Novella Review: Before Space Recon by M. D. White

Before Space Recon by M.D. White
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As humans push out into space, they encounter only one other sentient species residing in a distant star system. The other species remains pretty passive–until they don’t.

This short tale follows a smattering of bridge officers on an minor transport vessel that gets waylaid by technology that they don’t understand. Suspiciously, an Aquillian ship happens to be primed to help them out in the insignificant stretch of space in which they’re stalled. Immediate warning bells goes off, when they think on the cargo of weapons they transport . . .

Multiple POVs are offered of the brutal infiltration and occupation of the ship. An additional POV is given from someone stationed at the asteroid where the Defiance was scheduled to arrive. Shipping routes are not exactly linear due to the complications of space/time bending travel so the search for the missing cargo ship involves its own detective prowess.

A paradigm is willfully broken here, when no canny hero of the Defiance rises fantastically above the situation. Sometimes, impossible odds are impossible odds. There’s not always a Ripley in the face of an Alien incursion or a John McClane when terrorists create a hostage situation. If The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones have taught anything, it’s that just because a character is liked, it doesn’t mean they’re not expendable.

A series will be forthcoming, which I welcome.

I received my copy of the collection directly from the author through bookreviewdirectory.wordpress.com.
 
 
 
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Short Story Review: “Ten Thousand Miles” by Connie Wilkins

4 of 5 stars.

The horrors of war get a fresh treatment in this tale set in a Union hospital encampment at the edge of the Louisiana swamp. A virtual limbo, the miasma-filled camp is staged for confusion as first Rebels overtake the camp and then a Union gunship takes aim amid the roiling mists and smoke.

The camp is largely manned by “African-descent” former slaves fighting for freedom. Two main characters hold down the hospital tent. Gem is an elderly African-American woman disguised as a man to help the freedom effort. It reads more queer/trans in the narrator’s use of male pronouns for male-guised Gem. Gem’s also attuned to the restless spirits awaiting reunion with the still battling living.

The narrating surgeon is a widowed white Quaker son and grandson of Quaker abolitionists that were at the forefront of the Indiana portion of the Underground Railroad. He’s also haunted by spirits in the form of his deceased wife. The camp is filled with her beloved moths of every size and color, and they serve as a constant reminder of her.

This moving tale shifts from black to white, male to female, living to dead, substantial to spiritual all amidst the roiling mists and flocking moths . . . It’s recommended.

This tale appears in Shades of Blue & Gray: Ghosts of the Civil War edited by Steve Berman.
 
 
 
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Short Story Review: “Mistress” by Jennifer R. Povey

2 of 5 stars.

This tale relates a contemporary ghost story, when the narrator visits a Civil War plantation house that was burned at the end of the war. The circumstances of its burning and the fate of its final residents remain a mystery.

The narrator sees a female ghost twirling a parasol and realizing that it’s the plantation mistress. [Other site visitors have seen the same visage.] However, this encounter escalates as memories of the final days of the plantation seep into the tourist.

Race and the politics of race are brought up deliberately in the tale in the effort to show its contemporary POV But it has the effect of emphasizing its own “whitewashing” with its focus on the “mistress”, her doting “servants” [aka slaves], and her benevolent treatment of them as the murdering Union and Rebel troops flood the landscape only to meet at the plantation . . .

This tale appears in Shades of Blue & Gray: Ghosts of the Civil War edited by Steve Berman.
 
 
 
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Short Story Review: “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This haunting, psychological bender depicts the dramatic hanging of a Rebel supporter by the Union troops. Most interestingly, the tale was written in 1890 with not even a generation lapsed since the end of the war. Wounds between North and South would still have been quite raw. Especially in this tale in which a Southern civilian is baited into doing something illegal by a Union soldier in order to drum up a hanging. And so it plays out.

But it doesn’t play out as characters nor readers would expect as minute details, sensations and thoughts flicker across the page–all from the POV of the condemned man falling . . .

I highly recommend this story. This tale appears in Shades of Blue & Gray: Ghosts of the Civil War edited by Steve Berman.
 
 
 
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Short Story Review: “Spectral Drums” by Devin Poore

4 of 5 stars.

This moving short story uses metaphor to great effect in the interactions between soldiers from 2 different wars. Generations may separate them, but the understanding bridges impossible gulfs.

On the verge of WWI, the narrator [a trolley driver] notes his standard route to and through the old Civil War battlefield. His respect for the history is evident in his stopping to pick up and let off ghostly riders in blue and gray that whisper of home and family. The tourists also on the trolley gape at the spectacle but don’t move to interact. The ghosts do not communicate directly with the living.

One young man on the trolley boldly attempts to initiate conversation with the spirits, but to no luck. Later, when the trolley is down to just the driver, the young man and a handful of ghosts, the man confesses to the driver that he’s left his Indiana farm to join the war front in France. He expresses his hopes and dreams and what compelled him to leave the safety of home. A ghost replies . . .

I highly recommend this story. This tale appears in Shades of Blue & Gray: Ghosts of the Civil War edited by Steve Berman.
 
 
 
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Short Story Review: “The Swell of the Cicadas” by Tenea D. Johnson

4 of 5 stars.

This is a lovely little ghost story in that it’s written from the POV of a Civil War battlefield ghost. In life, the speaker was not participating in the war, but rather Cat was shot by a stray bullet while crossing the adjacent woods while on an errand for her Mistress.

The slave’s ghost was left to mingle with those of the blues and grays left on the battle field and other non-participant causalities. While the world moved on from the war, the spirits were largely trapped in their animosities for decades until peace settled across the ghostly valley. Now, all of the spirits watch crowds of tourists come to gawk at their history oblivious to the unsettled around them.

