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A to Z Review: “Death Goddess of the Lower East Side,” Link Yaco

A to Z Review: “Death Goddess of the Lower East Side,” Link Yaco

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A to Z Reviews

Published in 2000, Link Yaco’s “Death Goddess of the Lower East Side “ was written for Steven-Elliot Altman’s shared world anthology The Touch: Epidemic of the Millennium,  which invited authors to write stories in a world in which Deprivers are stricken with a disease which causes them to lose their slowly senses. Highly contagious and passed on by physical contact, Deprivers are forced to declare their medical status and cover themselves in clothing to avoid accidentally brushing up against someone and causing them to  become infected.

Maria Terez Lopez is one of the afflicted, living in New York, seeing posers who have adopted the styles used by the Deprivers as a fashion statement, and working as a waitress in a small restaurant that only employs Deprivers and focuses their service on those who are Deprivers or feel a kinship with the Deprivers. Even though she is surrounded by people, her customers, her co-workers, and especially her boss, Jake Nada, who keeps making passes at her, despite the danger to both of them, should she ever accept, there is no sign that she has any deep connections to anyone, keeping everyone at a distance due to her malady.

 

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A to Z Review: “Tongtong’s Summer,” by Xia Jia

A to Z Review: “Tongtong’s Summer,” by Xia Jia

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A to Z Reviews

The letter X provides us with our only duplicate author of the year, with a second story by Xia Jia, which, it should be noted, is the pen name used by Wang Yao. As with last week’s story, “A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight,” Xia’s story “Tongtong’s Summer” also appears in Ken Liu’s anthology Invisible Planets.  It was originally published in Chinese in 2014 in ZUI Novel and later that year was translated by Ken Liu for the Neil Clarke edited anthology Upgraded.

“Tongtong’s Summer” is a very different story than “A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight.” While the other was a ghost tale that draws upon Chinese mythology, “Tongtong’s Summer” is a science fiction story about the impact of technology on individuals, particularly the aging.

 

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Play’s the Thing: Playground by Richard Powers

Play’s the Thing: Playground by Richard Powers

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Playground (W. W. Norton & Company, September 24, 2024)

The ocean covers approximately 70% of Earth’s surface. It’s the largest livable space on our planet, and there’s more life there than anywhere else on Earth…Despite its importance, the majority of our ocean is largely unknown…Scientists estimate there may be between 700,000 and 1 million species in the ocean (mostly animals and excluding most microorganisms, of which there are millions). Roughly two-thirds of these species, possibly more, have yet to be discovered or officially described.

— NOAA Ocean Exploration

The capacity to play began evolving millions of years ago; it appears to exist in animals dating back 500 million years.  As evolution created ever more complex animals, play capabilities expanded too; humans are the most complex and the most playful of all species.

— The National Institute for Play

In The Overstory, Richard Powers depicted the concentric connections of the world’s forests and the human tampering with, if you’ll pardon the pun, “roots” of the natural world.  In his latest novel, Playground, Powers explores the interrelations among life below and above the sea,  as well as the effects of AI on both. But the overstory, if you will, is about the importance and effects of play.

The titular playground is actually several playgrounds and types of play. Rafi Young, a Black scholarship kid, and Todd Keane, a white nepo baby, first meet at a prestigious Chicago high school, bonding first over chess and then over Go, an ancient Chinese board game of strategy played with stones.

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A to Z: “A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight,” by Xia Jia

A to Z: “A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight,” by Xia Jia

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A to Z ReviewsKen Liu. Liu also translated Xia Jia’s story “A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight” for Clarkesworld, and then reprinted it in the anthology of Chinese science fiction Invisible Planets.

Xia describes Ghost Street as a long, narrow ribbon of a street and the home to numerous ghosts as well as one living person. The ghosts, which are departed souls residing in mechanical bodies, represent all ages of China’s history and living in an almost carnival like atmosphere. They also have a need to interact with living humans, which is where Ning, the living narrator comes in.

Ning has a relationship with most of the ghosts, but most especially Xiao Qian, who was mother to several children in her previous life and who have provided him with everything he has needed since he was orphaned. At the same time, Ning allows the daily pageantry of Ghost Street to take place.

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Folk Horror edited by Paul Kane & Marie O’Reagan

Folk Horror edited by Paul Kane & Marie O’Reagan

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Folk Horror (Flame Tree Publishing, August 27, 2024)

Folk Horror is one of those terms that’s never quite fashionable or unfashionable.

To me there’s only either good or bad horror fiction, and that’s what really matters to the readers.

This anthology — part of the Beyond & Within series from Flame Tree Publishing — fortunately is very good, regardless of labels. So kudos to the editors (excellent horror writers themselves) for assembling such an amount of creepy and entertaining material.

To be precise the book includes two little poems and fifteen stories.

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A to Z Review: “The Sin-Eater’s Tale,” by Brennan Wysong

A to Z Review: “The Sin-Eater’s Tale,” by Brennan Wysong

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A to Z Reviews
A to Z Review

Brennan Wysong’s “The Sin-Eater’s Tale”  opens with the introduction of the sin-eater in the post-Civil War  south.  The  sin-eater’s task is to go around to the funerals of the boys whose bodies have been returned home after their deaths and force people to confront the evils that their sons and brothers and friends had done. Once all the sins were enumerated and the sin-eater wrote them down, he would charge the family and eat the paper, thereby giving the family closure and providing absolution to the dead for the evils they committed during their lives.

