A Taste of Fear: Ansible 15715 by Stant Litore

Wowsers.

Ansible 15715 (The Ansible Stories) is going to be hard to review without spoilers, but it so worth the read. Okay, let’s see if we can give it a go…

If you’ve read Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game series, Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep, or Dan Simmons Hyperion Cantos, you’ve run into the concept of an ansible before. For the rest of you, an ansible is a fictional device that allows authors overcome the light speed barrier with instantaneous communication from point A to point B.

In Stant Litore’s formulation, a person is merged with the power of an ansible to travel across space and, eventually, time. That journey leads to a world that is both dark and despairing, and more so because there is almost no one there to be aware of the sad imprisonment of its inhabitants, with exception of Ansible 15715.

Ansible 15715 should be classified as science fiction, but Litore reminds us why science fiction has as much in common with horror as it does with the literature of wonder. He takes in loops of darkness, creating a sense of impossible terror limited only by the bounds of human comprehension. Indeed, it is perhaps because of Lovecraftian nature of his tale that it is chilling. Compared to what we know, the horror is incomprehensible.

Ansible 15715 is the first in a series of tales, The Ansible Stories. I wanted to give it four stars, but wasn’t quite satisfied enough to bump it up a notch. However, the tale was short (I read it while waiting for an appointment) and I was intrigued, so I’m game to try the sequel, Ansible 15716.

Title: Ansible 15715
Series: The Ansible Stories
Author: Stant Litore
Genre: Science fiction
Publisher: Westmarch Publishing
Release Date: April 19, 2014
Format: Kindle
Pages: 19
Source: Copy provided by publisher

"Please hear me. We are all in danger, the most terrible danger; we are all going to die terrible deaths. If you can hear me, if anyone can hear me, remember these words. Please. Pass them on to your children, and to theirs. You are our one hope..."

Ansible 15715, a short story, is a frantic broadcast from the mind of a woman lost in time, a researcher trying to forewarn the human species about an unexpected and terrifying threat.

There is very little chance that anyone will hear her plea.

Unless possibly you.