Grimdark“Our Lady of Perpetual Disdain” by Rich Larson (reprint, not reviewed)
“Love’s Mirror” by Ken Liu (reprint, not reviewed)
“Tears Cost Extra” by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
“Eviction Notice” by Corey Jae White and Maddison Stoff
“Drona’s Death” by Max Gladstone (reprint, not reviewed)
“Reconnaissance Notes Episode 2” by Miles Cameron and Emma Burnett (part 2 of a serial, not reviewed)
“The Long Sleep” by T.R. Napper
Reviewed by Seraph
What remains of fantasy when the world around us feels as though it is burning down around us, and the lines between fiction and reality are blurred every time you look at the news? I have seen the argument made often as of late that grimdark fantasy is inherently and unapologetically political, and it inarguably is. At the core of almost all grimdark stories is a powerful rejection of the imperfections and injustices of the world(s) around us, framed in the light of whichever power structure the author chooses to target. Be it gangster, god, or government, something is inherently wrong in each of these worlds, and the hallmark of the genre is expressing condemnations of these things in no uncertain terms. All three of the original stories reviewed here are set in futuristic and technologically advanced worlds, each focusing on a particular form of desperation or suffering.
“Tears Cost Extra” by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
Corporate greed and predatory lending are the themes of this story, the endless circle of marketing and debt incurred in trying to keep up with all the latest technology. Anyone even remotely familiar with cyberpunk or even just darker science fiction settings probably has a pretty good idea where this is going. When that technology includes all kinds of new body parts, or even entirely new bodies, your debt and the subsequent collection practices get very… personally physical. Generational debt, and the impact such practices have on ensuing generations, are often central themes, and are the central focus here. Machang is three generations deep in this debt, and now works for the very people who have repossessed everything his family owned, a debt collector in a secondhand Body. The story serves not only as a profound condemnation of the predatory lending practices that leave entire families bound in debt that they will never be able to pay off, but also as an impressively succinct but thorough explanation of how you get trapped in it. It is salient and relevant in any era, whether it is that of modern consumerism or futuristic technology, and woe unto those who ignore these lessons. There is an ingrained bitterness in those who are left to struggle under the burden long after those whose choices accrued it have passed on, and it is well spoken here.
“Eviction Notice” by Corey Jae White and Maddison Stoff
This grimdark story, wrapped in a cyberpunk shell, is an expression of gleefully unrestrained violence and unrepentant victimization of the innocent, with a dash of hypersexualized fixation thrown in for good measure. The squad of corporate mercenaries, who call themselves the KILLSEEKERS, have been sent to evict a bunch of low-income families from an apartment complex that the company, unsubtly named “GENtrification, Inc” wants to fix up and resell at a premium. One of the squad casually mentions using the payday to take their aging mother out to the range and euthanize her… with a flamethrower. An infant is referred to as a “fuck-trophy” just before it is literally ripped from the hands of its mother, simply because she slammed the door in the face of one of the squad trying to evict her. Collateral damage would be an extreme understatement once some of the residents dare to fight back to protect their homes. The squad is obsessed with their sexuality and gender to the extent that it’s pretty much the only thing they feel the need to discuss as they are wounded and dying, completely indifferent to the carnage they’ve just inflicted for the sake of profits they’ll never even see. The “villain”, if he can even be described as such, is their employer, David. An utterly forgettable cog in the corporate machine, he’s more pathetic than anything, just someone to pay these caricatures of psychopaths to do the unpleasant things that aren’t always exactly illegal, but that the public can never know the corporations sanctioned. There are no redeeming qualities here, just victims and those who directly or indirectly inflicted said sufferings. Whatever point was intended to be made, is simply lost in the gleefully callous inhumanity of the story. Unless that itself was the point, in which case it was thoroughly made, if heavy-handedly so.
“The Long Sleep” by T.R. Napper
Is reality just another layer of a larger simulation? When you start reaching a level of technology in which sleep/dreams become truly programmable and subjective, how do you even know that you are awake? Max is a dreamscape engineer, a specialist in crafting and guiding whatever dream you can afford to experience. People who pay can experience anything they want for as long as they want, and those who can’t get fed targeted advertising that exploits their characteristics and personalities on a level that alters their behavior in ways they are barely aware of. Max calmly and expertly manipulates the masses who have his corporation’s hardware installed, changing their spending habits, their preferences, even altering entire elections. But at what point are your own fears and vulnerabilities just as easily used against you, by the very mechanisms you are using to create these dreamscapes? No, of course not, this is what you do for a living. You know every trick, and you would know if you weren’t really awake this whole time… wouldn’t you? There’s more than one point being made here, and all of them are made with elegant and almost surgical precision.