The Butterfly Disjunct
And Other Stories
Stewart C Baker’s The Butterfly Disjunct is an intriguing short story collection in which characters navigate futuristic worlds and fight to survive unjust and tyrannical systems.
The collection makes intriguing use of story forms, using how-to guides and a troubleshooting guide, among other formats, to structure its tales. The effect enables quick leaps into high-stakes scenes. For example, one entry is an action-filled lesbian romance whose heroine fights robots alongside her love interest. Each section in her tale is annotated with commands like “Dust’em” or “Bust’em”; these punctuate the combat scenes well as the characters fight their ways from room to room, daring each other to kiss.
Throughout The Butterfly Disjunct, such containers create immediate tension and intrigue. One story is also split across the collection: “The Future, One Summer Behind” concludes before its main characters attend a Martian lights festival, and its protagonists return fifty pages later in “Festival of Lights” and again one hundred pages later in “Maricourt’s Waters, Quiet and Deep.” Footnotes at the end of the first two stories denote that the story continues and where to find it, bridging the significant distance between each piece.
The stories unfurl with speed; their worldbuilding and character development take a back seat to plot twists and action. Nevertheless, they are entertaining, playing with myriad forms, settings, and concepts. They center women in a way that is refreshing and muse through motifs including the loss of memory, recovering from calamity, and attempts to reclaim agency, all set against the backdrop of futuristic worlds in which technology has become an extension of humanity’s foibles.
The short science fiction vignettes gathered in The Butterfly Disjunct traverse planets, stars, and time.
Reviewed by
Mike Good
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
