Lone Star Stories #26

Lone Star Stories is a bimonthly webzine which offers three pieces of fiction and three of poetry. That it has lasted for 26 issues (now 27) speaks well of its endurance and consistency. This issue opens with a short story—almost flash fiction—titled “The Stamp” by Terry Bisson. It’s deliberately simply written and tells the tale of young brothers Orville and Wilbur. One sibling buys a magazine of wonderful speculative fiction for the other, reasoning that it is well-suited to his brother’s tendency to dream. The other, wondering what gift to offer in return, finds in the magazine an offer for some collectible stamps. But these aren’t any ordinary stamps—they are future stamps. From these two simple gifts, destiny unfolds. “The Stamp” is a warm and joyful story that perfectly captures the youthful innocence and self-assurance of its characters.

Following “The Stamp” is the similarly heart-warming “The Hero of Ward 6″ by Sandra McDonald. It’s an unusual take on the idea of superheroes, setting them as keepers of civic peace and order in small areas of a sprawling city—more like neighbourhood bobbies than your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man. Ward 6 is the name and zone designated to the hero who occupies Jack’s body; Jack is quite literally an ordinary man by day and a hero by night. As the story begins, Jack and his lover, Simon (the regular human persona hosting the Sidekick Kid), are among the most loved and efficient heroes in the city—except, it seems, at Hero Hall itself. Jack himself has also stopped talking to Ward 6, seemingly because of denial or bitterness at Hero Hall’s attitude towards Jack’s homosexuality. This state of affairs slowly begins to change as Jack and Ward 6 are drawn into the business of a rundown neighbouring ward and its similarly rundown hero. “The Hero of Ward 6″ is a beautiful story of acceptance, forgiveness, and comradeship, grounding its fantastic conceit in the mundane everyday without becoming saccharine or overly sentimental. It’s not perfect—at least one plot strand that gets tidied up is knotted with a deus ex machina—but it surely cannot fail to put a smile on your face.

Worlds away from this warmth and hopefulness is Jeremy Adam Smith’s wonderful “The Wreck of the Grampus.” Its roots lie in a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, but familiarity with this is not essential to enjoy this tale of struggle against isolation and of the bonds of friendship. The story begins with the construction of the android Pym—built to form a bond and point of contact between the Neptunian Cognizance, a collective group-mind of robots and androids, and the human family who have moved to their planet. Pym quickly forms close relationships with the family, particularly the boy, Augustus. It emerges that though his father has fled the company of humanity out of disgust and despair at their ignoble acceptance of chance and meaningless fate, Augustus is simply lonely and bored, dissatisfied with Neptune and the life he feels trapped inside. In attempting to understand Augustus and his family, Pym comes to realise that he too is dissatisfied with the stratification and lack of change in Cognizant society (itself ably represented by the figures of Sisyphus and Prometheus, here presented as robots ceaselessly enduring inexplicable tasks).

“The Wreck of the Grampus” is a lengthy tale, perhaps 20,000 words, and every part of it is a pleasure to read. It presents wonder in its Neptunian coldness and shares valuable, if small, nuggets of warmth between its isolated, frustrated characters. Pym, the tale’s first-person protagonist, grows greatly over the story’s course, becoming both more human and more android as he develops (androids are no mere sub-humans, here; the trope of humanity’s traditional strength versus its creations is undermined by the revelation that the most developed androids possess a greater emotional range than any human). Neptune is similarly well-realised, populated with the mechanical society of the Cognizance and gloriously pulpish megafauna. Smith also ably captures an image of a decadent, declining humanity. I highly recommend this story.

Samantha Henderson’s “Hungry: Some Ghost Stories” is included under the poetry header but is instead a related clutch of vignettes that explore the meaning of ghosts to the living: what they mean to us and why we create them. Each vignette explores a different type of ghost and asks the reader a related question. These pieces are vivid and gently unsettling.

Deborah P. Kolodji’s “Animal Rescue” is a short and simple poem that imagines animalkind removed from Earth and placed on another planet where they will be safe from humanity’s depredations. I didn’t find this poem particularly affecting; whilst it makes clear that the loss of a species of animal is our loss, too, and emphasises the threat we pose to our fellow Terrans, it is neither startling nor profound.

More exciting is “Autopoiesis” by Sonya Taaffe, a poem about poetry. It’s more interesting than this sounds, as it argues that the strength and vibrancy of poetry stems not from “visionaries and sullen eremites” but from the constantly changing and endlessly complex world that we live in. Poetry writes itself.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Lone Star Stories #26 and found much in it to celebrate; Jeremy Adam Smith’s contribution in particular will linger in my mind. Although this was my first encounter with Lone Star Stories, it will not be my last.