Honey, Blackcurrant Wine” anchors an issue focused on choice, grief, and time. In it, Irena has grown old and outlived a husband she never really loved, though she didn’t hate him either. But in marrying him she turned her back on a magical relationship, choosing her obliga­tions to family and society over the longing in her heart. Sixty years later, she has a chance at least to explain herself to the lover, a wood­maiden, she left behind, and Robinson weaves nostalgia, longing, and regret into a powerful and memorable narrative that simultaneously urges that it’s never too late to act out of love, and acknowledges that time is not infinite, and choices have at times heartbreaking outcomes. It’s a lovely story.

Recommended Stories

“A Pin Drops”, Kurt Pankau (Flash Fiction Online 6/24)
“By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars”, Premee Mohamed (Strange Horizons 6/24)
“The Institute of Harmony”, J.C. Snow (Beneath Ceaseless Skies 6/26/24)

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

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