'Nathan Burgoine's Blog, page 34

Short Stories 366:255 — “Alex’s Choice,” by Barb Goffman

[image error]I’m at the end of Crime Travel today, an anthology of short crime stories with the linked theme of time travel, and the last story has left me with a bit of a perplexing note. I should be clear: I’m recommending this collection, absolutely. There are some stellar stories in there, and this is also a really well-written story. It’s just I’m not sure what the crime is. Or, I guess, there’s two potential crimes that might be the crime element, but I’m not sure about them, as one is barely an aside, and the other… well. Let me start with the set-up: Twelve year old Alex is living with his grandfather after losing his uncle (who was his guardian) to a speeding car (that’s potential crime the first, though it’s an aside). He lost his parents before he could really remember them, when he was barely a toddler. The only constant in his family has been his dog, Maxwell.

After a day spent wandering with Maxwell where Alex is sure he heard a woman or girl laughing at the cliffside beach—but there was no one there—he finds a completely white bicycle leaning against the shed at his grandfather’s mansion, and takes it on a ride, and for the first time in ages, feels alive and happy. When he and his grandfather exchange notes on the day, his grandfather becomes atypically excited: that bicycle, he claims, is magical, tied to the family, and can let him fix wrongs in time, if he concentrates enough while he’s riding it. His grandfather also explains what really happened to Alex’s parents, and Alex rides off, prepared to stop his parents from dying, and almost immediately realizes that something—Some force? Time itself? Just the wind?—is fighting against him in one aspect of the problem, and he needs to make a choice (hence the title).

This is where I almost quit the story, to be honest. I’m delving into spoiler territory here, so stop reading if you don’t want to know, but the choice is this: his parents originally died because his father threw a stick too close to the ocean and a swell swept the dog away. When the father dives in to save the dog and takes too long to return, the mother also dives in. Father does make it back to shore with the dog, but sees his wife is gone, so he goes back in… and they both drown. No matter how hard Alex tries to stop them from throwing the stick, they keep doing so, and he eventually decides to throw the stick himself, lie to his parents about the dog running off to chase birds, and basically kill his dog to get his parents back. Is murdering his pet the crime that puts this story into a crime time-travel collection? I’m not sure. Further spoiler: The denouement of the tale reveals the dog did survive after all, but by his own merit and with a life-long scar. So, I don’t know how to feel about this story at all—it’s well written, it’s got a charming time-travel idea (the bicycle), but… I’m not sure why it’s in a crime collection, and I’m not sure having the child to decide to sacrifice his dog, the one companion he had all his life thus far, for parents he didn’t quite remember really worked for me, personally. Given my threshold for “family is inherently worth it” is set very low, I think other readers with a more typical point of view would likely really find it moving. I’m not sure as a reader I forgive him his choice.

Short Stories 366:254 — “Fannin,” by Bryan Washington

[image error]In Lot: Stories, there’s a narrator who shows in about half of the stories (a third?) and nudges the narrative a little further along each time. He has an older brother, an older sister, a mother and a father in the first tale—when his father leaves them—and as the stories progress, the sister meets someone and moves out (and emotionally and physically all but removes herself from the family thereafter), the brother is killed overseas after joining the military, his mother sells the restaurant the father left them with, and so on. I’m embarrassed to admit I was so used to this character popping up that I’m going to admit I didn’t realize this story was narrated by the sister for quite a while.

But there we go. We get a glimpse into Jan, and a brief interaction she has with her father at one point in the story before she has married, but after she’s already withdrawn from her family. I say her father, but there’s ambiguity in the moment, and Jan’s certainty reads almost willful, and I think it matters more than Jan is sure than whether or not the man was, truly, the absent father who left them in such a dire position in the first place.

This time with Jan isn’t long—two moments, really—but we see her with a friend (and potentially running into her father), and then we see her once she’s met her husband-to-be and visits her mother to let her know she’s getting married. Those two moments, one with each parent, bookend a character who comes off cold, aloof, and borderline cruel whenever her youngest brother is the narrator, and grants just enough space in her head for the reader to consider her in a different light. Embarrassment over not realizing who we were with at first aside, I really liked the opportunity to side-step here, to see this recurring family again, but though a different lens.

