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The art for this roundup is a detail of Asya Yordanova's cover for the March issue of The Dark Magazine. More about the artist at https://www.artstation.com/asya_yordanova.
An audio version of this roundup is available on YouTube:
For more of my story picks, check out my latest Short Fiction Treasures column at Strange Horizons: http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/short-fiction-treasures-quarterly-fiction-roundup-6/
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Icariana
by Wen-yi Lee in Baffling Magazine
I adore every last bit of this story, including this masterful
opening paragraph that sets up everything you need to know for what’s to
follow:
I find her by the riverbed after the end of the world, wings tucked under her grubby ribs. Some new kind of being, or else some rich maniac’s attempt to engineer homo deux before it all went down. Or went up. Tides, lava, nukes, spaceships. Those last ones, especially, aren’t ever coming back down.
Lee finds beauty, tenderness, and caring in a harsh world,
and stitches the relationship between the two girls, one with wings and one
without, with exquisite care and skill.
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A
Lion Roars in Longyearbyen by Margrét Helgadóttir in Slate
Svalbard had become a popular center in the Arctic Ocean after the Great Ice vanished. Then, as the world became increasingly uninhabitable, people sought out the Arctic for more than holidays and business. Fleeing the deadly sunlight in the south and the wars that had broken out in the wake of the fatal climate change, the swarms of refugees had steadily grown over the past century.
This story is set in a future where climate change has made much of the
world difficult, or impossible, to live in, and where Svalbard, in the Arctic
Ocean, has become a home for climate refugees. In Svalbard, Longyearbyen is home to thousands
of these refugees, and it’s also home to a zoo inhabited by cloned animals that
no longer exist in the wild. The most famous animal at the zoo is a lion, Levi, who may or
may not be one of the last wild-born lions in the world. But now, Levi is gone
from his cage and everyone is looking for him, including one very determined hunter.
In Helgadóttir’s story, this changed world, and the many things humanity has
lost, is interwoven with several characters who all have their own reasons for
trying to find Levi. I love the ending, in all its sadness, violence, and
tenderness.
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The
State Street Robot Factory by Claire Humphrey in Apex Magazine
New story by Claire Humphrey? That’s always a must-read in my
book. (Her story “Wooden Boxes Lined with the Tongues of Doves” published in
Beneath Ceaseless Skies in 2017 is still one of my all-time favourite
short stories.) In this new science fiction story, we follow Darius who lost
both his legs in an accident and who now makes small robots that he sells,
trying to make enough money to buy himself a pair of legs. Humphrey sketches in
the future-Chicago Darius lives in, and the larger world, with a gentle,
precise touch: “Darius was never a soldier, though. He hadn’t even been in the
reserves. Not even at the height of the recent global conflict, when many of
his friends had enlisted for jobs like loading supply trains or inspecting
munitions.” This might be a small story, about one person trying to carve out a
life in a harsh city, but it shines because Humphrey gives the story, and
Darius, such a big heart.
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Them
Doghead Boys by Alex Jennings at PseudoPod (narrated by Dominick
Rabrun, first published in Current Affairs Magazine)
Well, carve out some time in your day and give this story a listen, or a read. A knockout, masterfully written tale set in a New Orleans neighbourhood inhabited by dogheaded boys, vampires, a few ghosts, and maybe even a few magic users capable of calling down a piece of the night. Violence, and the threat of violence, permeates every bit of this tale where families and friendships, and blood, can bind, change, and sunder people. Jennings weaves a rich and vivid world here, a world so deep and real it feels like it extends off the page, taking place in a universe all its own. It's a story with a narrator, and a voice, that grabs you by the scruff from the get-go as we are brought into a world of shapeshifters, magic, darkness, monsters, and ancient gods.
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Mother’s
Teeth by E. L. Chen in The Dark
I love this story. I love the way it absolutely chilled me to the bone. I love the way it crept under my skin. And I love the way Chen twists and turns the horror, making it glint of pain and grief and loneliness beneath the hunger and the fear. A boy is visited by a shadow every night, looming outside his bedroom window. The shadow brings his dead mother’s teeth, and her teeth tap on the window, and it brings his mother’s voice, whispering his name. There is a ghost here, but there is also the house the boy lives in, a house with a darkness of its own, reaching out for the boy, staining the room and maybe staining souls too. Chen’s prose is marvelous, tender and subtle, dark and compelling.
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Notes From a Pyre, by Amal Singh in The Deadlands
Singh's story is science fiction story
about death. Does that sound bleak? It's not. Rather, this is a gentle,
emotionally powerful story told in a strong, yet quiet voice about boy and the
passing of his grandfather, and about the grandfather's research about the
beliefs and rituals various alien species have concerning death. Singh
interweaves the grandfather's research notes with the boy's account of what
happens after his grandfather dies, about the rituals and rites performed,
about how the people in the family react to the death. There's a beautiful web
of connections spun between all these various people and creatures and the
different ways they handle their dead, and how they think about death, and
there is a life-affirming light shining through every word and sentence of the
tale.
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About Her Bones So Bleak And Bare by Matthew F. Amati in Flash Fiction Online
The dead girl had never been a favorite of ours, and now she wouldn’t leave our yard.
I watched black birds wheel like burnt crosses over the fields. The sun fell, dragging the sky down with it until the last light shone on our freakish visitor.
A fabulous story from the March issue of Flash Fiction Online, and it feels like a dark fairytale wrapped inside the present day. In the interview at FFO, Amati says that the story was inspired by "...the early Scots border ballad “The Twa Corbies” Two crows talk about a dead knight whose corpse they’re planning to pick apart." It is a wonderfully evocative and ominous flash story.
