Shadow Angel

Novelette by Erick Melton

Emil pilots ships between the stars, creating bubbles in space to exceed the speed of light. After enough trips, these bubbles can stabilize into wormholes. But it seems his ex-wife has manipulated him into helping her reach something strange in the middle of the sponge that is the universe. The whole story is told through his hallucinations, hearing of thoughts, voices, memories, and glimpses of the future, all caused by the strange nature of a mind twisting itself to control little bubbles of spacetime.

It seems a lot of people found the story structure confusing, and it was at first, but you have to just read straight through to the end, without going back to try and figure out the meaning of one or another sentence. It all clears up toward the end of the story, and there are several narratives going on in different times. I also quite like the world Melton built and the rules for physics and FTL. It's a neat idea.

That said, the story seems kind of boring to me, once you get past the confusing bits. Emil is an exceptional pilot. His ex knows this, and with her research has figured out why. She tries to use him to advance her research, and he eventually figures out what is going on: with his abilities, her plan, his hallucinations, his future, and spacetime in general. The reader figures this all out with him, which is fun and a bit mind-bending. In a good way. But that is really all there is to it. It is nice that the character is as confused as readers will be, but this is very much a story of a world, and how the physics in it work. Emil and the reader figure that out, there isn't much story to be had, besides some vague bits of Emil's future career direction. It's a puzzle to be unraveled, but the plot isn't much beyond that, and the characters are hazy by necessity, since most everything happens inside Emil's head.

3 sponge space futures out of 5.

The Odor of Sanctity

Short Story by Ian Creasey

Dora wants to ease the death of the priest who helped her and was a huge charitable figure in the Philippines, so she finds the scent of a forest near where he grew up, using a new scent-capturing technology. Since she can't afford such an imported scent, the shopkeeper wants her to capture the priest's scent as he dies. He's betting on the priest being canonized, and wants to trade on the medieval beliefs in the odor of sanctity. I like that Creasey named the church after a saint known for this odor.

Anyway, there is a clever but not unpredictable twist to the plot, and I do appreciate Dora's growth by the end of the story, but I just didn't see much to this one. It was written well enough, and things happened, but it dragged a bit and just doesn't leave me with much to think about, and didn't have me thinking much while reading either.

3 smelly saints out of 5.

Grandma Said

Short Story by R. Neube

A teenage protagonist gets a job as an apprentice plague cleanser on a world ravaged by a fungal pulmonary disease. This story follows his misadventures with goth girls, parents and hormone-induced stupidity as much as his burgeoning career and attempts to survive daily plague exposure. It's a story of growing up with lightly comic sensibilities, mirroring Grandma's advice to the narrator to keep laughing. Good advice, and an oddly cheerful little story. Sadly there is not much else to say here. I guess the commonplace modern elements of high school on this alien world bother me a bit, but it almost isn't worth mentioning. I never laughed, but I smiled quite a bit, and didn't want to stop reading.

3 UV lamp towers out of 5.

Danilo

Short Story by Carol Emshwiller

I'm never quite sure why I love Emshwiller stories as much as I do. This one left me with a big goofy grin, but it's hard to explain exactly why. I'm confident most people will enjoy reading the story though, so go do that.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled rambling:

Lewella is an older, single woman. Her head is in the clouds most of the time, and she's more than a bit crazy. The story is narrated by her friend Mary Ellen, who describes Lewella like so:

"She sits and hums to herself. Bees and hummingbirds fly aroundher as if she's a flower and even when she's not wearing red or yellow. There's a jay that comes and hops around her feet and she feeds him crumbs. ... Once a streak of sunlight shined down sideways through the trees on to her tangled white hair and made it glow in a magical way. Not for long, though."

One day, Lewella invents an imaginary fiance, and decides they are to be married in the spring. She gets a painting of him somewhere and eventually decides to set out into the world to find him. Mary Ellen tags along on this grand quest to make sure her batty old friend doesn't get hurt.

One big effect impresses me about Emshwiller's writing in this story, her descriptions and choice of details. The two old women, picking vegetables in their village seem to inhabit an idyllic fantasy land. As they wander further from home, the modern world breaks in. Hummingbirds and lace collars give way to bus fares and dollar amounts, and eventually Wal-Mart and park benches. This effect climaxes along with the climax of the story itself, with vines, trees, and other naturalistic descriptions intruding on a modern bar room. I also particularly enjoyed the odd symmetry of the last lines.

The story has fantastical descriptions, and perhaps Lewella is supremely lucky or implied to innocently cause things to work out for her, but this is magical realism with only the faintest tinge of fantasy. I think Emshwiller may write fantasy in the same way Neal Stephenson always writes science fiction: "it's an attitude."

I don't think I'd have enjoyed a story with this plot written by any writer besides Emshwiller, but she makes it sing.

4 lace collars out of 5.