Apex Magazine Issue 135

I finished reading my first issue of Apex Magazine! It was the first issue of 2023, number 135. On the whole, I enjoyed it. Interestingly my favorite two stories were the classic fiction that were originally published elsewhere. Hopefully that won’t always be the case. Now on to my brief review of each story.

The Big Glass Box and the Boys Inside by Isabel J. Kim is one of those rare stories written in the second person, making you feel like the story is about you. You work as an intern downtown in a glass high rise for a global magical corporation. The longer you work there, the more your body transforms. If you decide to accept their offer of a permanent position at the end of the summer, your body will become completely transformed; you will no longer be human. But that’s okay, you have no intention of staying. But maybe that boy across the office may change things…. This is a well-told story exploring the deeper aspects of what we really want out of life. (My rating: 4/5)

In Carnival Ever After, Mari Ness tells a tale of a woman who has joins the carnival due to an unusual condition that her family just couldn’t accept. When someone comes to “save” her, she might not be interested in leaving the supporting arms of her new “family”. While this story is interesting, it treads on ground that feels already well covered without offering much new to say. (My rating: 3/5)

A chess game forms the outline of The Immortal Game by Lindz McLeod. But don’t worry if you don’t know anything about the game. The story works even if you don’t understand chess notation. It is the story of a seduction. But who is seducing who and to what end? This is a somewhat familiar story told in a novel way. (My rating: 4/5)

Daughter, Mother, Charcoal by Akis Linardos is a story of generational subservience, showing just how difficult it can be to change one’s circumstance. And it isn’t always the physical obstacles that get in the way. It can be our culture as well as our own resulting mental states that hold us back and why it can take generations to change. This story evokes the feelings of darkness and despair that go along with challenges of such circumstances. (My rating: 4/5)

There was just one story that really didn’t do it for me. It was The Wreck of the Medusa by Jordan Kurella. A young trans boy comes of age on a pirate ship. It might just be me or my environment when I read it, but this story felt all over the place. I wasn’t sure what was happening or even what the point was. It is a story of transformation and growing into yourself, but it just didn’t quite work for me. (My rating: 2/5)

The shortest story in the issue is Experimental Protocol for the Coronal Sectioning and Assessment of a Human Soul by Sagan Yee. It intertwines a quasi-medical document describing how to remove a soul with a dying person’s telling briefly of their life as they approach their own end. It is clinical, beautiful, and haunting all at the same time and only 800 words. (My rating: 4/5)

Walking the Deep Down by Michelle Denham is a clever fable about a trek through the desert, avoiding being eaten by a monster, and planting something special that grows into something unexpected. The main character avoids the foolishness in old fairy tales and wisely outfoxes the monster in way that is reminiscent of Aesop’s fables. (My rating: 4/5)

Message in a Vessel by V. G. Harrison takes place on the moon in a future where some sort of medical disaster has split humanity into vampires and humans. The humans have essentially become livestock that the vampires feed from. One vampire isn’t entirely comfortable with this state of things. Her compassion and sense of justice is too much to resist as she attempts to save a human life. The world building is fantastic for such a short tale and the characters and circumstances really come alive. (My rating: 5/5)

My favorite story by far is Your Rover is Here by LP Kindred. A Rover driver (think Uber or Lyft) tells of how he uses magic to thwart a would be terrorist’s attack by one of his rides. In the aftermath, he is not treated as a hero. A thrilling but dark tale about the reality of social injustice from the view of someone in the midst of suffering it. (My rating: 5/5)

When I average my ratings for all the stories, this issue comes out to be a 3.8. Not bad! But as I said in the intro, the two best stories were not originals. Regardless, for a first issue this was a good experience. Dark stories that touch on deep human issues in ways that engage all the senses and make you feel something. That’s what I was hoping for from Apex, and it delivered.

Bite Sized Stephen King

I took a short vacation to Charleston, SC for the New Year. We drove there and back from Western North Carolina. As we usually do, we listened to audiobooks during the drive. On the way there, we started listening to Behind Her Lives by Briana Cole. This was a missing person thriller. Well, they got the missing person part right. We did not find it thrilling. It moved too slowly. And there were some odd word choices that seemed wrong. Maybe the narrator read the wrong word? That’s what it sounded like. In any case, we turned it off before we even finished our four and a half hour drive. Definitely not recommended.

