My Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Horror Short Fiction Roundup for May, 2023

 

The artwork for this roundup includes a detail of Cynthia Sheppard's cover for The Deadlands #24. More about the artist: http://www.cynthia-sheppard.com/. (Fair warning: this issue of The Deadlands also contains my essay "A Dog, a Heart, a Box of Ashes, or Whom Rhodope Shed Tears For".)

An audio version of this roundup is available on YouTube:

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AnyPercent by Andrew Dana Hudson in GigaNotoSaurus

When he wasn’t scouting, Luckless was running. Here’s what that looked like: you slather on the electroconductive gel, hook up the halo that reroutes your nervous system, press and hold START, and boom—it’s midnight on your 18th birthday, in a different body, a different identity, a new clutch of memories swirling in your simulated hippocampus.

What an amazing roller coaster ride of a story this is. It takes you into the life, or rather lives of Luckless, a man who plays the game AnyLife where you enter a very realistic virtual reality and can live countless lives in mere minutes and hours. In the game, you can be many things, strive for many different goals, and one of the ultimate goals for many players is to reach Economic Victory, to become the richest person in that in-game world, and to do it in the shortest possible time. Luckless becomes obsessed with reaching that goal, but it ends up costing him a lot in his real life. I've read a lot of great stories that deal with games and virtual reality and how they can intersect and affect our lives, and Hudson's story takes some interesting and unique twists and turns along the way, spinning a multi-faceted and deeply thought-provoking tale. As he spirals into his obsession with beating the game and "winning", Luckless abandons the relaxed way he used to play and enjoy AnyLife. He tries every trick he knows, and every trick he learns, in order to reach the top. And eventually, he does find a revolutionary way to win. I love how Hudson shows us that while the game is a simulation of real life, it also has the potential to affect Luckless, and other players, in real, profound and life-changing ways.

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Bruised-EyeDusk by Jonathan Louis Duckworth in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Rugg the spellbreaker was only passing through the Devil’s Palm on his way down to the coast, where he hoped to find his mother. He’d have avoided Ganvill, except he was running low on boom powder and salt, and the little settlement was the last tame place before a lot of nowhere.

After reading this wonderful and absolutely captivating story, I would like to follow Rugg the spellbreaker and his gator Tugboat anywhere, any time. Duckworth spins a hugely enjoyable tale where there is magic, sweet and sour, and where people are trying to find a way to live their lives in peace after war and tribulation. The language here is an utter joy to read, and a prime example of how to weave and stitch the worldbuilding into the fabric of your prose and story.

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AnAtlas of Names and Footprints and Thoughts Unsaid by Carlie St. George in IZ Digital

 Monsters play by certain rules; all you truly need know is which game you agreed to play. But a case means a human culprit, and humans cheat; it’s what they do. A human will break any law, any promise, any salt line in order to keep their sins secret and safe.

Cimcim, not quite human, can bend the rules better than most – but she feels the weight of it, of compulsion, obligation. More likely than not, it’ll put her in the ground someday.

Oh, this story is an absolute, gosh-darn delight. It's a story about monster hunting, about investigations and deductions, about ghosts and demons, murders, and sharp sharp teeth. But most of all, this is an intricately woven, complex, and conflicted love story, between Cimcim, not quite human, and Yesterday, "round, beautiful, with soft, thick, inviting arms that Cimcim has slept inside before when shelter was scarce". Cimcim keeps things, has kept things, about her true nature from Yesterday, and the relationship between them is deep and profound, but also fraught with things unsaid and undone. It is a gorgeous tale, with all its monsters and all its longing, spoken and unspoken.

More about IZ Digital: 

IZ Digital is the digital offshoot of Interzone. It publishes fiction and non-fiction from all over the planet. Every story is illustrated with full-colour art. 

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A Toitele by Celia Rostow in The Dark

All that remained of Chana came back from Kraków in a little wooden box: a golden chain with a pendant, a palm facing out with a carved unblinking eye to protect from evil.

Chana’s death lived on the mantle in the main room of the house, where it would gather dust if Rochel didn’t clean it once a week before shabbos, along with everything else in their little home. There had been no note, but even if there had, Rochel knew that Dovid wouldn’t have read it. The only reason she knew the box contained a chain was because he had opened it for half a heartbeat before snapping it shut again.

