{"id":48611,"date":"2025-09-07T05:25:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-07T05:25:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/48611\/"},"modified":"2025-09-07T05:25:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-07T05:25:11","slug":"review-by-paul-di-filippo-locus-online","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/48611\/","title":{"rendered":"Review by Paul Di Filippo \u2013 Locus Online"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>A Catalog of Storms<\/strong>, Fran Wilde (Fairwood Press 978-1958880319, trade paperback, 256pp, $18.99<\/a>) August 2025.<\/p>\n

Although Fran Wilde\u2019s career began with her debut short story in 2011, her work did not fall under my gaze until her first novel, Updraft<\/b>, in 2015. I reviewed it admiringly in Asimov\u2019s in 2016. Then I sat down under a tree, fell asleep, and awoke ten years later, to find that she had published seven more novels and a passel of short stories. This feels awfully unfair, but that\u2019s the life of a reviewer: too many good books, too little time. And even as I write this, I note that her next book, A Philosophy of Thieves<\/b>, arrives soon.<\/p>\n

So before I fall any further behind in my noble but hopeless pursuit to read everything by those writers whom I enjoy, I should tell you about her newest short story collection, A Catalog of Storms<\/b>.<\/p>\n

The tales in this book, all excellent, possess a remarkable quality. While they are utterly contemporary state-of-the-art fantastika, there lingers about them a subtle aura of old-timey SF, a kind of solid craftsmanship and a subliminal shout-out to the genre\u2019s lineage that is not always inherent in the SF of this postmodern century. If you saw one of these stories in Horace Gold\u2019s Galaxy, you would of course be taken aback by its uncommon sophistication for that era\u2014but then, after reflection, you would not be altogether astonished. \u201cYeah, sure, I can see where she\u2019s coming from\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Be that as it may, these selections from Wilde\u2019s oeuvre constitute a remarkably pleasurable reading experience in any era.<\/p>\n

We open with \u201cThe Rain Remembers What The Sky Forgets\u201d, a borderline steampunk tale. Our Cinderella-style protagonist, hat designer Celia Smith, refuses to employ real bird plumage in her creations for vital reasons almost opaque to herself. So when she is forced to do so by an overbearing patroness, dire events ensue. The title story reminded me a bit of Le Guin\u2019s work. In the world of the telling, \u201cweathermen\u201d share a literal identity with the phenomena of the skies, and when a young girl is called to the transformative profession, her mother mourns, but her sister anticipates.<\/p>\n

\u201cBuilding Migration #1\u201d is a jaunty, droll account of when smart structures go wandering the landscape like Ents.<\/p>\n

\n

A new condo in Denver wanted to see the ocean. Three office towers decided to throw a bash down in Baja. Two corporate apartment blocks in Colorado were following old butterfly and bird migration patterns south and claiming they\u2019d be back north when it got warmer. And the Radcliffe wanted to meet someone cute in Wilmington.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Is it possible to seed the world with unexpected events, most of them beguiling and pleasant? That\u2019s the job of Lane, in \u201cHappenstance\u201d. As a Happenstance Engineer, she coordinates surprises, almost like Monty Python\u2019s \u201cConfuse-a-Cat\u201d service. But what happens when her innocent talents fall prey to manipulative profiteers?<\/p>\n

Tales of altered sensory inputs are a flourishing subgenre, and \u201cHow to Walk Through Historic Graveyards in the Digital Age\u201d is a superior instance. Prosthetic eyes endow our protagonist with almost extrasensory visions, including that of the ghost of Tallulah Bankhead. The story has a Beagle-ish vibe. A short-short, \u201cPlease Stop Printing Unicorns\u201d considers a time when \u201cbioprinters,\u201d machine-assemblers of living creatures, become playthings for children. There\u2019s a great graphic novel by Guido Buzzelli titled \u201cZil Zelub\u201d, in which a hapless fellow discovers his body parts separating and fleeing at random. A similar malaise plagues our heroine Izze in \u201cDisconnect.\u201d But she eventually learns that literally \u201cflying all to pieces\u201d has its advantages.<\/p>\n

Now comes a quartet of stories that illustrate Wilde\u2019s facility and flair for horror. In \u201cShadow Plane\u201d, two sisters have crash-landed on a mysterious mountain in the Himalayas. What happens there would not be out of place in At the Mountains of Madness<\/b>. The hobby of \u201curbex\u201d\u2014urban exploring of ruins\u2014takes a dire turn for the influencer team of Cambell [sic] and Ginny, when they experience the haunted, Robert Aickman-style oddities in \u201cWelcome to the Underhill Cinema\u201d. In \u201cOnly Their Shining Beauty Was Left\u201d, Dr. Ganit is desperate to find out why people are growing bark and leaves and setting down roots.<\/p>\n

\n

Dr. Ganit had plenty of research and data. She sent messages flying, sketched theories. From the end of the world, she caught her mentor\u2019s notice again. She pictured inorganic carbons transforming like myths, like nymphs.<\/p>\n

\u201cI extrapolate from the evidence that pheromones may be triggering some commonality long dormant in our DNA,\u201d she told an emergency committee broken into squares on her laptop screen. \u201cWe\u2019re not too distant relatives from plants.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Last of the terror quartet is \u201cThe Midway\u201d, where a haunted amusement arcade conceals a beast that must be fed, Stephen King-wise. Can our protagonist survive the ordeal? Perhaps she will actually come to delight in it. \u201cClearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand\u201d is an imagistic, surreal foray through an establishment much like the famous M\u00fctter Museum of teratological abominations. Did you know that Charon the Ferryman of the Dead has a co-worker whose job it is to salve the frustrated wants of the newly deceased? \u201cMy Cloak of Keys\u201d will reveal a day in the afterlife of this supernatural worker. And finally, \u201cRhizome by Starlight\u201d might be alternately titled \u201cThe Island of Doctor Linnaeus\u201d, with its focus on an isolated spot where engineered vegetation has gone wild, with only one person able to withstand the vegetal assault.<\/p>\n

I hope that my short synopses and assessments have conveyed Wilde\u2019s deep and broad range of subject matters. She varies her angles of literary attacks at will, and displays a flexible prose style that adapts to all tones and topics. But the most important quality of her work is an always discernible passion for her artistry and caring for her characters. We can hope she gives us as many more good books in the next decade as she has in her first.<\/p>\n

Interested in this title? Your purchase through the links below brings us a small amount of affiliate income and helps us keep doing all the reviews you love to read!<\/p>\n

\"Text<\/a>\"Text<\/a><\/p>\n

Paul Di Filippo has been writing professionally for over 30 years, and has published almost that number of books. He lives in Providence RI, with his mate of an even greater number of years, Deborah Newton.<\/p>\n

\"Locus<\/a>While you are here,<\/strong> please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely on reader donations to keep the magazine and site going, and would like to keep the site paywall free, but WE NEED YOUR FINANCIAL SUPPORT<\/strong> to continue quality coverage of the science fiction and fantasy field.<\/p>\n

\u00a9Locus Magazine. Copyrighted material may not be republished without permission of LSFF.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Catalog of Storms, Fran Wilde (Fairwood Press 978-1958880319, trade paperback, 256pp, $18.99) August 2025. Although Fran Wilde\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48612,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[266],"tags":[36006,6137,359,18,117,21588,19,17,361,5,6765],"class_list":{"0":"post-48611","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-author-interview","9":"tag-book-review","10":"tag-books","11":"tag-eire","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-fantasy","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland","16":"tag-magazine","17":"tag-news","18":"tag-science-fiction"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48611"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48611\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}