Reactor, August 2024
“The Alice Run” by Nancy Kress
“Before the Forest” by Kell Woods
“The Gulmohar of Mehranpur” by Amal Singh
“Ace Up Her Sleeve” by Genoveva Dimova
Reviewed by Mike Bickerdike
Reactor (formerly Tor.com) offers four short stories this month; one SF and three fantasy.
“The Alice Run” by Nancy Kress is quite an engrossing SF short story. A woman in a coma is given an innovative form of deep-brain stimulation that awakens memories from a dream state, and ultimately leads to a waking state. The treated woman dreams a series of scenes from Alice in Wonderland—dreams that gradually morph into her own memories to reveal deeply hidden secrets. The switching of the scenes between her surgical suite and her dreams is well managed, and the dream scenes themselves are quite convincing and interesting, as we wonder where the dreaming is taking us. The denouement is not quite as intriguing or ‘speculative’ as one might hope, though coming from Kress—an excellent writer—it’s a decent read, nonetheless.
“Before the Forest” by Kell Woods is a dark fantasy short story. In the Holy Roman Empire, a city is besieged, leaving the inhabitants without food. A woman, who lost her parents to the plague and was forced to marry her violent cousin, struggles to survive the hardships of the siege. Her husband treats her appallingly, but she taps into dark powers to survive. The story serves as the prequel to an existing novel by the author, and does not stand alone entirely comfortably, as it sets up a premise for the novel rather than concluding in a wholly satisfyingly manner. Moreover, the prose is a little choppy, with many single word or incomplete sentences—an affectation that may not appeal to all readers.
“The Gulmohar of Mehranpur” by Amal Singh is a fantasy short story, written in the prose style of a fable. The leader, or Nawab, of a poor town in a south-Asian land lives under the yoke of the regional Shah. As his town loses vitality, the Nawab pays a ‘khansama’ chef to cook a special meal, over a period of eighteen days, that he is promised will have magical benefits. The tale is quite interesting and reasonably well-told, but the slightly simplistic fable styling of the piece places the action at arm’s length and reduces the reader’s involvement in the story’s tensions.
“Ace Up Her Sleeve” by Genoveva Dimova is a fantasy short story, set in the author’s Witch’s Compendium of Monsters book series. I’m not sure if this is ‘young adult’ by design, but it reads as such, being rather simply written and direct. A young witch, Kosara, living in the Slavic walled-city of Chernograd must survive through the 12 days of monster-infiltration that besets her city each New Year. To counter her chief monster nemesis—a dragon-like shape changer—she plays it at cards. The idea is okay, and the slightly off-beat European feel to the scenes and monsters is colourful (and will appeal to fans of Sapkowski’s Witcher books), but there’s not an awful lot of novelty or surprise here to raise it above the average.
More of Mike Bickerdike’s reviews and thoughts on science-fiction can be found at https://starfarersf.nicepage.io/