Rostow describes this gorgeously wrought story about a ghost, and a ghostly lover as "queer Jewish erotic horror". It's also a story about tight-knit and fracturing relationships, between Dovid and Rochel in their marriage, and between Rochel and Chana who were once the closest of friends, before life separated them. I love the darkness and the fire of this story, and I love the way it captures Rochel's complicated and complex feelings about her own identity, her place in the world, as well as her husband Dovid and her friend Chana.

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The Pigeon-Keepers Daughter by Su-Yee Lin in Strange Horizons

It is in the summer, during the monsoon season in Taipei, when the pigeon keeper’s daughter moves into the apartment on the top floor of a building on an alleyway in Wenshan District. From her window, she sees not only Taipei 101 in the distance with Elephant Mountain behind it, but also the rooftop of the building abutting hers. Her mind recognizes those buildings atop that roof, the ladder leading to a sitting area, the shoddy tin roofing above the makeshift coop, even the old man with his shock of white hair, and she is hit with nostalgia for a past not so long ago.

I can't even properly describe how much I love this gentle, quiet, utterly gorgeous and devastating story. There is shapeshifting and magic here, there's a quiet life lived on the outskirts of society, there is the sound of birds and the memories they evoke, and there is a longing and the lost memories of a past the protagonist cannot quite grasp. One of the most beautiful and emotionally powerful stories I've read in a long time.

The Miraculous Account Of Khaja Bairaq, Pennant-Saint Of Zabel by Tanvir Ahmed in Strange Horizons

It is said that when Bibi Siti wrapped herself in the pennant, the cloth was soaked by her blessed sweat and warmed by the prayers she breathed into it. Overflowing with her wild graces, the pennant pledged itself to the same way of truth and righteousness, out of adoration for the saint who had held it close.

Tanvir Ahmed writes prose that enchants and glitters, that has the texture and gloss of fairytale, myth, and history, while telling stories that feel brand new and ancient, all at the same time. I read and loved Ahmed's story in The Deadlands, "A Dervish Among the Graves of Ghazni", and this story in Strange Horizons is just as lush, just as fierce, and just as devastatingly gorgeous.

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Every Time the Circus Comes to Town by Fred Coppersmith in Etherea Magazine

Every time the circus comes to town, someone dies.

It was only a few years ago that comic, death-defying spectacle was the circus’ bread and butter. The audience couldn’t go a night without seeing one of the clowns snatched at the last minute from the lion’s jaws or saved from a perilous drop by an acrobat and a well-timed seltzer bottle. Back then, there were sword-swallowers and red-nosed knife-throwers aplenty. The crowds would cheer as tiny cars spilled pancake-makeup-covered faces through rings of fire so hot they’d singe the electric-colored curls of the clown collective’s wigs.

But that was back when death could still be defied. That was before the curse.

Coppersmith puts his own unique spin on the cursed traveling circus here, in a tale that blends fantasy with strands of horror. This circus is a place where magic is at work, where someone must die and where Death will always get their due. But then something happens: a new employee at the circus turns the tables on the curse, and on Death itself. I love the Bradbury-esque vibes here, and the gentle way Coppersmith inverts and subverts some well-known genre tropes.

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The Bleak Communion of Abandoned Things by Ariel Marken Jack (narrated by Kitty Sarkozy) in PseudoPod

I accept the house in lieu of a settlement. I don’t want Ashley’s dirty money. The house is the least ill-gotten thing she owns, an isolated property she won in a card game and forgot. We’ve never even been there. I’m hoping that the lack of shared memories will make it a perfect place to hole up while I try to get over her and get on with my life. I’m comforted by the fact that the house is supposed to be haunted. I don’t think I’m quite ready to be alone.

Yes, I do love haunted house stories, and this haunted house story is magnificent. Here, the person moving in actually welcomes the haunted presence in the house and soon establishes a close relationship with it as she cleans and dusts and fixes up the old abandoned house. But few things come without a price, and sometimes, when something seems too good to be true, it really REALLY is. There's an undercurrent of (sometimes dysfunctional) love to this horror that is beautifully subversive as it explores profound feelings of both loneliness and belonging.

