Short Reviews – April to June, 2025

Andrew Leon Hudson

S tarting with something short and sharp, Broken Windows by Nicholas Diehl gives us a narrative about crime and punishment – two concepts, it would have us perceive, more conjoined than some quarters of society would like to acknowledge. It takes the form of five monologues, opening with The Window Man, for whom opening windows was very much not the role, followed by The Defenestrator, which would explain why, if you happen to know what defenestration means. I won’t spoil.

The three remaining characters are all of far more recognisable types (The Student, The Paramedic, The Press Secretary), but it is of course the context about which all five are speaking that makes these ordinaries stand out. As is the way at Sci Phi Journal (Laureate of the European SF Award for Best Magazine, no less!), the story is followed by a philosophical note from the author to help clear up uncertainties harboured by any passing US senators unfortunate enough to accidentally read the story and have their charcoaled souls exposed.

C ontinuing, we take to the road along one of the many routes administered by the Department of Social, Political, and Speculative Cyber-fiction, aka The Future Fire, in this case pacing steadily towards our destination under the guiding hand of Juliet Kemp.

In Treading Invisible Threads we accompany narrator Senna as they revisit familiar ground, compelled after many years to return to the place of their apprenticeship following the death of their estranged master. That place is Avebury, a village in the south of England famous for a five millenia-old Neolithic monument akin to Stonehenge, and Senna is a justiciar, serving the communities of their assigned district by combining the functions of both courier and judge, settling local disputes and conveying messages across the country that are passed by justiciars from hand to hand. Yet this is not a bygone world but a future one, hinting at long-passed social and ecological collapse and a culture more carefully rising from the ruins.

With their replacement as apprentice not yet ready to take up the role, Senna has travelled from their own circuit up north in Chester to provide reluctant assistance, carrying a number of communications for people who were once regular acquaintances. What results is a journey that kicks up memories of Senna’s past, the kind of things that seem to get in your eye like road dust and provoke a similar unwanted reaction. And Treading Invisible Threads is very nicely told, its only slip – an unironic and therefore slightly eye-rolling mention of the oh-so-cliché “before times” early on – a forgivable one.

T o round off this issue’s excursions, two recommendations from Issue 10 of Radon Journal, focus point for Radical Perception, where is published prose and poetry relating to science fiction, anarchism, transhumanism, and dystopia. And my picks here happily mirror the previous, the first being another longer story comprising troubled environments, apprenticeships, and journeys, the second a swiftly stabbing tale of social correction that hints at darkness behind the scenes.

In The Oneiromantic Sheep, ageing shepherd Samuel and his adult granddaughter Min are taking their flock to join a seasonal gathering at a distant community, an event that will mean not just trade but the chance for their animal charges to breed outside their regular group, mixing up the gene pool and ensuring stronger lambs for the next generation. Immediately we join them this mission is under threat, as a pack of predators block their path along a crumbling motorway: chimeric creatures with varying coyote-like traits, some going on four legs, some bi-pedal and wielding weapons with unsettlingly human hands. Scaring them off is only the first of a series of challenges and setbacks Samuel and Min must overcome.

Author Frank Baird Hughes crafts a really interesting storyworld here, though not so much for its taking place on another planet in an distant solar system. Avunculus was terraformed in such a way that its native biome would be merged with that of its new human occupants, only for a natural disaster to collapse the technological foundations that allowed any of this to happen, thrusting society on the planet into a far more primitive state. However, while creatures like the “coyotl” manifest their hybridization physically, Samuel’s sheep share a hivemind, one their shepherd can communicate with while sleeping, after consuming certain more or less naturally occurring roadside herbs, that is. These sometimes philosophical conversations with the flock are the gems in this story, but there’s plenty of action and adventure to enjoy besides.

A nd finally, as promised, Instructions for Rewilding the Wasteland, a sequence in four bite-sized chunks this time, circling us back around to matters of justice. We join one of a group of persons sentenced to make amends for past actions, transported through the night into the heart of a forest of unknown depth. I shall say nothing regarding the nature of the punishment that awaits, the extent to which their willingness to submit is voluntary and informed, nor the implications left hanging by the whole. Go read it instead.

Instructions… was written by Emma Burnett, who has appeared twice previously in Mythaxis and, I shall now divulge, will do so again before the year is out! I was strongly reminded of yet another nutshell-sized sf tale of institutional correction, Rachel K. Jones’s celebrated Five Views of the Planet Tartarus. In my opinion, this makes a very fine complementary piece for that.

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