“Five Views of the Planet Tartarus” by Rachael K Jones in Lightspeed Magazine Issue 164 January 2024 by Rachael K. Jones Narrator: Justine Eyre
Format: ebook, podcast
Source: podcast, supplied by publisher via Hugo Packet
Formats available: magazine, podcast
Genres: science fiction, short stories
Series: Lightspeed Magazine Issue 164 January 2024
Pages: 10
Length: 5 minutes
on January 1, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo
Goodreads
LIGHTSPEED is a digital science fiction and fantasy magazine. In its pages, you will find science fiction: from near-future, sociological soft SF, to far-future, star-spanning hard SF-and fantasy: from epic fantasy, sword-and-sorcery, and contemporary urban tales, to magical realism, science-fantasy, and folktales.
Welcome to issue 164 of LIGHTSPEED! Our science fiction shorts kick off with a story ("Shadow Films") from Benjamin Peek about the film industry and a conspiracy theory sprouting from an unsettling truth. In the very poignant tale "We Shall Not Be Bitter at the End of the World," David Anaxagoras captures an unusual group trying to cope with an incipient apocalypse. We also have a flash story ("Five Views of the Planet Tartarus") from Rachael K. Jones, and another ("Night Desk Duty at the Infinite Paradox Hotel") from Aimee Ogden. Our fantasy shorts include a fascinating meditation on sacrifice and inter-species understanding in Sloane Leong's "A Saint Between the Teeth." Adam-Troy Castro returns to our pages with a new story about an irresistible offer in "Farewell to Faust." We also have two terrific flash pieces: "In the Tree's Hollow, a Doe" by Lowry Poletti and "To Be a Happy Man" from Thomas Ha. Of course we've got our usual array of nonfiction: book reviews from our review team (what should you be reading when you're not reading Lightspeed?), and spotlight interviews with our authors. And our ebook readers will enjoy an excerpt from Amy Avery's new novel THE LONGEST AUTUMN.
My Review:
I listened to the final three Hugo Short Story nominees in a single evening. In the practical sense, that wasn’t hard as they are all, indeed, short. So now that I have finished the lot, I can say unequivocally, IMHO, that there’s definitely a divide in the set. The first three I read/listened to weren’t terrible, but they either weren’t special or didn’t grab me or were so experimental they didn’t land or didn’t have enough room to work or all of the above.
The three I listened to, all on the same night, all did interesting things, told their stories in interesting ways, grabbed me hard or used their experimental structure to its utmost AND remained comprehensible. AND they used every word at their disposal to great effect.
“Five Views of the Planet Tartarus” was short, bitter and ended in an absolute gut punch of a reveal – and only needed 549 words to wreck my brain in the process.
First, the title is a big, freaking huge, ginormous hint that this is not going to be a comfortable story. If the name “Tartarus” sounds familiar, that’s because you’ve heard it before in other contexts that are all intended to invoke the original. In Greek mythology, Tartarus is the deep abyss that is used as a dungeon of torment and suffering for the wicked. It’s the place where souls were judged after death and where the wicked received divine punishment.
In other words, Tartarus is HELL. Figuratively and literally. The Tartarus of this story may be inverted, in that this Tartarus is a planet and its version of hell is the ‘asteroid’ belt around the planet instead of a deep, dark chasm ON the planet, but hell is, well, still hell.
The story follows a simple pattern, one that is seen often in fanfic, where there are X times that something happens and often (but not always and not in this case) one time it doesn’t. Each of those times – or in this case views – are short and usually disastrous in one way or another – but not THIS disastrous.
In this story it’s a ship filled with prisoners on its way to Tartarus, viewing the planet from afar, those same prisoners being tried, then processed for sentencing, the sentence carried out, and then their incarceration. Which is where the story goes full circle and all the things that were foreshadowed in the first part hit home at the end.
Which, to return to an earlier statement as the story itself does, hits like a gut punch, leaving the reader wet-eyed and breathless.
Escape Rating B+: The story is a bit of a tease in that we know nothing about the crimes committed or the reasons this system evolved the way we see in the story. Howsomever, it certainly does stick the dismount, while the story itself is so simple that the reader isn’t really braced for it and it sticks harder than it otherwise might.
It also sticks harder because this story just does so much more with its brief length and its experimental nature than those first three stories. I was hoping for something better or more interesting or both and was happy as well as a bit winded from that gut punch that I got exactly that.
This story didn’t so much fall into the middle of my Hugo voting as rise above it. Then the final two stories topped that, as you’ll see in my final two reviews in this ‘series’.
