Lightspeed “Virtually Cherokee” by Brian K. Hudson
“So You Want to Kiss Your Nemesis” by John Wiswell
“Lament of a Specialist in Interspecies Relations” by Amy Johnson
“Construction Sacrifice” by Bogi Takacs
“Spaceman Jones” by Adam-Troy Castro
“When the Giants Came Through the Valley” by Derrick Boden
“Every Bone a Bell” by Shaoni C. White
“The House, the Witch and Sugarcane Stalks” by Amanda Helms
Reviewed by Geoff Houghton
Lightspeed #155 contains four original pieces of SF and four of fantasy.
The first piece of SF is “Virtually Cherokee” by Brian K. Hudson. This substantial short is set in a near-future United States where the media trend towards biased reporting and dumbed-down information feeds have continued and even accelerated. An anti-science, humanity-first party has succeeded in forcing through a ban not only on the use but even the continued existence of Artificial Intelligence.
The author has postulated a very realistic mechanism for creating and training sentient AI, including the innovative concept of using a Native American language rather than English, since the animism of a language such as Cherokee draws a much looser border between inanimate or alive and alive or sentient.
The role and safety of AI is a truly global issue but the author does appear to conflate the decisions made in the United States with the fate of all humanity in the same way that the English author H.G. Wells once closed a chapter of War of the Worlds with the statement: “The machines had reached the sea at the coast of Kent. Civilisation was at an end.” However, the United States portrayed is unfortunately an only too believable extension of existing trends.
It is probable that the current readership of Tangent Online are all organic at present, but even so, they may not necessarily disapprove of the final denouement where the outlawed digital people launch their response to the genocide against them.
The second offering is a flash fiction fantasy of less than 1000 words: “So You Want to Kiss Your Nemesis” by John Wiswell. The female protagonist runs a weapon shop in a world where lesbian love is a norm but where courtship between females of differing social rank is complex. It is written in a light-hearted style that is (hopefully) intended to minimise the essential offensiveness of wooing by violence, but that is what is proposed. The reader can decide if the ends ever justifies the means.
“Lament of a Specialist in Interspecies Relations” by Amy Johnson is an SF story set on a far-future Earth. Planet Earth has become a major interstellar vacation resort for alien species with shapeshifting abilities who find pleasure and amusement in imitating some of our planet’s teeming and varied species of animals and plants. This piece takes the form of a monologue delivered by a human official to a particularly difficult interstellar tourist who has a long history of wildly overstepping even the most reasonable of rules on every world that he/she/it has visited. The author neatly captures the carefully chosen but slightly exasperated words of the human host as he patiently works through the alien’s persistent history of rule-breaking, all in the best tradition of a long-suffering service worker with a particularly outrageous client.
“Construction Sacrifice” by Bogi Takacs is a much longer and darker story. Reliable and reproducible magic coexists with technology roughly equivalent to our own in the “Seven Lands” where this near novelette length short story is set. The story is told through the narration of two POV characters. The first is a young mage who has moved from another of the Seven Lands to the city of Fejertorony to work as a Clairvoyant finder of lost antiquities. The second is the persona of the city itself, a once-human volunteer who has agreed to become the city and operate its infrastructure. The darkest part of the story is the way that even some of those citizens benefiting from that willing sacrifice cannot accept that different does not mean wrong and alien does not mean enemy. The most cheerful part of the story is that the young mage who directly suffers from that prejudice finally finds a finer and more fulfilling life as a result of that suffering.
The third SF offering is “Spaceman Jones” by Adam-Troy Castro. Midshipman Fenn Jones is a heedless and reckless young officer on one of the starships that link a large but unspecified number of planets together in a great trading web. The starships may require years to complete a circuit of worlds and the interaction between worlds is sufficiently light that cultures can develop their own individual foibles. At his last port of call, fate catches up with our protagonist when he samples a very specialist drug that is found only on that one world. It is a substance that is relatively harmless in regular use but painfully fatal to stop. His Captain has no choice but to return to the planet and drop him there to lay in the bed that he had made for himself. Years later she returns for the first time since the ship dumped him to fend for himself to discover that he is not only still alive and well but entirely happy and content with his involuntary exile. The reader is invited to consider what true happiness is and whether there are many ways to reach that state.
“When the Giants Came Through the Valley” by Derrick Boden is a short story set in contemporary California, except for one fantasy element. On an otherwise unremarkable day, Santa Monica is devastated by the appearance of giants, hundreds of metres tall, that stomp through the city and march straight into the sea without paying the slightest attention to the humans in their path. The author explores the varied responses to that inexplicable event, including the ability of the human race to adapt to almost anything and to convert even the bitterest lemons of life to lemonade.
The last SF piece is the flash-fiction length story, “Every Bone a Bell” by Shaoni C. White. This is set in a far distant future where galaxy-spanning starships carry cargo between galactic arms as easily and cheaply as a modern turbo-fan aircraft can travel between Earth’s Nation States. However, this swift and economic transport has a price. Selected space-born humans can link with computers to permit that travel, but only at a high cost in physical distress and pain to themselves.
This personal sacrifice would be hard even if it is was made to benefit family, friends and other truly deserving people, but how much harder it would be to accept if it was involuntary in the first place. The author explores exactly how hard it could be for a pressed man to be forced into that position and what extremes they could be driven to for some form of escape.
The last fantasy story is “The House, the Witch and Sugarcane Stalks” by Amanda Helms. The deep background is a fantasy version of the Antebellum South of the United States, but most of the action occurs in and around the magical house of edible delights. The house was created by the Witch of the title, although her true magical powers remain mainly a mystery. However, little snippets of information about her past pop teasingly out throughout the text so that an attentive reader gradually learns enough of her history to guess at why she is where she now is and why the house is built from such exotic materials.
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.