'Nathan Burgoine's Blog, page 37

Short Stories 366:227 — “The Case of the Missing Physicist,” by James Blakey

[image error]Marrying time travel to crime stories, Crime Travel‘s next story, “The Case of the Missing Physicist,” from James Blakey, is a kind of noir, cold-war detective story (only with time travel) and I adored it. We’ve got everything here of the usual set-up: hard-luck detective Mikey Sturgis with a gambling debt hanging over his head, a leggy woman who needs him to find someone: her physicist father. She wants to reconcile with him (they’re estranged) but there’s no sign of the man. So, off Mikey goes to figure things out, tracks the man down to his former mansion, and just before he discovers what he might be looking for, he’s taken down for the count.

Mikey comes to with a few more mysteries: why didn’t whoever clocked him kill him? They didn’t even take his money. He gets back to the search for the professor—was that who hit him?—and then discovers a hidden elevator, opens the doors to see he’s not alone and is presented with very hard evidence that what he just used isn’t an elevator at all, but a time machine. Which is when all the Russians and Germans hoping to heat up the cold war (or just end WWII differently) show up, and things get all the more complicated.

The story flows with great style, the setting and characters all chewing the dialog and scenery with equal verve for a noir detective style story, and the time-travel is just an added touch of flavour. The route of Mikey’s survival is clever, and the final moments of the story are another moment that had me intrigued, as it opened up the door to different possibilities (or, rather, closed some quite completely) and leaves the reader wondering what will happen “next” time.

Short Stories 366:226 — “Lot,” by Bryan Washington

[image error]Oof, this story. Okay, like many (half? a third? I’m not sure) of the stories in Lot: Stories, this one returns to a single family, and is told through the voice of the youngest son, who is gay and coming to grips with that, and who has already seen his father walk away by this point, and his sister is more or less also gone from the family. His mother runs the restaurant she and his father opened—perpetually on the edge of running out of money—and this tale opens with his elder brother, Javi’s proclamation that “the only thing worse than junkie father was a faggot son.”

This nameless son character is the anchor of the collection, and every time we step back to him, he is both losing something and gaining something—though rarely does it seem like the gains are worth the losses. Here, his brother Javi, who has been careening further and further out of control in various stories, joins the military and is eventually shipped to the Middle East. The main character writes him, and there’s this brilliant passage where he walks right up to the edge of coming out without completely doing so, but in a way that makes it perfectly clear if one is willing to see it… and the brother never writes him again.

What follows in the story is that balance of loss and gain I was talking about earlier, and in Washington’s hands, the reality of the two is done so freaking deftly. Things are falling apart again, every time a little worse, but you can feel the strength of this character forming. The casualness of his queerness is there, and despite not being completely out to his brother, the rest of his family has figured it out or has been told (or some amalgamation of the two) and it’s not their largest problem (it’s not a problem at all, really). They’re broke. They’re hurting. Worse news arrives, again. The solution isn’t one he wants to see happen, but it is going to happen. And so he goes onward.

Short Stories 366:225 — “Michael in the Library,” by Alex Jeffers

[image error]The thing about Alex Jeffers’s Not Here. Not Now. is how incredibly well it shows off his ability to evoke other times and places (and yes, I get most would infer such from the title right there, but listen, sometimes I’m slow to twig to things, okay?). “Michael in the Library” dives all the way back to Rome, but not to any glorious figures of the time facing down historical moments of grand import. No, we get to travel with Michael as he heads to the library to do his daily work as a scribe, copying old, fading scrolls onto fresh papyrus to ensure the stories are not lost.

There is such charm in this character I don’t know where to begin. Despite him existing centuries ago, he felt as alive and as amusingly ever-so-slightly-awkward that he could well have been any number of my friends (or, y’know, myself) doing his daily slog of a job for small pay, making it a day at a time before walking home again. But it’s when he gets home that we meet the other character in the story, a slave Michael purchased with pretty much every coin he managed to save throughout his own and his parents’s lives. This slave—a survivor wounded and disabled in the arena—is obviously someone Michael cares for and loves, and the relationship between the two is the entire balance of the tale.

