Trevor Quachri

Review for Delicate Ministrations

A book of short stories can take on many forms, and Delicate Ministrations takes along us for a ride that sometimes are a few, independent stories and some that feel like independent chapters of a larger story. I often had the feeling that the stories were reminding me of some sort of cross between Vonnegut and a literary version of what Cobain’s songs, an idea I may have cribbed from the conclusion of the first story.
The author writes excellent prose that is captivating and gets the reader’s attention. My favorite line of all of the stories comes from the last story, and I really want to quote it: “Death chiseled a harsh beauty, a minimalist taxonomy…” The stories are interesting and innovative and littered with details of their own. Forrest doesn’t spare us the world-building.
Each of the stories get you involved in their microcosms and makes you want to know about that, and that conclusion leads me to talk about my only real criticism: I wanted to read more of two particular stories, the Unlighted Sentinel and Reboot. I didn’t like when a story told me from the beginning to the middle and cuts off right before the ending. Some of the stories left off like this, and I didn’t think it was a problem. Somewhat redeeming is that some of the other stories obliquely continue the story in a non-obvious way.
In my conclusion, definitely read Delicate Ministrations. I enjoyed it greatly. Its tone, ranging from a faux children’s story in Where No Fox Should Follow, a Young Adult-style story in The Unlighted Sentinel and the rest Cyber Punk and more general Science Fiction, made me smile and laugh at what seemed to me like a Gen-X sarcastic take on the optomistic and pessimistic high-minded Sci-Fi of the 50’s to 80’s. I recommend this book to answer some questions and ask some of your own.

Now that the heart of my review is done, you can follow along and read what I thought of each of the individual stories with light spoilers, caveat emptor:

Come Gomorrah:
We follow Agent Robert Cooley as he and his partner perform eugenics to maintain the practice of controlling human overpopulation. Early on, the story felt like it fell in the trap of optomist pseudoscientific H , the likes of which reminded me of Dan Brown’s Inferno, but it came back in the end to make fun of the concept, notably by explaining the only way it would work: wide-spread obligatory changes of sexuality to make everyone homosexual to reduce the amount of ‘breeders.’

Chasing Forever:
Forrest follows our two protagonists, Adem and Varig as they outrun the burning sun. Without explicitly saying so, we can identify a post-apocalyptic world where humans are struggling to survive, and a casual mishap means life or death. It’s fascinating, and the ending where one of our protagonists finds the opposite populace, those that flee the nighttime, does a great job of showing how easily people fall into little traps of convincing themselves they are the righteous and are the only ones who know the truth. I especially liked the introductory poems/scripture which gives us an immediate idea of what we are reading.

The Unlighted Sentinel:
I must admit that this was probably my least favorite story of the collection, though that’s probably because it was faithful to its genere more than anything. The story is a YA-style story of two children, secretely friends of opposite factions fighting on a long-abandoned space station, are forced to marry for a political pact. They end up betraying both sides to force peace and progress on others. The author does a good job of highlighting both other-ness and similarity between the factions, making everyone seem reasonable. I found the ending a little troubling because the two protagonists seem to employ the tactic of getting WMDs and threatening to kill everyone else unless they compley, effectively making them the enlightened dictators. Then they go off to screw around, which, I guess, is kinda accurate of how people in power act.

The Treachery of Cats:
This is a short and sweet story of an assassination mucked up by a cat. It’s arguably the least Sci-Fi of any of the stories, but it really hits a great mark by proceeding so quickly that you can imagine a whole story of what comes before and after in just a few pages because the literary short-hand of Forrest lets us imagine everything we need to. Those mischevious cats!

Reboot:
The other of the two stories I had mentioned as ending too soon above, this story is probably my favorite of the collection. A woman-cum-cyborg awakens and doesn’t know who she is or what’s going on. She wanders with a metallic man for awhile before coming home and finding out what’s going on. The story gives many pastoral scenes and gets the reader to relax in what is an obviously dangerous post-apocalyptic world.

Sum of Errors:
A family is held hostage by a malevolent Artificial Intelligence during a centuries-long transfer between planets. This short story, is, uh, well, short. It packs a surprising amount of horror and tension in what is a fairly compact space — both literary and in the story. The protagonists all have a sense of impotence against what is a greater force that can basically will them in and out of existence, and they have to appease it as far as they can. It ends on a sad but wholly appropriate note.

Where No Fox Should Follow:
If I were to name another favorite story, this one would be it. The story is a Fantasy story with touches of children’s narratives stuck in. One thing that really stuck with me is Forrest’s use of alliteration and repeated-and-simplified verbiage. However, the story is clearly not for children and describes graphic scenes of mutilation so don’t let your little ones read it. The story is fascinating and humorous as it follows five anthropromorphic foxes and their badger guide as they go to hunt on the sacred and protected human hunting grounds. It turns out to be a much harder voyage than they thought, and Forrest plays the childish descriptions fantastically against the growing realism and action of the latter half of the story.

Betty Jam:
In what is the most cyberpunk story of them all, the author examines transhumanism for the second time. In a world where sensations and experiences have become shared, some people hunt for the most twisted and depraved of them all. A washed up ex-SWAT officer becomes a vigilante and hunts what he views as the worst of these purveyors. While Come Gomorrah seemed to be a repudiation H ideas, Betty Jam shows a second response: what really is the problem are humans, not technology which is actually capable of wonderful things. It is an idea I can get behind wholeheartedly.

The Amateur Spacefarer’s Ultimate Survival Guide:
Okay, I should stop picking favorites, but this story made me laugh uproariously. The reader is given a dialog reminiscent of us trying to talk to tech support. The narrator’s voice is an intelligent book helping out a group of space travelers who have to repair their spaceship before they all die. The book is uncaring and listens while people are dying giving out such useful advice as buying a companion book to deal with survivor’s guilt or that the austronauts may have difficulty repopulating a planet if that was their goal because most of the women have died. Oh wait, they can check out the chapter on asexual reproduction if it might help them. Don’t skip this one!

Dandelions in the Kentucky Blue:
The penultimate story is probably the most depressing and realistic take on human-alien first contact. Saucers, impervious to all intereference, appear and disappear from Earth’s atmosphere with no warning at all. As a vague allegory to the protagonist’s damaged relationship with his father and family, he ponders the non-chalance of the aliens. I enjoyed the weighty ponderance of human thoughts as a counterposition to the flying saucers and what seems comparable to the whole genre of Science Fiction.

Liminal:
To start my description of the story, I want to put it and the others in a timeline. I think the first story of this series is Chasing Forever, when an AI has destroyed the atmosphere around the planet, next Reboot where the ending hints at a human-cyborg restores empathy to otherwise purely destructive machinery, after that is Liminal where humans and the AI have struck up a truce where the Warren, a collective consciousness that humans may willingly join, respects human laws and The Unlighted Sentinel is an offshoot far-removed from Earth of the story.
Liminal is the story that interfaces most sympathetically with the transhumanist ideology. Explicitly, human and robot live in peace with strict boundaries in some places and co-existence in others. The story follows Marya, a centuries-old human who has made herself mostly cybernetic except with a strong hold on maintaining her free will. Sometimes she visits her home, now made a rare exception to the few zones where humans are allowed to live. There humans futilely reject all of benefits of merging with technology because, as one character states it, they hope that God will come back and smite the AI. They’re afraid because they’re no longer in charge. In what is probably the most understandable point of the story, humans reveal how scared they are of not mattering at all to the world.… (more)