Lightspeed “You, Me, Us” by Oyedotun Damilola Muees
“Waru, Waru” by Ruth Joffre
“The Assumption of Maria” by Max Gladstone
“Hungry Like The” by E. Catherine Tobler
“Fetspace” by Rhiannon Rasmussen
“The Punishing Animal” by B. Pladek
“If a Discarded God Can Change, So Can I” by V.M. Ayala
“Concerto For Wartime” by Sean Williams
Reviewed by Henry Gasko
This month’s Lightspeed opens with “You, Me, Us” by Oyedotun Damilola Muees, a short story told in present tense and second person point of view. Present tense is not unusual these days, but you sort of suspect that there is something funny going on when the author resorts to 2nd person POV. You know that second person stories can occasionally be brilliant, such as “The Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang. But you are aware that more often it is a smoke screen deliberately chosen by the author to draw attention away from the overall weakness of the story. And you also know that being addressed as “you” throughout the piece grows tiresome very quickly.
In this case, you find a story about a pilot who has crash-landed on a planet with highly questionable physics that allows alternate-reality versions of herself to visit her. These ghost-sisters offer advice but for some reason are unable to help in any meaningful way. The concept interests you but the story is too short to make an impact, and magical realism masquerading as science fiction has never interested you. In addition you see clauses such as “a great force as it dashes forward at the speed of sound travelling in vacuum” and “staring at the ship’s dashboard with gaiety smeared all over face,” and you quickly move on to the next story.
That story is “Waru, Waru” by Ruth Joffre, set in contemporary Virginia but with a background of the Inca culture from the high plains of South America. One of the culture’s traditional practices is the handing down of memories from one generation to the next, using a secret potion concocted from the plants native to the area around Lake Titicaca, plants that are surprisingly available in Virginia. On this occasion, the memories are being handed down by the grandmother to her granddaughter, with the mother having abandoned the family some time ago.
The story begins with a devastating incident: the grandmother suffers a stroke during the taxing memory handover process, leaving the memories in jeopardy and the link between the generations possibly broken forever. Unfortunately this promising beginning does not lead to an equally interesting story. Instead most of the story consists of flashbacks to the mother and the reasons that she left, along with many paragraphs on the agriculture practices of the Incas (known as “waru, waru”) that allowed them to flourish in the high mountains. The result is a story that is pleasant and even life-affirming but meandering and with the central problem of the grandmother’s stroke unresolved.
“The Assumption of Maria” by Max Gladstone is by far the longest story in the issue and also the best by a considerable margin. The story’s brilliant central premise is that, while current detective work is primarily conducted using the internet to gather information, in the near future the web will be so choked with AI garbage that has been generated from other AI slop that any information gathered is immediately questionable and therefore useless. And so we enter into a new era of the gumshoe, the private eye of the 1930s resurrected in the 2030s and once again bumping heads with the bad guys and doing the legwork required in that time-honored profession: not a pastiche but a homage to those classic stories.
In this case, the mystery is the disappearance of the accountant for one of the mega-churches which preach the Prosperity Gospel while taking a sizable tax-exempt cut of their adherents’ bank accounts. So an easy target for satire, but Gladstone does handle even that aspect with some sensitivity and respect for both the founders of the church and the worshippers.
Along the way, there are some wonderful turns of phrase that I won’t spoil for you here. But it is apparent from the first paragraph that this is the work of a true professional author at the top of his game. And what a pleasure it is to read a story that does not rely on flashbacks or gimmicky flash-forwards but is simply told from start to end, trusting that the sequential events of the story itself are interesting enough to carry the reader from the first sentence to the last.
“Hungry Like The” by E. Catherine Tobler, despite the unusual title, uses the common magical realism device of a human changing into an animal for no apparent reason, as in Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” In this case, a young girl’s brother is turning slowly into a wolf. The transformation is clearly meant to be a metaphor for some life-changing event that the son is going through, possibly an addiction or a life-changing illness such as schizophrenia. And the story is quite moving in its description of the parent’s attempts to help their son, focusing all their attention on him while largely ignoring their daughter. However the actual reason for the change is never even hinted at. As a result the story remains a metaphor that is untethered from reality and therefore loses much of the impact it might have had.
