This year, I have become a huge fan of Cadwell Turnbull, just in time for the release of this short story collection. As with any short story collection, there are some stories that resonated more with me than others, but all of these felt at the standard I’ve come to expect from Cadwell Turnbull’s writing. I would say most of these stories are science fiction, but in his style, there is also plenty of horror and fantasy worked in.

There are other components that I associate with his writing: the majority of the stories are set in the US Virgin Islands, and often have queer characters. I didn’t check this while reading, but I believe that every story has a black main character, except for one with a Nepali main character and a black side character. As someone who knows very little about the Virgin Islands except through Cadwell Turnbull’s other work, I appreciated how many stories there were to tell within that setting, and I also appreciated when we got stories in totally different settings too. I believe his wife is Nepali, so it was sweet to see Nepal incorporated into his work.

A lot of the stories are about similar topics to the Convergence Saga, such as mages, Afro Caribbean monsters, and gods. There is a short story called The World Above which is set in the same cosmos as the Convergence Saga. If you haven’t read the Convergence Saga, I think it still works, but the names of some characters might go over your head. A lot of other stories are near future sci-fi stories exploring some kind of new technology.

There are a few that involve artificial intelligence, which I found interesting, because it is most likely not what we have branded as AI today, aka generative language models. I still get a bad taste from reading about things that are called AI, but I respect that Cadwell Turnbull seems to have wanted to explore more hopeful and community oriented approaches towards artificial intelligence. So many of the stories featuring new technologies are not even about if these new technologies are inherently ethical; instead they explore how the technologies affect human relationships, which is a perfect use of sci-fi.

I’ll say a bit about each of my favorite stories now. The Letters Triptych might be my favorite out of the whole collection. It is made of three letters written by three family members in a near-future dystopian setting. Each of the characters offers a different perspective as the scale and horror of cryogenic technology expands, and the end still ties it together so well. It has the perfect blend of the personal and the political.

There, She Didn’t Need Air to Fill Her Lungs is one of the several short stories in this collection that are hard to pin into a genre. I would describe it as a type of horror or sci-fi or fantasy about characters who accidentally find themselves at gaps or slips in the fabric of reality, where suddenly the laws of physics don’t quite apply for a second. I really enjoyed this one because it was set on a hike, and was written primarily with the pronoun “we” (which I believe could be called first person plural perspective) and it was so creepy.

When the Rains Come Back is set in a far future world where all kinds of governments and economies exist, and people can always change their nationalities to find the government style that suits them. The characters we follow are from a small anarchist island government facing drought and exploitation by larger governments, but it’s also about the relationship between a father and daughter. This really reminded me of The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin, in the best way.

Loneliness Is in Your Blood is written in the second person, and it is the story of a soucouyant, the Afro Caribbean vampire. I just love vampires, and it was very engaging, and I loved seeing the evolution of the Caribbean from the perspective of this vampire-like monster.

I was provided an Advanced Reader Copy by the publisher for review.