Maria's Reading: April 2024

The art for this roundup includes a detail of the cover for Hexagon #16 by Yorgos Cotronis. More about the artist: https://cotronis.com/

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The Three Thousand, Four Hundred Twenty-Third Law of Robotics by Adam-Troy Castro in Lightspeed

If a robot stands alone in a field, staring into the forlorn distance as it obeys the last order it was given by a human,

that order being, “Don’t move until we come back for you,”

which it can remember uttered with a cruel sneer by a man who has taken a cruel dislike for it,

the kind of man who will not be coming back,

if the robot understood at once that no one would ever be coming back,

if it also understood that the laws governing its actions prevented it from objecting, or resisting, or even giving its instructions an expiration date,

I'm always a sucker for stories about sad and/or old robots, and Castro tells a beautifully twisted story about robots and laws, and how humans might treat these mechanical servants that have to obey the laws we made for them. There's a poignant, sharp darkness at the (robotic) heart of this story and I love it.

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The Let Go by E. Catherine Tobler in Nightmare

I was not born
In this field of grass,
But know what it is
To let everything go.

A gorgeous and piercing poem that carries so much loss and pain in such a small space. There's a quiet fierceness to this that really cuts deep. To quote Tobler's comments on the poem: "We give pieces of ourselves away, we have pieces taken, we cut ourselves down to nothing in the name of love, and it is both a horror and a revelation."

Our Best Selves by Fatima Taqvi in Nightmare

“Muniza,” my husband says, eyes on the road. “Your skin is slipping.”

Clunky keys open our heavy front door. I used to be able to smell forest pine on it. I can’t anymore. I wince at the mud tracked in from outside. I can’t quite bend the right way, so it’ll take ages to clean.

“Muniza.” My name is a complete sentence when my husband says it in that tone. I pull up my skin. Give my shoulders a shake. It doesn’t really do much, but it looks like I’m trying, which is important evidence for the rest of my life.

There is body horror here, yes, in this powerful and deeply unsettling story about body parts slipping off, falling down, eyeballs dropping from sockets... but the real horror here is the emotional pain, the emotional and physical emptiness in a relationship that has turned a woman into nothing but a jumble of pieces. Victim and monster: Muniza is both.

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Matter of Taste by A.D. Sui in Hexagon

Taste blooms at the tip of my tongue, where most of the receptors live. The nexus of sweet and sour, bitter and umami, summons a memory of a sunny afternoon, when the poppy seeds are sweeter than the grapes growing from grandmother’s balcony vines.

A chef that "summons flavour from memory" and, using a technology called Reconstruct™, can "pull forth a deep memory and flood the mouth with succulent reminiscing". Sui pulls together such a heart-tugging, sharp, and bitter-sweet story and I love its light, darkness, and warmth.

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Median by Kelly Robson at Reactor

Someone will stop, she thought. Someone will come. Someone has already dialed 911. But nobody stopped. Certainly not the cement truck, which had long since disappeared beyond the highway’s distant curve.

She climbed to her feet and waved at an oncoming car. One of its headlights glinted in the sun. The driver turned his head as he passed, mirrored sunglasses square on her, but he didn’t slow. The other drivers didn’t even look at her. The truck drivers stared straight over her head.

“I’m right here,” Carla said, waving her arms.

To quote the introduction to this story: "A professional caregiver’s commute takes an unsettling detour when car trouble forces her to pull over on the highway, where she begins receiving distressing phone calls from strangers…" Robson gives this story a surreal depth and increasingly nightmarish/dreamlike quality as Carla tries to find her way through a world that doesn't seem to acknowledge her existence anymore. This is quiet, devastating horror that manages to find the warmth of humanity in the middle of a nightmare. (PS! Reactor is the new name for TOR.com after they rebranded their website to separate it from the TOR publishing. Check out the FAQ for more about the name-change: https://reactormag.com/faq/)

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Heathman Ldg by Brian Evenson in Bourbon Penn

That many days on the road, that many days in a row, and you started to lose track of yourself. Most mornings Erlend woke up unsure what town he was in, disoriented, confused. And whenever he picked up his phone, it seemed like the company’s app told him where he was to go next, not where he was. He was living away from what he thought of as his real life and, in this new false life, was always unsure of where he was at any given moment, always freed to look ahead to the town to come.

Erlend keeps driving for work, keeps going on the jobs he's sent out to do, following the maps and coordinates given to him by his work, even as it seems to him that he keeps going to the same town, or at least a town by the same name, over and over again. Evenson gives the story a quiet, increasingly unsettling horror vibe as Erlend ends up going off the map, into nothing. The emptiness inside mirroring the emptiness of the map, of the town, of the world he Erlend finds himself in.

