Reactor, December 2024

“Vulcanization” by Nisi Shawl

“Songs of the Snow Whale” by K.A. Teryna, (translated by Alex Shvartsman)

Reviewed by Geoff Houghton

The first original piece in the December issue of Reactor is “Vulcanization” by Nisi Shawl. This alternative history is set in the year 1898, at the Court of Leopold II, King of the Belgians and sole personal proprietor of the Congo Free State, an area of West Africa 75 times larger than Belgium itself. The author has rather daringly taken the deeply unlovable Leopold as her Point of View character and does not soften her racist, European Supremacist views in any way. Leopold never physically visited his African holdings, but his orders to extract ivory and rubber from the natives at any cost led to a humanitarian nightmare in which millions of Africans died at the hands of his minions.

All of the above is historically accurate. The only deviation into alternative history is the well-deserved haunting of Leopold by some of the millions of Africans who were murdered on his orders during his ownership of his gigantic African fiefdom. Leopold turns to the new physical sciences of his period to deal with this metaphysical problem, only to find that the cure is worse than the original problem.

This offering is an uncomfortable read in which racist terminology is freely used and racist attitudes are even more freely displayed. The only defence is that the Leopold portrayed in this story matches the real Leopold of history. Readers have been warned and must decide for themselves if that is an adequate justification for this piece of fiction.

Secondly, Reactor offers “Songs of the Snow Whale” by K.A. Teryna, translated by Alex Shvartsman. This is an unusual, near contemporary, fantasy set in the northernmost part of Russia/the Soviet Union. On this bleak northern island, the rule of Moscow and even what the nation is called has lost any relevance. The native inhabitants still live the same simple lives that their many times great ancestors lived before the Commissars came and informed them that they were now Soviet citizens, before the Boyars arrived and told them that they were a part of Tsar Peter’s Greater Russia.

Five travellers wait in the shelter of a small weather station for the end of one of the frequent storms that close the island to the outside world. In the style of “The Canterbury Tales”, each journeyer in turn relates a story. Each tale is laced with typically Russian gloom and darkness, but each one has its own separate voice and each story is stranger than the last.

The denouement then overlays the deeper mysteries of an ancient people on the mere veneer of Russianness. In the end, only three travellers leave the island and none of them are surprised by the absence of two whose tales they briefly shared.

Geoff Houghton lives the life of a retired old fogy in a leafy village in rural England and he may be declared by Tangent readers to be entirely out of touch with the modern world without him taking offense.