Review: Endless Summer

Misha Burnett proves himself a true talent that deserves a lot more attention with this collection of short stories.

The story

I had never heard of Misha Burnett until Cirsova sent me Endless Summer to review. I wish I had been aware of him long before. In this book, he offers up a number of sci-fi stories that fuel the imagination and do so across a number of sub-genres. The book contains detective stories, alien visitors, surveillance everywhere, the end of the world, time travel, and more.

It’s hard to pick a favorite. Most of them are not particularly hopeful, but there are some exceptions. Such as Milk, Bread, & Eggs in which aliens come not to invade but to pick up some groceries. And by groceries, I mean stopping at an actual supermarket, not harvesting people like War of the Worlds. And the opening story, The Bullet from Tomorrow in which the heroes avert a nuclear apocalypse by stopping a plane crash. There is also These Were the Things that Bounded Me, a story of a paraplegic and a blind girl work together survive in a world decimated by a virus similar to The Stand.

Perhaps the saddest of them all involves a bunch of apparently sentient theme park characters keeping their park going when everyone else is dead, called The Happiest Place on Earth. There is something about the need to keep on going, to fulfill some kind of purpose in the face of utter desolation that really reaches in and tugs at the heart strings.

The most unsettling goes to The Island of Forbidden Dances, a story of a vacation at the Morningside Resort. Think of it as Big Brother but on an entire island and the cameras are literally everywhere. And one of the founders of it are always on the lookout for new recruits to keep the ratings high. It isn’t so much what happens in the story that is so unsettling, it’s the fact that we’re about one or two years away from it actually happening.

There are a total twelve stories in the collection and each one is engaging and will likely even spark a thought or two.

The characters

Like the stories, the characters are many, varied, and extremely well developed in a shockingly small amount of space. One that really sticks in my mind is Len, a man stuck in his auto-driving care In the Driving Lane. As the story progresses, you can feel his desperation, trying to figure out what is going with his car and why he can't get off the road.

Then there is Mr. Emil Becker, an apparently soft and mild mannered auditor sent to check out operations in a mutant wasteland. When the operation decides to strand him and doom him to the Serpent's Walk, Becker is revealed to be something else entirely.

Not all of the main characters in Burnett's worlds are good guys either. In Heartbeat City Homicide, we meet Alex, a dirty cop who manages to feel some remorse about working with the criminal elements of the vast underworld.

It would be easy to go on and on because in every story, the author manages to deliver characters that are never flat or one dimensional despite allowing himself just a few pages to develop them.

The world

Obviously, there is no one thru line on the world building in a collection of short stories. However, each story feels like a snippet of a complete world even though most are only around twenty pages. Burnett manages this through a combination of brilliant setting descriptions, dialogue, and character reactions that show the tone of the world, sketches how the society works and how the characters’ place within it. The fact he does this so consistently demonstrates the author’s immense talent more than anything else. If you go read through his comments on the stories in the back, Burnett suggests that several of them could easily exist in the same universe.

The politics

As is often the case with books reviewed here, there are no explicit politics. Yet, each tale tells the story of how individuals react to their circumstances and it is often the individual and his own action and responsibility that drives the story, placing it somewhere in the libertarian camp.

Content warning

There a couple of gay characters in the first story but nothing special is made of it. There is also one not-quite sex scene and a number of naughty words that are unlikely to ruffle the feathers of anyone reading the book.

Who is it for?

If you are fan of speculative shows like The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits and the like, you are going to love this.

Why read it?

You should read this because Misha is a gifted writer who knows how to tell a tight story without sacrificing character or plot development.