Philia,
Eros, Storge, Agápe, Pragma by R.S.A. Garcia in Clarkesworld
This is a spectacularly
good science fiction novella that weaves together military sf, heart-pounding
action scenes, political intrigue, family drama, artificial intelligence as
friend and family and foe, AND has a deep love story at its heart. If you've
read Garcia's The Sun From Both Sides from 2019, you're on familiar territory,
because this is a sequel/prequel to that story. The main character is Eva who
has retired from her military and political career and settled down with Dee, a
man with his own complicated past. Then, it appears that Eva's
"Sister", the AI she bonded with at birth, is trying to kill her, and
Eva is pulled back into a world and a war she thought she had left behind. It's
an intricately layered, powerful story that plays out in the past and the
present, and is set in a unique and vividly drawn universe with a cast of
fabulous characters. Give me more of this future-verse, please!
Intentionalities by
Aimee Ogden in Clarkesworld
Sorrel never intended to
confer a child to the Braxos Corporation. But Sorrel had never intended a lot
of things that managed to happen with or without her say-so.
Motherhood is at the
center of this heartbreaking story by Ogden, but it's a take on motherhood that
I haven't seen explored and laid out quite like this before. In this future,
where companies own and trade pretty much every part of every human being's
life, Sorrel has managed to get herself so deep into debt that she sees no way
out. Except that there is one way: to carry a child and give it up to the
corporation once it turns five years old. I love how Ogden makes Sorrel a
seemingly rather clueless and rather irresponsible adult who agrees to give up
her child without really realizing what that will mean. She is not a bad
person, she is just incapable of living a good life inside the terrifying
corporate system that dominates this world. The tragedy is that once Sorrel
DOES realize what she is actually going to lose, it's too late to stop the wheels
from turning. Gutting and riveting from start to finish.
Yearning by
Maya Beck in Strange Horizons
I called it
"yearning" at first, but by the time word had spread to all twenty-two
of us croppers, a divide had resulted: half called it firesouling, and half
called it firesailing. All thought it was vodun, but still, all followed my
lead to the campfire where I held the weekly ceremony.
Beck's quietly powerful
story, is set in the time of sharecroppers, soon after the end of slavery in
the United States. The weekly ceremony the protagonist tells us about, involves
a kind of deep magic that brings the whole community either backwards in time
to see their origins, or forward in time to see where their descendants will
end up. In the story, they guide Elder Sunday into the future and it is a
rather joyous trip, but afterward, an unwelcome visitor joins them by the fire.
There's a subtle power in this story, and I love the way it explores how a
community is trying to come to grips with the injustice that defines their
world, and yet find hope for the future, and draw strength from the past.
Scallop by
J.L. Akagi in Strange Horizons
Scallops are ringed with
eyes. They have hundreds of them. Over two hundred eyes tucked under the edge
of their shells. Inside each of these eyes are mirrors, like a telescope. Human
eyes have retinas. Scallop eyes have mirrors.
This isn’t poetry. It’s
biology. But sometimes those are the same thing.
There are definite shades
of body horror in this unsettling, evocative, but also tender story about a
woman who suddenly starts growing eyes in the most unexpected places. However,
this story is more than the kind of horror that makes you cringe. It's about
transformation and identity, it's about love, and about the secret parts of
ourselves that we often hide from others, even those closest to us. That line
from the opening of the story, "This isn’t poetry. It’s biology. But
sometimes those are the same thing." echoes through the whole piece as
people turn into trees, into snakes. A strange story that will stay with me for
a long time.
Winter's Heart by
Vanessa Fogg in Hexagon Magazine
At the core
of Winter’s realm, there are no beating hearts. No moving blood or
warmth. Not even breath.
"Winter's Heart" is
sharp and shimmery like ice and snow. It's a story about the Ice Queen, told by
someone who used to live in her realm, but left with a man, had a family with
him, and is now dealing with her own conflicted emotions about her past, and
her present. Fogg always writes complex, compelling mothers and children, and
she is a master at capturing the sweetness and wistfulness and conflicted
nature of love, and that holds true here . This story hit me right in the feels
because I know this mother. Sometimes, I am her.
