Baum, American Book of the Dead (2009)

Henry Baum, The American Book of the Dead. Backword Books, 2009. Pp. 248. ISBN 978-0578026930. $13.95.

Reviewed by Don Campbell

A simple cover, featuring a series of stylized cartoonish scenes, white on black, belies a complex tale of humanity’s ability to be both rational and stark raving mad. Baum, who is at work on a follow up story set in the same universe, makes this novel available for free download, as well as on sale as a traditional hardcopy; it is more than worth the cost. The American Book of the Dead is an apocalyptic tale of an apocalypse that hasn’t happened, does happen, doesn’t happen or might happen.

Eugene Myers is a failed author who simply wants to leave a mark on the world. His career is going nowhere and his family is falling apart. His marriage is rocky at best, and he has discovered his daughter is doing Internet porn for extra cash. Things look bleak for his life when the dreams start. Dreams of faces, places, names and addresses. Dreams of real people, people he has never met. He begins chronicling the phenomena and the state of the world, only to watch as everything he writes begins to unfold. Is he making the future, or just seeing it?

Baum sets the novel’s beginning in a near, all too believable, future where violence is commonplace, almost expected and Internet porn is just something college kids do, because to them it’s not really a big deal. It is easily a world that could believably exist a very few short years from now. The novel presumes that humanity is slowly going mad, society devolving all over the world.

Enter President Winchell, his father, and his cabinet, who believe completely that it is their job to bring about the End Times. Winchell the elder has secret information, things that only top level government officials know and he divulges this information to Winchell the younger upon his son’s ascendency to the seat of President of the United States. Aliens exist and they wish to help us become a better society. There is no hell. Everyone who dies goes to a peaceful place, free of sadness, pain, and doubt. Everyone who dies goes there. It is knowledge that would make war obsolete, killing an enemy would be pointless.

Armed with this knowledge, Winchell the elder seeks to, as Eric Voegelin put it in The New Science of Politics in 1952, immanentize the eschaton, which is to bring about a final stage of heaven on earth. It is felt, however, that getting people to come together, unified as a species, is more than difficult. Too many cultural and religious boundaries exist. Winchell the elder seeks to break these concepts with a massive and devastating war. Billions will die, but he knows, he doesn’t just believe, he knows what will become of them afterward. For those that remain, life will be harder, but this hardship will force a social evolution as nothing else possibly could.

Winchell the younger, however, seems to wholly miss the point of there being no “correct” religion and sets about the task as more of a religious crusade. At first he sees himself in the role of a necessary Anti-Christ and then, later, decides that he may be the actual Messiah. His father supports this delusion at first for he feels it is necessary to get the American people to back what seems to be an insane war, but comes to realize his son has his own personal agenda.

Written in a self-aware, sometimes humorous style, Baum portrays protagonist Myers as a genuine human being, filled with the sort of traits we all share, even the ones we don’t always want others to see and never give voice to. His constant discomfort at his role as either author or prophet of the apocalypse feels genuine; his desire to not have the constant responsibility is understandable. The reader finds Myers easy to identify with and therefore his actions, whatever they may be, seem reasonable.

On the flip side of this is the almost cartoonish demagoguery and naiveté of President Winchell. It is unclear whether Baum intends him to be a parody of former President George W. Bush, but it certainly feels that way. It is difficult to tell whether the man is insane, stupid, or both. He is easy to hate but also easy to pity. He truly believes in what he is doing, but is unwilling to accept all of the information his father provides him. Like any good zealot he cherry picks what parts of the truth to believe in and twists each revelation with his own personal interpretation based on his preexisting beliefs. He is the closest thing the piece has to a true villain, and though he may be completely mad, unlike predecessors such as Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or Mr. Burns he may actually be the closest any one madman has been to correct. His father, who approaches the whole situation with a more logical, less narrow minded view, pulls all the strings perfectly right up until it is time to bring the survivors together, at which point the puppet decides to assert its own will. When President Winchell meets his eventual fate, it is easy to, if not sympathize with, then at least pity him.

