Maria's Reading: My Speculative Short Fiction Roundup #9 2024

The artwork for this roundup includes a detail of the cover for The Deadlands #36 by Babar Moghal. More about the artist here: https://www.instagram.com/babar_moghal/

Fat Kids by Alex Jennings in Bourbon Penn

Sometimes when I sleep, I wander too far from my body—or at least that’s how it feels. It’s like swimming out to sea, being caught by an undertow and knowing you’ve gone too far to make your way back to shore. Except I always do.

This story winds its way through past and present, looping back and forth, in and out of the highs and lows of a life, through the pandemic and hurricanes and ghostly sightings, and you can feel a pattern forming as the story is told, as the tale unwinds itself. There's darkness here, and memory, and Jennings holds my rapt attention with every turn and every twist.

The V*mpire by PH Lee in Reactor

It’s 2012 and you’re fourteen years old and you have strong feelings about Captain America so of course you’re pretending to be a girl on Tumblr.

Whether you're on Tumblr or not (I kind of love that site), the social media interactions and the dynamics of the discourse will likely feel very familiar as you read this story. You don't want to be prejudiced against vampires, right? So why wouldn't you invite one into your home? Come on, blood bags! Lee's story is both terrifying and hilarious and rings true in a way that is both painful and glorious.

Where They Sleep by Heather Clitheroe in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

On those late afternoons, when the day slipped away and the night lights came, the shades would wander out from the empty hills, down to the road. All kinds of them. People we knew. But more we didn’t, moving slowly along in search of something, somebody, as slow and determined as the north lights in the sky.

The afterlife and the life of the living are tightly entwined in this wrenching story, and I love how the world and the characters are painted in such delicate shades of grey. A war has torn the country apart, and now the dead and their unburied bones, and the shades tied to those bones, haunt the living and have made the world a place where no spring ever comes. There's so much sadness and pain running through this tale, but in the end, Clitheroe leaves space for hope and something beyond the devastation. A sharp and beautiful story that cuts deep.

The Empty Ones by Vivian Shaw in The Deadlands

“The empty ones, they’re dead crab. Only they ain’t exactly all the way dead, on account of they’re still movin’ around, despite the fact they’re nothin’ but empty white shells.”

Shaw's story gives a visceral (and deliciously sweary) closeup view of life on a crabbing vessel, and then slips horror into the tale through the presence of undead crabs. I love the characters in this story and their relationships and interactions are captured with both a sense of humour and a love for people's flaws and wounds and scars. It's the kind of story where all the voices ring true, and the horror and dread tug at your insides from the get-go.

Telling the Soul of Mars by Alina Pete in Augur Magazine

Wāpan-nikamowin sipped her muskeg tea and thought she’d gotten her Earth legs under her at last.

Wāpan barely remembered making landfall. After the comfortable confines of the shuttle, the planet beyond was too bright and unfathomably vast. There had been speeches and ceremonies, but her mind was nothing but whirling silence, lost in the endless stretch of blue sky that you could fall into and drift through forever like the eagles circling overhead.

If you love stories about stories and storytelling, this story is for you. It's set in a future where we understand that terrible things have happened on Earth, and that some humans fled the planet and settled on Mars. Now, Wāpan-nikamowin, a descendent of those Martian settlers has returned to Earth to reconnect with the community there. Pete's story captures so many things with delicate precision, like the conflicted feelings of coming to a place you've heard so much about and finding the reality to be both jarringly alien and strangely familiar; or the feeling of belonging and yet being a stranger in ways that you cannot ever truly overcome. And the way Pete imagines the evolution of storytelling in this futuristic context is absolutely fascinating.

The Last Flesh Figure Skaters by Claire Jia-Wen in khōréō

They whispered that you were trained in China, where they apparently install the bionics under the skin rather than above it, flouting the bans on invasive mod tech. No matter that your parents were Singaporean. It was a comforting idea, that you were a china doll android, face painted into a smile and body preprogrammed to succeed. To replace. Maybe they would have said the same about me, if I was any good.

Science fiction, body mods, and high-tech figure skating make for a really compelling story, and Jia-Wen weaves all that together with a tight, sharp tale about two frenemies, adolescence, competition, and thorny family dynamics. It's a story that has a profound and heavy emotional center that gives it real beauty and heft.