Sailing to
Byzantium by Jennifer R. Donohue in Fusion Fragment #4
Maggie’s mother said
“Your father is building his ship” the moment she answered the call, before the
holographs fully resolved. The world dropped out from under her.
“What? It’s too early.”
Her mother shrugged, holographic hands palm up, helpless. “Why don’t
you try to tell him that, Maggie? I tried already. Come home.”
Maggie's father is
building his ship. This is not an uncommon thing in the world of this story,
but it means that Maggie's father is leaving, and will never come back.
Donohue's tale is an aching, heartbreaking story about family and grief,
and ultimately about death, even if it's death by leaving forever in a rocket
ship you built in your own backyard. This story has a certain Bradbury vibe for
me, and the title, of course, is from a lovely poem by William Butler Yeats.
Where the Stones Fly by Steve Zisson in Selene
Quarterly vol. 3 issue 2
A quirky and thoroughly
enjoyable alternate history tale that gives the reader a new take on the
history of early airplane development, with a group of workers and craftsmen
building an airplane our of rock: "Rock could fly. Pigeon Hill
granite could soar." There's real human depth and complexity to this story
that also involves union organizing, and the often tense rivalry between
different granite quarries,. I love stories that take a strange premise like
this and really make it, well, soar. Part of a great issue of Selene
Quarterly.
The Long Tail by Aliette de Bodard in Wired
Nanites were war weapons,
and the Conch Citadel was a ship full of them. They hadn’t run
into variants before, not on this ship. Mutations usually didn’t show up on the
scans because the sensors weren’t calibrated for random, unknowable varieties.
But they’d heard the stories.
A space adventure where a
crew is scavenging parts from an old, derelict spaceship where reality and
unreality are layered on top of each other, and where the threat of falling
under the spell of that unreality, the (technical) ghosts of the past, and the
threat of dangerous nanites, is ever-present. What makes this story even more
fascinating and compelling for me, is the idea of "lineage memory"
where members of the crew can share in each others' recollections.
Song of the
Raven And Crow by Avra Margariti in Zooscape
A little while ago,
Rosanna used to feel hollow all the time, a dead husk. She knew she wasn’t made
of flesh and bone like the rest of her family, but of sackcloth, crude
stitches, and moldy cotton unevenly stuffed inside her belly and wings. Her
adopted family gave her their own down feathers to fill the empty places inside
her. They gave her a home in the clouds.
Oh how I love this fierce
and feathery story about Rosanna, a ragdoll raven; her family of crows; and her
Mama, "Mother Crow, the leader of their clan of avian deities and former
witch familiars". Rosanna tries to be happy with her crow family, but is
haunted by the truth of how she was made, and the quest her maker, a witch,
created her to carry out. And when Rosanna goes looking for the witch, things
come to a head...
Bast and Her Young by Tegan Moore in Beneath
Ceaseless Skies
Any moment now the
sun-disk would break the horizon and Amun would climax, the spirit would take
her, and her father—her father the god, Amun, but also her father the great
pharaoh Aakheperkara Thutmose—would appear before her, her dynasty incarnate,
embodying an unbroken line between the gods and man like a column of light
reaching from the earth to the heavens. The Spirit of Kingship would greet her,
would whisper to her the secrets of pharaohs past, and she would be imbued with
the all wisdom of her god-king-father.
At least, she thought
that’s how it was supposed work.
I do love tales of
ancient Egypt, and in this story, Moore follows Hatshepsut in the early days of
her reign as she seeks to establish her claim to the throne by receiving the
Spirit of Kingship in an ancient ritual. But the spirit that appears to her is
not her father, the old king, as she expected. Instead she is visited by an
older and much different creature from Egypt's past, and this presence refuses
to leave Hatshepsut alone once it has been summoned. I love how this story
delves into the everyday world, lore, religion, and politics of ancient Egypt,
and Moore's Hatshepsut is a powerful and compelling character.
Colombina by
Jelena Dunato in Beneath Ceaseless Skies
Pick me up, girl.
I’m such a pretty,
delicate thing, hidden behind the gondola’s cushion. You feel me before you see
me: the soft velvet of the cushions suddenly replaced by the roughness of my
lace and the cool touch of my silk. Your fingers are smooth as you gently pull
me from the shadows.
