Cosmic Roots & Eldritch Shores, June 2020

“The Last Rosy-Fingered Dawn” by Paul Celmer

Reviewed by Kevin P Hallett

There is one first publication story in the June issue of Cosmic Roots & Eldritch Shores.

Bowman is a slave in this SF short.  Two hundred years ago, humans had sent robots for their last battle, which they lost.  The victorious aliens enslaved the surviving humans; and Bowman is a descendant of those first slaves.  It is all he knows.

At the top of the wall that protects the citadel, Bowman is tending to his master when he hears metal scraping on stone, coming from the barrens.  Warnings to his master go unheeded, leaving him to wonder and hope if this is his final salvation.

This snippet of a story added no new ideas to the SF genre, though it read easily enough.