My Speculative Short Fiction Roundup #10 - 2024

 

The artwork for this roundup features a detail of the cover for Clarkesworld #219 by Alex Ries. More about the artist here: https://www.alexries.com/

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We Who Will Not Die by Shingai Kagunda in Psychopomp

When the Wageni first come, they are birds that sing a song we do not understand, but we are a curious people, so we want to know more. Their drones buzz and flutter and spin around us like magic. It is a dance of wonder and delight. Our children laugh and squeal and try to chase the flying things that are always so far out of reach. On the first day it is only a few hours of curiosity before they leave, disappearing into the stars that brought them to us. 

A devastating and powerful novelette about a world, and a people, where death has a profound meaning and importance. To quote Psychopomp’s description: “Nima and Tuni share everything. Theirs is a lovely world, where people were once animals, and carry these traits forward into their human lives. But Nima beieves she was something else—a star that exploded, a nova. The arrival of aliens on their world will change everything the girls know, but not quite everything they believe.” There's a quiet sense of menace beneath the surface in this story as the two sides come together, and clash, with shattering consequences.

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Derail by E. Catherine Tobler in Bourbon Penn

The train whistle never stuttered, was always smooth and sure of itself. It called him, a sound he might follow forever, but Nicholas was snug in bed now, his feet warm, and he could feel the weight of a body in bed with him—he wasn’t inclined to leave this sweet space, so let the train steam on.

Tobler’s Circus universe is one of my favourite fictional worlds, and this story is set on the edges of that universe, with memories of the magic, weirdness, and wonder peeking through the cracks of the everyday world. This is also a heartbreaking and tender love story where two people who are no longer as young as they used to be, face the consequences of their choices, and the love they have for each other. (For another gorgeous, recently published Tobler story, check out To Drive the Cold Winter Away in Strange Horizons, or R Is For Running in Three-Lobed Burning Eye.)

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Inside the House of Wisdom by Tamara Masri in Lightspeed

Even though this room is a circle, the outside of the building looks like a spiral. A single helix going up to heaven, was the architect’s inspiration. The design came to her in a dream: an angel told her to rebuild the House of Wisdom, the Grand Library of Baghdad during the Abbasid era. The angel said that our dark times were over, the golden age had begun. And here we are.

Masri's story is full of sorrow and grief and memories of a past that is only too familiar to all of us in the here and now. But there is hope here, too. I love the light and the dark of this story, the way it allows the shadows in, but dares to believe, to dream, that another kind of world is possible. Beautiful, with a sharp, dark edge beneath the beauty.

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Your Return to the Five Ruins of the Bog by Parker M. O’Neill in Apex

This castle–this crouching heap of Bog iron–was shaped by anti-entropic ones, a race of Timeless builders. Built in the time when the universe was young and humankind had not yet touched the stars, when you and Seb had not yet been born and your hearts had not yet been broken.

I do so love stories that twist through time and timelessness, past and present and future, and O’Neill’s story is a beautifully crafted gem. It’s worth both reading and re-reading.

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After Stasis by R.T. Ester in IZ Digital

He groped for signal from his neural implant. Dead air still. Next, he elected to yank the no-freeze tube from his throat. Once done, he waited, eyes wide as the protective, clear polymer between his upper half and everything outside the cryopod slid down.

A slice of science fiction / body horror where a tragedy plays out after an attack and time spent in stasis. What do you do when your child is changing into something you can barely understand? Ester’s story is gripping and unsettling as it explores what happens when you're faced with terrible, impossible choices.

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A Slightly Different Sunrise from Mercury, Nevada by Íde Hennessy in Strange Horizons

“And because of the sheer number of atoms split here,” Annie recited in tandem below, from the crew deck of the double-decker, “it’s also the easiest place in the U.S. to open a time portal.”

Annie works for a company that runs guided tours through a portal in time: from Nevada in the future to Nevada in 1952. What draws the tourists is the chance to watch a nuclear weapon explode in real time, before they safely return to their future. I love how this story takes the concept of time travel and puts a different twist on it, and also keeps it grounded in Annie’s singular point of view. I also love the quiet strangeness of this story, and the way Annie navigates the past and the present in her own unique way.

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A Lithuanian Folktale (Told Backwards and Forwards in Time) by Beston Barnett in Trollbreath Magazine

One third of the way down the great spit of forested land that arcs south from Teutonic Klaipeda and protects the sweet waters of Kursen Lagoon from the salty lash of the Baltic Sea, there in the sandy littoral stood I, a great spruce! My skin was silver brocade, my boughs were clouds of evergreen filigree. At my crown, I was tall enough to sieve the pure, cold, wet airstream off the Eastern Baltic, and at my roots, wide enough that I could strain that pure water through pebbles of amber down to the little darting fish of the lagoon.

This is a fascinating tale, told (as the title suggests) both backwards and forwards, as memory and story and magic twine together. The folktale itself is a story of freedom and transformation, of life and death. Barnett’s prose has a lovely flow and rhythm to it, and the tale feels both ancient and brilliantly new.

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T-Rex Tex Mex by Sarina Dorie at Escape Pod (narrated by Tina Connolly)

“Nah. That ain’t a dinosaur costume. That’s a Big Bird costume, except you got the feathers all wrong. They shouldn’t be blue and red—though that’s mighty patriotic of you.” The man chuckled and patted the distended belly of his costume. “This, here, is a real dinosaur costume. This is a replica of the T-Rex from Jurassic Park.”

I love this deliciously dinosauric twisted tale where the true fate of the T-rexes is revealed, AND there is (hidden) danger afoot at the Halloween party.

Mother Death Learns a New Trick by Addison Smith at Escape Pod (narrated by Andrew K. Hoe)

When Mother Death foretold her own demise, nobody paid her much mind. The old AI was less a prophet and more of a doomsayer stuck on repeat, her body buried in the mess of tech detritus between the bakery and the retro VR shop. 

What do you do when you’re an AI stuck and deteriorating, while the world has long since passed you by? Well, it might be hard for an old AI to learn new tricks, but maybe, maybe, it’s not impossible. A gentle story that both has a sense of humour and emotional depth.

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St. Thomas Aquinas Administers the Turing Test by Mary Berman in Diabolical Plots

On the 25th day of the month of March in this year of our Lord 1265, I was ordered by the Most Holy Father to the Studium Conventuale di Santa Sabina all’Aventino to evaluate the existence, or lack thereof, of a soul housed within a Wooden Likeness of a Man, the Likeness having been constructed by Father Antonio di Cassino, a friar serving in that place.

