August was so full of amazing speculative short fiction that it took my breath away. I’ve picked 11 stories here in addition to the 10 stories I picked for my B&N roundup, and I still feel like I’ve left a ton of stuff out. Read all the stories in these zines, because there is a whole lot of amazing fiction not on these lists.
Special shoutout to the brand new SFF zine Translunar Travelers Lounge – they just published their inaugural issue and it is an amazing collection of stories.
A Song for the Leadwood Tree, by Aimee Ogden in Beneath
Ceaseless Skies
“She wishes she could tell him that everything will be all right.
That they’ll ride forth under the banner of the leadwood tree and scourge the
Buskruten from these lands forever; give them the metal for which they came to
Watuk, but on the blade of a sword and the point of a spear…. But she cannot
say so; cannot say a word. She is not sure she would believe it, even if she
could say it.”
A fierce and bloody story about a world riven by war, but where the hope of
peace and a new kind of life for the people still lingers. Ogden’s world is
deep and rich, and the Queen, who wields the power of her weapons and her
voice, is a fabulously complex and nuanced character. This story feels like an
epic, told at short story length. Magnificent prose.
Well Wishes, by Lucille Valentine in Vulture Bones
“I was four years-old the first time I drowned. We had gone to the
lake, a dark stain seeping into the red earth’s cupped palm, and you took your
eyes off me for just one moment, which was all I needed.”
A lyrical and powerful story about transformation and longing for something and
somewhere else. Death lurks at the edges of the story, but it’s the kind of
death that seems more like a kind of unexpected change than the end of
everything.
The Happiest Place, by Kevin Wabaunsee in PseudoPod
“I’m not just weaving a magical amusement experience for the guests. I’m also
doing my damnedest to protect the guests from what the Funventors have termed
“the unwanted encroachment of reality.””
A darkly hilarious, yet also terrifying and deeply unsettling story set in
a future amusement park where everything is great and terrific and FUN, except
maybe not really. The external reality is revealed to be rather less than
perfect, but it’s really what’s going on inside the mind of the performer in
the giant foam head — the desperate levity, mixed with anxiety and terror
— that makes this such memorable horror tale.
Three
Tales the River Told, by Stewart C. Baker in Nature Futures
“Nothing lived up here in these heat-stroked mountains, not since
the Yellow River’s slow death had driven people away — first to the ocean’s
edge where water could be desalinated and used to survive, and then into the
cavernous city-states they’d built beneath the earth. Even that had been ages
ago, back in her own mother’s childhood.”
A quiet, moving story from a future where large areas of the Earth’s surface
are no longer safe to inhabit. Siu Fan is visiting the surface world, streaming
what she sees to her followers at home, but the trip ends up affecting her more
deeply than she thought it would.
Knitting in English, by Brit E. B. Hvide in Cast of
Wonders
“Looping the thread over her needle, Kari caught the sun in her
knit. It was an old spell: warmth trapped in rows of neatly patterned wool to
stave off the winter wind. The first spell her pappa taught her. The only one
she knew.”
A lovely and uniquely imagined story about a girl who is trying to use the
spell her Norwegian father taught her to knit a scarf. I love how this story
delves into what it’s like to grow up with different languages and cultures in
your family, and how you can feel both connected and disconnected from that
heritage and from those languages. I also love how it gently makes the point
that you have to try to combine the different strands of your life into
something of your own.
Sorry, Wrong Number by Tonia Thompson in Nightlight
Nightlight is a podcast featuring ” Creepy stories with full audio
production written by Black writers and performed by Black actors”. This story
features some awesomely silky smooth and menacing narration by Dominick Rabrun,
and it is a dark, twisty and NSFW tale with an ending that took me by surprise.
Fare, by Danny Lore
in Fireside
“The change always starts at the back of DeShaun’s neck, and it
takes everything not to claw the beast out — to not let it peel him open along
his spine like pages of a book.”
This werewolf story takes place over a short period of time in the confines
of a taxi, but it is tense and taut and riveting, telling you a whole lot about
the world and the people in it. Masterful, evocative storytelling by Danny
Lore.
Cerise Sky Memories, by Wendy Nikel in Flash
Fiction Online
“I remember a childhood that didn’t exist.
Hot apple pies cooling on park benches. Small toes pressed into scorching
white sand. Snowball fights leaving crisp, crunchy ice crusted in the collar of
my coat.”
In this future world, some people have been genetically engineered and
“produced” to be used in the workforce. But what happens when you’re one of the
“older models” and you get decommissioned? A quiet, moving story about
memories and humanity, and what makes us who we are, and what makes us human.
The Horrible Deaths of Helga Hrafnsdóttir, by Christine
Tyler in Podcastle
“Thanks to her mother’s vigilance, Helga Hrafnsdóttir outlived all
the ill fortunes of her infancy. But from that time on, everyone knew the girl
was destined for a gruesome fate.”
This is a fantastic story about a place where girls get told their future
fate by the flowers of the Ævilok tree. “Normal girls had dozens of flowers
that showed visions of contented grandmothers holding their loved ones’ hands.”
But not Helga. All the flowers foretell a gruesome fate for her. When it’s time
for Helga to climg the tree and pick her fortune, things do not go the way they
usually do. A wonderful, strange, dark, and wild story that has the bite and
the flavour of a fairytale.
Growing Resistance, by Juliet Kemp in Translunar
Travelers Lounge
“Mathias wants to fix all of this, for everyone, and goodness knows he’s
right. But I can’t do what he does. I do what I can do, instead. I keep people
alive when I can, as much as I can. That’s good, right? It never feels like
enough.”
I love this story about resistance in a dystopian future. I love its
nuanced take on what it’s like to try to resist, to try to make a difference,
even when you struggle with how to do that. This isn’t a story about grand and
heroic deeds in the classic Hollywood movie manner, but it is a story about
everyday people, and everyday courage.
Blood Is Another Word For Hunger, by Rivers Solomon
at TOR.com
“Sully’s whistley, syncopated pants could’ve been the dying wheezes of a
sick coyote or the first breaths of a colt, the battlesong of a screech owl, a
storm wind. Sully closed her eyes. In the darkness and quiet of the barn, she
could hear every night sound as loud as a woman hollering a field song. The
music of it entered her, and she succumbed.”
A fierce and bloody story about revenge, but more about what comes after,
how a slave girl named Sully becomes more powerful than she could have
imagined, giving birth to the dead, and claiming part of the world of herself
and others. I love Solomon’s beautifully crafted prose, and the way that beauty
intertwines with the darkness at the heart of the tale.
(Originally published at mariahaskins.com)