Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://carolineyoachim.com/
CITY: Seattle
STATE: WA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://carolineyoachim.com/about-me/bio/ * http://www.apex-magazine.com/apex-interview-with-caroline-m-yoachim/ * http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-caroline-yoachim/
eESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Children: two.
EDUCATION:Attended college, including graduate school; Clarion West Writers Workshop, graduated 2006.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, novelist, short-story writer, and photographer.
AWARDS:Nebula Award nomination, 2010, for novelette “Stone Wall Truth.”
WRITINGS
Also author of the novelette “Stone Wall Truth,” 2010. Contributor of short and flash fiction to periodicals and Web sites, including Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and Daily Science Fiction.
SIDELIGHTS
Caroline M. Yoachim started writing speculative fiction in 2005 and has contributed stories to periodicals and Web sites. In an interview with Apex magazine Web site contributor Maggie Slater, Yoachim remarked that she began writing when she was very young, noting she “scribbled stories and poems into notebooks.” Yoachim went on to remark that she stopped writing fiction when she went to college. However, several years later, while Yoachim was in graduate school, a friend told her about his efforts to write a science fiction novel. “This triggered an epiphany of sorts for me: novels are written by people like me,” Yoachim noted in the Apex Web site interview.
In her debut collection of stories titled Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World and Other Stories, Yoachim presents 25 previously published stories and two new stories. The stories feature a wide range of speculative backdrops and tales about everything from time travel and alien invasions to Japanese mermaids. Many of the stories are brief in nature and some fit into the category of flash fiction. Yoachim told Apex Web site contributor Slater: “I’ve written more flash than any other length of story, and most of what I do is intuitive rather than planned. When I’m writing flash fiction I spend a lot of time on the opening paragraph. Since flash is so short, those first few sentences are crucial in getting the reader grounded in the story.” Yoachim went on in the interview to note the importance of the first paragraph in flash fiction. In the case of her speculative fiction, Yoachim told Slater: “The beginning has to set up the reader’s expectations so that the ending will be satisfying.”
Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World and Other Stories is broken up into three parts: “Our World,” “Fantasy Worlds,” and “Alien Worlds.” In addition to short stories, the first two sections include “Flash Fiction Worlds” sections featuring six flash fiction stories. The story titled “Rock, Paper, Scissors, Love, Death” first appeared on the Online magazine Lightspeed and tells a story featuring time travel and love. In the tale, three people meet on a bus which ends up getting destroyed by a landslide. Two of the people survive and fall in love but later separate. Eventually, one of the survivors is visited by his older self and told how to build a time travel machine in an attempt to save the couple’s relationship. In “Five Stages of Grief after the Alien Invasion,” Yoachim explores the toll in human suffering after aliens, known as Eridani, invade Earth and conduct a “sporefall” in which their food is imbedded in the spores. The Eridani mistakenly did not think the sporefall would be harmful. The story is a composite of five separate flash stories in which the story is told from the perspectives of five different characters.
In an interview with the writer G.G. Silverman for Silverman’s home Web site, G.G. Silverman, Yoachim noted that her stories have repeating themes . She told Silverman: “My academic background is in psychology, and I’m fascinated by the human mind. Several of my stories examine the nature of human identity. What defines us as individuals and makes us who we are? If we replace all the cells in our body, do we become someone new?” Joachim also noted that other themes included people undergoing transformations, family relationship, and loss and grief.
Some of the stories in Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World and Other Stories also deal with environmental themes. For example, in the flash fiction story “Honeybee,” all the honeybees are dying off. Although clones have been created, they are dying as well. The story’s narrator is a time traveler who has been traveling back in time and decides to transport some bees from the past to the future world. However, by the end of the story, it is unclear whether or not the transportation of the bees is actually what causes the bees in the future to die off. “Her gift for reshaping and polishing dulled old gems makes Yoachim’s collection truly noteworthy,” wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, July 11, 2016, review of Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World and Other Stories. p. 48.
ONLINE
Apex, http://www.apex-magazine.com/ (May 6, 2014), Maggie Slater, “Apex Interview with Caroline M. Yoachim.”
Caroline M. Yoachim Home Page, http://carolineyoachim.com (April 4, 2017).
G.G. Silverman, http://www.ggsilverman.com/ (February 10, 2017), G.G. Silverman, “Women in Speculative Fiction: Caroline Yoachim, Author of Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World,” author interview.