Short Stories 366:253 — “Mate Abduction,” by Eve Langlais

[image error]I mentioned last week how I’d had a migraine a couple of weeks ago, so I avoided screens and dove into romance novellas as a recovery activity, and “Mate Abduction” was the next in said recovery plan, and it fit the bill to a tee. Eve Langlais (who is the mastermind behind Romancing the Capital) has a way with snarky, kickass heroines that I adore, and Clarabelle is no exception. And she’s definitely in a position where being a snarky, kickass heroine is going to come in handy, what with the whole abduction thing.

See, back when she was on a class trip with a bunch of teenage misfit girls, Clarabelle’s whole trip worth of people were abducted by aliens. It was a whole thing, and they more of less landed on their feet with a race of Amazon-like aliens (who have beaks) who have since raised the kids more-or-less like their own, loving them in their own harsh way, but definitely with a heavy dose of warrior-training. Clarabelle is getting a bit older, though, and she’s sort of in the mood for y’know, some sexy times, and beaky amazon-like aliens aren’t going to cut it, so she asks (demands might be a better word) for a ship and a shot at finding more humans. Like, a boyfriend. Not just for her, but for all the girls.

Going back to Earth isn’t an option—no one who has learned about alien races is allowed back at that particularly primitive planet—but other people must have been abducted, right? So Clarabelle begins her hunt for a very human male at the same time a really bronze, buff, and hunky (and okay, he has a tail) alien dude is out there looking for his own mate, and the local goddess has told him his mate isn’t on his own planet. They collide. He thinks it’s fate. She thinks a tail is too much. Hijinks and violence ensue. It’s all very Eve Langlais, and I chuckled and giggled my way through to the happy ending.

Short Stories 366:252 — “At Her Service,” by Suleikha Snyder

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Okay, this first story from Prem Numbers has so very much to love, not the least of which is the notion of a woman POTUS and a woman VP—the VP is the character we’re with for the duration of this story, a Black woman, Letitia Marie Hughes—but Snyder also leaps immediately into having said woman finishing a rough day and having one of the men on her protective service, well… servicing her. And oh wow does this sizzle. This piece is definitely erotic, but it’s also romantic, and there’s a wonderful arc between the two and the seemingly insurmountable odds against them: they’re a May-December pairing (she’s older), he’s Indian and Muslim, she’s widowed and in a super-public position… Well.

There’s a lot going on there, but the thing is, Hughes is already the first Black woman VP, so she’s already done the whole “work four times harder than everyone else” thing, so in Snyder’s hands, this becomes a story more about the ‘how.’ (Alongside more sizzle. So much sizzle.) We get to see just what’s holding both of these people back. Shazhad Khan, the service against, especially is written so wonderfully devoted in so many ways, but still hasn’t quite conquered the whole “am I worth of this legend?” thing.

Ultimately, this is a freaking triumphant erotica story that shows off the chops of what erotica can accomplish so brilliantly: the narrative is sharp, has a hell of a lot of depth, speaks to a time and place with deadly accuracy, and does it all while making the reader’s teeth sweat. As an opening story, I’m not sure Snyder could have done a better job launching a collection, and it’ll definitely go down as a future example of “let me point you to opening stories that just knock your socks off.”

Short Stories 366:251 — “Red Scare,” by Catherine Lundoff

[image error]There’s this thing that sometimes happens when you’re reading a collection of short fiction where you realize you’ve been cresting for multiple stories in a row. Sort of like the moment you’re on a roller coaster, and you’re doing that clack-clack-clack thing up to the top of a big drop and you know the drop is coming? But instead of a drop, while you read the next story and the story after that, the rise keeps happening, and you’d be jealous or something as petty but honestly? You’re just having too good a ride to go there. That’s how I felt when I got to “Red Scare” in Lundoff’s Out of This World: Queer Speculative Fiction Stories. It’s so damn good, and so was the last story, and the story before that and… Well.

I’m not sure I can do this justice beyond saying it’s a kind of science fiction but also private detective-noir; it’s set on a different colonized world, but full of femme fatales and mafia-like bosses and a contested a drug trade; it’s got the titular “red scare” right out of American history, except it’s in the future and it’s not the communists everyone is afraid of but a menacing alien race—one our detective isn’t even sure exists.