At the core, the novel is a story about mankind and the need for change. Myers wishes to change his life, his world, and begins the novel in effort to vent this desire for change. Though things seem bleak, the novel manages to hold on to a certain hope in the intrinsic goodness of people, but also seems to feel that without a some catastrophic event forcing total social reevaluation, the human race is ultimately going to continue to degrade. While the Winchells’ plan for war may be unfathomably destructive, even Myers is unsure whether or not it is needed. As casualties mount, first thousands, then millions, and ultimately billions, the cost in lives forces the remaining few to reassess social priorities in a way that it seems little else could.

I don’t mean to say that I agree that an apocalyptic war is the only way to bring about change but… well maybe I do. Policies, however well meaning, will be resisted. Politics are a constant battle between left and right and I don’t think it matters what side of that line you may fall on, we can all probably agree that government may have lost any real interest in governing and is instead more interested in playing a game of thrones. Religion has ever been a huge dividing line, the words of one prophet or another fought over as it has been for centuries and likely will be for centuries to come. Cultures will always try to preserve themselves, which isn’t a bad thing by any means, but it does leave one to wonder if it isn’t just another way we separate ourselves from one another. “Separate but equal” sounds good in theory, but even while many are perfectly fine with it (I count myself among that number), there are just as many who regard that separation with suspicion. While you may define this as largely just the ignorance of the uneducated (as I do) it is difficult to come up with any real piece of social engineering that could break through that ignorance.

This is where the war comes in. Keep in mind that the ideas here come with the caveat that it is known utterly and without question that the survivors will reach a new stage of enlightenment due to their shared experiences and those that fall will absolutely go to “heaven”. Operating with that as a known set of parameters, can I at least see the argument that the war is a valid means of social change? Sure. Even the protagonist Myers wishes there were another way, but seems to accept that there may not be. If the power were put into his hands to try a different route, would he take it? Absolutely. That does not mean, however, that it is impossible to accept the apocalypse war as a means to an end.

The ground covered in the novel is not particularly new. Plenty of apocalyptic novels have covered it before. 1949’s Earth Abides, in which humanity is all but wiped out by an unknown virus and must be rebuilt, focusing specifically on one man as an architect of a new society explored it. 1977’s Lucifier’s Hammer in which a massive comet slams into the Earth, reshaping the landscape, burning away or drowning much of the life on the planet, causes the priorities in the lives of the survivors to be completely rethought. Even in Cormac McCarthy’s unbelievably bleak novel The Road, The Boy has been raised in a burnt and ashen wasteland, filled with every manner of human horror imagineable, but has been instilled with and clings to a very palpable sense of right and wrong. We wonder sometimes if The Man is doing the right thing by sheltering The Boy in this way, if he is not in fact teaching The Boy to be weak in an age meant only for the strong, but The Boy seems strong with conviction, even bending his father under the weight of it. The Boy represents an ideal that persists even in the face of overwhelming misery and violence.

Even in stories where a full-on apocalypse is not on the setlist, there plays a similar song. Theodore Sturgeon’s short story “Unite and Conquer”, published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1948 has mankind uniting against an engineered alien threat. This would later become the basic plot of the Outer Limits original series episode “The Architects of Fear” starring the late Robert Culp which in turn would inspire comic book creator Alan Moore to write the now classic Watchmen graphic novel (in the film version you can actually see the Outer Limits episode playing on one of Ozymandius’ monitors).

It would seem that many writers agree that a paradigm shift of this magnitude would require an equally massive catalyst. The subject matter has been covered again and again. Baum does manage to put a rather pleasant new twist in the tale but in the end it’s the same lesson we’ve been trying to teach for who knows how long. Race, religion, culture, or country we are all humans and have, at our core, the same strengths and weaknesses. The lesson always seems to be that we should try to leave behind this focus on our differences, and instead concern ourselves with the similarities. It’s a lesson taught in many different ways, but it’s always the same lesson. It’s a pity it’s one we seem to have so much trouble actually learning.

Like two great men once said: Be excellent to each other, and party on, dudes.

