![]() Kemper props for effectively pulling me into this story and world. It’s a fatalistic and seriously depressing story, but since that’s clearly the intent, I have to give Erinn L. I appreciated the reveal at the end on a literary level, though as a practical matter it struck me as far-fetched. The haunting whale song is echoed in the women carvers’ plaintive singing of “Oh Danny Boy” and the melancholy tunes hummed by Suzanne. “The Song” is heavy on setting and atmosphere, and scores some points about ecological concerns. But Suzanne is finding some disturbing things in her research, and the song of the whales seems to be worming its way into Dan’s inner soul. But then he meets Suzanne, an animal behaviorist who has been snuck onto the rig to study the whales’ song and some oddities in the whale pods’ actions, and life seems to be looking up slightly. The rig is a depressing, awful place, and the sense of isolation is intensified in the case of Dan, whose wife died before the story begins and who seems to be marking time, not really living any longer. With animal-rights extremists bombing transports and killing the replacement staff, no one on the rig is currently being allowed to leave for a break. It’s a floating slaughterhouse for whales. ![]() ![]() Review first posted on Fantasy Literature:ĭan is a welder on a repurposed oil rig floating in the ocean, now euphemistically called SeaRanch 18. 3.75 stars for this bleak ecological cautionary tale, free online here at Tor.com. ![]()
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