This tale stands out in the interactions of the ghost with her environment. She notice of, reaction to and interaction with the play of the forest, the dappling sunlight through the leaves overhead, the whirr of the cicadas. Things as simple as wind and rain pull and disperse the ghost as she moves through her environment:

The sky darkened as the raindrops turned fat and multiplied. Cat struggled to keep her composition as parts of her were saturated and fell to the ground, trying desperately to rejoin the whole before she moved on. She slowed and waited for herself to catch up . . . Cat could see no more. Her vision blurred and prismed as the rain became a downpour and washed her away.

The night came and, painstakingly, she reconvened. As she materialized a wet wind blew through the grove, lifting the hem of Cat’s dress. She made it across the road and to the swollen ditch. She stood in the dark, at the edge of the water, willing herself to disappear. Around her the wilderness swelled with the sound of cicadas, until she could hear nothing but their reedy eruption. . . . She fell slowly, piece by piece into the water. Where the moonlight had moments ago picked out her edges, the glow of her was gone now, and each part of the spirit and once-flesh was lost to the liquid darkness.

This tale appears in Shades of Blue & Gray: Ghosts of the Civil War edited by Steve Berman.
 
 
 
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Short Story Review: “Raw Recruits” by Will Ludwigsen

2 of 5 stars.

This is a ghost story without showing any ghosts. In the style of many 19th century stories, the tale is related through letters without depicting any of the action firsthand.

During the Civil War, a Northern Colonel writes a series of letters to his commanding general. In the first he relates a visit to a psychic with another officer. The psychic accurately relayed the location of a dead uncle’s hidden wealth by allegedly channeling the uncle himself. This lead to a plot to channel the spying capabilities of deceased Union soldiers to best the Southern army.

The psychic is leery but is convinced for double money. A vague suggestion sends troops to their doom. The location of the troops was correct, but the level of preparedness was not. Perhaps the ghosts or the psychic have other motives . . .

The breadth of the story is limited by the singular speaker writing to, not just a singular reader, but to his boss. It’s also levels removed from the action by the filtering process of time [the delay between action and relating those same events] and letter-writing. A mix of letter writing and action would increase the immediacy of the tale.

This tale appears in Shades of Blue & Gray: Ghosts of the Civil War edited by Steve Berman. I’ve previously read Ludwigsen’s “Acres of Perhaps” which I liked and recommended.
 
 
 
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Short Story Review: “Saxophone” by Nicholas Royle

4 of 5 stars.

In an interesting twist of alt-history, this tale depicts a ravaged Iron Curtain separating Communist Soviet Union’s sphere of influence from that of NATO’s. The tense border between East and West Germany led to shots fired, war escalating, and eventually biological warfare. Hungary and Yugoslavia are the worst ravaged, with most of the population turned to zombies and a dark trade in live organ harvestings. Harvested American military organs bring an especially hefty price on the black market . . .

The metaphor of zombies as denizens of warzones is both unique and particularly apt. It is a tense and joyless existence. The fully cognizant zombies try to keep their heads together [literally] to keep on going, even after the loss of their “lives”. Memories of better times, ie living times, are bittersweet.

Hasek, the main zombie POV, played jazz saxophone when living, now he doesn’t have the breath for it. Nor the instrument. That doesn’t stop him from fingering his air-sax out of habit as he tries to bring a little imagined joy into his music-less reality.

This tale appears in Book of the Dead edited by John Skipp and Craig Spector.
 
 
 
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Novella Review: The Adakian Eagle by Bradley Denton

3 of 5 stars.

Detective thriller meets World War II historic fiction in this novella set in the Aleutians when a private finds first a ritualistically slaughtered bald eagle on a wind-swept volcano on Adak. He returns to the scene of the crime to find a murdered Navy grunt.

What unspools is a tale of power, corruption, intimidation and canny detective work on the part of the Army base’s lead news reporter. Profound rifts divide the island’s inhabitants: native and military, enlisted and officer, army and navy. Distrust run deep. Echoes of A Few Good Men reverberate through the story.

A supernatural element comes into play when the private and the detective go on an Aleutian vision quest for answers. It’s an unnecessary plot device akin to finding a magic mirror to reveal all of the elements . . .

This tale appears in Weird Detectives: Recent Investigations edited by Paula Guran.
 
 
 
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Graphic Novel Review: Saga, Volume 7 by Brain K. Vaughan [w/ Fiona Staples]

Saga, Vol. 7 by Brian K. Vaughan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Saga series consistently delivers a nuanced tale spanning a multitude of cultures, ideologies, personal motivations, and sexualities. Led by the brilliant artwork by Fiona Staples and the clever and canny writing of Brian K Vaughan, this epic tale follows the star-crossed lovers, their multi-racial lovechild, their few allies, and their many enemies across years and light years and they hop from star system to star system in an effort to get away from bounty hunters and the war that divides their respective races.

This installment sees much of the cast including the protagonists stuck on a comet embroiled in an endless civil war. Religious dogma takes center stage as multiple analogies to Middle Eastern conflicts play out across the page. The cultures of the hero couple also have hands in the civil war as the comet is fuel-rich, and to the winners go the spoils.

Most clear, is that there can be no winners in such a deeply embedded war. This issue is about loss and its many facets. There is loss of innocence. Loss of potential. Loss of loved ones. And even genocide.

This entire series is highly recommended.

I’ve previously read:
     Saga, Volume 1–5 stars
     Saga, Volume 2–5 stars
     Saga, Volume 3–5 stars
     Saga, Volume 4–4 stars
     Saga, Volume 5–5 stars
     Saga, Volume 6–5 stars
 
 
 
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