Brimstone Slipstream

by Matt Weber

Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 65
Rating:

Synopsis:

It's the eve of the biggest dragon race in the city of Yemareir. Zaya Shearwater and her wife, Kiriki, have spent the year shooting up the rankings, and now they're favored to win. But how did a team of women from Yemareir's roughest precincts become the favorites in a sport where most winners buy their victories?

Doctor of Journalism Shenireen Agama wants to know. Through interviews with Zaya, Kiriki, and the ground crew that's become their family, she begins to weave a story. Its threads are love, desperation, biology, and magic – all bound together with the early history of Yemareir, where Zaya and Kiriki's ancestors fled centuries ago to escape the pogroms of a mad king, and where the colonists resettling the ruins of an ancient city have just discovered that it is home to dragons…

Matt Weber’s Brimstone Slipstream is a short story which sets the scene for a full length novel (or possibly a series), but offers in itself quite a lot of world and character building, giving us a picture of one family of racers in a world of semi-illegal underground dragon racing that’s rife with racism and people who try to pay to win.

The format is basically that of a magazine article by a journalist digging into the scene and following a pair of upstart riders who are working together to use a trait normally considered intrinsic to their people, “empathy” (which is sort of… telepathy-ish communication with animals) to give them an advantage at dragon racing. We get the journalist’s-eye view of the subjects of the article, with all their evasions, prickly edges, and the things they won’t say.

I wouldn’t say no to reading more in this world, but it’s also a fairly satisfying story just for its own sake, despite the relatively low page count, with quite a bit of world-building and a good sense of a wider world around the story. You can kinda sense the ending coming (the note “after publication” of the article), because the foreboding is wound through it: they’re doing a dangerous job.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)