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She Blooms and the World is Changed by Izzy Wasserstein in Lightspeed

I was six months old when we landed on Lilit. Sera was born three years later. Now I wonder: was I born too soon? Or was she born too late?

A fantastic, gripping, and deeply thoughtprovoking story about two sisters, and the new planet their parents have brought them to. While the parents try their best to shield the planet, Lilit, from any interference and contact with the family, the sisters take a different path. What's happening to the younger sister is proof that contact has already occurred. Can we cut ourselves off from a world and just observe it? Can we live (should we even try to live) without changing, and being changed, by the world around us? Wasserstein's story is a beautiful exploration of change, the fear of change, and what we can find on the other side of that fear.

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A Chestnut, A Persimmon, A Cunning Lie by Michelle Denham (narrated by Isabel Kim) at Podcastle

Haewon’s Omoni brought home the tiger-hearted girl and said, “This is your sister, Hyojin. She has been reborn to us, isn’t that wonderful?”

The tiger-hearted girl had amber eyes that burned, red stripes on her face, and long white teeth that gleamed in the dark. Omoni looked at Haewon like she expected her to do something. (A chestnut. A persimmon. A cunning lie.) So Haewon threw her arms around the tiger-hearted girl and said, “Hyojin-ah! I thought we’d never see each other again. I missed you so much.”

I absolutely LOVE this fairytale-tinged story of two sisters and a mother who find a way to live, and make a family, at the edge of a precipice. There are so many facets and so many layers to this story: deception in order to survive, violence and power in society and a family. And also: how do we see those around us? and how are they, and we, changed by how we see them? Denham's story is both gorgeous and powerful as it delves deep into one family, and the power of truths and lies.

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Jar by Erin Brown in The Deadlands

They say the Jar standing high on the hill above the city, silhouetted against the sky, alone and imposing, is the eternal stomach of the River God of the Valley, who is praised to devour us one by one. But one doesn’t have to be in the Jar for his digestion of your flesh to begin. I knew this—it was in all the teachings—but I didn’t understand until he chose me.

I adore this beautifully strange and gorgeously crafted short story by Brown. There's a good amount of body horror and some rather gory details here, but they are set in a story that seems to me to be about the transcendence, and the transformation after death -- diving deep into a metaphysical reality beyond the horror of decaying and digested bodies. I particularly like how Brown makes the ritual, the transformation, of Death and digestion so visceral in its details and yet also so lyrical. It's a truly unique take on the afterlife, and a must-read, as far as I'm concerned. 

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Carapace by Angela Sylvaine in Dose of Dread from Dread Stone Press

It started with the red heel. Or pump, as my mother called them. I saw it while walking to school with the other kids in my neighborhood. A single red high-heel in the middle of the street. Some of the kids blew it off, didn’t care, while others insisted they couldn’t see it at all. Playing pranks on me, as usual.

A lovely slice of unsettling and surreal darkness that feels like it pays an almost tongue-in-cheek homage to Kafka. I love the deceptive simplicity of this story, and how that simplicity hides layers of meaning and horror, all lurking beneath that surface.

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Come Out, Come Out by Myna Chang in Radon Journal

Nati wanted her mother. She needed her mother’s jellied eyes and flesh-whorled fingers. Her heat. The chill of the ruined space station gnawed at Nati’s biometal bones, leached into her human-tinged processing lobes. She was tired of the cold.

An excellently creepy and unsettling slice of science fiction flash. Motherhood can be dangerous and have unexpected consequences, as we find out here. I love the way Chang blends love and longing with fierce, even obsessive, determination.

Money Thirst by Eva Papasoulioti in Radon Journal

“Water is overrated,” they say, and you agree. You’ve been drinking nothing but water for the past year and think, well, you can easily do without. For this kind of money, you definitely can.

What if you could earn a lot of money, just by never ever drinking water again? This is a wicked sharp story about a near future where the protagonist signs a lucrative contract with an energy drink manufacturer, but the terms of the contract might be more than they bargained for... Everything in this story is sharp and jagged, and it has such a deliciously dark and sinister vibe. What can I say? I just love the pitch-black sense of humour and the way it cuts so close to the bone.

