Title: All the Little Hedgehogs
Author: Leigh Kimmel
Publisher: Self-Published
Publication Date: April 29, 2023
Genres: Science Fiction, Horror, Alternate History
Length: About 20 pages.
Source: I received a free copy from the author.
Rating: 3 Stars
Blurb:
In Soviet Union, genetic engineering does you. Yona wondered why everyone kept steering him toward a military career, until one of his teachers noticed his aptitude for genetics. Now he’s the personal student of Academician Voronsky, working in a secret genetic engineering facility in a closed town. However, Yona keeps having to spend as much time babysitting the Academician’s adopted son Kolya as actually doing genetics. When this extra assignment becomes a frustration, Yona learns just how quickly privileges can be retracted. And then he starts learning just how deep the secrets of the Soviet human genetics program really goes. A story from the Grissom timeline (Gus on the Moon universe). Caution: Contains intense material that may be disturbing to some audiences. Reader caution advised
Content Warning: Pregnancy, birth, cloning, and brief references to infanticide.
Review:
DNA only tells part of the story.
Genetic engineering is one of those topics I often like to see covered in the Science Fiction genre because of how many different ways it can be approached. While I don’t want to go into too much detail about what exactly what happening in this facility, I thought the narrator asked some interesting questions about how important genetics are to how someone turns out that might be of special interest to any readers out there who might be related to people who are incredibly different from them in crucial ways. That is to say, you can be a blood relative of someone and share very little in common with them.
I struggled with the violent content in this short story due to how unnecessary it felt for plot development. Horror is a genre I’ve been moving away from, so this made be of greater interest to readers who still like to read that sort of stuff. Still, there was one particular scene I thought was egregious and could have easily been cut out without ruining the effect of the chilling world Yona knew in general.
The descriptions of the medical facilities were my favourite part of this short story. They were given so much attention that I could easily imagine what it would be like to visit or work there. One bright moment that stood out to me the most involved how the fetuses interacted with each other before birth. I could have read many more pages about them if such a thing were possible due to the funny things they did to each other.
All the Little Hedgehogs made me shudder.