I spent some time on New Year’s Day looking for a short audiobook for the ride home. Something in the four to five hour range. There isn’t much in that time frame, especially that is a thriller. I landed on Elevation by Stephen King. It isn’t exactly what I would call a thriller, but that is how my library tagged it. It is the story of a man with a mysterious malady who uses it to help out a couple being discriminated against in small town New England. It has the fantastic storytelling that King is famous for in a package that is much smaller than usual for him.

We were pleased to learn that there were actually two short stories in the audiobook. The second is simply called “Laurie”. It tells the story of how a puppy changes the life of a recent widower in Florida who is finding it hard to move on with his life. It is funny, poignant, and completely relatable, especially to anyone who had ever had a puppy.

Not For Me

I have in interest in writing, though most of my own writing is simple journaling. I have written one short story that I have shared with a few people and in a writing class. That class made me even more interested in learning to write better. I have collected quite a number of books on writing in my “to read” list.

One of those books is Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose. I have to admit that I only got to the third chapter. Near the beginning of that chapter, the author puts forward a 134-word sentence as an example of a good sentence. She even writes, “Despite its length, the sentence is economical.” I couldn’t disagree more. This was not a sentence. It was a paragraph! And it wasn’t all that clear to me. There were some other things earlier in the book that I also disagreed with, so when I got to this “economical” sentence I called it quits. There are too many good books out there for me to spend time on one that is clearly not for me.

Unusual Style

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream book cover

I was familiar with the name, but I had never read anything by Harlan Ellison. Recently his Hugo Award winning short story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” came to my attention, so I borrowed the book of the same name from my library. It is a collection of some of his short stories, originally published in 1967.

The book includes an introduction by Theodore Sturgeon and a Foreword by the author. The author also writes a brief introduction to each story in the collection. The story titles are:

I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream
Big Sam Was My Friend
Eyes of Dust
Word of the Myth
Lonelyache
Delusion for a Dragon Slayer
Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes

My favorite stories are the first and last. His style is unusual. A bit stream of consciousness. In the foreword and introduction, both writers comment on how Ellison’s style is not for everyone. For me, the stories here were a mixed bag. Some I liked okay. Some felt a bit dated. Overall, I have to say that I appreciate having read this book, but I don’t know if or when I might pick up anything else by Harlan Ellison.

Exploring Human Challenges

A Psalm for the Wild-Built is exactly my kind of science fiction–the kind that explores ideas. Like her longer novels, in this novella Becky Chambers shares a vision of a future that is both positive and optimistic. The story takes place on a verdant moon where humans have confronted what they were doing to the environment and corrected their activities. One of the catalysts for this was the rise to sentience of their robots. The story takes place many years after that.

The novella tells of a young monk who has a crisis of purpose and decides to change their vocation. At first they find their new work quite a challenge. Eventually they become very good at it and find that the hole they felt inside is not filled after all. At this point they take drastic measures to address this personal crisis. And throughout the descriptions of the countryside and outdoors in general nearly give the same feeling one gets from walking in the woods oneself.

I love it when science fiction addresses both the outward and inward challenges that humans face. This book does a masterful job of addressing both. It shows a positive future (though not a utopia) where humans have successfully and collectively navigated past a challenge that faced them all. But the core of the story is about one person trying to figure what their purpose in life is.

The Undiscovered Joy of Writing

I’ve been interested in writing for a while now. I’ve created a long “to be read” list of books about writing. Once of those is Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. This book is a collection of short essays about the life of writing, including such topics as Getting Started, Shitty First Drafts, and Finding Your Voice. Some of them are less directly about writing itself, like Looking Around and Radio Station KFKD.

A main focus of the book is encouraging the reader to write, not with the goal of being published, but for the sheer joy of it and the unanticipated benefits is brings. Among these are a deep connection with your fellow human beings. She encourages the reader to write what they know starting with their childhood. She includes the idea of writing about the nasty or abusive lover. Just be sure to change enough details (including giving him a small penis) that he won’t sue for libel.

This book won’t take the place of a writing course or a more detailed book on the craft of writing. But it does a masterful job of sharing the ups and downs of a writers life, encouraging the reader to write despite the fact that their chances at publication, followed by fame and fortune, are minuscule at best. She teaches that the writing life is deeper and more satisfying than that.

