The art for this roundup includes a detail of the cover for Hexagon #16 by Yorgos Cotronis. More about the artist: https://cotronis.com/
☀
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.
☀
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.
☀
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.
☀
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/)
☀
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.
☀
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.
☀
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.
☀
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.
☀
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.
☀
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”.
☀
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.
I have recently paused my Patreon, but I am still accepting tips on KoFi: https://ko-fi.com/mariahaskins
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