DreamForge Anvil #13, Fall 2023
“Goblin Market” by Darrin Bright
“Variegated, I” by Jason P. Burnham
“No Hugs For Holographic Fathers” by Robert E. Harpold
“Grasshopper/Ant” by Don Mark Baldridge
“Somehow, She Remains” by Z. T. Bright
“Cold Heart” by Victoria Dixon (reprint, not reviewed)
Reviewed by Mina
An issue about what drives us, whether we are aware of it or not.
“Goblin Market” by Darrin Bright is a skit on fantasy tropes. A goblin shopkeeper who’s seen it all serves Chosen Ones and Evil Sorceresses with aplomb. But what is his true motivation? I get that the author is playing with a character who is aware of the tropes ruling his world and trying to avoid or subvert them, but it doesn’t let you read the story as a story. It’s like watching a film where you are obliged to watch with the director’s voice in the background and no option to switch it off. Ultimately, it can be off-putting and, please, don’t do it, unless you can do it better than The Princess Bride already did.
In “Variegated, I” by Jason P. Burnham Karina is attempting to finish her doctoral thesis. Karina has been studying the shrinking red spot on Jupiter for years. She postulates that the red spot is the result of aliens attempting to communicate with extra-terrestrial octopuses. A nice detail is her close relationship with her dad. A light-hearted story about daring to think outside the box, which Karina’s thesis director (the establishment) does not approve of.
“No Hugs For Holographic Fathers” by Robert E. Harpold is a sweet story. Tak lives and works on Mars; Indra on Earth. Together, they decide to raise a genetically engineered baby, Pranil. Being a long-distance father who cannot touch his child has its frustrations. Despite the unusual circumstances, the story is very much about intergenerational relationships. Pranil’s lack of understanding for, or interest in, his father’s life and struggles has nothing to do with his father being a hologram—a lot of Earth parents could report the same! And families being split between continents/worlds like this is not unusual outside the first world. But Tak is able to save the day at the end of the story precisely because he is a hologram.
I found “Grasshopper/Ant” by Don Mark Baldridge frustrating. The author clearly loves words and their rhythm and cadence, but the end result takes patience to read and is alienating. The story takes place after a solar flare wreaks havoc on Earth. The narrator shoots down junk floating in space—I don’t think I need to read “I go pew” one more time—and wonders about the menace of the military satellite he passes regularly, while he begins to identify with it. The author tells us this story is a cautionary tale about fascism and the protagonist falling under the influence of evil—laudable, but I must have missed it.
“Somehow, She Remains” by Z. T. Bright follows Mahra as she travels to an alien world to see her dying twin sister, Cehri. Her twin wants her to solve the puzzle of why the indigenous species all chose to die at the same time. Mahra realises that Cehri wanted her to find the solution to avoid the world being colonised and its natural beauty destroyed. It’s a story about life, death, grief and rebirth—all the good stuff. And it challenges our fear of death, which I enjoyed.