Lightspeed, http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/ (April 4, 2017), Lee Hallison, “Author Spotlight: Caroline Yoachim.”
Rocket Stack Rank, http://www.rocketstackrank.com (September 7, 2015), review of short story “Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World.”*
NONFICTION
Purchase Issue
Author Spotlight: Caroline Yoachim
by LEE HALLISON
PUBLISHED IN FEB. 2015 (ISSUE 57) | 732 WORDS | RELATED STORY: RED PLANET
What triggered the idea of a person being offered a solution to a problem that did not exist for them?
I find psychology fascinating. How do people process sensory information? How do we react to adversity, or to opportunity? Which aspects of our lives are most important to our identity?
“Red Planet” is a counterpoint to a story I wrote a couple years ago. “Harmonies of Time” featured a deaf character who eagerly embraced first a newfound ability to hear, and later an alien time-sense of past and future. In “Red Planet,” I wanted to show a different perspective — someone who is happy the way she is and isn’t interested in acquiring a new sense.
You are a photographer, so sight must be an important sense for you. Was writing this story difficult or painful in light of that? Would you make the same choice Tara does?
It’s hard to say whether I would make the same choice. Certainly if I became blind now, after having had sight my entire life, I would jump at the chance to get my vision back. But there is a huge difference between losing sight as an adult (or even as a child) and never having had it to begin with. What would sight mean to me if I had been born blind? The closest analog would be if someone offered me a new alien sense that was potentially useful, but also disruptive to my current perceptions of the world. But that isn’t quite the same situation, because many aspects of our world are designed for people who can see. Gaining a novel alien sense would make me different. Gaining sight after having been blind made Tara more like everyone else.
Would I make the choice Tara does? In the story, Tara is someone who successfully navigates her life with the senses that she has. She is a scientist, thriving in the academic world, and the only major roadblock that she can’t overcome without sight is the vision test to get to Mars. If I was Tara, I might make the choices she made. Of course, I’m not Tara. So . . . maybe?
Did you research biochemical uses for electric eel cells or theoretical avenues for optical enhancement, or was the futuristic vision treatment something you just imagined?
Modified electrical eel cells for biomedical implants is a real line of research. I stumbled across an article about it, and filed it away as a cool idea that I’d like to use in a story. Modified eel cells make a great candidate for powering biomedical implants because, unlike traditional batteries, there is no danger of toxic chemicals being released if the eel cells fail. They’re just ordinary cells. So the entire system can be implanted under the skin, rather than having an external power source.
There were a couple other topics I researched to write the story — the effect of climate change on phytoplankton morphology, and Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation as a treatment for depression. A common saying in writing is “write what you know,” but I think a good corollary would be “if you don’t know, learn.”
The experiences Tara has as a blind scientist felt authentic — did you work with anyone with a sight disability or have you had experiences that helped you connect to her?
One of the many inspirations for this story was an article written by a blind marine biologist, Dr. Geerat Vermeij, about his experiences in the field. The article gave me a feel for what it was like for a blind person to try to navigate the academic world. I also read articles about teaching biology to students who are blind, to get a feel for different approaches that might be used.
Any new projects on the horizon?
I’ve been playing around with a short story technique I call flashmash. Basically, I write a series of interrelated flash stories and then mash them together into a single story. “Five Stages of Grief After the Alien Invasion” was the first of these, and it came out in Clarkesworld last August. Since then, I’ve written a few other stories this way — one of which is forthcoming in Lightspeed later this year.
Apex Interview with Caroline M. Yoachim
by Maggie Slater on May 6, 2014 in Interviews | 0 comments
Tags: apex magazine, caroline m. yoachim, interview, issue 60, maggie slater, nonfiction
Since her writing career began in 2005, Nebula–nominated author Caroline M. Yoachim has written over a dozen short stories which have appeared in Lightspeed, Interzone, Daily Science Fiction, Shimmer, and Asimov’s, among many other top–notch markets. In 2006, Ms. Yoachim graduated from the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop, and in 2011, her novelette “Stone Wall Truth” was nominated for a Nebula.
This issue of Apex Magazine includes Caroline M. Yoachim’s heartbreaking flash fiction story “Paperclips and Memories and Things That Won’t Be Missed.” In this interview, Ms. Yoachim discusses with us the challenges of character development, her approach to flash fiction composition, Habit RPG, and junkyard pixies!
