Del Sol SFF Review

“See, Lili. The man doesn’t look too dangerous,” the woman – with a look suggesting she had not had her morning coffee in weeks – reassured the girl standing beside her, smiling while wincing at the white-knuckled pain the nine-year-old was inflicting on her hand. Lili was scared, and apprehensive. Parents aren’t meant to hand over their children to middle-aged men who advertise available seats in their cars for two-hundred-mile trips. At least not good parents.  “Hi, Mrs. Jessop. I’m Andrew. We spoke on the phone yesterday.” Andrew Fennick reached out his hand in greeting, but the woman’s own was still in the grips of a child nearing a meltdown with every passing second. He lowered it and placed it in his pocket, deciding that pushing physical contact on the mother would not bode well for any potential trust she could have in him. He looked at the child doing the clinching and noticed her piercing grey eyes. They seemed to reflect everything they saw. Lili was eyeing his car with ...

After my grandmother's death, my uncle, consumed with grief, locked himself up in his studio for weeks on end and did nothing but stare at the wall like he was staring into an abyss. Almost like he was trying to get rid of his sadness by projecting it onto the white nothingness of his studio wall. My uncle was especially angry because even on her death bed when she could no longer speak or swallow because the cancer that would eventually kill her had metastasized into a goiter in her throat, my grandmother still had a look of disappointment in her eyes when she saw my uncle for the last time because despite his immense talents, he remained an obscure, penniless artist who brought nothing but shame to our family name with his excessive drinking and street fighting. My grandmother died a few days later convinced that my uncle was an irredeemable failure who would never make anything of his immense talents because he always sabotaged himself with drink. He became even angrier because ...

The footsteps hurried closer, quicker, slower, then quicker still, and Clementine sat and watched, but all she saw was the grass moving this way and that, as though the wind was blowing but it could not decide in which direction to blow.  Now, this way, now that, a furrow of flattered grass creeping nearer, and nearer, and “oh, dear,” sighed Clementine, certain that she was probably about to be eaten by something invisible, which, she decided as the footsteps stopped in front of her, might be preferable, because if she was inside the stomach of something invisible, then she too would be invisible and that in itself might be a relief. But, instead, the footsteps moved around her until they had formed a complete circle and stopped in front of her. “Hello?” She  asked , to the air itself, and then, when no reply came, she ventured, “I’m Clementine,” because surely she couldn’t upset anyone with her name alone, and then, because she simply had to know her fate, and asking directly...

Waking, on his back, Saufir discovered he couldn’t move. His senses: sight, sound, taste, smell touch, they were dim, distant, vague; this had happened before. He opened his mouth to draw in deep breaths, made an attempt at stretching. Trying to roll to his right hip, he failed; to his left, failure. He went limp and fell back asleep. When he woke the second time there was pressure on his eyelids; a rubbing in circular motion. He asked “Who’s there?” and the rubbing stopped. He’d tried earlier to open his eyes and failed. His head was rolled gently, side to side, then back. A deep voice said “Saufir.” Saufir stayed perfectly still, and when he heard nothing more he spoke: “I can’t open my eyes.” The rubbing started again – little circles – and he said nothing; the pressure increased, moved to the corners of his eyes, to his nose, cheeks, mouth, chin, back to his eyelids and his eyebrows, then stopped abruptly. He waited, managed to open his eyes and raise himself up on an elbow. He loo...

I stood at the picture window of my Golden Triangle penthouse, gazing down at the pathetic nobodies driving on the streets or boating on the Volga River, when my eyes were drawn to an enormous dark form materializing over Saint Petersburg. By which I mean to impress upon you once again, I, William Griftovich Meritsky, proved my superiority over the rest of you. For I was witness to the very first appearance of the Oocheetselya. I didn’t hear about them on Twitter or Facebook. I watched the first starship emerge from its wormhole in real time. As you know, I’m one of the five richest people in the world. But you may have forgotten I am only human. Like Jesus, I reached my achievements despite a flawed and imperfect biology. And so my stomach lurched with the same existential dread that you lower classes felt—though, of course, I felt it first. As the sleek black ship, the size of a small city, appeared over the Baltic Sea, I perceived that not only was this an alien species, but they we...