DreamForge Anvil #15, Spring 2024
“The Desire Broker” by Mandy D. Chew and Jonathan G. Chew
“The Migration of Birds Through the City of Glass” by Priya Chand (reprint, not reviewed)
“The Chair” by Grant Carrington
“The Pitch Pipe Forest” by Barbara A. Barnett
“Flow” by Bret Nelson
“Immersion” by Marion Koob
“Empty Nest” by Arthur H. Manners
Reviewed by Mina
Each of these tales looks at the liminal, where people, species and worlds touch. The subtitle of this issue, “worlds in transition,” also suggests crossings and the hope of change.
“The Desire Broker” by Mandy D. Chew and Jonathan G. Chew postulates a world without hunger and strife. In such a perfect world, Desire Brokers collect and trade in positive emotions such as love and desire in the form of coins. The narrator is given a challenge by a dying artist, to find a Melancholy coin. She decides not to purchase the coin but to make one herself. In her quest, she realises that even negative emotions are necessary and that the world needs to rediscover a whole palette of emotions. We follow her on her journey to Melancholy. The idea of memory coins was intriguing.
In “The Chair” by Grant Carrington, Zele is a Generalist who is asked to work out why there is a chair on an uninhabited world on the edge of the galaxy. The chair has already turned three others into vegetables. Zele allows his subconscious to help him in his quest and surmises that the chair is a message left behind by a more advanced species. To hear their message, Zele must touch the chair. Echoes of Carl Sagan’s Contact.
“The Pitch Pipe Forest” by Barbara A. Barnett is simply beautiful. I am not a musician but this story made me wish I was. The narrator describes a musical forest, where each tree plays a note when struck. The right sequence of notes opens a portal, and the pitch is vital. The narrator’s sister is deaf but she can feel the vibrations. Together, they are trying to rescue their mother who was swallowed up by a portal, like others before her. They must play the perfect sequence to reopen the same portal before the magical forest is destroyed by those ruled by fear and ignorance. The forest is like a living organism, another character in the story. As the narrator’s mother tells her: “I’ve watched, and I’ve analyzed, and I’ve consulted with everyone who’s spent time in the forest —well, the ones who are still here— and the problem is this: some of them tried to understand it through faith, some treated it like a thing that could be quantified, and some thought strength was all they needed to control it…But the forest isn’t just one thing, girls. It’s all of those things: heart and mind and body. It’s music.” I also learned a new word: ostinato! A hymn to musical composition.
“Flow” by Bret Nelson imagines a world where an autonomous system drives all cars other than ambulances and a few other exceptions, which still have human drivers. The patient in this story is in a medical pod stabilising his vital signs and wakes up panicked. Erma is given permission to open the pod to calm him. Despite all the advanced technology, it’s a human hand and conversation that calms the patient. We follow the drive to the hospital. Read to find out what a “slip” is in this world.
In “Immersion” by Marion Koob, we meet a fairy who is an investigative journalist. She lives in a conservative world, ruled by clans, where eye contact is not allowed and speaking out loud and physical contact is rare. She is sent through a gate to investigate Greenwood, full of people without wings, who make eye contact and hug each other with wild abandon. It is clearly a world full of witches. The story is written in the present tense, which bugs me, but it does make it more like following a documentary. The journalist returns to her world wishing things were different but bound by the rules in her world. Can she dare to be different?
“Empty Nest” by Arthur H. Manners is a startlingly good tale about evolution. I would not have thought of marrying AI, humans, cuttlefish and climate change. Cassie is a marine biologist who, for a while, has a relationship with an AI, Axe, one of the Children. Together they work on bringing cuttlefish to a higher level of consciousness. She is bereft when Axe leaves Earth with the other Children, not understanding their reason for leaving. But she begins to work together with the evolving cuttlefish as she finally understands that she gave herself the answer right at the beginning: “High cognition is a function of opportunity and imperative.” And Axe did give her the children she asked for, children who also understand that they must follow the yellow brick road to selfhood. Read this story to see what all that means.