Liberating Earth

★★★☆☆ – Respectable!

Freaky and Fun – Perhaps Occasionally Too Freaky?

Liberating Earth belongs to that more ambitious class of anthologies – one that unites it stories not only under a common theme, nor a common premise, but a common framing narrative. Two acolytes of Faction Paradox take turns instating new rulers on (a simulation of?) our Earth, and thus create a string of alternate realities where we, the humans, invariably have our collective day thoroughly ruined in a series of distressing science fiction ways. It’s not the sort of collection to use this premise to say anything in particular about the finer points of power structures or human nature, but rather uses it in service of three Fs: fun, fancies, and freakitude.

What sets Liberating Earth apart as a publication more than anything is that it’s an anthology written entirely by women! Stuart Douglas, the man behind Obverse Books, strikes me as a lovely bloke – reportedly, this was his admirably pragmatic solution to the issue that they hadn’t hired many female writers up to that point. As a woman who writes science fiction myself, of course I had to read it. As expected, the result is a refreshing lack of male gaze and chauvinism, not to mention the beneficial side effect that we have a higher proportion of new blood than usual. Somewhat funnily (stereotypes are what they are for a reason!), it also results in a markedly higher romance and sex content than in your typical Faction Paradox fare. A few of these romances hit hard; some missed me entirely. Some of the romantic and sexual elements, unfortunately, put me off quite profoundly – most notably, the framing narrative has a psychosexual throughline that I’d rather not have had in the background the whole book. See my individual story reviews below for details.

Though I tend not to mind when it comes to independent publications, I would in the case of Liberating Earth be remiss if I failed to mention its seeming complete lack of proofreading. Grammatical and typographical errors abound, punctuation is missing here and there, and no unification of typography appears to have been made: Some authors use curly quotes and some straight; some use en dashes and some use hyphen-minuses… Particularly tickling is an example from the final story of the bunch – a draft appears to have slipped through the editing and publication process, rather than the final version:

[…] [']You have to be able to prove heritage these days and even then...'

*something here.

There's a huge scarcity of resources in most of the European countries because of all the refugees. […]

The author apparently left a note to herself to fill out the scene, but never did. A decade after publication it’s a bit late to do anything about it, innit. For the most part, the proofing errors were only a mild amusement – but they did distract here and there, as well as impede some of the more emotional scenes. The publisher have gotten a bit better about it since.

I look forward to reading another Faction Paradox anthology! This sort of not-hard-but-certainly-not-soft sci-fi – high-concept, but not high-science (you could call it “science as magic”) – is surprisingly difficult to find, and I will forever remain thankful to Obverse Books for carrying that torch.

“Playing for Time” by Kate Orman

★★☆☆☆ – Couldn’t quite abide.

It’s a bold decision to frontload your anthology with psychosexual discomfort – for your framing narrative to heavily feature a group of young men being sexually exploited. That’s a plot device I, to be honest, am not particularly comfortable with. Had it been a short story positioned on the same level as the others, this would not have been quite such a problem – but being the framing narrative, it’s interwoven between the other stories, and thus makes its presence known again and again, meaning a part of me dreaded the interludes this story comprises. That and the fact that it’s a bit vague and fuzzy on the details – I certainly have a grasp on the emotional arc of the story, but the exact plot is a bit up in the air.

Still, “Playing for Time” contains some beautifully wondrous (and unsettling) imagery, and ties into one (only one, but nevertheless one) of the short stories to great effect (see “Red Rover Red Rover” below). The anthology would be poorer for a lack of it. It does elevate the book to “more” than a collection of short stories.

“Dreamer in the Dark” by E. H. Timms

★★★★☆ – Don’t mind if I do!

Economical and efficient; emotionally resonant and eminently personal. Possibly other “E” words. Effulgent. Effervescent. Ecclesiastical. No… I immediately veered into irrelevance there.

A lovely image of a smartly bounded mini-world, painted in a bit further with every paragraph. Timms gives the impression of having an eye on what every part is meant to accomplish.

