SF/F Commentary

I am new to Residential Aliens.  Last year they published one of my stories, being the first place to publish anything I’ve written.  The publication was a fluke.  Mr. Perry, the regular editor of the online and print magazine, responded to one of my tweets about a story I was having trouble placing, and I decided then to send it his way.  Clearly he liked it. Issue #4 of the magazine is a special edition, though.  Not because it includes anything I’ve written, which would represent a conflict of interest on my part for this review, but because John Ottinger, the infamous blogger at Grasping for the Wind, stole the editor’s seat for this one issue, selecting seven speculative tales for inclusion.  I don’t know what the editorial process was like for him, and I can’t recall if this is his first foray into editing (which is not an easy job to do, by the way; rejection letters are not fun to write).  In any case, it gave me the opportunity to use my Nook, which has not been getting the use I would like due to graduate school. Cover Art (“That Darn Tower of Babel!”) by Aaron C. Wirtz Issue #4 is somewhat of a mixed bag, but it is also an issue that shows a fair deal of potential, which I think is important to note for a small, semi-pro market.  While the issue contains stories that I didn’t care for, there are also stories here that I think are fantastic examples of speculative fiction.  “Salieri” by Marina Julia Neary, for example, end well enough, but is most interesting because of what it does with its setting and novum (the “new” idea).  It follows a brilliant college student in a faux-Victorian-era city who finds himself turned second-rate by his equally brilliant, but unusual, albino roommate.  The main character’s interactions with the social landscape of a rigid university is only overshadowed by the plot twist, both of which are interesting concepts to consider in a realistic setting.  The only significant flaw in the story is its light-handed tackling of the twist, which could have been expanded and addressed with as much fervor as the university’s social rules.  There’s a grain of something brilliant in this story, not just because the ending flips the relatively mundane setting on its head, but also because what happens and what is left to be discussed are both ideas that really should be explored in quasi-fantasy (quasi-steampunk; quasi-alternate-history) fiction.  “Salieri” is certainly one of the strongest stories in Issue #4, despite its minor flaws. “Flawed with some shiny, expensive gems,” I think, is a useful way to describe Issue #4.  Most of the stories in this issue are at least entertaining (which I’ll get to in a moment), but there are also stories that I think miss the mark.  “End of Eden” by Shane Collins, for example, reads more like fan-fiction for The Road (or any other dystopian tale from which McCarthy might have drawn), with a pair of lovers traveling across a ruined landscape avoiding gangs of wild people.  The problem with post-apocalyptic fiction (for me) is that so much of it reads like things that came before, and are, as a result, predictable.  In the case of “End of Eden,” it is obvious from the moment the main characters arrive in a utopian community early in the story that everything is going to fall apart.  The fact that the female character gets pregnant during this journey–which is supposed to be devastating for her and her partner–is left unresolved; as far as post-apocalyptic fiction goes, few stories that I have read have dealt with how one survives while pregnant in that kind of hostile environment, which might explain why I was surprised to see this particular plot point in “End of Eden.”  It would be better to see that plot resolved, though. While Collins’ story benefits from the potential for unfamiliarity–i.e., that readers unfamiliar with dystopian SF might not recognize the story’s cliche framework–the same is not true of “The King of Infinite Space” by Jason Reynolds.  As a story about drunk driving and racing, Reynolds’ tale suffers from being utterly familiar.  We’ve heard this story told before:  a young man gets plastered and attempts to drive home, decides to try racing someone at a light, and then pulls out in the end only to find out the following day that the other car had crashed, killing the passengers.  Even the final “twist” is problematic, since it does nothing but conveniently connect the main character to someone else and provide closure.  As a motivational story, I suppose it works, but it is otherwise seriously lacking. Other stories have similar flaws, though less pronounced, but they also contain a flare of originality.  “Fishing the Moons of Jupiter” by Jason Rizos takes a premise that should be quite boring (mining in space) and flips it on its head like a Doctor Who story by changing the search for minerals to the search for enormous, and dangerous, space worms (which produce copious amounts of energy that can be harvested back on Earth); but after the story progresses from the trials and tribulations of a mining crew in space to a very interesting “discovery,” it ends, leaving an unresolved bigger picture.  I would have liked to see where the story could have gone with that ending, but the story simply stops. “Overgrown” by Stoney M. Setzer, in contrast, reads like a pulpy action story that knows it’s a pulpy action story, which might explain why its narrative feels disconnected.  The story tries to work too many narrative strands together (the story of a scientist who has overstepped and of a dysfunctional family who has to contend with the effects of science gone wrong–i.e., plant monsters), as if the author wanted to interject and say, “See?  This is what is going on over here.  Now back to your scheduled programming.”  The story is, overall, entertaining and humorous, but too much attention is placed somewhere