Dan’s Comments (group member since Oct 07, 2023)

Dan’s comments from the Spells, Space & Screams: Collections & Anthologies in Fantasy, Science Fiction, & Horror group.

Thanks for the nomination, Georgina. Two more nominations would bring us to five, enough to run a poll!

Trial by Cow by Andrew Rucker Jones ★★★1/2

This is a light, entertaining story about a witch who has problematic relationships with her familiars, so problematic that she is in fact on trial by her coven for killing her previous familiars. Her current familiar, a cow, is determined to show Arwen in a positive light while fully supporting a witch who isn't treating her too nicely.

Blackwood's Tomb by Joseph Floyd ★★★

A cat, a wolf, and a raven, all familiars of a witch who injures herself casting a spell, are determined to save their leader. They need an ingredient to effect a cure and so begins a quest. Quests are the easiest story to tell and maybe I have just read one too many to get excited about them anymore. Still, this one had pleasant enough characters to while away an hour with.

The Ritualist and the Hedge Wizard by Kit Calvert ★★

A story about two cats named Palug and Shallot trying to trick their human, Neil, into summoning a witch. I'm not sure why. Maybe they're trying to stimulate a romance between Neil and the witch Allegra? I found the writing unclear and confusing.

Beneath the Wings of Night by Ngo Binh Anh Khoa ★★★

This is a poem, though not a lyric one. It contains a story about a witch being attacked and a mother reluctant to help lest she foster dependence. It's a good story that would have worked better as a story rather than a poem, but I enjoyed it all the same.

The first three stories of this anthology were fun. The three stories since have just been, at best, okay. I hope this picks back up.

This is the third anthology Kevin J. Anderson and Allyson Longueira have edited together. Both are heavily involved with developing and bringing new writers into the field, as can be seen by their work in the Writers of the Future series that has L. Ron Hubbard's name on the cover no matter how many years passed he may be. I also know personally of Anderson's involvement with Writers of the Future from his discussing it at the Dragon Con panel I attended.

These anthologies mostly feature new writers from the University of Colorado program with a couple famous names thrown in, no doubt to give the book a boost in sales. Works for me! This anthology was published in 2024. The earlier two were in 2022 and 2023 respectively and look interesting as well.

The Dragon's Cat by Jody Lynn Nye ★★★1/2

Jody Lynn Nye is one of those famous writers generously contributing a story to enhance the name recognition for this anthology. I know of her from having seen her at Dragon Con too. I saw her at a table promoting her and Robert Lynn Asprin's latest comedy fantasy endeavor, which I picked up for free if memory serves.

Anyway, her story here is pretty decent. After having just read an anthology in which so many writers seemed to be missing the basic elements in their work, I was so happy to read a story with a protagonist who had a clearly defined goal early on: take stray kitten back to Mama cat. I'll omit a key fact about the protagonist so that other readers will get a pleasant surprise when they read this story. It was a good beginning or introduction to the anthology with a solid story that yet left room for other writers to shine by topping it....

So Burn Us Both by Lisse Kirk ★★★★1/2

....which this next story promptly accomplished. Wow! Witch hunt. Grim topic made bearable because it was told from a cat's perspective. Maybe I should give it five stars, but while I liked the originality of telling a story from the familiar's point of view, it was somewhat limiting too. Still, the story simply overpowers that limitation. Amazing stuff.

The word on the author at the end of the story stated they mostly publish LGBTQ (plus another letter or two that eludes my memory) stuff. Cool, if that's what they care about and want to write for the audience they want to reach. My interest in any of that is nil because that's what its impact on my life is. But I would look for other work from this author if they decide to break out of that niche again. This was powerful stuff!

I just noticed, these stories are "never published before." At the end of my review of Nebula Awards Showcase 59, I lamented that good authors aren't publishing in speculative fiction magazines any more, like Asimov's, F&SF, not even Clarkesworld. More and more they're publishing their original short stories in anthologies like this one.

Now most of these 26 authors don't seem like big names to me. I've only heard of four (Nye, Lackey, Chandler, and Tem) of the 26, or 22; I'd never expect to have heard of a modern poem writer. But I am still really looking forward to reading this if for no other reason than to test my hypothesis. I expect these stories to be of above average quality.

