gengelcox's reviews
1994 reviews

Snow, Glass, Apples Chapbook by Julie Dillon, Neil Gaiman

4.0

This is similar to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked in its ability to reframe a couple of well-known fairy tales so that the reader discovers that history is written by the winner.

Proof by Induction by José Pablo Iriarte

challenging medium-paced

3.5

For me, the math in this story got in the way, but that’s likely because I’m not a math person. The idea of a static copy of someone’s brain could still “think” and provide input is unique, though, and Iriarte compounds that with a father-son relationship that’s strained to provide an emotional context to the story. I think there’s more to the idea of induction, which is never defined in the story, per se, but is alluded to in the idea at the end that if the son inherited math skills from the father, than his daughter likely inherited those same skills, but the flip side of that would be to imply that the son would be as bad a father as the father and that’s not the case, as the son is able to learn from the mistakes he perceived in his father.  

For Lack of a Bed by John Wiswell

lighthearted

3.0

A cozy fantasy about friendship and hardship, in equal parts, with a bit of drama around a succubus-turned-sofa. Reminded me a bit of something Nina Kiriki Hoffman might have written. Somewhat amusing and definitely heartfelt, but overall I missed something from this: more tension, more stakes, I don’t know.  

Dinosaurs by Walter Jon Williams

5.0

A wonderful depiction of what humans could become in the far, far future. So far in the future the aliens seem more human than the human diplomat arrived at the alien planet to discuss a peace treaty. This story is a perfect example of what science fiction does best: questioning human motivations in the present by imagining a future possibility. Highest recommendation. 

I'm Alive, I Love You, I'll See You in Reno by Vylar Kaftan

hopeful medium-paced

4.0

Aside from the use of second person, which at least isn’t meant to be the reader but the other half of this love pair, I enjoyed this story of time passing by so quickly for these two people who are unable to stay apart from each other for too long, even given travel to other planets relative to dimensions in space and time. Even the ending, which implies that what we’ve read will be discarded, thus just a draft of what might be said, worked for me in how it tied things up neatly. 

Coyote Stories by Charles de Lint

challenging slow-paced

3.5

This story is hard to follow intentionally as befits its theme: the stories we tell ourselves about our tribes, defining our backgrounds, our goals, our lives. de Lint’s stories come close to being too precious for me sometimes, but he does a nice job here of keeping that in check for the most part, and the unreliability of the voice and the narrator isn’t such that you don’t understand the meaning of the story. 

Unknown Number by Blue Neustifter

challenging emotional fast-paced

3.0

The issue with a story like this is any criticism of it can be misinterpreted by a certain set to be critical of them and their choices. So let me say this first: I don’t care if you’re a boy, a girl, a trans, or something else entirely. You do you. But I read SFF and I comment on SFF as stories. This is hardly a story, but a therapy session. It’s possibly a very good therapy session, and if couching therapy as a story helps some people, more power to it. But I disliked the format (really, published on Twitter as a series of screenshots? — experimental AF, but I hope it’s no trend) and it’s basically a couple of talking heads (although their characters come across clearly and distinctly) in what is essentially just a dialogue.  

Tangles by Seanan McGuire

adventurous medium-paced

2.5

 The issue with any story connected to something outside itself—in this case, the card game Magic: the Gathering—is that much of the world is known by the acolytes of the thing, but unknown to the casual readers. McGuire does the best she can in this world, but at best it is only a yeoman story, nothing that truly illuminates or achieves anything beyond its simple beginnings. 

Where Oaken Hearts do Gather by Sarah Pinsker

challenging dark medium-paced

4.0

Another story with a fairly experimental structure, in this case the wiki/reddit-way of commenting on a text where others can add comments and upvote or downvote previous comments. For the most part, this works for the story, reminiscent of the kind of sleuthing in longer works like A.S. Byatt’s Possession or even Richard Powers’ The Gold Bug Variations. I kept expecting that one of the commenters—BarrowBoy—to be revealed as something else, but was disappointing. The ending is heavily implied—if you follow the idea of the story, you are led to a recognition that the documentarian is being led astray by the village historian there at the end. Fun, if made somewhat more difficult than need be by the experimental format. 

The Sin of America by Catherynne M. Valente

challenging dark medium-paced

2.0

Okay, sure, this is supposed to be allegorical, possibly even surrealistic, in much the way that Ballard et al. challenged norms and mores in the New Wave with stories like “The Assassination of John F. Kennedy Seen as a Downhill Motor Race.” I get that. Which means I need to interpret this story, and my interpretation may not be yours or even what the author intended, because once you move away from realism, stories like these become fairly subjective. I see it as a cross between “The Lottery” and the Jesus myth, crossed with a bit of Native Americana: sin-eating cleanses the world, but at what cost for the eater, and who would ever voluntarily take that upon themself? I liked it up until the ending, where the diner crowd turns on the sineater…for what, I’m not sure. Has she not done her duty? It was all too gross and violent, likely to echo the sins that America is founded on and continues to endure, and yet I just don’t buy it. Every culture, every country, has sins. Don’t fool yourself. While some in America wish to deny this, there’s enough people who do recognize it, such that we are no monoculture. At the end, I just didn’t see what Valente’s story was meant to accomplish.