“Fetspace” by Rhiannon Rasmussen is a broad satire on the sort of sub-groups that keep popping up on Reddit, forums that cater for every interest and taste. In this case, the members of the group are into sex, specifically with aliens of various shapes and colors and genitalia. The author is apparently expecting the reader to first be shocked by this idea, and then to titter at the outrageous secret desires that are posted, or at least hinted at. And while it is true that this sort of nudge-nudge snicker-snicker aren’t-we-being-risqué innuendo might amuse a twelve-year old, it will likely do little for an older reader. Far better if the story had opted for either full-on horror or for a serious exploration of what lies behind the attraction these men feel (and yes, they are all men). Unfortunately the author does neither.
“The Punishing Animal” by B. Pladek presents another post-apocalyptic world but from an unusual perspective. Cairo has been bombed, Chicago is a crater, there are refugee camps in Saskatchewan. But the characters in this story, a boy and his father and the girl they have befriended, are in an ecological refuge on the shores of northern Lake Superior. They are refugees from the war below the border, a war which has divided the family since the mother is American and chose to stay to fight while the father, a Canadian, ran, taking the boy with him. And the son has never forgiven him for what he perceives as cowardice and now plans to escape across the huge lake and back to what he clearly considers his home.
The story is told from multiple points of view, the son and the father, the girl and the officials of the camp, and even the now-dead mother, as it presents their feelings about the war and each other. All that is fine and dramatic, including the planning and the escape itself. However, near the end of the story the author decides that perhaps he hasn’t given us a clear enough picture of the situation, and they break the fourth wall to address the reader directly about the fate of the two children.
And then, perhaps also thinking that the reader has missed the symbolic presence of the birds in the story, the author includes a section from the point of view of a loon on the lake during the rescue, and uses that point of view to tell the reader directly that this bird is not a symbol but just a bird.
The story of the boy is resolved in a somber but logical conclusion, but I couldn’t help wondering why the author felt the need to disrupt any empathy the reader would have had for him by so blatantly pointing out that this is after all just a story.
“If a Discarded God Can Change, So Can I” by V.M. Ayala is another evil-earth-corporation-plundering-a-planet story. In this case, there is the added twist: now that the plundering is complete, the top brass are not just departing the planet but actually leaving behind most of the low-level workers.
The main character, unnamed, is brilliant technically and ran a sophisticated series of scams with their partner during the plundering phase. But that person, a partner in romance as well as crime, has now absconded with the rest of the rich and left the main character to the mercies of the wilderness. But there is hope: some of the sophisticated machinery, now abandoned, is still at least partially functional and might be repairable. But the only one who can do this is a stranger who is introduced late in the story, a presence never seen or even spoken to, a true Deus ex Machina. Which is a pity since there is considerable promise in the early scenes of life on the planet and in the pure evil of the abandonment itself.
The very last story this month is, at 265 words, by far the shortest: “Concerto For Wartime” by Sean Williams, and I will keep this review short as well since it otherwise runs the risk of being longer than the story.
What can an author say in such a short piece? Hemingway wrote a famous story in four words that was superb, with all the necessary information to both paint the situation and elicit the emotion that was inherent in it (but you’ll have to look it up).
Here, with a few more words at his disposal, Williams drops some very tantalizing hints: a war by an aggressor, and a magician with a past who might just be able to end it. It is all very suggestive of something just out of reach, like the rough notes an author might have scribbled lying in bed, in that state of pure invention that often seems to come just before sleep, when ideas briefly sparkle like jewels, only to be revealed as mere pebbles when viewed in the morning’s light.
There is certainly a story worth telling here. Even pebbles can shine in the right setting. And perhaps Williams will not be content to merely tease us but will one day expand and polish this very short story, and dazzle us.