She Shits Bricks and Other Stories by Samson Tonauac

She Shits Bricks and Other Stories by Samson Tonauac
Publisher: Self-Published
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy
Rating: 5 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

Twerker, COVID-991, advert jinn–we all went a little crazy after 2020 … did we not? 13 ultra-short science fiction and cyberpunk stories inspired by the events of 2020.

Anything can be turned into a joke with enough effort.

I’ve reviewed countless collections and anthologies over the years. Normally, I pick out specific stories from them, but everything in this book was so closely intertwined that I decided to take a different approach this time. While each story worked well on its own, one of the best parts of reading them was picking out all of the references they included to one another. Some of these references were fairly obvious, but others asked the readers to spend a little more time thinking about how certain characters or settings were connected to each other. I was impressed by how well this technique worked. It gave the audience many opportunities to compare and contrast everything they’d read so far, and it provided a strong sense of unity for what I’ve seen of this author’s work so far.

The pursuit of justice was an overarching theme for many of these tales. Some characters received their just desserts in unexpected ways while others sought out justice for unfair things that had happened in their own lives. There was a beautiful sense of order to how everything unfolded. As soon as I noticed this was a topic the author was planning to return to repeatedly, I eagerly anticipated future endings and hoped that everything would turn out right in the end for every character involved.

Mr. Tonauac had a wry sense of humor that were well suited for the types of science fiction he wrote. Some of the scenarios he came up with were so outlandish that I started chuckling even before I knew what the punchline might be. I figured out his irreverent writing style so quickly that it was easy to anticipate the lighthearted spin he’d put on all sorts of different topics even before I knew exactly how he was planning to turn often deadly serious subjects into amusing ones. Based on how much he made me laugh, I’ll be keeping an eye out for more work from him for sure.

This is part of a series, but it can be read perfectly well as a standalone work.

She Shits Bricks and Other Stories was tongue-in-cheek science fiction I’d recommend to anyone who loves this sort of thing.