'Nathan Burgoine's Blog, page 32

Short Stories 366:274 — “The Final Decree,” by Jeffrey Ricker

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By now, it’s likely you know I adore Jeffrey Ricker (see: Detours, The Unwanted, my never-ending-suggestion-that-I’d-like-a-sequel-to-The Unwanted) but it’s maybe less known how much I like me a good pew-pew-pew sci-fi story (okay, maybe that isn’t less known, it’s just less often I get to read them). Jeffrey Ricker doing a queer sci-fi with cranky/grumpy hero trekking half-way across the known damn galaxy because that’s the only way his husband agreed to sign the damn divorce papers so he can marry the guy he’d really like to marry? Oh, I am so in.

The above is more-or-less the set-up: Bill (sorry, Lockhart William Templeton III) really wants to marry his fella. His fella is not only a lovely, cuddly, snuggle-bunny sort of man (maybe not in those words), their marriage would also seal a pretty awesome family “merger” among their two powerful families. There’s just a tiny problem, really. That quickie marriage thing he did as a hotheaded youth to a guy who was so the wrong man. So he reaches out to the ex (but still legally binding husband) and asks him to finally, finally sign the damn papers. And the ex agrees! Except he demands to do it in person and he’s in the middle of nowhere, and so now Bill is filling his backpack with family proprietary tech to keep himself safe and/or on the subtle for the worst vacation ever.

Things are not all, of course, as they seem, and by the time Bill realizes just how not-as-they-seem things are, he dials up from “grumpy” to “sincerely displeased” and I think the snark factor between the characters is sort of the best thing ever. Also, pew-pew science fiction happens, some really wonderful world-building about this future galaxy, and it’s a Jeffrey Ricker book, so you know there’s going to be some feelings and some self-doubt and then maybe an explosion or two because pew-pew. I read this novella in one sitting (I was lucky enough to get to see it before everyone else), but the best news is The Final Decree is now available everywhere.

I asked Jeffrey Ricker where he got the idea for this novella, and the inspiration is awesome:

Where did the idea come from? Joan Collins. Specifically, the ’80’s nighttime soap opera Dynasty. For those who don’t know, her character, Alexis, was the arch-nemesis of her ex-husband Blake and constantly tried to make live miserable for his second wife, Krystle. And when Alexis found out that Krystle had also previously been married but had never actually gotten around to getting divorced, well, that was perfect fodder for her scheming ways. It obviously took a bit of a leap to get from there to The Final Decree, but my brain works like that sometimes.

Also, I wanted to write something fun. For the past several years (more than I wish to count—OK, fine, eight years), I’ve been working on a novel about near-future climate collapse and… it’s been heavy. Writing this lightened my mood, and I hope people who read it have a similar experience.

Jeffrey Ricker

Short Stories 366:273 — “Tangled Up in You,” by Suleikha Snyder

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Okay, so we all know how I feel about superhero stories, so likely it will be a surprise to none of you how much I squeed out about this story once I realized it took place in an academy for people with gifts, and how the main character was a woman who has powers much like a poison-dart frog (no, really, don’t touch). Then we add in the other hero, a guy who has perfect control of things he aims/throws and, well, we’ve basically got a Rogue-Gambit thing going on here, only done with Snyder’s amazing sizzle and a tonne of awesome world-building. So, needless to say, Prem Numbers continues to deliver what I love.

“Tangled Up in You” begins with Rohini, the aforementioned toxic-to-the-touch woman, going by the codename Krait (though she points out she actually should be called “beesh konna,” were someone getting the Indian legend correct). She learns that Archer, the only guy who ever got under her skin (and who she nearly killed via a single kiss), is coming back, and she’s not okay with that, but she doesn’t really get a vote. When said gorgeous Black man returns, all Cajun accent and world-wise from wherever he’s been, she’s all the more determined to shut him out. She can’t, but she’s determined to.

Of course, he says he’s learned something very important about her powers, and all it’ll take is a bit of trusting him to find out. Of course, she doesn’t trust him at all, she just wants him, and that’s the whole problem. Snyder ratchets up the tension between the two, dripping out little bits of teasing world-building alongside the resolution of the will-they/won’t-they, and the end result is more of the scorch I’m starting to expect. It’s a great story, and hey, like I said: superheroes.

