Book Review: Promise by Christi Nogle

A young woman confronts her digital doppelganger. A mother and daughter struggle underground, finishing robots for the rich. A loving couple find that their mirrors are very different than mirrors used to be. Your devices sometimes connect not just to the web but to the afterlife.

Be prepared for strangeness here. We have several types of aliens, alternate dimensions, virtual-reality writing retreats, time-travel games and time-travel tragedies, cosmic artforms and living paintings, haunted Zoom meetings, and giant worms. These stories reflect the weird and unknowable future. They are often bizarre and dreadful, but they also veer towards themes of hope, potential... and promise.

GENRE: Science Fiction Anthology (Single Author)

PURCHASE LINKS: Amazon | Flame Tree Press

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Christi Nogle writes psychological and supernatural horror, dark science fiction, and weird fiction. She is the author of the collection The Best of Our Past, the Worst of Our Future and the novel Beulah. Her short stories have appeared in over fifty publications including PseudoPod, Vastarien, Escape Pod, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, and Dark Matter Magazine along with anthologies such as C.M Muller’s Nightscript series, Humans Are the Problem from Weird Little Worlds, Mixtape: 1986 from The Dread Machine, and Flame Tree’s American Gothic and Chilling Crime.

Christi loves learning and has studied visual arts as well as writing and literature. After twenty years teaching academic writing and occasional literature classes at a university, Christi moved on to spend more time focusing on her own fiction and supporting other writers in the horror and speculative writing communities. She enjoys sharing stories and critiques in various writing groups, mentoring and volunteering for writers’ organizations, teaching creative writing workshops, and learning more about editing and promotion. She is also an Associate Editor at the popular horror podcast PseudoPod.

She continues to write short fiction and is working on a new novel, All My Really Good Friends. She also hopes to someday return to painting, which was an obsession for many years.

Christi is an active member of the Horror Writers Association, Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, and Codex Writers’ Group. She lives in Boise, Idaho with her partner Jim and their gorgeous dogs. Follow her at christinogle.com or on Twitter @christinogle.

Review

Ever since I read Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others (largely because of the movie Arrival) I've found myself interested in sci-fi anthologies. I've watched Black Mirror and Love, Death and Robots, and I've read a few more written anthologies. Promise is one of the closest that's come to those three aforementioned titles so far.

Everything was weird, and I mean that in a good way! Some were certainly thought-provoking. Some I didn't get, but hey, I can always still enjoy something without fully understanding it. (Case in point: time travel or time-adjacent movies. Predestination always comes to mind. And most recently, Tenet.)

But some of the stories that really caught my attention were:

• Flexible Off-Time - I liked the premise, because I can relate to not having enough time to do everything I want. So the idea of having the chance to do that is promising (see what I did there? 🤭) but also... terrifying. I also loved the Inception-like vibe to it.
• Cubby - I always love time travel shenanigans, but this was kind of sad. I did really like the idea of "the child" and letting children decide what they want to be later on.
• Fables of the Future - So I thought the story pages past, An Account, was pretty interesting, then I got to this one and I was very excited to see they were somehow connected! I was hoping to at least have a third story, at last that wasn't the case. Hopefully at some point.
• Substance - I can't find the words to describe it, but something about this piece just really stuck with me. Maybe it's the strange world and ways of the giant worms. Maybe it's the little queen's strange fascination with the human world that she wanted to become human. It was interesting and vivid and complex and also sad, in some way.
• The Orbital Bloom - I loved the "cycling" theme in this, and the twist at the end. The mother-daughter relationship was a nice touch. I think plenty could relate to that, though we, as of yet, do not have the luxury of resetting. (Or do we? Does forgiveness count? See, these stories make me think and go all philosophical.)
• Viridian Green - Short but entertaining. As I work from home, I found myself relating to it easily.

My Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️