Short Reviews – January to March, 2025

Andrew Leon Hudson

I mentioned in the editorial that the world has more than enough room for more online zines in it, so it was with pleasure that I recently learned of the existence of Phano, which aims to share “beautiful stories, essays, interviews, reviews and art to make sense of our world in constant change”. Good luck to them! Also a pleasure was to see P. R. O’Leary there, whose crime story Crunch Thump Thump appeared in our very last issue.

In Millions of Seashells, our narrator embarks on the administrative grind-side of that thing we supposedly all want to do: go back in time to fix that one thing that went so wrong, thereby uncoiling a whole new past for a brand new present with a glorious new future stretching out before us. Of course, casually rocking the status quo to its bedrock is exactly why The Man is always going to erect barriers in one’s way to ensure the correction of old mistakes just doesn’t happen, not to us, and not to the recipient uzzes of parallel universes either. It’s going to take an inventive man to find a way around that. Or an infinity of them.

Hard to tell a time-travel tale that hasn’t happened before, of course; or at least that hasn’t been told almost exactly this way before, only slightly differently; or that probably won’t be told almost exactly this way again, only – but lets break the cycle, it’s a fun little story.

I always return to ergot., as I tend to do anyway, when it’s time to draft my shortlist of quarterly recommendations. As with any relationship between magazine and reader, not every story I find there clicks for me; but I can always rely on something interesting, and the last three months have been no exception.

ergot. regular Andrew Kozma’s A Movable Piece of Firm Material is about as odd a piece of writing as its title might suggest. An employee at a weapon’s manufacturer vacates his desk to meet colleagues for post-dayjob-drudgery drinks and discovers the way out of the building is… wrong. I won’t divulge more than that, but I will mention that I found the plain-spoken style of the prose to be an excellent foil for the hint of weirdness in what is going on.

A s promised, the last review here is a bit different from the norm. Entitled The Giving Man, it presents a billionaire’s relentless quest to deny the fate lurking in his genes, to overcome the brain tumour that will surely kill him by turning all his wealth and resources upon it, unleashing humanity’s potential, directing it, shattering all previous limits of science and technology in service of that single goal: his own survival.

And it seems he succeeds, because he outlives us all.

A man’s will is the thing. It is the irresistable force that cleaves his path through the world. His destiny written in what he is willing to take. Not what he is willing to give. This is the true engine of my success.

However, that quote doesn’t do the moment justice, dear reader, because where this short story differs is that it’s also a comic strip.

Bad Space, Stories for the End Times, is a science fiction webcomic that delivers “short sharp shocks in 10 panels”, slightly more if you support writer-artist Scott Base on Patreon. Beautifully rendered all in black and white, with appropriately occasional shades of grey, they present a series of wildly varied sf narratives that are nevertheless almost universally dark in one way or another – the occasional glimmer of optimism only highlighting the otherwise consistent journeys into the bleak, sour, or sinister.

A Bad Space book is currently in the works, and coincidentally the very first strip, called The Billionaire, makes for a rather neat bookend pair with The Giving Man: not alike, exactly, but certainly of a kind. If you’re the type of person who’s up for an illustrated downer you can down in two minutes, I can’t recommend these comics enough!

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