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The Alien in My Bathtub by Tony Dunnell in Escape Pod (narrated by Bryce Dahle)

The alien in my bathtub refused to leave. It was there when I returned to my apartment in Ring B. It ignored me when I asked it to vacate the premises, and when I enquired as to how it had entered my apartment it replied with a dismissive grunt. I had no intention of trying to remove it by physical force, which would have gone against the most basic rules of human-alien etiquette. And, to be honest, I didn’t want to touch it.

This is a straight-up and all-out fun and entertaining science fiction story about an alien visitor, really good soap, and a space-based, diplomatic incident. There’s a great sense of humour here, and I love how the story takes some unexpected turns on the way to its resolution.

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In the Museum of Unseen Places by Marsh Hlavka in Kaleidotrope

There is a light in the collection hall. The curator left it burning.

The rest of the staff departed hours ago, leaving the exhibition rooms and preparatory labs shuttered and silent. In the center of the hall, a lone drafting table glows under a dozen lamps. The map on the table depicts a coastline speckled with harbors. A sketched route arches northward across the blank inland expanse. Once there were roads there. They have long since been erased.

The curator sits back from the drafting table, holding a jar to the light.

This story is such a gorgeous, fluid, surreal, and dreamy trip about memory and loss, and about how the past keeps reappearing and disappearing from memory in a society that does not seem to value its people. The story ebbs and flows as the memories ebb and flow, and I love how Hlavka tells us a story about a society and about a life in such a beautifully subtle way.

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Rhythms of the Resonant Revolution by Rodrigo Culagovski in khōréō

Market Hexagon is loud, even in the middle of the night. Behind the noise of commerce comes the staccato symphony of the City’s factories working their indentured servants round the clock; the shriek of steel sliced into weapons so the poor may fight and die for aristos’ entertainment; the whine of cement and stone under iron carts pulled by captive magical creatures; the banal melodies piped into working class neighborhoods to quell thoughts of revolt—a perversion of the true sound of my People; their heritage warped into a weapon of bondage.

Oh gosh, music is described in the most vivid and visceral way in this story, and it is used as an actual tool of revolution and resistance and survival. It’s a masterclass in how to describe sound and music and rhythm in writing, and how to make you feel the force and power of it through text.

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Your Sword, Your Trumpet, by Anjali Patel in The Deadlands

The first time I saw you was at the beginning. This world was flat and featureless and newly made, and I its named guardian. With my hammer in hand, I waited for time to spin into motion. When the first sunrise broke its yolk on the horizon, I thought I would never feel anything as glorious as those first rays of light.

You showed up to ruin everything.

A beautifully evocative and thoroughly haunting story of a relationship, a rivalry (and more) that spans the ages. I love the scope of this story, the way it soars and plummets through the years as two beings crash and clash and shape each other and the world. It is an epic in short story format.

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What Any Dead Thing Wants by Aimee Ogden in Psychopomp

The third week of a planetary exorcism is the hardest—at least if the planet in question has megafauna to deal with. Enthusiasm wanes even faster on worlds that never evolved past microbes. Hob’s crew always comes in like a team of intrepid explorers, swapping stories with the outgoing terraforming crew as they run down the handover checklist.

Science fiction with terraforming and human colonization of exo-planets is woven together with honest-to-goodness magic, and the supernatural dynamics of exorcisms (of the lingering spirits of dead alien creatures). Yes, Ogden’s story brings all the speculative fiction elements together in a truly original story that is also, very much, about human beings and humanity, and about caring for the lives of any living thing. To quote Ogden herself on Bluesky, this story is about “human ghosts, alien ghosts, fucked-up terraforming practices, the inherent value of life however strange”.

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Finally, I want to recommend three short story collections that will all be out later this year. I’ve read advance reading copies of all three and loved them.

- Ghostroots by ‘Pemi Aguda (coming in May, 2024)

A brilliant collection of short fiction that gleams with glints of unsettling, quiet horror. The stories have a surreal quality to them, as if reality is shifting and twisting beneath the surface. You can read Aguda's story "Manifest" from this collection in Granta.

- Pick Your Potion by Ephiny Gale (coming later in 2024)

Gale’s short fiction has an unsettling beauty, and, in this collection, warmth and closeness mingle with deep, dark, and decidedly uncanny undercurrents. Pick Your Potion is full of stories that will snag your mind and work their way underneath your skin, maybe even into your dreams. You can read Gale's story "Rewind" from this collection in The Dread Machine

- Slow Burn by Mike Allen (coming in July 2024)

This collection of short stories and poetry is a beautiful, dark, and thoroughly unsettling trip. I love the way Allen twists and skews the reality and the everyday, tucking shadows and terrors into the cracks of what we think is real. You can read Allen's story "The Feather Stitch" in Lackington’s.