A Short Review of The Long Past & Other Stories, by Ginn Hale

The Long Past & Other Stories by Ginn Hale

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I'm imagining Ginn Hale and her wife hanging out one afternoon, drinking coffee. They start talking about the Weird West and its stories, and one of them said: what kind of world, what kind of Weird West, would there be if magic was real? Suppose the practitioners of this magic, mages, wage war, and this war results in " a vast inland sea that splits the United States in two. With the floodwaters come creatures from a long distant past. What seems like the End Times forges a new era of heroes and heroines who challenge tradition, law, and even death as they transform the old west into a new world" (backcover). What kind of adventures would these heroes and heroines have?

The stories in this collection, love stories all of them, include tales of a "laconic trapper and veteran mage" risking everything to close the rift that unleashed the great flood, of a "brilliant magician and her beautiful assistant fight one of the most powerful men in the world and his diabolic automaton invention, and of "an impoverished young man and a Pinkerton Detective" fighting a corrupt judge, are the results of these "what-if" questions, this world building. That these are GLBT heroes and heroines, and people of color, makes these well-told tales all the richer.

Check this book out.



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