World's Long Lost

It is rare that two of my favorite ideas like science fiction and horror get combined so well, but the new anthology from Baen, edited by Christopher Ruocchio and fellow blogger and writer Sean Korsgaard titled World's Long Lost has really managed to scratch that itch! I had been looking forward to it for many months now, and it's fabulous to finally get to run through these pages! Korsgaard does the opening blurbs, and he builds the stories up quite well, while expounding on the central themes to the overarching anthology. The stories themselves are a fabulous mix of creepy, mysterious, and downright horrifying.

I will be endeavoring to write spoiler free reviews, so feel free to read on ahead, and I promise only minor spoilers if necessary!

To start out, we have The Wrong Shape to Fly by Adam Oyebanji, which starts out as an embarrassed collector of the artifacts of dead civilizations is divesting themselves of a piece misidentified as that belonging to a dead civilization which could not possibly have had the technology described. Academics were far too eager to identify a pet theory rather than look at the evidence. Now an art dealer is embarking on a journey to the edge of civilized space to ponder his own theory. It's not creepy in the way many in this story are, but the reveal at the end just blew my mind with the subtle hints and tensions Oyebanji was able to build on. A superbly strong opener!

Mother of Monsters by Ruocchio is a short story set in his own Sun Eater series. Ever battling against the forces who despise humanity like the Cielcin, the hapless soldier Valen discovers there are worse things than even those that eat human flesh. Things hide in the dark which can warp human minds, tangle with the laws of physics, and damage conscious itself. Told part by interrogation and part by flashback, it's a chilling look at alien intelligences and the ways they don't necessarily care about what our puny minds think of how the world is supposed to work. Genuinely chilling end, which makes me merely want more in that universe!

Next up is Rise of the Administrator a story by M.A. Rothman & D.J. Butler, which details the rise of the mysterious administrator. Set against the background of the discovery of incomprehensible ancient runes and sandstone of unusually indestructible properties, it also tells the tale of an extradimensional being which has risen beyond our plain of understanding. It's a sort of prequel to Time Trials, which details the machinations behind this alien administrator's decision to test humanity in such a way. The reasoning, and extremely destructive outcomes, are laid out in a sort of dispassionate bureaucratic manner which is both alien, and extremely terrifying in its mundanity. To learn more, you must go read Time Trials!

Coming from Les Johnson (of Saving Proxima fame) we have Mere Passers By which sees an exploratory vessel USSS Alligator stumble across what should, by all rights, be an impossibility. Planets held together in a way which defies our understanding of physics. Even more unsettling is the lack of any indications of a technological society in this system. This merely raises disturbing questions of, what kind of technology could do this? Would they even notice our existence? Do we even want to meet them? Unsettling in it's own way, the story really pulled me in and got me quite excited (if a little terrified) by the idea of what could be out there in the universe.

Erica Ciko writes perhaps one of the best pieces in the story with a clear Lovecraftian theme. Never Ending Ever-Growing sees the contractors of "Verdant Dreams" responding to a distress call on the planet Vaenmyr, where the thriving rich settlement has gone mysteriously quiet. The terraforming agency which sterilized the planet to standard for human colonization needs its' crown jewel up and running again, but the aliens they thought they wiped out might not be so dead after all. It's an amazing sweep of horror which catches you off guard and sucks you right in. One of the most unsettling and mesmerizing in the whole anthology!

They Only Dig at Night by Sean Patrick Hazlett is another short, but spooky, story that wouldn't look out of place as a piece from Tales from the Cryptkeeper or another TV horror serial like the X-Files. Ostensibly two old pals who work at the same company are sitting down to coffee and one is trying to get a transfer, but as the conversation goes on, much more disturbing things come to light. Is it a good idea to try and monetize something you don't understand?

