Syndromes

Science Fiction Stories

By: Alec Nevala-Lee

Narrated by: Catherine Ho, Jonathan Todd Ross

A finalist for both the Hugo and Locus awards, Alec Nevala-Lee has seen his short fiction and essays featured in Salon, the New York Times, and Analog Science Fiction and Fact. Now Nevala-Lee delivers a gripping meditation on the human experience with his powerful collection Syndromes: Science Fiction Stories.

These stories contain a cross section of narratives, people, and places: an unusual couple requests to be flown to a remote island near Alaska; a series of beached whales vex a US military officer in Vietnam and cause unrest in a local village; an ecoterrorist’s bomb at an upscale ski resort has unintended consequences; and mysterious killings thought to be the work of a monster in Japan turn out to be something much more real.

©2020 Alec Nevala-Lee (P)2020 Recorded Books

Short story tapestry of a weird, interesting world.

I snagged this after coming across Alec Nevala-Lee’s “At the Fall” in a year’s best anthology. That story is in here, along with a dozen more, but reading it in the sequence it’s been placed in gave it additional meaning.

Because I hadn’t realised until I was a fair way in that these stories, progressing in time from the 1930s to the 2030s and on, were tracing the history of a shared world.
And a weird one.
The collective picture is interesting: sort of a Johnny Quest/X-Files/Fringe world full of strange anomalies; all with Scooby-Doo endings grounded in the weirdest bits of actual scientific articles.

There are a few moments where guessing the gimmick starts to overtake the story itself, but on the whole this was a very pleasant surprise from an author I hadn’t heard enough about. And I genuinely appreciate the range of genre experiments, as well as the time span. Nevala-Lee has variations on frontier adventure, war stories, police procedural, whodunnit (with octopodes), cryptid encounter, eco-thriller, horror, a little fantasy, and sci-fi. It’s comfortably holistic way to build the picture of a world.

This was nowhere near being on my radar, but was a real treat to discover.