[On May 10, 2021 Strange Horizons officially expressed its political support for Palestinian solidarity. The views of Tangent Online reviewers are not necessarily those of Strange Horizons. Fiction critiqued at Tangent Online is, as much as is humanly possible, without prejudice and based solely on artistic merit.]
Strange Horizons, April 1, 2024
Reviewed by Victoria Silverwolf
Describing the plot of “Vermilion” by Victor Forna is nearly impossible, given the story’s experimental narrative style. In brief, it has something to do with the narrator, her twin sister, and other people escaping a damaged Earth and traveling among pillars on another planet, where they battle (and, apparently, sometimes become) glass people, in order to reach another vessel at the sea and from there voyage to yet another world.
This jumbled synopsis is extremely misleading, I’m afraid, and may not even be reasonably accurate. That’s because the work is so opaque. Typographic tricks, such as nonstandard indentation and sentences with a comma after each word, add to the confusion. The narrator seems to be experiencing hallucinations, making comprehension of what is really happening even more difficult. The work is better interpreted as a prose poem; at more than four thousand words, a little of this goes a long way.
Victoria Silverwolf was not the victim of any April Fools’ Day jokes this year.