When I was a kid, I used
to read my uncle's old comic books when I visited my grandparents' house (they
kept them in a closet in his old room), and one of my favourites was The
Gauntlet of Fate (Ödeshandsken in Swedish). The gauntlet is picked up
by a new person in each issue, and adventures ensue. "Colombina", an
excellent fantasy-romance about Caterina, a young woman who is in love with a
man without money, while her family wants her to marry a rich man she despises,
reminds me of those gauntlet stories. Caterina finds a colombina mask, and when
she eventually slips it on... magic, dangerous magic, is triggered. I really love
that the story is told from the point of view of the mask itself. It gives the
story, literally, a unique perspective.
The
Badger’s Digestion; or The First First-Hand Description of Deneskan Beastcraft
by An Aouwan Researcher by Malka Older in Constelación
Magazine
"There's a Beast in
Vulup that could use a crew member for a short time....it's not work,
at least not in the Aouwan sense of the word. It's a volunteer Beast. Strictly
occasional and unpaid."
In Malka Older's
dizzyingly strange and intriguing story, a scholar visits another country. A
country where the inhabitants can join together as various types of
"Beasts"--dragons, kestrels, sea serpents, badgers, etc.--that
perform important tasks in society. It's a kind of cooperation and
transformation that is decidedly magical: the people become a
creature, each of them part of its body, performing a part of its function.
Older's focus is not really on the way the Beasts work, but how the society they
are part of works. The visiting scholar notes many differences between their
own home country and this new place, and notes the ways that working together
as Beasts affect both citizens and society. It's an intricate and utterly
charming story that has a real Ursula K. Le Guin vibe in its focus on society,
and how different types of magic and/or technology might influence the way
people live together.
My Mother's Hand by Dante Luiz in Constelación
Magazine
Horácio is haunted by his
dead mother's spirit, and it's not just that her spirit is still around to
abuse him, she literally controls parts of his body, even after death. In order
to free himself from her influence, and to reconcile the past with who he is
now, he must embark on an almost impossible quest. There's a very dark sense of
humour woven into this gutting tale, and the scenes when Horácio finally
finds his mother's grave are...well, go read this story. A terrific story from
this wonderful first issue of Constelación Magazine:
Constelación is
a quarterly speculative fiction bilingual magazine, publishing stories in both
Spanish and English. Writers can submit their stories in either language. Fifty
percent of the stories we publish in every issue will be from authors from the
Caribbean, Latin America, and their diaspora.
I
Will Teach You Magic by Andi C. Buchanan in Cossmass
Infinities #4
My child, this is my
promise to you: I will teach you magic.
We will find snatches of
time together, on sunless mornings before you make your way down the outside
staircase to the school that does not want you, and in the evenings as I brush
out and braid your hair... I will teach you magic in the roof gardens at night
and hurriedly in the doorways of shops closed on a rest day. You will learn to
learn anywhere, in brief snatches of time, looking out for intruders all the
while.
Buchanan is a must-read
writer for me. I love their stories so much, and if you haven't read their
fabulous, ghostly-strange novella From A
Shadow Grave, you should remedy that ASAP. "I Will Teach You
Magic" is a wonderful, tender story about parenting and love. It's also a
story about disability and physical pain, and about how the process of teaching
a child to use magic can be a tool to help them live a better life, even when
that magic might not be permitted by society. I love how this story
interrogates how society and its institutions view and control the use of
magic. It adds real depth to a moving piece of fiction.
From Witch to
Queen and God by L. D. Lewis in Mermaids Monthly
The witch walks out of
the sea on two legs alongside her men, armed to the teeth with fury meant to
carry them through Eros's liberation.
Well, holy whoa, this
story is amazing in every way. It's an absolutely radical, unique take on
Ursula, the Sea Witch from The Little Mermaid, reimagining her as a
much more powerful and complex character. Here, she is leading the overthrow of
a government and a society built on the slave trade, at the head of an army
made up of the people she's saved from drowning beneath the waves. Using her
potent magic, she walks on land in the attack, but what she is attempting to do
stretches the utmost limits of her power. It's a smashingly good, hugely
entertaining story from this first issue of Mermaids Monthly.
