Review: Limelight and Other Stories by Lyndsey Croal

Read the review on Shoreline of Infinity. ●●●

Chatbots in the flesh, starlets enslaved by industry, victims of malicious marketing, AI entities entrusted with human lives… Lyndsey Croal’s short story collection Limelight and Other Stories is, unmistakeably, an outgrowth of twenty-first century anxieties and (let’s face it) outright fears. The stories are organised into two subcollections. Those in Near take place on Earth in times resembling our own, like ‘Hush, Little Sister’, in which a protagonist goes to her late parents’ home and must deal with a glitching hologrammatic version of her long-dead kid sister. Those in Far, meanwhile, transpire further afield, like ‘We Maintain the Moons’, where a sentient machine comes to terms with a lonely existence in its frozen corner of the universe.

What unites the stories, however, is Croal’s clear-headed management of her characters…

Published in 2025 on the SOI website.