These Broken Little Words (Polestars 13) by E.M. Faulds (book review).
When I was offered These Broken Little Worlds for review, I checked my computer banks and found that I had enjoyed two stories by E.M. Faulds in anthologies, so a whole collection of her work looked like a good bet. It was. Here are some of the stories I particularly liked, although they are all pretty darn good.
Godzilla As A Young Man Named Mike is about a young man named Mike who is slowly turning into Godzilla. It’s narrated by Kaydee, a young woman who works in the same office but is practically invisible to everyone else because she keeps a low profile, or perhaps she is obscured by fog. It isn’t clear. As Mike changes, his employers try to make reasonable adjustments. A very odd tale, beautifully done, which won the 2026 BSFA Award for Best Short Fiction.
Love, Scotland is about refugees who arrive in the town of Love, Scotland, in the near future and work with Mingis, recycling e-waste in a new, science-fictional way. I was confused by a paragraph describing how each refugee died, followed by several pages about their lives in Scotland, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Refugees are either all saints or all scum, depending on which newspaper you read. E.M. Faulds treats them all as human.
Broken Blue is one for dog lovers. After her divorce, Katie takes up with a strange woman named Rowan, whom she meets while walking Herby, her black Labrador. Rowan is a useful housemate who can produce money when necessary but seems to have no job, no history and no family. You can become attached to both dogs and people, but there’s a price.
Soldier Brijnk is shepherding her dead commander back to Earth for his funeral in Hand Of Fire when she meets someone who might change her life. It is a slice of life from a far-future dystopian setting, with some clever technology, where people do what they must to survive, as ever.
The ‘terrible lizard’ of the title is Hank, a redneck who works at Wheelz Deelz and has transformed into a Tyrannosaurus rex, albeit a human-sized one. Other people transform into different creatures according to their temperaments, it seems, so his boss becomes some sort of newt. Hank is a horrible character who deliberately runs over his neighbour’s dog in the first paragraph, but the author almost makes him sympathetic. Almost. In a funny way, this reminded me of Joe R. Lansdale’s work.
Pearl And The World is science fiction. In a house-sized FTL pod, one of many dispatched from Earth by Bettera Corp, Pearl can have any simulation she wants for company, including celebrities, but she has chosen two old friends and an ex-boyfriend for emotional reasons. It has a clever and hopeful ending that I thought might go down the hoary old Adam and Eve route at one point, but it didn’t.
People go to fantasy conventions in all kinds of costumes nowadays, so it would be easy for real pagan deities to turn up without being noticed, which is exactly what happens in All The Way To The Dead Dog Party. It is an enjoyable yarn told almost entirely through dialogue. The gods’ existence will persist as long as humans continue to acknowledge them, so some are safer than others: Easter, the Green Man and the Saint, for example. The Burryman of South Queensferry is not well known but has an idea that might save him and his friends.
Earth has gone to rack and ruin in The World Is What You Make Of It, but there is hope. Humanity lives in the Orbital and sends scientists down to the surface to find DNA from species that existed in the Before Time, hoping to use biological printers to restore the planet to its former glory. Euanthe is sorting through insect collections in an old mansion when she receives a call to investigate a malfunctioning printer. This is a classic SF story that uses one character’s crisis to show us an entire future. Very well done.
If you were called ‘four-eyes’ when you wore glasses at school, you might have some sympathy for Cathy Emerson in CAT-88. She has to wear a glass contact lens with a cradle on her head, wired to a computer with a floppy disc, to correct her lazy right eye. The low point is being called a ‘creepy crybaby cripple’, but things improve when she reprogrammes the gadget and it starts helping her. This goes pretty far out towards the end, but it’s good fun.
Elphbats aren’t real. I Googled them to check. When her mother dies, Patricia inherits her house in a small Australian outback town. It isn’t much of a house, and it comes with an elphbat that perches on the roof and howls, screams and cries all day and night. Unable to get any help with this, Patricia sets up an elphbat support group and finds similarly afflicted women. I liked the section about job interviews, something I will never have to do again, thank God.
In Heavy, Heavy Down, Sean takes compassionate leave from work because his father has died of heart disease and his church has a ten-day funeral ritual. The entire family gathers at the house and is given parts of the late lamented person’s corpse, with different activities taking place throughout the mourning period. The children call their mother ‘Mum-Bot’ because she doesn’t show her grief, as that generation usually didn’t. They were great. The interpersonal family dynamics will strike a chord with many readers, and it’s an affecting story if you have lost your dear old dad.
Many of the characters in these stories have ordinary jobs in offices or cafés, and I expect the author has done similar work because you can’t make a living writing short stories, no matter how beautiful they are. It lends her writing the verisimilitude that makes the fantasy feel real. There is also a strong sense of location, often Glasgow, in the tales set in the present day. The social attitudes are left-liberal.
Faulds has a novelette called Bring Me Home in Wiz Duos Book 2 from Wizard’s Tower Press. The Wiz Duos are presumably a homage to the old Ace Doubles. I’ve just bought it for a crazily low price. It might be worth a look. These Broken Little Worlds certainly is.
Eamonn Murphy
July 2026
(pub: NewCon Press, 2026. 234-page enlarged paperback. Price: £13.99 (UK), $16.99 (US). ISBN: 978-1-917735-23-0. Ebook: £4.99 (UK))
check out website: www.newconpress.co.uk
