Posted by Nicky Drayden on Oct 9, 2014 in
Reviews Daily Science Fiction
http://dailysciencefiction.com/science-fiction/space-travel/m-e-garber/dancing
Minutes after an explosion kills Arun, beloved father and husband and pilot to their antique spaceship, a mother and daughter are forced to put aside their grief to land the ship and find a way to save both of their lives.
The ship’s belly bumped the ground, rose up, and dove hard. Tearing metal shrieked louder than Natesha. Seema buffeted in her restraints as a series of booms shook what remained of the ship. Then it settled, hissing, to the ground.
She freed herself and raced through the chaos of debris to Natesha, who sagged against her restraints. Trembling hands touched her daughter’s cheek, her neck. A pulse! Natesha’s eyes fluttered. Seema’s clenched body released, and she placed a kiss on her daughter’s bruised forehead.
Tears welled in Natesha’s eyes as Seema’s hands flew over her, loosening her restraints.
“Daddy wouldn’t have crashed us,” her daughter said, then threw herself into her mother’s arms and wept.
We’re instantly thrown into a tear jerker, these two women and a child on the way, set down on a hostile planet whose air will kill them in an hour. All of their emergency lifesuits have been destroyed by the explosion that killed Arun. Mother, Seema, cannot see how life will be possible without her husband, but for the sake of their children, she pushes forth, trying to be strong for their guilt-ridden daughter Netesha.
This piece of flash hold’s its fair share of emotion, and then some. Their reactions rang true, and their anxiety transferred to me as I read along. I felt Seema’s frustration of her daughter refusing to listen, but understood that Netesha was not in a place to make a rational decision of her own. The ending image (without spoilers) is a very powerful one that echoes the relationship between mother and child. My only gripe is that Seema stumbles onto the solution to their problem rather abruptly, and I would have liked it to be more of a natural discovery, but still, this is a very quick and emotionally potent read.
Tags: Daily Science Fiction, Flash Fiction, Short Women in Space, Space Travel
Posted by Nicky Drayden on Oct 7, 2014 in
Reviews Clarkesworld, August 2013
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/macfarlane_08_13/
Author Website: www.alexdallymacfarlane.com
Short Women in Space, Review # 7
In Found, a merchant peddling spices among a collection of asteroid colonies is making one last run before life there changes forever. Colony life is tough, as evidenced by what the merchant encountered at the last asteroid:
I had found its interior spaces open and airless, blast-marked, most of its equipment broken or gone, debris—shards of metal, rock, old synth materials, blackened bits of bone—still lodged in some deep crannies.
At the sight of the devastation, a thought of Aagot slips past the merchant’s mind. Had Aagot been there, a man who the merchant had once shared a juniper berry flavored kiss with? There is a romance story somewhere, lost in the spaces between asteroids, but there is something of even more significance that has already been found: the colony itself. And they didn’t even know they were lost. The people of Cai Nu are soon coming to save the inhabitants of the asteroids, victims of an intergalactic diaspora gone wrong.
Okay, I’ll admit it. I am still a bit clueless at using alternate pronouns, and have in the past gone through impressive feats of word maneuvering to avoid it in reviews. When reading first person pieces, it seems I go through a mental process of trying to figure out what gender box to put the narrator into. When it is not initially obvious, we become attuned to hints, like the mention of the man that has been kissed by the narrator. Of course, at this point, I have trained myself not to jump to any conclusions based on this alone, but it narrows the field, if only marginally. But why is it so important to for us to put such labels on characters? Why limit our spices to salt and pepper, when there are cinnamon and thyme and cumin and bay and star anise…each different and delectable in their own signature ways?
I don’t know, so maybe by “Short Women in Space”, I really am looking for gender diversity/inclusiveness in space, or maybe something even broader that I cannot yet articulate, but I am interested to see where I come out on the other side of this thing. One thing I do know is that sometimes labels are important, especially when you keep the cinnamon and cumin next to each other on the spice rack. Trust me, cumin in your oatmeal doesn’t taste nearly as appetizing as it sounds…
REAL Women in Space
Millie Hughes-Fulford
First female payload specialist
STS-40 (Jun. 5, 1991)
Creative Commons
Tags: Asteroids, Clarkesworld, Colonies, Short Story, Short Women in Space
Posted by Nicky Drayden on Oct 6, 2014 in
Writer's Life Lightspeed, September 2014
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/ten-rules-intergalactic-smuggler-successful-kind/
Author Website: http://blackholly.com/
Short Women in Space, Review #6
In this novelette, a young girl stows away on her uncle’s cargo ship, fleeing a homesteader lifestyle on the boring planet her parents immigrated to. Life aboard the ship presents its own challenges when she realizes that her parents’ warnings about her uncle weren’t completely unfounded. He’s an intergalactic smuggler, but there’s no turning back now. She’ll just have to learn the rules so she can properly follow in his footsteps.
She’s heard a lot of bad things about spaceports, but when she lands on Zvezda-9, it doesn’t live up to the hype. No one’s trying to slip her drugs, no flesh-ripping Charkazak anywhere in sight.
Zvezda-9 is a big stretch of cement tunnels, vast microgravity farms, hotel pods, and general stores with overpriced food that’s either dehydrated or in a tube. There are also InterPlanetary offices, where greasy-looking people from a variety of worlds wait in long lines for licenses. They all stare at your homespun clothes. You want to grab your uncle’s hand, but you already feel like enough of a backworld yokel, so you curl your fingers into a fist instead.
There are aliens—it wasn’t like your parents were wrong about that. Most of them look human and simultaneously inhuman, and the juxtaposition is so odd that you can’t keep from staring. You spot a woman whose whole lower face is a jagged-toothed mouth. A man with gray-skinned cheeks that grow from his face like gills or possibly just really strange ears loads up a hovercart nearby, the stripes on his body smeared so you know they are paint and not pigmentation. Someone passes you in a heavy, hairy cloak, and you get the impression of thousands of eyes inside of the hood. It’s creepy as hell.
After she’s over the initial shock of it all, after she’s gotten herself some high-tech threads, some trendy holographic earrings, and a don’t-mess-with-me swagger, she realizes this place is exactly what she was running away from — boring.
That is until her uncle scores a no-questions-asked job of a lifetime, smuggling a cylindrical casket full of something, or more likely — someone — to an unscrupulous genetics lab. And of course, these things can never go well. Will pluck and her uncle’s rules be enough to get our heroine out of an intergalactic bind?
For all of the blood and guts and gore in this story, it’s a truly charming one. On top of being emotionally wrenching, it’s also masterfully written. The first time I came across this story, I moved right past it, thinking the format was a gimmick, but there’s no gimmick here, just pure and awesome storytelling. I’m so glad I went back to give it a full read. It’s really uplifting to see a young woman in space, setting out on adventures, solving momentous problems, and making a name for herself. This one is a bit of a time commitment, coming in at over 8000 words, but I promise, by the end of it you’ll be wishing there were 8000 more.
REAL Women in Space
Sally Ride
First American woman in space
STS-7 (Jun. 18, 1983)
Creative Commons
Tags: Aliens, Lightspeed Magazine, Nicky's Pick, Novelette, Short Women in Space, Space Travel
