Remorse: Catgut Series
Formalin. He recognized it immediately, pungent and familiar. Outside, the fading sounds of late-night revellers returning home drifted toward him from the street. He breathed in; the formalin permeating his uniform, soaked in during the day on the wards, seeping into the cloth. He remembered it and experienced it, all at once.
Memory to reality.
Remorse is a story of regret. But how far would we be willing to go to change our reality, and what would be the cost? For first year Nurse Steele, the past will haunt the future. But even if can understand what he must do, he can never comprehend the consequences.
Acoustic Elegance Review
freelancer | LAS VEGAS, NV
I’m a fan of science fiction, and I love this Anthology. The writing is sharp and precise (the author is a medical doctor).
The dialogue is authentic and pithy. It would be easy to overwrite any one of these stories, but the author does not indulge himself in this manner. There are no weak links; each of the 6 stories hold their own weight and tell their own stories magnificently. From start to finish, this collection maintains the highest level of creative integrity and consistency. This book is a superb achievement and a joy to read.
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Kirkus Independent Reviews
A subtle and meaningful collection about humankind under stress.
A clear concern for humanity, reminiscent of Philip K. Dick’s dystopian fiction, appears throughout all of Falconer’s stories.
Dystopian futures reveal the universality of primal human emotions in this SF story collection.
Each story in this anthology focuses on people grappling with the consequences of intense emotions. Highlights include “Terror,” in which a father and son living in a subterranean city win a lottery to join a group of citizens headed aboveground to prepare Earth for repopulation. According to their leaders, “the Terror,” defined as having “sharpened pointed” teeth and “catlike” eyes, live on the surface. As part of their pre-ascent orientation, the citizens view frightening images from the past. The leaders manipulate them through the use of special effects (“thunder rolled around the room, so that the very benches they sat on trembled”) so that they’ll uncritically accept the mission. In “Despair,” Skazi, a gambling addict and prisoner, awakens in corporate psychiatric facility Trans-Con, which rehabilitates mentally ill persons by shifting “the consciousness of patients…to primates and returning it back.” It turns out that participation in the program is mandatory, and noncompliance of any kind results in enslavement and exile to another planet for life. A clear concern for humanity, reminiscent of Philip K. Dick’s dystopian fiction, appears throughout all of Falconer’s stories here; their characters start out as victims of their unique situations, as one might expect, but they’re also at the mercy of their own individual flaws, as well. As if to accent the theme of humanity, the stories all distinctively open with the protagonist encountering a specific smell, such as “garlic,” “perfumed floral air,” “roasting coffee beans, “freshly cut grass,” or “sweat, linen, plastic.” Moreover, they all struggle against greater societies where humanity—as a group and as a state of existence—has been diminished, giving the tales an unmistakable feeling of profundity.
A subtle and meaningful collection about humankind under stress.