Skybound by Aleksandr Voinov

Title: Skybound
Author: Aleksandr Voinov
Cover Artist: Jordan Taylor
Publisher: Riptide Press
Genre: historical, World War II
Length: 13,300 words/44 pages



Love soars.

Germany, 1945. The Third Reich is on its knees as Allied forces bomb Berlin to break the last resistance. Yet on an airfield near Berlin, the battle is far from over for a young mechanic, Felix, who’s attached to a squadron of fighter pilots. He’s especially attached to fighter ace Baldur Vogt, a man he admires and secretly loves. But there’s no room for love at the end of the world, never mind in Nazi Germany.

When Baldur narrowly cheats death, Felix pulls him from his plane, and the pilot makes his riskiest move yet. He takes a few days’ leave to recover, and he takes Felix with him. Away from the pressures of the airfield, their bond deepens, and Baldur shows Felix the kind of brotherhood he’d only ever dreamed of before.

But there’s no escaping the war, and when they return, Baldur joins the fray again in the skies over Berlin. As the Allies close in on the airfield where Felix waits for his lover, Baldur must face the truth that he is no longer the only one in mortal danger.

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The viewpoint and setting of Skybound is truly startling: the losing side of a desperate war is bleak ground for a love story, yet here it is.


Baldur, a pilot of such skill as to make him royalty to his fellows, takes chances in the sky and on the ground. He's an ace among aces, and Felix might love him or merely have a bad case of hero-worship. Baldur is the one bright spot for Felix in this war—he rebuilds tattered planes enough to fly again, but the growing despair of the war is sapping him badly.

One air battle proves nearly fatal for Baldur and Felix is the one to rescue him. Felix would walk through fire for Baldur, and is overcome to be chosen as companion for the few days the war effort can spare the pilot to recover. Both anxious and hopeful, Felix isn't sure what the few days of solitude will bring, and even when they return to the airfield, it isn't entirely clear how deeply Baldur is invested. Sentiments like “I love you” have no place in this war, but the chances Baldur runs to be with Felix speak loudly.

The clues to what happiness they might find in the end are scattered cleverly though the text, but it is a mixed happiness, the best they could hope for. The tone of the story recalls parts of All Quiet on the Western Front, where ending the day with all arms and legs had to be accounted a triumph. Desperation drives Felix, both for the war and for Baldur.

The author has gone to great lengths to provide solid research and a vivid sense of time and place, not only at the airfield and in battle but in the village where they take their leave. Knowing how this war ends provides a special poignancy to the small comforts they can take. Even the characters' names add to the atmosphere: Baldur, named for a god whose death presaged Ragnarok, and Felix, the one small bit of happiness.

With all this care taken, it was a jolt to repeatedly encounter a term translated literally from the German that means something entirely different and unrelated in English, and which wasn't explained until nearly the end. The reorienting needed to get back into the story after each use took away from the total submersion of reading. Even so, I would give this short, unusual tale 4.5 marbles

He Is Worthy by Lisa Henry

Title: He Is Worthy
Author: Lisa Henry
Cover Artist: Petite-Madame VonApple
Publisher: Riptide

Genre: Historical
Length: 28k words

Rome, 68 A.D. Novius Senna is one of the most feared men in Rome. He’s part of the emperor’s inner circle at a time when being Nero’s friend is almost as dangerous as being his enemy. Senna knows that better men than he have been sacrificed to Nero’s madness—he’s the one who tells them to fall on their swords. He hates what he’s become to keep his family safe. He hates Nero more.

Aenor is a newly-enslaved Bructeri trader, brutalized and humiliated for Nero’s entertainment. He’s homesick and frightened, but not entirely cowed. He’s also exactly what Senna has been looking for: a slave strong enough to help him assassinate Nero.

It’s suicide, but it’s worth it. Senna yearns to rid Rome of a tyrant, and nothing short of death will bring him peace for his crimes. Aenor hungers for revenge, and dying is his only escape from Rome’s tyranny. They have nothing left to lose, except the one thing they never expected to find—each other.

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I don’t often read slave-fic, the power imbalances bother me. I do however, read historicals, the more accurate the better. I took a chance on the slave aspect here in order to reach first century Rome through Lisa Henry’s words, and I am very glad I did.


The blurb hints that the need to assassinate Nero and get Rome out from under his pustulent thumb is foremost, and it is. Senna’s function is to tell prominent men that they no longer enjoy the favor of the emperor, a code universally understood to mean “Go kill yourself.” And they did. His last straw was delivering this message to a victorious general, and from then on Senna watched for the right assistant to engage in the suicide mission of taking Nero out. Aenor, the Bructeri slave and Nero’s plaything, still has enough spirit to act.

“Do you hate Nero?” Senna asks, and Aenor can tell him in broken Latin, “I hate him. Hate all of you.”  With reason. The men are together for reasons other than love or attraction, yet something blossoms between them. Loyalty. Respect.