Download this e-book from Feedbooks
Buy this item from Amazon.com
Buy this item from Amazon.co.uk

Whitten, Confessions of a Zombie Lover (2011)

Zoe E. Whitten, Confessions of a Zombie Lover. Aphotic Thought Press, 2011. 27,000 words. ASIN B004SIR300. $1.99.

Reviewed by Don Campbell

I was initially wary about this book; for one thing, I was coming to the second book of a larger story without having read the first, which is something I never like to do. For another, the cover art did not thrill me. Oh, the image itself was fine, and it conveyed the contents well enough, but it lacked a certain polish. Ms. Whitten is largely self published so of course high-end professional cover art can be hard to come by. So while I was wary, I don’t read a book for its cover, I read it for its content and the somewhat amateurish art on the cover belies the very professional and well-written work inside. This is definitely a case of “you can’t judge an eBook by its cover image.”

Ms. Whitten’s second “Zombie Era” novella finds Eugene “G” O’Donnell two years out from his experiences in the first story, Zombie Punter, where he learns that the zombie apocalypse he and his friend Jake have been planning for isn’t exactly what he expected. The truth is, the walking dead’s minds may be down, but they’re not out. “G” has roamed the countryside looking for his best friend and “adopted daughter”—a zombie girl he’s helped—for those two years, ending up in a military installation where he once again begins his work trying to solve the problem of the epidemic. G has found a way to “heal” the infected zombies, training them off raw flesh and bringing their minds up out of the stupor of undeath.

Like many of the new zombie stories being written, Ms. Whitten’s focus is on the subject of human rights and the idea of creating a second class citizenry out of people who find themselves in a lifestyle they did not necessarily choose. Gay rights is a prevalent issue, with G being a homosexual and working in conjunction with the military. It is a situation full of tension, sometimes only imagined tension, which is nice. G has become, over the years, somewhat defensive about his sexual tendencies and it’s interesting when he sees a problem where none exists. It’s also fairly interesting to see the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy discussed as we may be finally seeing it thrown out for real.

The message is at times a tad heavy-handed, but it’s one that bears stressing and Ms. Whitten’s personal feelings about it certainly come to the fore. G himself knows what it is to deal with a world that sees you as something less than human and worries that he may be dooming the “healed” to a lifetime of actually being so. He also knows that without his work, humanity may very well have no hope of survival. In a world where any death that occurs brings a mindless killer into our midst, something must be done. Even in areas where people feel safe, all it takes is one elderly grandmother dying in her sleep to set off a chain reaction of death that could burn out of control if left unchecked.

Not having read Zombie Punter, I’m not entirely sure of the origins of Ms. Whitten’s zombification virus. I do know it was purposely engineered and let loose by terrorists of some sort, but truthfully I don’t know who or why. What I do know is that everyone is infected. Every man, woman, and child. You do not have to be bitten; there is no escape. When you die, by whatever means, you turn. One supposes this would bring about a certain culture of death, though Ms. Whitten does not detail it very much. Death-watches over elderly relatives or “safety” killings in which someone who is about to die is killed with some sort of cranial trauma would presumably become common even in non-military communities. One can imagine these sorts of events taking on sacred tones and entering the zeitgeist in much the same way as a funeral.

Of course, the whole point to “healing” the undead is not only to gentle them, but to use them to help control others of their kind that have yet to be healed. They have certain abilities of command over lesser undead and this is the rub of the story’s message. Will they be relegated to being not much more than appliances? Convenient tools to stock every house with so that if grandma does die, there’s an early warning and prevention system in place to wrangle her old bones before she messily devours the family dog.

I’m sad to say I’m not as familiar with Whitten’s other works, but the story moves well, taking little time to get where it needs to be quickly and, best of all, succinctly. Coming in at just around 50,000 words, she uses them all wisely, wasting none on anything unnecessary and referring back to the first story just enough to keep a reader who has missed it informed of character motivations and instilling a desire to play catch-up on this world.

