Book Review – Faraway and Forever By Nancy Joie Wilkie

This collection of five short stories mixes sci-fi elements with religious or human identity elements. Wilkie writing is clear and puts the sci-fi more in the background to highlight the characters. Like most short story collections there are favorites. There are not any that are terrible and that usually means that this collection will be a good pick-up for many readers who will end up liking different stories for different reasons.

The first story, Once Upon A Helix, involves a first-contact scenario through SETI. Unlocking the message comes from a chance encounter between the scientist and a bioscientist who just so happens to provide the key. One tends to forgive this chance encounter as a kismetic shortcut for the short story. The science used seems to make sense at that’s good enough for my science fiction. This was one of my favorites and as the figuring out the puzzle by two experts in their field was a struggle for the prize of listening in on the first message from space.

The second story is The Goldfire Project which involves the discussion of the afterlife, the soul, and consciousness when it comes to humans going into the computer world and AI wanting to come out of the computer world in order to die and go to Heaven. This could have easily been my favorite story if the AI’s part of the story was more flushed out or the conversation between the main character and the AI occurred longer. There is a lot to like here and this could easily be a longer novella that could really explore a lot more.

The third story is Half The Sky. A girl raised in a convent orphanage with another guy friend finds out that her mother and father are still alive on the post-Earth planet they are living on with her. She seeks out the truth of why she was put up for adoption and why someone would want to stop her from finding out the truth of it. This had good characters but it really missed the bigger picture overall. The main character and her friend have good dialogue and I ended up really liking them. However, Wilkie attempts to zoom out from the main character’s plot and discuss humanity’s role to explore the stars – and this rings a little hollow. A missed opportunity but not too bad.

The fourth story is The Wishbringer. A reporter travels through a portal to discover God exists and he uses a farmer to cultivate wishes, which are different than prayers, that humanity is granted if unknown reasons allow for them to be picked. This almost feels like a low-key Twilight Zone episode with the end that occurs which is probably the best part of the story. The rest of it is fine but the reporter interview setting makes it too exposition-heavy into the system of wishes. It almost seems like the story was padded either from an idea and system that needed a plot or a plot that needed a system.

The final story is The Last Sunday Of Summer and involves a nun in training whose nun teacher is murdered. It’s found that the the trainee is tasked with transporting a book from her planet to another one without being caught by the shadowy figures of Rome and the Pope who want to stop her as the book is the second coming of Jesus that already happened on Earth and now a third coming is being prepared for. This is really my least favorite one and the closest one I came to really not liking at all. The story is pretty bland with no real big revelations or action pieces. Find old dude in the woods, get MacGuffin, run away, get on ship, sleep, wake up, end. Sadly, a disappointing ending to a pretty decent collection.

Overall, I enjoyed reading this book and it’s nice to see that indie market include religious aspects to the sci-fi genre. It seems like Asimov and Clark wrote out religion in the future of sci-fi literature and did so without realizing how much of an impact religion has had on all human history (especially considering that Jesus Christ is the Creator and Lord of all). As for the book, pick it up if those stories sounded interesting.