A review by coolcurrybooks
Shades Within Us: Tales of Migrations and Fractured Borders by

4.0

As you can tell from the subtitle, Shades Within Us is a speculative fiction short story anthology about migration, immigration, and refugees. The collection mixes authors I’m already familiar with (Karin Lowachee, Seanan McGuire, S.L. Huang, Rich Larson) with plenty of authors who are new to me.

I’m going to start positive by going over some of my favorite stories of the collection. Karin Lowachee’s story, “Invasio,” is absolutely stunning, showing off her fantastic prose. During an alien invasion, the main character is forced to flee as the world slowly crumbles to ash.

I really enjoyed Amanda Sun’s “The Travelers,” in which time travelers escape a cataclysmic past by taking refuge in our present. It’s a really cool concept that she executes flawlessly, only going to show that I need to track down more stories by her.

I love S.L. Huang’s longer work, and her inclusion was one of the reasons I decided to pick up this collection. “Devouring Tongues” is the story of a Chinese immigrant in Japan who is trying to learn Japanese and gain a career that will let her provide for her parents, who write and illustrate dangerously political children’s books in mainland China. To speed her way, she has made a deal: her mother tongue for Japanese. But as she loses more and more of the language of her birth, she fears she is losing herself as well. “Devouring Tongues” is a powerful story of language and identity.

One of the most memorable stories is “The Swordmaster of Ravenpeak” by Brent Nichols, even if it ultimately takes a turn for the depressing. A disabled man is able to have friendships and happiness in life through an online gaming community, but his abled family members decide to move him to a different facility… which means he will be moving servers without even the chance to say goodbye to the people who matter most to him. “The Swordmaster of Ravenpeak” might not at first glance be connected to the theme of the collection, but even if the protagonist isn’t changing countries, he is still forced to change his life.

Seanan McGuire likely has the greatest name recognition of all the authors in the collection. Her offering, “Remember the Green,” takes place in a future where the densely packed, urban “grey,” and the agricultural “green.” A family from the green is forced to move by the government, who is relocating farming families to turn them over to mega-farms. I would put “Remember the Green” in the upper half of the collection, but we’re starting to get out of my favorite stories and more into everything else.

Likewise, Alex Shvartsman’s “Defender of Mogadun” is a well-constructed story that I enjoyed reading but doesn’t have a huge amount of staying power. Dragons from other dimensions try to break through the veils of reality and destroy cities… but some guards against them are infinitely reincarnated.

Rich Larson imagines an eerily believable future where people are trying to escape America. The protagonist of “Porque el girasol se llama el girasol” is a little girl whose mother has contracted a coyote to get them past the border wall and detention camps and into Mexico. The coyote operates by moving them outside of our reality for portions of the trip… but walking outside the world is dangerous, and not everyone will survive.

In “Superfreak” by Tonya Liburd, a girl moves from the Carribean to Canada after her parents die and she’s supposed to be left in the care of a predatory and sexually abusive uncle. Unfortunately, the next relative she’s left with isn’t much better, and she soon finds herself in a shelter for homeless teens. Oh, and did I mention? In this world, most everyone has some sort of supernatural power… except for our protagonist.

“The Vagabond of Trudeau High” by Sarah Raughley is another story set in modern-day Canada. A black girl witnesses her father get beat up by the police and makes a deal with a supernatural power to be able to curse people. She decides to use this gift to get revenge on behalf of marginalized people who have been wronged.

Two stories deal with the Holocaust and World War II. In “Critical Mass” by Liz Westbrooke-Trenholm, a Jewish scientist and her niece are trying to get to Canada but find their visas repeatedly denied. “Screen in Silver, Love in Colour, Mirror in Black-and-White” by Julie Nováková follows a movie crew in Prague who are working on the edge of a war.

Some of the stories imagine a future devastated by environmental collapse. In “From the Shoals of Broken Cities” by Heather Osborne, some people have genetically engineered themselves to be able to live beneath the ocean, but they are inundated with refugees from above and divided as a community about how to treat them. “Gilbert Tong’s Life List” by Kate Heartfield follows a teenager in a walled-off refugee community of people from a drowned Pacific island that is kept apart from Canada, with none of the descendants of the original refugees granted citizenship or permission to leave legally. “In a Bar by the Ocean, the World Waits” by Hayden Trenholm has the presumption of a failing planet, but the focus is on a young woman given a choice: be put into an all-immersive virtual reality where she’ll have the experience of a happy, full life… but her organs will be harvested after six months. Is it worth it to live and keep trying to save the world, or should she just give up and accept the happiness before death? “Habitat” by Christie Yant depicts a future where everyone is forced to live in one place to preserve the rest of the planet’s ecology. Those who resist are forcibly relocated.

“The Marsh of Camrina” by Matthew Kressel may be a bit about an environmentally devastated future… but it’s more about a future in which technology has advanced to the point that few jobs or economic opportunities are available. A college graduate with no prospects goes to work in a new type of eco-city.

The last of the “middle of the road stories” is “Shades of Void” by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro. I really don’t have much to say on this one. It’s about space exploration and a relationship, but it blurred pretty quickly with all these other stories I’ve read.

Now we get into the stories I had more negative feelings toward. “How My Life Will End” by Vanessa Cardui isn’t a short story at all — it’s song lyrics, and I’ll admit to skimming or outright skipping them.

“Imago” by Elsie Chapman may have been going for a surrealist approach? I’m honestly not sure what was up with it. There’s a ship that people get on to go to the other end of the world, but the trip’s dangerous and most don’t return.

I felt sort of weird about “Voices” by Tyler Keevil. An American man moves with his wife to her native home of Ireland, and he worries about his son, who is bullied for not following conventional gender norms and speaks to presences that may go beyond imaginary friends. The protagonist has a brother-in-law who is Native American and the source of wisdom and life advice. It kind of coat hangs the “Native wisdom” trope… but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still doing it.

However, the story I was most iffy on was “Inkskinned” by Jeremy Szal, which has aliens moving into a mostly human city and facing prejudice. You get aliens as a stand-in for marginalized people, and it also gave off the message of “be kind to bigots and they’ll be less bigoted.” In my experience, that doesn’t work at all and just leads to a lot of suffering on the part of the people doing the kindness.

But a few stories aside, Shades Within Us was a solid speculative fiction collection, if not the best I’ve read this year. I do find the topic of the collection timely and vital, and many of these stories are well worth reading.

I received an ARC in exchange for a free and honest review.

Review from The Illustrated Page.