Beneath Ceaseless Skies #450, Science-Fantasy Month 8, February 5, 2026
“Medusa’s Ship, or The Thing About Bodies” by Natalia Theodoridou
“Precipice Sun” by Ewen Ma
“Like Thorns on Her Tongue” by R.Z. Held
“A Dirge for the Mirrorbirds” by Emily C. Skaftun
Reviewed by Axylus
This issue features four science-fantasy stories that are built around characters who chase a romantic partner hoping to gain a flourishing life through a lasting connection with a true love. Each faces obstacles. Three lose, and one wins. Two of the losers sabotage their own dreams by failing to rise to the challenge those obstacles present. As a result, each loses true love and then dies, either literally or symbolically. This is in line with the cliché that fictional characters who refuse to change or grow tend to die or disappear in some manner. The third loser gambles unsuccessfully on forbidden love, and also dies, in a sense.
I have an aside that is only for grad students in linguistics or English: how about some corpus work for a research project? Concordancing, anyone? All four stories in this issue include either LGBT or gender-neutral characters. They also include gender-neutral pronouns, including one unobtrusive token of “xir.” Since Beneath Ceaseless Skies has been around since 2008, a nice discourse analysis project would be to track these elements, noting whether the incidence of their usage has changed through time. But someone has probably done this for science fiction before, at least in some context.
The most prominent question I faced during these reviews is this: what makes stories compelling (as opposed to boring)? One very important factor that makes stories compelling is the struggle that results when the goal or goals of at least one character, the protagonist, face one or more obstacles of various kinds. The very best tales not only create a tension or struggle within the plot but also evoke strong emotions and/or cognitive dissonance—a conflict between cognitive schemas—in the mind of the reader (see for example, Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery”). Finally, a protagonist is someone who rises to the challenge, who takes action against a significant trouble or host of troubles with stakes that are significant to that character, and seeks to end the struggle via opposition.
I do not suggest these principles due to hidebound adherence to a prescriptive strategy of writing fiction. Instead, they emanate from psychological truths regarding human nature and readers’ motivations and expectations when approaching stories. We as human beings typically have greater emotional investment in people who actively attempt to face their shortcomings and change than we do for people who do not. We root for them, especially if they have suffered in the past. As the time and energy they devote to change increases, so does the degree that we root for them. That dynamic also works in the opposite direction: if people face negative consequences after they did not actively attempt to change, we judge them negatively, fairly or unfairly ascribing their failure to the consequences of a lack of some positive quality. At the same time, we as readers enter into fictional realities seeking an ersatz emotional experience, or at least one of many different kinds of emotional experiences. These emotions help us read ourselves into the story, help us quarantine our inner struggles and play them out in a fictional sandbox, where we come out successful (or not) in the end. If none of this were the case, we would have turned to the nonfiction section of the library or bookstore instead of genre fiction. So the primary art and craft of fiction resides principally (but not solely) in the level of emotional manipulation that the story achieves. Alas, the first three of these stories lack the elements described above. Some have high stakes, but no struggle. Some have struggle, but low stakes. And so on. The fourth one is a separate issue entirely.
The first tale, “Medusa’s Ship, or The Thing About Bodies” by Natalia Theodoridou, is an allegory involving love between the (male) captain of an interstellar ship and the ship’s (female) sentient AI, and the sad consequences of misreading the nature of a situation. As the story winds on (big spoilers!), the ship’s captain, originally presented as male without further elaboration, is gradually revealed to be transsexual. Fair enough, I have no complaints here. In fact, the story gets positive marks for presenting a transsexual character within a framework that is definitely not pure agitprop and has no traces of smut. Eventually (second spoiler!) the ship transfers its sentient AI into a fabricated female human body, so they can consummate their love. For unexplained reasons, the AI female forbids the captain to look at her or anything else in their surroundings, to the point where he is required to wear a blindfold. Since this tale draws explicit parallels with the myth of Medusa, one can guess the inevitable revelation takes place and doesn’t end well.