Robot sci-fi but make it historical? I cannot argue with that premise (in fact, I adore it), and Berman turns it into a quietly profound musing on religion and humanity. I love the prose and I love that Wooden Likeness of a Man.

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Rise Again by Ramez Yoakeim in Kaleidotrope

Sound asleep when it happened, I only caught the rumbling aftereffects, along with rust flakes raining down from the ceiling. I bolted off my cot in a daze, uncertain if the red flashing lights and deafening klaxon were real or the flourishes of a vivid nightmare.

Then a second explosion hit.

A hugely enjoyable science fiction story about a world lived in silos, with humans obeying the will of the mysterious, unseen Caretakers. As it turns out, that "reality" turns out to be a cover for something else entirely. This is great science fiction with a satisfying twist as it muses on humanity’s failings, and its strengths.

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A Guide for Your Journey to the Green Hills by R. K. Duncan in Nightmare

Since the late war and the revolution of memory that ended it, the Green Hills have been opened. You are one of the lucky few to win the lottery this year. Welcome to your travel guide.

The trip is not difficult, but there are things you should not miss, and there are customs you may not understand as a new arrival in the Kingdom. Let us begin.

As Duncan alludes to in the intro to this story at Nightmare, this is an ode of sorts to what our world might be like if Fairyland was victorious in its battles with the world of humans. The language, the flow and rhythm of the prose, is gloriously dark and beguiling,

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Stranger Seas Than These by L Chan in Clarkesworld

It is two days since our original projected mission end date. We are running out of oxygen and we are trapped in the throat of a god. Technology and a prudent safety review panel have kept casualties on deep dives low, but abyssal layer dives have always been risky. Still, there hasn’t been a fatality in years and none, to the best of my knowledge, within the trachea of one of Pelagia’s Godwhales. Perhaps they will name a safety rule after us.

An expedition trapped in the trachea of a giant creature called a Godwhale? Chan absolutely had my attention from the get-go with that setup and the story delivers in every way I might have hoped for. There is the majesty of a creature that is so mysterious humans can barely comprehend its existence (even less comprehend the fact that the species is present on several different planets), there’s tension within the crew, there are memories of a lost parent, AND, maybe most crucially, there is the song of the Godwhale and what it means, and what it does, to those who hear it. Wonderful, immersive science fiction.

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Crossroads Diner Blues, 1937 by Myna Chang in Centaur

Sometimes the want is so bad you think you can trick the devil. You know you gotta step right up, bold as soda glass, run your finger across that pearled glint of devilteeth. Gotta be quick, before devil takes a bite. 

A wickedly good slice of flash fiction that tells a story of devilish desire and those times when you really can’t be bothered to play it safe. Chang captures the feeling of reckless, joyful abandon perfectly.

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I Am Not the One Who Gets Left Behind by Eric Smith in Sunday Morning Transport

When I can smell my wife’s apple cinnamon French toast, I know the monsters are outside.

I peer out of our third-floor window to the darkened street below, and for a second, just a second, I can almost taste it again, but I know it’s all a lie. A trick. I lost my sense of smell after hitting my head in a car accident years ago. I’ve made it too long, and they’re not gonna get me.

A dad and his son are alive, barely, in the aftermath of an alien invasion. These aliens have a way with scents, with smells, luring people out before they kill them. Smith’s story brings such a down-to-earth vibe to the whole alien invasion idea, and I love the way we see how the dad has managed to keep not just himself, but his son alive in the midst of devastation and carnage.

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The Vessels of Song by Avram Klein in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Your payment first. The Badchen Yankel is too aged, too well-traveled, and too experienced to extend credit to an audience. Now pinch your lips and listen.

It was the year of their lord 1618, and we’re two days outside Grodne when we run into the demons.

Four musicians, on the road, cold and tired, when they find a (suspiciously) inviting inn, warm and comfortable inside, where they are served some terrific plum wine. But all is not as it seems and soon, the musicians are in a lot more trouble than they expected. Klein’s story is full of such delicious storytelling joy and energy, it fairly pops off the page. I love the world, the characters, and all the twists and turns.

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Between the Shadow and the Soul by Lauren Groff in The New Yorker

They had lived together for twenty-five years in the old stone house on a bend in the river. They were young when they first saw the place, wildly in love, and so poor they could afford only one of two dwellings in the valley: a battered trailer huddled against the cold wind, and the antique house in foreclosure, a breath from letting the weeds muscle it back into the earth.

This story is not speculative fiction, but it is a devastatingly piercing story about love and aging, about relationships and what we settle for and why, what we might dream of in our solitude, and the yearning for something more than we’ve allowed ourselves to want.

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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/

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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?"

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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.

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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

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If you want to support my work, I am accepting tips and sharing news on KoFi: 

https://ko-fi.com/mariahaskins

My Speculative Short Fiction Roundup #8, 2024

 

The artwork for this roundup includes a detail of the cover of Lightspeed #172 by Tithi Luadthong (aka Grandfailure) / Shutterstock. More about the artist at https://tithi-luadthong.pixels.com/.

In Haskins by Carson Winter at PseudoPod, narrated by Jess Lewis

At the fairgrounds, Jennifer arrived early to help set the stage. Her eye sockets hung loose and rubbery around her blue eyes. She was the first Jennifer to have blue eyes. The mane on top of her head was coarse and tawny. Flies buzzed in her stomach and she was thankful she was Jennifer because Jennifer always had to stay busy. 

Obviously I had to read this story because it (literally) has my name on it, and wow, it's a knockout. It's unsettling and disturbing in a way that goes deeper than just freaky masks (and there are a lot of freaky masks in this story). The way Winter digs into the way we expect others to act, the way we assume roles, get assigned roles, get stuck in roles not of our own choosing, the way we judge others by the roles we've assigned them... all these things simmer beneath the surface of the rubbers masks in Haskins. It makes this a story that crept in under my skin and will likely stay there for a good while.

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Colony by Ben Murphy at Many Worlds

Fully three cycles had passed since their introduction into the universe, but neither Iyna nor Wem felt comfortable in their bodies. Flight, in particular, was a challenge, their wings easily used when they weren’t thinking about it but clumsy as soon as conscious control entered the equation. Iyna was vexed to be on equal, and awkward, footing with Wem, so many years her junior, but few cartographer-priests had passed time as a Coleomordax, which she felt was an acceptable excuse.

