Review of the Day: House of Illusionists

Ever since Aeschylus and the invention of tragic theater in ancient Athens, one of the marks of great literature, according to Aristotle, Tolstoy, and others, is to create an emotional response in the audience. To put this point another way, lately I have been watching the television show The Pitt about people who work in an emergency room in a Pittsburgh hospital. I enjoy the show because the people who made the show make me feel like I am experiencing the joys and struggles of real people with serious medical issues.

House of Illusionists by Vanessa Fogg is a collection of 17 short stories which could all be described as speculative.

The story that most made me feel like I was emotionally invested in the characters was “The Wave”. This story is about Shannon, a woman who is a professional surfer who livestreams her extreme events to people in far flung places using some sort of technology called a live mind-cast. Unlike those following the mind-cast, Shannon says

“But we want to feel it when we surf. Not use neural programs to turn ourselves into perfect, contest-winning, record-breaking machines. I’ve experienced the mind-feeds of those neural app users; I know the difference” (location 1373).

Shannon also worries about the dangers of oversharing her surfing experiences”

”There are moments that you don’t want your loved ones to share. Time that you hope they’re not logged in, feeling what you feel” (location 1409).

Toward the end of the story, Shannon reflects on how her experience on the ocean waves is different than those experiencing her feed.

”This is the dirty secret of a mind-cast: you’re not really experiencing what the mind-caster felt.

Even if it’s a raw mind-feed with no filters or safeguards at all — it’s not the same. It’s not real.

Because some small part of you knows that you’re not really there; you know that you’re actually in your bedroom or lying back on your living room couch, the mind-receiver set shading your eyes” (location 1469).

At least for me, “The Wave” was the best story in the collection. However, I did not find the other stories nearly as emotionally engaging as this story. If you have an interest in speculative fiction or science fiction, then I think you might like Fogg’s story collection. Overall, I felt like this is a good, but not excellent collection of stories.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing a copy of this book; all opinions are my own.

Scheduled for publication 3 November 2025.

epub. 311 pgs. 16 September 2025