These Broken Little Words (Polestars 13) by E.M. Faulds (book review)
When offered this book, ‘Broken Little Words’, 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 works looked like a good bet. It was. Here are some stories I particularly liked but 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 lady who works in the same office but is practically invisible to everyone else as she keeps a low profile or maybe 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 and it 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 at recycling e-waste in a new, science-fictional way. I was confused by a paragraph about each refugee telling you how they died, followed by several pages about their life in Scotland but enjoyed it nonetheless. Refugees are all saints or all scum, depending on which newspaper you read. E.M. Faulds treats them as all human.
‘Broken Blue’ is one for dog lovers. After her divorce, Katie takes up with a strange lady named Rowan, whom she met 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 get 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. 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 human-sized. Other people transform into different creatures, according to their temperament, it seems, so his boss is 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 works.
‘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 sim she wants for company, including celebrities, but picked two old friends and an ex-boyfriend for emotional reasons. A clever and hopeful ending that I thought might go 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 and not be noticed, which is exactly what they do in ‘All The Way To The Dead Dog Party’. An enjoyable yarn told almost entirely in dialogue. The gods existence will persist as long as humans still 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 of species from the Before Time, hoping to use them to restore the planet to its former glory with biological printers. Euanthe is sorting through insect collections in an old mansion when she gets a call to investigate a malfunctioning printer. This is a classic SF story that uses one character’s crisis to show us a whole future. Very well done.
If you were called ‘four-eyes’ when you wore glasses to 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 fix her lazy right eye. The low point is being called ‘creepy crybaby cripple’ but things get better when she reprograms the gadget and it starts helping her out. This goes pretty far out at 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. Not much of a house and it comes with an elphbat that perches on the roof and howls, screams and cries all day and all night. Unable to get any help for this, Patricia sets up an elphbat support group and finds similarly afflicted women. I liked the bit 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. All the family gather at the home and are given parts of the late lamented person’s corpse and have different activities together over the mourning period. The children call 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 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 cafes and I expect the author has done similar things, because you can’t make a living writing short stories, no matter how beautiful they are. It lends her writing that verisimilitude which makes the fantasy 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 out called ‘Bring Me Home’ in ‘Wiz Duos Book 2’ from Wizards Tower Press. The ‘Wiz Duos’ are presumably a homage to the old Ace Doubles. I just bought it for a crazy low price. It might be worth a look. ‘These Broken Little Worlds’ certainly is.
Eamonn Murphy
July 2026
(pub: NewCon Press, 2026. 234 page small 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
