Electric Velocipede #14

Electric Velocipede #14, in acknowledgement of WisCon, the leading feminist-oriented SF/F convention, is a special issue featuring all women writers.

The first offering is “Hermit Crabs” by Elissa Malcohn. Fifteen-year-old Mandy is a bright student yet unpopular. Mandy is a cutter, finding relief from her pain with a razor blade. She meets up with Noah, a homeless boy who lurks around her school. Noah is different from the other boys. Formerly a junkie, he sold himself in prostitution to a pervert who tied him up and murdered him. Normally that would be the end of such an unfortunate youth, but now Noah is inhabited by the spirit of a raccoon, and Noah has an idea for Mandy to release her pain. The plan involves their mutual deaths.

Despite the stock setup of a miserable girl who meets a miserable boy, the fantastical element eventually coming into play, this is a powerful rendering. My only problem is the dénouement that makes Noah’s plan depend on his huge blunder, based on his own ignorance, but I found I could overlook that. There’s much to like about “Hermit Crabs,” and I can see why the editors kicked off the issue with it. Great title, too, as it’s a metaphor for the crustacean that takes its new shell for a home after the old inhabitants have departed from it.

Erzebet YellowBoy tells of an old woman who is “Waiting at the Window.” Alma used to be young and unafraid, but now she sits in her rocking chair waiting for the great beyond to come visit her. This is a flash piece, and a fine one, and as such I’ll let you find out for yourself what pays Alma a visit.

As the title might suggest, “Them” by Michelle Scott is a tale of paranoia. A young man with large sideburns is sent out into the world to take notes. The agency he works for is disseminating various catchphrases that control people’s lives to one degree or another: old erroneous chestnuts such as, “Don’t go swimming until an hour after you eat” and “starve a cold, feed a fever.” The only character ever named is Goldstein, who is retiring and moving to Florida; everyone else is either the young man, a construction worker, a skinny waitress, or a fat policeman. Told from a very distant omniscient point of view, using stark declarative sentences to achieve a remote effect, this is completely an idea story, and unfortunately, this is an old idea. This might have worked if I cared something for the characters, but I didn’t; all I felt was distanced by the narrative.

In “The Last Tiger,” Tracie McBride uses both second and third person to tell of a deadly woman with a military ident chip who’s on the run. The second person narrative places the reader inside the woman; the third person explains the tale. This is a short piece, more clever than satisfying.

D. E. Wasden retells a classic SF story in “The Artificial Sunlight of Memory.” On Mars, Nandroids made in the image of famous artists from the past are nannies for children while their parents are away. Dali, one of many Dalis, is Maddie’s, and from next door Melissa and Matisse come to visit. The conflict here is that some of the Nandroids are being “retired.” This story has an emotional, heartfelt dénouement with a switch on the original from acceptance of the status quo to one of rebellion, but through the entire story I couldn’t help thinking I was reading an updated version of Ray Bradbury’s “I Sing the Body Electric,” or various stories by Philip K. Dick. While I enjoyed “The Artificial Sunlight of Memory,” I was left wondering if our field has truly run out of new ideas, and all there is left to do is refurbish the old ones. Still, this is a well-crafted and emotional story.

Sandra McDonald’s “Recipe for Survival” is a second person narrative with a slightly experimental form. A young girl, whose mother is no longer with her, lives with her alcoholic father and her grandfather, who has had a stroke. The preparation for various kinds of food is told by a creature the girl’s grandfather found in the creature’s royal lair of ice. I was dubious about this story at first, finding it relying too heavily on the recipe motif, but McDonald kept slipping in interesting nuggets about the family and their odd life together. Any doubts I had about this short-short were washed away by its powerful ending.

In Jennifer Pelland’s “Sashenka Redux,” Sashenka is one in a long line of copies of herself forced to find a cure for the disease she created to vanquish the invading aliens. For the past seventy thousand years, more than ten thousand copies of her have been imprisoned in isolation on a spaceship. Sashenka is not alone, however, as she has a ghost version of herself who is either trying to help her or is in league with the aliens. Pelland possesses first-rate skills at writing science fiction, but like in her story “Mercytanks” in Helix #4, here, she favors a plot where the protagonist has no free choice; hence, why should I care? Ultimately, “Sashenka Redux” devolves into a horror story that I’ve seen too many times before. In all fairness, one could say that the author’s intended theme might be the human will to live despite the pointlessness of human existence, as it should be noted that Sashenka does possess a strong desire to survive. But in the end, I was left feeling like a dupe, or I would have, except I saw this dénouement coming a light-year away.

The longest offering and only novelette in this issue is “Your Blood” by Leslie Claire Walker. After being dumped by his girlfriend, Tom, a musician, goes to a club to see his musician buddy, Jazz, perform. There he meets Rachel and takes her home for what he probably figures to be a one-night stand. The next morning, she informs him that now he is hers, and she controls his life. Actually she does, as she sends him out into various fantastical versions of the world to experience heaven and hell. This is well written on a narrative level, making the characters and the world come alive, but I was left bemused at the end to the author’s purpose. Perhaps it’s to show that each of us must find our own path in the world. Perhaps it was just a chilling horror tale designed only to titillate. I’m leaning toward the latter, as I found the treatment “morally” dubious, with too many impossibilities stacked atop one another that were never really explained. As a horror tale, though, it’s a good one.

“No Bubblewrap for Little Guys” by Sara Saab is a flash piece, and despite the action of the story, it is difficult to review. The protagonist is chasing a boy through the city; obviously he has something he/she wants. I never could figure out much about the narrator, even his/her gender. Nor could I find a speculative element. Saab’s prose is flowing, graceful, articulate, erudite, just the opposite of what this little chase-scene of a story needed.

“Bull” by Sharon E. Woods is a delightful treat. After the American Civil War, a bronze bull sits in a widow’s parlor narrating this story. The parlor is where society women come to gossip during the daytime, with talk of theosophy and the salacious Tennie Claflin, a most liberal woman of her era. During the evenings, Tennie often breaks away from the parties with a gentleman of her choice and proves with her sexual escapades just how liberal she is. Aware of the bull’s sentience, they become acquainted. Woods makes this more than it might’ve been if set in our modern day. A quaintly perfect little tale that I recommend.

Leslie What’s “#1″ concerns Mindy, her dying mother, and her half-sister, Clarissa, whom Mindy barely knows. Clarissa has a young daughter who needs a kidney transplant, but Mindy refuses to help for completely selfish reasons. Despite that, I somehow liked Mindy. She has spunk. This is well written, but except for Mindy’s PowerWalk shoes that make her move quicker than she normally would, I couldn’t find a speculative element. This is a fairly good mainstream story that almost worked; it’s just missing something in the dénouement to turn it into an unforgettable tale.

As is often her bailiwick, Lisa Mantchev mixes the mundane with the fantastic in “Perfect Tense.” Time travel is the speculative element here, as a woman is in conflict with an earlier version of herself on whether to have a baby or not. In less than 2,000 words, Mantchev employs multiple “scenes” (many a single sentence long) to show the time shifts from past to present, of conflict and indecision. With its fine, heartfelt conclusion, “Perfect Tense” works.

The last story of this issue is “Stepsister” by Melissa Mead. After her father dies, Myrtle and her sister, Annie, go and live with their new stepfather when her mother remarries to keep them out of the poorhouse. The mother’s plan is to marry her daughters off into gentry, but unfortunately there is a stepsister who steals all the boys’ attention. And then there’s a horrible fire. This well-written piece was a joy to read and a fine story to close out this issue.