Reviews and Comments

Ronnie Bottoms kills Lorraine Fell and stuffs her body under some rocks in Central Park, which is also where a mysterious all-powerful alien box is. Lorraine talks the box into letting her convince Ronnie to bring her back to life. She has to possess Ma Lin, a former South Vietnam soldier who took care of enemies of the state, because he sits next to Ronnie. Ronnie then returns to Central Park, digs up Lorraine's body, and by the power of the Silver Box, brings Lorraine back to life. They spend the night in a hotel where Lorraine tries to fuck her murderer (and would be rapist) but he can't get it up. Then they are jailed because Lorraine has been missing and they used her credit card. After a bit of being roughed up by the cops, a lawyer hired by the Silver Box springs Lorraine and Ronnie.

And at this point they are all transported somewhere else in the galaxy where Ronnie (yes Ronnie the wanna be rapist) explains that Ma Lin now contains a molecule of an intergalactic race called the Laz and the Silver Box, tells Lorraine and Ronnie their quest is to save earth from the Laz molecule.

Yes. That is the story so far. I'm sure there's a reason why all of this is set up this way, but I am not willing to read through to the end to find out because it sure as hell won't be worth it.

DNF at 22%

Construction-Paper Moon by Michael J. DeLuca

A comet knocks the moon out of Earth's orbit, and a decade or two later affects a father's relationship with his daughter who is too young to remember the moon.

Impracticable Dreams by Jason S. Ridler

A comic's best material comes from purging into a bottomless hat, but he's so empty now he may not be able to get enough material in time to hit the big-time with an agent who is to be in his audience tomorrow.

Colonized by Scott H. Andrews

What if the Chinese colonized America and Anglos were the immigrants who didn't fit in with the majority?

The Recurrence of Orpheus by Erin Hoffman

Whoosh. This went so far over my head I don't know what it is.

Welcome to Foreign Lands by Justin Howe

A man journeys to the land on the inside of Earth's crust and participates in a societal ritual that brings him to feel at home inside, rather than on the surface world.

Not a bad little chapbook of stories, even if I didn't get the one at all. The Homeless Moon chapbook PDF is available free from the authors' web site, and is Creative Commons licensed.

Charles, a robot valet, unexpectedly murders his employer. He then sets out on a journey to Diagnostics to find out why he did it, and starts a heroes journey of sorts. Through seven episodes, mostly accompanied by the Wonk, who he meets at Diagnostics, he journeys through a societal landscape where humans are mostly dead or scrabbling to survive.

So what happened? The Wonk wants it to be that robots have obtained self-awareness. Charles just wants to be a valet for a human, but is complex enough to act unhappily at some of his opportunities. Even though he claims to be incapable of unhappiness.

I found myself really liking Charles, but that may be my internal tendency toward the satisfaction of ticking off tasks on a task list, which is what a lot of Charles' internal monologue is about. The overall story is good, but it is overly long (7 episodes in Charles' quest) and I just wanted to get on with it in a few places.

I was hooked from the start with Tchaikovsky's description of sending prisoners to Kiln as freeze-dried corpsicles that are reanimated on arrival. Actually doable? Actually money-saving? Hell if I know. Grabbed my attention.

Kiln has life. Not only does it have life, it has monuments built be an intelligent species, but there's no sign of them. That's a secret that was kept from Earth by it's rulers, the Mandate. Arton Daghdev, our protagonist is an unorthodox xenobiologist. A prisoners because of the unorthodoxy. But also he didn't know because it was kept so tightly secret. And the last part of of the premise is that there aren't exactly species on Kiln. The flora and fauna, such as they are, are more agglomerations of species with one purpose each: a stomach and an eye and a leg muscle get together to form a symbiotic creature. But they can all split up and form other creatures somehow.

So Arton is doing two things: trying to figure out what happened to the builders, and fighting the Mandate as its prisoner. He's got gallows humor in spades. He's also a somewhat unreliable narrator, though it's mostly lies by omission. The story drags in parts. When Arton merits extra punishment, he goes into overlong detail on that punishment. And lastly, the suspicious nature of a subjugated population is hammered home again and again. Yes, I get it that people, especially prisoners, are going to wonder who the snitches are. But by the 5th or 6th time Tchaikovsky and Daghdev go into it I was just wanted to move on.

But Tchaikovsky also ties it all together pretty nicely. The nature of life on Kiln is especially vexing for a totalitarian orthodoxy, and provides some distinct advantages when the conflict between them comes.

Half a star off because it does kind of drag in places.

A damn fine follow-up to The Legend of Charlie Fish. Rountree says in the afterword that he has a series of monster stories set in the Wild West in mind. I hadn't seen Charlie Fish as The Creature from the Black Lagoon when I read it, but that's the inspiration. This is Frankenstein in a Wild West Revue. Where my takeaways from Charlie Fish were a sense of place and longing for a family, Frank Lightning is the tragedy, trauma, and perhaps inevitability of violence.

Catherine Coldbridge is both a doctor and something like a witch. Two weeks after marrying Frank Humble in Montana in 1879, he is ambushed while on patrol for the U.S. Army. Distraught and heedless of the consequences, Catherine stitches him together from battlefield body parts and uses magick to bring him back to life. In a soulless, monstrous rage, he kills and Catherine flees. 25 years later, she attempts to right the wrong by killing him, for which she has hired the brothers Dawson, men not afraid to kill.

Be ready for a lot of horror-movie-level violence. Unlike many Westerns, the violence takes its toll. On everyone. On Catherine especially. Also on Frank, Catherine's first love Louisa, the Dawsons... everyone. This is bloody and traumatic. Not a wilting flower, Catherine is nevertheless consumed with the psychic effect of violence.

Quite good! Not as good as Charlie Fish, but I'm still giving it four stgars.

Jack Yu is a detective who is assigned to New York's Chinatown beat, where he grew up. There's a crime and an investigation and I really enjoyed that it involved shoe leather and collecting clues and not jumping to conclusions. But the heart of the story is really about Jack Yu navigating being second generation, and being a cop on behalf of a white-led power structure policing his own community. He's no dupe, but he also doesn't think Chinese people should prey on their own. A childhood friend was murdered by a Chinese gang. Jack Yu's is to become law & order. Another friend's response is to become the leader of another crew that exacts revenge. Years later, they come in contact around the crime at the center of this story.

The ethical lens is presented by the author as complex, and the portrayal is a series of fuzzy compromises rather than easy, sure answers. That feels better than a black-and-white view, but being a non-immigrant white dude, I'm missing experience and perspective.