Howlers in the Void by Brian Trent combines some of the best of Lovecraftian fiction with classic scifi. After a run in with alien pirates, Captain Shayne Dunsay discovers that he may have found the origins  of strange artifacts which can be found throughout space. The question is, does he want to know what made them? Marooned on an alien world, he and what remains of his crew must fight past increasingly strange encounters and hostile weather in order to stand any chance of making it out alive.

Gray Rinehart presents us with what I consider an amazing combination of Michael Creighton style adventure and exploration, and Stephen King or Lovecraftian style horror. The Building Will Continue chronicles the unravelling of a series of academic expeditions on a world whose inhabitants built fantastic artifacts, and then simply vanished. The engineer Leland has terrible nightmares, and the whole crew soon seems to be equally infected by them. As his team are slowly driven mad by whatever haunts these ruins, Leland finds himself questioning whether it could all be caused by innocuous seeming life forms which infest the area. But can he find the secret before he is consumed by his dreams?

re: something strange by Jessica Cain delivers horror at its best. In a series of increasingly strained, chaotic, and horrifying phone calls and texts, we see a seemingly insignificant discovery of an ancient statue devolve into a horror show. The story is made all the more tense by the fact the two people talking are jilted lovers who broke it off in questionable circumstances. The reader can wonder whether anything real is even happening, or whether this is all a desperate plea for attention. By the end, you'll really be wondering just what happened! A genuinely freaky story it really belongs in this anthology and was one of my favorites.

The Sleepers of Tartarus by David J. West sees the dying special operator Cormac on a one way ticket to a lonely asteroid which is now believed to be undergoing militarization by a hostile power. With a deadly cancer eating him away, he really doesn't care and only wants to complete one last mission. However, when he arrives, he winds up with more than he bargained for as the asteroid is not quite what it seems. A tale of adventure and mild cosmic confusion, this one really deserves your love as I can't say anything without some major spoilers! If you can, dive in and read it and I guarantee you won't be disappointed! West turns this one on its head!

Dark Eternity by Johnathon Edelstein is one which, I admit, I did find difficult to get into. It lays out its background and the world lovingly, with excellent attention to detail and world building, but I feel I lacked an overall context for it. The story was told well, and I genuinely enjoyed each little piece of information fed to me from the narrator Kalonde, but without a fuller understanding of his work, I don't think I appreciated the genius of the ending as much as I could have.

Patrick Chiles delivers a sense of mystery and wonder in his Rocking the Cradle where a little bit of geology and a lot of language class pays off after a crew investigates what appears to be an alien ruin in a far solar system. The way Chiles unpacks the mystery at the heart of this story is slow, deliberate, and not something you wouldn't expect outside a techno thriller. The revelations are disturbing to ponder on at least. You wonder about the longevity of human civilization, and whether we have a way forward from traps of our own devising. Chiles doesn't scare you with aliens, monsters, or impending black holes, but some mundane and fundamental questions about how we manage. A wonderful story!

Giving Up on the Piano is a prize inclusion by Orson Scott Card, which compared to much of the anthology is a more mundane delivery of a creepy factor. Not the most terrifying inclusion, but a good capture of what can go wrong in suburbia. It wasn't my favorite in the anthology, but it did provide perhaps a bit of relief from the heavy going of many of the other stories with its more domestic setting and almost tragicomedy presentation.

Finally, we have Retrospective by Griffin Barber. This one is haunting just as much for it's vagueness vs what we actually see. The story is told as an interrogation of a soldier who touched an unknown alien artifact during a firefight. However, the exact nature of the artifact, what it did, and fully what happened to said soldier is left vague as even those discussing it don't seem entirely sure of exactly what they're dealing with. The ending is just creepy enough with how little you know despite all this that your mind can fill in the blanks in unpleasant ways! A great end for the anthology and really helps capture the spirit of it all.

With science fiction and horror being among my favorite types of story, I was enthralled by how well this was put together. There are so many good stories it's impossible to choose just one to love. All were well crafted with skill and and a love for the genre. This is one you should absolutely pick up!