What follows is a PI noir story with a woman trying to wiggle out of a dangerous situation with her identity (she lives with a faux male persona, something that allows her to be a detective), her life, and maybe even her heart intact, but facing the very real possibility of ending up on the wrong end of a ray gun. And yes, I said ray gun, and that’s just one of the many, many flavours of this particular story that makes it feel like a retro futuristic take on genre mystery. It’s so damn clever, and more than that, the twists and revelations feed right into both the tone of the story and the world building that came before like the clue-crumbs they were.

I asked Catherine Lundoff about the tale, and she had this to say:

Combine a bit of the “Maltese Falcon” and some queer history and send it to outer space and you get one of my quirkier science fiction stories.

 

Short Stories 366:250 — “Quiet Desperation,” by Greg Herren

[image error]There’s a kind of mystery narrative that begins with the main character dealing with a body, and I have to admit I have a soft-spot for them. I’m not sure what that says about me as a person, but there you have it. “Quiet Desperation” begins with the author main character in exactly that position, and then spins the narrative backwards through all the events that got him to this moment before giving the reader the glimpse of what might yet come to pass with the man’s plan.

This is by no means a good man, but at the same time, this is also by no means a inherently evil or terrible man. That’s something that pops up quite a bit in Survivor’s Guilt and Other Stories, where often damaged or dismissed characters spot an opportunity that could change their life, attempt to take it, and then… well. Things rarely go to plan, right? And it’s not a mystery without a murder. Such is the case here, with a writer who has made a living mostly from ghost-writing, who works hard but sees little in the way of the acclaim that his words should have earned him—certainly those he has written for have no shortage of it—and we learn of his friendship with a gay literary name who passed away young and left all his papers to the writer.

There’s no hidden novel in there, no missing stories, either of which could make him income he’d welcome, but after a string of disappointments, it occurs to him that he could write in the style of his friend, the friend who often said he deserved more recognition than he’d gotten, who often said he was more talented, who wished he could succeed more in the rigged publishing game. Well, surely his dead friend wouldn’t begrudge him this? And so he sets out to present his own novel as a lost work… and things go off the rails. It’s the last few moments of the story, where practicality has settled in, that I really found myself considering my own moral failings—you know you’re not in the right place when you’re rooting for the murderer to get away with it, but that’s just more praise for Herren’s writing.

Short Stories 366:249 — “A Traitor’s Heart,” by Karina Sumner-Smith

[image error]Oof, this one was dark, and felt like an inexorable fall into something cold and merciless, but it was so well written that I couldn’t look away. Found in The Clan Chronicles: Tales from Plexis, “A Traitor’s Heart” connects us with a woman who has been living under an assumed identity on the grey-to-black side of legality for a while, working with another two not-so-by-the-book fellows and getting by with a modicum of self-sufficiency and making her own choices. Then she realizes something’s up with one of her partners, and things spill a bit out of control, and then things go further sideways.

Learning who the woman really is, and who she has ties to—or owes her entire life and upbringing go—is a twist I won’t spoil, but I will say for readers outside of Czerneda’s shared world, the story works just find on its own: you don’t need to know all the names or players for this to be anything other than what it is: a great story about a woman, organized crime, betrayals, and trying to figure out if there’s a way out or if the only way out is through—or some other, worse, option.

Ultimately, Sumner-Smith ties up the tale in a place that left me shuddering ever-so-slightly at the choices and decisions, but feeling one-hundred-percent that this is what the character would do. This was the option. That’s a delicate balance to pull off when you’ve written a character the reader is cheering for throughout (and I was!). “A Traitor’s Heart” is a great story in and of itself, and it adds great layers to Czerneda’s already complex world-building of the Trade Pact universe.

Short Stories 366:248 — “And Then There Were Paradoxes,” by Cathy Wiley

[image error]Crime Travel, an anthology of short crime fiction with the admixture of time travel, really delivers in this, the penultimate story of the book. Here we meet Detective Chief Inspector Trevor Ashcroft and his partner as they walk into what might be the detective’s last crime before he retires. He hopes it’s an easy one, and says so aloud, which of course activates that curse in all detective fiction where it’s totally not. Faced with a literal locked-door mystery, the two detectives find a man who was sealed in a room, has been shot, doesn’t appear to have done so via suicide, and apparently believed he could invent time travel. There’s even a prototype on the floor.