About “Paperclips and Memories and Things That Won’t Be Missed”
APEX MAGAZINE: This is a lovely tale, very finely wrought with an intense emotional kick woven into its core. What was the initial spark that made you sit down to write this story?
CAROLINE M. YOACHIM: The initial spark for this story was a prompt and a deadline — I wrote it for a writing challenge I do every year called Weekend Warrior. The challenge is run through Codex, an online writing group I’m in, and participants write a flash fiction story every weekend for five straight weeks.
Vylar Kaftan writes the prompts for the challenge, and the one that sparked this story was to chose any three words from a list of twenty and write a story that included those words. I selected ghost, peanut, and invoice, but the list of words also got me thinking about odd collections of things. I liked the idea of ghosts collecting little things from the world of the living. At the time I wrote the story, my youngest daughter was about 3 months old, so the other bit of inspiration for the story was her fondness for warm bath water and white noise.
AM: Flash fiction can be a major challenge to write in a way that feels complete, but this story has a satisfying wholeness to it. How do you approach writing a piece of flash fiction versus other short fiction? What kinds of things do you take into consideration?
CMY: This is a tricky question for me. I’ve written more flash than any other length of story, and most of what I do is intuitive rather than planned. When I’m writing flash fiction I spend a lot of time on the opening paragraph. Since flash is so short, those first few sentences are crucial in getting the reader grounded in the story. The first paragraph (often the first sentence) introduces the speculative element for the story, and also sets the tone. The beginning has to set up the reader’s expectations so that the ending will be satisfying — if I stick a humorous ending on a melancholy opening, the reader will feel cheated. Or if I introduce the speculative element too late, it feels like a twist or a cheat, instead of the premise for the story.
AM: What was the easiest part of writing “Paperclips and Memories and Things That Won’t Be Missed”? What was the most challenging? Was there any part during the writing of this particular story where you surprised yourself?
CMY: The easiest part was coming up with all the random little things ghosts might collect. The most challenging thing was figuring out how to include (1) the rules of how collecting worked and (2) all the necessary backstory for both Margie and the narrator. To get everything in, the story definitely jumps around a bit, and coming up with smooth transitions from one paragraph to the next was often tricky.
The moment where I surprised myself was when I was writing the ending and realized that the baby could also collect things — which resulted in my favorite paragraph of the entire story.
About Writing in General:
AM: On your website, you mention that you started writing speculative fiction in 2005, and in 2006 you attended the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop. What drew you to writing fiction and what was it in 2005 that sparked the determination to take your writing to the next level?
CMY: What I have on my website is true, but incomplete. I loved writing when I was a kid. I scribbled stories and poems into notebooks, many of which might still be boxed up in my basement somewhere. Then I went to college, and somehow in the chaos of living on my own and figuring out what my major was I stopped writing fiction. I don’t think I wrote anything but essays and term papers for several years. In 2005, a friend of mine mentioned that he was writing a science fiction novel. This triggered an epiphany of sorts for me: novels are written by people like me. (I was in graduate school at the time, so obviously I recognized that novels were written by people. It just didn’t occur to me that I could be one of those people.)
I wrote three or four chapters of a truly terrible novel, realized I was in way over my head, and sought out a writing group. I heard about Clarion West shortly after joining the writing group, and the concept of spending six weeks surrounded by a bunch of other writers and focusing on nothing but writing sounded amazing (and it was!).
AM: Do you have a set writing routine for yourself? Do you write every day, or in bursts? Work on multiple projects at a time, or focus on just one? Do you use any specific methods for keeping yourself on track on a given project?
CMY: I have tried, on several occasions, to write every day. I hear it works well for lots of other people, but my brain simply refuses to do it. I get a lot more done if I let myself work in bursts — a couple days with lots of writing followed by a day or two with none. (On the ‘non–writing’ days, I often do writing–related things like send out submissions, write critiques, answer interview questions, etc.)
I used to write one story at a time and not start another until the first was either finished or trunked, but lately I’ve shifted to working on several projects at once. I’m not sure what prompted the change, or even whether it is a good thing. I used to force my way to the end of a story even if I felt like I was stuck — now if I get stuck I tend to jump to another project for a while and then come back.
