Cast of Wonders, Strange Horizons and Hexagon Winter: Reviews by Charles Payseur

Cast of Wonders 12/3/24
Strange Horizons 11/18/24, 12/9/24
Hexagon Winter ’24

Alexander Hewitt defies genre horror expecta­tions in “Emily” from the December Cast of Wonders. In it, a queer couple who are trying to adopt buy an old doll in anticipation of their new family member, only for the doll to begin to exhibit some… alarming behaviors. The narrator at first attributes these spooky goings-on to her partner moving the doll or otherwise playing a prank, but things come to a head when both learn that little Emily is not the toy they assumed. Rather than walking the same road as Chucky or other killer doll stories, though, Hewitt pulls the tale into a more complex direction, touching on discrimination, kindness, and family in a wonderful and moving way.

Modelled after a similar poem describing nautical ships, M.C. Childs’s “Interstellar As­sistance” in the November Strange Horizons imagines spaceships instead, one calling out in distress and another answering. Unfolding in space, there is a sense of distance and coldness about the piece, as both distress call and response are partly automated, the ships speaking rather than anyone aboard them – which at the same time removes the human element from the equa­tion and also challenges readers to decide if that makes the situation more or less tragic. Because there isn’t the same emotionality surrounding the decidedly grim situation, there is a despair and tragedy that Childs captures powerfully, and the poem is well worth checking out. Íde Hennessy appears in the same issue with “A Slightly Different Sunrise from Mercury, Ne­vada”, which focuses on Annie, who works at a time-travel tourist spot, accompanying patrons to watch atomic testing in a desert, which has worn spacetime thin enough to pass through. She’s not a tour guide, though. Rather, she’s a canary, reporting any possible changes to the timeline as groups go back and forth on a regu­lar basis. Annie has her own plans, though, that don’t really align with what her bosses want, and as she witnesses the terrors of the past next to the bleakness of her present, she has some difficult decisions to make. Hennessy explores just what that means for Annie as she dances around despair, yearning, fate, and a hope for a better world.

Moving to December, Corey Farrenkopf’s “A Wish for the Drowned” imagines another bleak future – one where the narrator and their partner, Sevvy, work in a T-shirt shop with a boss who might just be an AI voice through a speaker. Every year they lose a little bit more, and while they try to stay hopeful and resilient and grateful that they have work at all, they are also pulled toward a local ritual where people can petition the water wench for a wish. Only one in five have their wish granted, though, while the large majority become sustenance for the water wench. Farrenkopf captures well the crush of employment that’s well below subsistence, slowly crushing people while telling them they should thank their employers for not quite enough to live on. And the magic of the water wench becomes a desperate option, but one so many turn to be­cause corruption and inequality have made the world into a grinder where people are forced to choose between a slow or quick obliteration. It’s a fantastic read! Michelle Koubek also contributes to Strange Horizons’s December with the poem “The Universe Is Dying”, which seems to be told from the perspective of medical nanobots inside a person, working on their brain to delay a degenerative condition. And yet the scope and scale of the piece is that of cosmos – stars and galaxies winking out slowly over time as the bots try to keep up. For me, what Koubek excels at is in capturing the worth of a person, their being a universe in itself and their decline one of huge impact and ramification. Though the bots them­selves recognize that there will be others, that the universes they care for will inevitably decline and fail, their job is no less important, and the piece is a powerful reminder that each person contains so much, their mind unique and irreplaceable.

The latest issue of Hexagon features a strange and rather haunting look at a toxic workplace in J Wal­lace’s “This Job is Turning Me into Something I Don’t Like…”. In it, the narrator is a realtor and recently turned vampire who finds it easy enough to feed on potential clients in the derelict and unwanted rentals he oversees. Strangely, though, each person he feeds on ends up taking the prop­erty, and his promotion prospects start interfering with his ability to get a vampiric meal. Wallace does a great job in complicating the vampirism of the narrator, linking it to the exploitative and ruthless world of realty, where he becomes part of a larger system sucking people dry of their life and energy. The story seems to ask which makes the narrator more of a monster – his attacking people for their blood, or his rising position within the home buying and rental market. It’s great. Aurelien Gayet also contributes to the is­sue with “Recruitment Drive”, which finds Jason helping people bypass the often impossible terrain of job-hunting as a kind of hacker. Taking them into a metaphorical virtual space, he races them around obstacles and defeats security measures designed to keep people from being hired. The story exposes the often commonplace barriers of shoddy AI, nepotism, and corruption that makes even getting to the interview stage of job-seeking actually impossible for many. Jason evens the play­ing field a bit, but Gayet also recognizes that this individual act is hardly selfless, and that there is a lot more needed to start to untangle the twisted web corporations have woven to maintain the illusion of access while strictly controlling who can get hired where. It’s a sharp critique wrapped around a fast-paced and action-packed adventure.

Recommended Stories
“A Slightly Different Sunrise from Mercury, Nevada”, Íde Hennessy (Strange Horizons 11/18/24)
“A Wish for the Drowned”, Corey Farrenkopf (Strange Horizons 12/9/24)
“Recruitment Drive”, Aurelien Gayet (Hexagon 12/24)

This review and more like it in the February 2025 issue of Locus.

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