Take Us to Your Chief is a wonderfully charming, clever, melancholy collection of what Taylor describes as Native sci-fi. The author is an Ojibway from the Curve Lake First Nations, and indigenous traditions and ways of living and thinking inform every one of these stories. In one, dream-catchers turn ominous; in another, a newly born artificial intelligence tries to find a place for its soul within native beliefs.

I was aware of Taylor as a playwright — I keep trying to convince my library to order alterNatives but so far no dice — and, more recently, as a humorist, but this is my first introduction to his SFF. As he notes in the afterword, this book exists because he didn’t have enough money to pay potential contributors to a Canadian Native sci-fi anthology; so it may also have been his first introduction to his SFF. At times there’s a little clumsiness with conveying complicated premises, but his writing is very assured overall. He weaves Native influences into familiar types of stories (first contact, government’s-gonna-get-you, etc.) in a way that makes them seem utterly fresh.

I also love the idea of a Native SFF anthology. Does that exist? Can someone point me to it? Failing that, I’d love to be pointed towards more First Nations / Indigenous / Indian authors of speculative fiction. Any recommendations?

The post Review: Take Us to Your Chief, Drew Hayden Taylor appeared first on Reading the End.

You Know When the Men Are Gone is a loosely connected group of short stories about the army: life on an army base, or life in a war zone, or how to handle a homecoming. I feel like I’ve seen a lot of stuff about this lately, but I think that’s just because my roommate watches Army Wives and Coming Home back to back every Sunday evening. An army wife herself, Fallon depicts life on an army base with incredible vividness, the social norms, the constant worry, the small resentments and disrupted schedules.

Good endings junkie that I am, I tend to find short stories unsatisfying. The authors don’t have enough time to build up the emotional resonance I want, and when they do, they run the danger of coming off melodramatic. It is my opinion that short stories work best one at a time, in total isolation from other short stories. “The Lottery” will bowl you over when you read it by itself, but maybe not if you’ve just read fourteen other short stories by Shirley Jackson.

You Know When the Men Are Gone had this problem too. There were several stories in the collection that ended similarly to each other, with a sort of “my man, I will stand by him; my life, it isn’t so bad” attitude on the part of the protagonist. I didn’t dislike any individual one of those endings, and in fact actively liked several of them, but the collective effect was diminishing. I think I’d have really loved the end of “Inside the Break” if I’d read it by itself. Such are the vagaries of short story reading.

This all sounds rather negative, when in fact this was one of the very few short story collections I’ve ever (a) managed to get all the way through and (b) wanted to get all the way through. I was reading it for a book club, but I’d have finished reading it anyway, once I started. It wasn’t like Let the Great World Spin, which I might well have abandoned if I hadn’t known I needed to be able to discuss it in book club.

Thanks to the lovely Lydia for sending me my copy!

The post Review: You Know When the Men Are Gone, Siobhan Fallon appeared first on Reading the End.