[On May 10, 2021 Strange Horizons officially expressed its political support for Palestinian solidarity. The views of Tangent Online reviewers are not necessarily those of Strange Horizons. Fiction critiqued at Tangent Online is, as much as is humanly possible, without prejudice and based solely on artistic merit.]
Strange Horizons, August 2022
“Spirochete” by Anneke Schwob (8/1)
“The Merry Abortion; or the Song of the Deed of Rue” by Katy Bond (8/8)
“Tusker Blue” by Lalini Shanela Ranaraja (8/15)
[Editor’s note: A review of Strange Horizons’ Special SE Asian Issue posted August 29th is forthcoming.]
Reviewed by Geoff Houghton
“Spirochete” by Anneke Schwob is a story of demon possession set in present day New England. The afflicted individual is a young female college graduate who is gradually succumbing to possession in spite of the best efforts of her boyfriend (caring but desperately unable to help), conventional medicine (predictably and entirely ineffective) and a local amateur warlock (surprisingly, also ineffective). There is no entirely happy ending but neither does the afflicted protagonist run amok in the style of a zombie apocalypse. This story is written in the unusual and tricky second person and the unfortunate student’s fate is only clarified in the last sentence of this subtle piece, as is the identity of the narrator.
“The Merry Abortion; or the Song of the Deed of Rue” by Katy Bond is set in a fantastical world where a mysterious and distant King rules over a realm of humans, changelings and others. The pregnant human female, Rue, is assisted by her shapeshifting friend, Foxglove, to break the King’s Law by seeking a banned abortifacient herb found only in the King’s Greenwood. Initially, you may very well like the protagonists, but their actions stray a long way from exemplary. The pair attempt to prove that as long as you are cute and lovable you can cheerfully murder the King’s guardians and break his law in this morally ambiguous story that pitches the rule of law against personal autonomy in a way that has echoes of the current reality of Roe vs Wade in the USA.
“Tusker Blue” by Lalini Shanela Ranaraja is set across a number of years leading up to the present day on a subtly distorted version of the island of Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka had a long and splendid history and its own unique mythology long before its colonisation by the British Empire, but now is counted to be a developing nation by the rules of the west. This tale borrows some of those ancient beliefs in order to explore the ever-present tension in such “developing nations” between the westward-leaning modernising influence of the cities and the deeply traditional rural villages.
In the mundane real world, these tensions are almost always resolved entirely in favour of the rich oligarchs of the cities but in the author’s world the struggle is somewhat equalised by a semi-magical ally of the village folk, the Tuskers of the title.
Geoff Houghton lives in a leafy village in rural England. He is a retired Healthcare Professional with a love of SF and a jackdaw-like appetite for gibbets of medical, scientific and historical knowledge.