Lightspeed #184, September 2025
“Last Meal Aboard the Awassa” by Kel Coleman
“Beginning Before and After the End” by Jake Stein
“The Place I Came To” by Filip Hajdar Drnovsek Zorko
“Apeiron” by Cadwell Turnbull
“The Girlfriend Experience” by C.Z. Tacks
“On an Unusual Kind of Spatially Distributed Haunting” by Bogi Takacs
“City of One” by Steven S. Power
“Human Voices” by Isabel J. Kim
Reviewed by Geoff Houghton
Lightspeed #184 contains four original pieces of SF and four of fantasy.
The first SF is “Last Meal Aboard the Awassa” by Kel Coleman. This story is set aboard a multi-species exploration vessel in a far distant region of space. Humanity is not involved in this pan-species endeavour and it is implied that this alien federation may not even know of the existence of a species so mind-bogglingly arrogant that some of its membership believe that the whole Cosmos was created just for it!
If there is a single protagonist, then it is the ship’s gardener, but the real heart of the story is the way in which representatives of these many species all co-operate, work and play together without significant friction between them. The author has wisely made this society admirable but not perfect. There are hints of some partiality and minor ruffling of feathers (possibly literally in some cases), but that only make them seem more like the very best human rather than truly alien.
The civilised and comfortable life aboard this science vessel is assaulted by a deadly and unstoppable menace to all of their lives. There is no chance of surviving what is to come but their manner of dying is a challenge which these aliens deal with in a most exemplary manner. Like the best of all utopia stories, you may look back and wish that our own world was more like the one that you have just left.
The second offering is a flash fiction fantasy: “Beginning Before and After the End” by Jake Stein. The premise here is that the narrative of a story has a real existence of its own. That notion has been explored before. Robert Heinlein’s “The World as Myth” concept was that stories create their own separate realities that become as real as our own reality is to us. This author suggests that many narrative realities are not as stable as Heinlein would have it. The narrative of this story knows and fears the oblivion that comes with an ending and attempts to persuade the reader that reaching the story end is not a good idea. The narrative implies that the reader will also join it in oblivion. Since there is no obvious rationale for that assumption, that leads this particular reader to an interesting question. If narrative can speak outside of the words of the story itself then can narrative lie for its own self-preserving ends?
“The Place I Came To” by Filip Hajdar Drnovsek Zorko is another flash fiction piece written in the first person. It is a snapshot in the life of an immigrant who left his provincial fishing village to live in the big city. It is an SF story solely on the basis of being set on another planet. In reality, very much the same narrative with the same challenges could easily have been set in any country on Earth where internal immigrants leave their rural homes to make a new life in the cosmopolitan city.
The second fantasy offering is “Apeiron” by Cadwell Turnbull. As the title implies, this story is set in the place where universes are created, the infinite source of all things. The protagonist, Asha, is the young protégée of the Universe creator. She is an entity with almost godlike powers. Simultaneously, she is also a child with the enquiring mind of a bright youngster and the natural rebelliousness of a teenager.
Like all children who have seen and know no different, her weird world is just ‘The World’ to her. This tale opens at the crucial point where she is beginning to wonder how and why it is that her mentor paints new realities into existence and what is the purpose of her own life.
This is a very unusual ‘Coming of Age’ story that explores how a well-meaning creator with god-like powers, but without the omniscience, omnibenevolence and omnipotence associated with capital letter Gods might go about the task of creating and training a successor or additional godlet.
Any reader who has been both a child and a parent will understand how difficult it is even to follow the well-trodden path trampled down by countless previous generations. Asha is this Creator’s first such student and both he and she must learn their way without benefit of textbooks, protocols or precedent.
“The Girlfriend Experience” by CZ Tacks is a short story set in a near future world that would be considered dystopian by all but the most radical free-enterprise capitalists. The protagonist has escaped the catastrophic collapse of Siberia’s climate and economy and has to make her living as a sex-worker in this ultra-capitalist western nation where the power ratio between wealthy users and poverty-ridden service deliverers is cruelly skewed in favour of the rich and powerful. The author’s precisely written detail of the operation of the ‘Manic Pixie’ brothel suggests either an actual knowledge of how such establishments might function or an extremely fertile imagination. The brothel can support some extremely violent sexual practices thanks to bio-tools with the ability to aid recovery from extreme physical abuse such as strangulation. However, the scariest computerised biotechnology is the capacity to allow the overwriting of the sex-worker’s own personality with an alternative human character.
It is the latter that delivers the final twist in the story. One of the richest, most violent and cruellest of the wealthy people-users suffers an unexpected rebellion, delivered in response to both their past and present behaviour from an entirely unpredicted source.
“On an Unusual Kind of Spatially Distributed Haunting” by Bogi Takacs is a fantasy piece of flash-fiction. It is written in the form of a letter, from one academic to another. This polite and cultured communication attempts to explain why its author is the unwitting perpetrator of a series of widely distributed hauntings, even although he is, indubitably, still alive and well.
This is a neatly written piece of prose, but the purpose of the fictional author in penning this civil letter is clear and entirely reasonable, so if the reader is waiting for some unexpected twist or dark motive to be revealed then this reviewer advises: “move on, please, there’s no dark twist to see here.” What you see is exactly what you get.
The last piece labelled as SF is the flash-fiction story: “City of One” by Steven S. Power. Initially, this piece reads like the shortened manual for a fantasy game where you already know the underlying game mechanism but require to be reminded of the objective and points system. However, it appears to be akin to the Star-Trek Kobayashi Maru in that the best efforts are still going to lead to defeat.
It is not easy to extract any uplifting message from this flash story. Perhaps the author intended the City of One to represent the inexorable and certain end of a human lifespan, where there are no extra lives for reaching 1000 points and no free replays? Or perhaps the reader will draw a different and more cheerful meaning from this piece?
“Human Voices” by Isabel J. Kim is the last fantasy story in this issue. It is set in a present-day beachside town in the USA. A mid-teenage girl and her even younger sister have been abandoned by a particularly feckless set of parents. Originally they were under the supposed care of their barely adult 18-year old brother. After his apparent death they now live unsupervised by any adult, attempting to avoid the notice of the government’s mainly benign and well-meaning, but only marginally effective, civil service.
The reader discovers that the elder of the sisters has potent magical abilities, chief-most of which is the ability to use a ‘Voice of Command’ that can compel her listeners to obey. She has used her powers to track down and bind a truly magical creature, a siren, who was responsible for the disappearance and the magical subduction of their elder brother into the siren itself. This dangerous, mermaid-like creature is now their prisoner in the bathtub of their small apartment.
The gradual change in the relationship between each sister and this entirely magical creature is at the heart of this story. The siren cannot change its underlying magical nature but all three entities can undergo profound changes in how they perceive what they are and should be, and how they should direct their future actions.
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.