Upon What Soil They Fed by Jennifer Mace in Flash
Fiction Online (first published in Syntax & Salt)
I once visited a home where brambles had grown so high that they drank all the light before it even touched the walls.
Oh what a wondrous, gorgeously wrought story this is. A dark
fairytale planted and growing in the midst of our own time and place where a
sales person selling frozen meat products ends up in a house surrounded by
brambles where everything grows and seems inclined to keep you from leaving.
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Unimagined
Delicacy by Lyndsie Manusos in Hex Literary
He picks up dirt with one arm. And then another. The suckers on each limb grab at the dirt, and he throws it in waves behind him. There is Miracle Grow in this soil, he sees by the specks of white and the over-earthy scent. It makes his skin itch. His arms are red at the tips, the suckers are swollen. But still, he must dig.
A fabulousstory of a transformation gone
awry (maybe), where the transformed must deal with the aftermath of what
happened in the laboratory. Manusos masterfully tells us a full-bodied,
eight-armed tale in flash fiction format, and I know I was rooting for good
old Jeffrey at the end. Let's hope he made it to the ocean...
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The Field Guide for Next Time by Rae Mariz in khōréō
When a child learns to speak, their first word is a gift. It is a butterfly wing that swirls the dust motes ignited by the sunlight. A snowflake that shatters an arctic sea to match its fractal pattern. The glitter on sand in the desert at dusk. A distant star shifting its color.
This issue of khōréō is well worth picking up, and
not just for this glistening tale of how better futures are possible, even
after a terrible past. The story is told as if it is the text found on a
winding, woven tapestry, telling the tale of a society that has survived a
changing world and found better ways to live, better ways to exist in the
world, than what we might think is possible right now. It's a beautiful story,
filled with hope, even as the people in this better future also remember the
grief and loss of the past.
For more excellent fiction by Rae Mariz, check out her novella Weird Fishes.
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Haunting the Docks, by Marie Vibbert at Cast of Wonders, narrated by Roderick Aust
No one comes to my dock anymore. It’s so empty I can hear the ping of metal struts relaxing. The sounds of life elsewhere on the station, transmitted through multiple bulkheads, are muted, inchoate moans. I cycle through checks on systems unperturbed by human hands. I tidy what is already tidy.
This is a perfectly hilarious flash fiction story about a sentient dock on Jupiter that is having a little bit of trouble attracting, and keeping, visitors. Why would people avoid this dock? Well, it might have something to do with how it seems haunted... or maybe it's the somewhat problematic way the dock chooses to communicate with visitors? Charming and funny, and with some very sassy bots to boot.
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“Narratology” by Peter Young, written by Cadwell Turnbull at Many Worlds
Gustave Flaubert was in a brothel, a woman's legs wrapped tightly around his thrusting hips when it entered him at climax. He screamed like he had been run through with electric knives.
"What is wrong with you?" asked the woman.
Gustave didn’t answer because it told him not to. He went home, and in his dreams, the thing spoke to him. It told Gustave that he would be its vessel and it would make Gustave a famous writer.
Something happens to Gustave Flaubert that changes the course of his life, and his creativity. Something enters him, an entity described as "the narrator", and for the rest of Flaubert's life, he is never free of its influence. Turns out, the narrator is not alone, and soon other narrators will test the waters. There are several meta-layers to this story, including the bio of the presumed author Peter Young, that is another wrinkle in the tale of the narrators.
Many Worlds is a writing collective (and fair notice: I recently sold a reprint to Many Worlds, which means I am now listed as one of the collective's authors), writing stories that all fit into an overall narrative about "the Simulacrum":
"They call this entity the Simulacrum and its collection of worlds the Simulacra. The Simulacrum doesn’t just copy the world, it adjusts it, adds things to the world, deletes other things. But its most terrifying power is its ability to alter meaning: to change what people care about or find interesting or the very relationships people have to things, to other people, to themselves."
For more about Many Worlds, and more stories set in this universe, check out https://www.manyworldsforum.com/concept
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The Book of
Gems, by Fran Wilde
This novella is out later this year and is available for
preorder now at: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250196569/thebookofgems.
The official blurb from the publisher:
It’s been centuries since the Jeweled Valley and its magical gems were destroyed. In the republics that rose from its ashes, scientists craft synthetic jewels to heat homes, power gadgetry, and wage war.
Dr. Devina Brunai is one of these scientists. She also is the only person who believes true gems still exist. The recent unearthing of the Palace of Gems gives her the perfect opportunity to find them and prove her naysayers wrong.
Her chance is snatched away at the last moment when her mentor steals her research and wins the trip for himself. Soon, his messages from the field transform into bizarre ramblings about a book, a Prince, and an enemy borne of the dark. Now Dev must enter the Valley, find her mentor, and save her research before they, like gems, become relics of a time long forgotten.
I just read an Advance Reading Copy of this novella, set in Fran Wilde's magnificent, terrifying, gorgeously evocative Gem Universe. The novella is a terrific read, a true page-turner, set in a world that is gripping and vividly brought to life and where there are unique and profound ties between gems and magic and people. If this really is the last Gem Universe book, then it's a worthy, and quite spectacular ending. As so often in Wilde's work, it's relationships that are at the heart of the story. In this case, it's the friendship and bond between the gem scientist, Devina Brunai and Lurai, a young woman living in the Valley who has already lost her mother at the ancient, excavated Palace of Gems. The Book of Gems digs into the past, and finds terrifying and beautiful treasures, and maybe even a new kind of future.
I've read and loved all the other stories set in Wilde's Gem Universe. If you want to check them out, there are two short stories
in Beneath Ceaseless Skies:
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