Aurealis “Something Rich and Strange” by Jordan Chase-Young
“The Star Songs” by Declan Ellis
“People of the Forest, Reflections of the Heart” by L P Melling
Reviewed by David Wesley Hill
I have always enjoyed science fictional Rip Van Winkle tales. Laumer’s Night of the Trolls was a favorite, as were Farmer’s The Stone God Awakens and The Wind Whales of Ishmael, Blish’s Midsummer Century, Bass’s The Godwhale, and de Camp’s Genus Homo. To this list we can now add “Something Rich and Strange” by Jordan Chase-Young, the first story in the June issue of Aurealis. Sometime in the relatively near future, augmented human Seely Rao is convicted of sedition and sentenced to imprisonment for more than two hundred years in a cryogenic pod. Unfortunately, she sleeps not for centuries but for millennia, awakening in a universe where humanity has vanished and the Earth itself has been changed from a solid orb into a kaleidoscope of fractal planes. With the help of Vish—an AI made flesh known as a sprite—and Nthu, an intelligent organic machine, or scendant, Seely sets out through this weird world to discover if any pockets of humanity still survive in this delightful fey quest studded with whimsical detail…. Recommended.
Next up is “The Star Songs” by Declan Ellis, in which humanity has been receiving binary messages from a star more than five thousand light years from the Earth. These messages are interpreted as poems, or songs, but no one is sure of their ultimate meaning. Unfortunately, probes sent through a traversable wormhole to the songs’ origin system return only patchy and incomplete data, so Eric—apparently a veteran soldier or explorer—is dispatched on the Sojourner I down into the black hole and beyond on a mission of discovery in this solidly wrought SF tale with a satisfyingly revelatory conclusion.
The last story in the issue, “People of the Forest, Reflections of the Heart” by L P Melling, takes us to a near future dystopian Earth ravaged by plague and ecological collapse. Mae, a primatologist drawn in the vein of Jane Goodall, is in charge of a remote orangutan research station in Borneo, which is home to three of the apes, including Jane, a young female. Perhaps because she had been inoculated at birth against the “cross-species Herp-47 virus,” Jane is exceptionally adept at solving puzzles, and immediately recognizes a new symbol, such as a heart, when it is introduced into the mix. Sadly, though, the perimeter of the station is breached, resulting in tragedy I will not detail for fear of spoiling the plot. I will, however, observe that the story’s end is not predicated by the rest of the tale, leaving this reviewer rather baffled. Maybe I missed something.