[On May 10, 2021 Strange Horizons officially expressed its political support for Palestinian solidarity. The views of Tangent Online reviewers are not necessarily those of Strange Horizons. Fiction critiqued at Tangent Online is, as much as is humanly possible, without prejudice and based solely on artistic merit.]
Strange Horizons, October 5th, 12th, & 19th, 2026
“138 Express Inbound” by Caleb Astey (10-5)
“Endless Requiem” by Y. M. Pang (10-12)
“Every Day I Feed Mother” by Imogen Ma (10-19)
Reviewed by Malory
There were three stories this month, one each Monday, and among them there’s a station full of refugees, a village fable and… a mother kept in a bucket in the kitchen closet. All three explore some great ideas, but I did think only one of them fully delivered on its idea.
“138 Express Inbound” by Caleb Astey is narrated by a transfer agent at a vast station where trains come in packed so tight that passengers “remain upright through the pressure of the surrounding passengers.” Intriguingly, every ticket stamped comes with the same line, “Reminder that you have no agency to affect change. Enjoy your trip.” Our narrator’s friend, Charles, keeps falling asleep on the platform bench and seems to rather enjoy the effect on the rich arrivals as “they realize they are closer to being like me than to being like who they was before.” As the story progresses, we learn that the train numbers actually mean something, which, pleasingly, Astey allows the reader to work out from one throwaway exchange with a group of tourists. There’s lots to like here, but it irritates me that the agent is never anything but right. There’s also a long walk through the station near the end that slows things down entirely unnecessarily just when they should be speeding up. Nevertheless, this was an enjoyable story.
“Endless Requiem” by Y. M. Pang starts with introducing us to Wuyin, who’s an unmarried fisherman of “eight-and-twenty” who is mourning his childhood so hard that, somehow, when enough children are playing in the water he finds himself among them in a second, younger body. The rest of the story follows what comes of that over the next few decades. It’s told like a folk tale, almost entirely in summary and the opening is lovely. But at nearly seven thousand words, that sort of summary becomes a bit of a problem. It means that the big events of the second half get a paragraph each, and the people in them start to feel rather like types. Fei, who arrives later, is “the most beautiful woman the villagers had ever seen,” and from there she’s mostly a list of cruelties. Likewise, the nature of the river magic more or less drops out after the first third, and I found myself missing it.
That leaves us with the third story, which is very strange indeed. “Every Day I Feed Mother” by Imogen Ma opens with the narrator, known only as Eight, getting a group-chat message from her aunt and then flying to Bangkok for the funeral of a woman she hadn’t spoken to in six years. A few days after she gets back to New York there’s “a small mound of meat” breathing on her doorstep. For some reason, she takes it upstairs and starts… feeding it. First, she gives it orange juice in the bathroom sink, then compost scraps, before graduating to rats off the glue traps in the basement. The rat scene is properly horrible and absolutely won’t be for everyone (anyone!). In general, though, the control of voice here is very good, and I enjoyed Eight going round the flat in wired headphones “on a three-foot leash, like old times.” However, the story keeps stopping to tell the reader what this all means in pretty clumsy terms (“Surely this is the American dream we envisioned for our children”), and I found the party with the parrot to be a long detour that adds very little. Oddly, though, it’s probably the one of the three I’ll remember most.