This is very far from being a love story. Instead, love is used as a canvas or a stage on which to play out the central goal of discovering how a lover (perhaps as a proxy for society as a whole) reacts to revealing one’s true self. The newly-embodied ship falls into the role of Medusa, while the captain’s main function is to blunder and drop the ball when he should have known better. On a deeper level, the allegory here is that the ship, instead of the captain, represents an embodiment of the relational experiences of transsexuals (at least as this author presents them).
All of this is conceptually sound, perhaps even elegant, but several elements of the story work to undermine its intended impact. After the clever initial setup, the plot marches inexorably toward the expected ending. Any kind of twist along the way might have added value. On the surface, moreover, this story has some very mildly nonstandard formatting, and it bends toward the poetic/expressive end of the spectrum. However, the language use really isn’t all that lyrical, evocative, or memorable. But in my view, neither of these is the central shortcoming. The fatal flaw is that neither character rises to the challenge of any significant struggle. All struggles are downplayed or elided. The erstwhile ship’s AI has no significant qualms about the fact that her plan to become human endangers the captain, nor seemingly much guilt after the outcome. The captain’s struggles with temptation to remove the blindfold are presented with minimal emphasis, as unremarkable flagstones along the path to the ending. The loss the two characters experience is huge, but the emotional texture of the story is largely granted only cursory attention. Everything has the feel of a foregone conclusion. It almost seemed as if Theodoridou was reluctant to explore the struggles with temptation, doubt, or guilt, or the emotional impact of loss. This in turn seems to be because the intended payoff was never the events themselves or any emotional impact along the way. Rather, it lies in the teaching/learning moment of a debriefing-like recap by the ship’s AI. One of these is the platitudinous “…not everything is a story, that sometimes things are just the way they are and not everything makes sense.” The others center around the idea that the captain misunderstood both the AI ship/woman’s intentions and the correct response to the situation.
So did this tale have any lasting emotional or intellectual impact on me? I have to say the answer is “No.” That is perhaps regrettable, because we often grasp truths about life and human nature with greater intuitive acuity and far more permanence when they are attached to resonant emotions. I give Theodoridou’s story credit for originality in drawing a parallel between the experiences of an embodied AI and a transgender person, but it doesn’t offer any other selling points.
“Precipice Sun” by Ewen Ma meanders through a series of loosely-connected anecdotes and events related by a lifelong thief and murderer as she writes to seek acceptance from a lover she had abandoned long ago. Her lover was a female military guard protecting the rich planetary rulers from whom the protagonist was stealing. Each anecdote in this epistolary tale is interesting when considered in isolation. Regrettably, the whole string of them, when taken together as a complete tale, clearly adds up to less than the sum of its parts. The central character’s missives frequently interject that she has turned or will turn from her life as a thief, but her actions repeatedly show otherwise.
I never rooted for the protagonist, nor was there an emotional connection at any point. The protagonist never exhibited real agency, which is to say, she never took any decisive action. She never dares to act against a host of sublimated insecurities and instances of personal oppression, never chose to cling relentlessly to the tenets and requirements of hope. Instead, she is floating on the tide of her flaws, insecurities and desires. This is the story, then, of one character’s unvarying and ultimately forgettable rejection of personal change, or of doing anything other than pay lip service to change. The narrator does not die, but drugs herself into an oblivion symbolic of giving up on the pursuit of joy. It is a slow motion, low-impact slide into failure along a notably picturesque road. However, the tale is reluctantly recommended, because each separate anecdote is so nicely done.
Oh wait! This novelette tacks on a 60-word postscript which says “[We were always meant to have freedom]… to define ourselves as our own people, to make of our lives what we will and face up to every consequence that comes our way.” The story is rescued, hooray! Sorta kinda. Too little, too late. The character should have sincerely tried, and invested effort and self into trying, then failed. That would have led me as a reader to invest myself emotionally in the events. Recommended but with no stars.