Short Stories 366:272 — “Storm,” by G. Winston James

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I keep taking breaks from His 2, and I don’t think I would have needed to had it not been our year of 2020, the perpetual trash-fire, but it is, and I have been. These short stories are firmly of the 90’s, with all the pain, grief, and sorrow thereof, and they are incredible and wonderful—I am truly loving this book—but they’re also often quite relentless. And relentless brings me to the next story in the collection I’m going to mention, which is G. Winston James’s “Storm.”

Fiction set up in a way that explores AIDS/HIV from the outside-looking-in is something I often struggle with, given how many voices from living-within were silenced, lost, and/or erased, but James pulls this pathetic fallacy trick with “Storm” and the result is so sharp it draws blood, frankly. We’re with a young man in a hurricane, in his home, and he, his mother, and his brother are ministering to his brother, who is delirious and in the end-stages of his illness. The storm was misreported/misrepresented as being less damaging than it turned out to be, and the healthy brother is watching as pieces of his house, as well as whole buildings he can see from his broken windows, are swept away and destroyed.

All the while, the brother is dying, the mother is grieving, and the brother is stuck somewhere between trying to make sure they survive and knowing the world around him is being irrevocably changed. The storm looms over everything, the personal grievances, the upcoming losses, resentments and love, and the young man knows this doesn’t end when it stops, but instead will create a new, forever damaged, kind of now. As metaphors go, it’s perhaps not subtle, but throughout the story, the keenly felt sense of survivor’s guilt/survivor’s resentment is perfection.

Short Stories 366:271 — “Don’t Look Down,” by Greg Herren

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The last story in Survivor’s Guilt and Other Stories, “Don’t Look Down,” is one I can easily see polarizing readers of Herren’s collection. It’s atmospheric, with an almost gothic feel to it: a gay reporter who was already heading to Italy as a getaway to try and recover from some of the grief of losing his partner is assigned a former flash-in-the-pan beefcake model/actor/musician the reporter had a massive crush on. It’s a cost-cutting measure, allows him to claim a few things, and… well. The guy was famous for being a hunk and dropping trou “by accident” and honestly, I couldn’t stop myself from imagining Marky Mark’s underwear years, given Herren’s descriptions, so that was good.

But once he’s in the town, the citizenry are only nice to him until they learn why he’s there. Others warn him. There are screams in the night attributed to a local institution. The interview is going well—except the townsfolk really don’t seem to like him—and he might very well be flirting with the reporter, which… Well. Unethical. A problem. Super-flattering. It’s all very conflicting for the reporter, a man who is already grasping for something to feel good about, and so his defences aren’t up. And the repeated warning to get out of the town, that the man will be his doom just add more and more to the rising tension of the story.

When I said this story could easily be polarizing, I mean very much the ending. I come down solidly on the side of enjoying it—it’s got the kind of ending I loved from some of the lesser supernatural episodes of the Twilight Zone, for example. It’s dark, certainly not hopeful, and hits a tangential twist rather than relying on the expected, but the story is so infused with such a sense of dreadful ‘fated to be’ that instead of knocking me out of the flow, I found myself shuddering along with the ride. Fans of suspenseful horror thrillers are in for a treat with this one, which closes the collection on a note of reminding the reader to maybe leave a light on.

Joke’s On Me

Remember way back at the start of this year when I had a plan to release a short story about Owen and Toma (who you met in Faux Ho Ho), and their adventure on April Fools’ Day with a prank gone wrong? Then my tendons got wrecked and everything fell to pieces and April Fools’ Day went by?

Yeah, me too.

But! Said short story did that thing so many of my short stories do and get longer, and longer, and then suddenly they’re a novelette and then they’re a novella and… Well. Next March? Ahem.

[image error]Isn’t it gorgeous? Another fantastic cover from Inkspiral.

Owen is only confident in two places: at work, supporting clients through IT woes; and when he’s sitting around a gaming table playing the role of his smooth and charming bard, which is why he’s never acted on the crush he’s had on his physiotherapist—and total cubcake—Toma. Even though they’re not patient and client any more and Owen’s crush hasn’t dialled down in the slightest, he can’t figure out the right plan to do anything about it.

When a friend decides to play an April Fools’ day prank involving Owen’s contact list, Owen spends most of his morning on April Fools’ Day inadvertently texting smooth and charming thoughts about Toma… to Toma himself.

