Review of “God 47” by Laila Amado

This is a flash fiction piece from Daily Science Fiction, which posts short fiction online and also sends it out by email for busy people through a subscription service, Amado is a teacher and a mom, and says this story was inspired by car license plate numbers. The story runs 346 words, and this review contains spoilers.

God wakes up in a pristine white capsule and blinks to separate light from darkness. Creation goes well, and eventually God finds their name and wonders what happened to the last 46 avatars. Further research indicates that it is the creations that cause the problem. What’s to be done about it?

The best thing about this story is the mashup of the creation story with a high tech heaven. It’s written in the second person, and the tone makes it light and entertaining. There’s a mild social commentary about human nature and a suggestion that (on a grand scale) humans have the attention span of goldfish.

No less positives on this one. I can see it expanded.

Four stars.

Review of Spiderman: No Way Home

Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) is a superhero film based on the Marvel Comics character Spiderman, co-produced by Columbia Pictures and Marvel Studios and distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing. Other films in the series include Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) and Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019). The film was directed by Jon Watts and written by Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers. It stars Tom Holland as Peter Parker/Spiderman and Zendaya as MJ, as well as Charlie Cox, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jacob Batalon, Jon Favreau, Jamie Foxx, Willem Dafoe, Alfred Molina, Benedict Wong, Tony Revolori, Marisa Tomei, Andrew Garfield, and Tobey Maguire. This review contains major spoilers.

The film picks up where Far From Home leaves off. Quentin Beck has framed Spiderman for his murder and named him as Peter Parker in a public broadcast. This makes life miserable for Peter, his Aunt May, and his friends as they’re harassed by law enforcement and the press. Lawyer Matt Murdock gets the charges dropped, but the harassment continues. Frantic to make it stop, Peter goes to Dr. Steven Strange and asks him to work a spell to make everyone forget that Peter Parker is Spiderman. However, in the middle of the spell, Peter suddenly realizes what this might mean. Strange manages to contain the spell, but this opens rifts in spacetime for Peter’s enemies in alternate universes to come through. With a little work, he and his friends manage to round up the group, which includes Doc Ock, Norman Osborne, Curt Connors, Max Dillon, and Flint Marko, and imprison them while Strange works on a spell to send them back to their individual universes. After talking with them, Peter suddenly realizes all these people have been killed by Spiderman, and resolves to “fix” them so he won’t have to kill them in the alternate universes. This seems to go well, but Norman Osborne turns out to be a problem. And now more Peter Parkers are appearing. Things are getting dire. Is there any way Peter can repair spacetime?

The best point about this film is the appealing characters. Of all the Spiderman films, I think this is the best cast, chosen to appeal to the Disney audience most likely, but representing Peter well as a high school student. Willem DeFoe as Osborne is suitably creepy and the other villains manage to be more appealing than dangerous. This film also integrates the previous Spiderman films through the vehicle of the multiverse, bringing in older versions of Peter to give him advice and moral support. And last, there are consequences here.

On the less positive side, this feels like an obvious steal from the Academy Award-winning animation Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018). One of the characters in this film actually wishes for a black Spiderman. Besides that, it’s something of an eye-roller because of the typical Disney tendency for their characters to make emotional decisions. This causes huge problems. First, Peter doesn’t think out the consequences of asking Strange to make the world forget Peter Parker. Next, he decides he can “fix” evil from the alternate universes so none of his captives will die when they’re sent back. The action sags while the other Spidermen commiserate, and then Peter doesn’t end up making his own moral choices, but has to be saved by these other, wiser versions of himself.

There are plenty of consequences here, but I’m not sure the audience will connect these with Peter’s poorly considered choices and emotional overreactions because the film doesn’t really point these out. Strange says something about it after the interruption to his first spell, but it’s early in the film and goes by too fast—Strange should be wiser than this and Peter should be, too. Something not addressed by the film is how fixing the villains so they don’t die will change events in spacetime. The end result will take some fixing in the next film. Last, it was interesting to see Charlie Cox here. I hope it’s an indication Disney is going to try to reboot his Daredevil series that they destroyed through ending their contract with Netflix

This film has been highly successful at the box office, but there are a lot of not-so-positives. I’m going to give it tree and a half stars.