When the partner jokes it’d be handy if the device was voice-activated, because they could time-travel back to ask Agatha Christie herself how this happened (they’re close by to where she lived) and then states the time and date he imagines would be best—they learn the hard way that, yes, the scientist did indeed create the device to be voice activated, and they’re now in the past. Faced with the reality of where and when they are, the two can’t help themselves. They go find Agatha Christie, and ask for help.

The advice Christie offers, and the path the officers take to get there, is a clever play on the locked room set-up, and more, I have to applaud Wiley for both Ashcroft and Christie, both of whom play off each other in a fashion that felt so smooth and real. I had more than one chuckle reading this, especially when the detectives slip up and call her “Dame” Christie long before she actually earns the title, and her reaction to the foreknowledge. All in all, this story was borderline cute, despite the murder mystery, and I really enjoyed it.

Short Stories 366:247 — “Peggy Park,” by Bryan Washington

[image error]Some authors have the skill to turn character into narrative, and it’s one of those things that I find myself studying, dissecting, and trying hard not to descend entirely into paralytic envy over, but I love this type of short story so very much that I generally get over it just to sit back and enjoy. “Peggy Park,” by Bryan Washington, does this with a group of neighbourhood young adults and on the surface, it’s simply a list of characters, but holy crap does it tell one hell of a quick-punch story. Like the rest of Lot: Stories, it’s a snapshot of a place and people usually dismissed, poor and not-white Houstonians, but through the lens of a particular park, and those who played there.

The first line, “Micah turned pro and the rest of us went regular.” is so pitch-perfect for the tale as a whole. What follows is a run through of every player, their position, and—most centrally—where they are now. It’s a snapshot sort of story, a list of characters and situations and often tragedy, but it paints this brilliant picture of there can be a group of people playing baseball one moment, and in what can seem like the blink of an eye, they are gone, scattered to different places and lives, and with perhaps one or two of the whole to even remember.

I often talk about whether or not a story feels “triumphant” (especially when I’m talking about stories that centre queer voices and queer characters), but I think “Peggy Park” is a brilliant example of a story where I can’t be that reductive. There’s a triumph, yes, but I couldn’t help but think it wasn’t the point. There’s a scene near the end of this incredibly short story where Micah—the one who turned pro—succeeds because of all the others, and I think that’s the moment the story collected itself into a whole for me: the “we” of it, maybe. It stuck with me a long time thereafter.

Short Stories 366:246 — “Chance of a Lifetime,” by Susan Hayes

[image error]Last week, at the worst possible time (I was on a live panel) I got smacked with a migraine. I’d had one the day before, as well, and had medicated it into oblivion, but sometimes when you do that, they sort of come racing back (it’s called a “bounceback migraine” I believe) and it raced back with a vengeance. It was a little bit embarrassing (a lot) and I basically had to dive off the call and run for the bathroom. Fun times. Post-migraine, sometimes I end up in a place where looking at screens threatens to make it come back again, and I was not up for a three-peat, so I grabbed my e-reader and cracked a collection of space novellas, and went to go spend some time on Susan Hayes’s edge-of-civilization space station, the Drift.

“Chance of a Lifetime” is a slight departure from most of the Drift novels in that the cyborg involved is not a combat model. Instead, Chance—that’s her name, which also makes the title a pun, so already this is magic—has heightened processing and perception, and this translates into the ability to predict things with incredible precision, given enough data. She’s also on the run, because—a repeating theme in Cyborg romance, and in Hayes’s worldbuilding—the people who created her want her back in lockdown. Instead, she finds herself on the Drift, in a particular bar readers of Hayes’s Drift series will recognize, and bumping into a particular cage-fighter (who is trying to be more of a former-cage-fighter and current security).

There are sparks—not real sparks, which could happen with all the cybernetics, but the chemistry kind—but there’s also someone sending signals and information out of the bar to their enemies, so ex-fighter and security guard Erik has to deal with the possibility that the lady he’s interested in isn’t who she says she is (not helped by her, of course, not saying who she really is because she’s on the run). It all cumulates in trademark Hayes’s style, in a pew-pew sci-fi scene with tension and stakes aplenty, without drowning out the core romance of the novella. It was fun, and exactly what I needed to start my day of trying to not pass out again.