Archive for the ‘J.C. Davis’ Category
Bastion Science Fiction Magazine, issue 6
Published September 2014
where I got it: received review copy from the Editor (thanks!)
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This was a very satisfying, yet difficult issue to get through. Let me unpack that a little, because it sounds a little mean, and I meant it to be the opposite. this isn’t a very long issue, so I’d planned to binge read the entire thing in one or two sittings. The stories in issue 6 focus around death and memories, risk and responsibility, things we all have to deal with but are terrified to talk about. After a couple of stories I needed to take a break and read or watch something happy. But it was really hard to take a break, because the stories all start with a great hook! When fiction can affect you like that, this is a good thing.
The issue opens with an emotional bang, with John Herman’s “Pancakes”, in which Charlie is given one last chance to see his father. But is this simulacrum really his dad? It sure looks like his father, sounds like the old bastard too. If you had just a few minutes to talk to a parent who was barely there for you, someone you never got along with, what would you say? Is this the time to be thankful, to be gracious, to be honest, to say the things you never thought you’d have the chance to say? Charlie says them, and leaves, and then his father finishes the conversation without him.
We then move into the very dark “The Long, Slow War”, by Stephanie Herman, a far future science fiction story that takes place at a human colony on a distant planet. I enjoyed how the world building was done in this one, with Herman throwing the reader into the deep end at first, not quite explaining the sky split in half, or these aliens that will kill us if we so much as look at them wrong. The aliens taunt us, and our only weapon is apathy, it’s a futuristic expression of “if you ignore the person teasing you, they’ll get bored and leave you alone”. It’s time for the treaty to be renewed and signed by both parties, and on the human side of the Embassy is a wall of photos of Ambassadors who didn’t survive the signing meeting. The story focuses around the current human ambassador and as the meeting gets closer, his anxiety rises like bile in the throat. There is a subtext here of the silent fury behind the pacifism the colonists swore they chose for themselves.
the Little Red Reviewer 
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