As we find less and less reason to reduce whole sections of our population to that status of second class citizens, we seem to need to find more and more reason to not do so in the first place. There are always explanations that seem, to the general populace, to make sense at the time. This has held true in every civil rights movement ever born, and Ms. Whitten’s zombies are little different. Their danger can be offset, their ferocity mitigated. If their threat can be reduced, isn’t that better than outright slaughter? Do we have the right to reduce them to utensils if their brains can function on a higher level even if it is the means by which we may secure the safety of the human race? Difficult questions, difficult answers.

The story attempts to answer these questions, though I admit to having issues with the method by which G meets his particular fate. For me, it felt as though it undermined the story’s overall message. I do concede it nicely sets up another story set in the same world, which is something to look forward to, but in a story trying so hard to take a positive stance on gay rights and frown upon the concept of second class citizenry, one has to wonder if G’s fate was the best choice. It was certainly interesting from a storytelling standpoint, but from the viewpoint of the sociopolitical stance the story tries to take, I’m not sure it was the best way to go.

Nevertheless, that’s merely my opinion. There’s no doubting the skill and crafting that went into the story itself. One supposes a new installment in the series could help shed light on whether the ending was worth the setback to the message or not. I look forward to it either way.

Buy this e-book from Smashwords

Polson, Loathsome, Dark and Deep (2010)

Aaron Polson, Loathsome, Dark and Deep. Belfire Press, 2010. Pp. 204. ISBN 9781926912141. $11.99 print / $3.99 e-book.

Reviewed by Don Campbell

Henry Barlow fought in the Civil War. His wife met her end as the victim of a vicious murder. He hasn’t touched a pistol or a rifle since and has crawled deep into a bottle of bourbon and when we meet him is hiding out at the only brothel in Ecola, Oregon. There, he receives orders from his employer, H & P Lumber, who want him to travel up the Lewis River and investigate why their camp there has gone suddenly silent. With his colleague, the nervous and meek Otto Olson, and a small group of hired men, Henry makes his way up the river toward the silent lumber camp only to find a situation worse than anyone could have imagined.

Loathsome, Dark and Deep is Aaron Polson’s third book and second novel and his first published through Belfire Press, a small house established in 2009 and primarily interested in cross-genre titles. The cover evokes a feeling of being lost in the forest, the trees closing in, a feeling I am personally all too familiar with. Even readers who have not wandered aimlessly through an endless labyrinth of trees for hours on end searching for a way back to civilization may find it to be effective in conveying a sense of isolation at the very least.

The title of this novel is a subverted reference to Robert Frost’s poem ‘Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening’; where Frost speaks of the woods as “lovely, dark and deep”, here we are given an alliterative opposite. Polson weaves a solid narrative using aspects of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the basis for the film Apocalypse Now, giving it a dark horror, somewhat steampunk and certainly more American spin. Lumber was far more important in America post-civil war than ivory would ever be. Barlow finds Curt’s camp devastated by greed and ambition, men twisted by Curt’s vision and the work of Curt’s second in command, Dr. Scheller, an engineer and inventor.

This is a relatively easy read that is hampered only, in my opinion, by too much focus on Barlow’s reminisces and not enough on the situation at hand. Edmund Curt himself appears only briefly and Dr. Scheller almost not at all, and one feels there were opportunities missed for some far more grandiose villain scenes than are presented. Our visitation with The Colonel, a man so driven by religious fervor as to be dangerous, is also all too brief. Chalk it up to the first person narrative, but I felt the scope of the story could have been larger, focusing as it does almost solely upon Barlow. That said, however, Polson’s writing itself is quite good, his descriptions vivid. When Barlow meets his colleague, Olson, he states, “Otto Olson had a face that looked like a thin strip had been sliced out of the middle and the remaining halves shoved back together.” A fantastic image deftly composed and indicative of the rest of the story’s style.

