From Bram Stoker Award winner Pedro Iniguez, Echoes and Embers: Speculative Stories weaves fantasy and science fiction, Latinx themes, and traditional pulp stylings. This book collects 21 tales of outsiders, explorers, renegades, and dreamers as they navigate the mysteries and perils of the vast sandbox that is the universe.Some of the stories you'll read: A boy and his grandmother witness the spectacle of a magical lucha libre match; amidst the Robot Apocalypse, an expectant mother's only hope for survival may just be a robot; a convict finds himself torn asunder and reassembled into a facsimile as he is teleported to a distant battlefield; plagued by ghosts, a young girl finds the source of her hauntings may be tied to time travel; after the Earth is destroyed, three astronauts stranded on Mars may hold the key to humanity's future.From magical realism to military science fiction, Lovecraftian cyberpunk yarns to swashbuckling tales in space, this collection spans the frontiers of the imagination and the vastness of the cosmos.
"Echoes and Embers" is a fun collection of speculative-fiction stories that touch on various themes and dabble in various sub-genres. Many of the tales were previously available in other publications but a few are new to this anthology. There are sprinklings of military sci-fi, cosmic horror, fantasy, and even a bit of cyberpunk, just to name a few, with different twists on recurring concepts that help to keep things fresh and reasonably unpredictable.
I definitely enjoyed some of the offerings more than others but I found them all to be at least interesting, entertaining, or thought-provoking, or some combination of the three.
If you're familiar with Iniguez's excellent speculative-poetry collection "Mexicans on the Moon," you'll likely have a good idea of what to expect from "Echoes and Embers" in terms of social commentary and subject-matter. These stories often have a distinct focus on Latinx perspectives, histories, and cultural elements, which isn't at all surprising given the author's heritage, but all of that could certainly be considered a noteworthy "feature" of the read for those particularly keen to experience such things. Personally, I'm a big fan of those inclusions, and the deft techniques the author consistently employed to present them in ways that always felt natural and unforced to me.
Despite its many positive attributes, I will say that this collection didn't quite wow me on the whole in the way I'd hoped it might but I still found it to be a very satisfying and worthwhile read, and wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to any lover of speculative fiction, or fans of Iniguez's other works.