10 Steps to a Whole New You by Tonya Liburd
in Fantasy Magazine
It began, as most things
do, simply enough. In a simple neighbourhood, on the edge of a town. Too urban
to be rural, too rural to be urban.
Women grew old. Some
women aged with their children, grandchildren, family around them. Some grew
old alone, isolated, bitter. Others might grow old and die sick, in pain.
Then there was you.
This story is a chilling,
compelling delight. Azelice is fascinated by her charismatic new neighbour
Francine right from the start, and Francine also shows an interest in Azelice.
Even though Azelice has some real misgivings about Francine's strange
propositions, she is also ready to try and see if Francine can really do what
she says she can do. Once Azelice understands exactly what Francine is after,
well... by then it's not just too late, but Azelice doesn't WANT to back out
even knowing the price she might pay. There's a wonderful dark undertow to this
story, and Liburd's prose is compelling as it weaves together Trinidadian
folklore and horror.
Things to Bring, Things to Burn, Things Best Left Behind by
C.E. McGill in Fantasy Magazine
Clearly, judging by the
number of people they brought to drag him out of his house, they weren’t
expecting him to come as easily as this. Oz knows exactly what they’re
thinking—what’s wrong with him? Is he up to something? He’s become
fluent in dirty glances and sidelong looks over the years.
“What things?” asks one
of the councilmen.
“My things,”
Oz says, and shuts the door again. To his surprise, they don’t force it open.
Even they wouldn’t deny a dead man his last request, it seems.
This is a wonderful,
sharp take on a common fantasy trope: sacrificing a person to keep a community
safe from a dangerous entity. In this case, there's a mountain that requires
the sacrifices. Names show up in the magical hearth and then that person must
be sent off to be eaten by the mountain, never to be seen again. Oz has lost
his mother to the mountain, and now it's his turn to walk the long way to is
own death. He packs his things and heads out, thinking he knows what will
happen, but as it turns out, the mountain requires something from him that is
much more difficult for Oz to give than his life. I really like how this story
explores the idea of sacrifice, and what it means to sacrifice yourself, and I
also like how it twists and turns this fantasy trope and finds new facets to
it.
The
Van Etten House by Carrie Laben in The Dark
The way I remember it, I
got the call about the Van Etten house first, from a guy I knew who hauled
crates of vinyl from record fair to record fair all over the state. His name
was Clint, and though it’s probably unrelated, I never saw him again after that
weekend.
As soon as they find the
dolls in that upstairs room in the Van Etten House, SO MANY DOLLS all boxed up
and covered in dust, I got the best kind of horror-story chills and tingles.
Laben's story doesn't spell out in so many words exactly what the dolls are, if
they are effigies or sacrifices, or what kind of terrible magic has been
wrought with them, but there are hints and glimpses of it throughout the text.
I love that this story doesn't explain it all, but allows the unsettling
strangeness of the old house and its contents, and the effect it may or may not
have had on those who came to empty it after its owner died, remains mysterious
and haunting.
Your Own
Undoing by PH Lee in Apex Magazine
You look at me and you
don’t recognize me.
It hurts that you don’t
recognize me, your own familiar that you made from a part of your own soul, but
there are more important things for us to deal with right now. I push through
the hurt and speak to you, saying, “This is not a story you are reading. This
is actually happening, and it’s actually happening to you.”
This story kicked me right
in my solar plexus. It's a story about magic, and deception, and it's about how
terribly hard and painful, almost impossible, it can be to break free when
someone has managed to convince you not to believe in your own reality. A
scholar and sorcerer once took on an apprentice, but once the apprentice had
learned enough, he tricked the sorcerer and bound them in a horrific state of
deprivation and punishment and pain. The sorcerer's familiar keeps trying to
break through the curse, to set them free, but how is that possible when the
imprisoned person doesn't even believe they are a prisoner? A gutting, gripping
story.
All
I Want For Christmas by Charles Payseur in Apex
Magazine
This was the winner
in Apex's 2020 Holiday Horrors Flash Fiction Contest (the
judge was Mike Allen of Mythic Delirium), and it is a perfectly
crafted, gutting piece of flash. Robby is waiting for Santa to come, but his childish
anticipation is tinged with a whole lot of darkness. A very quick read that
packs a big emotional punch.
