The Day the World Turned Upside Down, by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

I went looking on Free SF Online for something to read, and found that the webmaster had put the two winners of Hugos on the home page.  The Day the World Turned Upside Down won in the Best Novelette category, was linked there, and I had not read it.

So this evening I did so.  And it's a nice little story--an end-of-love story, with a trick speculation.  The loss of the love of his life has turned the protagonist's world upside down, and then--that happens, literally.  Everything that is not attached to the ground falls up. Somehow the atmosphere and water stay in place, but otherwise everything sticking up falls unless it's held firmly by the ground.  Quite the mess.

So our hero is one of the very few survivors, and processes all this as he is processing his broken heart.  He has something to live for--returning his lost love's goldfish, who has survived also.

And so the metaphor goes.  It's reasonably entertaining, if not excessively so.  I'm glad I found it and can say I'm caught up on award winners for now.  I give it 3 stars.

The Ink Readers of Doi Saket

I rather enjoyed the first story of Heuvelt's that I read, The Boy Who Cast No Shadow.  This one, The Ink Readers of Doi Saket, not quite so much.  It's written as a very light and fun tale, set in Thailand in order to allow a sort of quaint rendering where everyone has a nickname and a descriptive adjective that follows them everywhere.  But that's not the point of the story.  The people of Doi Saket grant wishes as part of an annual festival.  But Tangmoo does not wish for anything--apparently having achieved enlightenment.  The story rolls along in a droll sort of way, with various coincidences described in that quaint dialect.  I was perhaps too tired when I read it, but just couldn't get into it.  Two stars, but you might like it.

The Boy Who Cast No Shadow, by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

It took a bit of digging to find a source for The Boy Who Cast No Shadow, but it was worth looking for.  This is a nice little giveaway from PS Publishing.  In it, we have a boy called Look, who for some reason literally casts no shadow, makes no reflection, can't be seen in media.  What would his life be like?  He tells us a bit about it, being famous for no particularly good reason.  Pretty sad until he meets Splinter, a boy of normal volume but made of glass, only weighing 9 pounds and fragile as can be.  Their friendship and romance form the core of the story, though I would say that the romance is quite mild as that goes.  Alternative bodies are quite common in speculative fiction, but this is a uniquely interesting take on it--usually what we get is that the difference is some kind of superpower but makes the holder misunderstood.  Look and Splinter are just weirdly different, not revoltingly ugly or hiding special powers--just quite unavoidably different.  And reacting to that difference in a pretty normal, but interesting way, not just sublimating it into being superior.  I would say it is worth checking out for yourself.  3 stars from me.