Harare Review of Books

212 pp. November 3, 2025, Interstellar Flight Press. SFF.

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I don’t often read fantasy and reading the blurb for this, I wasn’t sure I’d be the right audience. How wrong I was! This is an excellent anthology, filled with fine stories, all of which I would recommend highly.

How did Fogg think up the stunning, intricately executed love story involving post-human intelligences and a very down-to-earth neuroscience couple researching memory (“Traces of Us”)? The characters ponder what makes us us, and how or if that can be encoded. And the story puts what makes us so very human—love—at the heart of scientific enquiry, applying it so beautifully. It reminds me why we do science at all, that at the heart of that it are human questions.

”Sweetest” is one of the creepiest fairground stories I’ve ever read (a whole genre, which makes sense because there’s something really unhinged and hysterical about the fairground experience). This combines with another trope, that of the candy shop—also potential unhingement; a whole temple to sugar??—and almost immediately the reader knows something terrible must happen, which it gratifyingly does. The really smart twist that will break your heart is the revelation of the protagonist’s own story.

In another excellently creepy story, “Taiya,” a woman’s moved back with her husband to his home country, and they encounter a ghost that’s desperate to gain human attention. Her husband’s fairly dismissive—he grew up with the legends, and knows what to do with the taiya (just ignore it); he has the ability born of familiarity to treat it as background. Besides he’s very busy with work. She, unfortunately, is not. This story spoke to me of being immersed in unfamiliar cultures and territory, being emotionally abandoned in a marriage, and about a descent into madness—the siren’s call of compulsion, a theme that’s also in a later story, “The Breaking.”

That’s just three stories in this wonderful collection. Most of what makes this anthology so good is Fogg’s excellent prose, always very even and assured no matter the subject. Compellingly, she seems to know a lot about every subject she tackles, from neuroscience to surfing. There’s time travel, shapeshifting, an eternal garden, a sea witch, magical illusions, the Queen of the Hunt, and lots more. Even a story about fanfic. But all of this always rooted in human things: in the love between a couple, between a mother and daughter, in friendship, home, the wounds of loss and abandonment, and trust. I also really enjoyed the international flavour of these stories. They feel like they’re from many different cultures and folkways; in fact, if you told me Fogg was the pseudonym of an international collective, I’d believe you.

Anyway, again, a stunning and really lovely collection, highly recommended. Thank you to Interstellar Flight Press for an early DRC.

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