Baffling, Flash Fiction Online and Zooscape: Reviews by Charles Payseur

Baffling 12/24
Flash Fiction Online 12/24
Zooscape 12/24

Baffling closes out 2024 with plenty of steam in an issue that mixes queer themes, speculative elements, and a particular focus on intimacy and sex. In K-Ming Chang’s “The Glass Wife”, that focus illuminates a narrator and her lover, who is made of glass. For the narrator, having a lover made of glass means sometimes losing sight of her, not seeing her labor or her true self, though I feel that doesn’t make the narrator’s feelings about her wife invalid or immaterial. For the woman made of glass, though, her nature is something that moves beyond the traditionally fleshed – a glimpse at a future where we can see the beauty of a person’s inner light rather than what’s just skin deep. For the narrator and for readers, the relationship is fleeting, perhaps doomed, as the narrator cannot fully embrace what she cannot see, and so knows on some level that their time together might be fleeting, but is special and precious all the same. It’s a lovely and aching story. Louis Evans’s “Xeno ISO Synth for One-Time Encounter” is another about two very different people finding intimacy and fulfillment, but through the frame of a dating or fetish site scene/classified ad. The person posting is an alien Xeno looking for a robot to engage in some consensual… activities which really digs into taboo, bodies, and comfort in some intense ways. Readers might find it difficult to accept what is described in the scenario as anything but violent and violating, and yet the Xeno knows what they want, what they need, and how to ask for it. What might be interpreted as bluntness rather reflects a kind of affirming confidence and self-knowledge that refuses to be disgusted or ashamed with the pleasure and satisfaction that the Xeno feels through this rather specific scenario. And through that refusal to bend to the expectation of “polite society,” Evans reveals a character deeply in touch with their desires, their sexuality, and their body. It might entice or repulse, but it’s that very dichotomy that the story plays with, teases, and ultimately satisfies. It’s great!

The December Flash Fiction Online features a new story by Tina S. Zhu. “Why I Quit Teaching at the Villain Academy” is presented as a list that not only explains why the narrator quit teaching, but also builds up a complex and fascinating look at a future where climate change has devastated a world kept distracted by an endless cycle of hero and villain battles. The narrator had aspired to be a villain, after their more famous father, but as they try to teach pupils who face increasingly dire situations, they see that the pageantry of the hero versus villain battles does little but divert attention from the lack of infrastructure, prospects, and hope outside of the domed outposts controlled by moneyed interests and upheld by everyone fighting for their own place inside them rather than against the forces that have led to this dystopian state. Zhu doesn’t waste a single word in revealing the world, the characters, and the resolve of the narrator to reach for something other than the easy conflict and spectacle of heroes and villains. It’s very much worth checking out!

The latest issue of Zooscape opens with Beth Dawkins’s “A Colony of Vampires”, which unfolds in what might be the distant past, where bat-like Jeholopteruses compete with the Qianzhousauruses for access to feed on the herds of Tsintaosauruses in the area. For a long time the groups have maintained a sort of balance, but when the Qianzhousauruses find a way to taint the Tsintausaruses and poison their bat-like competitors, including the story’s narrator, it throws everything into disorder. The narrator finds herself thrown out of her family group and needing to find a new family as well as a plan to take back their food source and survive. Dawkins does a good job weighing the more personal moments in the story as the character faces their loss, their fear, and their hunger against the larger action and conflict between the different groups trying to survive and thrive. It might not feature many familiar creatures, but their feelings and struggle are all too recognizable, and it makes for a fine read.

Recommended Stories
“Xeno ISO Synth for One-Time Encounter”, Louis Evans (Baffling 12/24)
“Why I Quit Teaching at the Villain Academy”, Tina S. Zhu (Flash Fiction Online 12/24)

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

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