Reactor, June 2024

“Breathing Constellations” by Rich Larson

“Reduce! Reuse! Recycle!” by TJ Klune

“The Colors of Money” by Nisi Shawl

Reviewed by C. D. Lewis

Reactor offers speculative fiction online and free of charge several times per month. In June of 2024, Reactor published three works, each a science fiction story told in third person. This reviewer has previously suggested that if one third of a compilation’s stories are worth recommending, the collection is worth a consumer’s consideration. Between the fact that the June 2024 Reactor offers a dramatically better percentage, and the fact that it is available to you through the device on which you are reading this review by visiting reactormag.com where you can get the stories for free, it seems a foregone conclusion that adding that link to one’s reading list should be one’s next course of action. Definitely worth one’s time to read.

Rich Larson‘s 3,300-word “Breathing Constellations” opens on orphaned siblings unsuccessfully negotiating to secure underwater construction rights from a disinterested orca pod because their community will starve without the facility. Although set on a future Earth with speech-to-whalesong translators, the story evokes some of the best things in alien-contact SF: one must understand the aliens if one has any hope of negotiating with them, and desperate humans can be creative and daring. And, as it turns out, understanding outsiders is a skill that helps us understand each other. Larson manages to strum heartstrings while delivering a winning-either-way conclusion that proves “Breathing Constellations” to be a coming of age story: we don’t know what result the protagonist gets in her dealings with the orcas, but we know she’ll be fine.

TJ Klune‘s nearly-11,000-word science fiction novelette “Reduce! Reuse! Recycle!” describes a week in the life of an android who proceeds in blissful naïveté to enjoy the one-week vacation earned through ten years of labor. Since the protagonist spends no time dwelling on anxieties or concerns, the reader doesn’t immediately appreciate the dystopic process that governs the protagonist’s work, vacation, and ultimate fate. Curiosity how an upbeat but oblivious worker android will spend a week’s vacation seems to be the story’s initial hook. The android explores the world and experiences what it’s like to be treated like an android in a world of humans, building sympathy with the android’s undeserved mistreatment and stoking interest in whether the android can somehow beat the clock on the vacation’s shrinking duration. Characters approach classic what-does-it-mean-to-be-human questions from various angles, not so much to teach readers something but to set up the story’s climax. Emotionally engaging and hopeful despite the darkness, “Reduce! Reuse! Recycle!” paints a vision of life in which victory lies in our understanding of ourselves and the quality of our relationships rather than in the defeat of enemies. Adversity will, after all, endure; perhaps attitudes that support endurance are more valuable to one’s community than approaches that lead to heroic destruction.

Nisi Shawl‘s 6,900-word “The Colors of Money” is set in the neo-Victorian alternate history universe of her novel Everfair after the events of that novel, and to be appreciated seems to require that novel as prior reading. New readers, unfamiliar with the protagonist and unaware of her values or the nature of the central conflict or major factions in Everfair, are provided little aid in deciphering the larger conflict that frames the episode depicted in this work, and little insight into the characters’ goals or threats that might help one understand whether something should feel frightening or hopeful as a scene develops. While there are many techniques one can use to engender sympathy for a character, blindness to the character’s goals, fears, allies, and opposing factions creates significant headwind in embracing the character’s goals or caring about the character’s fate. Eventually, when the protagonist’s brother is revealed as a creep bent on plundering locals’ natural resources, one understands one should hope the protagonist dashes his plans. Yet watching this unfold in slow motion is difficult. It’s not a long work, but the content that seems unconnected to the apparent conflict leaves one struggling to work out whether one is missing something, or whether the text is simply not propelling the visible conflict. Characters are sometimes introduced to the reader by name only, with little hint about their appearance, roles, or relationships, so that late-delivered descriptions condemn readers to re-imagine already-pictured material with different details in order to perceive what the author had apparently meant to convey previously. Readers have little clue why the protagonist’s political goals involve visiting a harem or why the protagonist is connected to its members when the story opens, and certainly have no idea what connection new named characters have to the character or to the world when they’re dropped on readers. This isn’t shallow nitpicking, but goes to the text’s intelligibility. The “find” function reveals a number of proper nouns that appear in the text exactly once each, including Lily and Mr. Mkoi. These particular names appear solely in the description “the chain of the locket Lily had bequeathed her from the elephant hair braid she wore because of Mr. Mkoi.” While one may appreciate that the locket has personal meaning to the protagonist, one learns nothing about who Lily is and why she is important, or what Mr. Mkoi meant to either of them (whether he was their dire enemy, or perhaps only their fashion consultant). This class of problem frustrates comprehension each time it recurs. Should one recognize this name? Is it supposed to mean something? Did we miss something? More information about the characters’ internal state might help readers overcome the meaninglessness of details for which context is unavailable; but most description is physical, leaving readers to infer characters’ internal state from their conduct, or puzzle out how it might connect to the visible conflict. It’s possible the text is rich with meaning and subtleties for those who already understand this world and its politics and its factions and their members, but without that background “The Colors of Money” feels so opaque that the effort to decode it exceeds the payoff. Fans of the novel may enjoy this episode in the evolving conflict.

C.D. Lewis lives and writes in Faerie.