Del Sol SFF Review

    They call us  angels  because we help fix broken people. It’s hard work to go inside someone’s head,  live  there for a month, try and pull them back from the dark side and put them on a better path. That first week is the most difficult, when their mind is still strong and you are trying to uproot everything. Synapses splintered by trauma and a life of crime, they are hard-wired for badness. We angels, we get in there and we put it back together. We unbreak the broken connections, awaken their buried consciences, and set them on a better path. It almost always works, but that first week or so is like playing with gelignite on a warm day. If you ask me why I became an angel, there are two versions of that story: the public one and the private one. The public one you probably already know. My name is Soren and my daughter’s name was Amelia. You remember now, don’t you? You remember how Amelia was on her way home from school when a car pulled up alongside...

In the future, Perso Tech allows anyone, including criminals, to change their personality through chemical dosing. Now, in order to be convicted of a crime, a person must have not only criminal intent, but a criminal personality: a personality capable of committing the crime for which a person is being prosecuted. The role of incriminator arose as a way for law enforcement to get convictions by ensuring a suspect’s personality was sufficiently criminal.   It was beautiful and I hated it. Sitting on my porch and watching the endless sway of the night-shrouded grass, feeling the wind caress my naked torso, the stars dazzling overhead—disgusting. Too empty, outside and inside. I never liked being able to see all the way to the horizon. What kind of person wakes up every day eager to be themselves? The problem is that even after three years my mind is frustratingly resilient. I suppose I should have seen that coming; it was why they got me so young, after all. Now my memory is either r...

Xanthe sipped her coffee as she eyed the dragons. They climbed the wall, seeming to curve sinuously around invisible poles. Some of the dragons were black and white, some were coloured and gaudy, some shared the long and square snouts seen in the classical Chinese dragons, while others bore the sharpened snout and piercing eyes of the westernised dragons. She let her gaze drift across the wall to the section with all the women on, skipping over the coy smiles set in beautiful faces, the mermaid tails or devils’ tails, until her eyes settled on the one that held the only picture she cared about, the wall with the eagle’s picture. She felt a small thrill when she looked at it. The eagle had deep, black eyes, set in a sharp, aquiline face that seemed to stare right at her. Glorious wings rose up either side of a feathered, golden body, with dangerous looking talons, ready to grasp what was in front of it, pointed straight at her. This wasn’t just a picture of an eagle on the wall, it was...