For the next month we are reading the anthology Feisty Felines and Other Fantastical Familiars, edited by Kevin J. Anderson and Allyson Longueira.

For the next month we are reading an anthology of the following 22 short stories and 4 poems, all about cats operating as witches' familiars:

1 • The Dragon's Cat • by Jody Lynn Nye
15 • So Burn Us Both • by Lisse Kirk
31 • Trial By Cow • by Andrew Rucker Jones
37 • Blackwood's Tomb • by Joseph Floyd
53 • The Ritualist and the Hedge Wizard • by Kit Calvert
63 • Beneath the Wings of Night • poem by Ngo Binh Anh Khoa
69 • Kitten For Sale • by Aster Marsh
71 • The Dreamer • by M. Lalli Lassegard
89 • A Rat, a Root, and a Big Orange Fruit • by Zach Shephard
101 • Second Life • poem by Christina Sng
105 • The Witching Hour Letters • by Amanda Cecelia Lang and Brittany Noelle
123 • The Familiar's Familiar • by Maegan Langer
141 • The Cat • poem by Sandy White
143 • Some Spider • by Pines Callahan
157 • Scary, Scary Skunk • by Heather Graham
173 • Orphans • by Matt Beswick
185 • The Last Life of Hilde the Small • by Jessica Feather
197 • And Have Never Forgotten • by Mercedes Lackey
215 • Fluffy • by T. Chandler
233 • Earth, Bonding • by Kerri J. Roe
245 • Not Common • poem by Lois T. Bartholomew
247 • The Secret of the Sorceress • by Alexander Hay
265 • Sink or Swim • by Rebecca M. Senese
279 • Old Crow • by Steve Rasnic Tem
289 • Tail-End • by Lia Wu
305 • Renfield • by John G. Hartness

My review of the anthology, 86% copied from above, can be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show.... After the disappointing experience of reading the first and latest in this series, I'm not rushing to read my next one.

Imagine: Purple-Haired Girl Shooting Down the Moon (2023) by Angela Liu ★★

Prostitutes try to get by in a near-future dystopia. There are no compelling characters, no situation interesting enough to remember.

Six Versions of My Brother Found Under the Bridge (2023) by Eugenia Triantfyllou ★1/2

Random facts given about confusing characters living near a tunnel under a bridge being confronted by someone called Devil.

Let me provide a paragraph: "Olga was trying to work up the courage to visit the tunnel for the third time." Good so far, right? There's a scary tunnel and we're about to find out what frightens Olga about it. The paragraph continues: "She speared some spaghetti drenched in a sauce that people in her house called Bolognese. It wasn't the authentic recipe; Olga had looked it up on the Internet once out of boredom. This was more like the Greek Mom version of Bolognese. Each household had one and swore by it while scoffing at the other inferior but equally inaccurate versions. Olga was thankful for that pasta in ways she couldn't really express with words."

That was the entire paragraph. The first sentence was the topic sentence about the tunnel. The rest of the paragraph could have been supporting details, but instead we get a digression about Greek spaghetti. Writers might put that in when free flowing in the first draft. It should be edited out at a glance in the first revision. Irrelevant. But it's not. Neither by the writer or the editor. It just stands, and in the story goes to be a Nebula Award nominee, and the entire thing is written just this awfully. Almost all the novelette stories in this section had writing this awful. It simply blows my mind how this kind of stuff gets published let alone nominated for anything!

The last section of this book (7%) is about other speculative fiction gems like these we readers can consider for purchase. It starts off with an excerpt from Al Jiang's Nebula Award winner of the novella category titled "Linghun." This story might be decent. It's hard to tell from the small, poorly selected smidgen we are given here. A family is in a neighborhood and their neighbors make them nervous and linger within sight of the house. That's it. My hopes aren't high. The story is written in present tense, always a good indication of amateur hour.

A one-paragraph synopsis of all the other stories and categories' works are provided. I would have been more interested if I had any faith left at this point in their likely quality.