Whether Polson meant it to be explicit or not, the book paints a grim picture of technology during the infancy of the Industrial Revolution. It does not necessarily condemn the technology itself outright, but certainly highlights man’s ability to twist it towards dark purposes. Scheller’s devices and machines that begin as a means to make logging more efficient, evolve into engines of horror that almost literally strip the men at the camp of their souls. Even before the team reach the camp, alluding to his past in the Civil War, Barlow states, “By the end of the day, I would once again be under those trees, but this time marked for life and waiting to die in a hell made with the machines of war.”

Man’s inhumanity to man is not new territory for a writer to cover, but Polson does the job well enough. Barlow’s struggle to maintain a semblance of sanity when everything around him is going to hell and Otto Olson’s eventual growth from lily-livered craven to a man with a bit of sand in him are juxtaposed against characters who have fallen so far down the well they can no longer see the daylight. The frontier was a brutal place full of brutal men and many found it difficult to hold onto their values or far too easy simply to try and create new ones. With virtually no law or government comes opportunity to create what one will out of what one has, be it an edifice to horror or a utopian playland. Unfortunately it all too often begins as the latter and rapidly spirals into the former.

Perhaps it was Barlow’s former tragedies that help him move through this landscape of insanity without losing too much of himself. He wears the scars of his past on his face in both a literal and figurative sense and perhaps the parts of him he had thought lost to those events were not so much gone as forgotten. His decisions are certainly informed by a core of, if not morality, then at least a well developed sense of right and wrong. Ethical certainty in the face of moral ambiguity can be difficult at best. Stripped of consequences, more than one person has found it difficult to distinguish the left-hand path from the right-hand path.

Loathsome, Dark and Deep treads a path well worn by books that have come before, but it is a path of adventure and excitement nonetheless. Those looking for more gratuitously visceral fare under a horror label may be slightly disappointed, but if it’s a dark adventure with a strong protagonist you’re looking for, this novel delivers. Reminiscent of, if somewhat less graphic than, early Jack Ketchum (specifically Ketchum’s first novel, the Sawney Bean-inspired Off Season), Loathsome, Dark and Deep is a good piece of historical horror set against the backdrop of the forest, dark and deep.

Purchase this book from Belfire Press
Buy this item from Amazon.com
Buy this item from Amazon.co.uk

Gates/Holt, Rigor Amortis (2010)

Jaym Gates and Erika Holt (eds.), Rigor Amortis. Absolute XPress, 2010. Pp. 148. ISBN 9781894817837. $14.95 print / $2.99 e-book.

Reviewed by Don Campbell

Sex and Death; do any two things more preoccupy the human condition? Sex makes us feel alive, it is instrumental in the creation of life itself. Death is our only certainty, our inevitable decay is only a matter of time and our control over it is miniscule at best. Perhaps we get to pick the where, when and how, but we never get a choice about the if.

In Rigor Amortis we have a book that is not really about sex and death. It’s more about sex and undeath. That crawling hunger we all feel replaced by another kind entirely. The lengths we might go to out of lonely desperation or simply the grief of a lost love, those stories are here too. Sometimes it’s gray-green flesh meeting pink or perhaps some straight-up zombie on zombie action. These are stories of loss, experimentation, and control. Genitals grind, teeth scrape on bone, and sometimes it’s happening all at the same time as strips of flesh slough away or are torn off in a passionate frenzy.

The book began as a Twitter joke by Gates and some of the authors, a commentary on the oversaturation of zombie-related fiction on the market. It took on a life of its own and soon Holt brought the collection to the attention of Absolute XPress, a direct-to-reader publisher known for a focus on genre books. The trip from Twitter to “real book” was a surprisingly short one and an interesting example of how different modern technology has made the writer’s struggle. The book itself is in four sections labeled Romance, Revenge, Risk and Raunch, and coming in at only 134 pages, it is a short and sweet collection of flash fiction. Most of the stories found here are no more than a page or two long making them easily, ahem, digested in a single sitting.

The Romance section contains stories such as ‘Til Death Do Our Parts’ by Kaolin Imago Fire (14) in which a freshly turned couple are intent to spend what little remaining time they have together in fiery passion. It is only a couple of pages but one gets the sense of urgency they both feel at their quickly deteriorating state as simple things become more and more difficult. As well as ‘Surrender’ by Xander Briggs (22), a quick tale of a woman trapped in her home by the ravening hordes and the now nearly mindless man she loved having just enough of his self left in his rotted skull to come looking for her.