Review of “Where Have All the Mousies Gone” by Mary E. Lowd

This is a flash fiction piece from Daily Science Fiction, which posts short fiction online and also sends it out by email for busy people through a subscription service. Lowd is an established writer based in Oregon, and says this was inspired by her grandmother’s death and the 2016 election. This story runs 1033 words, and this review contains spoilers. 

Narrator’s mouse grandmother has died, after a night of pain and nightmares of the cat invasion. The cats chase the mouse people like they are nothing but dolls to be played with, maybe eaten and maybe just killed and left to rot. Narrator lies to give their grandmother comfort, promising the cats are gone, but then they have to work to make sure it really happens. Afterward will be a chance to really say goodbye.

This is absurdist. It’s not immediately clear that we’re dealing with cats and mice here. There’s a nice introductory paragraph about thoughts on dying before the narration begins, and then the emotional heart of the story is grandmother’s death and Narrator’s lies that give her ease. Lowd says her grandmother was upset about the 2016 election, and this makes one wonder how the family might have tried to ease her pain about it. The virtual visit at the end is a common desire, the dream that keeps mediums in business. How wonderful would it be to bring back the ghosts of the dead for just one more brief conversation?

On the less positive side, there doesn’t seem to be any subtext in the story that explains why we have cats invading in flying saucers and mice living in human-type cities. Is this about politics some way? Liberal mice and conservative cats? The virtual reality tech used to contact the dead at the end of the story is developed from the cats’ particle blasters. The tech is unexplained, and again, there is no clear subtext to relate this to reality. Something about turning the enemy’s weapons against them? Unknown.

Three stars.

Review of The Expert System’s Champion by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Adrian Tchaikovsky is an award-winning British writer, best known as author of the Shadows of the Apt fantasy series and the Children of Time series. This is Book #2 of the series, following The Expert System’s Brother. It was published by Tordotcom on January 26, 2021, and runs 194 pages. This review contains spoilers.

Ten years after his accidental Severance, Handry and his sister Melory are now the leaders of Sharskin’s cult of outcasts, rebranded as the Bandage Men. The group is based at the Ship of the Ancients and circulates between villages, carrying communications and helping to defend against problems in the environment. Something new is happening, though. A hunter named Erma has brought a tale of shelled monsters invading the area and pushing the local wildlife into the villages. One has been wiped out already. The shelled monsters look to be undefeatable and there is nothing in the Wisdom of the Ancients about how to deal with them. Can Handry, Melory and their little band solve the problem and save the villages?

The most interesting thing about this series is the world building that imagines a totally alien world where humans can’t actually survive without modification. The system set up by the Ancients uses the local fauna to inoculate the population with a vaccine that allows them to eat food produced from the soil and Severance is a potion that removes this protection and leaves the person an outcast. The state leaves the person under attack by the environment, but also allows them a true human perspective. The plot, characters and description are all good enough to do the job.

The worst thing about this is that it’s pretty horrific. The original set up was bad enough, where the “ghosts” of expert systems warp and consume their hosts, but the hellish bargain the shelled creatures have created really tops it off. This is likely excellent for lovers of horror, but I’m not a fan of the genre. Also on the less positive side, Tchaikovsky isn’t that great at handling his characters. The leads were well developed in the first book, but there’s no intimacy here, and Handry tells the tale with a lot of distance. Maybe that’s good considering of the quality of the horror, but it leaves the characters flat. I didn’t identify with any of them. Also, I’m wondering how the technology manages to maintain itself so long after the Ancients have disappeared. There’s still no explanation of how it was developed.

Three stars.

Review of “Folkway” by Eric Brown

This is a flash fiction piece from Daily Science Fiction, which posts short fiction online and also sends it out by email for busy people through a subscription service. Eric Brown is currently working on a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Southern New Hampshire University.  This story runs 143 words, and this review contains spoilers.    

This happens in Folkways a lot, but Narrator says not to let it worry you. Everybody is used to people just disappearing, sometimes individually and sometime in groups. We just fill out a form and box up what’s left, the clothes and shoes and wallets and things and send them over to Briggs where they look into it. Of course, they never find anything. Just hand me the form…uh

This is a sharp little story about how we get desensitized to really terrible things than happen in the world. At first we might react with horror, but eventually apathy sets in and the response becomes indifference. This is an excellent job, with all the elements of meaning, characterization, world building and imagery in a little package of just 143 words. There’s a lot of showing and not telling and a great twist ending where the new guy disappears right in the middle of the conversation.

