Quick Sips - Fireside Magazine #81

Fireside Magazine closes out July with four new stories that deal with family and with bargains. Often with bargains that don’t exactly go as planned. A faerie queer who kidnaps a child only to find herself getting involved in the life of the mother. Spice traders opening up a new market in the shadow of colonialism. Workers trapped in a place where they are always outsiders, exploited, making connections no one expects. A magical being of water making a bargain much deeper than the words used to contain it. The works look at how bargains are often made with one side trying to cheat the other, and how that can be avoided, and how sometimes it can’t be. It's a lovely bunch of stories, and I’ll get right to my reviews!

Quick Sips - Uncanny #33 [March stuff]

Art by Galen Dara

Three short stories and two poem round out Uncanny Magazine’s March offerings. And the pieces mix magic and seduction, visions and trauma, freedom and loss as they explore their worlds and futures. It’s difficult for me to pick out a single connective tissue that runs throughout, but I appreciate the way each story features characters struggling with the decision to act or remain silent. And in that silence, complicit. Each character ends up making the decision to act, but how they do that, and what they’re acting against, are quite different. So yeah, let’s get to the reviews!

Quick Sips - Beneath Ceaseless Skies #270

Art by Flavio Bolla

The second Beneath Ceaseless Skies issue of January brings with it two stories about war and conflict and the women, reaching for each other, who are pulled apart by conflict, death, and grief. It follows two women in two very different situations, but both of them hurt by war, by what it has taken from them. And they both have to figure out what to do and where to go when what was familiar and relatively safe for them is taken away. Is made not an option. And it leaves them struggling to snatch something back from the jaws of war, from the gravity of sorrow. So let’s get to the reviews!

Quick Sips - Apex #105

The two original stories from February’s Apex Magazine mix hope and fear, rules and confinement. They show two very different takes on isolation and regulation. In one, characters push against a system that stifles and oppresses, that denies and demands sacrifice when none might be necessary. It shows the drive for freedom and the joy and hope that can produce. In the others, characters push against a system that might be the only thing standing between them and an unknown devastation, that demands sacrifice when none might be necessary but when it might indeed be necessary as well. It shows the drive for freedom and the terror and tragedy that can produce. These are two very different stories that take two very different looks at the unknown, and it makes for a fascinating one-two punch of short SFF. Let’s get to the reviews!

Art by Justin Adams

Quick Sips - Tor dot com December 2016

The offerings from Tor dot com this December all hover around the long short story/short novelette line in terms of length, and start in the distant fantastical past before drawing closer and closer to the fantastical present. Things kick off in ancient China with a judge and a unicorn (well, a kind of unicorn) and a personal crisis, then move to the Manifest Destiny of American colonialism, then finally end in a New York much like our own…but with some superpowers involved. These are story that are at turns fun and fast and brooding and dark. There's a lot to see and feel, though, and as the stories draw nearer to the present they seem to me to grow a bit more hopeful about the new year approaching. So yeah, to the reviews!

Art by Ashley Mackenzie

Quick Sips - Shimmer #27 (September Stuff)

Two new stories this month at Shimmer and they're both stories about time and about humans finding places that aren't quite meant for humans. In the first an alternate Dust Bowl threatens to do much more than make for bad crops and a woman finds a child she knows is not her own. In the second, a man is trapped in a house that is not a house, that is alive and a prisoner in its own right, though neither is really able to free the other. In both stories there is a grim inevitability to the tales, a recognition that some people are incapable of healing the wounds caused and a waiting for the ones that can. Sad and moving, the stories offer small glimpses of hope, but it takes quite a bit of suffering to get there. So without further waiting, to the reviews!

Art by Sandro Castelli

Quick Sips - Strange Horizons January 19

Strange Horizons is back with the second of the two-part "The Animal Women" and so I'm back and ready to review. Also DISCLAIMER: my review for the story is less review and more meandering effort to figure out how I feel about that story. It's a bit long and changes midway a few times and...well, I just kept it as-is because I'm not sure I have my thoughts completely together on it and if I have time maybe I'll be back to re-think this. Also a new poem, which is always nice. So let's go!

Stories:

"The Animal Women" (part 2) by Alix E. Harrow (4434 words)

Well that was satisfying. I suppose I shouldn't say that when a fictional character gets killed, but Orrin really deserved it. The amount of wanting-that-guy-to-die-ness that went into that character is impressive, and the story not only gets him mauled in the face but then completely destroyed. It's fun and has a great mood to it, but now I'm trying to unpack the story a bit. And I think there is a lot going on in this story, with the little white girl who becomes a part of something...well, both animal and human. For all that these are Animal Women, I think there is a point that they are human, that it might ask the age-old favorite in science fiction and fantasy of "who is the real animal?" Of course, that gets complicated a bit because of the racial issues at work in the story, at the time that it is set, on the day that it came out. The women are all victims who found strength and power in...I guess rejecting the place people wanted for them. They break from the world that is set up to destroy them and find a little bit of power of their own. Wait a second. Maybe I'm thinking about this wrong. The women are probably all dead, aren't they? They all "split" and gained their power at times when they were about to die. One through a mob, one through self-inflicted harm. They all died, and in doing so became something like Furies, spirits of vengeance who are apart from everything, unable to change anything, except perhaps to save Candy. But...huh, does that mean that Candy is dead too at the end? And would that mean that these women only gained some power through their deaths? This just got way more complicated than I thought it would. Re-reading the end...

