Abyss & Apex #27

Abyss & Apex is a professional e-zine of speculative fiction and poetry of all stripes with a long established history. The editors make a special point to emphasis their interest in character over plot. If issue #27 is any indication, the editors certainly have made their preference felt. This issue contains four short stories plus two flash fiction tales, along with a selection of poetry and nonfiction articles. This was my first experience with this e-zine, and I found the fiction to be a mixed bag.

The first offering, “The Number of Angels in Hell” by Joanne Steinwachs, is an overlong, confusing tale where we follow colonists on a hostile, low-gravity world as they scratch out a life as miners and prospectors. But the implants the colonists use to fly like birds induce an infectious form of mass insanity where they sometimes see the face of God and commit mass suicide. Harry is one of the few who are immune to the full effects of the ailment. Years pass and Harry moves from being a prospector mourning the death of his family due to the God-delusions, to an agent seeking out those who are becoming unstable, to himself becoming one with God. His pain and ultimate bland acceptance of this mass delusion is what we are asked to understand.

This is certainly an imaginative tale with wonderful worldbuilding, but the purpose of our journey with Harry left me cold. I found myself lost in what this world was about and struggling to care, as Harry was not a particularly sympathetic character.

“Väinämöinen and the Singing Fish” by Marissa K. Lingen seems to be a fanciful retelling of a morality tale of the Lapland folk. Joukahainen is a young magician who arrogantly believes he is the greatest spell singer in the land. Full of youthful naivety, he challenges the great magician Väinämöinen to a duel. The vastly more experienced Väinämöinen easily defeats the young fellow and prepares to kill him. Desperate, Joukahainen pledges the hand of his sister in wedlock to Väinämöinen. But sister Aino has other ideas when she learns of her betrothal and flees in the form of a singing fish, even though her parents enthusiastically welcome Väinämöinen as a future son-in-law. And there the tale ends, Aino hiding in the lake as a magical fish with Väinämöinen lurking about waiting to seize her should she return to the family farm.

Understand, the setting, the actions, and lives of these folks are fascinating, a foreign land unlike anything I know. But in the end, I just didn’t understand the lesson being taught here. We have an arrogant young man who doesn’t seem to have learned anything and a willful woman who refuses to obey her parents’ wishes, even though she makes clear from the beginning she resents being given away like chattel. And of course we have Väinämöinen, quite smitten with Aino, although he never laid eyes on her before, demanding her hand, and who is only met with furious disinterest when he does meet her. I guess this is a cultural thing.

“Praxitales” by Nye Joell Hardy is a challenging tale that probably would work better in a longer format. Helene is a grad student who is exiled from a university position in Miami, where she worked with porpoises, to a secret government facility in the far northwest of Washington State. It seems scientists there managed to transplant a porpoise’s brain into the body of a brain-dead scientist some decades earlier. Helene is sent after a disaster at her own research facility to assist with Parxitales, the porpoise-man, as he seems to be dying. She and the porpoise-man slowly work through their own issues of trust and belief, as Praxitales’s mysterious government handlers lurk around the edge of things.

The tales ends, but I found myself wanting more. The author raises so many wonderful issues that she is unable to answer in such a short piece. Helene has seen her own career cut off by her mentor-professor’s negligence—she is lost. Praxitales has chosen to leave his own world for the good of his fellows but is suffering terribly now. And we have the staff and government at the periphery. What are they up to here?

“Walking Across the Bomb” by Alexandra MacKenzie is about an adolescent hippie girl in a 60s high school who tries to deal with the fruits of past evils. The school is in a community famous for being where the first atomic bombs were built. The symbol of the bomb is everywhere, in frescoes on the floor, on the cheerleaders’ uniforms, on the names of the streets and the names of the sports teams. But weird accidents are happening as things begin to disintegrate to ash around the school. Lizzie soon realizes it is the work of an evil Japanese ghost who died in the bombing of Nagaski, 25 years earlier. The tale revolves around Lizzie’s efforts to get her incredulous fellow students to make a symbolic act of appeasement for the death of the ghost and her family. A nice tale, but I found the leaps of logic and faith Lizzie and her peers must make hard to believe at times.

“The Green Inifinity” by Camille Alexa is a flash fiction tale about genetic research gone wrong and its impact on Gary and his paramour, Sharon. Gary is dying of cancer but is at peace with this. But Sharon is not and enrolls Gary in an experimental treatment that splices plant genes from the kudzu vine into his own. Disaster follows as Gary becomes a green monster that engulfs the city and threatens the whole state. In desperation, the government flies Sharon back to the hospital to plead with Gary, now a giant kudzu that stretches for miles. They meet, they communicate, and she leaves with a small piece of Gary to nurture. Whether this is the end of Gary or not is unclear, but Sharon is now at peace with her loss.

The last, and best, tale of this issue is “The Night the Stars Sang Out My Name” by Ken Scholes. A soldier on an alien world is captured by the Chib but is able to escape with the aid of an implanted AI. As he runs naked across alien land pursued by the Chib, his AI, Eddie, alternately drives him to distraction with infantile word rhythms and saves him from recapture with intel and, at one point, takes over his body to fight. Back on the base, he collapses, free but lonely, as Eddie the AI is now dormant. The relation between the two, closer than most married couples, is the heart of this tale.

Overall, this is a fine exploration of people in strange worlds and how they react. As different as these settings are, people are still people. But that is the editors’ point, I guess. I commend Abyss & Apex to you. Until next time, enjoy.