Grimdark “The Royal Game” by Christopher Ruocchio
“The Night Sung Out My Name” by Ken Scholes
“The Cure” by Guy Haley
“Electric Sonalika” by Samit Basu (reprint, not reviewed)
“Dead Reckoning” by Miles Cameron
Reviewed by Victoria Silverwolf
Unlike most issues of the magazine, this one contains only science fiction, although at times the stories feel like fantasy.
In “The Royal Game” by Christopher Ruocchio, a government agent secretly plots to terminate a fetus grown from an apparently immortal man who has been taken in by the agent’s ruler. The agent fears the birth of another superhuman being will lead to chaos and war with other powers. The immortal takes care of the situation in his own way.
The complex background of this story is more interesting than its simple plot. It requires a great deal of exposition, much of it in the form of a conversation between the agent and another operative during a chess game. The resulting narrative seems almost like the opening of a much longer work.
Narrated in stream-of-consciousness style, “The Night Sung Out My Name” by Ken Scholes relates the experiences of a soldier on the run from an alien prison camp. The escapee has a symbiotic artificial intelligence, which sometimes takes control of the soldier’s body.
This synopsis fails to convey the work’s intensely subjective narrative style, which mixes events occurring in the present with memories, internal dialogue, and bits of doggerel. The author chooses a very difficult manner of telling the story, and succeeds in creating a compelling psychological portrait.
In “The Cure” by Guy Haley, mercenaries convey a priestess suffering from a bizarre illness to a temple. Along the way are multiple dangers, from a mysterious rotting disease to a deadly extradimensional being. Only at the temple does the narrator discover the true reason for the journey.
Appropriate to the magazine’s theme, this is a gruesome, bloody story with a large body count. The mood is unrelievedly grim from start to finish. Advanced
technology is akin to magic in this imagined setting, so it may appeal to readers of fantasy as well as to those who prefer science fiction. Much of the speculative content seems random. The extradimensional being, for example, is entirely without explanation or motive.
In “Dead Reckoning” by Miles Cameron, a starship carrying freight to a colony world is threatened with capture when an embargo breaks out. The crewmembers take desperate measures to escape their heavily armed pursuer, leading to an extraordinary discovery.
Much of the narrative deals with descriptions of the ship’s evasive maneuvers, which will appeal mostly to those who enjoy technical details. The twist ending at the very end comes out of nowhere, and renders the story open-ended.
Victoria Silverwolf has to deal with a leaking kitchen sink.