Revenge contains stories of a more sinister nature, like ‘Love, Love (And Chains) Will Keep Us Together’ by R. Schuyler Devin (37) in which a man’s dream girl comes literally bursting into his apartment, infected and insane, and he does the only reasonable thing he can think of, hold her prisoner and use her as a squirming sex doll. The Revenge section contains the most examples of the human being the aggressor rather than the victim, and in the case of ‘Syd’s Turn’ by R. E. VanNewkirk (58), a powder procured from a local bokor leads to a new type of BDSM play in which a young couple take turns zombifying each other into sexual submission. Incensed over his treatment during his last zombification, the titular Syd takes his turn at being master too far for too long. As the rotting flesh sloughs off of his beloved it is then that you get the true horror of the situation, and it is a story about how sometimes when we give power over ourselves to others, we may find that they abuse it beyond return.

Risk is the section for experimentation, the section in which Michael Phillips dreams of surrendering to the zombie apocalypse in his prose poem ‘Waking Up Someone Who Isn’t Me’ (77). It is a place where a “Z-curious” girl can make a Craigslist hookup with the undead girl of her dreams (no maggots please) in Sarah Goslee’s ‘My Summer Romance’ (81). From one perspective it could be seen as the tale of a doomed romance, from another it is a cautionary yarn about the dangers of online predators. It is a tale of misguided exploration and restraint that ends as all summer romances must, in horrible bloodshed.

The final section, Raunch, is what its name implies. If you haven’t gotten your fill of squelching zombie genitalia by this point, this is the section for you. Your first stop is an undead sex club for a little gangbang action (don’t forget your penis!) in ‘Urbanites’ by Pete “Patch” Alberti (99). Afterward, make a stop in the restroom to tidy yourself up and maybe have a chance encounter with a beautiful stranger in V. R. Roadifer’s ‘Honey’ (109). We end the section and the anthology with ‘Cloudy With a Chance of Zombie Orgasm’ by Annette Dupree (119). It is a bizarre if somewhat clumsily titled piece about a sexually frustrated gun nut of a girl who finally finds the satisfaction she’s so longed for when an army of zombie lesbians show up at her doorstep wielding the ultimate love toys.

I’m just going to come right out and say it, I loved Rigor Amortis. Beginning to end and front to back. I have absolutely nothing really negative to say about it. The worst that can be said is that it is a book of zombie erotica, which has a certain squick factor that is certainly not for the squeamish, but it is well written squick for all of that.

It’s not just about sex and death, of course, but also about our relationships. It is about a longing to be together beyond the veil and how, given the opportunity, we can be overly cruel even to the ones we love. Especially to the ones we love. Our capacity to love is great, but our capacity to take advantage of even the most deleterious of situations can occlude it easily when we are put into a situation where the old rules no longer apply and the new rules barely exist if at all. Sometimes love is beautiful and sometimes it is rancid and festering and full of pain, but we hold onto it anyway. If these are the sort of stories that interest you, you could do far, far worse than this little anthology.

Buy this item from Absolute XPress
Buy this item from Amazon.com
Buy this item from Amazon.co.uk

Roberts (ed.), Zero Gravity (2010)

Alva J. Roberts (ed.), Zero Gravity: Adventures in Deep Space. PillHill Press, 2010. Pp. 266. ISBN 9781617060007. $16.99.