Fair warning that I am a a member of the Many Worlds collective, so I do have some interest in this story since it's published there, but beyond that, this is just a really great science fiction story. It has insectoid aliens, multiuniverse-academia, a hive in space, and it explores the complexities of belonging and identity when you're working undercover for science (indeed assuming a different body for that purpose), but find yourself unexpectedly becoming part of the society you are supposed to be studying. The ending is both tender and devastating, and there's a harrowing sense of loss and sadness running through every bit of this story.

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Five Views of the Planet Tartarus by Rachael K. Jones in Lightspeed

Once a decade, a titanium-nosed shuttle plows through the rings of the planet Tartarus with a new batch of prisoners destined for the Orpheus Factory. The debris that makes up the rings is so thick that it thunders like a hailstorm, deafening the passengers. As the orbiting debris bounces and scrapes against the hull, the prisoners squeeze their eyes closed and beg the pilot to be more careful.

A perfectly constructed piece of flash fiction, building a world and a universe with beautifully effective strokes. Just over 500 words, and that's all that's needed. There's the mythology lurking beneath the science fiction (Tartarus, Orpheus), as Jones paints a picture of the prison planet, and in the end, the full darkness and tragedy of what is happening is revealed. 

GaaS by Meg Elison in Lightspeed

“How long do I have to have my membership with Juno before he proposes?”

“Well, is he subscribed, too?”

“Lifetime with Venus.”

“Girl.”

“What?”

“You got the wife package and he’s on the new-girl-every-week program. He’s never gonna propose.”

Lana sighed. “It’s been four years. We’ve been happy! Why not lock this thing down?”

 Any new story by Meg Elison is an automatic must-read as far as I'm concerned, and this is near-future sci-fi with a wicked-sharp edge. The proliferation of apps, of virtual reality, our descent into online-lives, and the eternal quest for romance and love... it's all here. There's also a sense of fun, but it's the kind of fun that has a twinge of darkness and a salty edge to it as well.

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Cryptid Car Rental by Allison Pottern in Trollbreath Magazine

33 REPLIES:

     1. Re: CRYPTID CAR RENTAL ANY GOOD????
Posted: 10-10-23
By: undead_darling149

hi @veggie_dana, yes i have used cryptid many times and they are very affordable and discreet. but know they only take cash or blood donation.

This story is from the first issue of Trollbreath Magazine, "a journal of speculative fiction, poetry, and non-fiction... Our interests are as varied as the endless amount of genres, from dark fantasy to hope punk to surrealism, and everything in between." It's a very promising first issue and this story is a delightfully funny, quirky piece where we see a story unfold in the form of online posts, including several posts by "Abbadon the Despoiler, Supreme Ruler of the Bottomless Pit."  

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They Remember Faces by Leo Oliveira in Radon Journal

I’ve never desired the crushing weight of a spotlight either (lest my poor bones shatter), nor have I harbored much need for luxuries beyond hot water and a stove. My childhood weaned me on charity: first with the roof my father shared, then with the opportunities the ravens traded me.

If you're a lover of birds, and of crows in particular, then this story is deliciously gruesome, dark, and grimly satisfying. A lesson learned: don't mess with corvids. 

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New In Town by Corey Farrenkopf in Weird Horror #9

There is a crypt in the cemetery in the center of town. There is someone inside the crypt. Everyone in town knows who’s inside the crypt, but they won’t tell you. No name is written on the outside of the crypt. Just a date and a once-ornate angel with most of her details worn smooth with age. You are new in town. Your neighbors refuse to call you neighbor…not until you enter the crypt. Until you come out of the crypt. That is, if you come out of the crypt. 

This is such a deliciously haunting, chilling, strange tale. I love how the narrating voice comes closer and closer in the telling, and by the end, it's right there next to you. Do you want to be part of this community? Are you ready to enter the crypt? Or are you not quite ready for it yet?

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Another Old Country by Nadia Radovich in Apparition Lit

There are at least three stories here. There’s a bird, there’s a goddess, there’s a high school student—they’re either three stories, or they’re the same one. For now, I’ll tell it like three.

Several stories - myth and legend and fairytale, past and present - entwine so beautifully in this story. I love the flow of the story and the way the stories come together and apart, creating a weave of tales. Gorgeous from start to finish. 

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Mammoth by Manish Melwani in Nightmare Magazine

If you haven’t seen it yet, you will.

Three hooded figures sit cross-legged on the floor of a candle-lit warehouse. There’s something strange about the middle one: its torso somehow both too long and too hunched. The figure flickers, like a transcription error in crimson candlelight.

It gets stranger.

Nightmare keeps publishing some astoundingly good horror short fiction, and this story got me in all the best ways. It is eerie, creepy, chilling, with a voice that is strangely beguiling and also terrifying as the point of view seems to shift in the telling. This feels like the kind of story that is whispered in your ear in the dark, scaring the the crap out of you.

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#000000: From the Permanent Collection by LeeAnn Perry in Strange Horizons

Black Quadrangle, Mesolithic era

Unknown

Charcoal on sandstone

This work, created c. 15,000 BC (17,000 AS), precedes earliest surviving written texts. It was rediscovered alongside human remains and burnt carbon deposits, suggesting a role in a burial, sacrificial, or remembrance ritual. 

Haunting and evocative, this story draws a story from a series of descriptive passages. I love how it tells a truly epic of tale of art, AI, humans, human society, space exploration, science, the fate of humanity, and what comes after, through these descriptions. A piece to read, savour, and re-read.

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“Manywhere, Manyone, Manything” by NM Whitley in Seize the Press Magazine

I. The torturers arrive, stocky and headless, clad only in loincloths.

Dark eyes scowl in their chests, noses protrude from their sternums. Their truculent sneers open like a slash across their bellies. At first, they ask no questions. They lash me to one of the long tables in the main cavity of the vessel-fish, they prod and poke and call me ‘old lizard woman’ and other cruel words that ring hollow, words I barely understand. Words that recall my erstwhile footman Erc.

This science fiction story has the texture of fantasy, as it tells the harrowing and totally trippy tale of spacefaring vessel-fish, its crew and its captain, and the ways in which they depend on and interact with each other. I really like the gritty, organic feel of the prose, and the way the story twists and turns as the fate of the "old lizard woman" is revealed. In his newsletter, Whitley says the story is "about a shipwrecked lizard queen who falls into the hands of some nefarious akephaloi (those mythical little no-head guys with their faces in their chest)." Akephaloi AND a lizard queen? I mean, how can you resist?

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A Stranger Knocks by Tananarive Due in Uncanny Magazine

“There’s a man on the front stoop.”

