It’s time for another round of short story reviews, marking the first time in loooong while that I’ve managed to do these posts two months in a row. (I’m still not sure I’m ready to make that a habit again, though.)
We will start out strong.
If an Algorithm Can Cast a Shadow by Claire Jia-Win (Clarkesworld):
Honestly, I hate this story so much.
I hate it for having an original twist to the digital-copy-of-a-deceased-love-one trope that is so much better than the one I just wrote a story about. I hate it for finding an angle to perfectly show what it is like to live with the fear of your kids turning into monsters (something I have been mulling over how to do for a long while). I hate it for being so all-round excellent that I almost want to give up writing, because what is the point when other people can come up with something this brilliant?
So, yeah, obviously I don’t hate this story at all. In fact, it’s not just the best story I have read this yeah, but one of the best stories I’ve in the last decade.
It’s a story about a mother, struggling with the loss of her son and the general falling-apart of her family. Her husband is obviously having an affair, and her daughter hates her. To find answers to her son’s death and to bring her family together, the MC has bought a device which will create a digital copy of her son based on all the traces he left online.
Viewed from the outside, the family is close to perfect, or was, at least, until the son’s death. They live in the perfect suburban area, the kids go to an elite school, and the daughter is brilliant, ready to choose whatever career she wants. Of course, the cracks in this shell of perfection are already there when the story starts, and while the digital copy does nothing to bring the MC closure, it does gradually smash that shell to pieces.
It turns out the neighborhood is everything but perfect, but people (the MC especially) are good at looking the other way when the mirage of perfection glitches. The good results the school presents in its overall numbers comes at a prize for the students which cannot cope with the pressure. The now-dead son could very well have been one of those students. And the daughter, the oh so perfect daughter, well, she’s a bratty teenager turned up to 11.
This is a story seemingly about many things. About grieving and attempting to find closure, about the danger posed by relentless pressure to perform, about what hides beneath the surface in perfect little societies, and about all the biggest fears of a parent: your children dying, growing up to monsters, or growing up to hate you. Yet it treats none of these subjects superficially.
Jia-Win manages to let every one of those elements shine on the page and give them the depth the subjects deserve. And she manages to build sympathy for the characters, even though each and every one of them are shown to be a monster in some way, yet it is never the individual that is blamed but rather the circumstances forced upon them.
This was simply a well-written piece. To me, this is a masterclass in what a good short story should be.
Said the Princess by Dani Atkinson (Podcastle, originally published in Daily Science Fiction):
This was a classical princess-in-tower-needs-to-be-rescued kind of story but with the twist, that the princess can hear the narrator of the story. Think The Princess Bride meets the Will Ferrell movie Stranger Than Fiction.
At first, this just leads to things being awkward, and Atkins plays the situation for some jokes. And it is a funny story, but it gets even better when the princess realizes that she can use the narrator and his extended knowledge of her situation to get out.
From there, the story becomes equal part humorous action-adventure and meta fiction. The meta fiction element, especially, is what takes the story from good to great. Like, when the narrator suddenly turns into an unreliable narrator in an attempt to change the plot of the story itself, or when his time jump makes the princess stumble to a stop, because what does the narrator mean by “Two hours later”?
And to top it all off, Atkins elevates the story even further by having the speculative element make sense in the world of the story. Aktins brilliantly come up with a good in-world explanation for why the princess can hear the narrator.
After Stasis by R.T. Ester (Interzone Digital):
Admittedly, I found it a bit difficult getting into this story to begin with. There are multiple POV characters all of whom are on a spaceship or station, waking up from stasis after some sort of attack. They are themselves somewhat confused, and so there is some intentional vagueness in the story opening. Despite the vagueness seeming intentional, it did make the story opening more confusing than I would have liked.
That said, Ester did hook me, despite my initial confusion, by adding the mystery of what exactly had happened to the spaceship/station and why the ship AI had wakened the remaining survivors up early. And once I moved on from those initial scenes, the mystery only intensified.
The story had a really nice thriller/mystery plot with some really great twists. I can’t reveal too much without ruining the story, but there are both a mysteriously quiet boy, a previous catastrophe at the ship/station, and an AI that is not revealing everything it knows. And it is up to the lone surviving military ensign to figure out what exactly is going on.
If you are into original SF stories and mystery plots, this story is worth giving a read.
Adverts by Rick Danforth (Metastellar Magazine):
We get thrown right into the action in this flash fiction piece. The protagonist is chatting with a handsome guy in a packed train, only her friend is on board the train as well and the friend seems adamant in getting in the MC’s way. As it turns out the handsome guy might be nothing but a paid human advertise for a cult or MLM company.
It is a pretty cool concept, and there is a bit more to the story than that. Though, it’s a three minute read, so if you want to find out what happens next, you will have to read the story yourself.
Toby Backman 