I particularly enjoy the element of using mythology without naming it – the ruling class is plainly based on Medusa, but she is never named, which (along with the fact that it takes place somewhere in Egypt-ish) lends the story a moreish sense of cultural amalgamation; of living naturally in the greater collective consciousness of fiction.

“Annie’s Arms” by Xanna Chown

★★★☆☆ – I had a good time!

A pleasantly quotidian glimpse of a very strange alternate present. The sort of thing made for anthologies. It ultimately goes in a fun, non-obvious direction, which I appreciate – the sort of direction you might (stereotypically, perhaps, but in this case correctly) imagine is more expected to come about in an anthology written exclusively by women. Lovely to read something by Chown outside of Big Finish!

The story is let down by an all-too-abrupt ending and a lingering feeling that neither the “hook” nor the characters were quite compelling enough – it spends many of its precious words on worldbuilding the same few aspects somewhat redundantly, leaving the more personal elements underexplored.

Until the final couple of pages I was certain that Annie was going to boink her shade. Deeply thankfully, that did not turn out to be the case. I couldn’t have taken it after Kate Orman’s (probably intentionally) eminently unpleasant psychosexual onslaught.

“The Mountains Are Higher at Home” by Juliet Kemp

★★★★☆ – Alright, yeah!

‘Look, there are all those bits that have cracked off the tree,’ Bretet said, making out like he knows all about carbon lifeforms. ‘Something must have put them there.’

‘Leaves,’ I said, remembering our last Earth lesson. ‘They’re called leaves.’

I love a story that describes familiar concepts in unfamiliar terms. There was a series of sci-fi novels written from different species’ perspectives, weren’t there? Some squid creatures or some such? Can anyone tell me what that was? Either way, it’s as titillating here as always.

I can admire the focus and restraint that this story shows. Kemp exudes somewhat of the quality of a Zen master: Countless trifling questions that would niggle at any sci-fi writer abound – How do these boulder creatures locomote? How do they, concretely, restrict the humans? Why are they such staunch environmentalists? – but she either lacks the impulse to get into them, or rightly recognizes that answering them would be liable to at best yield an “oh, huh” and at worst wreck the pacing or eat up precious word count.

The decision to set the story not from the freedom fighter’s perspective but from that of a doubter is an intelligent one – it partly replaces the default tension of “will they succeed or fail?” with a feeling of watching a trainwreck in slow motion. Not that the underdog perspective doesn’t work – far from it; it’s the popular mode for a reason and worked just fine for “Dreamer in the Dark” – but this feels perhaps particularly fitting for the theme and setup of this anthology: that it’s about Earth being thoroughly messed up in a series of freaky-deaky ways.

Incidental spoilers for (this short story and) Earthshock (Classic Doctor Who, 1982): In a rare move, this short story breaks from a particularly famous part of Doctor Who continuity by replacing the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event – rather than Adric on a space freighter, the sapient boulder race from this story (the “Kyal”) decided they’d had enough of theropods. Truly immaterial in the grand scheme of things – especially given that Doctor Who is preeminently unconcerned with “canon” and “continuity” – and perhaps the author hadn’t even seen Earthshock… but it’s fun to see such a concrete manifestation of Faction Paradox’s growth into its own entity, a piddling manifestation though it may be.

“Judy’s War” by Rachael Redhead

★★★☆☆ – Sure!

A short short story woven of irreverence and spur-of-the-moment nonsense. It almost gives the impression of the author having sat down and written nonstop whatever popped into her head. There’s a certain Douglas Adams-ian tone, but there’s none of the prudence or internal logic that characterizes his work – very #NoFilter.

As a result, this story feels entirely unsubstantial, but it’s having fun, so it’s easy to have fun with it. Besides, it’s shorter than the skirt I’m planning to wear to next month’s sapphic club night.

