Crawling out from a cave of winter blankets (vaguely resembling Punxatawney Phil, the valiant hero of seasonal affective disorder), I sniff the air and screech, "Hello World, this is my first review!"
RATING: 3 SOUPS
Beneath Ceaseless Skies #349 is the... well, 349th edition of the popular fantasy literary magazine (huh, that's not very concise) that publishes short-form fantasy stories in a biweekly ebook format! How's that for an introduction?
All jokes aside, I think these kinds of literary magazines are really important for genre fiction, and BCS is doing a great thing with focusing on more unique and less mainstream types of adventure fantasy. BCS is great for finding new authors that we, the readers, might fall in love with, but it's also excellent exposure for anyone who fancies themselves as a professional writer.
Anyway, let's get to the good stuff. This edition is a sci-fi/fantasy double feature which is pretty exciting because that means you get MORE stories all in one bundle. Plus, there's the new and totally gorgeous cover art by Jose Borges. The featured stories are (in order of appearance): Yoon Ha Lee's Bonsai Starships, Jason Sanford's Blood Grains Scream in Memories, Aliya Whiteley's Rich Growth, and Ted S. Bushman's Burying the Seeds of Spider Gods.
Bonsai Starships - Yoon Ha Lee
"In her secret heart she longed to see what shape it would take if she let it grow as it wished--but she did not dare."
Well, what is there to say? This is a Yoon Ha Lee story about a girl, who is essentially a shrine maiden, who tends to bonsai trees that are used to control spaceships. If you've read anything by Yoon Ha Lee, you know that he's an author who breathes magical mysticism into everything he writes. It's honestly incredible. His stories are always dreamy and have folklore elements woven into them. Unsurprisingly, Bonsai Starships is no exception, and it is a very high quality short story about being true to yourself. Wait, that sounded less corny in my head. Maybe it's about choosing your own path? The moral themes are multifaceted, and I think the main takeaway from this story is just that--despite appearances, nothing is solely good or evil. We may be surprised at the complexity of even the simplest things.
👍Undeniably good soup.👍
Here's your free, life-altering quote, stolen by me from Yoon Ha Lee: "It resembled black opal if you didn't look at it too closely; if you didn't realize that every hairline fracture in its hull opened into fractal vistas of protest and upended propaganda. It sawed against the twine with knifing growths, strained against he cage like a fretting animal."
Blood Grains Scream in Memories - Jason Sanford
"I stabbed her in the chest, wanting to end it quickly, hating myself for what I was doing but afraid to defy the grains, afraid to lose all the power and privilege I had, by virtue of being an anchor."
Okay, so... Full-disclosure, I didn't like this story. You know what they say, you can't win 'em all. I'm just preparing you for the criticism. And, it's honestly unfortunate because this was the longest story of the four.
I don't know much about Jason Sanford as an author. He seems to be famous? Popular? An award winner? I can't speak about him as a writer because I haven't read anything else by him, but I really got the sense that this story was supposed to be the crowning jewel of this edition of BCS. Sure, maybe if... the crown were made of dried mud... and the jewel was an ugly rock.
This story was about... Umm, I'm not really sure. There are these things called "grains" that hUmAns created (?) to maintain the state of the world (??), and there are kinda-sorta HuMaNs that have the grainy stuff inside of them (???) who kill other... HUMANS to make sure that Order exists (????) or something. We are just dumped into the trashcan from the get go with this one, boys and girls. No bag, no set-up, no nothing. Just raw dog. There is an evil Badman McBad character called Brother Anderly, and I can only assume that he is some kind of priest and not just a weird guy with the first name "Brother" who tells everyone to go around calling him by his full name all the time. There's no way to know for sure, though, because the author never talks about anything religious. I still don't know why he was torturing kids. He's honestly super one-dimensionally evil, and Sanford throws in a bit of a sob story in the last pages to try and give Brother Anderly some depth. It didn't work.
I'm not going to spoil the story because Jason Sanford did write the damned thing, so he deserves to get his coin. But, the main character is a woman named Chakatie who, along with her whole extended family, used to be an "anchor" that maintained some land and murdered people (day-fellows) at the grains' order. She's alright. No one in this book is described in any way or form, to the detriment of the story, but Chakatie has this thing where she wears a neon blue bowler hat. It's her signature. I'm not smart enough to figure out what that's supposed to symbolize.
