Oddly, this is not a collection of ogoense, which I initially assumed was some sort of self-described category of Rebecca Ore's fiction that would become clear when I read it. Ogoense are African fish and they're collected by a young lady called Sarafina in 'Collected Ogoense', the last of nine stories on offer here that were originally published in the nineties.

By collected, I mean that Sarafina attempted to smuggle them out of Gabon to breed them in her lab back in the States and the discovery of that attempt by customs officials sparks quite a serious escalation. And by collecting this story with eight others, we discover that Ore had an unusual set of focuses back in the nineties, because fish smuggling is not restricted to that story. This is a book about weighted warp looms, the meaning of art, scholarly research and, well, fish smuggling.

Oh, and CD-ROMs. One notable observation is that these stories don't generally feel dated in the slightest, which is telling for science fiction. Most of them could have been written yesterday, only occasional details leaping out as anomalous now we've moved forward in history. In 'Accelerated Grimace', a rich couple receive the 'New York Times' digitally but then print it out on a presumably very large format printer at home to read. Maybe that's what rich people will do in the future, but somehow I doubt it.

And CD-ROMs turned out to be a technological blip in history, but Ore didn't foresee that when she wrote that story, in which the most interesting books are only available as CD-ROMs. Ironically, of course, this book is not available in CD-ROM format, to the best of my knowledge, though it would be glorious if Aqueduct Press actually did issue it that way, just because. CD-ROMs show up in 'Half in Love with Easeful Rock and Roll' too, used in writeable form by a sophisticated VR system, like a hard drive. I wonder what capacity Ore was extrapolating for the format back in 1998.

I couldn't call out my favourite story here, because, a few commonalities in detail aside, they're a highly varied bunch and even those stories that I might consider my least favourite have elements that are going to stay with me. It wouldn't shock me if I wake up three weeks from now with one of these stories having been elevated in my head because one of its ideas germinated subconsciously while I was asleep.

The opening piece is the obvious choice, because 'Hypocaust & Bathysphere' is so substantial as an opener that I presume it has to count as a novelette rather than a short story. This is a wonderfully deep story that I can imagine reading in different ways each time I come back to it. It's set up in an unusual fashion—time travellers venture back into history, but the people they find know precisely what they are because they're rather used to strange people arriving from the future—and plays a lot with the concept of time.

This means that the two researchers from the future, who have travelled back to mediaeval times to research the origins of the Black Death, might expect to be the brightest, most educated, most historically aware and downright most able people there, only to find that they aren't, perhaps in each of those respects. This story is quirky—they like Dr. Pepper in the Danelaw, it seems—but it's very good indeed at weaving its themes. Their Roman hypocaust is the past and the bathysphere that Cecil has invented is the future, but the present is just stuck between them, almost lost as it soon will be when the plague arrives.

'Scarey Rose in Deep History' also tackles historical research but in a very different way. Instead of being able to physically travel back in time, the characters here are restricted to literally looking at the past through a device. The idea is reminiscent of Bob Shaw's slow glass, but with a modicum of control, and rather than reliving earlier moments in their own lives, they look at those of a shared set of ancestors. Given that they're multi-racial and some own others, it's all rather sensitive. It's a fascinating concept but I'm sure I missed a lot of nuance and connected to it as a genealogist who understands how unreliable family stories are.

Other stories here take us into the future. 'Liquid Assets' does that most effectively, because Ore succeeds at making aliens alien, which is not remotely as easy or commonplace as it seems. This is the other fish smuggling story, but it's set on a different planet with Augustus Koch, presumably a human, being hired by a Locrian, with Samian bodyguards and a Naxian truth reader, to avoid the tariffs and embargoes on Herrin and get her certain specialty fish. It's fascinating but confusing, because we're hit with so much so quickly that I wasn't entirely sure what happens and how all the intrigue played out.

'Half in Love with Easeful Rock and Roll' is a very different story, a character study that follows a hippie chick who spends more time in virtual reality having sex with Janis Joplin than in real life. She thinks she's gay but she's had a kid and she gives Janis male genitalia. The VR starts out as a form of escape and sexual release but ends up becoming therapy. 'Accelerated Grimace' follows a trophy wife called Marilyn who dreams of being Ralph's widow rather than wife. Which he learns, because he's an artist who uses a mind reading machine to make art out of her thoughts. Both of these stories have elements I appreciated but I didn't connect with either.

My other standout choice would be 'Ocean Hammer', oddly because it's not speculative fiction at all, the inclusion of a ghost whose appearance indicates death or hurricane notwithstanding. It's a quiet drama for a story that contains an incredibly violent storm and it's told like Joe R. Lansdale might tell it, but with a female voice. Irene breeds dogs and housesits on a South Carolina beach during storm season. Sandy is the painter next door who's clearly working through some issues. It gets dark, as indeed a few of these stories do but it's very well told indeed and it resonates.

Talking of dark, there are two stories here set in Bracken County, where magic is real but not well-controlled. 'Stone Whorl, Flint Knife' seems like the more substantial of the two, but it's actually a little shorter than 'Horse Tracks'. The former is about a woman whose hate for the man who killed her son manifests a Norn, who weaves his demise. Notably, he knows the weaving is for him, so this doesn't quite go where we expect. The latter underlines how dangerous it is to live in a magic place, even when asleep. It's more straightforward but just as impactful.

And there's 'Collected Ogoense', which seems like a pretty straightforward story to start with, an underpaid researcher doing what she can to conserve a particular species of fish, only for it to get progressively darker until we start to wonder who the good guys are in this story, if indeed there are any, and who is the bad. What that brief synopsis doesn't point out is that it's a revenge story, a particularly nasty one that doesn't remotely go as planned. I liked it a lot but I feel like I shouldn't because it questions my judgement.

I thought I'd read Rebecca Ore before, but apparently I haven't. Collections are a good way to get into the mind of a writer, because, if I don't like one story, there's always the next. The nine pieces here are all impressive in their way, even if I didn't connect with them personally. They're all deep, even the shortest of them, and I'm going to be thinking about them all, even the ones I didn't like quite as much. It's telling that my least favourite story, 'Accelerated Grimace', is the one that was shortlisted for an award, an Otherwise in 1998. It's also telling that my response to that is that I'm clearly missing some sort of nuance rather than assuming the judges got it wrong. ~~ Hal C F Astell