In “Like Thorns on Her Tongue” by R.Z. Held, an itinerant blood mage named Trist offers a magical cure for depression. Her mind-spells also facilitate reality-testing of negative self-talk by transforming it into the easily-recognized hissing speech of evil snakes. Blood mage spells require her to engage in self-harm to help herself and others navigate life’s emotional challenges. While traveling in a post-apocalyptic world to sell these therapeutic spells, Trist is hired by an especially attractive woman named Maya to drive away an angry ghost that’s protecting an apple orchard. Eventually Trist uses magic to permit Maya to see and speak to the ghost, then adds a second spell that causes Maya’s tongue to hurt whenever she makes caustic comments, as is her wont. Unsurprisingly, the second spell requires a deep kiss between the two. The spells work, the ghost is mollified, and Trist and Maya end up as a romantic pair who have learned to manage their depression and negative self-talk (Trist) and sharp speech to others (Maya). They even get clippings from an apple tree. All is well.
This is a wish-fulfillment tale with Trist as a Mary Sue character. It is also centered squarely within a therapy culture worldview. Neither character’s flaws have high stakes. They are not a matter of great loss or of life and death. Neither character struggles to find inner healing through facing and overcoming (or not) her personal flaws. These are not characters who bravely and honestly struggle against their inner demons. Instead, they learn stopgap measures to manage the symptoms of their minor ailments, with Trist’s blood magic as a genre-based stand-in for real-life pharmacology. The magic merely blunts the impact of those challenges, which allows them to manage their way through the world. Their internal goals are quotidian, the external goal of getting apple clippings is “small potatoes,” and the threat of harm they face from an irascible ghost is minimal. Short stories, by their nature, tend to describe very important events in a character’s life. However, the struggles and stakes in this tale are so microscopic that I suppose the characters’ romantic pairing is the only real payoff. Good for them, I guess, but there is no other vector of emotional energy in this tale with force enough to move the needle even the tiniest notch.
My reactions to “A Dirge for the Mirrorbirds” by Emily C. Skaftun went through nearly a mirror image sequence compared to mine for Ewen Ma’s “Precipice Sun.” On my first reading, I was seriously wondering what Beneath Ceaseless Skies believed there was to enjoy in this tale. As I read it again, my opinion cycled through waves of greater and lesser appreciation. In this tale, all sentient beings in the universe are intimately aware that they undergo continual reincarnation, and are aware of their past lives. However, they are always reborn into different lives on different planets. Only one species from one planet (Yem) knows how to control the place of their reincarnation, and they keep this knowledge a secret from everyone else. The narrator of this tale falls deeply in love with a non-Yem named Divagra, and teaches her the secret method. Fast forward several lives, Divagra leads an invasion of Yem that is ultimately thwarted, and the narrator is sentenced to be unable to direct the location of his/her/its/their reincarnation, thus being banished from the much-beloved home world.
My first clue to the source of my misgivings about Skaftun’s story was the fact that my reactions improved as the protagonist became caught up in events rather than describing/explaining self and setting. In the end, my qualms were an artifact of the interplay between narrative distance and the old adage “show don’t tell”: infodumps feel considerably more off-putting, distracting and annoying when they are placed within stories set in first person.“A Dirge for the Mirrorbirds” has some nontrivial infodumps, especially near the beginning. I spent altogether too much time feeling altogether too removed from the story, and being far too aware of that fact. I suppose there is a dissonance between the expected closeness of the POV and the distance created by exposition of backstory, setting, and so on. I have no idea how the author should address this. Would it be better to shift to a more distant POV, or break up the huge chunks of infodump and sprinkle them elegantly throughout the text, or…? I don’t know. But it’s definitely something, because this story does not work for me. I feel conflicted, because in the end it began to work. Much as I reluctantly recommend Ma’s story, I reluctantly decline to do so for this one. It coulda been better.