Deep Relationships

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow book cover

There has been a lot of hype this year about Gabrielle Zevin’s novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. It is all deserved. The book is a tale of lifelong friendship that starts in a children’s hospital. Sadie and Sam go on to become world-famous video game programmers. Many reviewers have focused on that last aspect of the novel, but the story is much deeper than that.

This is a story that any person can identify with. These friends support each other, fight, go through periods of not speaking, and still care deeply and struggle together and with each other. It is a tale of relationship more than anything else. And it is an engrossing story supremely well-told.

The author uses what some may call gimmicks in a few places. For instance, one chapter is a he said/she said where the same experiences are told from the point of view of each of the main characters. Another chapter is told in the second person (you). However, in each case, the method of writing serves the storytelling well. At the end of the book I felt I had been taken a deep into the lives of very real people from whom I learned a lot about the struggles and rewards of deep relationship.

Respectful Genetic Archeology

I read multiple books at a time–at least one fiction and one non-fiction. At the same time that I started reading The Peacekeeper, I also started reading Origin by Jennifer Raff. The Peacekeeper is a novel that takes place in an alternative present where North America was never colonized. Origin is about the peopling of North America. It is written by a biological anthropologist–she uses genetics to study our ancient human past. It turned out to be a good pairing.

In this book the author presents both the archeological and genetic evidence for how and when humans first arrived in the Americas. I found the addition of the genetic evidence fascinating. While I might have thought that genetics would have unambiguously narrowed the possibilities, this does not seem to be the case. It brings some clarity but also some questions and therefore some dispute. Raff is open and transparent about this dispute, doing her best to simply present what the evidence could mean as well as pointing to what most archeologists believe.

What I most appreciated about this book is that it is sensitive to what the genetic research means to indigenous peoples. Tribes consider the DNA and bodies of their ancestors to be sacred. Scientists and archeologists have not always respected this. Raff discusses at length in the latter part of the book how this has hampered research and the trust needed between indigenous peoples and the scientific community that are required to perform it. All in all this book is a wonderful introduction and foundation for understanding the current state of genetic archeology in the Americas as it continues to develop.

A Story of Trees and People

I finally got around to reading The Overstory by Richard Powers, and it did not disappoint. The simplest description of the novel is that it is the story of trees and forests. But that is over simplified. It is the story of humans, their experience with trees, how they learn and grow in relationship to them, and how they come into conflict because of this. Still doesn’t sound very enticing or interesting, but it surely is.

The storytelling is gripping. In the first section of the book, each chapter is a separate story about a person or family. These are internally complete and gripping stories themselves. The second section starts to bring them together. The language is flowery and descriptive as well as immersive. I found myself sucked into every person’s life story. I am very grateful to have read this as an ebook as there were a lot of words new to me. This ease of looking up word definitions is one of the main reasons I prefer to read ebooks.

The theme of the book is very ecological and makes a strong statement about the place of trees. I found the ending a bit of a let down as it does not wrap things up neatly. There is no happily ever after or prescription for a better future. The book is more an exploration of how we got here and some ways some of us have and might address this condition. After thinking about it a bit, I feel like that was the ending the book needed regardless of my expectations or desires.

Murder in a North America Never Colonized

I was drawn to The Peacekeeper by B.L. Blanchard due to its setting. It takes place in modern time but in a world where the Americas were never colonized by Europeans. The story is about a young man whose mother is murdered by his father when he is a teenager. He spends the rest of his life caring for his sister who was twelve at the time of the murder. He eventually becomes a peacekeeper (what today we would call a policeman) and starts to investigate only the second murder in twenty years in his small town.

Due to what felt like heavy-handed foreshadowing, I suspected the murderer from the beginning. Nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. The world building is amazing. The story takes place among the Great Lakes. There is a map in the front of the book but with East at the top due to world view of the Anishinaabe tribe, the tribe of the main character and the tribe of which the author is an enrolled member. We learn how the criminal justice system in this world is based an restorative justice rather than punishment.

In addition to the culture and cities, we learn also about how communities and families work in this modern indigenous world. And the themes throughout the story touch on and explore these as well. This is more than a simple murder mystery set in an alternative world. It explores what it is like to live in that world and how people living there might deal with what happens around them. I would love to read more stories that take place in this world.