Reading the story, the sin-eater is, in some ways reminiscent of the role Orson Scott Card provided Ender Wiggin in Speaker for the Dead, a way of summing up a person’s life, warts and all, although Wysong’s sin-eater also offers a means of expiation for the dead. Once the sin-eater is paid and the sins are swallowed  , the family and friends can pretend the cruelties and crimes of the dead no longer exist.

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Gothic Noir: The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Gothic Noir: The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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The Shadow of the Wind (Penguin Books, February 1, 2005). Cover by Tal Goretsky

Shadow of the Wind is the English rendering of  La sombra del viento, the 2001 novel by Carlos Ruiz Zafón and the first (though a standalone story sans cliffhangers) in his five book Cemetery of Forgotten Books series, translated by Lucia Graves (a serendipitously appropriate last name and, as it happens, the daughter of poet and historical novelist Robert Graves, he of I Claudius and The White Goddess fame). I hope this is a literal translation as Shadow of the Wind perfectly captures the story’s gothic and noirish essence. We can’t actually see wind, nor does wind cast a shadow; rather we feel the wind, detecting by inference the sometimes destructive aftereffects of high winds. Or, to paraphrase as someone else famously put it, the allegory is blowing in the wind.

The titular Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a somewhat fantastical labyrinth repository of rare books. Unlike Julia Alvarez’s Cemetery of Untold Stories, where texts are buried and talk to one another in their afterlife, the Cemetery of Forgotten Books could be some idiosyncratic bookshop with obsessively weird stock accessible only to certain people, which is not that all different from certain kinds of booksellers.

But the touch of fantasy  is when our hero, Daniel Sempere, taken to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books by his bookshop owning father, is tasked to select one volume, and one volume only, he feels drawn to from among a complex maze of shelvings. That book is Shadows of the Wind  by Julian Carax, and, yes, we’re getting metafictional here. What kicks the plot off is that there are no other surviving copies of the work, Carax’s output having been destroyed in a warehouse fire of mysterious origins.

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A Very Fine YA Novel: Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell

A Very Fine YA Novel: Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell

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Impossible Creatures (Knopf Books for Young Readers, September 10, 2024). Cover by Ashley Mackenzie

Katherine Rundell is a British writer who has been publishing YA novels for some time now, though I was unaware of her. Last year she published the first novel of a prospective series in the UK: Impossible Creatures. This became a big hit, and has now been published in the US. The book is quite good, fun to read, clever, also serious and quite moving, with real consequences to the characters.

There are two protagonists, Christopher Forester and Mal Arvorian. They are children of roughly the same age (early adolescence or just on the cusp of it, I think … somewhere between 10 and 13, I suppose.) Christopher lives in London, but has been sent to Scotland to stay with his grandfather, while his father is away on business. (His mother is dead.) Mal lives in an island in the Archipelago, with her great aunt. (Her parents are dead. Dead or absent parents, of course, being one of the most common situations in YA novels.) Both Christopher and Mal are special, of course. Animals of all sorts are attracted to Christopher, to an unusual degree. And Mal — Mal can fly (with the help of a magic cape.)

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A to Z Reviews: “Black Box,” by Peter J. Wacks

A to Z Reviews: “Black Box,” by Peter J. Wacks

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A to Z Reviews

Peter J. Wacks’ short story “Black Box” appeared in the 2023 anthology High Noon on Proxima B, edited by David Boop, a collection of stories that mix tropes of the Western with science fiction to varying results. Unfortunately, spaceships are horses, planets aren’t ranches, and treating them as interchangeable results in stories that feel as if they were written for the early to mid twentieth century pulps. “Black Box” falls into that category.

“Black Box” is set in a world where spacecraft are used to travel between planets, but once landed, horses are used to cover the terrain rather than motorized vehicles. The Crystal Colony, the solar system’s governing organization, has sent multiple ships to visit a planet (or planetoid, Wack’s terminology changes). After a ship from the planetoid opens fire on them they shoot it down a dn discover that the pilot is the sole survivor of the planetoid, which has apparently suffered an apocalyptic war amongst its inhabitants. The survivor doesn’t view himself as a member of the Crystal Colony and refused to help with their inquiries.

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Romancing the Planet: The 23rd Hero by Rebecca Anne Nguyen

Romancing the Planet: The 23rd Hero by Rebecca Anne Nguyen

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The 23rd Hero (Castle Bridge Media, August 13, 2024)

Hybrids are hardly unknown in the long history of fantasy and science fiction literature. It could easily be argued that the genre itself is a hybrid. In the case of Rebecca Anne Nguyen’s The 23rd Hero, this mixing of literary media is an essential element, baked in from the ground up.

The story begins by wearing its dystopian stripes firmly on its sleeve. The characters we meet in near-future Vancouver, including our hero, Sloane Burrows, live in a world of ecological collapse. Outdoors, everyone wears a filtration mask, and the last working farm in Canada closed just months before when the last of its livestock died from drinking tainted water. The handbaskets of hell, if I may mix a metaphor, have most definitely come home to roost.

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