Book Review: Core Truths, Lisa Fox
Short Story Collection: Core Truths, Lisa Fox
Blog Tour July 10, 2023
There exists a liminal space between fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Lisa Fox explores that space through 18 short stories in her collection, Core Truths. None of the stories are directly connected to each other, each inhabits a different world, a different reality, but all of them exist in the center of the Venn diagram between the three genres which are often simply lumped together under SFF.
The author herself describes the stories as being linked by characters who are confronting hard truths. Core truths are the “nebulous, quintessential ‘something’ that defines us as individuals.” The characters in these stories all face a dilemma that questions their own core truths. Is eternal life worth giving up everything to possess? Is a society that determines the length of a person’s life, enforcing it ruthlessly, worth living in? Does the survival of one world justify the exploitation of another? The answers are hardly straightforward, never easy, always redefining the questioners’ perceptions of themselves, of their realities, of their own lives, beliefs, and raisons dêtre.
It might be easy to avoid considering our own connections to these stories. We will never discover we are actually the witch we have been accused of being and magically dematerialize in the face of danger. We will never travel to another planet and weigh the value of life. We will never watch someone die and disintegrate before us when their government-issued lifeline runs out.
That dismissal, though, would be shallow and uninformed. We all live in a world where new information, new technologies, new encounters with different cultures, new acquaintance with new people from new places with new perspectives are part of our daily experience. The most frightening people and things are not those that are new. They are those who refuse to change in the face of the new. When I graduated from high school, I did not “know” anyone who was gay. Now, I know several of my friends were in the closet, afraid to reveal themselves. One friend was cast out of his home by his father, denied a parent’s love because of whom he loved. I would like to think I would have accepted him then, that our friendship would have been unaffected by that knowledge. I will never know–and given his experience with coming out to other people, I can’t blame him for his reticence. I did not know anyone who was trans until a friend began her one-woman show–a friend I knew before she revealed herself to be a “she.”
New ideas. New people. New experiences. We cannot avoid change, although we can refuse to change. We can harden ourselves, hold on to what we once knew was true, chain ourselves to the thoughts and beliefs and attitudes and prejudices we have always held. After all, change is disruptive. Change is dangerous. Change is unsettling.
But without change, we fossilize. And nothing fossilizes until it is dead.
Our thanks to Rachel Gilbey of Rachel’s Random Resources for our copy of Core Truths, provided so we could give an honest review. The opinions here are those of Scintilla. For other perspectives, check out the other bloggers on this tour.
Book Review: Core Truths, Lisa Fox