When one embarks on a long, one-way journey, there is loss and there are people left behind, as Klages adeptly shows in a tender, bittersweet story.
Archive | Individual Stories
The Individual Stories category has two types of content : 1 – the stories I read in magazines and anthologies and review straight away, rather than waiting to complete the magazine or anthology and reviewing it all in one go. I started doing this in 2010; 2 – stories published as standalone ‘chapbooks’, or published online, or otherwise as a singleton. There are a couple of dozen stories of this nature, reviewing during the 2000s, which are available here.
Karen Lord. Hiraeth : a tragedy in four acts. (Reach for Infinity)
Young Janik falls on the moon, and against the odds needs to have his damaged eyes replaced with a cyborg pair, and this is the first in a long step of augmentations that take him very far from home.
Val Nolan. Diving into the Wreck. (Interzone #252, May-June 2014)
The wreck in question being The Eagle, the ascent stage of Apollo 11, long-lost on the Moon.
Katharine E.K. Duckett. The Mortuaries. (Interzone #252, May-June 2014)
Strange and unsettling story in a world gone to pot, and with plastinating the dead and displaying them in mortuaries the norm.
Megan Arkenberg. Houses Without Air. (The End is Nigh)
Seven sections, or in fact seven matches, each match, like those of the fairytale Little Matchgirl, throwing light.
Pat Cadigan. Report Concerning the Presence of Seahorses on Mars. (Reach for Infinity)
Inventive setting and nice narrative from Cadigan, as a young woman narrates a visit to their Martian colony by a representative from Earth.
Karl Schroeder. Kheldyu. (Reach for Infinity)
Further near-future science thriller from Schroeder, featuring the return of Gennady.
Gordon Eklund. I Said I Was Sorry Didn’t I. (Fantasy and Science Fiction, Mar/Apr 2014)
Eklund has been writing high-quality SF as long as I have been reading it, and I’m pleased to say that this story is of as high a standard as his best