The words spilled from her in a much more mundane way than Judy had expected, considering how her neck was fluttering with her excited pulse. Alvin looked up from the new Langston Hughes poetry collection he was reading under the lamp in Professor Garrett’s parlor. Every window confirmed that it was long after dark, a full two hours since supper.

What a gorgeously wrought tale this is! Due weaves the kind of tale where you want to scream at the participants to turn back, to not follow, to not allow themselves to be seduced, and yet you know that their darkness coming for them cannot be stopped. I love how the horror here truly plays out like a seduction. The mood, the vibe, the vivid sense of time and place pulled me in deep, and then the horror lurking beneath is slowly revealed. 

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Here in the Glittering Black, There is Hope by Monte Lin in GigaNotoSaurus

Kavita stepped into the communication booth on Artemis Station and put on the glasses. An image of David Worthington, Immortal of Solar Standard, Inc., appeared in front of her, as if they were both standing in the middle of a black void. There was still a couple of seconds delay in transmission between Artemis and Earth; even the Immortals hadn’t found a way to warp space-time. Yet Kavita felt if anyone could, Worthington would find a way to break physics, to survive even the heat death of the universe, if it kept him alive or made a profit.

Some of the best science fiction stories I've read in recent years were published in GigaNotoSaurus, and this is one of them. It's set in a future where crews haul freight over long distances of space and time, where long years pass for the people that hired them, and the people they might have left behind on Earth, as they travel through the far reaches of the solar system. Kavita works on one of these space freighters, caught up in a system that extracts wealth and profit for some, and gives the crews some kind of freedom and life they wouldn't have on a deteriorating Earth, but that also costs them a heck of a lot. The system doesn't care about relationships, crews, friends, or even people, and as Kavita's life plays out, we see the toll it takes on her. This is such a sharp, fierce, powerful story and I love every bit of it.

*

Bonus recommendations:

Novella: From These Dark Abodes, by Lyndsie Manusos - Beautifully written, dark and strange, this novella is full of dancing skeletons, shapeshifting revelers, and slipped skins. It's a realm of death where memories can be lost but where maybe love can be found.

Short story collection: The Coiled Snake by Camilla Grudova - A wickedly sharp and dark collection of short stories where the real twists inexorably into the surreal. I love how the world and the characters feel so rooted in the real world, yet drift so far and so deep into the utterly, and spectacularly, weird.

Short story anthology: Winter in the City: A Collection of Dark Speculative Fiction, edited by R.B. Wood and Anna Koon - I'm reading an advance reading copy of this anthology right now (it's out in December), and it contains a wealth of marvellous stories by Brian Evenson, Sarah Read, and many others.

Non-fiction reads:

Dance the Exotic Dance for Me by Yoon Ha Lee in SFWA

We’re Not Good Enough Not to Practice by Kiese Laymon (from 2015)

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I have recently paused my Patreon, but I am still accepting tips on KoFi: https://ko-fi.com/mariahaskins

 

 

Maria's Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Horror Short Fiction Roundup #7 2024

The artwork for this roundup includes a detail of the cover art for FIYAH #31 by Kaitlin Edwards. Find out more about the artist at https://www.instagram.com/kaitlin_june/.

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And to Their Shining Palaces Go by Betsy Aoki in Asimov’s September/October 2024

When my parents heard I was selected to serve in the Alariel’s shining palaces, I think it broke them.

Letters made of actual paper were so expensive that I ran as soon as the drone handed the envelope to me. I banged open the front door of our tiny apartment and rushed into my mother’s study.

Shaking, I broke the filmy seal and read them my acceptance to become a worker-in-residence in the San Francisco Dome. I was to work with the Alariel on the Great Game, the global virtual experience that tied humanity together and kept the peace with our interplanetary overlords.

After an alien invasion (which is followed by a lot of destruction and death), giant glittering domes appear in cities across the world and the brightest minds on Earth are called to work there, including Mayumi. The project, a game, is meant to benefit humanity but is also a scientific investigation and/or experiment by the aliens. It's a virtual reality everyone on Earth plays, and when Mayumi is called, she is thrilled (in spite of her parents' misgivings). Once she arrives, she is awed by the tech the aliens are using, but she eventually encounters the dark side behind the glittering curtain. I especially like how Aoki allows for shades of grey for both the alien overlords and the other characters as Mayumi's compliance and admiration change into confusion and horror, and then into resistance. Aoki gives us such a rich and textured world and a cast of characters, human and alien, that is compelling and complex. It's a story that has stuck with me long after reading.

"And to Their Shining Palaces Go" is a stand-alone story set in the Many Worlds shared multiverse.

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What He Woke by Jess Whitecroft at PseudoPod (narrated by Kat Day)

Everything was woke. Lawyers were woke. The media was woke. Even Strictly was woke now, with same sex couples dancing together and all. Blue hair, almond milk, lattes, tofu, lifeboats, LGBTQ or however many letters they had in it these days – all dreadfully woke. The condemnation of tofu as a malign left-wing influence should have been a tip-off really, especially coming from the lips of the Home Secretary herself, but it was still a shock when Caroline discovered that even her breakfast was woke now.

A savagely hilarious horror story that is both brilliant, funny, and razor-sharp. Present-day politics mingled with horror makes for one heck of a combo here, and the narration adds another layer of awesome to this story. Also: DO NOT miss Alasdair Stuart's outro! I mean it! 

*

Reduce! Reuse! Recycle! by TJ Klune in Reactor

He goes to a mirror. Looks at his reflection. He doesn’t look like Jesse or Jenna or Ronnie or Simon. He does not have hair on his head or face. He does not have eyebrows. His lips are thin. Ears small. He pulls at the skin on his face and arms that covers metal and wires. It stretches, stretches, and when he lets go, it snaps back into place.

A thought enters his head, foreign and loud. Run, it tells him. You could run. See how far you can get before the fail-safe triggers. Perhaps it’s farther than you think.

One of my favourite science fiction stories that I've read this year. Klune's story is a beautiful, heartbreaking, and bittersweet story about an android who has known nothing but work, wor, and more work his whole life, and has now come to the end of his lifespan. At the end, the android gets a few days to live his life in the outside world, to meet people, to do something other than work, before he has to report back to be destroyed and recycled. There's a tenderness to this quietly devastating story that broke my heart.

*

Rachel Is at a Protest, by Esther Alter in The Deadlands

There’s a new speaker, a Palestinian immigrant. He’s condemning Israel’s use of white phosphorous. He starts to describe how the weapon burns its victims’ clothing and skin before he abruptly stops, overcome by emotion. The crowd, maybe a couple hundred people, is shouting “SHAME! SHAME!” at Israel. Loudest of all are the handful of Jews. Not in our name. Never again.

