Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls

Back in 2017 the movie The Shape of Water was released to box office success and critical acclaim. In November of that same year, this novella, originally published in 1982 and long out of print, was republished. It then found its way onto my list of books. This past week I had some longer than usual drives to scholastic soccer matches that I officiated, so I listened to it on audiobook.

An amphibious creature escapes from a lab where it was being tested on, tortured, and abused. The titular Mrs. Caliban hears about it on her radio as she does her housework. She and her husband are somewhat estranged though still living together. They lost a son to an operation gone wrong and another to a miscarriage. While Mrs. Caliban is preparing and serving dinner for her husband and a co-worker, the monster shows up in her kitchen. She befriends him, hiding him in her son’s old room as her husband never goes to that room or even that part of the house. Mrs. Caliban and the monster have an affair and work on a plan to get him back to his own home in the sea.

Numerous themes and ideas are explored in this short novella. Naturally relationships and fidelity, but also what it means to be a monster and the treatment of non-human animals, including the ethics of eating meat. None of this is heavy handed but occurs in the natural course of the storytelling. Despite being written over forty years ago, it feels surprisingly contemporary. What I appreciate most is that it doesn’t really give answers, though these are implied. Instead, it is a book that questions many things that we often take for granted without even thinking.

My rating: 4/5

Someone in Time edited by Jonathan Strahan

I read this as member of my book club at my local library. We each read a different book on a particular topic. For the most recent meeting we read historical fiction that takes place prior to the twentieth century. I kind of cheated with this one. It is short stories and only some of them go that far back in time. But it seemed to be a hit when I told them about it.

The editor was able to get stories from a lot of well know contemporary authors of science fiction. The theme of the anthology was time travel love stories. The book’s title as a call out to the 1980 move Somewhere in Time was totally on purpose. There were sixteen stories in the book. Here are my brief synopses and ratings.

  • “Roadside Attraction” by Alix E. Harrow — After his girlfriend breaks up with him, a young man loses himself by going to the past over and over only to find his destiny in the present. (5/5)
  • “The Past Life Reconstruction Service” by Zeb Cho — A movie director recently dumped by his boyfriend keeps seeing him as he explores his past lives. (5/5)
  • “First Aid” by Seanan McGuire — In order to take care of her younger disabled sister, a woman prepares to go back permanently to Elizabethan England. (5/5)
  • “I Remember Satellites” by Sarah Gailey — When a time traveler draws a short straw job that leaves her permanently in the past, she has to leave behind a girlfriend to become a divorcée who causes the future King England to abdicate. (5/5)
  • “The Golden Hour” by Jeffrey Ford — A time traveler stuck in time reconnects with his time-traveling wife. (3/5)
  • “The Lichens” by Nina Allan — A woman in northern Scotland during the time of Culloden encounters a scientist from the future looking for a buried spacecraft. (4/5)
  • “Kronia” by Elizabeth Hand — Lovers who grew up a mile apart find each other through time. (2/5)
  • “Bergamot and Vetiver” by Lavanya Lakshminarayan — A woman from the 2500s travels back to the Indus Valley Civilization where the future’s leaders use her to steal water the man she falls in love with. (4/5)
  • “The Difference Between Love and Time” by Catherynne M. Valente — A woman tells the tale of her romance with the personification of the space/time continuum. (4/5)
  • “Unbashed, or: Jackson, Whose Cowardice Tore a Hole in the Chronoverse” by Sam J. Miller — A young man regrets not walking his first love home, finding out the next morning that he has been murdered for who he loved. (4/5)
  • “Romance: Historical” by Rowan Coleman — A young neurodivergent woman mysteriously connects with a man from 1914 in the bookshop where she works. (5/5)
  • “The Place of All Souls” by Margo Lanagan — Two people who found each other connected in the space between times, find each other and struggle about what to do about it and how it will affect their families. (3/5)
  • “Timed Obsolescence” by Sameem Siddiqui — A man pursues a fling during multiple visits to the past only to find that his behavior there has affected his present. (2/5)
  • “A Letter to Merlin” by Theodora Goss — A woman from the future inhabiting the body of Guinevere in an attempt to keep the timeline on track writes a letter to Merlin who is also inhabited by someone from the future. (4/5)
  • “Dead Poets” by Carrie Vaughn — A female academic drinks from an ancient cup dreaming of meeting Sappho but instead goes back to 1536 to visit Sir Thomas Wyatt in the Tower of London shortly after the execution of Anne Boleyn. (4/5)
  • “Time Gypsy” by Ellen Klages — A woman goes back in time to meet her scientific hero only to fall in love with her and discover that her advisor in the future isn’t what he seems to be. (5/5)

The average of these ratings give the book as a whole a rating of 4/5.

The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Naler

For my trip to a recent soccer tournament where I refereed, I was looking for a novella that I could complete while driving. Since I would be driving alone, I only had my own tastes to consider. I keep a list of books I am interested in reading. I sorted to those I had tagged as “novella”. When I saw this one, it was an easy choice. I thoroughly enjoyed the author’s first novel The Mountain in the Sea. So I cued this up for my trip.

