Lightspeed #175, December 2024
“Inside the House of Wisdom” by Tamara Masri
“Ol’ Big Head” by Melissa A Watkins
“A Catalog of 21st Century Ghosts” by Pat Murphy
“Sleeping Beauty and the Restless Realm” by Lincoln Michel
“What We Plan to Do with You” by Adam-Troy Castro
“The Godhood of Ima Day” by Cressida Blake Roe
“Get Hyped!” by Gene Doucette
“Three Birds That Came Out of Grayson Huff and a Bunch More That Fell from the Sky” by David Anaxagoras
Reviewed by Mike Bickerdike
“Inside the House of Wisdom” by Tamara Masri is a short story that is nominally SF. Someone who works in a middle eastern library in the future reads a transcript from war-torn events set in the present day. This is therefore a reflective piece of non-genre writing, bookended by a future perspective. It’s okay, though it contains no SF ideas.
“Ol’ Big Head” by Melissa A Watkins is a fantasy novelette, set in the deep south of the US. A boy who has been sent to live with his great-grandmother realises she shares her home with a spirit. The prose is told in the boy’s colloquial speech, but while this approach can sometimes seem clunky, it works quite well here. The fantasy elements develop at a gradual but effective pace, and characterisation is quite good. Overall, this is an appealing novelette.
“A Catalog of 21st Century Ghosts” by Pat Murphy is a short SF story, not fantasy as one might expect from the title, as the titular ghosts are technological projections. In a post-climate change dystopian future, ‘ghosts’ are public installations that transmit ideas and images directly to the brain of observers. While much of the world has run down, some ‘ghosts’ still exist, and one woman travels across the US from New York to a flooded San Francisco, visiting those ‘ghosts’ she can find. It’s an effective piece of SF, with some nice ideas and imagery; recommended.
“Sleeping Beauty and the Restless Realm” by Lincoln Michel is flash fiction that retells the old fable with modern cynicism and an awareness of humanity’s all-to-common motivations. It’s quite readable.
“What We Plan to Do with You” by Adam-Troy Castro is a short ‘story’ written as a polemic against, well, all sorts of things—though it lacks focus. Ostensibly a message from a position of authority, it suggests how people will be made powerless by those in power. With no SF or fantasy elements, and presenting no story, plot or characters, I’m not sure exactly how to categorise this, or whether to recommend it.
“The Godhood of Ima Day” by Cressida Blake Roe is also pretty short. The protagonist has had a ‘god’ removed from behind her (or his) rib and tries to exist without it. Told in second person, this is one of those tales that places ‘imagery’ and ‘meaning’ ahead of clarity, plot and characterisation, but as with many such stories in modern speculative fiction, it’s not especially successful.
“Get Hyped!” by Gene Doucette is an SF novelette. A woman buys an exercise bike that comes with an AI e-trainer called Jacko Hype. But who or what, exactly, is Jacko Hype? The answer seems pretty clear early on, and so the tale drags somewhat, with no new SF ideas to support it.
“Three Birds That Came Out of Grayson Huff and a Bunch More That Fell from the Sky” by David Anaxagoras is nothing if not inventive. The tale essentially presents the plot outlined in the terrific title. Short, but imaginative, this was a nice fantasy short story with which to end the magazine, successfully conveying a wistful sense of the loss of innocence. Recommended.
More of Mike Bickerdike’s reviews and thoughts on science-fiction can be found at https://starfarersf.nicepage.io/