Book Review: Do Not Go Quietly: an Anthology of Victory in Defiance edited by Jason Sizemore and Lesley
What are you fighting for? Your space? More space? Your territory? More territory? Your reputation? A better reputation? A better outcome? The best possible outcome? — Bianca Lynn Springgs “Plot Twist” from Do Not Go Quietly: An Anthology of Victory in Defiance Bianca Lynne Spriggs’ volume-closing poem “Plot Twist” challenges the reader with these provocative questions and many more, and had I been doing editors Jason Sizemore’s and Lesley Connor’s job, I would have been sorely tempted to put it first rather than last. However, since this poem’s challenges are as good a return to the real world we’re all stuck in as they are a microcosm of the themes this collection explores, I can absolutely see why they chose otherwise. Which is to say that Sizemore and Connor earned every nickle they could ever conceivably be paid for producing Do Not Go Quietly: An Anthology of Victory in Defiance.
Book Review: THE LAST ASTRONAUT by David Wellington
Some books grab me by title alone. As someone whose life has been spent very emotionally involved with the fortunes of the United States’ space program, I felt positively yanked by David Wellington’s The Last Astronaut. An actual last astronaut is something that I fervently hope never actually exists except in the extremely long-term “heat death of the universe” sense. The idea has haunted me since at least my teenage years when I grappled with Bruce Sterling and William Gibson’s melancholy short story, “Red Star, Winter Orbit.” In this story, there are still people going into space, but only for commercial gain; the tasks are finite, clearly defined, not even suggested if they don’t enhance shareholder value. Whatever the members of such crews are, they are not astronauts. They are not exploring the sea of stars. It’s a sad and all too plausible vision of the future of the space program. The Last Astronaut has its own unique take on the future of human space travel. Just look at the cover!
Book Review: LISTEN TO THE SIGNAL (Short Stories, Vol 1) by Rob Dircks
If your busy lifestyle is leaving you with little time to enjoy the speculative fiction that you love, allow me to suggest a remedy: short story collections and anthologies. Such books require a low time commitment, and if a few days — or weeks — go by between the moments you manage to carve out for reading, recalling details isn’t a struggle. Reading shorts, though, can still tease the imagination, challenge a preconception, and let you explore a tiny slice of another life — maybe even another life form. And in that realm, you could do far, far worse than treating yourself to Rob Dircks’ Listen to the Signal: Short Stories, Vol 1. Collecting work from the author’s short fiction podcast of the same name, Listen to the Signal is a delightful bounty of fun ideas, clever twists, and endings that leave just enough to the reader’s own imagination to beguile a tedious wait for a doctor or car wash or turn at the DMV — or, my personal choice for short fiction, as bedtime stories for grown ups. Although, let me add, there is nothing here that, say, a mother should hesitate to let a young’un read, especially in her attempts to cultivate in the kid a love for her favorite genre (i.e. this is a precocious and kid-friendly collection).
Book Review: THE OUTSIDE by Ada Hoffman
With a boffo combination of hard science fiction, cosmic Lovecraftian horror, both cyber- and god-punk, some ridiculously charismatic aliens, and a fascinating female protagonist somewhere on the autism spectrum, Ada Hoffman’s The Outside feels like it was made to order for us here at Skiffy and Fanty! But this isn’t just another space adventure, and its protagonist’s uniqueness, however refreshing, is not the most interesting thing about it. The Outside is a work of near-maddening subtlety that plays with an interesting set of conundra: given that we perceive the universe via kluged-together sense organs with very limited range, how much of what is actually Outside can we comprehend? Say we try to do something about it and invent machines to augment our senses. And then we let them evolve into godlike self-aware entities. The better to expand our horizons?
Book Review: Infinite Detail, by Tim Maughan
“It’s not enough to just take power away from those in charge. If we don’t use it ourselves, they’ll just take it back.” — “Anika” in Tim Maughan’s Infinite Detail “Be careful what you wish for; you may get it.” — Everybody since the 2001 ape threw a jawbone into the air Let’s think awhile about tools and how we use them, and how they end up using us when we’re not careful. Like how the human-engineered maize plant has basically turned us into a slave race frantically devoted to propagating it, defending it, etc. Let’s think about revolutions and why they tend to fail.
Book Review: New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color ed. by Nisi Shawl
Anthologies are my favorite way of discovering new writers, and they’re my favorite kind of books to review for Skiffy and Fanty, but some are harder to review than others. I’m a white woman living in a red state in Trump’s America, so my opinion on these works is probably the last anybody would want, but at least I’m in a position to beat the drums and pass the good stuff on to you readers, and I’ll tell you what: there’s good stuff aplenty in these pages.
