Every Color of Invisible, by Robert Reed

[F&SF]

★★☆☆☆ Not a Stand-Alone Story

(Modern Fantasy; Amerindian) Young Raven Dream grew up in a secret community of Lakota Indians who live underground. Now he lives with his uncle, and he’s struggling to adapt to our world. (13,642 words; Time: 45m)

This story seems to be heavily dependent on previous stories in the series. Worse, this story clearly contains spoilers for the previous content. All four previous stories are collected into a single volume called “Raven Dream.” Readers interested in this story should probably read that first.

"Every Color of Invisible," by Robert Reed [bio] (edited by C.C. Finlay), appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction issue 11-12|18, published on October 27, 2018 by Spilogale Inc.

Mini-Review (click to view--possible spoilers)

Review: 2018.593 (A Word for Authors)

Pro: Most of the fun of this story is Raven’s attempts to describe our world in terms that make sense to him. All non-Lakota are “demons,” for example, TV stations are “windows,” but the best is his description of groceries, including this bit about breakfast:

. . . and eggs from some bird that laid one fresh egg every day, summer or winter. This was some great bird, and if the demons ever stopped eating her eggs, that magical bird was going to take over the planet.

Con: There’s not much of a story here. I suppose this would be interesting to someone who’d read the previous stories, but I found it really dull.

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