Diabolical Plots #138, August 2026

“Njiran Folk Beliefs, Volume II” by Claire Jia-Wen

“We Burst Across the Theoretical Gore” by Sara S. Messenger and Simo Srinivas

Reviewed by Henry Gasko

The first story, Diabolical Plots #138A” is “Njiran Folk Beliefs, Volume II” by Claire Jia-Wen, and is written as fragments of an anthropological study that a researcher from the advanced Radiant Empire has carried out over some years into the native culture of a planet. The initial fragments are indeed very fragmentary, with heavy overtones of myth and religion and little apparent relation to the actual culture of the natives.

Even though the story is less than 2000 words, many of the fragments seem redundant and repetitive, and offer little in the way of a coherent story and even less about the natives’ day to day life, and the reader is soon wondering if the frame of a researcher’s journal is nothing more than a gimmick.

However as the story progresses the frame does indeed become an important part of the story: the fables and myths become more political, slowly revealing the colonization of the planet and the possible medical experimentation of the natives. And alongside this are the increasing efforts by both the researcher and the editor (presumably back in the comfort of the Radiant homeworld) to steer the narrative away from anything that might be politically damaging. Unfortunately the final fragment spells out the damage the invaders did all too clearly, and is completely at odds with the vague mythological images of most of the story. This might be an artefact of the very short length of the story, but it would have been fascinating to see the truth emerge with a little more subtlety.

The second story this month, “We Burst Across the Theoretical Gore” by Sara S. Messenger and Simo Srinivas, begins with all guns blazing, reciting a litany of wild animal images in the first person plural: we are this and we are that and we are that other creature as well. “We are sleek and gorgeous. We are starved and diseased,” and the reader is soon wondering if there is any point to this. Is the story going to be told from the viewpoint of all animals everywhere on the planet? Those images of brave and fearsome animals are soon joined by pictures of their deaths, all told very lyrically but with insufficient context and therefore little impact.

Just as the story seems to be settling into this litany of unconnected animal images, it morphs into an equally disconnected set of images of cars of all types being produced, seeming to become conscious in the process and feeling the power of their tires over the road and over the animals that venture to cross it. The story finally settles into something resembling coherence. There are sections of a mother cougar (or is it a lion) teaching her daughter the ways of the world, including navigating across the newly expanded highway that runs through their territory. These sections, told in italics, are interspersed with longer sections told from the point of view of one specific car, which is racing to bring a man and his pregnant wife to a hospital. And eventually the two worlds collide, literally.

Once it becomes clear what is happening, the story intrigues with its linking of the two types of “creatures”: the ones made of flesh and blood and the ones made of steel and chrome, and their shared hunger for the chase and for the prey. (Of course in the case of the car, a human agent is required and this does tend to spoil the analogy somewhat.)

However everything is told in such relentless prose and difficult-to-picture metaphors that the reader is soon screaming “Enough already!” and wishing that the authors had been told somewhere along the line that a little restraint goes a long way and sometimes less really is more.