I recently found a great tool for staying on track with my projects: Habit RPG (habitrpg.com/). It transforms your to do list into a game, and as you get things done you are rewarded with gold and eggs that hatch into pets.
Caroline’s workspace, complete with toys and trees
Caroline’s workspace, complete with toys and trees
AM: What is your editing philosophy? What works (and what doesn’t) for you when approaching an initial draft?
CMY: My revisions process mostly consists of reading through a draft repeatedly, and fixing whatever things bother me the most on each pass. This is often incredibly inefficient, because even if I know that something about the middle of the story is broken, I will still do a full pass from the beginning all the way through to the end changing all kinds of little things as I go through. Part of the reason that I do it this way is that I have a terrible memory, and I worry that if I jump around fixing things out of order the story will crumble into a bunch of pieces that no longer fit together.
AM: What is the best piece of advice you ever received about writing? What was the worst?
CMY: The best piece of advice is one that I’ve heard from many sources: don’t self–reject. A story will never sell if you leave it sitting on your hard drive, so once it is “done” start sending it around. I can’t think of a worse bit of advice off the top of my head — if I get a piece of advice that doesn’t suit me, I tend not to remember it!
AM: There always seems to be one element of writing that comes more naturally to any given author, be it world–building, or character development, or dialogue, or pacing, etc. Is there any element of writing that you find comes easily to you? Is there any element that you find particularly challenging?
CMY: I’m not sure there’s any one element that always comes easily for me. I tend to start from a core idea (e.g., ghosts that collect or time that flows backwards or an enchanted carnival made entirely of sugar), and whatever elements tie in closest to the core idea of the story tend to come easiest for me. Character development nearly always gives me trouble, and I have a tendency to avoid dialog as much as possible because I have a hard time making it sound realistic.
AM: You’re also a professional photographer. How did you become involved in photography, and what about that visual art form inspires you? Do you have a favorite picture?
CMY: With two young kids, I haven’t had the time to keep up with photography and writing, so photography is more of a hobby than a profession for me these days. That said, I still love taking pictures, and I hope to get back to doing more photography eventually.
I love the way photography can capture a moment in time. A picture can evoke emotion or trigger memories or inspire an idea (I sometimes use interesting photos as prompts for stories). But the thing that really made photography work for me was the transition to digital cameras. I love the freedom of being able to take hundreds of pictures and discarding all but the best three. It lets me, as a photographer, really experiment with the images in a way that I’d be reluctant to do if taking too many shots meant wasting film. I often wish that there was a writing equivalent of digital photography, where I could write a hundred stories and only submit the best few, but given how long it takes me to finish a story, I don’t think that would be a good strategy.
AM: Being an author often goes hand in hand with being a voracious reader. What are you currently reading, fiction or non–fiction? Any recommendations?
CMY: I’ve been reading a lot of YA and MG lately, to get into the right mindset for revising a middle grade novel I’m working on. I’m in the middle of reading Nalo Hopkinson’s Sister Mine at the moment — I picked it up because I saw it on the list of nominees for the Andre Norton Award this year. I’m not entirely sure I’d classify it as YA (although I can certainly see how it got there), but I’m enjoying the book. A couple other recent reads that come to mind are Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me and Ally Condie’s Matched.
AM: What are you working on now, writing–wise (if you can say), and what can we look forward to seeing from you in the coming months?
CMY: I’m currently working on revisions for a middle grade novel with the working title Junk Craft Magic. It tells the story of an eleven–year–old mixed–race girl who saves a bunch of junkyard pixies from a wall of hazardous waste. I’m also writing an assortment of short stories, including a couple of collaborations with Tina Connolly.
In the upcoming months, I have stories coming out in Lightspeed, Flash Fiction Online, and Daily Science Fiction. I update my website periodically as stories come out, so for a complete listing of recent publications, go to: carolineyoachim.com
AM: Thank you so much, Ms. Yoachim, for sharing “Paperclips and Memories and Things That Won’t Be Missed” with us here at Apex Magazine, and for giving us this behind–the–scenes glimpse of your writing!
BIO
Caroline YoachimCaroline M. Yoachim lives in Seattle and loves cold cloudy weather. Her fiction has appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and Daily Science Fiction, among other places. She is a 2006 graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, and her 2010 novelette “Stone Wall Truth” was nominated for a Nebula Award. Caroline’s debut short story collection, “Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World & Other Stories,” came out with Fairwood Press in August 2016.
