I love short fiction, and Sunday Shorts is the feature where I get to blog about it. I’ve considered promising to review a short story every day, but that’s a lot of pressure. And while no one will fault me if I miss days, I’ll feel guilty, which will lead to not posting at all. So better to stick to a weekly post highlighting a couple/three stories, as I’ve done in the past.
Two From Lightspeed Magazine #144
Grace Chan’s “Nobody Ever Goes Home to Zhenzhu” starts out as a simple missing persons thriller: Orin’s sidekick/mechanic Calam, an orphan taken under Orin’s wing a decade earlier, has pulled the disappearing act Orin always suspected he would – but Orin isn’t letting go that easily. The pilot/Beaconer wants answers about who Calam really is and where he came from. And so Orin tracks Calam back to Calam’s homeworld. If this story was a simple “find the missing person / learn their secret” story, it would still be fantastic. Chan paces the reveals wonderfully throughout, threading Orin’s feelings about Calam neatly into the overall narrative. But the story takes on added resonance as Orin learns more about the injustice Calam’s family, in fact entire society, has been dealt. Without spoiling too much: this is a story about colonization, about how the winners write the history books, and about how the colonized are forced to assimilate or be wiped out. I had just recently completed Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States before reading this story, and the non-fiction book heavily influenced my reaction to the events of the fictional story. The reveal of what happened to Calum’s family is not the denouement of the story, however. There’s more to it than that, and Chan kept me riveted up to the final paragraph.
In “The Plastic People,” Tobias S. Buckell extrapolates a future in which Earth is essentially a giant trash heap and the rich have, generations ago, escaped to live in orbiting space stations. Occasionally, the children of these families like to camp amongst the trash-heaps for a bit of adventure. On one such trip, Rhea finds a seemingly-feral child among the trash and decides to “rescue” the boy – after all, bringing the boy to live among the civilized surely must be better for him than leaving him among the trash where his own parents don’t seem to care if he’s fed or lives or dies. Complications ensue, of course. Buckell makes his main character likeable at first, but she’s still very, very flawed thanks to the way she’s been raised. The privilege of Rhea and her friends is on display from the very start of the story, and even though she thinks she’s doing something good and noble she’s still mis-informed about the nature and history of the people still living below – including why families like hers left Earth for … well, not greener pastures, exactly, but certainly for a less polluted life. The story comments on how what’s passed down as family historical truth isn’t always true, how the privileged often take on “rescue” projects that they then lose interest in, and how sometimes the idea of “one life-changing encounter” is just that – a nice idea, but not something that happens as often as one would hope. But there’s also a nice underthread about the resiliency of humanity in general, and how we might adapt physically to survive, even if that survival doesn’t look like the gleaming future we’ve longed hoped for.
Full disclosure: I am one of the proofreaders for Lightspeed Magazine, as well as its sibling publication Fantasy Magazine.
