Apex #132, July/August 2022
“Have Mercy, My Love, While We Wait for the Thaw” by Iori Kusano
“Creatures of the Dark Oasis” by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam
“A Country of Eternal Light” by Jennifer R Donohue
“Schlafstunde” by Lavie Tidhar
“Your Space Between” by Marie Croke
“Notes to a Version of Myself, Hidden in Symphonie Fantastique Scores throughout the Multiverse” by Aimee Picchi
Reviewed by Geoff Houghton
Apex #132 contains six original pieces of fiction and two reprints.
The first new SF story is “Have Mercy, My Love, While We Wait for the Thaw” by Iori Kusano. It tells of a distant future where an otherwise unremarkable peripheral star system has recently overthrown the semi-benign but cloying rule of an ancient, slumbering Empire, only to discover that freedom is not as simple as actually rebelling in the first place.
The first person narrator is the estranged daughter of the rebel leader, now living in voluntary semi-exile with the son of one of their former rulers. She is acclaimed as a hero of that revolution and the Imperial Captain with whom she lives is a notorious war criminal who barely escaped a well-deserved death, but she knows the eternal truth—the winners get to write the history books!
This is not a “Star-Wars” style story in which courageous rebels bravely struggle against the evil Empire. It is a quiet exploration of the lasting impact of insurrection and war on those forced by circumstance to take up the sword against an honourable enemy with a different vision of what is right. Our narrator knows that in their desperation to win, the rebels were honestly willing to sacrifice themselves and, like all zealots, they expected and required the same from everyone else. Now she must come to terms with all that she had to do in order to win that war, even if those inconvenient truths sully the revolution itself.
The second piece is “Creatures of the Dark Oasis” by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, a horror story set in roughly contemporary rural America. The swamp-monsters are adequately horrible and the lake scenes are adequately suspenseful as a calm unruffled surface makes way for a sudden explosion of water, sharp teeth and talons. You may recoil in shock as the beleaguered colony of finwomen eviscerate yet another victim, but the true horror in this story is its human participants. The teenage boys are homicidal proto-rapists. The adults turn automatically to violence as the first rather than last resort and will kill without remorse. All social interactions appear to be violent or abusive.
It is to be hoped that Ms Stufflebeam is one of those talented individuals who has the skill to convincingly write of a world that she does not actually believe in, since the alternative is that the author has an incredibly dark view of her fellow Homo-sapiens.
“A Country of Eternal Light” by Jennifer R Donohue is a short horror story that explores a lonely individual’s idiosyncratic reaction to the death of their partner. The location could be anywhere in the contemporary western world, but this is unimportant since the “action” either occurs entirely off-stage or, quite possibly, only in the head of the narrator. By the finale, you may hope that it is the latter!
The penultimate story is “Schlafstunde” by Lavie Tidhar. A hi-tech future Earth has been repeatedly ravaged by war and the survivors of that almost Darwinian selection process are all deadly and able, or they too would be dead. The protagonist is a highly enhanced mercenary, currently working as a rather overqualified barmaid between assignments. She is offered more specialist paid work by a self-appointed vigilante hive mind and engages in verbal and/or violent discourse with philosophical war-drones, aggressive battle-dolls, itinerant hobo-robots and old humans with strange powers before finally completing the hive-mind’s mission—which proves to be not quite the purpose for which she was first engaged.
This is a classical SF mystery/quest story, although set against a particularly rich and complex background. It also leaves our protagonist still standing and available for future adventures in a universe that most certainly deserves a further outing.
“Your Space Between” by Marie Croke is a classical form of SF where one highly improbable invention exists in a world that is otherwise almost indistinguishable from our own. In this case the innovative invention is the multiple closet—a space-time distortion that allows more than one storage space to exist in the same place. These impermanent storage spaces not only exist but are cheap enough that an ordinary household can afford to buy one. No further need to tidy your closet or throw out old favourites—just rotate them away into another dimension, and in their place there is another empty wardrobe available to fill. What possible down-side could such an invention have—until it goes wrong? Marie Croke explores what could go wrong and its lasting impact on those involved.
The closing story is the extravagantly named: “Notes to a Version of Myself, Hidden in Symphonie Fantastique Scores throughout the Multiverse” by Aimee Picchi. This story is set in a series of alternative versions of contemporary New York City. Our protagonist, Zoe, has just been taught by another version of herself how to open a portal and travel between these multiple realities. The core of this story is our Zoe’s gradual realisation that her trainer’s motives were not what she first believed.
Although the mechanism of transport between alternate realities is under the control of our protagonist there is more than a frisson of Heinlein’s Job in this story. Like Heinlein’s protagonist, our hero starts with the conviction that she has come from the best of all possible worlds and the heart of this story is her gradual, painful, realisation that different does not automatically equate to inferior.
Her initial desire to help all other Zoe doppelgangers to be as successful as she was in her own world does not survive that realisation, and that is followed by the shocking realisation that the portals are essentially a one-way system. Our protagonist version of Zoe is left with a stark choice: should she copy the deceit of her mentor and send out another innocent Zoe to make room for her in their world, or must she devise a new and arguably better mission for her continued journeying through the multiverse?
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.