By the time Owen discovers the April Fools’ prank, things are completely out of control. Discussions of thighs and awards for the World’s Best Chest have been handed out—not to mention they’ve set an accidental coffee date—and there’s no taking that sort of thing back, no matter how smooth or charming he might pretend to be. When this joke finally gets told, Owen’s convinced he’s going to be the punchline, but with a little luck and some nudges from his friends, the last laugh might still be worth it.

So, yeah. Coming next March from Bold Strokes Books, the next holiday trip to the Village. (And can we just agree to gush about that damn cover? Because it’s so perfect. The little coffee beans in the E’s of Bittersweets, the lights on strings like on the cover of Faux Ho Ho… GAH!)

Short Stories 366:270 — “Good With Numbers,” by Heather LaVonne Jensen

[image error]One of the awesome things about The Clan Chronicles: Tales from Plexis is how you get to visit supporting characters in the greater Trade Pact universe, and get into their heads. That isn’t to say you have to have read Czerneda’s wider universe to enjoy the anthology—honestly, most of the stories in this book would happily stand alone and be just as good—but some of them have more impact when you know the character involved already, and… Well, I adore Ansel, the accountant and organizational master from Huido’s ‘Claws & Jaws’ restaurant, okay? The harried little human fellow who tries to keep the massive alien organized is sort of the best, and this story goes back and tells you how they met and started working together and it’s just adorable, okay?

We meet Ansel when he’s more-or-less a nobody doing a menial job for a tile-maker, and no one really realizes his quirks yet. Ansel has a way with numbers and organization that borders on being a savant, but at the moment, he’s not able to use those gifts at all, though he can’t help himself from doing mental math all the time, and noticing patterns in the shipments going on and the like. Which is where he starts getting in trouble, because those tiles being shipped to some restaurant on the interstellar trading post Plexis? Something’s up with them.

Ansel ends up in over his head (quite literally at one point) and by the time he ends up on Plexis, tries to warn the innocent (and not-so-innocent) Huido of what’s going on, and has his talents exposed, things go sideways in a rather chaotic way. But the ultimate solutions and friendships formed along the way had me grinning, and having this piece of the history of the two characters filled in left me very satisfied. I always knew I liked Ansel, but now I know why.

Short Stories 366:269 — “Canadian Blood Diamonds,” by Kristi Charish

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And we’re back in the realm of superpowers and Canada with the next story from Masked Mosaic: Canadian Super Stories. And oh-my-gosh this was fun. As opposed to the previous story, which was a bit grittier and grim, this one has the just-shy-of-over-the-top feel of some early comic books, with a super-villainess starting off her bad day by realizing her two minions just let her nuclear reactor freeze because they forgot windchill (it’s the Yukon, how bad are these minions?) and now her diamond mine isn’t performing. The day goes from bad-to-worse when it becomes clear that even if she had the diamonds, she couldn’t liquidate them thanks to a problem with a Canadian superhero and… well.

The villainess in this one is air-kiss sharp, and I adore the little touches of world-building Charish snuck in there. She doesn’t use a particular code name, and as a result, her crimes are attributed to four different super-villainess characters, and she uses that to her advantage (though she wishes the Northern Cougar wasn’t so popular compared to the Lynx). She also has a lot of plans, a way out of this diamond problem, and is on track right up to when the superheroes show up.

But here’s where Charish turns a left instead of a right, and our heroine—uh, villain—of the story has to zag in the face of unexpected assumptions. I won’t ruin it, but I will say I cackled out loud when she sneaks in a letter to the Dan Savage column asking for advice. This story had me grinning from ear-to-ear, and made me think of fun gaming group nights playing Heroes Unlimited, back in the day. If Kristi Charish has written more from this setting, I want it right now.

Short Stories 366:268 — “Elgin,” by Bryan Washington

[image error]And here we are at the end of Lot: Stories. Holy flying crap, this collection was amazing. I’ve mentioned it a few times, but throughout the collection, we return to a single (unnamed) man who begins the collection with his parents running a restaurant and his older brother and sister and himself living together. As the stories go by, this man loses people: his father walks out on the family, his brother joins the military and dies overseas, his sister meets a man and basically vanishes out of the family, his mother sells the restaurant, and now, by this story, the man is living in the house alone (his mother having moved to Louisiana). This is post-flood Houston, and he is filling his life with one-night-stands and working at a restaurant.