Saturday's Song (2023) by Wole Talabi ★1/2
This is a confusing novelette about seven siblings outside the bounds of space and time that tell stories. The siblings are named days of the week. These days each have characteristics that individualize them from each other. But we never learn of their real nature, what they are in other words, or why they're telling us random aspects of a love story between two characters names Saura and Mobola who meet at a financial management conference in Abuja just before the cold harmatan of 2005, whatever that means. We're never informed. Nothing in this Nigerian story clicked for me. I suspect the story is in this collection for DEI reasons.

I Am AI (2023) by Ai Jiang ★★
This story is told in a monotonous first-person voice by an Artificial Intelligence that is apparently a cyborg. Almost half the sentences start with "I" plus verb. "I just have to hold on...", "I dismiss it and scramble...", "I don't notice...", and on and on. The AI's power is low and keeps running down until it doesn't is the key suspense element of this story. The author gives the reader no real reason to care. It's as interesting as monitoring the power level of your smart phone daily and making journal entries about it.

A Short Biography of a Conscious Chair (2023) by Renan Bernardo ★★
The title is pretty much all there is to this story. Some interpersonal drama of a rather pedestrian nature happens around the chair and the chair tells us readers about it. There is no real overarching theme or goal for our conscious chair. It just observes. Its creator said someone would love it and the chair wants to find out who, but that's all the chair wants to accomplish. This story takes a long time to tell for little reward.

Two more to go. I'll try to bite that bullet tomorrow.

I am not finding these stories in the novelette section to be good at all. Is this because there was a much more limited number of possible stories to select from?

For the more serious minded, I've always been meaning to read The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton.

I nominate fellow South Carolinian Grady Hendrix's short story collection Dead Leprechauns & Devil Cats: Strange Tales of the White Street Society. Warning: horror can be funny too.

Tell you what. We just did a SF anthology, followed up by a fantasy anthology. It's time for a horror story collection. Story collections are by one author. Anthologies have different authors. Would anyone care to nominate a good horror collection or two by the end of June?

The Sound of Children Screaming (2023) by Rachael K. Jones ★

This was an anti-second amendment polemic thinly disguised as a fairy tale of some sort. The author is anti-guns, but to just write about how horrible guns are wouldn't fly. So she used school shootings to justify her position. As if we her readers can't or haven't read about this in a a newspaper, seen a broadcast, and reached our own conclusion. This author felt the need to insult her audience by telling them how it should feel about this political issue, the same as her of course.

She wrote the story in a clever and artful way, so that people who feel the same way as her politically could use that as cover for commending the story. I do feel similarly on the issue, but her trick didn't work for me. I read speculative fiction for purposes other than to have simplistic political positions rammed down my throat.

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The first part of the book contained the six short stories to be considered for the Nebula Award for the year. I suspect they were arranged in order of story that got the most votes to the story that got the least. The next section is the six novelettes.

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The Year Without Sunshine (2023) by Naomi Kritzer ★★★

This is a long short story (novelette) about people organizing survival at a community level after a devastating holocaust. It won the top award for novelette. Frankly, I don't understand how. The story was okay and well told. It's just that it wasn't much of a story, but read more like a factual account of how one woman dealt well with the aftermath. I'm not sure what was missing that was needed to take this to the next level, maybe information about anyone else in this woman's household, her history, something about how the world reached this state. It needed something more than a plot that basically says, "I did clever organizational things and survived a nuclear winter." It just doesn't seem enough of a story to have earned such high regard.

Both of the next two stories were published in a 2023 issue of Clarkesworld first.

Window Boy (2023) by Thomas Ha ★★★1/2

Thomas Ha has no listing in the GoodReads database, but he has published 30 short stories, all from 2020 through 2025, no novels. This is one of the six short story finalists for a Nebula from last year's voting.

It's a really good story, highly dystopic and unsettling. We get a glimpse into a very dark world where things are dangerous and have clearly gone very wrong in the near future. We get everything from a child's point of view, one that has been given limited knowledge, no doubt to protect him against grim realities. But these realities keep leaking through as the story progresses. Every sentence builds this disturbing atmosphere Ha so masterfully sustains.

I would have rated the story higher, but we never get much more than this sliver of a glimpse. We don't know exactly what's wrong or how it came to be so grim. There's simply so much missing. Nevertheless, I really like this story because of its point that underinforming our children in order to protect their childhoods or innocence can be a grave disservice to them.