The Carcosa Pattern by Conrad Loyer in Fiyah

Amongst the 546 passengers on that ship, there is exactly one cognitive pattern. Stranger - that pattern does not correspond to the brainwaves of any person on the passenger manifest. Stranger still, as far as I'm able to tell, the pattern isn't human.

Quoting Fiyah's tagline for this story: "Dr. Octavia Kincaid discovers a sleeper vessel that went missing over 200 years ago. She breaks protocol and attempts to help the passengers on board before slowly falling victim to their collective nightmare." That's the setup in this knock-out piece of science fiction horror that skillfully blends sci-fi and cosmic horror into a haunting and soul-chilling tale. The story is taken from Fiyah's fabulous spacefaring aunties issue.

Perfect Water by Simon Gilbert in Nightmare

The girl looks up.

A second, a sliver of eye contact is enough: the chair clatters as you stand. Already you’ve looked away, heart beating hard, determined not to look at the window. Already you find it hard to recall her face, although there was something about it—something in the slackness, the colour—but that’s not what made you stand. It was the sense of absolute bitterness and resentment, aimed at you. Your palm’s damp with sweat on the back of the chair.

I love a horror story that hides its terror in plain sight and pulls you into the depths before revealing its secrets. Gilbert's story has a quiet darkness that tightens like a noose in the telling. It has a strong sense of place, and such a wonderfully, quivering sense of foreboding.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackened Husk of a Planet by Adeline Wong in Strange Horizons

You’ve never seen something like this before.

No one in your class has. You’re standing on the observation balcony of the timedeck, all twenty-four of you, staring out through six layers of reinforced carbon-mesh plexiglass. No one speaks. No one even picks up a datapad.

Somewhere to your left, lost in the long single-file line of seventeen-year-old wannabe valedictorians, someone coughs. The noise feels like sacrilege.

It used to be so blue.

Standing on the timedeck and seeing the full impact of climate change play out while you're also playing a part in both the future and the past, is a heavy load to carry for the group of students in this story. They are filling in their worksheets for a field study, but none of them will leave this place unchanged. I love how Wong twists the idea of time travel: "Open-loop time dynamics says: the moment you leave here, the timeplane changes. It folds around you, for you, based on how your experience and your observations inform your future actions: the will-have-been."

This Little War of Ours by Arden Baker at Escape Pod (narrated by Scott Campbell, Graeme Dunlop and Valerie Valdes)

Most of my compatriots are still in denial about the whole “Extinction Level Event” thing. I don’t think the brain is meant to handle these sorts of problems, no matter how much wetware we install or how many simulations we run. At the end of the day, we’re cavemen who worked out how to make explosives, living and dying in the cosmic blink of an eye.

This is a story about what happens after the end of the world, and it's told in the form of a correspondence between people who were intimately involved in bringing about that end. It's a terrific story and Mur Lafferty's host commentary captures a lot of what I loved about it: "What this story tells me is that when the big picture is incredibly dire, or even if the war is over and we lost, there are still things and people who can find joy. And, dare I say, hope?"

Ruminants by Kay Chronister in The Dark

Our first night, we see the ruminants only as silhouettes laying or standing in the pens with their backs to us. We do not look closely. Later, we wonder if we were scheduled to arrive at night so we would not see the ruminants while there were still boats at the dock that might be hijacked and made to carry us away.

A strange, surreal, and soul-squeezing story that moves from unsettling to a sort of existential scream into the darkness. There's a group of immigrants coming to work on an island. They don't know exactly where they are or what they're supposed to do, but they've been promised better lives and they took that chance. But the ruminants, the animals they have to care for, are no normal creatures and leaving the island, and the ruminants, is no easy thing.

Podcastle 862: Flash Fiction Extravaganza: Canine Companions

Finally, because dogs and dog stories make the world a better place and we all need some of that right now, check out this trio of stories at Podcastle that are all about dogs. I love each and every one of these stories, and they lifted my spirits at a time when I really needed that.

“A Strange and Terrible Wonder” by Katie McIvor (narrated by Eliza Chan) Previously published by Zooscape
“The Dog Who Buried the Sea” by Andy Oldfield (narrated by Devin Martin) Previously published by Flash Fiction Online
“What Wags the World” by Sarah Pinsker (narrated by Eleanor R. Wood) Previously published by Daily Science Fiction