Kate Orman’s framing narrative connective tissue after this begins with a character remarking “What the hell was that?” – a hilariously rude move on her part that I can’t help but read as her using her characters as a mouthpiece. BM, Kate Orman. BM.

…Not that it isn’t a reasonable comment to make!

“Red Rover Red Rover” by Q

★★★★★ – I’m smitten.

Dammit. My fear was realized: The most exciting story in the anthology was written by the author only known as “Q”, meaning that I’m now interested enough to have to wonder who in heaven’s name Q is.

I’m taken with Q’s worldbuilding technique – details about the world are invariably presented like the bonus temporary tattoo in a popsicle wrapper: always slipped in with something tasty and engaging; always delivered with something to make taking it in extrinsically worth it. Chew on this early example:

One of the trails goes through an abandoned neighbourhood, and I like to make up stories about the people who might've lived there. For example, that reed shack with the caved-in roof? It belonged to an old Korean couple. Married 53 years. They ran a roller skating rink and went to a different theme park each year for their anniversary. (Yes, I know. Theme parks and skating rinks are like unicorns over here: people will send you to the looney bin if you say you've ever seen one. But it's my story; I can tell it like I want to.) See that sad-looking tree-hut by the thorngrove? The woman who lived there won the lottery. No one knew it till she disappeared to travel the world and left a fortune to her favourite animal charity. That red bamboo longhouse with the rope-swing housed a lesbian couple who were trying to get pregnant before the floods came.

In a paragraph, we’ve learned 1) that we’re in a spin on our own world, 2) that this place floods, 3) that it wasn’t always that way, 4) what the local architecture looks like, and 5) that we’re in a dystopia dour enough to lack theme parks. Not one of these was stated as a plain fact or in a “box text”-style description. Instead, the author gives us a device to make it exciting, and simultaneously builds out the perspective character’s personality. Supremely efficient. The venerable short story is the author’s home field.

The texture of the story changes dramatically throughout, what with changes of perspective (and with it, voice) and scenery, and since the character writing is already strong from the word “go”, it has its claws in you from start to finish. I’d read a whole book about the all-too-prosaically-named Joe Brown (who, although he seems a bit of a doormat, didn’t manage to roll my eyes further than 45° or so) and his emphatically more protagonistically named moitié Ellie Green. Hoo boy. Their romance had me hot under the collar all the way up to the tear ducts.

For the first time in Liberating Earth, a story ties into the framing narrative, rather than the street being exclusively one-way. The shining result is that it both is greatly augmented by the framing narrative and greatly augments it – the whole book, really! – in return. Note to self: When I end up writing for an anthology (I can’t imagine it won’t happen), communicate proactively with the editor – this sort of coordination and synthesis is only possible by going out into the yard and playing a bit of the good old conversational catch.

Figures that the story that captures me is the decidedly YA-esque one. I haven’t read YA in a long time – but though I am an A, I am, I suppose, still a Y one, so I shan’t hang my head in too much shame.

“The Víkingr Mystique” by Dorothy Ail

★★☆☆☆ – Not my thing.

A trope I can’t stand in sapphic fiction – and the mirrored version exists in similar measure in MLM stories – is when the romance is inflected around disagreeable men. For one, it’s a shame to have your sapphic romance hinge on, in the end, the actions of men. On a level more fundamental yet, however, a romance – according to my sensibilities – shouldn’t be driven by how horrible your preexisting partner is, but how wonderful the other party is. In fact, I find it quite uncomfortable to have to deal with the messy, hurtful business of choosing somebody specifically over another – let alone relishing in that.

And that’s this story: A Thelma and Louise-style (very Thelma and Louise-style) love story between two women where the constant throughline is how detestable the main character’s caricature of a husband is, and the appeal of the other woman isn’t sold very convincingly. (I myself am not particularly drawn to the “gruff & buff” archetype in the first place – even less so when she’s violent and displays a disregard for the value of human life.)

