Things get profoundly weird in these April short stories from Motherboard’s Terraform. Very. Very. Weird. From planets where people worship different body parts of their prophet to visions of the future or present where people experience alterations in their perception, the works are all about bending the rules of what makes logical sense in what might be attempts to shake and call into question the fundamental and assumed orderliness of the universe. It finds characters embracing the dark and the unknown, rushing into the jaws of chaos, and struggling against the feelings of stagnancy and inertia. There are some really strange works on display here, but I’m going to give it my best in reviewing them!
Motherboard's Terraform seems to be going through a new transformation of sorts. Not in its schedule or really even in the themes and genres it publishes, but rather in the length of works it focuses on. For a little while now, the bulk of the work it's been publishing has been ranging less into the flash fiction length and more solidly into short stories. Which means a bit of extra space to explore the futures these authors imagine—which can be both a good and a not-so-good thing, given how dark and gritty a lot of those future are. This month five short stories reveal futures full of slavery and corruption, drugs and borders. They star characters trying to heal the fissures they've opened up in their lives, or falling headlong into them. So yeah, let's get to the reviews!
