DreamForge Anvil #5, October/November 2021
“Harbinie of Death” by J.J. Litke (Reprint, not reviewed)
“Kill Your Darlings” by A.J. Mietke
“Mermaids in the Garden” by Elaine Cunningham
“Unlinked” by Kelley Stead
“Our Kind” by Crystal Crawford
Reviewed by Geoff Houghton
The October/November issue of DreamForge Anvil #5 includes several non-fiction articles, four original stories, one reprint and part 5 of an ongoing serial. Only the four original pieces have been reviewed.
The first original story is “Kill Your Darlings” by A. J. Mietke. A young contemporary author, newly started on her writing career, is experimenting with multiple fantasy worlds and characters. However, experimentation comes with an unexpected price, not to the author herself but to those fictional characters.
The story borrows from Robert Heinlein’s concept of “the world as myth,” the view that an author’s creative thoughts can generate new realities somewhere in the infinite multiverse. “Kill Your Darlings” explores what happens to those unfortunate characters brought into existence during the writing process but then subsequently written out of the story. A. J. Mietke postulates that character creation and deletion is not entirely an identical two-way street and that the removal of a character from the text is not automatically the end. But if not, then where do deleted characters go and what can they do to persuade their creator to restore them to their former lives?
This is an easy to read fantasy with no villain except the rules of the multiverse itself.
The second offering is “Mermaids in the Garden” by Elaine Cunningham. This is a cheerful tale of feminine one-upmanship set in the most luxurious suburban homes of present day New England. In the Ladies Gardening Club, battles are fought across fine-china tea services, with precedence and prestige as the glittering prizes of civilised but implacable combat. One of the aspiring lady gardeners attempts to upstage her rivals with an unbeatable water feature, but what should she do when she discovers that her prized display items are actually sentient?
“Unlinked” by Kelley Stead is set in a high-tech future America that could be only a couple of generations away. In this believably drawn world, every full citizen is linked by computer implant to their own personal servant drone, an AI equivalent of the famous English valet, Jeeves. An entire network of easily accessible services make their lives too easy and comfortable for the tastes of the protagonist.
The narrator is more in denial than successful rebellion against this fairly benign regimen. He refuses the almost ubiquitous link that would allow him to be a useful contributor to his society and subsists on handouts from the very system that he despises. In the end, he gets more than he deserves, again at the expense of those he considers to be the traitors.
This reviewer cannot agree with the precepts proposed by this lone-wolf abortive rebel but the author has most certainly succeeded in creating a complex and believable character whose struggle against an intricate and internally consistent world fully engages the reader, whichever world view that reader choses to support.
The last story is “Our Kind” by Crystal Crawford. This story is set in the contemporary USA against the background of a merciless secret war between two branches of an alien species. The war has raged for more than twenty years without the hapless human race having the slightest idea what has been going on under their noses and it has now degenerated into genocide rather than straight conflict.
The young female protagonist and her mother are two of the few survivors of the losing side. They are on the run from their ruthless pursuers, moving from town to town, attempting to blend in with the human masses about them for concealment. When the youngster saves one of the enemy from death she discovers that not every member of the other branch of her race is equally committed and enthusiastic about seeking implacable revenge on innocents and the children of innocents.
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.