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How to Stay Married to Baba Yaga by S.M. Hallow in Baffling Magazine

7. In the woods, in the dark, your heart thuds and your breath makes ghosts in the starlight. Nothing here will harm you, but when you stand between white pillars of petrified sycamores, you feel the way you did the night you met her, when you were just another Vasilisa, another Yelena, another Marya, another Ivan Ivanovich: another lost soul in a litany of lost souls whose skulls stake the path to her door. Don’t ever forget how your story started.

A beautifully layered, and thoroughly devastating story about Baba Yaga, written as a list of tips. There's such richness in every detail of this story, in the way it brings together different versions and parts of the tale into a new whole. And there's an emotional depth here where love and pain and fear run through everything. Hallow uses the old expertly and makes it into something new and heartrending.

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Quandary Aminu vs The Butterfly Man by Rich Larson in TOR.com

“Thought it’d be bigger,” Jow says, to mask the crawling in his spine.

“You spilled some,” the woman says.

The butterfly man doesn’t breathe like a human, no familiar up-and-down locomotion to the ribcage. Instead, its whole body seems to ripple.

“We used to play butterfly man, when we were little,” Jow says. “Me and my sisters. Always imagined it bigger. Scarier.”

How scary can something be when it's called a "butterfly man"? Turns out, pretty freaking scary. In Larson's brutally entertaining science fiction tale, we follow Quandary Aminu who is trying to survive the butterfly man sent to kill her. To quote the story description at TOR:

When an illicit trade deal goes wrong and Quandary is blamed for it, she goes on the run to avoid the crosshairs of a bioengineered killer that only lives for 24 hours. If Q can evade it for that long, she just might survive.

This is a high-powered, fast-moving story with a squishy, regenerating body-horror center (the creation of the butterfly man in a bathtub is the stuff of sci-fi nightmares), and I enjoyed every bit of it.

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Timekeeper's Symphony by Ken Liu in Clarkesworld

While the question of whether the nature of the universe is continuous or discrete remains hotly debated, there is sufficient consensus that consciousness doesn’t so much flow like a smooth river as leap forward from moment to moment, a glistening frog atop a drifting lily pad.

Any story by Ken Liu is a must-read, and this story, about the way time is experienced, differently by various creatures in various parts of the galaxy is a mind-bending, thought-provoking trip. I love the way Liu takes big scientific, and science-fiction-y, concepts and turns them into lyrical beauties. Here, Liu explores the concept that a creature's metabolic rate is linked to its perception of time, and it is a fascinating and profoundly haunting read.

The Massage Lady at Munjeon Road Bathhouse by Isabel J. Kim in Clarkesworld

Kim Jinah has worked at the Munjeong Road bathhouse for six years. She’s scrubbed the tiles of the large baths. She’s manned the counter that sells squeeze packs of shampoo, baked eggs, and cold drinks. Jinah is now a massage lady. It’s not a glamorous job.

Jinah stands in her old underwear and scrapes the future from women’s skin. Their scales fall to the floor. The women sit up scoured red and smooth.

A thoroughly wonderful and uniquely imagined story where a person's future shows up as scales on their skin, and the thicker and harder the scales become, the less possibility there is of change for that person. Most people cannot see the scales, but Jinah, the massage lady, can. She scrubs away the scales on the women who come to the bathhouse, and also ponders her own scales. Kim tells this story with such gentle and insightful voice, exploring the joy and fear of change, and what futures and what choices we might impose on ourselves and others. What choices would we make if we were less set in our ways, less covered in hard scales? And what choices would we allow others to make if we allowed ourselves and them more freedom? 

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My Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Horror Short Fiction Roundup - April 2023

 

The artwork for this roundup includes a detail of DM7's art for Lightspeed #155. More about the artist at https://www.deviantart.com/dm7

An audio version of this roundup is available on YouTube:

The Time Traveler’s Cookbook by Angela Liu in Cast of Wonders (narrated by May Chong)

Don’t eat dinosaur. Just don’t. Mom marked it as a must-have, saying it looks and tastes “like an exotic giant chicken,” but just getting to the meat has been a nightmare. The skin’s teeth breakingly-tough and the sucker hooked me in the thigh with one of its nasty claws during the hunt. I’ve staunched the bleeding with Happy Time Traveler’s super medical glue, but holy hell it still hurts.