...and still missing out on something that would help me completely wrap my head around the story. I think I'd draw it back to the Shakespeare quote that Candy cries out when she changes. I think I have to think that the women are dead, that Candy is dead. I have to think that this is basically a story about how hatred creates something dark and twisted, that it doesn't just leave. That those women have become Furies, and that Candy has too. That they have, largely, lost their ability to change the world except through violence, that they have left the world except as vengeful spirits. Which makes this a little less the historical fantasy I thought it was at first and more a horror story. The implication being that what you do comes back in the end, and you should try to do good, to sow peace and understanding, or what you sow you will reap. Hmm. Not exactly what I thought I was going to find in this story. It's a bit less hopeful than I thought at first. Because Candy has effectively lost her voice. She gained it, but it has become something cold and animal. She lost her camera, which was the greater voice, which might have had the greater strength, and instead has become a killer.

Okay, apparently I have thoughts on this story. Many thoughts. I still like it. I mean, it's a fun story, and sometimes what you want is a story where the bad guy gets punished as he should and where the little girl gets the power to punish him. But something about it is...well, sad. Probably that was on purpose. Because sad things do happen. The women in the story went through horrible things and they couldn't stop that. According to them, they got a power in return, a kind of magic. But I'm still not sure what kind of magic that is. They say they were not nothing anymore, but I wonder what they are. They get the power to not conform, but still lack the power to...belong? Unless they're choosing to belong with more of a natural world instead of a human world. They have power, but it seems only the power to protect themselves, the power to kill, and how Candy fits into that is a little confusing because she seems different in the end, free but also changed, no longer the girl she was, and if the implication is that this version of Candy is better then I'm just not sure and look I've gone cross-eyed. I'm just not sure how to approach that just now. Hmm. Gah! I'm probably just over-thinking this and need to stop and delete all this.

SUMMARY OF THE ABOVE: I'm not sure how to feel about liking this story. Because I do like it. But I can't seem to wrap my head around it completely. Help?

Poetry:

"Retirement" by Samantha Renda-Dollman

Now that I'm all confused I probably shouldn't read anything more but I'm charging ahead (sorry this poem). And I like the poem. It seems to be hinting at a relationship that isn't really as stable as it could be. Making a statement about retirement in general, that this old (presumably) married couple has moved to the moon to retire and the woman (it seems feminine to me, but I suppose that could be wrong. The character is never gendered, but I guess I assumed) is completely okay with that. The man, however, doesn't seem to be able to stand it. He lost something on Earth and wants to go back. But she doesn't. She just enjoys herself. Maybe I've just seen this in people after they retire and that's why I gender the narrator (is it still a narrator in poetry?) as female. Because in some ways retirement is getting rid of a lot of expectations placed on you by society. And because for women those expectations are generally crappier than for men, they seem more able to handle retiring, while many retired men I know can't handle being a part of those expectations, because it gave them more power. And who knows, maybe I'm once more reading too much into this, but I like the poem. Quite and with a sense of a long exhale. Nice work.

Quick Sips - Strange Horizons January 13

Another week means another "issue" of Strange Horizons is out. Only this is the first part of a two-part story by Alix E. Harrow. And a poem. And some non-fiction, but this time I'm not going to look in depth at the nonfiction. Perhaps because I don't have much experience with what it's about so I wasn't sure what to think. But here I go!

Stories:

"The Animal Women" (part 1) by Alix E. Harrow (3591 words)

Well this first part of the story really makes it seem like stuff is going to hit the fan. About a young white girl in the rural south right after the assassination of MLK, Jr., this story is a little hard to judge based solely on the first part. There's a lot going on here, a little girl with speech problems who wants to be a photojournalist and who finds a small group of houses where some women live. The women are described as animal-like but it's not really clear yet if that is to challenge the reader or if they are actual...well, creatures wouldn't be the right word. Spirits? Shape-shifters? It's a little difficult to guess but there is some power to them that looks like it's going to lead to some serious carnage in the second part. But I could be wrong. The premise is an interesting one, and the racial elements seem well done to me, making for a complex situation, especially when not all of the animal women are non-white. It makes me quite excited to see what happens next week.

Poetry:

"Orthography in the Lands of Yahm" by Daniel Ausema

I really like this poem. Though it does sound like it is very difficult to communicate in this Yahm. I love the ideas that are introduced, though, the writing on spider silk, which is delicate and often goes astray when spiders escape. Then the trees, writing that is concrete but always too late to do anything, that does nothing to stop the warring. Then the writing on the sand, which is supposed to be lasting but that only disappears. It examines the ideas of language, and how language can fail us, how it can fall short, because while these methods all seem amazing, they don't really work. And that's great. It builds an idea of each of these places, gives them personality and depth and conjures them with more force than I think would have been captured with a prose story. The structure worked for me, with the first and last sections, where the language is more ephemeral, having a loser structure and the middle, where it is written in trees, being built like a little brick of text. Excellent stuff!