Elephants In Bloom (Polestars 5) by Cécile Cristofari (book review).
‘Elephants In Bloom’ by Cécile Cristofari is the fifth book in the Polestars series of individual author short story collections from NewCon Press. The collection features eighteen original stories, with ten previously published in magazines or anthologies.
In ‘All We Ever Look For,’ a lady opens the window of her Quebec apartment and sees ‘three parrots perched on a tree hanging over a deserted beach of pure white sand.’ When she closes the window, the scene reverts to the maple tree outside as normal. If she opens it again, she knows there will be something completely different: mountains, deserts, and jungles. The window is somehow a portal to other places. This fantastic premise sets up a quiet, thoughtful tale, a slice of life, really, with an Eleanor Rigby theme. Is anybody happy out there?
Huge environmental issues are tackled in ‘The Fishery.’ The fishery opens at dawn, cranes ready to drop the day’s load onto the conveyor belts, ‘nets overflowing with dead things from across the cosmos.’ The catch in the nets is ‘the usual fare: debris, fragments of asteroids that had been roaming the void for aeons, a few anaemic rays of light here and there.’ The story is told from the point of view of three characters. Orna is an environmental inspector. Jana is a journalist working undercover. Ary is an overseer. It’s a metaphor for overfishing, but the cast are not villains, just trapped by circumstance. The world needs food.
Alice and Laurent are dropped off on a small island by their son to avoid a pandemic. They can see the lights of the mainland and have stocks of pasta and beans. They can fish, but the lights on the mainland get fewer and fewer. Are old people worth saving? I liked ‘A Kingdom Of Seagrass And Silk’ but have a fondness for tales of married couples who actually get on well. The circumstances reminded me of ‘Birdwatching At The End Of The World’ by G. W. Dexter, which is also available from Newcon Press.
One of my favourites here is ‘The Hangman’s Legacy.’ In a settlement near Narbonne, the hangman sells corpses to a widow, something that would get them both in serious trouble if discovered. She pays in coin. Madeleine sells remedies, poultices, lucky charms, and embroideries to locals who don’t know what goes into them. Then the prettiest girl in the village asks her for a love charm to make a wicked man want her. This dark fantasy is one of the strongest stories in the book.
In ‘Soaring, The World On Their Shoulders,’ the decent patriots of France have had enough and elected a strong leader who will make the country great again. Top scientist Madame Armande Santucci hopes to keep a low profile and avoid working for their war machine, but that won’t happen. She’s disappointed by how many friends cooperate to save their own skins. What would you do? It’s easy being a keyboard warrior, but it’s tougher in a damp basement with your nipples wired to the mains and a little sadist in a grey uniform holding the switch. That’s not a scene in the story, just my own opinion. The title refers to Santucci’s invention, which the regime hopes to use for war. Is she able to reverse their plans?
Archie lets the cat out of the quantum bag in ‘Schrodinger’s Children.’ Two cats, actually, one alive and one dead. The original belonged to the man next door. Our neighbour, Mr. Newton, is the unpredictable sort. This is a bit of fun with the English language by a native French speaker and first appeared in ‘Andromeda Spaceways Magazine,’ which I must read someday.
In ‘A Diary From The End Of The World,’ an alien narrator has disguised herself as human and spent three years studying planet DA3(1), the third daughter of star Alkahran, where the dominant species has ‘a voracious and utterly unviable relationship with their habitat.’ Summoned home, she must find a way to a remote isle off the coast of Tierra del Fuego where she left her transport. A poetic travelogue of the Beagle Channel with a story thrown in.
‘The Owl Woman’ is a prehistoric tale about the lives of hill people in Provence, subject to raids by bigger, stronger men from the valleys who take their women away. It’s an interesting speculation on a time for which there are no written records.
The book closes with the title story, ‘Elephants In Bloom.’ God, it seems, has fallen out of the sky and landed on a mountain conveniently near a cathedral. Scientists are burrowing into his corpse to find out what they can. ‘This was God, the same as he’d always been: a ponderous, useless carcass, taking up so much space you couldn’t help running into him even when you tried your best to live away from his influence.’ Victor, the narrator, is a fourteen-year-old boy who is quite smitten with his teacher Ilana, a member of the religious group called the Children of Charity. The setting is after a cataclysm that had nothing to do with God, just global warming, plagues, and the energy crisis. Scientists must pedal bikes to run their computers. It’s an odd tale, but it sort of works.
An interesting and well-written set of stories that will make you think. Mostly, it will make you think about environmental disaster, pandemics, global warming, man’s effect on nature, and whales. Each story has an author’s note appended to tell you what inspired it and add commentary. Cécile Cristofari teaches English literature and has written a PhD dissertation on science fiction and fantasy. I like that she only writes short stories and has a proper job as well. That indicates they were the result of inspiration, not hacked out to make a buck. Four of the stories were previously published in Interzone,’ and this collection has been nominated for the British Fantasy Award, so you can tell it’s intelligent, literary, and modern. Worth the effort of reading, but my brain hurts now, so I must go and watch ‘Buck Rogers.’
Eamonn Murphy
July 2025
(pub: NewCon Press, 2024. 240 page small enlarged paperback. Price: £13.99 (UK). ISBN: 978-1-910953-68-2. Ebook: £ 4.89 (UK)).
