Aurealis“The Map and Territory” by Jocasta Suzanne and Maddison Stoff
“Song of the Stormy Petrel” by Kaaron Warren
“Treasure Moon” by Neurocleric
Reviewed by Seraph
“The Map and Territory” by Jocasta Suzanne and Maddison Stoff
Some ideas are really intriguing, genuinely cool, and just don’t translate to the media of writing very well. Things that use implicit or overt silence to convey meaning lose almost all power when just indicated with a series of spaces and dashes, devoid of the absence of sound that is so powerful. People would rather watch a movie than read the screenplays for the same reason, but even screenplays would give the pauses and silences more weight than they carry here. The idea behind this story is too interesting to be let down the way it is. The premise is amazing: A star-faring crew discovers and explores the ruins of an alien civilization, lost to time, that left behind cities and a language that is geometrically programming the brain of those who read it. The language runes, the layout of the buildings, the whole of the ruins, is all part of the language. It is an amazing idea. The protagonist is the only one who really succeeds, or perhaps moreso the programming succeeds on them, for reasons the story does, to its credit, set up well. It is the silence in between the words, in between thoughts even… that convey the meaning. It could have been an amazing story about the power of concepts and their ability to change us… even when we don’t hear them so much as experience them. More effort was seemingly spent on inserting pointless pronouns to a glorified sounding-board given no depth or description to merit them, than was given to conceptualizing how to convey the power of the silences and the ensuing changes they cause. Insert your ideology, go off, but this starship never made it off the ground.
“Song of the Stormy Petrel” by Kaaron Warren
I’m not sure if the disjointed flow of this story was intentional, or the result of trying to pack entirely too much into too small of a small space. The concept is simple enough, it’s all but “Hotel California” set on a cruise ship, but then the fever dreams start. We get it, the rich eat the poor, they take all the beautiful and desirable ones for themselves. Well, in this story, maybe moreso their souls, but it’s a ghost ship, so who knows? The narrator comes aboard this doomed vessel since their elderly curmudgeon of a relative didn’t want the tickets. Their partner Joanie is a true vision of beauty but sickly, and while it isn’t hard to understand what’s happening with her, much of the disjointed nature throughout centers around her. There are quite a few elderly folks, as would be expected on a cruise, and a collection of the rich and beautiful, which also tracks. There’s even the stowaways, the poor who sneak aboard to… escape homelessness due to the …lack of homes… in society? Okay, sure. Then people start disappearing, but hey, people get sick on cruises. Right? An absurd number of dark birds follow the ship and surround it wherever they go, more and more as fewer people populate the ship. I mean, the horror elements are all loosely present, and the concepts are all loosely present, but it falls apart trying to be both horror/ supernatural and a commentary on the collective sins of humanity and a criticism of the excesses and bottomless greed of the rich and some kind of metaphor about how everyone loses everything to the rich whilst drowning trying to escape. Any one or two of these could have been interesting and gripping, but it’s just too much, and nothing gets the time needed to develop any sense of identity.
“Treasure Moon” by Neurocleric
Let it be noted that I will happily accept scat in my jazz improv, where it is a very positive and fun thing, and less so in the more biological sense, where it and the rest of the story just leave me feeling like a good long shower with lots of soap. I absolutely love me some werewolves, but this really just wasn’t an angle of their lore I was really prepared to explore so deeply. The two siblings at the center of the story live in a swamp known for Howlers, which, as mentioned, are werewolves. The locals have a rather unique cycle of life going on, where criminals get fed to the howlers, and some brave few go digging through the piles of… remains to collect the miracle-healing wolf crap. Yep, wolf crap. There is explanation given in the story for why this is so important, and I’ll leave that up to other readers if it is given sufficient depth to really explain it, though for me it was almost a passing afterthought of an explanation. There really isn’t much setting beyond a town in a swamp to go on, but it is certainly dirty and gritty all around. The general character of the people involved is just about on par with the subject matter, which to sum both up politely has all gone to the dogs. There is precious little redeeming quality to anyone described, or to the life they find themselves in, just a lot of unsavory people and unsavory topics.