Story Unlikely“The First Cell” by Dana Wall
“The Twenty-Year Echo” by Steph Stockhill
Reviewed by Philip Hutson
“The First Cell” by Dana Wall is about the beginning and end of lives. The story opens with the narrator-protagonist, a newly conceived child beginning the process of “becoming” at the same time the mother she is gestating in has the beginnings of cancer.
The mother in “The First Cell,” as told by the child, is full of regret that she will never know her child, and a fear that the child will never know the mother.
While I was reading it, the story was just there; it wasn’t until I started to reflect on it for this review that the loss and what will never be hit me. For a reader like me, a little slow and not very empathetic, it helps to reflect upon the story to feel the emotion the author put into it.
“The Twenty-Year Echo” by Steph Stockhill is set in a future where there is no room in any prisons on Earth. Any convicted person is offered a choice of death or to be placed on a ship in space to make their own way among the planets. The story describes the passengers as scavenging what they could from failed human settlements or derelict ships.
There were lots of questions I had when I read the story about why the passengers didn’t use their extensive knowledge to create their own settlement beyond the ship.
The point of the story was not all the questions that I had, but the part of the story that led to the end and how a government can be so cruel to the point of being vindictive, and how people will struggle to survive and even overcome obstacles.
I found the story interesting in its take on the equivalent of a future version of the penal colony.
Philip Hutson’s ramblings and poor attempts at storytelling can be seen at https://tr8t.com