DreamForge Anvil #10, Winter 2022
“The Joy Fund” by Susan Kaye Quinn
“Where Rivers Meet” by Indiana Tilford
“Door to Portal: A Salesman’s Story” by Adam Jarvis
“Against the Time Beasts” by Ana Sun
“The Express” by Michael Zahniser
“The Lost Village” by E.E. King
Reviewed by C.D. Lewis
From this issue of DreamForge Anvil, Tangent reviews six new pieces. The issue is mostly winners, and is recommended.
Susan Kaye Quinn‘s “The Joy Fund” is a third person drama set in a future Pittsburgh which has not only universal health coverage but a separate program to provide funds terminally ill patients can use to enjoy the last days of their lives. A character receives funds of this kind and concludes that the health program knows something about his life expectancy he doesn’t; hijinks ensue. If you’ve never heard the term “hopepunk” before you’re not alone. The story is hopeful and fun. It’s also optimistic, which in these dystopic times is a distinct pleasure.
Indiana Tilford‘s fantasy “Where Rivers Meet” relates a third person conflict between a hunter and the antagonist forcing him to hunt the targets she picks. Tilford builds the antagonist’s villainy on three pillars: broken agreements, ecological offense, and disdain for the sacred. When the hunter and his people are forced to seek large prey instead of smaller, more easily-located, non-breeding specimens, and local laborers are forced to abandon good meat so their employer can chase bigger trophies for use in a ritual intended to advance the employer’s self-interest, the story problem is launched. Anyone who’s seen Fort Apache or Avatar knows that employing outside force to advance an overconfident leader’s personal ambition in a land populated by competent and unsympathetic locals is a recipe for disaster, so the result represents no great surprise. The fate of the offending parties provides the kind of satisfaction one might derive from a revenge plot.
Set in an urban fantasy dystopia, Adam Jarvis‘s first-person short story “Door to Portal: A Salesman’s Story” is related by a used-wand salesman on his first day at a job seemingly modeled on the door-to-door marketers who once plied their trade on the strength of in-home vacuum cleaner demonstrations. The initially cautious narrator carefully restricts his magic to small effects well within his license, which pose no danger to the secondhand (or older) wands in his inventory. The impoverished community seems not to have much prospect for buying his costly wares, and he tries to make himself feel better about their plight by providing freebie knife sets (with a low-grade enchantment to keep them sharp as long as someone in the family still has the “gift” of post-Collapse magic). It’s a crummy world full of sad people living dismal lives and the narrator doesn’t tolerate it very well within the limits of his magic license and his company’s policies. It’s a beautiful story with an ending much more uplifting than the heart-wrenching environment leads a reader to expect. Jarvis delivers a Riders of Rohan moment without a battlefield and without a soul in sight. Glorious. Recommended.
Ana Sun sets the flash fiction “Against the Time Beasts” in a grimy urban fantasy universe in which parallel worlds fractured by time beasts leave angels, or at least fallen angels, uncertain which reality confronts them. As a flash it does not attempt to deliver an entire plot arc so much as a vignette. “Against the Time Beasts” sets forth a character and a confrontation and a world without offering a resolution so much as an opportunity to feel the narrator’s yearning for companionship and redemption.
Michael Zahniser‘s “The Express” is flash fiction set on Mars. The story’s movement is the main character’s internal journey from suspicion about a newcomer to acceptance. The fuel for this movement is the main character’s realization the newcomer isn’t a poser or fool, present only to gawk, but someone who understands his work and can contribute to it. The vignette’s setting in a Martian lab has a solid and convincingly science-fiction-y feel and the main character’s terraforming work is definitely science-fiction-y in nature, though the character’s internal journey is driven by psychology and would function the same way set on Earth in a theater or a soup kitchen (though of course the work-related details the characters communicate to establish they’re from the same tribe would vary dramatically). “The Express” follows a character’s internal journey to accept a stranger, which feels wonderful just as accepting someone does in real life. Fans of SF settings will enjoy the verisimilitude in all the SF details.
Although initially teasing a fantasy set in a world unaware of adjacent magical lands, “The Lost Village” by E.E. King appears to be set in a world like our own. It opens as a comedy about a grandmother who wins Scrabble with the narrator by announcing new vocabulary from the lost village from which she was kidnapped as a child by a dwarf before it was destroyed by evil sorcerers, and concludes with the granddaughter’s realization of the kinds of dark horrors her grandmother witnessed as a child that caused her to explain it to herself in terms of supernatural villainy. The story doesn’t develop so much into a climactic decision as through a narrative-altering revelation. It’s funny and terrible and worth reading.
C.D. Lewis lives and writes in Faerie.