Strange Horizons, April 2008

“In Ashes” by Helen Keeble, one of the April, 2008, Strange Horizons fiction offerings, is set in the same world as her previous Strange Horizons story, “In Stone,” a world of elemental magic that comes at a high price. Jessa and her brother, Jennet, live with their mother in a small house where Jennet is kept away from the fire that fascinates him and is forced to bathe in the freezing stream every day. Jessa does not understand this cruelty until raiders set fire to her father’s house, and her brother’s affinity with fire is the only thing saves their family. The next morning, the Fourth Fire Division arrives to take Jennet, as mandated by the State, for service in the army.

The moral complications of the elemental power make Keeble’s world a particularly interesting one. Jennet’s mother did not hide him from a fun life of shooting fireballs and receiving fame and awe; she tried to save him from becoming like Fuel, the fire elementalist with Fourth Fire Division:

I saw the other side of her face: black, soot-covered bone; black, empty socket; white, grinning teeth.…”Am Fuel, brother. Know you.” She unwrapped one arm from around her bearer’s neck—a blackened arm, burnt down to twisted scraps of flesh, though her other was whole, perfect—and held out a skeletal hand to my brother. “Come now.”

Fire Elementalists do not last long. And Keeble does not shy away from this unpleasant fact; her story’s ending offers no one an easy solution. Recommended.

Chris Szego offers a gentler story with “Valiant on the Wing.” A family of seven young people take in a girl found wandering, near-dead, on the mountain. As time passes, she becomes a part of the family. Like the markle bird, often called valiant-on-the-wing, she is lucky for them. She helps them heal. And woven into the story of the family’s healing is a commentary on the difficulties of life as a Princess. Szego most appositely conveys this in Letty’s remarks about her hair:

“In fact, it was the first time I ever wore my hair up, like a grown woman.…My nanny had to twist the combs in tight to keep it all together. They pulled so hard I thought they’d rip out every strand….And that painful prickling stretch just went on. It even hurt afterwards, when I took it down, as if my hair was a muscle that had been worked too hard.”

Dangers at court after the death of her father, the King, drove Letty into hiding, and with the family of seven she finds genuine happiness herding goats and washing dishes among people who grow to love her. Of course, her respite cannot last. Though the story treads no new ground, Szego writes his characters with a sensitivity that makes them real and sympathetic; the family of seven are troubled but not melodramatically so, and Letty is not just a little brat who didn’t get the right pony. “Valiant on the Wing” is a touching story.

The two-parter, “Five Good Things About Meghan Sheedy” by A. M. Dellamonica, is set in a future where the squid-like Kabu, an alien race, have settled on Earth alongside humans. Civil war has been raging for decades between the Democratic Army, supported by the Kabu, and the Friends of Liberation—called Fiends by their opponents—who want to evict every offworlder from the planet. Childhood friends Dinah and Meghan are trying to raise their children in the conflicted city of Seattle, but as the city becomes more of a war ground, their friendship grows increasingly strained.

Dellamonica avoids the trap of making one side clearly good and the other clearly evil, giving both sympathetic and unsavoury aspects. The Kabu, with their touching that invades personal space, are not an entirely pleasant race, and their administration on Earth is not always fair:

“He wants to prove someone within the Kabu Consultancy abducted his brother.”

This was, in all likelihood, the truth. “So he’ll go on the Watch List, the Fiends will approach him, and they’ll all get busted and dusted?”

“I thought he would let me help him.” Chamon rolled a tentacle over her shoulders, lashing the floor helplessly. “Stubborn, like all humans, swimming upstream…”

They are also the originators of the destructive dust bombs. It is understandable that a lot of people would not want them on Earth. However, the Fiends are suspected of having offworld dealings despite their condemnation of offworlders, and they use dust bombs against civilians; they are not good either. This complexity makes the war feel as real as any of ours.

The story is about Dinah’s actions following the Fiendish dust-bombing of a school. This focus on the personal level complements the complexity of the war by showing that its impact on the individual is not straightforward either. However, we do not realise what the story’s plot is until the end of the second half, which leaves the first half (and much of the second) as setup for something unknown. Upon a re-read, little asides fell into place, but the first read through felt almost directionless. Considering the situation in which Dinah is placed at the end, showing some of her thoughts leading up to it—rather than simply saying that she’s trying to hide something from Meghan and Chamon—could have better brought out how difficult it is to balance between the two sides of the war. I also felt that the plot element which provides a key item for Dinah in her negotiations was a little too convenient, her intentions not being apparent. Overall, “Five Good Things About Meghan Sheedy” is good, but not as good as it perhaps could have been.