Review by William Grabowski

She was not a ship at all; she was the ocean, deep and vast, with a form forever changing in waves of green and blue.

I’ve been fortunate these past weeks to receive books by authors mostly new to me—including Caroline M. Yoachim‘s debut collection. As much as Weird Fiction has evolved since roughly the late 90s, Science Fiction, in the hands of writers like Yoachim, has responded even more radically to the times.

Beyond the stories’ obvious value, Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World is precisely the collection for readers not wholly invested in the “gosh-wow” factor that drives most—but not all—technologically oriented novels and short fiction. This is not to say Yoachim’s work displays no interest in exploring technology’s indelible role in speculative futures—it does. But the carefully figured science and engineering are embedded, favoring characterizations and storytelling. By embedded, I mean it isn’t necessary to comprehend—second by second—exactly how your coffee-maker’s circuitry operates during the brewing cyle in order to reap its benefits. You already know the machine’s function, so can focus on other matters. Read more »

Review by Paul StJohn Mackintosh

Inescapable Origins

I already had the pleasure of reviewing Stephen Graham Jones’s superb short story collection After the People Lights Have Gone Off, so it’s an equal pleasure to renew acquaintance with his often very domestic focus. But that’s domestic in an entirely different sense than you might think. Here, it’s a 1140 square feet modular house, where the protagonist Junior, then age 12, first sees the form of his dead father, in full Indian fancydancer regalia with “spikes coming out from his lower back,” step out of the kitchen. The family have left the Blackfeet reservation where his father died, yet “you can leave the reservation, but your income level will still land you in a reservation house, won’t it?” And that’s where the family are stuck. With something mysterious, and potentially very malign, coming after them.

After that first encounter, the boy starts obsessively scouring and pacing out his home “for evidence of his having walked through.” He records his findings in a science notebook, and minute details, such as a single bead or a bitten-off superhero figure’s foot, assume almost talismanic power. Later, he works out what his father is there for, and it’s not a family reunion. Rather, he has to learn and risk more to save his mother and his younger brother Dino, who is suffering far more immediate effects from his father’s recrudescence. Bullets don’t work, though they do work all too well on others. By the end of the story, there’s far more than indistinct presences in the spaces under the house. But even those are just a lead-in to the climatic confrontation, and its full significance.

To some extent, then, this is a coming-of-age story, but one that’s a very long way away from Stephen King’s “The Body.” You could read the father-figure as a personification of everything that ancestry and history do to pull down modern Native American life, but I wouldn’t want to overdo that interpretation. This isn’t a grudge-peddling or a score-settling story: it just gently, insistently, won’t let you forget its circumstances. “That’s how you talk about dead people, though, especially dead Indians. It’s all about squandered potential, not actual accomplishments.” It also doesn’t go the Stephen King Magic Negro/Magic Indian route: there’s no sentimental romanticizing of the Blackfeet tradition, and what it brings on the supernatural side is as much of a burden and a trammel as the poverty and deprivation of the protagonist’s background. But as inescapable as any home or origins.

Jones is 100% upfront and honest in his choice of title. As his protagonist says at the end, “When I was twelve years old, I mapped the interior of our home. Now, sitting across from my little brother, I’m sketching out a map of the human heart, I guess. There’s more dark hallways than I knew.” Where those hallways lead at the end of the novella, and the dark finale, I’m not going to share. Just read the book and find out.

From the Book:

To sleepwalk is to be inhabited, yes, but not by something else, so much. What you’re inhabited by, what’s kicking one foot in front of the other, it’s yourself. It doesn’t make sense, but I don’t think it’s under any real compulsion to, finally. If anything, being inhabited by yourself like that, what it tells you is that there’s a real you squirming down inside you, trying all through the day to pull up to the surface, look out. But it can only get that done when your defenses are down. When you’re sleeping.

The whole time I was getting stitched, the neighbor was yelling that I was a menace, that I wasn’t natural, that I wasn’t right. That a human couldn’t do this to four dogs, and any human that did needed to be put down, and that it was his God-given duty to do just that, he didn’t care how many deputies the county sent.

In movies, after you beat the bad guy, the monster, then all the injuries it inflicted, they heal right up. That’s not how it works in the real world. Here’s one way it can work in the real world: the son you accidentally father at a pow-wow in South Dakota grows into the spitting image of a man you remember sitting in the shallows of a lake that goes forever. Like to remind me what I did, what I’d had to do.

Publication Data

Tor Books, 112 pp, print and digital editions

Review by William Grabowski

By the time Aiko leaves, her footsteps echoing down the hallway, I’ve dug deep gouges in the door’s paint with my nails and teeth, my mouth full of her intoxicating scent.

The key word in this anthology’s title is new, and if that doesn’t quicken your heart, a sampling of the impressively diverse voices will. Editors Beagle and Weisman, both top-tier in their own right, seem to have absorbed the generous reach and flexible sensibility of Ellen Datlow who—like them—knows that a writer’s name and/or present level of accomplishment have little to do with storytelling. No one needs to be reminded that common expectations of plot and originality crumble into ash when handled by masterful writers. Read more »

Review by William Grabowski

Now he began spinning in circles—like a deranged dancer, or a whirling dervish, or a man inhabited by devils….

James Morrow explores ideas with visionary audacity and a satirical (yet nonetheless disturbing) bent perhaps unequaled since Philip José Farmer’s Riverworld series—as if directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. I like to imagine eavesdropping as some curious stranger—hearing Morrow’s profession—blurts, “Ooh, an author! What do you write?”

“Well,” says a stoic Morrow, “one of ’em features the divine half-sister of Jesus Christ. She’s been reincarnated in Atlantic City. Another one picks up after the death of God, and no one knows what to do with the 2-mile-long corpse. Bummer.” Read more »