Lost in the Archives

The 16 thought-provoking speculative shorts in Saxey’s excellent debut center on characters grappling with romantic and professional challenges while being menaced by supernatural forces and futuristic technologies. In “Missing Episodes” an actor struggles at his first sci-fi convention without his long-term boyfriend, while a gay man in “Uranus” seeks belonging through astral projection. The price of honesty is central to both “Windows into Men’s Hearts,” which uses diary entries to chronicle the havoc wreaked by a truth-telling curse, and “Not Smart, Not Clever,” which features advanced plagiarism-detection technology. Dreams plague Sigmund Freud in “Anxiety,” while Dil, a coder, commodifies dreams on social media in “Raising the Sea Drowned,” and in “Lucidity” dreaming can be controlled by a drug. Sunlight harvesting goes awry in “Sunslick,” mentally bonding with animals comes at a cost in “Red Kite Kindred,” and characters seek to commune with angels in “A Marvellous Neutrality.” The collection delivers wonderfully distinct narrative voices and a vast array of speculative ideas, which, even when wildly inventive and unfamiliar, all stem from grounded human struggles. Saxey is a writer to watch. (May)