Fantastic Stories #222, November 2014

“Night of Apophis” by Brenda Kalt

Reviewed by Charles Payseur

Publisher Warren Lapine resurrected the long-defunct and historic magazine in August of 2014 as a monthly e-publication. It includes one original and several reprint stories in each issue, along with various book and movie reviews, and commentary.

The world manages somehow to not end after an asteroid was supposed to annihilate it in Brenda Kalt‘s “Night of Apophis.” Apophis, the asteroid, is going to strike that night, is going to end everything, and most people are preparing for it. For Jeena, though, the thought of suicide with her boyfriend is unacceptable, and she leaves to roam the city looking for a fun way to spend her last hours. Stumbling across an end-of-the-world party, she meets the CEO of a large business and spends the rest of the night getting drunk and reveling in mortality. Only she wakes up in the morning. She wakes up and finds that the world wasn’t as destroyed as everyone thought it would be. And where the story ends is the beginning of that realization, the beginning of what happens next, which is left open to the imagination. Fitting, I’d say, given the magazine it appears in. Hopeful and unashamed, the story does a fine job showing how people might react to the knowledge that the world is going to end, and how some might react when the prediction turns out to be wrong. It’s a fun little story, but seems defined more by the ideas it opens up than those it actually addresses, and in some ways it ends right when it was getting most interesting.

Charles Payseur lives with his partner and their growing herd of pets in the icy reaches of Wisconsin, where companionship, books, and craft beer get him through the long winters. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming at Perihelion Science Fiction, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, and Fantasy Scroll Magazine, among others. You can follow him on Twitter @ClowderofTwo