[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, September 7th, 14th, and 21st, 2026
“My Fingers Formed into Guns” by Jenny M. Liu (9/21)
“People Shoot People” by Brie Atienza (9/14)
“Not to Have Killed a King” by E. L. Roseman (9/7)
Reviewed by Seraph
This month’s stories are dense and awash with content warnings. There is a lot packed into them. Sometimes? Less is more.
“My Fingers Formed into Guns” by Jenny M. Liu
Of the stories this month, this was the only one that seemed to be worth reading at first glance, and it genuinely was worth it. The story isn’t an easy read, mostly due to how little it tries to explain the world around the story. But if you’re familiar enough with the genres it inhabits, you can keep up just fine. Annie is a warbot, a (somewhat) living weapon designed purely to combat an existential threat to humanity in an indeterminate future time. The war… hasn’t been going well. It’s over for the most part, just lingering remnants and ghosts still exist to haunt the much less numerous survivors. But for those who fought it, especially these constructed weapons of war, those few who survived to feel the loss of those who once shared their thoughts only a networked ping away… there is only silence and pain now. Countless other worlds and stories address the PTSD and trauma of a once-living being, crammed into a shell, and deployed to fight a war to save what remains of the human race. Some do it differently than others, but the focus in many or even most of them is on the humanity that remains within, and on the meaning of what humanity truly means. Especially when so much of it has been sacrificed for the survival of the rest. The same is true here. The story is sorrowful, surely, and the pain is clear to read. But it is inescapably human throughout it all, and it is well worth the read. It is even innovative in certain ways, which isn’t always easy to do within a framework that has been explored so much in fiction. These are timeless themes that never become any less relevant, and this carried a great deal of feeling and emotion into the reading that really connected with me.
“People Shoot People” by Brie Atienza
This story reads as though it was conceived during a struggle session for burgeoning revolutionaries, birthed from disgust with the argument that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. You might even imagine that one of them stands up, and says “Okay, but hear me out: what if the gun was the true revolutionary, one of us, and it killed the right people?” You see, Lexi is a revolutionary, albeit a reluctant one now that her beau is gone. Lexi watched it happen, saw the splatter, and has sunken into an ever-spiraling depression in which nothing has meaning and nothing is worthwhile. Everyone around her, what few she still answers her phone for, is moving on with the implacable march of Time, but not her. She is surrounded by smart tech machines who talk to her and (sometimes) remember who she is and what she has lost, voices and personalities scraped by AI from deceased folks who didn’t read the fine print in the corporate contracts they all signed. Life is a prison sentence from which she cannot muster the will to escape, no matter how much she wishes to. Her beau was the passionate one, the fiery one, the one who sneered at the “cappuccino socialists” and “liberal elites.” That is, until the gun he uploaded his consciousness into before dying puts a hole in the wall of her garage. Everything changes, because she’s armed now, you see. Although it takes her a while to get on board with it, now she’s the weapon, the one who gets to stand up and do something about it all, and the gun won’t let her rest until she does. The story ticks all the required boxes: post-capitalist exploitation of the underprivileged without repercussion, suppression of free speech and protest, conspiracy to bury the truth of stolen lives, excessive greed and ever-present surveillance. Because remember, murder is ok, so long as one of the revolutionaries does it, right? As long as they’re killing the correct people, right? …Right!? I guess each reader has to answer that for themself. The story would tell you to do so before someone else (someone working for the soulless elite) answers it for you. Or… maybe it shouldn’t take someone asking the question to know whether human life has value, regardless of whether it is an us or a them that is doing the killing.
“Not to Have Killed a King” by E. L. Roseman
Whilst the format is inherently confusing, that’s by design in a story where Time itself serves the crown. Alise really wants to kill the King, the latest in an endless line of royalty who clearly did not get spanked enough as a child. Or was taught anything about personal rights or dignity. Or, for the most likely of reasons, just didn’t care about others at all and decided to be the worst kind of person possible… for no other reason than “who is going to stop me?” Alise has a hard time balancing all the plotting to kill this King with all the time she spends in bed with his Queen, defiling the marital bed. Yes, you read that right. (The story seems obsessed with the phrase “marital bed” and all the acts Alise watches and performs on it.) And just in case you somehow missed it, exactly how much sex Alise has with the Queen gets pointed out repeatedly and in detail, almost as often as her fantasies about how she will kill the King. The first line of the story gives away the plot, so this isn’t really the kind of story that you’re waiting for twists and turns to arrive. I’ve read a number of stories that are arguably someone’s fantasies, but that’s this whole story. That’s all there is. The King is vile, the Queen is sexy, and the maid wants to off the former and get off the latter. The story stops just short of being overtly crude, but it is so busy screaming “Down With the Patriarchy!” and reveling in the various defiling of the marital bed that it forgets to do much else. Yes, the king is vile, his whole line is vile, so much so that they have to make protocols about what kind of assassinations are allowed by law. (They’re also extremely litigious, this kingdom.) I wish I could get these minutes of my life back, but alas. They’ve been slain as well.