LIMELIGHT AND OTHER STORIES

Croal’s short stories ponder the human condition as it might exist in the future.

The thread connecting the short stories in this SF compilation is the presence of post-human and para-human culture in the future. When artificial intelligence, cyborgs, and robots overstep the operating parameters set by their human users, the results may be beneficial—or sinister. The title tale concerns a surgical breakthrough using “data node” implants to resurrect patients from devastating brain-injury comas. But along with this “AfterLiving” comes the temptation, particularly for ambitious parents, to secretly enhance the unwitting patients’ abilities. Thus, young car-crash survivor Nara find herself featured in a televised music show displaying singing talent she never knew she had. The narrator of the opening story “Patchwork Girls” is a beautiful entertainment-industry android, built to suffer violence, even murder, in films and live-stage productions; medical miracles make her good as new after every stunt. She is supposed to feel no pain or malaise, but she does (“maybe she’s dying for real this time. Maybe this is the end. There is some relief in that thought”). In “Hush Little Sister,” sentient holograms called Shimmers replace deceased family members, and these artificial ghosts bring comfort and solace to the household survivors (supposedly). In “Better Self,” retinal implants, mandatory for elite employees in the big-tech industries, bring nonstop bombardments of advertising. The solution only leads to exponential commercial intrusion. A few stories flirt with supernatural futures; “The Rift Between Us” posits a region of space in which the spirits of humans who die off-planet remain aware and available for melancholy reunions with the living. Some stories are “flash fiction” vignettes of only a few paragraphs. Croal’s prose is smooth as touch-screen glass and does not submerge readers in abstruse science or techno-jargon; still, genre fans must be quick on the uptake to recognize virtual reality, cryogenics, and other SF concepts. This collection commendably addresses deep emotions in addition to apocalyptic shocks and awe.

A heartfelt array of speculative SF tales.