He has a friend he works with, Miguel, who is working hard to get enough money to send his family back to Guatemala, and the two clash as often as they click. The contrast between the two forms a kind of give-and-take throughout the story, until Miguel finally succeeds in having enough, and sends his family away—and does not go with them. Thereafter, there’s a kind of slow-motion shattering around both Miguel and the main character, their jobs, the man’s home, and we watch as the narrator, who seems to have had no one in his life who didn’t leave, comes to grips with potentially admitting he wants someone to stay.

Washington finally allows this narrator’s name to be said aloud in this story, as well as a few other moments that read as important breakthroughs (one of which is not a favourite narrative choice of mine, but in Washington’s hands it at least didn’t feel like a simple trope), and the whole ends the collection as perfectly as I could imagine any story might. It’s not definitive. It’s not overtly hopeful, but nor is it a possibility that things will continue on the path the narrator had put himself on: he has finally come too far for that. So in the end, he’s changed, and that is enough in and of itself. Alongside the one-two punch that was “Waugh” before it, “Elgin” definitely skews more to hopefulness. That we can choose to imagine even more positive outcomes for him with what Washington provides is indeed there, but I don’t mind a little ambiguity in my endings.

 

Short Stories 366:267 — “The Galactic Tourist Industrial Complex,” by Tobias S. Buckell

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Another book from my pile of “Hey, exactly how long have I had this anthology? Oh my word, that long?” books, New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction from People of Color opens with a lovely introduction from LeVar Burton, and immediately beings delivering on the premise with “The Galactic Tourist Industrial Complex.” Buckell drops us into the day-in-the-life of a cab driver in a future Earth where aliens have come—by the droves—because Earth is just so gosh-darned quaint to visit. The allegory is pretty clear: humanity as a whole gets a taste of the whole colonial “let’s go see this place, pick the bits we like, commodify and commercialize it, change everything to suit us, and then leave without doing anything positive for the locals while outright making their lives worse in the process.”

Tavi drives his cab and does his best to scrape by (like a lot of humanity is doing now) and then one of his fares opens the door to passenger compartment while they’re high above the city, blathers on about “the spires!” (Manhattan’s skyline) and then… jumps out of the cab. This is going to be a problem, Tavi thinks, but the way the problem spins out and how it ends up working into the narrative is as clever as it is cynical (and ties back into that allegory I mentioned).

I really, really enjoyed this, to the point where I think it was the perfect mix for me specifically as a reader because of the way Buckell handled that cynical and grim side along with Tavi (and his supporters) looking at the world the way it is and finding the cracks to survive in. The glimpses of his network of people—all aware that none of this is a game they can win, but supporting each other as best as they can regardless—spoke to me on that whole queer chosen-family level, and I was in.

Short Stories 366:266 — “Have a Little Faith,” by Suleikha Snyder

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The premise of this story from Prem Numbers really struck me as fascinating. Snyder gives us an actor who is famously known for a role of dispensing soft wisdom and being morally unimpeachable, and because of that, the actor is bound by “endless moral clauses in his contract.” Ranvir’s not allowed to drink, to smoke, to utter foul language, and certainly no dating. Basically, the role is so above reproach that he has to live a life to match, despite not being an actor who should absolutely get to be himself. I remember reading something similar about the actor who played Superman on television, and how stymied he was in the public view.

Under this career and culture crush, the last thing Ranvir needs to do is bump into a woman who appeals to his baser side, but that’s what happens, and a quickie in an airplane lavatory ends up becoming an ongoing series of hook-ups when they can arrange to be in the same place at the same time. Snyder builds on this relationship of convenience—a relationship opposed to the role he plays in many, many ways—with deft touches, and we stay in the man’s mind as he struggles with anxiety over getting caught and also over losing something that might be the best thing he’s got.

As the characters reveal more and more of their real selves to each other, and the reader gets glimpses of who Ranvir and Aarthi are when they’re together, the dichotomy only gets more and more distant. It’s a clever set-up, and an even more clever execution, alongside some hot Snyder erotica. Trying to hold on to two things when one of them opposes the other is a huge tension, and the ultimate release in the last few lines was palpable.