Using Michael’s work as a scroll transcriber, and their relationship, and the gentle revelations of the two men and their relationship to storytelling, Jeffers writes what is honestly one of the most moving historical pieces I’ve read in ages. These are not wealthy men. Only one of them is (somewhat) free. Both are living in a small space with little other than each other to work with. But there are stories, and there is writing, and in that, there is love, and the final moments of the tale will go down in my memory as one of the most brilliant acts of love I’ve ever read.

Short Stories 366:224 — “Inscribed,” by Craig Laurance Gidney

[image error]I’m trying to remember if I’ve read another story that upped the creepy factor in a similar way to “Inscribed,” and I’m drawing a blank. Found in Skin Deep Magic: Short Fiction, this story is interspersed with excerpts from “Mercurial Magic: the Language of Hermes and Thoth,” by Byron Davies, the white (and, soon revealed, gay and largely absent) father of biracial Simon Davies. We meet Simon at his father’s funeral, where the pageantry is only outdone by the paganism, and Simon struggles to reconcile his widely varied feelings about his father with what he’s seeing.

The core of the tale a kind of triangle with Simon’s ambivalence (and sometimes well-deserved hatred) of his father at one point, Byron Davies’s afterlife journey at another, and the third point landing in a murky somewhere/something growing and trying to manipulate both to become something more than it currently is. Simon’s mother, Viola, who is also dead, has a few key moments in he story as well, but we mostly stay with Simon and Byron, and Simon’s slow fall into a video game that seems built upon so much of what his father believed and wrote about. While Simon tries to work out the puzzles in the game, Byron (and Fiona) try to fight their way through an afterlife to stop him from succeeding.

With a similar tone to the Orpheus myth, Byron’s story is heavy of magic and spirit and otherness, whereas Simon’s progress feels like a slow, addicting trap designed specifically to draw him in. The end result is a pair of ticking clocks, both counting down to something the reader only knows is ominous and not a good idea. The characters themselves are so wonderfully rendered, too, where even at their cruellest or most neglectful, Simon and Byron never feel irredeemable. They are instead two flawed people unknowingly in over their heads with an incredible force. It’s a wild ride, and one of the standouts of Gidney’s collection.

Short Stories 366:223 — “A Scent of Roses,” by Catherine Lundoff

[image error]If you’ve been around this blog at all in the last few years, you know I love a queer re-telling. I love writing them (I try to do one every holiday season, even, a tradition I started with my retelling of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer), and I adore reading them. It’s not difficult to understand the allure: the vast, vast majority of the stories we’re told are incredibly not-queer, so queering those stories feels like setting the balance back just a tiny bit, and saying ‘we are here, we always were here, and that legend can include us.’ So, I’m always down for a retelling, and “A Scent of Roses” from Catherine Lundoff’s Out of this World: Queer Speculative Fiction Stories takes the Tam Lin legend and gives it a lovely queer denouement.

And it is a denouement, in that the events of Tam Lin have happened. Burd Janet has won against the Fairy Queen, yes, but now she’s finding her life with the rescued Tam Lin to be… well. It’s not great, is what I’m saying. It’s not terrible, but imagine what it might be like to be married to someone who has seen the splendour of the fairy world, and now has to farm. Only the fairy world has left him “odd” and the cows don’t like him, and the daily drudgery is borderline impossible to bear, and so Burd Janet is doing all the world, Tam Lin is basically a drunkard, and all-in-all, Burd Janet is not having the happy ending she thought she was in for.

The reappearance of the Fairy Queen is the catalyst of this story, but it’s Burd Janet’s realization of her feelings about the Fairy Queen—and what she might be willing to do to live a different life than the one she has apparently been given—that queer this tale up a few notches and not only sets a new tone for the legend as a whole, but to my mind gives Janet something much, much closer to her due. I mean, the woman faced off against the Fairy Queen. She deserves something a mite more impressive than a handsome fella with barely any functional skills, no?

I asked the author where the idea for this one came from, and I love her take:

I’ve always loved the ballad “Tam Lin,” but I never thought Tam was a great match for Burd Janet. I mean, she’s mortal, pregnant and basically defenseless and goes up against the Queen of Air and Darkness anyway? So I wrote my own story about her.

Short Stories 366:222 — “Difficult at Parties,” by Carmen Maria Machado

[image error]Oh wow, this story. Before I start, I just want to be one hundred precent clear that if you’ve not already picked up a copy of Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, you should grab a copy. I’ll wait. Okay? Good. “Difficult at Parties” is the final story in the collection, and I’m still reeling from it, so this may be less coherent than usual, but wow this was incredible. Once again, the slice of the speculative in the tale is so very light a touch, and it takes a little bit of narrative to get there, but here we go.

