The Backstitched Heart of Katherine Wright, Alison Wilgus. A quite wonderful story, written with warmth and confidence, about the sister of the famous Wright brothers and her time-skipping efforts to save them from death. Most of the story adheres to the recorded history of the Wright siblings, although in its final section it goes further in an attempt to save Wilbur from his early death by typhoid fever, and Katherine and Orville’s long estrangement in the years that followed.
The Fukinaga Special Chip Job, Tim Chawaga. A sort of Invisible Cities, driven not by a storyteller in an imperial court but by a craphound hunting down the incredibly valuable last extant bags of the snack which choked a city. The invention is a lot of fun and the characters colourful, although no one is likeable enough to root for and the conclusion lacks a satisfying crunch.
This Buddhafield is not your Buddhafield, William Squirrel. A maid takes on a full-time job with room and board at an unknown trillionnaire’s space mansion, cleaning and maintaining it. She works there for years, sending money home and never seeing a soul. The world moves on without her. A story of tragedy, for the pointless waste of a human life, but also of contentment, for the maid was at peace with her life throughout. I struggle to imagine how many real people who would see themselves consumed in this way without any complaint or expression of regret – though we know little of where the maid came from.
For the Wicked, Only Weeds Will Grow, G. V. Anderson. An alien nursing home where the elderly of many disparate species come to die with dignity and peace, aided by the gaseous alien caretakers elsewhere abused for their ability to dispense what are basically opiates. Into this comes a cantankerous old human, alienated and bitter, who must be cared for by a gasbag who struggles internally with his own kind’s prospects for survival and reproduction. They both find peace, in their own ways, and it is for the reader to decide who might be considered wicked.
Seven Stops Along the Graffiti Road, David Cleden. Divided into several sections, this story is structurally a little forced – each section is not truly distinct and they flow into one another – but it’s driven by an intriguing concept, and characters possess psychological depth even if their origins and purpose is a mystery, even to themselves. In a way, this is a story about coping with loss, and how such coping mechanisms can protect us.
Terminalia, Sean McMullen. A Victorian period piece with the main conceit being that immortality has been made possible by the creation of mechanical bodies. This innovation has been appropriated by the aristocracy, a state of affairs not everyone wishes to see continue. A doctor who has made groundbreaking progress in resuscitation and electro-cardiac shock is pulled into these plots around the frontiers of death. A fun story and entertainingly written, it doesn’t dwell overly much on the Victorian setting. The call to arms at its conclusion feels melodramatic in contrast to the preceding rhetorical restraint.
