A Quick Review of Blood is Another Word for Hunger by Rivers Solomon

Reading Rivers Solomon is a visceral experience—one that I’m still reeling from having read their novella The Deep and their short story Prudent Girls for the Decameron Project.

So it’s no surprise upon seeing they’ve written horror alongside their impressive SFF track record, I immediately gravitated toward Blood is Another Word for Hunger, a short story that trails in the aftermath of Sully’s murder of her mistress and her mistress’ children when they learn of her master’s death. From murder comes new life, quite literally when Sully rapidly becomes pregnant and subsequently gives birth, a new being reborn for every person she’s killed and will come to kill.

She wished she missed them. She wished at the very least she felt sadness or guilt. But all she felt was the same old rage. It burned her up, leaving her numb, nerves charred. She’d done the thing she’d always dreamt of doing, and now what? Perhaps now it was her turn to die.

Blood is Another Word for Hunger, Rivers Solomon

Across the Stars and Back Again | A Review of Emergency Skin by N.K. Jemisin

Are you not magnificent? Or you will be, one day. But first, you must earn your beauty.

N.K. Jemisin’s entry into the Forward Series—a series of short stories featuring noted SFF authors—is, in a word, masterful, seeking to answer the titillating question of what would happen if Earth got to the point that it was truly uninhabitable? If, in a last-ditch effort to save humanity, the elite, the best, left, taking themselves to the stars to start anew?

This premise is not one that is new in speculative fiction. It is not even outside the realm of reality, when we have men like Elon Musk existing in our timeline, and the notion of colonizing nearby planets like Mars isn’t entirely novel. Space is, after all, the final frontier, and humanity is ever seeking to expand beyond the natural boundaries given to it.