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So a little housekeeping first, and a bit of an introduction. It’s been a while since I’ve looked at a collection or anthology here at QSR, mostly because of how I review for the blog (each story individually and substantively). It’s just so much work to do that for a collection of works that appears in book format on top of the other reviewing work that I do. I used to do these kinds of reviews, then, at Nerds of a Feather or The Book Smugglers, but I have had absolutely no energy to reach out to try and rekindle those ties, and so for ease I’ve decided to just make a new series her at Quick Sip Reviews that will focus specifically on collections and anthologies that I can get to. I won’t be breaking the books down into individual reviews, but instead looking at them as a whole with maybe some additional notes on works I really connceted with. These will be slightly different than my Regular Sip reviews, which look at singular longer works. But I’ve been reading a lot of collections lately, and I want a space to think too much about them!]
So my first introduction to Cinrak came in the form of “The Wild Ride of the Untamed Stars” (which appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies #252). And okay, a queer capybara pirate was a bit strange to run into, even at a SFF publication, but I was also almost immediately charmed. Anthropomorphic animals speak to the part of my heart that is a secret furry and I loved the adventure, the movement, the sense of a larger world and story. And here, finally, I get to find more of it. Not all of it, mind. The collection is not a linear novel but a mosaic one that checks in with Cinrak throughout her career, giving enough of the big events to capture a sense of scale and scope and continuity, but leaving enough unsaid that there’s still very much a sense that the myth and legend of Cinrak stretches much much farther, covering adventures that we’re only left hoping are covered in another collection some day.
