Published by Shortwave Publishing in September 2024
Review by Jeffrey Palms
Chatbots in the flesh, starlets enslaved by industry, victims of malicious marketing, AI entities entrusted with human lives… Lyndsey Croal’s short story collection Limelight and Other Stories is, unmistakeably, an outgrowth of twenty-first century anxieties and (let’s face it) outright fears. The stories are organised into two subcollections. Those in Near take place on Earth in times resembling our own, like ‘Hush, Little Sister’, in which a protagonist goes to her late parents’ home and must deal with a glitching hologrammatic version of her long-dead kid sister. Those in Far, meanwhile, transpire further afield, like ‘We Maintain the Moons’, where a sentient machine comes to terms with a lonely existence in its frozen corner of the universe.
What unites the stories, however, is Croal’s clear-headed management of her characters, her knack for pulling them through meaningful arcs or embedding them in settings that motivate their existence. And the great speed with which she does so. Here’s an example opening sentence: ‘I stare down at the silver stamp on my hand that cost me my life savings – my one-time admission to the Rift, the place where souls who die in space go to rest.’ In one sentence, she delivers the name of the narrator’s destination (the Rift), the severity of its admission cost (life savings), and what precisely it is (resting place for souls who died in space). If it’s an info dump, it’s a light and fast one. From elsewhere in the collection come these similar openers:
‘The burning of my tattoo wakes me up again, the iridescent ink rearranging itself uncomfortably under my skin.’
‘The first advert arrives in Callie’s retinal display as she sits down for lunch.’
‘Soft, calming music played in the background as the AfterLiving clinician led Tom and his wife into the room.’
All three of these opening salvos are, like the initial example, doing heavy worldbuilding work. The mobile tattoo ink, the retinal advert and the life-after-death clinic are all speculative objects whose nature is largely explained by what they’re called. Croal thus doesn’t get much tension from setting: these aren’t the kind of stories whose novel universes are built with pregnant neologisms that invite us to read slowly and fall into a strangeness. Instead, she situates us fast so she can get on with her character arcs.
A great example of that is ‘The Rift Between Us’, whose first sentence is quoted above. The narrator uses the rest of paragraph one to describe where she is, a space shuttle packed with tourists as well as visitors of dead loved ones, and then plunges us straight into that arc. The soul that our narrator seeks is Adri’s, we learn, a lover whom she argued with the last time they were together. Adri had insisted on going into space – she’s a traveller at heart, unlike the homebody narrator – and the narrator hadn’t even watched the launch. With that, we’re already primed for the climax of the piece: what will the narrator, entering the Rift with a mixture of guilt and grief and unfinished business, have to say to Adri if they meet in this strange place of souls? Croal chooses catharsis. Adri, it turns out, is there-but-not, mildly aware of her own death but unstung by it. ‘Why did you really come all this way?’ she eventually asks, setting us up for the endgame: ‘I loved her –’ the narrator tells us, ‘I still do – but nothing could fix that rift between us. At least now, I know she’s not suffering some horrible fate.’ And her story-closing response to Adri finishes the arc: ‘I came here to say goodbye.’
The actual science fiction of the story is boiled down to a simple, piercing thought experiment: what if we could talk to the dead? The idea is introduced swiftly, given life via human stakes, and concluded almost as fast.
While ‘The Rift Between Us’ culminates in a freeze-frame on emotional closure, others of Croal’s stories hang on other types of decisive plot beats or conclusory punches, always scaled well for the short fiction form. One of my favourites is ‘Rain Days in Biodome Three’, a beautiful two-pager that packages a moment from the natural fantastic – a rainstorm – into an artificial setting and then gives us a vessel in the character of Finn, a boy who communes with this event as it punctuates, once a month, his otherwise plain existence. The tableau is given incredible flavour at the end: Finn is the last human left in this once-burgeoning place. The story is over quickly but in the aftertaste come strange, lingering questions: what does a rainstorm in a biodome signify? What parallels of hauntology are there between this artificial empty environment and real-life places on Earth with more storms than people?
The clarity of Croal’s characters is complemented by themes that are similarly palpable, often strengthened by weighty word choices: ‘Swallow’ is the name of a company that all but force-feeds its product, a pill, to customers, while ‘Rift’ in ‘The Rift Between Us’ ensures that the troubled relationship between the narrator and Adri is foremost in our minds. This habit of using details to wink at a bigger picture only adds to the speed, the feeling of being pulled through the narrative. Taken together, Croal’s mastery over her characters and the grander reasons for their existence – combined with urgently familiar politics or relatable human issues – makes for a reliably joyful reading experience.