Frequently Asked Question: How do you pronounce your name?
Caroline = Care-oh-lynn (i.e., like Carolyn)
M. = M
Yoachim = Yo-kum
If you want to hear my name pronounced correctly, Tina Connolly does a lovely job on her podcast, Toasted Cake: http://toastedcake.com/podcasts/TC96-safe-road.mp3
omen in Speculative Fiction: Caroline Yoachim, author of SEVEN WONDERS OF A ONCE AND FUTURE WORLD
February 10, 2017 by G.G. Silverman
Hello, readers! I’m excited to introduce you to Caroline M. Yoachim, prolific author of short speculative fiction. Her work has been widely published in the best journals and anthologies of our day, and her short story collection, Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World and Other Stories, was just released from Fairwood Press to critical acclaim.
Caroline, please tell our readers more about the kind of stories they’ll find in your collection. What kinds of worlds should they expect, and what themes will they encounter?
In the introduction to my collection, Tina Connolly wrote that my stories are “dark but never hopeless,” which I really love as a description of my work. As a writer I try to evoke a sense of wonder–to create vividly imagined worlds and explore thought-provoking ideas. My collection includes a fairly wide range of stories (time travel, alien invasions, Japanese mermaids, etc), but there are definitely themes that I return to repeatedly.
My academic background is in Psychology, and I’m fascinated by the human mind. Several of my stories examine the nature of human identity. What defines us as individuals and makes us who we are? If we replace all the cells in our body, do we become someone new?
(For anyone interested, I did a detailed discussion of the theme of human identity in my collection for John Scalzi’s The Big Idea: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2016/08/16/the-big-idea-caroline-m-yoachim/)
There are several other themes that come up frequently in my fiction, some of which I hadn’t noticed until I put together my collection. Many of my characters undergo transformations. I often write about family relationships, and I have multiple stories dealing with loss and grief. I was also surprised the other day when I noticed how many of my stories prominently feature trees.
Wow. Yes, I noticed the love of trees in your collection (I love trees too!), and the family themes as well. Some of your stories deal with environmental themes, like “Honeybee” and “A Million Oysters for Chiyoko”, both of which took were breath-taking. What do you hope for readers to take away from these stories?
Ecosystems are beautiful and complex, robust in some ways but fragile in others. Many of my stories depict futures where the environment has been damaged–species have gone extinct, the chemical composition of the ocean has changed, sea levels have risen, etc. I try to create worlds that are broken, but still beautiful. Dark but not hopeless. I suppose what I want is for readers to see how precarious our situation is, and what the consequences might be.
Some of your stories have clever, unusual ways of dealing with time. When you play with time in your stories, what feeling are you hoping to leave the reader with?
Time is such a fascinating concept to play with. What happens if you alter the past? If you know the future? What would your conscious experience be like if you could step outside of time? My goal isn’t to answer any of these questions, but to give the reader something fun to think about.
I also think time travel stories are fun because you can get really convoluted loops. It’s like a puzzle trying to get all of the pieces to fit together properly so that the entire timeline makes sense. (This was particularly challenging in “Rock, Paper, Scissors, Love, Death.”)
Yes, I love how you worked time travel so cleverly in “Rock, Paper, Scissors, Love, Death”. Of all the stories in your collection, what is your favorite, and why?
Picking a favorite is hard, and I think I’d give different answers on different days! With that caveat. . . My favorite story in the collection (at least for today) is Five Stages of Grief After the Alien Invasion. The aliens were fun to create (I love coming up with weird aliens), and I like the structure of the story (it is what I call a ‘flash-mash’ story, composed of five separate flash stories, each told from the perspective of a different character).
You are a master of the flash fiction form–known for both its power and brevity. Why do you love flash fiction, and what advice can you give to other writers of flash fiction for packing vivid complete experiences into such small spaces?
I’m all about the shiny new idea. Flash fiction is great because I get to jump from one idea to the next and read (or write) about a lot of different things! The key is to distill the story to its essence and trim away everything else. My flash stories often feature a cool idea (knowing the future, ghosts that collect things, giving away your body parts, etc) and some emotion that I want to evoke (bittersweet longing, hope, grief, etc).
