YEAR OF GARAK, part 10: "When It Rains..." "Tacking Into the Wind" "Extreme Measures" "The Dogs of War" & "What You Leave Behind"

Welcome back to a year-long celebration of everyone’s favorite plain, simple Cardassian. Every month I’ve been looking at various media starring Elim Garak from Star Trek: Deep Space 9, and this month I’ve reached the end of the television series. The culmination of all the various plot lines that had been building over seven years of Garak stories. It’s...well, it’s big. And it pays off in huge ways, just as it disappoints in others. But if you’re just checking out the Year of Garak, I very much recommend starting at the beginning, as there are things that will be referenced from previous talks. You can find all the posts here: January | February | March | April | May | June | July | August | September.

And I’m flying solo this month, looking at the final episodes of DS9. Or, at least, the parts with Garak. The finale of DS9 spanned a great many episodes, after all, and a great many plot threads. Garak returned to play a rather significant role, though, first with Kira and Odo helping in Damar’s resistance, and then on Cardassia itself, helping to push the people toward open rebellion against the Dominion. The finale as a whole does a great job of wrapping up everything that DS9 had begun, weaving together character arcs and larger political arcs to bring the Alpha Quadrant to a whole new era. So buckle up and get ready for a whole lot of me talking about Garak. Cheers!

Quick Sips - Tor dot com October 2017

It's another rather light month from Tor dot com, with one short story and one novella, though the two pieces deliver powerful messages of art and fear and the way that a toxic culture can lead to people falling victim to demons internal and external. Both look at characters being pushed to participate in systems that are...not exactly healthy. One is a model influenced by financial reasons and a pursuit of "the art" who nearly helps to usher in a true nightmare. The other focuses on a young man pressured by his own insecurities, fears, and weaknesses toward self-destruction and endless anger. Both stories show a sort of abuse that is insidious and deep, and how characters can begin to push back against it. To the reviews!

Art by Goñi Montes

Regular Sip - "Reenu-You" by Michele Tracy Berger [Book Smugglers]

Okay, so I’m a little behind in my novella reading, but I’m making a start of things with this, the second of the Book Smugglers Novella Initiative releases. It’s a story that revolves around hair and community, injustice and identity. Hair is something that is not politically neutral, after all, carrying with it a slew of expectations, prejudices, and exploitations. And, of course, these pressures and pitfalls fall along racial, gender, and social lines, explored in this novella to sharp and shocking effect. As a bald white guy, it’s something that both is hard to understand as well as incredibly easy to see. After all, if someone started poisoning hair products aimed at white men like me, desperate to retain or regrow hair, the reaction, I imagine, would be immediate and intense. But of course, likely things would never have gotten that far. Testing and science already favor white cis men as research subjects, skewing most data about health risks, and that’s not even mentioning what happens when corruption and systemic racism mix to fail to regulate products and services aimed at people of color. So yeah, sorry, I really should just get to this review!

Quick Sips - Strange Horizons 10/16/2017 & 10/23/2017

It’s a somewhat brief two weeks of content from Strange Horizons in some ways, and I’m looking at a story and two poems. In other ways, though, the content is a bit deceptive, as one of the poems is certainly story-length and there’s a very in depth and expansive essay on Blade Runner that everyone should read but that I’m not going to react here, mostly because I’ve not seen the movie. So yeah. But there’s a sense of transformation and time captured in all of the pieces that I’m looking at, a sense of different worlds coming together or diverging. In some ways these works explore perspective and scope and the way that individuals lose themselves—to collectivity, to dreams, to time. The people in these works are looking for something and are giving away themselves in that pursuit, though whether to become more themselves or more something else is something you as a reader will have to decide. To the reviews!

Art by Sarah Webb

Quick Sips - "The Splendid Goat Adventure" by R.B. Lemberg

It’s not super often that I look at projects that aren’t available for the general public, but when certain stories come along I just can’t help myself. And getting a chance to tell you about a new BirdVerse story? Well, I kinda gotta. The story is available as a download to any and all backers of R.B. Lemberg’s Patreon, found here. And for this story alone, the price of admission is well worth it. I myself am a patron, just for full disclosure. But this story. Told originally as a serial story, it features a fairly minor character from “A Portrait of the Desert in Personages of Power,” Marvushi, and gives them their own epic adventure. Or, if not exactly epic...at least very fun and blissfully ridiculous. Often the BirdVerse stories can be deep and wrenching and just a bit shattering, but this story...well, goats! Academics! The promise of a Secret Goat Society! People, this is exactly the joy you might need right now. So yeah, definitely go and support R.B. and their Patreon, while I jump into this review!

Art by R.B. Lemberg

Quick Sips - Uncanny #18 [October stuff]

October arrives at Uncanny Magazine with a flush of monsters and love letters, a complex web of desires, communities, and speculative traditions. The stories aren’t really what I’d consider spooky, though they do have an eye toward “classic” costumes—monsters, historical fashion, and robots. Instead, the stories and poems as well seem more concerned with the ideas and styles of the past, about the ways the present erases the past in order to create a new vision of the future. Or, perhaps, the ways that people now imagining the future come to override the imaginings from the past, so that what is futuristic and what is contemporary and what is anachronistic all are thrown into question. In some of the pieces, it means the styles of the past are updated and reinvigorated, while other works seek to find strength and joy in how the past imagined the future and how the past actually was, before time and taste and injustice erased everything that didn’t fit into the dominate narrative of history. So yeah, these are some complex and deep stories that still manage a sense of fun and focus. To the reviews!

Art by Ashley Mackenzie

Quick Sips - Beneath Ceaseless Skies #236

The latest issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies brings a pair of stories very much concerned with harm and vulnerability. Both present tales where pairs of people circle around each other, trying their survive and thrive but also trying to do the right thing, to find some measure of peace and healing for themselves. In both stories, though, that healing isn’t really wholly possible. In one of the stories, the harm done cannot be erased, has to be faced and dealt with every day, at every moment. In the other, the characters try to erase the harm, to just ignore and forget about it, and yet that ignorance is fragile, no where near as strong as the awful knowledge the other story’s characters live with. So really it’s another very well paired issue involving people living on the margins of their communities, subject to violence and other dangers the moment a scapegoat is required. To the reviews!

Art by Veli Nyström