Special Double Review
by
C. D. Lewis & Mina
Utopia Science Fiction Magazine, June 2025
“False Equivalencies” by Evangeline Giaconia
“Gravitational Tug” by Anne Wilkins
“Skinny Legs” by Pauline Barmby
Reviewed by C. D. Lewis
Utopia Science Fiction Magazine is a quarterly publication that publishes “stories that shine with a more optimistic future, one we want to believe in, one we would fight for.” Yet Utopia does not publish Hallmark cards. The current issue focuses on disability, and thus looks unblinking at what that looks like for those who experience it and offers a view of what choices state-of-the-art care might force future patients to make. It’s not a whitewash.
Evangeline Giaconia’s short science fiction story “False Equivalencies” presents a third-person narration of the post-injury life of a onetime superluminal engineer reduced by physical injury and the onset of seizures to working as a technician (when the main character can work at all). The impact of the disabling injuries on work and quality of life are detailed so that after a medical appointment eventually is offered, it’s clear how much motivation the character must have to seek relief, not just for personal benefit but to reduce the impact of the condition on those who live with the main character day in and day out, at work and at home. The story is about characters and choices and values, but the world is solidly SF: the remedy has risks, the physician has the bedside manner of a cop directing traffic, and the dark choice looks and feels like something that would really befall a disabled worker in a gritty future complete with medical appointment queues and side-effects. Offering personal warmth in a place so dark is an achievement.
Set in a NASA craft designed to mitigate the space trash that in the real world has been documented in high-use orbits, Anne Wilkins’ “Gravitational Tug” presents a paraplegic widower’s first-person account from a tour of duty collecting space trash. The world-building is solid; the protagonist employs relevant technologies to gather space debris comprised of different materials in an 18,000-mile-per-hour Earth orbit to keep a valuable orbit available for use. But this isn’t a story about glassy-eyed wonder at space: it’s a long job with a cramped workplace … and the protagonist has a personal reason to be in space, unknown to his employers. “Gravitational Tug” weighs in under 1300 words, much of which is spent building credibility in the SF setting and explaining what the protagonist is doing in space. Wilkins successfully builds sympathy so that when the protagonist reveals his personal goal, and clandestinely performs his own mission, it feels like a victory for his humanity.
Pauline Barmby’s “Skinny Legs” narrates an offworlder’s account of the experience on Earth while living for the first time in one G during a medical residency. The story action takes place during off-hours, when the narrator interacts with a family friend and sets out with a goal to learn an activity that isn’t available in zero-G and which her mother had talked about before her recent death: swimming. We see the narrator’s discovery of Earth experiences through a space-dweller’s lens. Rooms are too big, places too crowded, ordinary things unexpectedly harder to bear. There’s no antagonist, as such; the narrator pursues her goals and grows in competence and builds memories and a friendship. The decision that shapes the story resolution is the narrator’s choice to continue trying (to swim, and to maintain a friendship) despite unpleasant early experience. The reassuring environment fostered by the family friend makes the stakes feel low: the protagonist is performing, as it were, with a net. It’s pleasant that the characters are able to pursue their lives and dreams, and it’s uplifting to see they’ve both adapted to their adversity. As a view into the world of someone overcoming physical and mental challenges, “Skinny Legs” delivers. For readers demanding a memorable villain and high stakes and heroic choices in a climax, this isn’t for them.
C.D. Lewis lives and writes in Faerie.
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Utopia Science Fiction Magazine, June 2025
“False Equivalencies” by Evangeline Giaconia
“Gravitational Tug” by Anne Wilkins
“Skinny Legs” by Pauline Barmby
Reviewed by Mina
This issue contains three stories where characters live with physical limitations. They are deceptively simple tales but with good world building and psychological depth.
In “False Equivalencies” by Evangeline Giaconia, we meet the android, Synth. They suffer from a lot of issues after an accident: glitches, spasms and fits. They live and work with a human cyborg, Huitzi, who is their platonic partner. They are offered a procedure that will fix their body but probably eradicate their personality. Huitzi is against the procedure as she does not want to lose Synth, who has a tough choice to make. Would you risk your sense of self for a perfect body? A simple but warm little tale.
I have just one small bug bear: I don’t like the use of “ze/zir”, as it breaks the flow of my reading, and it’s unnecessary when “they/their” work perfectly well as gender-neutral pronouns. (The author may be using them because they’re writing about an android to make a point.)
“Gravitational Tug” by Anne Wilkins is achingly sad without being depressing. A paraplegic finds he is ideally suited to work in space vacuuming up the rubbish in Earth orbit. Space debris is something that will come back and bite us one day, so we hope a solution will be found for it outside SF. But the tale is not really about that in the end. Read to find out more.
“Skinny Legs” by Pauline Barmby is a warm story. A spacer doing their medical residency on Earth struggles each day with gravity, as their body has adapted to live in zero-g. But Anna is determined to learn to swim in water, first in a swimming pool and then in the sea. She is helped by an old family friend. The story is in great part about their friendship and how real friendship can take some knocks. And it’s about knowing where you are meant to be.