A Catalog of Storms, Fran Wilde (Fairwood Press 978-1958880319, trade paperback, 256pp, $18.99) August 2025.
Although Fran Wilde’s career began with her debut short story in 2011, her work did not fall under my gaze until her first novel, Updraft, in 2015. I reviewed it admiringly in Asimov’s in 2016. Then I sat down under a tree, fell asleep, and awoke ten years later, to find that she had published seven more novels and a passel of short stories. This feels awfully unfair, but that’s the life of a reviewer: too many good books, too little time. And even as I write this, I note that her next book, A Philosophy of Thieves, arrives soon.
So before I fall any further behind in my noble but hopeless pursuit to read everything by those writers whom I enjoy, I should tell you about her newest short story collection, A Catalog of Storms.
The tales in this book, all excellent, possess a remarkable quality. While they are utterly contemporary state-of-the-art fantastika, there lingers about them a subtle aura of old-timey SF, a kind of solid craftsmanship and a subliminal shout-out to the genre’s lineage that is not always inherent in the SF of this postmodern century. If you saw one of these stories in Horace Gold’s Galaxy, you would of course be taken aback by its uncommon sophistication for that era—but then, after reflection, you would not be altogether astonished. “Yeah, sure, I can see where she’s coming from…”
Be that as it may, these selections from Wilde’s oeuvre constitute a remarkably pleasurable reading experience in any era.
We open with “The Rain Remembers What The Sky Forgets”, a borderline steampunk tale. Our Cinderella-style protagonist, hat designer Celia Smith, refuses to employ real bird plumage in her creations for vital reasons almost opaque to herself. So when she is forced to do so by an overbearing patroness, dire events ensue. The title story reminded me a bit of Le Guin’s work. In the world of the telling, “weathermen” share a literal identity with the phenomena of the skies, and when a young girl is called to the transformative profession, her mother mourns, but her sister anticipates.
“Building Migration #1” is a jaunty, droll account of when smart structures go wandering the landscape like Ents.
A new condo in Denver wanted to see the ocean. Three office towers decided to throw a bash down in Baja. Two corporate apartment blocks in Colorado were following old butterfly and bird migration patterns south and claiming they’d be back north when it got warmer. And the Radcliffe wanted to meet someone cute in Wilmington.
Is it possible to seed the world with unexpected events, most of them beguiling and pleasant? That’s the job of Lane, in “Happenstance”. As a Happenstance Engineer, she coordinates surprises, almost like Monty Python’s “Confuse-a-Cat” service. But what happens when her innocent talents fall prey to manipulative profiteers?
Tales of altered sensory inputs are a flourishing subgenre, and “How to Walk Through Historic Graveyards in the Digital Age” is a superior instance. Prosthetic eyes endow our protagonist with almost extrasensory visions, including that of the ghost of Tallulah Bankhead. The story has a Beagle-ish vibe. A short-short, “Please Stop Printing Unicorns” considers a time when “bioprinters,” machine-assemblers of living creatures, become playthings for children. There’s a great graphic novel by Guido Buzzelli titled “Zil Zelub”, in which a hapless fellow discovers his body parts separating and fleeing at random. A similar malaise plagues our heroine Izze in “Disconnect.” But she eventually learns that literally “flying all to pieces” has its advantages.
Now comes a quartet of stories that illustrate Wilde’s facility and flair for horror. In “Shadow Plane”, two sisters have crash-landed on a mysterious mountain in the Himalayas. What happens there would not be out of place in At the Mountains of Madness. The hobby of “urbex”—urban exploring of ruins—takes a dire turn for the influencer team of Cambell [sic] and Ginny, when they experience the haunted, Robert Aickman-style oddities in “Welcome to the Underhill Cinema”. In “Only Their Shining Beauty Was Left”, Dr. Ganit is desperate to find out why people are growing bark and leaves and setting down roots.
Dr. Ganit had plenty of research and data. She sent messages flying, sketched theories. From the end of the world, she caught her mentor’s notice again. She pictured inorganic carbons transforming like myths, like nymphs.
“I extrapolate from the evidence that pheromones may be triggering some commonality long dormant in our DNA,” she told an emergency committee broken into squares on her laptop screen. “We’re not too distant relatives from plants.”
Last of the terror quartet is “The Midway”, where a haunted amusement arcade conceals a beast that must be fed, Stephen King-wise. Can our protagonist survive the ordeal? Perhaps she will actually come to delight in it. “Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand” is an imagistic, surreal foray through an establishment much like the famous Mütter Museum of teratological abominations. Did you know that Charon the Ferryman of the Dead has a co-worker whose job it is to salve the frustrated wants of the newly deceased? “My Cloak of Keys” will reveal a day in the afterlife of this supernatural worker. And finally, “Rhizome by Starlight” might be alternately titled “The Island of Doctor Linnaeus”, with its focus on an isolated spot where engineered vegetation has gone wild, with only one person able to withstand the vegetal assault.
I hope that my short synopses and assessments have conveyed Wilde’s deep and broad range of subject matters. She varies her angles of literary attacks at will, and displays a flexible prose style that adapts to all tones and topics. But the most important quality of her work is an always discernible passion for her artistry and caring for her characters. We can hope she gives us as many more good books in the next decade as she has in her first.
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Paul Di Filippo has been writing professionally for over 30 years, and has published almost that number of books. He lives in Providence RI, with his mate of an even greater number of years, Deborah Newton.
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