History That Never Was

Rich Larson’s The Sky Didn’t Load Today and Other Glitches (Shacklebound Books, 2024) is a brilliant collection of dark sci-fi flash fiction. With fantastic characters and killer twists, this collection is sure to delight fans of the genre and format!

As with most collections, I have a number of favorites, but I enjoyed all of the stories. My favorites stood out to me for a variety of reasons. “Someone Else,” “Treadmill,” and “We’re Talking About Practice” each presented great characters going about their lives, but then offered the sort of twist ending that will absolutely rip your heart out. While “Breathing for Two” has a different sort of twist, this story of generational sacrifice also includes a heart-rending ending. I really loved the juxtaposition of “Six Month Ocean” and “Skinned,” which are presented one after the other and look at different sides of a technology that allows people to “wear” different bodies than the one they’re born with. There are other stories in the collection with a sense of a similar world or technology, but these two stories really shone as stand-out examples of interplay within one author’s work.

Fans of Rich Larson, dark sci-fi, and flash fiction owe it to themselves to check out The Sky Didn’t Load Today and Other Glitches when it comes out on September 3, 2024!

The publisher provided me with an advance copy of this collection in exchange for review consideration.

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This entry was posted by dawn.vogel on Wednesday, August 21st, 2024 at 6:00 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.