Conmergence: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction

by Tara Maya

Tara Maya’s previously published short stories, most of them no longer available in print, are gathered together here for the first time. A number of the tales are short shorts or flash fiction, including the poignant, "Ghosts on Red Strings, " and the biting alternate history, "Best of All Possible Worlds. " Longer stories and two novelettes round out the collection. The emotional timbre ranges across a wide gamut. "Tomorrow We Dance" is a bleak retelling of the fairy-tales Pied Piper and the Emperor's New Clothes. In the more heroic and romantic Painted World stories (two are here), artists are able to bring their paintings to life. For fans of hard sf, there is "A Thousand Blossoms With The Day," which starts from the premise there might have been life in the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang. An Author's Note, and author Comments on the story behind each story, enliven the volume with the author’s own strange journey from homeless street person to published author.

"Ghosts on Red Strings" - Only through forgiveness can she free her ghosts.... But some crimes cannot be forgiven.

"Conmergence" - In a non-Euclidean multiverse, parallel universes can meet.

"Portrait of a Pretender" - A murdered king, an heir in danger and a usurper... but is he as black as they paint? (a Painted World story)

"Refractions from the Neglected Side" - A brain damaged woman suffers from hemi-neglect, the inability to see anything on the left. The cure may be even more bizarre.

"Burn" - In that kingdom, witches burned. (8 of Swords of Tarot Tales)

"The Best of All Possible Worlds" - Money can buy anything, even a universe where you can be happy. Right?

"Public Eye" - To hide from the grid, you have to give up everything. Especially friends.

"Walker" - And yet there are those the grid refuses to see.

"A Thousand Blossoms With The Day" - The universe is less than a second old, and already life struggles to survive.

"You Have Not Forgotten How To Fly" - A faery once defeated an evil war lord, but can she handle a toddler?

"Delivery Status, Failure" - Note to don't try to call mom and work on the computer at the same time.

"Grace" - God promised her a great destiny. God lied.

"Tomorrow We Dance" - When the Bone Whistler plays his flute, the whole tribe dances and a new day is just over the horizon...

"The Virgin's Choice" - A princess tests her three suitors and discovers something surprising. (4 of Cups in Tarot Tales)

"Drawn to the Brink" - Her job is to hunt a monster escaped from a painting. She didn't expect him to be so handsome... or to need his help.

(Total 47,000 words)

Genres: Short Stories

186 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 16, 2010

About the author

Tara Maya has lived in Africa, Europe and Asia. She's pounded sorghum with mortar and pestle in a little clay village where the jungle meets the desert, meditated in a Buddhist monastery in the Himalayas and sailed the Volga river to a secret city that was once the heart of the Soviet space program. This first-hand experience, as well as research into the strange and piquant histories of lost civilizations, inspires her writing. Her terrible housekeeping, however, is entirely the fault of pixies.

Reviews

[Bnz · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a bit of understatement to say that this collection is uneven. You will find here several very short sketches, some in fantasy and some in SciFi genre, the latter better than the former. Fantasy lovers will probably enjoy two longer stories set in "The Painted World", competently written but rather uninspired chapters from a novel yet to be written, with familiar motifs of magical imagery turning into reality and even more familiar court intrigues (some interesting plot surprises do occur, though).

"Refractions from the Neglected Side" is the best SciFi offering here: reminiscent of early Greg Egan, this story wonders what would the world look like if we were truly able to pay attention.

But the sufficient reason to buy this collection is "Tomorrow We Dance". At the surface a retelling of "The Pied Piper" tale with some "The Emperor's New Clothes" and "Lord of the Flies" thrown in, this powerful novelette is much more than that: it convincingly tells how we fall for false prophets, how we abandon our humanity for empty promises, and why nobody is free of danger of becoming a beast to others, even the closest ones, in the name of great common good at the other side of the rainbow.

The author tells us in her comments she is working on the novel from which this little masterpiece was taken. Not a great fan of fantasy myself, I eagerly await it nevertheless. It might easily make hardships of life on the streets worthwhile (read those comments to see what I am talking about (o: )

[Vanessa Wu · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's commonly suggested that it's harder to write good short stories than to write good novels because in a short story there's less space to set the scene and develop characters. First of all, I don't agree with this. There's no room for flabby prose in a good novel either and short stories are easier to edit because they are shorter.

But, whatever your form, it's very hard to capture a reader's interest immediately. And in a short story it's very hard to take your reader on a journey that will leave him or her feeling satisfied.

If that is hard to do in a short story, it's even harder in a science fiction or fantasy story, in which the world inhabited by the characters may be very different from our own.

Tara Maya doesn't seem to be aware of any of these difficulties. She writes easily, fluently and eloquently as if she were born writing stories about strange people in exotic lands. There are no false notes, no awkward explanations, no loose ends. The surprises, when they come, are well prepared. The characters do develop and so does our understanding of them.

I got a lot of pleasure from these stories and I'd like to read more of Tara Maya's work. I especially enjoyed her story called Portrait of a Pretender. There were a couple of sentences in there that were far more erotic than a whole slew of stories by some erotica writers I've sampled recently.

[Emmanuelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Tara Maya. She's a fantastic author and I love that she takes the time to write thoroughly stories rather then rush through a story just to get it out. Sure, it means there are great lengths of time between releases but that's ok; I'd rather have that then have an incomplete or inaccurate story.

While I didn't necessarily personally like all the short stories in this anthology, there were a number that I thought were fantastic. I love getting to know Tara Maya as an author better and the back story to her life. I think her idea of a short story series based off of the Tarot cards is a great idea because I loved the twists on the two stories included in this anthology.

Keep it up Tara!