Reviewed by Don Campbell

Zero Gravity: Adventures in Deep Space is an anthology themed around stories firmly rooted in long term space exploration or in futures so advanced that space-faring ships have become the norm. Science vessels, space smugglers, and interstellar churches populate the book alongside alien beasts and creatures from beyond. Beyond the A.I. Singularity, beyond the edge of the solar system, sometimes beyond the light of the furthest stars, they are stories that deal with the future of humanity’s inevitable move to the stars with ideas rooted firmly in our social evolution, or lack thereof. The science in some stories may be farfetched, but how the characters deal with it is not. There will always be crime, there will always be fringe elements that live on the edge of social acceptability and even further, in the places others fear to tread. Human exploration has always been driven by a need to discover a better life, a place where one could live the life one wanted or a place where riches were abundant. Cities of gold, trade routes, lands of freedom. We are always looking for something better: there will always be those willing to take advantage of others if it means an easy score; always those who seek the precious freedom of living on their own terms, even when it means eking out a meager existence on the edge of survival.

The anthology opens with one of the latter, the story ‘Junker’s Fancy’ by Rosemary Jones (1), and it’s a strong opening, quickly pulling the reader into the far reaches of the solar system. It concerns a Junker—one of the space salvage operators who live most of their lives in their ships with minimal systems to extend time between dockings—named Jacie running across a major haul, a big government ship dead in the water. The only problem? One of the crew is still alive, but he doesn’t have long. What to do? Jones sets up her universe rather nicely in just the first few paragraphs so that when events start truly playing out, you feel at ease with the story. Every fantasy world has its own lexicon and hers is easy to grasp and understand quickly, helping drive the story telling forward rather than bogging it down in attempt to pepper her universe with flavor. Jacie is a character who lives most of her life alone in the far reaches, only docking to resupply. It’s an eremitical lifestyle and her unexpected passenger is a disruption, but is it a welcome one?

Also quite good was Kenneth Mark Hoover’s ‘To Stand Among Kings’ (88), which contains in its short span such a wealth of information about its particular universe that it is clear the author must have spent a significant amount of time creating races and political affiliations and seriously considering the evolution of society before beginning to write. This is a universe where the Church has split off so many times it has completely separated from Earth itself. The story is one of political intrigue and trade agreements, betrayal and wars fought over resources and the rights of an indigenous people. The ending was a bit weak, but the journey to that end was, as it always should be, pleasantly satisfying.

‘Tangwen’s Last Heist’ by C.B. Calsing (146) was a story that at first felt a little flat; it started out a bit too generic for my taste but managed to rope me in as I read on. It is the story of a smuggler who gets in over her head trying to go legit, and it is quite possibly my favorite of the book. Tangwen’s contract target turns out to be a little more heavily connected than even her client expects and a snap decision at a critical moment puts her into even hotter water than she had been in before. A bad situation for a girl simply trying to retire. Faced with an impossible situation, Tangwen attempts to do the right thing, only to be met with political corruption that seeks only to punish rather than listen.

All in all there are no singularly bad stories in the collection, but some are flawed. Some are perfectly good except for certain passages which feel weak or rushed. Others simply never quite live up to their subject material, such as Will Morton’s ‘Glacier Castle’ (188), which had some of the least credible dialogue in the book and was generally a mess. ‘Glacier Castle’ is the tale of a wrecked colony ship, woefully off course and stranded on a bitterly cold and inhospitable ice planet. In an effort to keep up morale while the ship’s crew effects repairs, it is decided that those not otherwise occupied would use the building equipment at hand to construct a great ice palace. The dialogue is clunky in places, the timeline difficult to follow. There are moments when I’m not sure how much time has passed or who exactly certain characters are. There is invented slang that never gets defined enough to make it feel natural. It is not a bad story on the whole but felt as though it needed another pass or two by the author to be ready for publication.

As a whole, Zero Gravity is full of stories that seem to understand that humanity is no longer physically evolving in the original sense. We no longer worry about those genetic markers that in the past made a mate unacceptable. Today we evolve through social interaction and technology and this will most likely still be the case as we hurl ourselves outward beyond the stars. On the perimeter of the universe it will be our technology and our ability to co-habitat with our fellows that will serve us and I feel this collection gets that right. It is just plain good reading that should easily please any fan of deep space fiction. It is light, good for afternoons on the porch or, if you’re like me, a quick story to relax a bit before bed.

Buy this item from Amazon.com
Buy this item from Amazon.co.uk