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A to Z Review: Once There Was a Way, by Bryce Zabel

A to Z Review: Once There Was a Way, by Bryce Zabel

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A to Z Reviews

The Beatles were one of the most important bands of the twentieth century, but at the same time, and despite the massive Beatlemania the accompanied them, they only really existed in the public consciousness for eight years and 12 albums. Their breakup in 1970 when they apparently had so much to offer has meant that fans have long wondered what would have happened if they had remained together, had a reunion, anything.

Among those fans are several authors who have written alternative histories in which the Beatles’ story had played out differently. Stephen Baxter tackled the topic in the short story “The Twelfth Album,” Ian R. MacLeod explored a John Lennon who quit the Beatles before they made it in “Snodgrass,” the Beatles went their separate ways during the “Please, Please Me” sessions in Larry Kirwan’s Liverpool Fantasy, and Michael A. Ventrella and Randee Dawn edited an entire anthology of alternate Beatles stories in Across the Universe.  Films, such as Yesterday have also tackled the idea of the Beatles not existing.

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A to Z Review: “Iron Monk,” by Melissa Yuan-Innes

A to Z Review: “Iron Monk,” by Melissa Yuan-Innes

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A to Z Reviews

Melissa Yuan-Innes sets her story “Iron Monk” on a spaceship traveling to the asteroid belt. Appearing in the May-June 2010 issue of Interzone. The crew of the spaceship seems an odd lot and it is eventually explained that they were selected by the Chinese government to go on what may very well be a suicide mission to make contact with aliens who have been discovered in Earth’s asteroid belt.

Told from the point of view of a monk who is on the trip, it is clear that unity among the crew of six was not an important concern for the people who put the mission together. The monk quietly lusts for the ship’s physician, thinks the etymologist is crazy, has little to do with one of the other crew members and actively avoids Hunan, who he believes is an agent of the government. The only crew member who he interacts with is a young boy named Little Tiger, who he trains in martial arts.

 

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Dark Fiction at its Best: This Haunted Heaven by Reggie Oliver

Dark Fiction at its Best: This Haunted Heaven by Reggie Oliver

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This Haunted Heaven (Tartarus Press, October 24, 2024). Cover artist unknown

Reggie Oliver is a British actor, playwright, illustrator and dark fiction author. He has published several short story collections and a few novels. As a matter of fact he’s also my favorite writer.

His latest collection, published once again by the excellent imprint Tartarus Press, includes ten stories, some of which are previously unpublished. As my favorite author it’s a bit difficult for me to produce an unbiased review but I’ll try my best, by choosing the more outstanding among the stories featured in the book.

“South Riding” an atmospheric, subtly disturbing piece depicting the unusual experience of an old actor temporarily moved into a secluded small town, while “ Grey Glass” is a superb supernatural tale revolving around a famous actor’s hand mirror.

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Ladybug Private Detectives, Living Ponds, and Robot Owls: The Owlstone Crown by X. J. Kennedy

Ladybug Private Detectives, Living Ponds, and Robot Owls: The Owlstone Crown by X. J. Kennedy

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The Owlstone Crown (Margaret K. McElderry/Atheneum, October 1983). Illustrated by Michele Chessare

The latest in my series of reviews of mostly forgotten SF/F from the 1970s and 1980s is a fairly obscure YA fantasy. X. J. Kennedy was the name used for his writing by Joseph Charles Kennedy. He was known as Joe Kennedy but started using the X. J. pseudonym to avoid confusion with Joseph Kennedy, the father of President John F. Kennedy. Kennedy was born in 1929, and is still alive, aged 95. This makes him a candidate for oldest living SF/F writer.

He was a prominent SF fan from the mid ’40s to early ’50s, publishing the fanzine Vampire, and co-founding an APA, the Spectator Amateur Press Association, that is (according to Wikipedia) still active. He also sold two stories to prozines in 1951 — “No More Pencils, No More Books” (not to be confused with the John Morressy story) to Science Fiction Quarterly and “Music From Down Under” to Other Worlds; both as by “Joquel Kennedy.”

By then he had received his B.A. from Seton Hall, and his M.A. from Columbia, and he went into the Navy as a journalist for four years. After his service, he studied at the Sorbonne and at Michigan, then went into academia as a professor at UNC Greensboro and at Tufts. The bulk of his writing from the early ’50s on was poetry — much of it light verse, and much of it for children — and college textbooks. He was also an editor, and with his wife Dorothy he founded a magazine devoted to New Formalist poetry, Counter/Measures. He wrote the occasional short story, and two YA fantasy novels, of which The Owlstone Crown, from 1983, was the first.

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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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