Oh how I love this story. It's a time travel story that is both whimsical and heartbreaking. The food, the recipes, the time travel tips... they're all fabulous and funny, but Liu's story is also a deeply emotional tale about family and grief and about trying to find a way to move forward, even when it's the hardest thing we'll ever do.

Crown Prince by Melissa Mead in Cast of Wonders (narrated by Jordan Kurella)

Behind a gauze screen, Crown Prince Manu slumps in his cushions. He’s grateful for the screen, hiding his lapse from Father’s petitioners. It takes so much energy to maintain his Stupid Body in anything like a posture of alertness. The more effort he puts forth, the more it writhes about. The law says that he, the Only Royal Son, must be present at all official proceedings, but behind the screen no one can see him if he chooses to save his energy for listening. He always listens. And remembers.

This is a fairytale about Manu, a prince with a difference: he has cerebral palsy. Mead's story deals with cerebral palsy, the challenges for Manu, and how his condition makes others view him differently and often underestimate him (sometimes at their peril!). To quote the CoW story commentary:

 Accessibility isn’t just about giving people access to support tools to engage more fully with society – it’s also about re-shaping society such that all people are included, regardless of their circumstances, with as much or as little extra support as they want or need.

I love this story for its fresh perspective and its terrific characters, and I also love it for the entertaining palace intrigue. Sadly, Mead passed away in 2022 before this story was accepted and published by Cast of Wonders. 

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, Bird by Uyen Dang in Necessary Fiction

Several years ago, the rain started stripping people of their memories. With every rain a memory or two would dissolve into oblivion only to later reappear, suddenly, in physical form, at the edge of the city. Cats, childhood homes, a beloved dead houseplant… Some believed it was a weird symptom of climate change. Others said it was divine punishment, that the rain was actually godly spit, an amnesiac. Hard to believe, but they claimed it true. There was something vengeful happening here, they could feel it.

This is a surreal and uniquely imagined story where memories are stripped away but do not disappear. I love the unabashed strangeness here, and the way that strangeness is made real and tangible. Dang's evocative prose has the feel and melody of poetry, giving this story real depth and heart. 

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Through the Glass, a Full Sea by P.H. Low in Apparition Lit

There is a girl behind the mirror.

You see her first when you are five, pinching your nose and cheeks and wondering if the greenish shade of your skin, which you’ll later learn is just the tint of glass, means you are made of cheese. She moves a half-breath before you do; speaks a language you have already forgotten, her pink mouth forming a childish perfect

Nǐ sì séi?

A life, and the process of trying to understand yourself and the world and what your life can be, what YOU can be and what you want to be, is captured with exquisite brilliance in this short story. Low twists in a strand of horror, with the recurring presence in mirrors and other reflections, but the pain of this story goes beyond horror tropes. Beautiful, heart-rending darkness.

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The Librarian and the Robot by Shi Heiyao in Clarkesworld (translated by Andy Dudak)

One day, the Curator salvaged a robot. It was a model ST-19, a military machine, designed for search and destroy missions. The Curator found it outside in a knee-deep snowdrift. The robot’s ship had crashed into a hill two kilometers away, the explosion cutting the summit right off.

A lquietly moving science fiction story about a far-future where humans have left Earth and colonized other planets, but where one person, the Curator, has returned to the old home-planet. There, she finds an old library and begins to salvage books. And when she salvages a military robot, she finds new uses for it too. I love the gentleness of this story as it explores human nature and the nature of artificial intelligence, and how we can become something different than the world wants to make us into.

Voices Singing in the Void by Rajan Khanna in Clarkesworld

On Narraweena-4, the Builders have begun.

