Simon Bestwick, A Different Kind of Light. Black Shuck Books, 2021. Pp. 167. ISBN 978-1-913038-61-8. £7.99.
Reviewed by Rachel Verkade
If you are at all familiar with automobile racing, you will likely have heard of the Le Mans disaster, considered the worst catastrophe in the history of the sport. On the 11th of June 1955 during the 24 Hours of Le Mans race, driver Pierre Levegh rear-ended the car of fellow competitor, Lance Macklin. Levegh’s Mercedes-Benz flew into the air, over the bern, and smashed into pieces upon hitting the ground. The flaming debris flew into the packed grandstands, killing 84 people and injuring 120 more. The accident resulted in ground-breaking safety measures in the sport, and in Mercedes-Benz withdrawing from racing for the next 34 years. Newsreel footage exists showing both the crash itself and its aftermath, but much of it was too graphic to be released. Considering the available footage includes images of gendarmes extinguishing flames on Levegh’s smouldering corpse, one can only imagine how horrific the lost films might be.
It is upon this framework that Simon Bestwick’s A Different Kind of Light is built.
Montréal resident Su J. Sokol’s novel Zee follows the life of a girl named Zee from birth to young adulthood as she struggles to deal with her talent for ESP. Sokol’s book delves into the feelings and the experiences of the title protagonist, as well as the four adults who care about her. Zee is not the author’s first published work; in addition to several short stories, Sokol has also penned two other novels, Cycling to Asylum, which has been optioned for development into a feature-length film, and Run J Run, published in 2019 by Renaissance Press. Zee’s publisher, Mouton noir Acadie, is an imprint of New Brunswick-based Bouton d’or Acadie Publishing. Bouton d’or Acadie declares “inclusion, accessibility and diversity” to be core values. Zee aligns well with these those ideals, featuring racial diversity among its key characters, and depicting queer relationships in a positive and matter-of-fact light.
Apex, one of the champion racehorses of the SFF promag world, has been out to pasture for a couple of years, and many of us have been eagerly awaiting its return to see if it’s still a winner or if it’s lost that spark. (Yes, I have discovered metaphors. No, I will not apologize.) Well, I was in the press box, and I’m happy to report: Apex has still got it.
Rebecca Roanhorse’s novel Black Sun is an epic fantasy drawing on the pre-Columbian cultures of the Americas for its world-building, social structures, mythos, and terminology. Like other fantasies that draw on history at a slant, it makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar. It is a true masterpiece of suspense and storytelling, and is simply the best new novel I’ve read in ages. Roanhorse structures the story in shifting times, and across several characters, leading up to the Winter Solstice and a celestial convergence leading to a solar eclipse that creates the titular Black Sun. The story moves forwards, backwards, and forwards again to illuminate what various characters know and when they know it, and providing new readings for different characters. If this novel were a film we would think of it as an homage to Tarantino; in the context of this story, in which scenes are placed against quoted texts, it is more like if Frank Herbert’s Dune series had dialed the anti-imperialist message all the way up.
For those who are tired of books and movies about hapless princesses who sit on their hands and wait for a prince to rescue them, K. Eason’s space opera How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse provides a welcome breath of fresh air. Released in 2019, the novel serves as book one of the Thorne Chronicles. Book two, titled How the Multiverse Got Its Revenge, appeared in 2020.
When I was thirteen, one of my favourite video games was Shadows of Darkness, the fourth entry in the Quest for Glory series. It was my introduction to Slavic folklore. Creatures like the rusalka, the leshy, the domovoi, and Baba Yaga featured prominently, and were a revelation to a Canadian girl who barely knew what Cyrillic looked like. An entire new mythology to explore, and one I was delighted to revisit in Eurasian Monsters.
Luna Station Quarterly, which has been in operation for just over a decade, has as its mission “to display the vast and varied talents of women-identified speculative fiction writers.” Issue 41 of the Quarterly, published in March 2020, includes 15 stories, with a roughly even split between fantasy and science fiction.
Nick Bones Underground is a slipstream novel, combining elements of Science Fiction, Urban Fantasy, and the Crime/Detection genre. It is set in a vague time frame, given that at least one of the characters is a Holocaust survivor, albeit a very old one, and computer technology has advanced into the realm of Artificial Intelligence, which impacts the daily life of the narrator-protagonist, Nicholas Friedman, a professor of Comparative Religions at a university in New York City. Life in the city has been inflected by something which is referred to as the “Great Debacle,” which is never completely explained or defined except at one point as having had to do with computers’ developing a degree of free will and acting in unpredictable ways. The most evident example of this cybernetic behavior comes in the form of Maggie, the A.I. in the apartment of the narrator, who, having become a transgender computer, now yearns to become an incarnation of Marlene Dietrich.
Among the token magazines I’ve always been fond of Mythaxis. It’s one of the longest-running token magazines, running since 2008, and its current editor, Andrew Leon Hudson, impresses me with his keen editorial sense and down-to-earth attitude. But the proof is in the proverbial pudding, so let’s make like Paul Hollywood and take a slice. The genres are an enjoyable mix of adventure SFF and mild horror, and the stories themselves… well, it’s a mixed bag. Like most layered desserts, there are bits that I found delicious and bits that weren’t to my taste.
Gross Ideas is a book unlike many others, for a number of reasons. First of all it is the companion publication of an architecture exhibition, the Oslo Architecture Triennale. But rather than a traditional catalogue it is an anthology of seventeen stories about future cities. The other peculiarity is that only some of the authors of these stories are fiction writers, the others are architects and engineers. So, if you like the challenge of something unusual, this book might be the right one for you.