On the less positive side, we’re left hanging. This would be a good idea for development into a longer work that could investigate relationships and their uncertainty.

Five stars.

Review of Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Adrian Tchaikovsky is an award-winning British writer and best known as author of the Shadows of the Apt fantasy series and the Children of Time series. In an alternate life he is a lawyer, gamer and amateur entomologist. This novella was published by Tordotcom on November 16, 2021 and runs 204 pages.

Lynesse is the queen’s Fourth Daughter and has never measured up to the standards of a royal princess. Instead of maturing into a settled administrator, she continues to favor childish epic stories and swordplay. She is especially taken by the stories about her great-grandmother Astresse Once Regent and the Wizard of the Elder Race in their war against the evil warlord Ulmoth. So, when a demon begins to terrorize the neighboring province of Ordwood and the people ask the queen for help, Lynesse knows she needs to call on her family’s pact with the sorcerer and ask him to banish the demon. On the other hand, Nyr is really only a junior anthropologist left to maintain an outpost on this world when his team was recalled. Still, he knows this isn’t really a demon. Can the two of them do anything to save their world?

The most interesting thing about this story is the collision of worldviews between Lynesse and her epic fantasy with Nyr and his science background. The novella has a tongue-in-cheek feel and tends to social commentary. The world building is excellent. These are all transhumans, with Lyn and her friend Esha both engineered to live on this colony world, and Nyr also non-standard, outfitted with inbuilt systems that connect him to an orbiting satellite through antenna horns. He has slept the 300 years since his activities with Astresse, which he considers a failure of his employment directive, which is non-interference with the local culture. He justified it at the time because Ulmoth was using Elder technology, but he has no like justification to help Lynesse, except that the world is threatened.

On the less positive side, the characters are a little thin, feeling like cardboard facases that represent their particular world views instead of real people. There’s also a lot of drama inherent in this setup that has not been fully developed. Nyr seems to suffer from depression, and he’s been left there alone for hundreds of years. It’s pretty clear no one is coming back for him. Plus, he’s apparently lost the love of his life in Astresse. Where’s that story? Because of his systems, he can suppress his emotion and act impartially, but when he turns this off for a reset, we still don’t get a feel for the agony he should feel about this.

This was almost a romantic adventure story, and I’d love to have this idea better developed.

Four stars.  

Review of “I Mean, It’s No Extra Parked Vehicle” by Jenna Katerin Moran

This is a flash fiction piece from Daily Science Fiction, which posts short fiction online and also sends it out by email for busy people through a subscription service. Jenna Moran has a computer science degree and lives in Portland with her cat. This story runs 696 words, and this review contains spoilers.  

Melanie is a ghost detective that works to help catch violations of the HOA rules so violators can be dragged off to HOA jail. When there is some question, she summons up a ghost who will finger the culprit. For example, whose cat has been messing up the garden, whose kitchen cabinets don’t comply with the rules, and who has not cleaned the inside of their mail box. Melanie does not do cold cases or murders because the ghosts are not reliable for that. It is unclear why ghosts might be interested in assisting the HOA.

I gather this is an absurdist piece. Presumably HOA means Home Owners Association, which suggests Moran may have been at odds with one sometime in the past and wrote this in revenge. Or has she been watching Ghostbusters, maybe? Or is this about stupid rules and authoritarian control, in general? I couldn’t find much subtext in there to help pin it down. There are a couple or three possible barbs. One is a recipe for an energy drink that depends on killing people. Another is trying to transcribe ghost talk because you’re supposed to show and not tell in your story. Then there’s mention of having to survive in a capitalist society, regardless if you’re a kitchen cabinet.

Hm. She lives in Portland? I don’t know that she’s namechecked the right political group. Less positives include the hodgepodge of elements and the difficulty in interpretation.

Three stars.

Review of One Day All This Will Be Yours by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Adrian Tchaikovsky is an award-winning British writer, best known as author of the Shadows of the Apt fantasy series and the Children of Time series. In a shadow life he is a lawyer, gamer and amateur entomologist. This novella was published by Solaris on March 2, 2021, and runs 98 pages.

