Reviews

Asimov's Science Fiction, June 2016 by Mercurio D. Rivera, Emily Hockaday, G.O. Clark, Dominica Phetteplace, Tony Daniel, Erwin S. Strauss, Paul McAuley, Rick Wilber, Robert Silverberg, Sheila Williams, David C. Kopaska-Merkel, Norman Spinrad, Geoffrey A. Landis, Sara Pinsker, James Patrick Kelly, Jay O'Connell, Andrew Darlington

mary_soon_lee's review

4.0

This is specifically a review of Jay O'Connell's splendid novella, "What We Hold Onto," not the Asimov's issue as a whole.... "What We Hold Onto" presents a layered and evocative vision of the future. Differences between our world and the story's future are unobtrusively threaded into the narrative. Some differences are large (climate change has already taken place); some medium (people can modify their bodies so that their skin displays images); some small (pet insurance has become hugely expensive). This mixture, together with the richness of the details, makes the world very real. More importantly, the characters are real, and the themes are human and heartfelt. The story speaks about loneliness, friendship, death, about being a parent and about watching your parents age, about holding onto the past and letting it go. The narrator's relationship with her two college-age sons particularly moved me. There is also a strong romance element, which I very much enjoyed. I didn't know why the man was so drawn to the narrator, perhaps because the narrator herself didn't know, but I cared about both of them, and willed them on toward what I hoped would be a happy ending. An excellent story.