I love short fiction, and Sunday Shorts is the feature where I get to blog about it. Posts will range from flash to novellas. At some point, I might delve into individual stories/episodes of anthology formats in other media, like television and comics, but for the time being, I’m sticking to prose in print and audio.
I get a lot of book recommendations from a variety of sources, including, of course, close friends. Every now and then, one of those recommendations leads to an author becoming a “favorite”/ “must-read everything.” For instance, it is Jim Savenkoff’s fault that you all now get inundated with so many Seanan McGuire reviews, interviews, and social media comments from me. I suspect, based on my enjoyment of the novelette and novella I’m about to talk about, that in the future you’ll be able to blame Claire Cooney for all the Francesca Forrest posts I’ll be making. Fair warning. (Claire’s first recommendation was Forrest’s The Gown of Harmonies, which I listened to as an audiobook last year and loved and briefly reviewed HERE. But me being me, it wasn’t until Claire recommended these two stories that I remembered I wanted to read more by the author.)
In The Inconvenient God, we are introduced to the world of the Polity through the first-person narration of Decommissioner Thirty-Seven, who occasionally allows people to call her by her childhood nickname of “Sweeting” rather than her job title or her real name. Thirty-Seven is a decommissioner of deities for the Polity’s Ministry of Divinity. The Polity is slowly migrating its citizens from worship of local gods to worship of universal Abstractions (like Justice, Peace, Mischief, etc.); when the time comes, fading gods are decommissioned – that is, their divinity is removed and they become mortal. They remember their divine existences but now age and die as mortals do. In this introductory novelette, Thirty-Seven has been called to distant Nando University to decommission a troublemaking minor local deity named Ohin, who is worshipped nowhere else but this campus and who is kept from fading because he’s basically the patron god of failing students. What should be a straightforward decommissioning takes several interesting turns as Thirty-Seven learns that the Ministry was not provided enough information about Ohin for her to do her job properly. I don’t want to spoil what the information is or how it affects the outcome of Thirty-Seven’s mission, but I will say that the twists and reveals flow logically from each other, expand our understanding of how decommissionings work, and lead to a great conclusion to the story. In fifty-five pages, Forrest gives us a chance to really get to know Thirty-Seven/Sweeting: her focus on doing her job well, her insecurities based on previous cases that were shall we say less-than-smooth, her aggravation when incomplete or inaccurate information hampers her efforts, her emotional ties to the now-decommissioned gods of the Sweet Harbor district where she grew up. I was as intrigued by what Thirty-Seven tells us about herself as what she doesn’t (her real name, for instance). Forrest also weaves in some hints about what kind of society the Polity is: world (or at least, continent) wide, pushing towards a state religion over the freedom to worship whatever gods a person chooses to (a move not everyone is happy about).
Both Thirty-Seven’s personal history and the Polity’s dystopian nature are revealed in the novella Lagoonfire. It turns out that one of Thirty-Seven’s earliest decommissionings was of the last still-deified Sweet Harbor god, Laloran-morna, and she botched the job. Laloran-morna is mortal but when he gets upset saltwater rushes from and through him, usually leaving unsightly puddles wherever he’s been. So naturally, when an unusual incursion of seawater threatens the stability of a land development project over the former Lotus Estuary section of the Sweet Harbor District of the Capitol, Laloran-morna is suspected and Thirty-Seven is sent to investigate. Neither Thirty-Seven nor the reader is surprised when the case turns out to be more complicated (involving a former lover of Laloran-morna’s as well as a human college professor of history and archaeology) and Thirty-Seven’s unorthodox problem-solving skills (so well displayed in The Inconvenient God) are needed, despite the preferences of her boss and other officials. Those other officials are the Civil Order – the state police. It’s through Thirty-Seven’s encounters with the professor and the Civil Order that we come to understand just how much of a dystopia this society is: “Big Brother” in a fantasy setting, out to subsume and overwrite local culture and even history itself – whatever it takes to solidify control and eliminate resistance. Everyone is watched and monitored via communications devices called “unicoms” and anyone suspected of questioning the Polity or working against its mandates is arrested and questioned. Thirty-Seven’s family history gives her plenty of reasons to avoid contact with the Civil Order and also explains her focus on just doing her job well and not being noticed. We get to see a great deal more of Thirty-Seven’s interactions with her co-workers (mostly her immediate superior, Decommissioner Five, and her closest peers, Decommissioners Thirty-Three (whose name is Tailin) and Thirty-Six (Feshi). We also learn Thirty-Seven’s real name and that her nickname of “Sweeting” comes from the decommissioned gods of Sweet Harbor, who treat her like a niece or daughter. The novella length allows Forrest to tease out these personal and world-building details slowly, allowing each reveal to breath a bit before the next one comes along. The slow build of tension is wonderfully paced until the action of the final act where it all comes together, and I had several “ohmygod, did that really just happen” moments along the way.
Each of these books wraps up its own major storyline, so there are no cliffhangers to entice you into the next book. That enticement comes through the wonderful character voice of Thirty-Seven and the world Forrest reveals through her. You could really read these books out of publication order and not feel lost in the world-building. The good news is, there’s a third Polity book in the works, and I cannot wait to see how Forrest builds on some of the sub-plots of Lagoonfire especially. In the meantime, I’ll be reading all the other short stories and novel (PenPal) by Francesca Forrest that I bought and downloaded before writing this column.