Any story that deals with the conflict between Israel and Palestinians is going to cut and bruise you, and that is certainly true of Alter's powerful and unflinching tale. This story is excellent but gutting and I highly recommend reading Catherine E. Tobler's Editor's Note for this issue of The Deadlands before reading "Rachel Is at a Protest".

*

Way Up In De Middle Of De Air By Jamie Roballo in Fiyah #31

“I musta been thirteen, the night the stars fell.”

Papa Ezekiel sits in the rocking chair, boards creaking as the ancient porch sags beneath his weight. His hand drums on the arm rest, and a flake of the long-faded paint drifts down to the boards below. June watches it fall. She loves to watch things fall.

“Tell me again,” she says. She’s heard the story as long as she’s been alive; hell, like as not she’s heard it longer.

Roballo's story is a quiet and lyrical with a heart-piercing emotional sharpness that gave me goosebumps as I read it. June's grandfather is telling her the story of a starfall he experienced as a child, a story he has told her before, but this time he is telling the story to her in a different way, revealing a secret at the heart of it that changed him and maybe changed the world. 

*

The Darkness Between the Stars by Richard Thomas in Lightspeed

Buddy and I were the only kin either of us had left, really, the only ones we could trust. The summer days were dwindling and the final year lay before us. Beyond that, trade schools, and sorted employment, mundane tasks, and a vague promise of marital bliss—an apparent guarantee of soft flesh that we hardly understood.

Thomas's story is a coming-of-age tale woven into a story of time travel that beings on an old, dilapidated fairground, giving me vibes of both Bradbury and Stephen King. One twist I appreciated here is that the starting point for the story is not our present but a near future version of our world. There's a wistful tinge to the horror in Thomas's prose that really resonated with me.

*

Our Lady of the Clay by Daniela Tomova in Apex  

No signs protect the backyards in this part of town from the Marl Pits Forest. There’s no treeline either. Of course there isn’t. But even in the dark, you can’t really miss where the forest starts—not if you’ve lived a childhood in the wilderness here like Ansel has. He knows it by the way the ground softens underfoot and becomes springy like the flesh of a mushroom; by the way the dry weeds and runty wild apples start to lean back, as if recoiling; by the stars above.

A harrowing story about a terrible tragedy and a desperate attempt to set things right by appealing to a mysterious power. The real world entwines so tightly with the darkest kind of fairytale and magic here, and at the end, maybe a glimmer of light.

*

A Botanist’s Guide to Memory and Forgetting by E. M. Linden in Small Wonders

Plants that wipe memories are illegal, and for good reason. Too much potential for misuse, or just miscalculation. I don’t mean potatoes or hops, fermented into alcohol. I mean the real stuff, the heavy-duty blank-slate memory launders. Cloud-frond, for example. Too strong a dose will scour everything away, from the name of your lover to how to boil an egg. Too weak and it’ll backfire; whatever you try to forget will haunt you forever.

Oh, what a beautifully twisted little tale about memory and forgetting. I love the enigmatic and looping nature of the story. It's sharp, with some barbs and maybe some poison in the mix.

*

The Goddess of Loneliness and Misfortune by Anna Bendiy in Khoreo

Bohdana takes a sip. Scrunches up her nose. Then smiles. Baba Dasha hasn’t gotten any better at this over the years. Or maybe it’s the tired, untilled soil—too bitter to make good wine, no sweetness left for the grapes. Bohdana’s mother would say, This land eats everything up. You stay here long enough, myla, it will eat you up, too.

This is a wonderfully quirky and piercing story that includes a grumpy, grouchy goddess who looks nothing like you'd expect from a divine being, but that doesn't mean she doesn't wield some power. For me, this story captures the feeling, good and bad and points in between, of coming home and finding that both the place you returned to, and you, have changed. I love the way Bendiy eschews maudlin sentimentality, and instead goes for the harder, deeper truths of family, memory, grief, and belated homecomings.

*

In Tandem by Emilee Prado in Diabolical Plots

Sephina first noticed me when we were partnered for the three-legged race. It was Field Day, the last hurrah of eighth grade. I wasn’t quite as tall as her, wasn’t quite as lithe, but when we set off, it was as if our hips and knees and ankles were pistons that had always fired together. “One, two, one, two, one, two,” we counted, miles ahead of the others. We were surging so full of glee that we stumbled over the finish line and tumbled hard into the grass. But still, we’d won.

I love stories about friendship, and I love twisted stories about friendship. This one is definitely a twisted friendship story, and it's also an absolute delight. It has darkness and tragedy, it has a real edge, but it also captures the warmth and the fun that brought the friends together in the first place, long before the darkness overwhelmed them.

*

Operating Within Normal Parameters by Irette Y. Patterson in Translunar Travelers Lounge

Things run out. Everyone knows that. That’s life. But I never knew the last time I said goodnight – her in her cradle, me in my bed, would be the last time we’d talked. There was no warning, none at all.

I’d gotten back from my silver sneakers walk with the gang and she’d already been settled in her cradle. I didn’t think much of it at the time, suspecting it may be because she was older like me. After all, already her manufacturer had started pinging me about possible upgrades.

 I've said it before: I am a sucker for wistful, bittersweet robot stories (really, I'm a sucker for most robot stories), and Patterson's tale is a beautifully told science fiction tale with a robot at its center. It's a a story about loneliness, and about overcoming loneliness, and it's about finding a purpose and companionship even when you thought you couldn't. This is gentle, hopeful scifi, and I love every bit of it.

*

Once There Was Water by Katie McIvor in The Dark

In the cold dawn light, they carry the child out of the big house and down to the pond. The water is grey with submerged ice, striated mud frozen hard to its banks, and the reeds are swollen within whitish sheaths. The child is sickly. It shrieks and shrieks as they lower its thin body into the water.

This story winds its way through centuries, through geology, through the water. I love the way this movement through time, and through the landscape, gives the story its texture and presence. There's a darkness there, a strange and mostly hidden magic that stirs or sleeps and can be woken. McIvor gives the story a rich, haunting, gothic vibe and it's the kind of horror that pulls you deeper and deeper into the darkness as the story is told. 