Something has happened to this woman, and it’s obvious it was both traumatic and happened in her home (it read to me pretty clearly as an assault, but it’s never completely spelled out on the page). Her partner, Paul, is trying his best to aid her in her recovery, but the woman is disconnected. Part of her approach is to watch porn—she orders DVDs specifically designed and marketed for couples—but that’s when the slice of the speculative first hits: she can hear voices over the soundtrack, and it takes her some time throughout the narrative to realize what it is she’s hearing.

I refuse to spoil this story for you, and I’m oversimplifying even what I’ve written there, but the full arc of this one had me from the start. More, the ending, where Carmen Maria Machado chooses to take the characters and exactly the moment where she ends the story, is just freaking magnificent. Fans of the literary and the speculative have more than a few treasures to find in this collection, and there are many new favourites for me found in the book. But for me, I think “Difficult at Parties” was absolutely the perfect story to end the collection.

Short Stories 366:221 — “The Rainbow Collection,” by Nathan Azinger

[image error]Very often in science fiction set in the far future, the only entertainment pieces that seem to make it through from our contemporary point in time are so often things that we already consider classics: classical music, for example. This latest story from The Clan Chronicles: Tales from Plexis had me pretty much grinning from ear-to-ear on the basis of what piece of entertainment history it chose to pop up in the story, and how “The Rainbow Collection” played completely on said piece and theme and okay, it was The Muppet Movie and it’s just so perfect.

Okay, we meet an alien who is struggling to get by—he’s managed to leave his home planet’s rural backwater, but the ship he manages to scrape enough credits to purchase, (alongside the cargo within it), break down mid-way to Plexis, where he’s hoping to begin his career as a merchant, plying the space-ways. Instead, he learns how cruelly stacked against the little guy “free” enterprise can be, and beside himself and without a plan, he stumbles across a human showing a movie as a part of an outreach/education program about human art history. And it’s a showing of The Muppet Movie!

What follows is a delightful twist on the theme from both the movie and the path the alien was already following, complete with a perfectly placed homage ending. The tone of this story is light, and breezy, even in the face of the insurmountable odds the alien faces at first, all while refusing to let his dreams die. That he finds a way—and where the inspiration comes from—just made it all the more enjoyable, and I left this story with a huge smile on my face.

Short Stories 366:220 — “The Dealey Paradox,” by Brendan DuBois

[image error]I really enjoyed this story from Crime Travel, an anthology that marries crime stories with time travel, in that it tackled a conceit you often hear bandied about whenever time travel comes up: if time travel ever became possible, certainly the horrible things that happened wouldn’t have happened: someone would have come back to fix it, right? That’s exactly what we get here with “The Dealey Paradox,” where Monroe uses time travel to go back to November 22nd, 1963, to stop the assassination of Kennedy.

What DuBois does so cleverly here is stack emotionality on top of practicality with Monroe. There’s definitely a case to be made logically for preventing the Kennedy assassination, but beyond that we learn Monroe’s mother was a huge fan of the man, and one of her great regrets in life is not knowing what good the man could have done if he hadn’t been killed, and even on her deathbed she was speaking of him, and in a delirium asked her son to “fix it.” Now having access to time travel—illicitly gained and fully aware of the likely consequences when he returns—Monroe decides to do exactly that.

DuBois puts Monroe right on the edge of what he wants, and then zags the story in a direction I particularly enjoyed, leaning harder into the science fiction than many of the rest of the tales in this anthology. Ultimately, the notion of what Monroe wants to do, what Monroe promised to do, and what Monroe should do, are put to the test—and the truth is these things are much, much bigger than he ever imagined. And while the story could have ended in a dismal place, DuBois added just a modicum of kindness in at the final moments, and for that I was extra grateful.

 

Short Stories 366:219 — “Bayou,” by Bryan Washington

[image error]As a lover of speculative fiction, I think I maybe had less of a jolt reading this story from Lot: Stories than perhaps others might. Prior to this the stories have all been grounded in a very contemporary setting, but this tale opens with someone finding a dying chupacabra (which seems to have died by the time they find their friend to bring them back to it). Like the rest of the tales in the collection, the main character (and his friend who found the chupacabra) are on the edges: they’re very poor, and the reality of their discovery might possibly pay dividends, so… that’s the plan.