Narrator is working to become the only survivor of the Causality War that destroyed time. It’s a complex issue, but once agents started to go back and change time to destroy their enemies, the timeline shattered into something unrecognizable. Causality bombs finished off everything at the end of the war, but Narrator escaped. He has set up a homestead at the End of Time to prevent anyone from going any further. When visitors show up, he kills them and feeds them to his pet Allosaurus. Then two people arrive from the future. This is a shock, as the whole idea of this set up is to prevent any possible futures. Weldon and Smantha hail Narrator as “grandfather” and take him on a quick tour of the utopia they live in. When he gets home, someone else is there—a woman named Zoe. The two of them spend a while trying to murder each other, but eventually they realize they’re united to prevent the future both have seen. Is there a way they can stop it from happening?

Somehow I have a feeling this was provoked by the 2019 novella This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. The narration has a tongue-in-cheek, satirical feel and makes light of all the destruction and murder. Tchaikovsky scores some good points. One is a quote from Einstein: “World War III will be fought, but the war after that will be fought with sticks and stones,” referring to the destruction of civilization. Another is about the utopian future that is regulated through social control and “scrubbing” the minds of dissenters who don’t want to live in a perfect, totalitarian society. Of course, the representatives of the utopia turn out to be pretty nasty underneath, like the mean kid, elite clique at school.

On the less positive side, Tchaikovsky’s tongue-in-cheek approach means the characters and events end up somewhat flat. Narrator describes them for us, but we don’t really experience the gripping drama of what’s going on. There should be an amazing romance between Narrator and Zoe, for one thing, but he skims over it. There should be terrifying events in the war, but it’s all sort of a joke. And then, once the ideas are presented, Tchaikovsky gets bored with it and stops, leaving the reader hanging. It’s his preferred style, I suppose, but a case of telling and not showing. I’d prefer less intellect and more depth.

Three and a half stars.

Review of “The Old Man and the Angel” by Matt Krizan

This is a flash fiction piece from Daily Science Fiction, which posts short fiction online and also sends it out by email for busy people through a subscription service, Krizan reports that he is an accountant in real life. This story runs 338 words, and this review contains spoilers. 

An old man and an angel watch the sunrise. A couple walks along the beach, hand in hand, and when they stop, the young man pulls a ring out of his pocket. The woman accepts it and the early rays of the sun catch in the tears on her cheeks. When the sequence has run out, the man asks to see it again, and the angel waves a hand.

This story is strong on sentimentality and imagery, and has a nice twist at the end when we realize this old man is reliving an emotional experience from his youth. The construction is fairly effective, as the couple’s joy is touching, and because of the angel, we’re also left wondering whether this might be a final, near-death experience for the old man. There’s a lot of description of the scene to make it real for us, including the colors and the light catching in the woman’s tears.

On the less positive side, I think this is slightly overdone, as the couple apparently has sex, described as “other things,” which is a somewhat raunchy jolt in the mood of the story. Also, the scene is disassociated from any other details about the old man’s life. Did they go on to get married? Is she still alive? Did they have a family? This has a nice sentimental feel, but again, the suggested sex makes it seem an odd fixation for the old man over other possible events in his life/romance/marriage/family life. Wasn’t there something more deeply felt?

Three stars.

Review of “Anti-Quarantine” by Jeffrey Lyons

 This is a flash fiction piece from Daily Science Fiction, which posts short fiction online and also sends it out by email for busy people through a subscription service. Jeffrey Lyons is a software developer who says he daydreams a lot. This story runs 599 words, and this review contains spoilers. 

Billy and his family are in anti-quarantine, and it’s starting to wear on Billy. He’s an introvert and being forced to stay in close quarters with other people is hard. Because the Divers can pick you out when they can’t see your face, masks are banned, and you’re never supposed to go anywhere by yourself and to always stay within six feet of another person. This is all for the greater good. Of course, there are conspiracy theories, that this is all so the government can implement their facial recognition police state, maybe. Finally somebody has developed a repellent, radioactive spray you can use to cover yourself and evade detection. If Billy uses it, can he go back to his old life?

This is satire, of course, and it’s pretty clear what it’s about. (Hint: ends with virus.) The story is a fairly straight forward narrative, without much in the way of characterization, world building or imagery. In this case, I could have used a little more world-building, as I ended up with no idea who or what the Divers are and why they are hunting people. It also seems like they’d be more likely to attack if they could see your face, so the part about the banned masks seems contrived to fit the story line. Whatever, it’s good to see some thoughts developing about the pandemic response.

Three and a half stars.