*

There’s Always a Dragon by Jac Morris in Kaleidotrope

Maddie straddles the branch of the lilac tree, her skirt bunched up to her waist, but there’s no one to see her knickers and in any case the lime-green leaves hide everything except her scuffed school shoes. Tree bark chafes her thighs. It’s a price she’s willing to pay for riding bareback on a flying horse above the jungles of Africa. The air is heavy with floral scent, a potion created by an Archimage to befuddle and bewitch. Bees buzz in the center of the purple flowers, doing all they can to save Maddie from enchantment.

A brilliant and shattering story about childhood and the power of storytelling and fantasy. I love how this story captures the way a child thinks about stories, about imagination, and how it shows that playing out in the context of a very real and sometimes terrible world.

*

I have recently paused my Patreon, but I am still accepting tips on KoFi: https://ko-fi.com/mariahaskins

Maria's Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Horror Short Fiction Roundup #6 2024

The artwork for this roundup includes a detail of Madison Brake's cover art for Lightspeed #170. More about the artist at: https://www.madisonbrake.com/.

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The Ecological Impacts of Resurrection: a Field Study, by Corey Farrenkopf in The Deadlands

My father was a professor of Ethology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, focusing on the study of death rituals and burial behavior in mammals and their intersections with human traditions. He said he was going to write his next paper on the otters, maybe even his next book.

This story about a father, obsessed with the death rites of wild animals, is dark and strange with an undertow of sadness and grief that makes it cut deep and strike true. I love how the landscape, the family's past, and the science, blend with observations that are so off-kilter and profoundly weird that you can sort of feel reality shift under your feet as your reading.

The Rerebirth of Slick, by Stephen Kearse in The Deadlands

They buried us in Detroit. The plywood was thick as Aretha’s bosom, but I felt as free as her glorious voice. Wasn’t my fault their overlords and former owners had plundered their homes and retirement funds. Shit, I was the one who warned them the fix was in. But to my annoyance they fixated on me and set their pageant in motion, calling up Swanson Funeral Homes, filing permits, and setting a date. I should have flaked, but curiosity snared me: Surely, they weren’t serious?

Kearse’s story is, in his own words, about “the life, death, and afterlife of a very special word”, and that word is the N-word. If that sounds sort of out-there for a short story, I can only say: read this story. It is brilliant, sharp, beautifully crafted, with a voice, a rhythm, a flow that is powerful and devastating. Do not miss this story.

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The Museum of Cosmic Retribution by Megan Chee in Nightmare

Not many people wanted to visit the park in this weather, it seemed. He paused to look at the first display: King Qinguang raising his fist in judgment as he presided over souls entering the underworld. The virtuous would be sent across the golden and silver bridges into paradise. The evildoers would descend into the Courts of Hell for punishment.

Set in Haw Par Villa, which is a real place in Singapore where you will find, among other things, the 10 Courts of Hell, this story is a dark, but not grim, story of a boy who gets a guided tour with a very knowledgeable caretaker. That's only the setup, because from that point, Chee weaves stories within stories, with tales of aliens and distant planets, of good deeds and bad, of far-flung space empires, of cruelty and suffering, and also, beneath it all, empathy.

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The Last Lucid Day by Dominique Dickey in Lightspeed

You hear the beeping of your alarm and you know you’re dreaming, but you can’t wake up any more than you can pull yourself free of your father’s hands. He holds you down and tells you to count the seconds, show him how long you can hold your breath, but the only way to make sense of the numbers is to tally them on your fingers. He pushes you down deeper. He walks away.

It always ends with him walking away.

It always ends with you splashing in the deep end, alone.

Well holy cow, this story crushed me and somehow managed to uplift me, all at the same time. It’s about a fraught relationship with a father who is both fragile and frustrating, and it’s about the life his child has made in the wake of a childhood that was nowhere near perfect. Throw in a new kind of technology which makes it possible to know when a person is having their last really good, really lucid day, and you get a story with one heck of an emotional punch.

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Creature, by Kelsea Yu in Kaleidotrope

It wasn’t the blood or the pain that took Esther Chen by surprise; it was the waiting. Two full weeks after her chirpy doctor frowned at the ultrasound screen, a dozen test results finally confirmed what Esther had already known. The baby was gone.

After Esther suffers a miscarriage, a strange (hungry) creature stalks her everywhere. The creature has very sharp teeth, and it wants, needs, something from her. I love the way Yu tells both Esther's and Esther’s mother’s story here, and the way terrible, frightening, and destructive emotions are given both voice and shape.

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The Barricade by Joyce Ch’ng in IZ Digital

Now birds and solar panels didn’t mix. Or, at least, couldn’t co-exist well enough. Birds hit window panes, the wind fans, and solar panels. The local cells were all trying to find ways to deal with the issue. Shorter solar panels? Flatter solar panels? Solar panel fields? The problem was physical space, a problem their island state was always facing. For a long time, they have tried to solve the problem by going vertical. Up, up, and up.

If you need a bit of sunshine, and a bit of sea, and a bit of hope in your science fiction, then this story by Ch’ng is the right medicine. It’s a tale of the future, or at least one possible future, where things have changed, though not easily, and where people are trying to find new ways to live that don’t destroy and ravage the Earth as much as our current way of life.

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Within the Seed Lives the Fruit by Leah Andelsmith in Reckoning

Morning dawns and Lou has exactly nothing left to give. She goes out to the garden anyway because that’s the way she was taught, and she waters as the heavy hose drags behind her and threatens to knock down tomato plants or flatten the sweet potatoes. Between her tee shirt sleeves and leather work gloves are bare brown forearms and dark elbows. Her short Afro is salt and pepper all over, except at the temples, where it has begun to come in white. Her knees creak as she hefts the hose, and she stops for a moment to wipe sweat from her brow. That’s when she notices the mint. The bindweed is wrapped around the stalk.

This story made me cry and it made me smile. It holds within it a whole life, and the life of a farm and the plants grown on that farm, and it also holds life itself, growing and sprouting in weeds and vegetables alike. The prose shimmers and the story weaves itself into magic as Lou finds old buried treasures in the garden, as grief comes, and as Lou herself changes into something new, while still staying connected to the land she loves. A luminous story.

*

Joanna’s Bodies by Eugenia Triantafyllou in Psychopomp

The woman whose body Joanna is renting has a nosebleed. Joanna is about to get evicted again and she’s cranky about it. She screams at Eleni in another woman’s voice.

“Hey, this shit’s burning!”

This is an absolutely devastating and thoroughly compelling novelette about two friends, possession, resurrection, guilt, and grief. I have a thing for stories about complicated, twisted friendships, and this most certainly qualifies. Eleni has been bringing her dead friend Joanna back to life into different bodies ever since Joanna died, but life after death isn’t easy and does not get any easier with time. Woven through the fiction is Eleni’s reflections on what used to be her favourite movie: Jennifer’s Body, and I loved the way the story ties all its threads into a weave without forcing the pattern.

