Part II of this debut collection by multi-award-winning author and artist Raven Oak brings together speculative fiction stories from the past ten years of her career, ranging from space adventures with a dash of mystery and other near-future tales to post-apocalyptic stories and deep dives into the mind.
You’ll find closed-ship mysteries, foul-acting apps, talking cats, retail hell, and hacked programs in these ELEVEN speculative fiction pieces. Space Ships & Other Trips contains FIVE never-before seen stories for your enjoyment, including a tie-in story from Jeff Sturgeon’s The Last Cities of Earth universe.
STORIES INCLUDED: The Loss of Luna, Hungry, Mouth, Only a Bird, Q-Be, Hands, Ol’ St. Nick, Drip, Level Up, Scout’s Honor, and D.E.A.T.H.

IN A NUTSHELL

There are eleven stories in this collection. Five of them worked well for me: Q-BE about an abusive app, OL’ SAINT NICK a murder mystery on salvage space ship, DRIP a vivid evocation of insomnia and anxiety , LEVEL UP a grim picture of the street people in the near-future and SCOUT’S HONOR a cartel-sponsored treasure hunt with a newly-minted pirate captain of an airship in a far-future Mexico

Overall, I enjoyed this collection. I admired its variety and its inventiveness and I liked the sense of intimacy added by the author’s notes.

I didn’t like the order that the stories where presented in. If I was the editor, I’d want to start and end on strong stories. From my point of view, the strong stoires are all in the middle. The downside of this is that I alsmost set the collection aside after none of the first four stories landed for me. The first one was a sort of poem. The other three were slightly whimsical or ‘what if?’ stories with a subtext on the importance of empathy. They left me thinking that I this collection might not be for me. Given the title, I hadn’t expected to wait until the seventh story before I encountered a space ship.

I’ve commented on each of the stories individually below, in the order that the occur in the book.

---

THE LOSS OF LUNA

This was a clever idea – of the one line punchline variety – presented almost as poetry. An odd choice to oprn a collection of speculative fiction short stories with. It was OK but more like a writing exercise in response to a prompt than a story to pull me into the collection.

HUNGRY

A near-future story with an app that translates a cat’s cries into simple human speach. The situation felt real. as did the relationship with the cat. I was surprised that the main point of the story was that, if cats could speak, we’d feel obliged to treat them well. I already feel obliged to treat them well, even when they are being scent spraying, dead bird carrying, arrogant, demanding little monsters, so this story didn’t have much impact on me.

MOUTH

This is a horror story where the main horror is having to do a retail job during the Christmas season which brings you into constant contact with screaming, smelly, contagious children and babies. It is a horror that only emerged when the tabletop gaming store our protagonist leved working at became ‘familiy friendly’ turning it from something cool and nerdish into something loud and incessantly demanding. I understnd the ending but it arrived quite abruptly.

ONLY A BIRD

This was a story about the importance of empathy. It had a couple of cute ideas in it about testing man-made animals but overall it was too didactic for me.

Q-BE

This was the first story that worked for me. I think it should have been the first story in the collection, not the fourth, eapecially as it was the author’s first traditionally published short story.

This story of an abusive app reminded me of Stephen King’s ‘UR‘ but set in a campus population.

HANDS

A vivid sketch of a how anxiety manifests. Not quite developed into a story.

OL’ SAINT NICK

At last, a space ship story and a mystery at that.. A dead body discovered by a crew salvaging a wracked spaceship – a body that hadn’t been dead when the crew boarded the ship. I had fun with this one. It was a solid mystery and did a good job of building up a picture of how a small salvage crew scrapes a living in space.

DRIP

This is a very short story but it isn’t a sketch. It’s complete and satisfying. It captures the experience of being in insomnia’s grip with your anxiety rising relentlessly like water that will eventually drown you. The anxiety here comes from being aware of the destruction being caused by wildfires and how hard they are to stop and how powerless we ae before them. It shows how the ability to visualise disaster can drip tiny drops of fear into your bloodstream for hours at a time.

LEVEL UP

I thought I knew where this grim story about being homeless in a near-future Manhattan was going. The desitnation I had in mind wasn’t a pleasant one but the story was getting there in style. Then I hit the twist, got taken somewhere even worse than I’d imagined and was given an ending that will stick with me, not just because it’s original and terrible but because I believe it describes something that the very richest in America would smile about as they set it up. As Raven Oak says in her afterword “We’d do it if we could”.

SCOUT’S HONOR

A cartel-sponsored treasure hunt with a newly-minted pirate captain of an airship in a far-future Mexico, two centuries after the apocalypse story that was fun and intriguing. I liked the Scout character and Captain Pia, I think they’d be a good pair to hang a novel on.

D.E.A.T.H.

This was a clever and original idea dealing with population control once most killer diseases have been tamed. It uses a puzzle type murder mystery to drive the plot and focus the world-building. I thought the ending was a little abrupt.