The whole story just exists on its own plane, and the author just keeps throwing in random stuff that is supposed to add to the environment or the worldbuilding, but it's honestly ineffective every. single. time. There were a lot of characters mentioned, but no one really mattered. Chakatie's son PINHAUS was a real bastard for no reason, and his anger didn't seem to be very justified considering his prejudice against the day-fellows but whatever... PINHAUS (I feel like his name belongs in all caps) has a daughter who gets bad-grained, and so she has to take this medicine that MIGHT make her lose all of her emotions or something. Apparently, that happened to this other guy who is also a member of Chakatie's big, dumb family. No details, though.
The climax was probably the best part, and the resolution was really stupid but also kinda twisty and unexpected. So, I'll give the author props for that. The grains displaying all of Chakatie's murders and the day-fellows turning on her (but not even completely!!!) even though she had been protecting them for a while made no sense.
Actually I did some research (like, I just googled it a minute before typing this), and it seems like Blood Grains Scream in Memories is a (really awful) sequel to Sanford's almost-award-winning novelette Blood Grains Speak Through Memories, which has a far less compelling and concise title, but is probably better content-wise. I'm not going to read it because my time is too precious, but I think I would have liked it better (hated it less?) if I had read the original story first.
Obligatory quote: "I understand why our ancestors created the grains to protect the environment from us. But the grains also pervert the world. This planet's environments and the creatures in them are supposed to change and adapt over time. This world no longer allows that."
Rich Growth - Aliya Whiteley
"Life gets better and better, said one man. The gemflowers see to that. Just touching them brings prosperity."
If you've read Aliya Whiteley's The Beauty, you won't be too surprised by this short story. She's super into plants and fungi, and she loves incorporating body horror into her stories.
I've found that I love Whiteley's novellas in particular. She manages to convey so much story and meaning with few words. Her writing style is unique in that it isn't overly flowery, but it's also not exactly to-the-point. I think it's perfectly concise for the type of fiction she enjoys writing, and her novellas are really well-paced. Can you tell that I'm a huge fan?
Rich Growth is actually a really short story. It's certainly not novella-length, and I think that I like Whiteley's short stories a little bit less than her standalone books. I always feel like they just aren't long enough or like a big chunk is missing from the beginning or the middle.
The premise is about a speculative society that grows gemflowers. Most people do not work in the greenhouses growing gemflowers, and the narrator mentions that less people want to give up their children to the greenhouses in the current time period. The people who work in the greenhouses are in constant danger of being... taken over by the plant life, and there is a real threat of those vines just growing into their human orfices, eventually killing them. The story's narrator uses her life savings of gemflowers to buy a boy from his mother, and he becomes her sad, little apprentice.
There are a few heavy themes in this one, and it has an overall kind of melancholy tone. Even so, Aliya Whiteley manages to handle everything grace, like a gardener tending to their gemflowers.
👌Pretty good soup!👌
There are many quotable bits in this story, but here's a particularly good one: "Stay close to the ground. Life out there is not real, and nobody needs anything they can't touch. It's all hopes and happiness. Slippery dreams."
Burying the Seeds of Spider Gods - Ted S. Bushman
"I wept for the beginning of the world.."
I think this story was the real wildcard of the bunch. When I was inputting the data for BCS #349 into Storygraph, Ted S. Bushman wasn't even recognized as an author in the site's database. I had to google the man to see what was up with him. I was led to his twitter, where he had very charmingly tweeted that this feature was his first professionally published work.
I mean, how wholesome is that?! Three cheers for Ted Bushman, and I hope he finds much success in the future.
Because... THIS STORY WAS REALLY GOOD! It's about a smallish, vaguely humanoid creature named Bimani who lives in a spooky cave with big robot spider gods. Of course, it wouldn't be much of an adventure story if she just stayed in that cave and continued to be mildly terrified of the honkin' spooders, so they send her off on a weird quest to plant some seeds, except they can't count because they told her to plant seven (7) seeds when they only gave her four (4). Now, she plants a couple of the seeds, and LO AND BEHOLD! She gets smacked in the face! Then, she's introduced to a human civilization! Then, she's accused of being a witch and tortured! Well, that escalated quickly... You know what? Good. That's what I like to see in my short stories. And, would you believe it if I said that was only just the very beginning of the story? So much more happens as the plot progresses, and Bimani takes us on a rollercoaster of a ride that begins with finding a place to call home and ends with the imminent demise of everything she's struggled to build.
This was a really good, toothy sci-fi story that reminded me of a nostalgic, old school style. Personally, if someone had told me that this had originally been published in the early 70's, I would've believed them. Trust me, this hit the spot.
👍Surprisingly good soup!!👍
And, I'll end this entry with a quote: "We all feel, at times, that we come from another world; that we only have place among our fellows by their mercy."
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