*

Linden Honey, Blackcurrant Wine by M.R. Robinson in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

The girl wore a marvelous gown as pale as winter butter and a wreath of bluebells crowned her golden curls. Her features were sharp and proud; she was as slight as a willow branch. The air around her shimmered like light on the water. She looked like no woman Irena had ever seen, and Irena knew immediately that she was no woman at all.

What a gorgeous, tender love story. Robinson’s prose gleams and shimmers as she tells us the tale of Irena, who is now an old woman, who goes back to see the love of her youth: a woodmaiden living among the birches. It’s a story of love and regret, but also of hope and joy, and every detail is bright and sparkling with life.

*

Our Father by K.J. Khan in Clarkesworld

Lila asks questions about the Horizon every time she visits. She plays games about being aboard it, where the food comes in tiny, dehydrated cubes, and the beds are lofted on top each other, so that every night is “like camping.” She doesn’t believe we could ever be bored, in such a paradise.

I love stories that tell a small, intimate tale while also giving you a much bigger, wider story that hovers around the edges of the smaller tale. Khan tells us such a story here. You can feel the presence of that larger world, and you feel its impact and its resonance in the smaller story, a story where we glimpse the bigger tale of space travel, generation ships, and the colonization of new planets through the tender, quiet moments of a family growing up, growing together, in an unusual place and under unusual circumstances.

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The Scientist Does Not Look Back by Kristen Koopman at Escape Pod (narrated by Ant Bacon, Valerie Valdes and Adam Pracht)

The technician at the morgue hesitated when releasing him to me. I’m not surprised, with the tone that took hold of my voice as I corrected her Mr. to Dr. as she took down my details. When I gave her my name, her pen stalled over the paper—a giveaway that his parents had called before I arrived. I should be grateful that she released him to me anyway, honoring my legal right to the body. I should be grateful for so much, I suppose, even if it doesn’t feel like it, to have this opportunity to—to not let his story end in tragedy.

According to the Escape Pod's story notes, Koopman describes this as an “unbury your gays” story and it is most certainly that. It is Frankenstein, but as a queer romance, where a determined/obsessed doctor works to bring back his lost love. There’s so much dark humour here, so much grief and love, as our protagonist deals with all the people, all the forces, who would rather see him give up and let the love of his life die. It’s a wonderful audio adaptation by Escape Pod.

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My bonus pick this time around is a terrific interview:

A Conversation with Sheree Renée Thomas - August 2, 2024

Sheree Renée Thomas is an award-winning fiction writer and poet, editor of the historic Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy and the groundbreaking anthology Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora. And she currently lives right here in her hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. George Larrimore hosts A Conversation with Sheree Renee Thomas.

 Not only do you get to hear Thomas talk about her writing and her work as an editor, but you also get to hear her read from some of her work. 

 

 

My Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Horror Short Fiction Roundup - #5 2024

 

The artwork for this roundup includes a detail of Tithi Luadthong's cover art for the April issue of The Dark. You can find out more about the artist at https://tithi-luadthong.pixels.com/.

☀

The Spindle of Necessity by B. Pladek in Strange Horizons

Andrew was convinced the writer had been trans. By this point his friends were tired of hearing about it, but he had no one else to tell besides the internet, and he was too smart for that. That would be asking for it.

This story quite simply knocks my socks off as it combines a very personal story with a big dollop of surrealism, timey-wimey stuff, and incisive thoughts on art. Andrew is somewhat obsessed with a writer named Samantha Finnes, “a minor historical novelist, unknown outside queer circles. In the mid-50s she’d written three books set during the World Wars.” He can't stop thinking about her and about how he believes she was trans. What happens next in this story is pretty darn mind-bending and I won’t spoil it, except to say that Pladek explores how we as readers interact with the fiction we read and how we might try to fit writers from the past into our own views of identity and self-expression. It’s a brilliant story that is going to be on my mind for a long time.

☀

Underdragon by Diana Dima in Giganotosaurus

Gabrielle’s face had always needed improvement. In the mornings, she worked face cream into her skin, smoothing over bumps and cracks, over the too-dry and too-moist places. She layered foundation. It shone on her fingers like a beautiful mirror glaze, but crumbled into dry flakes on her cheeks. Still, there were many steps to go. Powder. Bronzer. Highlighter.

GigaNotoSaurus is quite simply knocking it out of the park on a regular basis these days. (For example, "The Rainbow Bank" by Uchechukwu Nwaka won a Locus Award.) "Underdragon" is a subtly woven, deep, and quietly powerful story about daring to be who and what we really want to be, rather than trying to turn ourselves into what others want us to be. After using a new cream, Gabrielle begins a transformation that changes her life, and also changes her relationship with herself and her partner. I love how magic works in this story, and I love every bit of this tale of love, identity, and courage in the face of change.

☀

We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read by Caroline M. Yoachim in Lightspeed

ITERATION

This is our story, simplified: Life. Loss. Transformation. Love. Death. Iteration.

Science fiction stories about humanity receiving a message from the aliens are a dime a dozen, but Yoachim does something unique and pretty mind-blowing with her story. It’s a visual story in more than one way, one that repeats a pattern, and it’s also the kind of story that makes little sense when you describe it. Just read it and let the message find you.

☀

“This Week in Clinical Dance: Urgent Care at the Hastings Center” by Lauren Ring in Diabolical Plots

Brigitte Cole presents with lower abdominal pain, nausea, and a long-sleeved black leotard. She has a well-developed appearance and does not seem to be in acute distress. Her accompaniment for the evening is pianist Roy Weiss, a fixture of the local music scene whose minimalist style pairs well with the bold choreography of clinical dance.

Painfully funny and sharp as a scalpel, Ring’s story vividly brings to life what it can feel like to navigate any healthcare system when you’re in desperate need of help but cannot get the help you need. In a comment at Diabolical Plots, Ring says that the story “draws upon my own experiences as a disabled woman navigating the US healthcare system.”

“Six-Month Assessment on Miracle Fresh” by Anne Liberton in Diabolical Plots

Miracle Fresh is a soft drink produced by Spirits & Co. since 2027. The original pitch described a holy club soda blessed with droplets of blood from our devoted Messiah, something the average person could drink on the go, après-exercising, or even at [insert holy building of choice] without requiring long tiresome religious proceedings. 

