Lightspeed “Ghost in the Tank” by M.R. Robinson
“The Best of Intentions” by Mari Ness
“Memeostasis” by Benjamin Rosenbaum
“An Oral History of the Schooner Key Invasion” by Alex Irvine
“The Overview Initiative” by David Marino
“I Cut Off a Monster’s Arm. AITA?” by Marie Brennan
“The Sharing of Some Familiar Song” by Adam-Troy Castro
“Ash-Shura; or, A Book, a Bowl, a Bag of Coins” by Beesan Odeh
Reviewed by Geoff Houghton
Lightspeed #193 contains four original pieces of SF and four of fantasy.
The first SF is “Ghost in the Tank” by M.R. Robinson. This is a dark cyberpunk-style story set in the near-future. The first person narrator is a troubled young woman who works in the massive computer simulation industry. This fictional near-future world exhibits a very believable level of ultra-violence and sexualisation in role-play and simulation gaming, a trend that is already becoming evident today. The bemused young female protagonist has willingly signed up to take part in on-line mechanised gladiatorial games in which she must kill or be killed. However, she is ill-equipped for the mental stress involved and becomes entirely and extremely unhealthily fixated on her regular same-sex partner/opponent. The whole situation is well-described but also profoundly depressing, with no cunning exit strategy or clever solution available for our protagonist. So the reviewer warning is: by all means read this, but be prepared!
The second offering is flash fiction fantasy: “The Best of Intentions” by Mari Ness. The reader is likely to experience an eerie sense of deja-vu as they explore this offering since it is a very thinly disguised retelling of the Sleeping Beauty story, although it carefully avoids using Princess Aurora’s name or any other copyrightable descriptor.
The story is written from the point of view of the wicked fairy, which would have been fascinatingly novel a decade ago, but suffers from the prior release of Wicked and Maleficent, which have recently explored the same twist to a familiar storyline. The opening is altered just barely enough to avoid the Disney Corporation’s hordes of lawyers. The main point of deviation from the classical Sleeping Beauty story is the denouement, which is as far from a happy ending as the Brothers Grimm could have wished for in their darkest and most Gothic moments.
“Memeostasis” by Benjamin Rosenbaum is a short SF story set in the Oort cloud of the solar system, centuries after its initial settlement. The protagonist is an independent spacecraft pilot and the action takes the form of a single conversation with his charter passenger. The conversation reveals a five hundred year old secret project spread thinly across much of the Oort cloud.
There are tantalising snippets of detail about life in this future, not only in the Oort cloud but on the more highly technological inner worlds, but the main focus of the story is the reveal that an organised group of ecologists have set up a hidden culture in the Oort cloud, a culture that is intended to be sufficiently stable to carry the unchanged human genome safely forward across the millions of years of deep time that historically always end the progress of every species with greater aspirations than those of a slime mould.
The passenger is revealed to be a member of that closed and hidden society who has the minority view that the project is now ready to be revealed to the rest of scattered humanity. The story ends at that point, leaving each reader to decide whether this will be a benefit to the species as a whole, or merely the certain death of a fascinating but ill-conceived project.
The second fantasy offering is “An Oral History of the Schooner Key Invasion” by Alex Irvine. As the title implies, this story is set in the Florida Keys where the mundane life of a small semi-rural community was disrupted by an unexpected catastrophe several decades ago. A sudden and unheralded rupture in the dividing line between our mundane plane of existence and someplace well beyond our world allowed hideous and unearthly occult creatures to swarm through that rift and onto our planet, killing many innocents and, even more horribly, transforming some victims into foul copies of themselves.
The third-person narrator is an independent reporter who is producing an oral history documentary on these events after interviewing many of the surviving participants for the first time. The narrator matches the style of a genuine investigative reporter very believably, although the concept that such an unprecedented occurrence would not already have attracted deep and continuous, world-wide investigation well before this belated probe is possibly the weakest link in the actual story.
The tale follows a very typically American trope in automatically assuming that it is the citizenry of Schooner Key who offer the most effective resistance, in the style of the Minutemen of old, whilst the US Government ends up by shooting at the most effective defender, covers up all that they can of what occurs and kidnaps the only human who survived the transformation into an occult beast with some human traits still intact. Is this automatic distrust of Big Government only paranoia, or, perhaps, it is true that even paranoids have enemies?
“The Overview Initiative” by David Marino is a short SF story set in a very near-future USA. It opens with a sharply written and detailed description of the presentation of a new and expensive initiative to the Chair of a Congressional funding body. But the real protagonist in the story is not Dr Li, the senior NASA project manager who must present the initiative to an intelligent but very differently motivated committee Chair, but the author who invented her.
That sudden reveal, half-way through the story, is so critical to understanding this offering that this reviewer felt compelled to break his general rule and include that spoiler information in this review. It converts this story from a standard SF piece where the stodgy political machine once again crushes a bright and hopeful future initiative. Instead, it becomes a fascinating insight into the mind-set of an SF author. So fascinating that it is difficult to remember that that author is also still a fictional character.
“I Cut Off a Monster’s Arm. AITA?” by Marie Brennan is a flash-fiction fantasy set in present-day Japan. It is written in a terse first person style that transforms, in the course of its few hundred words, from an, at least partially, serious horror opening to a dreamlike slapstick that could have been written as a Monty Python sketch. The reader must decide if the protagonist is indeed the arsehole here, or just a wronged party who happened to possess their own almost magically sharp katana.
The last piece labelled as SF is “The Sharing of Some Familiar Song” by Adam-Troy Castro. This thought-provoking piece explores the genuine attempt by a truly alien species to understand even the most basic thought processes of the human species in order to draw any parallels between us and them.
Throw away the universal translator and forget species who look slightly different to us but share similar needs and wants. We are speaking here of a profoundly different life-form working hard and honestly in an attempt to understand even the most basic memes of a civilization so alien to them that only imperfect translations of translations can convey the meanings of one life-forms deepest thoughts in terms that the other might vaguely comprehend.
In the final paragraph, the author offers the alien species’ best attempt at sharing their own world view. It is strangely sad, as well as quite realistic, that it is both clear and practically impenetrable.
“Ash-Shura; or, A Book, a Bowl, a Bag of Coins” by Beesan Odeh is set in present-day Jerusalem. The protagonist is a physically and mentally crippled teenage boy living with his aging grandmother after the loss of both of his parents. The fantasy element is delicately hinted at in some early descriptions of the protagonist but the first three quarters of this work mainly consists of a depressing picture of the occupation of the old city by uniformly unpleasant soldiers who treat the inhabitants with a casual, thoughtless viciousness. Their nationality is never specifically named, although you must know who it is that the author means.
Whether you consider this to be a true description of the occupation of Jerusalem or Islamist propaganda may well depend upon your starting point in the debate over the past and future relationship between Palestine and Israel. However, it is certainly laid on extremely heavily and completely dominates the actual fantasy element of this piece, which is a relatively simple story of the interaction between a Djinn and the young teen. Heinlein’s TANSTAAFL rule (There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch) certainly applies, but for a crippled youngster, out of options and out of luck, the current going price of a Djinn’s intervention may still be acceptable.
Geoff Houghton lives in a leafy village in rural England. He is a retired Healthcare Professional with a love of SF and a jackdaw-like appetite for gibbets of medical, scientific and historical knowledge.