[Short] Review: Animals of Ure – Daryna Stremetska (trans. by Maksym Bakalov)

[Short] Review: Animals of Ure – Daryna Stremetska (trans. by Maksym Bakalov)

 

Short story| Speculative fiction| 10 pages

 

4/5. I read this story in the first issue of Three Crows Magazine (that’s a direct link to their site – no marketing ploys or any such nonsense, I just enjoyed their mag!).

There is little I can say about this short piece of fiction that won’t ruin it, so I hope it suffices to say that Animals of Ure follows a couple of political agents as they enter a long-abandoned planet in search of evidence of ecology and life. Sounds a bit like Wall-e when I put it like that, but there we go – not a terribly original core idea but as with any 10-page story, we can’t expect masterful originality. The translation from the original Ukranian is so good that I didn’t even realise that the story wasn’t originally written in English.

Stremetska here creates an entertaining secondary world with a dash of solid socio-political history with a rather unique twist at the end which left me wanting more. I would quite happily pay for a longer version of this story, as I found the efficient writing style easy to digest without hinting at too many unnecessary unanswered questions. Characterization is not amazing but what can we (fairly) expect in 10 pages? One little niggle I had was that whilst the ending was solid, I would have enjoyed a bit more action to take place.

 

4/5 for this short. It acts as a perfect introduction into the Three Crows magazine and (hopefully) into the author’s future works. I highly recommend that everyone pick up a copy of the magazine ($3 full price of .99$ as of writing this review). It’s fun and has a solid variety of high-quality content. I am excited to see what their future holds – I’ll certainly be posting reviews for other stories I particularly enjoyed!

 

The cover illustration is from the Three Crows Magazine, created by Cze Peku (https://www.artstation.com/czepeku). Check out the creators other great pieces!