A Worker drone surveys its assigned territory as its tunneler beam warms. A fluting call pierces the air, answered by a warbling trill. The drone pauses. Its code, shared with others of its kind, sings the story across their web. A Scanner glides free of its dock, winging toward the lifeforms, far enough away that it won’t alarm them. Optics and sensors identify two arboreal creatures, each clinging to a tree branch, their gray, spotted hide fringed by feathers of blue and vermilion.

A hauntingly beautiful science fiction story with a deep sadness and sense of loss at its heart, yet it's not without hope and wonder. On various planets in the universe, human-constructed artificial Builders have constructed places where people were supposed to live, and yet, no people have arrived. Khanna's story travels to these different worlds and sees them through the eyes and minds of the Builders, and then returns to Earth where we learn the difficult truth. There's an epic sweep and feel to this story that gave me chills.

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One Eye Opened in That Other Place by Christi Nogle in Three-Lobed Burning Eye

They were tied up together from the start: Dottie and that other place. That other place, that other eye. Charles didn’t like to think of it as a third eye, though that’s what it was. It wasn’t in his forehead, wasn’t in the center of his face at all. Instead, it rested between the right side of his nose and the tear duct. It wasn’t actually there, of course, and yet it felt like it was there.

A new issue of Three-Lobed Burning Eye is always good news if you like your speculative fiction dark and weird. Nogle's story, about a man who can see another place with his third eye, is dark and weird and deliriously unsettling. There's a quiet, ever-increasing strangeness to this story that is both mesmerizing and disturbing. And the ending? The ending is a scream.

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Kudzu Boy Dreaming by SJ Powell in FIYAH #26

He’s ten years old when he finds the body in the kudzu patch.

A boy and his mother live in a house where there is magic, both protective magic and terrifying magic, at play. Beyond the house, the kudzu grows and one day, the boy finds a dead body there. Powell's story has a dreamlike undercurrent, but is also firmly rooted in a real and vividly drawn world, that is seen through a child's perspective: what is real and what isn't, what is dangerous and what is not, are not always easy to determine. And there's a dream/nightmare sequence in this story that is absolute terrifying perfection, and that scene is going to haunt me for a while.

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Root Canticle by Natasha King in Nightmare

Oh, dear. Don’t bother going back up the stairs. Yes, they exist still, but the door at the top will no longer take you anywhere you would wish to go. Look—the vines, if that is what we want to call them, have made some room. Sit.

I love this unsettling, hallucinogenic, twisting tale that goes into the past and into the earth, and into bodies as well. There's an old magic at work here, old stories and tales that have taken root, and King spins a beautifully mesmerizing tale from all of it.

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Victory Condition by Eliot Peper in Anthropocene

Yes, the Golden Gate Bridge still stands—one of the few historical artifactchs outside the city’s gleaming walls. Of course, the bridge no longer serves the purpose for which it was built: to offer vehicles efficient passage up and down the California coast. Now, it’s primarily a wildlife crossing for wolves, grizzlies, antelope, jaguars, coyotes, and elk. People visit too.

A thought-provoking future tale by Peper about a world, and a city, that has changed fundamentally and where human beings are finding new ways to live. Peper has some interesting thoughts on this future SF, but what I loved the most about this story is the way it interweaves the history of old San Francisco with the future of the new, and the way both nature and city feature so prominently in the telling.

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Our Exquisite Delights by Megan Chee in Lightspeed

Almost everyone has, at some point in their lives, encountered a door that was not there before.

A little girl sits up in bed, staring at the two identical closets in her bedroom. She feels certain there had been only one when she fell asleep.

Oh, this is a great twist on portal fantasies, and all those fantasy tales about doors, leading people to other places. Here, we see these doorways from the other side, from the perspective of whatever lives beyond those doors. There's slow-burning twist to this tale and the point of view of the narrator that makes it even more satisfying.

Construction Sacrifice by Bogi Takács in Lightspeed

There’s dysphoria, and then there’s turning into a mid-size city. But sometimes you try male, you try female, you try different kinds of nonbinary and it only makes you realize that something still doesn’t quite fit, something fundamental. There is a mismatch.