The book follows a park ranger who is fighting poachers to save the elephants she is an expert on. One hundred years after she is murdered, her uploaded mind is re-awakened to be inserted into the leader of a resurrected mammoth herd on the steppes of Russia. The hope is that her knowledge of elephant behavior can help the struggling mammoth herd to survive. But that is not the only challenge faced by the herd. With the resurrection of the mammoth has come the return of poachers who caused the extinction of elephants in the wild.

The audiobook is read by two narrators, one reading the parts about the park ranger and one reading the parts of the poachers and hunters. This is very effective as is the writing. The book delves into the struggles against elephant poaching and the market for ivory while also exploring what it would mean to be a human mind inserted into a non-human animal. It is a philosophical adventure that I thoroughly enjoyed.

My rating: 5/5

Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 220 (January 2025)

I decided to add a bit of short fiction back into my reading life this year. Two years ago (2023) was my year of short fiction, which I read almost exclusively. At the end of the year, I stopped as I found that there was no easy way to find good short fiction without getting subpar stories as well. But last year, I found myself missing the timeliness of short fiction magazines. So I did a bit of research on my reading in 2023 and decided to subscribe (again) to Clarkesworld magazine in 2025. This is my review of the first issue of the year.

When There Are Two of You: A Documentary” by Zun Yu Tan (2,130 word) – In a near future world, citizens can get a copy of their mentality/personality called a Sentience. It’s kind of a snapshot of who they are. One character makes one of himself and puts it into his clone. We follow what happens with that clone after the original dies. The other main character is a woman who has her Sentience within herself. It’s kind of like the voice in your head on steroids. This is a wonderful exploration of identity and the way we talk to ourselves. (My rating: 4/5)

Child of the Mountain” by Gunnar De Winter (2,890 words) – Taking place on a mountain in an unknown place and time, a young girl is caretaker for her genetic sisters. When they die, she extracts a “soul seed” and resurrects them. This is her purpose in life. But the ritual vultures that eat the flesh off her sisters’ dead bodies seem to be suggesting a different path altogether. A haunting tale of life, death, and hard decisions. (My rating: 3/5)

Never Eaten Vegetables” by H. H. Pak (15,170 words) – A corporation sends a sentient ship filled with suspended embryos to a planet previously prepared for their arrival. But when something goes wrong, the ship has a tough decision to make on her own. The corporation won’t answer her questions as to what she should do as she keeps bumping into parts of herself that she has no access to. Very well written. The story just flows and it is easy to empathize and root for the characters. (My rating: 5/5)

The Temporary Murder of Thomas Monroe” by Tia Tashiro (11,900 words) – A young man wakes up to find that he has died… again. But this time instead of being at his own hand, he has been murdered. But he doesn’t recall who killed him. At least not at first. And as he starts to remember, things get odder and odder. Another propulsive, well-written read that kept me turning the pages. (My rating: 5/5)

Beyond Everything” by Wang Yanzhong translated from Chinese by Stella Jiayue Zhu (9,750 words) – In a future world devastated by never-ending war and environmental collapse, a new envoy is sent to seek help from extraterrestrials after all but one of the previous envoys never returned. After talking to the only returning envoy, the new one sets out to learn from the aliens, presumably more advanced than Earth, what the Earthlings can do to save themselves. The story feels muddled a bit and the writing felt clumsy to me. The author is going for something big and difficult to communicate. It didn’t quite work for me. (My rating: 2/5)

Autonomy” by Meg Ellison (3,100 words) – A woman meets her best friend, as she regularly does, and hears about a confrontation with a man who sat on the hood of her robo taxi and the mysterious code someone gave her to use in similar future situations. Later, on her way home, the woman is assaulted in her autonomous taxi and finds out what happens when she uses that code. Has some gore and a feel of a short horror story. I thoroughly enjoyed exploring “what if” in a world with fully autonomous vehicles. (My rating: 4/5)

That’s all the fiction in the issue. There are two interviews each with a writer/editor as well as an interesting essay about termites and consciousness. The issue is rounded out by Neil Clarke’s editorial reviewing happenings with the magazine last year and a brief bio of the artist of the cover art. My average rating for the fiction comes out to 3.83 out five stars. A solid start to the new year that leaves me grateful for subscribing again. I’m looking forward to reading the next issue!

My Favorite Thing is Monsters Book Two by Emil Ferris

As soon as I finished My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book One this past June, I put its sequel on hold at my library. It took until earlier this month for me to get my turn to read it. Like book one, it grabbed me right away. I tore through it in two days.

It continues the story of Karen started in book one. She continues to struggle with her own identity as a “monster” who doesn’t fit in. At the same time, she is coming to terms with a revelation about her brother from the end of the previous book. With a new friend, she continues to look into the mysterious death of a woman in the building who cared deeply for her.

As was the first book, this is in part a very challenging holocaust story. At the same time it is a coming of age story of a young gay girl. It is very touching and emotionally evocative in the way it deals with othering. The art is amazing and is a well-realized tool in the author’s storytelling.

My rating: 4.5/5