The Fragrance of Orchids and Other Stories

May 22, 2023
From Aurora Award winner McBride (Indigo Time) comes an impressive, career-spanning collection of 14 sci-fi shorts. Thematically, the pieces vary enormously, but uniting them is a lovely sense of playfulness and the clear joy McBride takes in writing, which shines through both in the stories themselves and in the brief author’s notes that accompany each piece. (On attempting her only horror story, “Hello, Jane, Goodbye,” she writes, “I cracked my knuckles and confronted my fears.”) Many of these tales deal in classic sci-fi tropes, including alien invasion in “Speaking Sea,” life on other planets in “A Breath After Dying,” and self-aware computers in “Softlinks,” and though they sometimes feel expected, they’re always well executed. McBride’s talents truly shine, however, when she flips familiar setups on their heads. The best example of this is the standout title story, in which an alien—the last of her kind and raised on Earth since infancy—struggles with loneliness and searches for love, told from the perspective of her therapist. New readers and those who have followed McBride for decades will equally relish this collection.

May 31, 2023
This collection gathers together stories published from as early as 1985 to the present. There are no real particular genre elements tying the stories together, with McBride trying their hand at any number of themes or settings including fantasy, horror, and various sorts of sf. Most of the stories are fair successes, with the strongest probably being the titular Aurora award-winning story about a psychiatrist to the sole surviving member of an alien species, and the ""Speaking Sea,"" where a mysterious organism begins spreading through Earth's oceans, transforming aquatic life and unlucky humans alike into one merging organism. Most of the other stories are at least fairly good exercises in their particular genres, although some such as ""It's the Elemental Spirits"" or ""Totem"" may make questionable use of mythology. Even if the collection overall doesn't break new ground in any genre in particular, it should please those looking for a pleasant, not too demanding read, as well as those looking to sample a wide variety of the work of a less well-known Canadian sf writer.

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