The atmosphere in this book is incredible. I was absolutely present in the slave markets and in Nero’s pleasure gardens, there with the characters, seeing what they saw, even smelling what they smelled. Small details made the setting come alive—it wasn’t enough to know there were hot and cold rooms in the Roman baths, but more feeling the heat of the water soothing bruised flesh.

This was Nero’s court, and all his excesses jump off the page too, making this book gritty and raw, and in places it may raise the reader’s gorge. None of the history comes in infodumps—it’s all worked in organically and naturally. I was going to say beautifully, but little of the subject matter is beautiful, though ugliness can be very well done. Nero's relationship with Christians assaults Senna's senses in the garden. Not every detail is horrific. “Bructeri, not German,” Aenor corrects Senna, showing his pride and placing his tribe on the map all at once.

The political tension is the greater part of the story, with furtive whispers about what prominent citizen would next declare for Galba, and everyone stepping softly lest the crazed emperor withdraw his friendship. That any kind of relationship can prosper between a man with no hope and no autonomy and a man who’s condemning himself and his accessories to a certain death must be a triumph of life.

Both Senna and Aenor are deftly drawn, well characterized in a small word count. We can feel Senna’s despair as the friend of his childhood becomes the monster that will bring down the Empire.
He wasn’t just planning treason, but the killing of a god, no matter how much Rome would benefit from it. If he needed redemption as a character, he achieved it by being willing to sacrifice all and die gruesomely. However, I didn’t see Senna as the villain, I saw him as the man who fell down the slippery slope. Nero didn’t start out awful.

Aenor has no love to turn to loathing—his tribe mocked the Romans until he learned of Roman rule the hard way. He’s systematically ground down, and the grinding is often sexual and ugly, difficult reading. If Nero hadn’t burned his city nor slain his generals, he’d still deserve his fate for what he did to his pleasure-slave.

This story succeeds beautifully as an historical piece, and that’s why I treasure it, but does it fare as well as a romance? To a degree yes, but when looked at in the cold light of analysis, it’s missing a fair chunk. And you know what? I don’t care. Normally an absent section of relationship development makes me froth at the mouth. Here absolutely everything works so well to make me relieved that everyone didn’t end up dead in the gutter after the political crisis that I wasn’t looking too closely at the transition. After finishing the book I sat transfixed, imagining for myself how the missing sections went, so perfectly immersed that I could continue spinning the story. But the details were not laid out. Connoisseurs of slave-fic might find this lacking. I find it to be more mainstream.

It’s been a long time since a book kept me reading late into the night. The hours of sleep were well spent. 5 marbles

Grown Men by Damon Suede

Title: Grown Men
Author: Damon Suede
Cover Artist: Roberto Quintero
Publisher: Riptide Publishing
Genre: Science Fiction
Length: 109 pages

Every future has dirty roots. 

Marooned in the galactic backwaters of the HardCell company, colonist Runt struggles to eke out an existence on a newly-terraformed tropical planetoid. Since his clone-wife died on entry, he’s been doing the work of two on his failing protein farm. Overworked and undersized, Runt’s dwindling hope of earning corporate citizenship has turned to fear of violent “retirement.”

When an overdue crate of provisions crashes on his beach, Runt searches frantically for a replacement wife among the tools and food. Instead he gets Ox, a mute hulk who seems more like a corporate assassin than a simple offworld farmer.

Shackwacky and near-starving, Runt has no choice but to work with his silent partner despite his mounting paranoia and the unsettling appeal of Ox’s genetically altered pheromones. Ox plays the part of the gentle giant well, but Runt’s still not convinced he hasn’t arrived with murder in mind.

Between brutal desire and the seeds of a relationship, Runt’s fears and Ox’s inhuman past collide on a fertile world where hope and love just might have room to grow.

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Woefully underskilled for the task he's taken on in terraforming, Runt is starving in the midst of plenty. Maybe he's streetsmart from his upbringing in spaceport alleys, but when he intercepts a big crab trying to carry off a mealpack, he eats the mealpack, not the crab. He's not TSTL, he just doesn't have the necessary skill set, and the clone wife who didn't survive the landing may or may not have been able to make up the deficiencies in wildlife recognition and machinery repair, but we'll never know. Equally mysterious is why he's out here at all, aside from the lure of riches once he's homesteaded his island. HardCell means business, we are told, but Runt isn't really a good prospect for a grubstake and doesn't have the necessary capital to buy in. If HardCell is so hardcore as to choose colonists only for their willingness to be dumped out in the back-ass of beyond, they don't need to kill off the underperformers; the world will take of that for them. Runt doesn't have the skills to teach the offspring he hopes to have to populate this new world.

Ox, the giant mute man who came with the supply drop, is equally a mystery, and while his backstory is explained elsewhere (a free short on the author's website), he at least comes with some skills that make all the difference between subsistence and prosperity. He also comes with some jacked-up pheromones, creating havoc with Runt's sex drive. Even as Runt and Ox have to come to a working arrangement as farmers, they have to come to some understanding about Runt's physical reactions. Runt's paranoia, fueled by a surprise in the supply shipment, is strictly his problem.