Another darkly funny and rather unsettling story from Diabolical Plots, this time about a very special kind of soft drink. I love the wicked sense of humour and the way Liberton tells a very big story in a very specific format.

☀

Imago by Steve Rasnic Tem in The Dark

Sometimes he’d wake up in the middle of the night thinking others were living in his house. Not intruders. Not burglars. They were full-time residents. They had voices too tiny to hear but put them all together and they suggested the most dreadful noise.

This is a quiet and haunting story, and one that depicts an inner transformation and expresses it through the transformation of a man’s surroundings. I love the way this story captures a sense of loneliness and claustrophobic anxiety. It’s terrible and beautiful all at once. Steve Rasnic Tem has written several stories in recent years that capture the process and subtle (and not so subtle) horrors of aging, including the devastating "Memoria" in The Deadlands.

Water Like Broken Glass by Carina Bissett in The Dark

When does a woman become a witch?

It’s different for all of us. Some come to it naturally. Others struggle for a while.

For me, that contest of arms started in a few inches of water with my lover’s hands firmly pressed down on the back of my neck.

He won.

Bissett’s story about a woman who transforms and finds a new kind of power after her lover drowns her in a river, has the feel of fairytale and folklore, but it’s threaded firmly into our own world. Love finds her, even when she doesn’t think it can find her anymore, but then that love transforms into something else. I really like how Bissett works with the shades of grey for each character here, and how guilt and love and the longing for a different kind of life are all twisted together at the story’s center.

☀

Mother’s Milk by Annika Barranti Klein in Weird Horror

She was and she was not changing.

August woke up at 4 most mornings. The boys slept through the night now — had for years — but she’d lost the ability to sleep in. This time of night (morning? It didn’t feel like morning yet) was the in-between: no one was demanding anything of her; she was and she was not a mother, a partner, a copywriter. She was and she was not perimenopausal, checking her phone only to find notifications reading “your cycle is due to start soon,” “your cycle is two (four, six) days past due.” She was and she was not pregnant.

I love stories about motherhood and parenthood, especially when they are as sharp and as full of teeth and darkness as this one. August’s body is changing and she tries to hold back the truth of the transformation with lotions and by talking to her mother and by wearing her husband's shoes, but she no longer fits into her old self. The story has a terrific surreal vibe, and I appreciated that the strange transformation doesn't necessarily feel unwelcome. This is a story that feels true to real life in all its strangeness.

☀

Down the Dust Hatch by Derrick Boden in Apex Magazine

Life is transactional. Give this, get that. It’s the first law of thermodynamics, nothing personal. No sense getting dust-fucked over it.

But you already know that.

A great science fiction story about the harsh rules of survival on “a decrepit mining base that’s clamped to the side of its asteroid like a barnacle.” On social media, Boden describes it as "a story about running out of air (and friends, and morals, and everything else) on an asteroid." After someone blows up several of the mining base's tanks of reserve oxygen, the crew has to be culled occasionally while they’re waiting to be resupplied. Desperate circumstances lead people to do desperate things, but not everyone is as selfish, or as easily suckered, as you might think.

☀

Katya Vasilievna and the Second Drowning of Baba Rechka by Christine Hanolsy in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

I knew what I looked like: my hair, long and water-dark, hanging to my knees; my arms, pale and slender. My eyes, too, were dark, like the deep pools by the riverbank where the sun did not reach. Young men had written poems about my eyes, once; women too. My clothing had long since rotted away, but what use had I for shifts and sarafans? I clothed myself in my own hair, in river weeds and trailing flowers.

A stunningly good rusalka story that feels old and new at the same time. Hanolsy’s prose has a gorgeous sing-song melody to it that is exquisitely crafted. As for the story, well, what happens when a rusalka meets a beautiful woman, is smitten by her, and then tainted by a mortal soul? Love is not an easy thing when the world intrudes in the form of arranged marriages and curses and magic that binds. Sometimes you might even need a bit of help, such as it is, from Baba Yaga.

An Uncanny Patch and Uncanny Hole: The Final Account from the Records of Ptaten, Imperial Surveyor by Cara Masten DiGirolamo in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

What is a map?

It is an aspiration, I would say—an attempt to draw the world and thus gain power over it. Some maps use more sympathetic magic than others—those hopeful routes that skirt demarcated dangers, promising riches on the other side. They are exciting, and sometimes they are reasonably accurate. Sometimes. “Danger here” does not mean a lack of danger elsewhere.

A strange area appears in the realm being mapped by our narrator, a surveyor. The strange phenomenon is described by witnesses as “an encroaching plot of death”, and its presence soon has terrifying consequences when a leader tries to make use of it for their own ends. There's a terrific mysterious and deeply enigmatic quality at the heart of the story, and what resonated with me was how people in power would immediately try to use this mystery for their own ends, even when they do not understand what they are dealing with.

 ☀

The Dark Devices by Bruce McAllister in Nightmare

At the tiny abbey in the province of Tasselt—the only abbey in the region with both an abbot and his monks and a dozen nuns as well (a temporary matter that had somehow become permanent)—the abbot, whose skin had gotten paler even as the veins beneath it had become more pronounced, and who preferred darkness to light of any kind, had taken over the West section of the abbey, with its many, darker rooms.

A wonderfully shadowy and chilling story. Something terrible is happening at the abbey and Pieter goes to set things right, but it’s not so easy to get away from the darkness once you have entered it, no matter how good your intentions were.

☀

In addition to the short stories, I also want to recommend two non-fiction reads:

Ursula K. Le Guin on How to Become a Writer (Step One: Write) by Ursula K. Le Guin in Literary Hub

How do you become a writer? Answer: you write.

It’s amazing how much resentment and disgust and evasion this answer can arouse. Even among writers, believe me. It is one of those Horrible Truths one would rather not face.

Le Guin talking about art and writing and how to become a writer? That’s obviously a must-read.

☀

A Woman Who Left Society To Live With Bears Weighs In On “Man Or Bear” by Laura Killingbeck in Bikepacking.com

When I was 23, I packed up my bike and camping gear and caught a one-way flight to Alaska. My relationship with mankind no longer felt tenable. I didn’t want to be female in society; I wanted to be free. I spent the next three and a half months pedaling down North America’s grizzly-filled coast from Anchorage to San Francisco. Out there in that rugged expanse, with my body in motion and my heart unfurled, I found boundless joy. And that joy did make me a little more free. 

This is the best take on the man vs. bear debacle that I’ve seen online.

☺

My Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Horror Short Fiction Roundup is an Aurora Award Nominee in the Best Fan Writing and Publication category!