Critiques
This is quite like Alastair's previous story, Sleepover, in that it's a collision of various genres tightly packed together into a novella: shaken, stirred, blended, and any other means necessary to squash them in.
Where it's different to Sleepover, is that this novella actually works. Maybe Liz Williams' co-writing helped.
I liked it anyway.
Alastair's next story in the timeline of publishing is At Budokan.
Read this one, (it's available to read for free at the URL in the book info) then seriously consider signing up for Lightspeed Magazine - they've put out some seriously good stuff in their short (16 issues) history.
On the science fiction side:
"Dissent: A Five-Course Meal (With Suggested Pairings)" from "Aimee Ogden" (724 words, https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/dissent-a-five-course-meal-with-sugge... ) - a quirky menu which ties food and real life issues from a dystopian world that sounds almost too much like our own. It is a nice appetizer for the issue but it is not my type of story - it is almost too tricky.
"Up Falling" from "Jendayi Brooks-Flemister" (3,560 words, https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/up-falling/) takes place in a far future when humanity had been ravaged by decease and had messed up the planet and anyone who seems to be immune to the current set of issues is valuable - as a breeder for some, as a chance to make a medicine for others. Some people had escaped the ravaged world and are now trying to help the world - but that requires a child to defeat her own fears. It is a nice story about what people are capable of and I liked the fact that the author did not take the easy way out of the situation.
"Leah Cypess"'s "On the Ship" (6,468 words, https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/on-the-ship/, originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, May-June 2017) introduced us to Ava - a child living on a ship which is trying to find a habitable planet. Do ships have ghosts? And if they don't, then who is the red-haired woman which shows herself only to Ava? Not everything is what it looks like and while I expected a twist of some type, it was not what really happened in this story.
"Lincoln Michel"'s "Cale and Stardust Battle the Mud Gobblers of Hudson Valley" (7,751 words, https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/cale-and-stardust-battle-the-mud-gobb... has one of those titles which make you think of superheroes and children's stories - except that it is anything but. Sometime in the future, New York is starting to disappear under the waves. So the politicians find a solution - move some of the land mass to the city - and the mud gobblers are sent to dredge the Hudson outside of the city and bring what they get downstream. Except that it is not just the river bottom that they dredge and the people who live along the river have a bit of a problem with it... at least for awhile. It is a cautionary tale of a future that may very well happen - and in some ways an exploration of power and opposition - when there are other choices, when there are other priorities, even what seemed important becomes just a nuisance.
On the fantasy side:
"In the Beginning of Me, I Was a Bird" by "Maria Dong" (5,446 words, https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/in-the-beginning-of-me-i-was-a-bird/)... narrator can jump between animals. It is unclear why they can do that or if it is common but we know that there is at least one more individual who can do that and that their initial jump was to escape from their old bodies which were taken over by a seed that fell from the sky. I liked the premise of the story but it felt like it went nowhere - there seems to be a love story (or a friendship?) in there and there is a lot of pretty language but... something just did not click properly for me.
"In the Cold, Dark Sea" by "Jenny Rae Rappaport" (716 words, https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/in-the-cold-dark-sea/) is an origins tale for the sirens. Well executed and getting darker and darker as the story proceeds.
The narrator of "An Address to the Newest Disciples of the Lost Words" by "Vanessa Fogg" (3,383 words, https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/an-address-to-the-newest-disciples-of... is an old man who came back to finish an education in a world where a lost language is treasured and all its words are considered important enough to be studied - even if noone knows the language and there is a very limited number of words which had been found. If one had ever learned a foreign language, especially one whose phonology is very different than the one they are coming from, this story will resonate. The words here are a lot more complex, they seem to include movement and expressions and song but... the challenges are the same.
The last of the stories in this issue is the reprint of "Give Me Cornbread or Give Me Death" by "N. K. Jemisin" (2,513 words, https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/give-me-cornbread-or-give-me-death/, originally published in 2019 in "A People's Future of the United States") in which has women fight dragons and the system by... cooking collard greens. It sounds almost comical but it somehow works and it connects resistance with food and tradition in a way you would not expect from a tale about dragons (and collard greens).
The excerpt from "Tochi Onyebuchi"'s "Goliath" would have convinced me to add it to my TBR list (if it was not already there). The three reviews (two novels: "Far from the Light of Heaven" and "The Misfit Soldier" and an anthology "Trouble the Waters: Tales from the Deep Blue") achieved the same (although the Thompson book was already there as it got nominated for the Philip K. Dick award early this year). The 4 author interviews (Dong, Brooks-Flemister, Fogg and Michel) are a good addition as usual (and each of the 8 authors with stories had a brief "About the Author" section so you know where to look for more work by them if you want to read some).
“Schrödinger’s Catastrophe” by Gene Doucette was the reason I picked up this issue, and it's my favorite of the lot. “Magnificent Maurice, or the Flowers of Immortality” by Rati Mehrotra and “Seven Ways to Fall in Love with an Astronaut” by Dominica Phetteplace are the other two that I enjoyed the most.
“It didn’t matter to me,” she said. “I didn’t care how you looked.”
Beauty by David Barr Kirtley is a twist on Beauty & the Beast, but in a really interesting way. What happens after the curse is lifted? What happens if they drift apart in their marriage? A surprising twist on the classic!
Full review: http://reading.kingrat.biz/story-reviews/lightspeed-magazine-december-2010
As for the fiction, I liked the Charles Yu story quite a bit, and the others were good.
Full review: http://reading.kingrat.biz/story-reviews/lightspeed-magazine-november-2010
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With a lot of stories. For that, it's well worth the price, even though I didn't find any of the stories to be the sort that I like.