In a flash story, it’s important to make every word count, especially at the very beginning of the story. I spend a lot of time getting the first paragraph of a flash story right–it’s important to set the reader’s expectations and get them grounded in the story. I always try to introduce the speculative element in the first paragraph (introducing the speculative element near the end can feel like a twist), and that’s also where I set the tone (if you put a humorous ending on a serious opening, the reader will often feel cheated).
Thanks for sharing your flash writing process with us. What inspires your writing? And who are your favorite authors?
I have a leaky brain. Everything going on around me–real world events and whatever media I consume–seeps into my brain, and then when I write whatever is on my mind tends to leak out onto the page (sometimes consciously and sometimes not). I expect I’ll be writing a lot of stories in the near future about the environment, civil rights, and standing up for what you believe in.
My favorite novel from last year was Death’s End, the third book in Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. The scope of that book was amazing. (I’d say more, but I don’t want to spoil anything for people who haven’t read it.) Some of my favorite authors include: Ken Liu, Octavia Butler, Ted Chiang, Maureen McHugh, Connie Willis, and Kelly Link.
What are you working on now? Will we see another collection from you soon? I hope so!
I’ve written six flash stories since the start of 2017, so writing-wise the year is off to a good start! I don’t have another collection in the works quite yet, but I do plan to keep writing short fiction, so hopefully I’ll be able to do a second collection sooner rather than later.
I’m also working on a middle grade novel which was inspired by my children’s fascination with garbage trucks. It’s an urban fantasy about a mixed-race girl who teams up with some junkyard pixies to fight a monster made of hazardous waste.
That sounds fantastic! Caroline, thanks for spending time with us today! It has been a pleasure.
Readers, please check out Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World and Other Stories. And connect with Caroline at the links below:
Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World and Other Stories
Publishers Weekly. 263.28 (July 11, 2016): p48.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Listen
Full Text:
* Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World and Other Stories
Caroline M. Yoachim. Fairwood, $17.99 trade paper (298p) ISBN 978-1-933846-55-2
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Yoachim's reputation as an exceptional flash fiction stylist is founded on her work for Daily Science Fiction. Compiled, some of these brief works initially read as slight. "Betty and the Squelchy Saurus"--recounting treaty politics with monsters under the bed--works well early on, its context already familiar. Full appreciation of the more science fictional worlds takes time, as Yoachim circles back in successive stories to add layers to major themes: interchangeable or malleable bodies ("Temporary Friends," "Stone Wall Truth," "Grass Girl"), displaced consciousness ("The Philosophy of Ships," "Do Not Count the Withered Ones," "Pieces of My Body"), time warps ("Rock, Paper, Scissors, Love, Death," "Harmonies of Time" "Honeybee"). She's especially successful in skewing hackneyed horror tropes, such as a spore invasion launched by compassionate aliens in "Five Stages of Grief after the Alien Invasion." "Everyone's a Clown" showcases Yoachim's ability to layer multiple themes in a very short space, picking up on the childhood perceptions of "Betty and the Squelchy Saurus" and refocusing them through the lens of an adult horror chestnut. Her gift for reshaping and polishing dulled old gems makes Yoachim's collection truly noteworthy. (Aug.)
Monday, September 7, 2015
Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World, by Caroline M. Yoachim
Cover illustration by zzUnknown
Read this issue
Young scientist trying to develop time travel encounters an alien intelligence that lives outside of time. (6,200 words; Time: 20m)
Rating: ★☆☆☆☆ Needs Improvement
"Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World," by Caroline M. Yoachim [bio] (edited by John Joseph Adams), appeared in Lightspeed Magazine issue 64, published on September 1, 2015.
Mini-Review (click to view--possible spoilers)
Extremely unnatural dialog, info dumps, lots of telling vs. showing.
For anyone who knows science at all, the scenario that a young scientist could do big physics research despite having no results is just not credible. Or that she'd be working all alone. The side story about a woman's mind being removed from her body and then returned is also very far removed from real science. Of course the story doesn't have to be hard science, but when the protagonist is supposed to be an academic scientist, that's what we'd expect. Instead, this is written by someone for whom there is no difference between science and magic.
As the story progresses, the departure from science as we know it into outright magic is relentless. For example, at one point the protagonist changes the orbit of a moon in order to win a game. Two AIs give birth to a "child." The protagonist, now a god, creates a world in the image of Earth. At least no one is named Adam or Eve.
Other Reviews: Search Web, Browse Review Sites