What an absolutely enthralling story this is. It’s told from two points of view: one is the city of Fejértorony, a city that has a mind of its own quite literally; the other is Mihue, a scholar called a clairvoyant who comes to the city to study it and gain a deeper understanding. What follows is a connection between these two that has unexpected and life-altering consequences for them both. Takács calls it a “a secondary-world science fantasy story about trans love in difficult circumstances.” And for more about the inspiration for the story, read the excellent interview in Lightspeed: https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-bogi-takacs-2/

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Locavore by Kim Harbridge in Strange Horizons

It forced itself to take that last step onto the ferry. Every step further from land felt like falling. Through space, through time, through every place it had ever been. It kept its eyes open, its features arranged in what it hoped was a neutral expression. Somehow, it walked itself up to the small covered passenger deck and took a seat on a plastic bench. The boat began to move.

This is such an excellent and fresh take on a horror story of shapeshifting monsters. Being a shapeshifter and a monster, isn't always easy as this story points out. You have to be careful, you have to consider your options, in order not to get caught, not to get found out and still survive. Harbridge's story is both quiet and powerful, and I love the intimate, under-the-skin view we get of the kind of being that is usually only glimpsed in the shadows.

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The Air Will Catch Us by Rajiv Moté in Reckoning

Walking is different now. The air resists my habitual gait. Little hops lift me into the thickened atmosphere that slows my return to Earth. It’s undignified, but it’s past time I got used to this. I’m not that old. I bob along after her.

A quiet, contemplative science fiction story set in a future where humanity has had to make some drastic changes in order to survive. These changes are the new reality for the children growing up in it, but for those who still remember the world, and the air, as it once was, it's a different story. There's a bitter-sweetness and wistfulness to this story that really got to me.

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The Dark House by A.C. Wise in TOR.com

It didn’t help that darkness crowded the edges of the photograph, smudged, like thousands of fingerprints marring the picture over the years. I would have blamed the quality of the reproduction, except the shadows gathered in the windows too. They didn’t reflect light so much as hold it at bay.

A profoundly unsettling and increasingly harrowing story by A.C. Wise about a house, about the ghosts that haunt that house, and about the lives that seem tied to the photos left behind in that house. There's a terrifying inevitability to the horror here: everything has happened before and will happen again. Wise has a terrific ability to crank up the intensity of horror with masterful precision, and that skill is on full display in this story.

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The Lone Drummer by A.G. Lamar in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

I love stories that tie together music and magic, and in A.G. Lamar’s story, we find ourselves in world where songs and drumming can be used for peaceful purpose, like making crops grow, and for war, as a weapon to defeat your enemy on the battlefield. Kamu is a young boy with a great gift for drum magic. At a young age, his father sent him off to hone his skills and become part of the royal army. Lamar’s story is a multi-layered and fascinating look at a society that wields magic for a variety of purposes, and at the heart of the story is Kamu, who is so very good at magic and drumming, but who is also deeply conflicted by going to war, and who still carries the pain of being sent away from his family when he was only 10 years old. It makes for a riveting and thoroughly compelling read set in a fascinating world.

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We, the Ones Who Raised Sam Gowers from the Dead by Cynthia Zhang in PseudoPod (narrated by Serah Eley)

There’s a profound fierceness and anger fueling this story, making it intensely powerful and affecting.

Yes, to answer your questions, we were the ones who did it; we were the ones who dabbled into the forbidden arts, who so casually threw away the good Christian values of our country for a flash of bloody vengeance. We are the ones you want, the ones who raised Sam Gowers from the dead.

The voice of the story is so strong and bold, and I love how it never shies away from telling us the truths we already know but sometimes try not to face: the injustice, the cruelty, the bigotry, the violence faced by Sam Gowers and others like him. Oh yes, I love the sharp teeth of this story, the raw emotion that runs through it, and I love how powerlessness is turned into unexpected, unimaginable power when necromancy is used.

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A Thousand Echoes in One Voice by Deborah L. Davitt in Podcastle (narrated by Dave Robison)

At first, you didn’t really commit to it. You only explored on weekends. Then it became an all-consuming obsession. You took your instructions from the hidden graffiti. Your only guide, the only proof that there were others like you. Your sole consolation.

The others exist. Some of them must go home again. And some of them never can. Caught, perhaps, when a reality blinks out of existence.

