Full disclosure: I received a free copy of The Cross and the Cosmos Anthology: Year One, from Frank Luke, a friend of this blog who is also an editor and contributor to the volume.
The Cross and the Cosmos: Year One is a collection of Christian science fiction and fantasy stories from the Cross and the Cosmos e-zine. As you would expect from such a publication, the quality of the stories varies considerably.
I was most impressed by a couple time travel stories by Kersley Fitzgerald. The stories, both about a single family, deal in very fresh ways with the old problems of temporal transport. The first story, “Saving Grase,” in particular, combined time travel conundrums with the kinds of mundane frustrations any mother who has tried to manage small children on an airline flight must be familiar with.
I also liked a couple supernatural westerns by Cathrine Bonham, “Souls Are Wild” and “Black Hat Magic.” They were pretty effective evangelical takes, I thought, on the old “he sold his soul to the devil” theme.
Frank Luke contributed three very good fantasies, set in a universe that seems part Norse and part Tolkien, but in which the Christian religion is practiced pretty much as it is in our world (how that works isn’t explained). Frank needs to tighten up his stories a little and watch for neologisms like “quite the woman,” but I got caught up in the narrative and wanted to know what else happened to the characters.
The bulk of the stories, I have to say, aren’t quite as good. Some of them were frankly preachy and simplistic, and most were weak on wordsmithing. One story seems to have been published before the author was done with it, because she inserted “[RUSSIAN PHRASE]” in the dialogue a couple time, apparently planning to look the phrases up but never getting around to it (unless that was a glitch in my electronic version).
I must confess I found it irritating that every single fantasy that involved warriors included female warriors as a given, as if ours is the only world in the universe where men’s greater strength leads societies, in general, to reserve the role of fighter for them. I suppose egalitarianism is so ingrained in our younger generation of Christians that they can’t conceive of anything else.
There’s some good stuff in The Cross and the Cosmos: One, and some disappointing stuff. Suitable for teens and up.
The cover image is cracking me up.
Thank you for the review, Lars. I appreciate it. I was surprised at first when you mentioned all the fantasy stories having female warriors. I know in my stories that “Sunset Over Gunther” has no women fighters, in fact the men send the women away near the end. In “Pursuit,” Sema is a tracker and uses a knife, but I didn’t think of her as a soldier. Then I remembered how Twindove enters the archery contest in “The Contest” and shows the drunk who’s boss in the inn. Is that the one you are talking about from mine?
When the stories move more into the Christian realms, the Christianity is dealt with more explicitly.
It was Twindove I was thinking of. I took her as typical.
Ah. Wild elves have female archers, but that’s about it. I’ll see where I can make her atypicalness more explicit. Women can and do fight in other times. There’s a scene in “The Stronger Rule” where several women and children fight alongside the men, but it’s a defensive stand-fight or be killed. As Granish says after that scene, “Do not get between a mother and her cubs.”
I’m fine with that. Did something much the same myself in The Year of the Warrior.
Regarding the story you mentioned with “[RUSSIAN PHRASE]” in a couple of spots: the electronic version couldn’t handle the Cryllic alphabet nor the change of fonts in those spots. The author didn’t want to Anglicize the words.