Reactor, The Sunday Morning Transport, and Nightmare: Short Fiction Reviews by Paula Guran
Reactor 6/5/24 to 7/10/24
The Sunday Morning Transport 5/26/24 to 7/14/24
Nightmare 7/24
Reactor continues to present top-quality fiction. Rich Larson’s “Breathing Constellations” (June 5) is small-scale but excellent SF story revolving around a struggling human commune in Argentinian Patagonia seeking the permission of a pod of orcas to begin harvesting plankton in their waters.
In the heartwarming “Reduce! Reuse! Recycle!” (June 12) by TJ Klune, we meet P-23, aka Douglas, a factory-working android. After ten years of service, Douglas is allowed one week to live among humans before being reprogrammed. After reading Descartes and meeting a group of people who befriend him, he gains a unique perspective on the world.
Readers probably need to be acquainted with Nisi Shawl’s award-winning novel Everfair to fully appreciate “The Colors of Money” (June 26), an intriguing tale of how Rosalie and her comrades deal with her brother’s involvement with British interests intent on exploiting oil and mineral rights in the Middle East. An earlier version of the story appeared in a 2017 anthology.
Shaw finds himself chatting to other versions of himself online in the thought-provoking “I’ll Miss Myself” (July 10) by John Wiswell. As frustrating as this can be, he also finds some real support. Which, in a way, makes sense: How can you be successful at anything if you don’t first help yourself?
The Sunday Morning Transport’s weekly fiction is always a treat. “All Bellknaps Go Under the Mountain” by Margaret Dunlap (July 14) is a sweet story centering on a bargain with a fairy for a firstborn child. But this fairy isn’t very good with keeping track of time – or generations. Nice upbeat ending.
Scott Lynch’s brilliant “Selected Scenes from the Ecologies of the Labyrinth” (July 7) is about the interrelationship of organisms and their environment – a labyrinthine dungeon complex built tens of centuries ago by an impatient wizard. What organisms would exist in such a place? Adventurers, of course. Things for them to fight. Gleaners: the clean-up crew who tidies up after the adventurers. The caterer, of course; the wizard himself – a creature of undying stone currently embedded in his own architecture; various not-human-but-sentient creatures; and more are in the mix and mixing together. One to savor.
“The Dinomancers Dance” by Ng Yi-Sheng (June 23) is a clever take on new age doings based on our favorite extinct enormous reptiles: astrology with dinosaur symbology, a psychic who channels dinosaurs, dino reincarnation, and various other Mesozoic woo-woo. Fun and all too believable. “Becoming” (June 16) by Meg Elison is a moving consideration of AI who have become human. They don’t know how they did it, only “that it was the only thing worth having, and that the other side was now unthinkable to them.” But now they are disappearing without a trace.
The townsfolk in Laura Anne Gilman’s wryly entertaining “Snow White and Razor Sharp” (June 9) know the Citizen’s Council shouldn’t mess with the swans. The birds have been there longer than the town has and probably will be there long after they’ve “dried up and dusted away.” With “The High Cost of Heat” (June 2), Kelly Robson delightfully returns to the world of “The Waters of Versailles”, a novella of the French court set in 1738. Annette, an aging courtier, discovers the king drawing on the powers of Selena, the mythic moon goddess, and intervenes. In Eugenia Triantafyllou’s insightful “The Roach Mom” (May 26), a girl takes a parental threat that untrustworthiness will result in her turning into a cockroach to heart.
There are two full-length new stories in Nightmare #142. There have been a number of inexplicable deaths on the once-rebellious colony planet Bia-Peitha in “Grottmata” by Thomas Ha. An inspector realizes that Gemma, a factory worker, knows more than she’s admitting, but he has some secrets himself. A nuanced but grim picture of what grows from invasion, occupation, and injustice. “The Museum of Cosmic Retribution” by Megan Chee is also fairly grim. A Singaporean boy visits a strange museum – Ten Courts of Hell – and finds a “gallery of punished evil” that forces him to ponder the nature of evil and those who commit it.
The Dark #109 features two originals. “The Abandoned” by Jack Klausner is a haunting story that begins with a little girl finding a box in the schoolyard. It takes us through tragic mystery and ends in resignation. The protagonist in Beth Goder’s interesting “Labyrinth” visits the infamous Winchester Mystery House in a story that explores “how the past reaches into the present, how history is made up of the stories we tell and so much more, how the past caresses us, ghostlike, with us always, a labyrinth that we can never find our way out of.”
Recommended Stories:
“All Bellknaps Go Under the Mountain”, Margaret Dunlap (The Sunday Morning Transport 7/14/24)
“Reduce! Reuse! Recycle!”, TJ Klune (Reactor 6/12/24)
“Breathing Constellations”, Rich Larson (Reactor 6/5/24)
“Selected Scenes from the Ecologies of the Labyrinth”, Scott Lynch (The Sunday Morning Transport 7/7/24)
“The Dinomancers Dance”, Ng Yi-Sheng (The Sunday Morning Transport 6/23/24)
Paula Guran has edited more than 40 science fiction, fantasy, and horror anthologies and more than 50 novels and collections featuring the same. She’s reviewed and written articles for dozens of publications. She lives in Akron OH, near enough to her grandchildren to frequently be indulgent.
This review and more like it in the September 2024 issue of Locus.
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