Aeon #12

I was quite impressed with Aeon #11 and found Aeon #12 to be equally impressive. Editors Bridget and Marti McKenna are doing a fine job of bringing a diverse selection of speculative fiction to their readers. This is adult, literary fiction with a true sense of passion, combined with thoughtful fun.

Sarah L. Edwards tells a powerful fantasy in “The Butterfly Man.” Renna is a “wild one” who communes with butterflies and hardly speaks. Having been raised by a couple in her village, she is sold in matrimony to the Butterfly Man at the age of sixteen and leaves with him for their new home in the mountains. Though not a lot happens in this story, it is fraught with passion. Edwards knows how to entice the reader and dole out details in a most satisfying way. After a couple pages, I noticed that Renna doesn’t speak, so my first thought was that she’s mute. She has a voice, it turns out, but prefers to speak with her hands in her own invented sign language that she teaches to her new husband along the way.

In the hands of a lesser writer, this might’ve been a disaster. “Fey, taciturn young girl who communes with nature” is almost a cliché to be avoided in fantasy nowadays. But Edwards overcomes this by not painting the Butterfly Man, whom Renna is somewhat fearful of initially, as a villain. For an unpolished rustic, he’s kind, gentle—so there’s no good versus evil here to reduce this to cookie-cutter fiction. The Butterfly Man does have a dark side, but Edwards’s treatment of it is most sophisticated. I don’t fling out the word “great” often, but I will here. Recommended.

Wilderness conservation takes a humorous twist in John Kratman’s “Harry the Crow.” Chester Laughing Crow wants his “son” to become chief of his tribe, but there is a problem. His son, Harry, is not human but a construct who’s four feet tall and resembles a spider with a saucer-shaped head dominated by a single eye. But Tommy, a contemporary of Chester’s, holds a thirty-year grudge (over a woman), and challenges the appointment. To prove himself, Harry must count four coups to prove his bravery and humanness.

To my displeasure, humor seems to have fallen out of fashion in speculative fiction in recent years, so this tale was a refreshing surprise. Kratman balances the humor and the drama quite well to keep this from degenerating into slapstick farce. The humor is funny and the characters believable in their own oddball ways. Nevertheless, “Harry the Crow” doesn’t end with a droll punch line but with a chilling realization that says something important about what it might mean to be human. Very enjoyable.

“Fitzwell’s Oracle” by Lawrence M. Schoen is a lustful short-short of academia. Untenured Professor Fitzwell, looking to change his lowly status through prophecy, goes into a bar and finds one of his former students working as a hooker. “You want a metaphor?” she asks him. The price is $500: one hundred for the hotel room, four hundred for the vision. The sex she’ll throw in for free because he taught her about Keats and “that Byron guy who was way cool.” Funny, intelligent, and salacious, “Fitzwell’s Oracle” worked for me.

Dev Agarwal tells a near-future military story in “Toys.” Rebecca is a “face,” a critic and reporter sent to cover a war in Germany against the Salusa—super-intelligent marvels developed from human DNA. Rebecca is given a field commission by Major Belgo and sent deep into the war zone. The worldbuilding is good and the characters realistic; “Toys” is a viable rendering of a possible near-future with all the technological trappings. Truth told, I’m not a fan of military-SF, and this one failed to hold my interest. I’m sure many readers who enjoy this SF subgenre will find it a gritty treat.

Lisa Mantchev’s “Her Box of Secrets” appears to be another mundane tale of marital unbliss on the surface, but there is more to it than that. A woman—wife and mother of a young child—believes she has fallen out of love with her husband while taking a few evening classes at a community college. An opportunity for an affair with her instructor is imminent.

Sentences such as:

I want more from life snatched the moth-words out of the air before they could even take flight.

and:

Good riddance mocked her from the top of the china cabinet.

and:

I’m not sure I love you anymore sat on the frame of the wedding picture that hung in the stairwell.

illustrate what makes this story unique. Mantchev tells her story employing everyday yet odd household abstractions that show the isolation and loneliness this woman is feeling. Despite that, I still wasn’t sure if I cared for her, a woman contemplating abandoning her family and commitments. Realizing my gender bias, I kept trying to put myself in her shoes but found it difficult. “Her Box of Secrets” felt like the play/film Educating Rita but without the charm and allure of a literary lifestyle and with little justification that what this woman wanted was really worth pursuing. But the author saves her best for last with a schism of characterization that washed away my doubts. I was left with a lump in my throat and a warmth as powerful as Mantchev’s evocative prose.

In his introduction, David D. Levine says that he wrote the first draft of “Moonlight on the Carpet” at the bar at the World Science Fiction Convention in Boston as part of the Two Beers And A Story Challenge. The rules were simple: write a complete short story in the time it takes to finish two beers. The result is an ambiguous flash piece concerning young Liam playing on the Persian carpet with his little wooden car, a fantasy of road suspense, his family, and moonlight. To me, this story skirted the boundaries of fantasy and reality too equivocally to gain much power or make any real point. I read it three times and didn’t get it. Perhaps you’ll do better.

In Katharine Sparrow’s “Welcome to Oceanopia!” every day is a perfect day on the motile manmade island. Trix is an aniborg, one of several populating the island to serve its human inhabitants. Trouble is, there are no more humans, except for Zaria, a 99-year-old woman who is dying.

The dialogue and narrative tone of this story are excellent. Sparrow employs an almost childlike glee throughout to nail the aniborgs and the utopian theme. But Oceanopia is far from utopian, because when Zaria dies, the aniborgs will have no one to serve. If “Welcome to Oceanopia!” lacks anything, it’s an energetic plot as tight and gripping as the worldbuilding is grand—it’s a little mechanical and pat. But the perfect short story is a rare find, and this one is successful on enough levels to work well.