The Shivering Ground & Other Stories by Sara Barkat

Overall Rating: ***** (5 stars)

The Shivering Ground & Other Stories is a collection of eleven short stories, combining science fiction with an almost Victorian sensibility and prose style.

A woman has her heart surgically removed to better survive the demands of her society. Ordinary people are caught up in irreversible climate change. A prison guard watches over the last prisoner from a war that ended long before. Two lovers living in alternate universes carry on a doomed affair through letters. These are some of the worlds explored in this unique collection.

The stories are independent, although they share some common features. Many of them seem to be set in steampunkish universes, with dreary industrial districts, airships in the skies, a sense that humanity struggles to thrive in the world it has built for itself. Several stories focus on the details of ordinary life in the shadow of massive disaster: war, ecological collapse, or the fall of civilization.

The prose style here is immaculate – I caught a couple of places where line formatting seemed to go awry, but copy- and line-editing were otherwise superb. Her style reminds me of some Victorian fiction: dense, with a broad vocabulary carefully deployed, often focused on fine descriptive detail. Sara Barkat is painting word-pictures, and she does it with considerable skill. Another reviewer likens the result to Emily Dickinson, and it’s not a bad comparison.

The reader will find most of these stories mysterious; each one contains a mystery, a puzzle that the reader may not be able to solve before the story closes. If you find yourself asking “what’s really going on here” right up to the last word, then the story is probably hitting its objective. Some of the pieces are barely stories at all, in the sense that they don’t seem to have much plot – they’re portraits, windows into universes that are not quite like our own.

I very much enjoyed The Shivering Ground, and I’m going to be looking for more from Sara Barkat. Very highly recommended if you enjoy evocative science-fiction stories in a distinctive style.