Mouth & Marsh, Silver & Song by Sloane Leong
in Fireside
I was born to the marsh
with a memory of silver, acute as fear and soft as peat on my tongue.
In Leong's story, a
marsh-born creature, a monster to the rest of the world, is born and grows in
the mud and water. The creature is blessed or rather cursed with a strange
power: when cut with a silver blade, the wound becomes a mouth that sings a
prophecy and that prophecy is required for a prince to become king, and so it
has been for a long, long time. The creature is visited by many prince through
the years, fighting some of them off while others cut a prophecy from their
body. But things change one day, when a young woman comes seeking a prophecy.
This a gloriously fierce and voraciously brutal tale, written in beautifully
dark, lyrical prose, and I love this savage take on prophecy and monsters and
how we might change our fate if given the chance.
La Camaraderie du Cirque by dave ring
at Podcastle
Gather round, and let me
tell you the story of Veronica’s Oiseau de Feu.
They were dark times, for
me. Every bloody day, Chuckles, Magda and Felix tried to trip me when I
walked by, ugly faces snickering underneath their greasepaint. My
everything, Michel, ignored them, even when they pull that shit right in front
of him. It infuriated me. He said it was to preserve “the
camaraderie du cirque.”
A fierce, sharp, and
jagged story about love and lust, and about revenge and repercussions. Paolo
feels ill-treated by everyone at the circus, like no one respects him or even
really wants him around. He grasps and grabs at whatever affection and love he
can get, but the snickers and sneers and slights he is subjected to eventually
lead to a faceoff with his rival in love, Lars. And what happens in that
moment, when Paolo's temper runs over, changes his life (and his understanding
of who he is and what he is capable of) forever. A dark and twisted circus tale
full of wonderful characters.
Wolfsbane by Maria Dahvana Headley in Nightmare
#100 (exclusive paid content)
It's winter when the wolf
comes into our wood.
Out there somewhere, a
howl. Out there somewhere, a cry. In the dark woods beyond our house, something
red is happening.
This story hits so many
of my sweet spots all at once. It's a re-telling of Little Red Riding Hood;
it's full of complex, forceful, difficult women; and the prose is absolutely
glorious (no surprise since it's written by the masterful Maria Dahvana
Headley). It's a story about resistance and revolution, about magic and
violence, about sourdough and what it takes to defeat the wolves that will come
for you and try to devour you and yours. Since it's exclusive paid content, you
can only read it if you buy the issue or if you are a subscriber to Nightmare,
but a) this story is worth paying for all by itself, and b) this issue of Nightmare (#100)
is FULL of outstanding horror.
AND if you want to read
some more fabulous re-tellings of Little Red Riding Hood (which is my
favourite fairytale) I can suggest three stories that are available online:
How To Break Into a Hotel Room by Stephen
Graham Jones in Nightmare
Once, coming up Mercer on
a beer run not long after graduation, Javi had seen Lisa K. He was pretty sure
it was her, anyway. It had been years, but she’d always had a way of standing.
It was like she’d just been punched in the gut. Like she was waiting for the
next punch.
Stephen Graham Jones
knows how to you reel you in to a story. He'll reel you in with a character or
a situation that seems somewhat familiar, like something that might have
happened, or someone who might have lived, in your own town, been part of your
own life. And then he takes the threads of that seemingly familiar strip of
reality and twists them until the world splits apart and you feel chills
crawling up your spine. Here, Javi is trying to pull off a small-time crime,
getting into a hotel room and stealing whatever he can get his hands on. But
right from the start he is haunted by thoughts of an old crime, a crime he's
told himself he wasn't really guilty of, but that he has been unable to shake.
And when the twist in this story comes, when Javi realizes that nothing about
this night, or the hotel room, is what he thought it was, by then it is much
too late for him.
Thanks so much for
reading! See you next month!
Listen to the audio-version of the roundup.
First published at Curious Fictions. Art is a detail of
Kenjay Reyes's cover art for Fusion Fragment #4.