Ox doesn't come through very clearly on the page, with brief mentions of traits that don't get clearly shown. Something like this:

The giant wasn’t quick to adapt, but he had a knack for thoughtful strategy when he stayed calm.

shouldn't be a throwaway line: what happens when he doesn't stay calm? Rubbing calms him, humming or rumbling calms him, but he doesn't get agitated or anxious first. There's another throwaway remark about Ox liking to play practical jokes, but no illustration of a prank.

I enjoyed the evolving relationship between the men; they communicate pretty well despite Ox's muteness, resorting to writing only once in a while. When they take the final plunge into sex, it makes perfect sense. The underlying current of small equals weak, big equals strong, big equals more work than small can do was really aggravating early on, but as the men's teamwork evolves, this irritant resolves.

The worldbuilding, while laid out on the page, doesn't make so much sense. Two suns and three moons are going to create extreme weather and hellacious tides, (plus really screwy shadows) but HardCell has been able to engineer these things away. The tropical climate they have should lend itself to a mostly outdoor life with palapas or ramadas to keep off the sun, but Runt and Ox lead a mostly indoor existence when not actually farming. An evening under the stars is so rare as to merit an entire chapter.

The society building is stronger—HardCell has a prepackaged, predigested way of life to sell to the galaxy, which comes through very strongly. Runt retells an ancient Greek story to Ox, recast in the corporate mold, illustrating the technological grip. The story raises some horrifying questions. What are clone wives, why do they exist in this society and what is their place? Are they human or property? Intelligent? Is there a shortage of desperate, risk-taking women, or why else go for engineered colonists? Cloned men are common, genetic engineering for humans is so routine that Runt bemoans his parents' lack of foresight in the matter, but the clones don't seem to be considered entirely human.

The one big sex scene is definitely a step out of the ordinary, taking account of the differences in size between Runt and Ox, and of Ox's oversize equipment. (Forty centimeters is about sixteen inches, FYI, and eighteen cm around is roughly a medium-sized wrist.) It was different, and it was hot, even if I did have to figure out who was where and how at one point. It was also a technical problem, coming on the heels of a near-death experience for Ox.

The plot twines around in a full circle with a twist, very nice. The writing is smooth and evocative; Runt's voice is very distinctive, and this is almost enough to soothe me past the story problems. The incomplete characterization of Ox, the partially explained society, the partial worldbuilding, and some continuity errors (eg a cleaned floor that is suddenly bloody, then clean again) keep me from being entirely in love with this story. 3.75 marbles

Pretty Monsters by Andrea Speed

Pretty Monsters
Publisher: Riptide Publishing
Genre: Paranormal Romance
Length: 15 pages

Josh knew the night shift at the Quik-Mart would be full of freaks and geeks—and that was before the hell portal opened in the parking lot. Still, he likes to think he can roll with things. Sure, the zombies make a mess sometimes, but at least they never reach for anything more threatening than frozen burritos.

Besides, it’s not all lizard-monsters and the walking dead. There’s also the mysterious hottie with the sly red lips and a taste for sweets.

Josh has had the hots for Hot Guy since the moment he laid eyes on him, and it seems Hot Guy might be sweet on Josh too. Now if only Josh could figure out whether that’s a good thing, a bad thing, or something in between. After all, with a hell vortex just a stone’s throw away, Josh has learned to take nothing at face value—even if it’s a very, very pretty face.
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Stories generally have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Even stories in series. If they don't have those elements, they are either not terribly well written or they are something else, no matter what they are called. Perhaps a vignette, or a chapter of a larger work. Pretty Monsters from Andrea Speed is a beautifully written something else.


There is little to the story that doesn't appear in the blurb, and frankly, quite a bit of promise of plot that appears in the blurb and not the story. The set-up is quirky and witty, a convenience store near a hell portal, where weird beings amble in and out, paying for chips and burritos, and occasionally oozing on the counter. Hot Guy, aka Colin, finally wanders in after one third of actual text pages go by (there are 6 pages of narrative in this 15 page file). The story establishes that Colin and Josh are interested in one another, and that Colin is a really hot weird being. That's it. This is not a plot.

So what we have here is a set-up and a hook. The story has #1 attached and the publisher's site bills it as the first in a series, but this reads like the first chapter of a serialized novel. Fine, if I know that's what I'm getting into, but that's not what I've been offered here. This introduction is interesting enough that I'd read more; another installment or two should clarify whether these are meant to be stories or merely chapters doled out at intervals.

Consequently, this piece is hard to rate. If I look at it as the opening to a larger work that was of similar quality all the way through, a 5, easy. But since I've been offered a short story that has a beginning but no real middle or end, it loses one point for each missing element. And that's a shame. 3 marbles