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WesternSFA


When Home, No Need to Cry
Conversation Pieces #85
by Erin K. Wagner
Aqueduct, $12.00, 118pp
Published: November 2022

This isn't my first slim volume in the 'Conversation Pieces' series from Aqueduct Press, a series focusing on feminist science fiction, and it's not quite up to the quality of the last one, Sofia Rhei's 'Everything is Made of Letters', but then that one was an absolute gem. This one is another collection of short stories that keeps getting better as it runs on, the final two stories of ten absolutely stunning, but it starts out from a lesser point.

That's not to say that it's bad but I didn't get the first few. 'Blow Flies' is sparse and strange with only a few characters and only one who really says anything. Maybe I was put off a little by the odd instances of double spacing within italic sections that I thought must mean something until the end arrived and I assume they were just a typographical problem. However, I read it twice and, beyond a neatly odd feel, it didn't connect with me at all. 'How to Tell the Future by Tea Leaves, Stars, and Cards' is elusive as well but also haunting. It feels acutely meaningful, told in details by an apparently neurodivergent girl who needs lots of footnotes. I like it, but I don't understand it.

It's 'Fallow', the story in between those two, that points the way through this collection, because it's all about belonging. It's a short short but it sets the groundwork in place for everything that follows, a set of short shorts that focus on where characters feel at home. The girl in 'How to Tell the Future' starts by detailing the three rooms in her great uncle's house that she likes. 'The Old Woman and the Kraken' is unmistakably about the place both occupy within the world. 'Blood and Formalin' stars a character who feels so at home in his mortuary that he remains in place doing his job long after he's been fired. Even the title track involves an astronaut's quest to return to space, even though she's dying of cancer, in an echo of Heinlein's 'Requiem'.

I should mention that, while the 'Conversation Pieces' series is nominally science fiction, the genre isn't strictly adhered to here. A few of these stories feel like general fiction, others like a variant of fantasy, with krakens and vampire and the ravens and doves who tell the unusual story of environmental doom called 'A Wind to Pass Over the Earth'. It's only when we reach the title story, eight in, that it becomes unmistakably science fiction. The final two stories don't even take place on our planet to hammer that point home and they're emphatically the best here.

'A Planet Like Earth' is my favourite. Kriesla Terrau is a safari guide on Mars, taking rich tourists out to hunt robotic game. She's fourth generation Martian so she's never known anything different, but her story is set against imminent takeover from Earth, whether through agreement or violence. And her next client is the Earth senator on Mars to organise the former if possible and maybe the latter if not. It's deep for a short story and it's still short at twenty-two pages, even if it's also the longest piece here. Unlike other stories here, I wanted more. I wanted to know what happened next, how things played out on the much grander scale.

My next favourite is the closing story, 'From That Sea of Time', which is a self-contained gem that has no need to ever be longer. It's about belonging, of course, but told in a fascinating way. The lead character is an alien who left her own species for a relationship with a human being, who loved her so deeply that he turned an entire planetoid into a memorial for her. It's the crew of a spaceship tasked with bringing a periodic delivery of flowers for her who discover her alive and well years later and now ready to return to her own. It's deeply touching with a host of neat moments.

Of these ten stories, I believe only four have been previously published, so it's primarily new material, even though Wagner's website lists a whole slew of other short stories that have been published, some in publications with names that suggest they're more science fiction than a lot of what made it into this volume. Presumably the goal was to curate to the theme, especially given the title. None of the stories included could have given their titles to the book in so effective a manner.

While only one story led me to want more from its characters and its setting, I do find that I want more from the author. Even the stories that I found elusive or, likely through my own lack of understanding, apparently meaningless, were written with style and presence. I couldn't just let any of them go and I had to put the book down often to allow what I'd read to resonate. Sometimes that didn't help, but the haunting nature of them stayed with me anyway and the best of them deepened. It looks like Wagner has two other books out, one earlier in the 'Conversation Pieces' series which looks like a novella and a short novel called 'An Unnatural Life' that was published by Tordotcom. I should find it. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles in the Conversation Pieces sesries click here

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