A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers by Alyssa Wong
My rating: 4/5 cats
The day my sister ended the world, the sky opened up in rain for the first time in years, flooding the desert wash behind our house. The snakes drowned in their holes and the javelinas stampeded downstream, but the water overtook them, and the air filled with their screaming as they were swept away.
this is good spiky stuff for your feeling-parts.
it’s a family story, and there’s magical stuff and a kind of time travel or time manipulation, but despite the bravado of a child: It was simple, Melanie had once told me. “Here, Hannah. Pay attention, and I’ll teach you how the future works,” it’s a little more involved and problematic than that initial confidence would suggest: Her eyes slid away from me. “It’s not that easy to get it right,” she said.
i really appreciated the fact that wong didn’t telegraph the specifics at the heart of this story, but that it wasn’t so subtle that you’d miss it. that’s a really tricky balance to pull off, and while a similarly-structured tor short – The Insects of Love – didn’t work for me, this one really did because she was able to control the ambiguity and the multiple timelines and repetitions without sliding too far into either explanation or obscurity.
this is the second tor short i have read by her, and i’ve liked them both. this one is a more sophisticated and complex story, but they are both floating on a mix of pain and love and helplessness and lonely alienation that is perfectly done. this one goes a little deeper – Scarecrow may have been intended for a YA audience, but in both she’s got a really strong voice, and i enjoyed the fresh spin she brought to a concept that’s been done bunches of times in bunches of different ways.
but jesus, that title… thumbs down.
read it for yourself here:
http://www.tor.com/2016/03/02/a-fist-…