“Bayou” follows these two as they try to turn this admittedly grim find into something. One of them has a grandmother slipping Navy pamphlets under the door (subtle, no?) and the other is struggling as well, so it’s not like you don’t hope these two don’t figure out some way to come out ahead, but almost from the start they’re just so incredibly incapable, and empathy shifts to sympathy. They take something that they know in some vague way might offer them an exit strategy, and proceed to just mess it up in what feels like an inevitable way, and that’s not a bad thing, it’s more like it’s an… intimate thing? I honestly felt like I was watching two men do everything in their power not to admit how much they needed each other.

Ultimately, “Bayou” ends in a way I refuse to spoil but feels about as perfect as any I could imagine for the tale, and if nothing else, I’d love more people to read it for the destination alone. The journey is absolutely one worth taking, but that ending, man. That ending. Again, Washington’s prose is just full of such fantastic turns of phrases, and the setting and characters—Texas, brown and Black (and often queer) men—are so rarely seen in fantastical stories that “Bayou” shot straight up onto my list of favourites.

Short Stories 366:218 — “Caught Looking,” by Adriana Herrera

[image error]The blurb of this novella from He’s Come Undone caught me on this one: When best friends Yariel and Hatuey’s gaming night turns into an unexpected and intense hook up, Hatuey can’t wait to do it again. Yariel is less certain–the major leaguer might seem to all the world like he has a heart of stone, but he’s been carrying a torch for his friend for years, and worries this will ruin the most important relationship in his life. I went in expecting a friends-to-lovers, and maybe some nerdery or geekery (turns out the gaming night was video games, but whatever), but it wasn’t long before I hit a wall of something I really, really shy away from: the set up for this novella is a Gay-for-You; in the first moments, Yariel feels like he’s completely messed things up because Hatuey is straight.

Oh no.

I considered stopping, but I know it’s possible to write a gay-for-you that’s more of an out-for-you and doesn’t drop the straight-men-are-just-sexier garbage, and I’ve been listening to Herrera’s Dreamer series on audio and really enjoying them, so I took a deep breath and kept going. First, the good (and I want to be clear here, the good is really good): the chemistry between these two, and the building blocks of a life-long friendship, combine into a great burn. They want to be together, but Yariel is in his own way for multiple reasons (none of which he seems capable of expressing to Hatuey), and Hatuey is so very willing to do anything to make this work (other than directly telling Yariel that, since he believes—and maybe rightly so—that Yariel needs to get there himself). Herrera also doesn’t downplay the impact of being out as a major sporting professional, nor does Hatuey completely disregard how this may affect his own life if he does move forward as Yariel’s lover in public. They do a will-they/won’t-they dance that feels built on their own baggage rather than invented drama, and there’s also a hinted-at issue from the past that is revealed closer to the end that makes Yariel’s hesitation make a lot more sense, too. And it’s a romance, so you know the will-they is going to win. That’s the deal. And if you’re a lover of angst alongside your sizzle, Herrera delivers a truckload of both within the short turnaround of the novella.

One last time, I want to say I did end up enjoying this almost entirely, because I’m also going to mention the thing that left me really frustrated in the “but he’s straight” plot: there are zero uses of the word bisexual or pansexual in the whole story. We get “curious” as a negative (in the sense that, curiosity sated, Yariel might thereafter lose Hatuey), and there is a single line, “So you’re going to use 1950s gay-slash-straight bullshit to talk me out of what I know I’m feeling? Is that what we’re doing now?” from Hatuey himself that at least kinda-sorta references the non-binary nature of sexuality, but Yariel has multiple conversations with friends about Hatuey, and the word is never raised. Most curiously, this included talking with a friend I think I’m supposed to infer is bisexual or pansexual himself (at least, it sounds like he cares about the woman he has an off-again, on-again relationship with, and he also has hooked up with Yariel), where even just a single “Dude, maybe he’s bi like me?” would have been the perfect open door to avoid what otherwise just struck me as omission. That said, I know Gay-for-You is a thing I react strongly to, and your mileage may vary, and honestly, the rest of the story is strong enough that I otherwise had a good time.