Harare Review of Books

301 pages. Published October 8, 2024 by Immortal Jellyfish Press. SF anthology.

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TL;DR A good collection of SF stories.

This is a collection that’s loosely about re-invention and rediscovery (like, New Year’s resolutions), featuring a mix of what looks like established writers and new. To run through just some of the ideas in here: Alter-you who is so much better at, like, everything, in Better Me is Fun at Parties, by F. E. Choe; a new beginning for sisters with a very toxic relationship in The Holy Daughters of Eng Mac, by C. R. Kellogg; ambition, and ways to get what you want in Shannon Spieler’s A Facade of Faith; running for the hills after an alien invasion in A Thousand Gomorrahs by Darryl Gregory; a reworking of Cinder Ella (:)) in Julie Danvers’s Ugly; a supernatural event (alien abduction, maybe?) in the desert, beautifully described, in Rowan Copley’s Aurora Deserti; Hades and Persephone in Alec J. Marsh’s Katabasis; and extreme bodysculpting and/or dysmorphia in The Ravishing Moon Princess by Charlotte Ahlin (great ending).

There’s an eel person in Sophia Tao’s The Catadromous Nature of Eel; interspecies love in Adianu Etinose’s The (Re)Creation of New Terraform; love across timelines, and toxicity, in Brigitte Winter’s Redo; more time travel in All the Time in the World and None at All by Allison Pottern; a beautiful story about future medical science in Fracture, by Melinda A. Smith; dimensional escapism in Victor Pope’s Wave Walkers (I would totally want to go there), which reminded me, of course, of Abbott’s Flatland; and you may already know (I did) Elizabeth Bear’s No Moon and Flat Calm, about postgrad apprentices who arrive at a space station in crisis.

Catherine Castellani’s Spaced is an excellent story on being an outsider and still making it. Athena’s Voyage by Nick DePasquale is about my favourite thing in the world, sentient spaceships (OpenAI has nothing on this, so far). A. E. Kirchoff’s My Lover’s Music Box is a melancholy story about death and a kind of afterlife. And doesn’t chat_transcript_elsie_user260916_2189-12-13T21-18-32.661Z have the best title? I enjoyed Ash Howell’s story about an uploaded consciousness, and how the ending suggests more. And then Chris Campbell’s story of the last person and possible simulated realities, Ada the Last Daughter: On Blackhole Cosmology and Computation.

All of these stories are super imaginative with many interesting ideas—as all SF should be—and fun to read. Of course, as happens with collections, I didn’t enjoy every single story. No matter: if you enjoy SF, you’ll enjoy this unique collection. Recommended.

Thanks to Victory Editing NetGalley Co-op/NetGalley and Immortal Jellyfish Press for DRC access.

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