I understand from where the impulse comes, in homoromantic fiction, to contrast the romance with a destructive heterosexual relationship. For one, if you’re to depict self-discovery – finding that your sexuality wasn’t what you thought it was – the easiest way to do so is to depict choosing the homoromantic relationship over a heteroromantic one. That poses a problem, however, in that you don’t want the reader to mourn the lost relationship; to feel sorry for the ex-to-be – so you naturally make the preexisting partner reprehensible enough to preclude any sympathy. (Of course, there are cases where there’s a simple case of heterophobia at work – the stereotypical “fujoshi” model – but you needn’t go nearly that far to arrive at this trope.)

When an author goes down this inadvisable road, however, they’ve inadvertently hurt their own work in two ways. One is simple: Now you have an odious character that needs to be present throughout, meaning you’ve introduced a recurring unpleasant streak. More insidiously, however – and I don’t think this is recognized enough – you’ve undermined the self-discovery journey. Your character finding themselves – their sexuality; their love – is no longer intrinsic, but spurred on by the disagreeability of the alternative. For lack of a better turn of phrase, you’ve painted the situation in a light in which the preexisting partner, in a sense, “turned them gay”. Which I don’t imagine is usually the goal. The ultimate romance is, in at least some aspect, slightly hollowed out.

The trope of choosing to let the whole world go to hell in favor of your romantic relationship is one that’s always pleasant, at least. My favorite scene of the story is how this decision is characterized – it’s spun as a reaction to the Cold War; a decidedly savvy, satisfyingly setting-anchored bit of character writing:

I wasn’t the only one who found the new situation […] something of a relief. After so many years of expecting the worst, finding that doomsday had finally come – and that it wasn’t quite as terrifying as we’d all be [sic] warned – was vastly preferable to the tension of waiting.

I’m usually not one to sweat the small stuff like whether something is “realistic”, but primed by the sour taste the romance left in my mouth, it perhaps stood out a bit more to me that it is ludicrous that the most infamously well-armed nation in the modern world would fall to an army of folks wielding axes and swords (though perhaps they were sci-fi axes and swords – it didn’t quite come across how technologically advanced the invasion portrayed in this story was). And that the world would jump to welcome and venerate the raiders. Hm.

This story will appeal to somebody – but that somebody isn’t me. (It’s, I’d imagine, somebody who has a thing for butch women who ~take charge~.)

“Life of Julia” by Tansy Rayner Roberts

★☆☆☆☆ – No thanks…

A story about horrible things happening to a young woman who exercises no agency until the epilogue. I’m not particularly drawn to melancholic descriptions of cold statue penis or attempted rape scenes.

Particularly frustrating was that Julia – the protagonist – does not seem to be afforded even the emotional agency of truly being against the horrible state of affairs (being married off at 15 to a space alien for whom she feels nothing). Instead, these scenes are written in a way that almost gives the impression that they’re intended to be titillating, which I don’t exactly see how they would be:

[Julia was] very much aware of his hand on her leg. It was an almost enjoyable sensation, and if he were human, she might have found herself catching her breath in anticipation of the wedding.

“Life of Julia” isn’t poorly written in a technical sense by any means, but I found the experience of reading it no more than depressing and frustrating.

“Project Thunderbird” by Kelly Hale

★★★☆☆ – I’m not complaining!

This one’s a bit slow for my tastes – not dense enough with happening (whether that’s plot-wise, character-wise, or thematically) for the pauce page count. Perhaps Kelly Hale does better in longer form? I’d imagine that could be the case – her prose is doubtlessly enjoyable. I look forward to seeing what her earlier Faction Paradox novel Erasing Sherlock is like (though I hear there’s a bit too much talk about Mr. Holmes’s “bulging member” or some such in that one).

This story is the one that suffers the most from the anthology’s seeming complete lack of proofreading, and it actually did impact my enjoyment when, say, punctuation was missing in an otherwise particularly emotional scene. It’s also the one that contains the “*something here” mentioned up top. Oopsie.