Real Sugar is Hard to Find - Sim Kern

Author: Sim Kern

Genre: Speculative Fiction, Anthology

Rating: 4.1 stars.

One of the top three anthologies I have read this year! (And I have read quite a few!)

This is a collection of short stories that tackle several hard-hitting themes such as climate change, familial conflicts, political machinations, and reproductive fairness.

The cover is gorgeous and hooked me the minute I saw it. But what attracted me even was this line in the blurb:

“Arranged in a progression from dystopian to utopian worlds, the stories chart a path from climate despair towards resilience and revolutionary optimism.”

Imagine a range of stories arranged in order of increasing optimism! How amazing is that! The question is, does the author do justice to this huge claim? The answer; to a great extent, yes.

Most of the stories contain a thread of dreariness, but the level of hope is what keeps compounding as we progress. While none of the stories are outright joyous, the latter stories still deliver a bittersweet satisfaction. None of the worlds were utopian to me; then again, I prefer dystopian to utopian fiction, so this wasn’t a problem at all.

The stories differ in length, but their impact is more or less similar. All the stories have well-created worlds, well-sketched characters and highly believable plots, the last of which is a wonder considering that this is a speculative fiction collection! Each story is quite varied in its setting and core idea, but still connected in terms of their approach. Benefit of having one author contributing all the stories in an anthology! Moreover, as the author is nonbinary, they ensure that their stories contain LGBTQIA+ characters also, with a couple of the stories even using the uncommon ze/zer and e/er pronouns. Yay to #OwnVoices!

One more thing I loved about this collection is that there is a brief content warning in the introduction, and a detailed list of triggers for each story at the end. This makes so much sense in an anthology as readers could just go through the triggers and see which stories might or might not work for them.

As always, I rated the eleven stories individually. Except for one, all the stories reached or crossed the 3.5 star mark. So only one story didn’t work for me. My top favourites in this collection were:

👉 The Propagator - 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 – Wow! This was the very first story of this collection, and it set such a high standard that the other stories fell short due to no fault of theirs. The story deals with restrictive reproductive care in a dystopian government, with the protagonist having figured out a novel way to rebel against the system.

👉 The new nomad - 🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 – I think I connected a great deal with this as I am a parent too. The story provokes you into thinking about choice – what do you do when you are expecting a child but you know that the dystopian world you live in can’t afford another living being?

👉 Tadpoles - 🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 – Never did I imagine tadpoles being the trigger for the mc to …. No spoilers. What a wonderful correlation!

👉 Unwhole - 🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 – Oh my dear God! This was like the worst nightmare possible! This story captures the essence of what Speculative fiction should be like. I couldn’t even visualise half of what was happening and I still relished it. That ending though! 💔

4.1 stars, based on the average of my rating for each story. (Rarely do my anthology ratings even touch 4 stars. So this is an outstanding rating!)

Recommended to all those who love cli-fi, enjoy anthologies, or relish speculative fiction. This was my first Sim Kern book, and it sure won’t be the last!

My thanks to Android Press and NetGalley for the DRC of “Real Sugar is Hard to Find”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.