Reviews
Museum Beetles
"Simon Kewin’s “Museum Beetles” is a lesson in brilliant storytelling. The world building is phenomenal. The story takes place in a gargantuan museum that is centuries old. Inside, there has been a lineage of Curators over the years, seventy-eight Curators in all–the Curators are the leaders, wise and responsible for recording the histories that occur inside the museum. Along with the Curator lives a tribe of people who have never lived outside. Because of Kewin’s choice of setting, this story is rich with fantastic imagery and enticing sentences. The main point of conflict centers around a species of beetles which have managed to escape from one of the lower insect floors of the museum and infested the upper floors. Over the centuries (in the short confines of the short story, three generations have gone by) the bugs begin to evolve and grow smarter, until all the books have been devoured and there is nothing of which the humans can eat. Kewin’s pacing borderlines on being perfect and the world he has created is dark and wonderful. This story deserves an award."
Reviewed July 2005 on Lit Haven
"my favorite story here this year was Simon Kewin's "Museum Beetles", from the Third Quarter issue, about people who seem to live in a huge museum, endless engaged in cataloging the exhibits, and how things change when some beetles escape from an exhibit."
Reviewed by Richard Horton at the Speculative Literature Foundation
"Museum Beetles” by Simon Kewin has an unusual narrative structure, following a succession of museum curators over generations. It appears at first glance to be about the growth of a beetle colony over that time, and their gradual destruction of the museum and its records. But in fact, there is another narrative arc here, and it is leading to the point where the people inside the museum will understand something new about their situation, and see a new possibility for their future. The reader, of course, makes the same discovery, and Kewin judges the reveal to perfection. This is beautifully written, fascinating, and one of the highlights of the book."
"a nicely turned parable about people who seem to live in a huge museum, content to catalog the contents. But everything changes when the title beetles escape from their exhibit."
Reviewed September 2005 by Richard Horton in Locus
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"Lovely concept, lovely poem."
"Love this, especially all the s sounds."
Reviewed on Bolts of Silk, March 2009
Perfect Circles
"the conclusion grabbed me and has stayed with me."
Live From The Continuing Explosion
"Simon Kewin's affecting, chilling post-9/11 science fiction Live From The Continuing Explosion offers depth enough for drowning."
Reviewed October 2007 on TRS2 Reviews
"scores highly with a very vivid central image and conceit. The main concourse at Grand Central Station is the scence of a slowly unfolding atrocity : a bomber has triggered a huge explosion, that due to quantum whizzery, creates a globe within which time passes at a crawl, enabling the viewing of the impact of the explosion on those caught within the sphere to be done at leisure."
Reviewed January 2008 on Best SF
"Simon Kewin's 'Live from the Continuing Explosion' has a fascinating and metaphorically effective central idea: a terrorist act, setting off a bomb in New York, is somehow contained in a time bubble, such that the victims of the explosion are frozen so that time passes much more slowly for them than for the outside world. The central character is the twin sister of one of the victims, who missed being in the bubble by a finger's length."
Reviewed January 2008 on The Elephant Forgets
"I particularly liked 'Live From The Continuing Explosion' by Simon Kewin where, by some blip of physics, a terrorist atrocity happens in a time bubble with excruciating slowness so that the world can watch the victims in a packed public place dying slowly one by one over a span of decades, with twenty-four hour news coverage. This has an effect on the world. It was original and well done."
Reviewed April 2008 on SF Crowsnest
The Thirteenth Labour
"Simon Kewin’s “The Thirteenth Labor” has the feel of Golden Age Science Fiction. The Heracles is an AI-controlled craft conducting an orbital survey of Mars. One of its probes detects an anomaly: a collection of five rocks, rearranged by some unknown agent to suggest the constellation Orion. This observation causes the Heracles to embark on a voyage of discovery, one which touches upon the nature and scale of intelligence.
The story has a nostalgic feel many will enjoy. The sensitive, empathetic personality of the AI also serves a treat; I found myself wondering if a human explorer would behave in as rational (and altruistic) a fashion. Kewin hasn’t broken any new ground with the ideas he raises in “The Thirteenth Labor,” but he provides a fine journey nonetheless."
Reviewed September 2006 on Tangent
The Final Machine
"a beautiful story of trust and hope in dark times. Mackenzie's ship has been monitoring a vessel, half ship, half asteroid, known simply as the Final Machine. Created by a ruthless, murderous race known as Draconians, the Final Machine supposedly has the capability to bring the entire universe to an end. In order to destroy it, Mackenzie must rely on the advice of one of the Xin, a mysterious group of people often revered as gods, who operate outside of any of the concerns of the Million Star Council. Only the Xin can help them deactivate the vessel—but can Mackenzie trust it?
"One of the things that struck me the most was how completely I trusted Mackenzie to make the right choices. From the beginning to the end, we had a confidence—one which in no way ruined the story or the tension of the story—that his choices would be the right ones. Maybe not the ones which would keep him and those around him alive until the end of the story, but the right ones, nonetheless. And we feel the solemn grandeur of the universe, as fresh and awe-inspiring as looking up at the night sky for the first time, throughout every carefully woven phrase of the story. "The Final Machine" is a masterful, compelling work, with deep themes underlying it that brush against life, eternity, and the meaning of existence."
Reviewed October 2005 on Tangent
Guitar Heroes
"In Guitar Heroes, by Simon Kewin, there’s a three piece rock band whose members save the world in their spare time. It took me a while to get a feel for where this story was going, but once it took off I loved it. It has a wonderful camp feel to it that made me think of the band The Darkness. I see them leaping from the stage, all hair extensions and spandex suits, off to do battle with demons. Doesn’t necessarily take itself too seriously, although it is well written with nice imagery in places."
Reviewed July 2005 in Whispers of Wickedness
Holy Mountains
"a wonderful story ... surprising, exciting and original ... brilliant reading, the author has a wonderful way with words, using beautiful descriptive writing showing a mastery of the english language ... wonderful"
"I couldn't stop reading"
"delightfully blends the elements of science fiction and fantasy ... The lyrical descriptions of space flight by Aether-Dragons were truly tone poems"
Earthworks
"beautifully executed"
Good Vibrations
"a wonderfully, almost surreal choice nibble which explores the pursuit of music through the universe and takes the music hunter to realms not thought possible ... very cool."