I'm going to keep an eye out for another Thomas Ha work. He has a very fluid writing style. One sentence builds on the last and flows into the next so well. I hope not all his work is quite so dark.

Better Living Through Algorithms (2023) by Naomi Kritzer ★★★★1/2

The protagonist, Linnea, is encouraged by friends and finally her boss to download a wellness app. The wellness app simply offers users good advice that helps improve their lives if taken. At first, Linnea wonders what the agenda behind it is? Who benefits? Who's making money? Soon, she finds out, no one is. The app really does what it purports to do: it simply makes users' lives better through good advice.

This is a wonderful concept for an app and for a story. It's very realistically told, and the examples of life improvement advice is very convincing. It makes me wonder why apps like this don't already exist in real life. Or do they?

The story goes on a bit long and ends on a slight rabbit hole tangent, but the ideas here are so well-considered I can't help but really like this story. It's second best in what is so far proving to be an outstanding anthology.

Computers Don't Argue (1965) by Gordon R. Dickson ★★★★

This is one of those funny bill-collector-from-hell automated letters stories that spawned its own sub-genre. They never get old.

Becalmed in Hell (1965) by Larry Niven ★★★

In Larry Niven's Known Space novels, the character Eric is a spaceman who controls a spaceship using his brain and nervous system. Eric the person has disintegrated and become the spaceship. The ship's human crewmember, Howie, troubleshoots the ship's problems, both mechanical and psychological. In this story--it's a sequel to an earlier Niven story featuring the same characters exploring Mercury--Eric and Howie now explore a hostile Venusian surface.

This is an enjoyable story even if it reads like a rehash of "The Coldest Place." In this story, the psychological element is downplayed to bring the difficulties the Venusian surface poses more to the forefront. This is not a favorable exchange in my opinion.

The Saliva Tre (1965) by Brian W. Aldiss ★★★

I read and reviewed this novella last year. My review, if interested, may be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....

The Drowned Giant (1965) by J.G. Ballard ★★★

Perhaps Ballard's most frequently anthologized story, I had read this before a time or two. A large giant corpse washes up on a shore of a small town to become a tourist attraction. It's a statement about humanity's love for a spectacle and its ability to find one from pretty much anything. The story could have been about a dead beached whale that had washed up ashore somewhere, then it would have been neither science fiction, or even necessarily fiction.

The last two fifths of this anthology is significantly better than the first three fifths.

He Who Shapes (1965) by Roger Zelazny ★★

I read and reviewed this story eight years ago. I'm not about to relive that torture. If interested, my review can be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....

"Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman (1965) by Harlan Ellison ★★1/2

This is the classic, counter-culture, 1960s, war-protest SF short story that won so many awards. The half star above two is because even I can recognize how well it's written. Three-star ratings and above are reserved for works I like.

This one isn't really science fiction to my way of thinking. I mean, it's slightly more so than Animal Farm, slightly less so than 1984, both of which I class in the same type of literature as this short story.

Balanced Ecology (1965) by James H. Schmitz ★★

The story is almost as exciting as its title. It is about whether a person should accept money to allow developers to cut down more of the forest than is good for the environment. It's a very suspenseful decision (sarcasm). I won't spoil the ending, except if you read the title you can figure it out.

That's all there is to this story. It's science fiction because it was set on another planet. But it didn't have to be. It would have been just as boring and insubstantial if it had been set on Earth. And nothing would have needed to be changed.

I'm having a difficult time figuring out how these two stories so far could possibly have been the best science fiction or fantasy 1965, or any year, had to offer.

Wow! That looks like it will be awesome. It's a much maturer take on the legend, not a movie one's six-year-old will much enjoy, for a change. I'll definitely be at the theater in mid-July for the first time this decade.

The New Wave was a science fiction style of the 1960s and 1970s. Zelazny was a key figure in it. There is a Wikipedia article on the period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Wav....

I reread and then rewrote my opinion of Zelazny's story. I still don't much like it, but I get what he was trying to do now, and I was able to make sense of the story after reading the Wikipedia article about it and giving it a reread. Sorry for the switch-up like that.

Thank you very much for starting this topic by the way. I think it will be fun and I am enjoying reading your reviews of the stories and participating in the topic.