Lightspeed #177, February 2025
“It Holds Her in the Palm of One Hand” by Lowry Poletti
“An Omodest Proposal” by Andrew Dana Hudson
“Standardized Test” by Seoung Kim
“Books to Take at the End of the World” by Carolyn Ives Gilman
“Some to Cradle, Some to Eat” by Eugenia Triantafyllou
“My Girlfriend Is a Nebula” by David DeGraff
“What We Don’t Know About Angels” by Kristina Ten
Reviewed by Victoria Silverwolf
Half a dozen short stories and a single novelette appear in this issue.
“It Holds Her in the Palm of One Hand” by Lowry Poletti involves huge birds that travel through interstellar space. Starships make use of captured birds for navigation. Pilots interpret olfactory signals from the birds to avoid obstacles. One such pilot discovers a message from her bird that is more meaningful than expected.
This is a fairly lengthy novelette, with room for scenes not directly related to the main plot. These provide depth of characterization, but add little to the theme. Translations of messages from the bird, found near the end of the story, add an exotic touch. Readers may find the ending ambiguous and inconclusive.
“An Omodest Proposal” by Andrew Dana Hudson is yet another response to Ursula K. LeGuin’s story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” By now, there are enough of these to fill an anthology. The prime minister of the utopian city that benefits from the suffering of one child suggests that other places voluntarily join them. There is not much here that goes beyond LeGuin’s original thought experiment, except for a touch of satire on utilitarianism.
As its title suggests, “Standardized Test” by Seoung Kim takes the form of an examination. The questions suggest that the school has been visited by a destructive angel, although this is left ambiguous. (One of the questions asks if it might be an alien or a demon.)
Besides the surreal premise, this brief piece appears to be saying something about current issues in education (there is mention of transgender students and critical race theory) but I found the author’s intent unclear.
Less than five hundred words long, “Books to Take at the End of the World” by Carolyn Ives Gilman is a bittersweet mood piece in which people decide what to carry with them when they leave for an unknown destination that may not exist. This tiny work might be interpreted as a metaphor for death, with a hint that human beings aren’t very important in the scheme of things. Readers more interested in tone than plot will best appreciate it.
Written in second person, “Some to Cradle, Some to Eat” by Eugenia Triantafyllou addresses you as the teenage daughter of ogres who appear as ordinary people during daylight hours. You wonder if you are doomed to become a monster, and try to protect your girlfriend from the ravenous appetites of your parents.
The girlfriend is abused by her parents, and the story is partly intended as an allegory for intergenerational trauma (confirmed by an interview with the author.) It can also be read as a symbol for rejection of a gay couple. In addition to these interpretations, the story is also a modern variation on the fairy tale “Hop-o’-My-Thumb” (the usual title given to English translations of Charles Perrault’s French original of the late seventeenth century.) Whether the story is seen as metaphor or fantasy, the use of second person narration may add a touch of vividness, but runs the risk of seeming affected.
“My Girlfriend Is a Nebula” by David DeGraff features two students of astronomy. One has a terminal disease, and hopes to live long enough to witness the star Betelgeuse becoming a supernova. Just barely science fiction, this brief, sentimental tale of love and death avoids mawkishness and has a powerful emotional impact.
The main character in “What We Don’t Know About Angels” by Kristina Ten grows multiple fingers from various parts of her body. Meanwhile, her lover is dying from cancer. The main part of the narrative alternates with myths, apparently created by the protagonist, featuring such characters as a one-armed goddess and siblings who play dodge ball with the newly created Earth.
There is much more to the story than I have indicated, giving it a disjointed feeling. The mood varies from whimsical to satiric to tragic. This combination of variegated elements may be a more accurate reflection of real life than is found in most speculative fiction, but is likely to disorient the reader.
Victoria Silverwolf has started reading Dune Messiah.