Oh, my kind of story: a messed up timetravel tale, where different choices make new timelines, where worlds diverge and join, and where the paths to the past and the future and the other worlds are difficult to find and understand. Davitt’s story is haunting and evocative, with a deep and dark heart. That ending gave me bone-deep chills.

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Sounds for Crustaceans by Addison Smith in Fantasy Magazine

OK, so a while back I was talking on Twitter about crabs and how easily lifeforms through the eons seem to turn into crabs (it’s a thing!), and then someone recommended I read this story by Addison Smith. It’s from 2021, so I’m obviously way late in covering it here, but wow, what a story it is! Here, someone is turning into a crustacean, but it’s not an easy process and it’s not easy to know what other people are going to think about such a transformation. Will they even believe it? Will they mock it? There’s a surreal vibe here, and a tenderness beneath the chitin, that is an absolute delight.

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BEHIND THE ZINES with Stephen Hunt, editor and publisher at INKLINGS PRESS

For this month’s Behind the Zines interview I am thrilled to be talking to the fabulous Stephen Hunt from Inklings Press. 

 

More about Stephen Hunt:

Stephen Hunt is a journalist, author, and editor, having worked in the newspaper industry for nearly 20 years. He is presently working in The Bahamas at The Tribune national newspaper. He is also one of the people behind Inklings Press.

More about Inklings Press:

Inklings Press is an indie publisher of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and other fiction by new writers. Their purpose is to provide new fantasy, science fiction, mystery and alternative history tales.

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Q. Tell us a bit about yourself. What’s your background, where did you grow up, where are you now, and what do you do outside the world of speculative fiction?

Hi Maria, thanks for inviting me to take part! I’m a bit of driftwood. I was born in Northern Ireland, but we left there when I was a kid, right in the heart of The Troubles. So I grew up as a bit of an outsider in North-East England, a boy with a funny accent and a funny hair colour. Then a little over a decade ago, I drifted across the Atlantic to where I live and work in The Bahamas. I edit a newspaper here, and the rest of my time is spent chasing round two kids and wondering with my wife where all the time in the day went.

Q. Most people who are into speculative fiction seem to have caught that bug early in their lives. What got you hooked on the speculative fiction genre? What stories, books, movies, TV-shows, or something else, lured you into that world?

I blame my mum! Or maybe my grandmother. My granny used to take my mum with her to the cinema when she was a kid to go see horror movies – which got my mum hooked. I grew up in a house full of books by James Herbert, Stephen King, Alan Garner and more. And my mum did the same to me, but with the small screen – keeping me up at night to watch Hammer Horror movies or Salem’s Lot so she wasn’t left to watch them on her own. A nice line of maternal terror passed along!

But the house was also filled with fantasy and sci-fi books – I’m the youngest of five kids, so my eldest brother had lots of Anne McCaffrey and Katherine Kurtz books, another brother got into D&D and Runequest and brought me along for the ride, there were shelves with Asimov and Clarke, Tolkien and Le Guin, and TV screens with Kirk and Spock, The Doctor and Quatermass, Space 1999 and Buck Rogers.

I fell in, and I fell hard. I remember making my parents walk me back out of the cinema backwards so I could see as many of the credits as possible for the first Star Wars movie. I was that kind of nerdy fan. These days, of course, the movie companies stick a scene at the end to get you to stay…

Q. You’re one of the people behind Inklings Press, an indie publisher that has published several anthologies (I’ve had stories in two of them!). How did Inklings Press get started and what’s your goal or mission statement?

We gotta get you back for a third! Submissions open now, y’know…

Inklings started out as a bunch of friends on the internet chatting about books. No, wait, let’s go a step further back. Back in the day in the UK, there was a competitive gaming scene for a tabletop collectible figures game called Heroclix. We’re talking little figures of Wolverine and Batman, Superman and Thor, and the mightiest hero of all, Hawkeye. Over the years, a bunch of us met up at tournaments, battled it out over the table, did the whole “hey, let me add you on Facebook” thing, and had beers after the gaming sessions.

Fast forward a few years and a whole lot of us have moved on to different parts of the world – but still kept in touch on Facebook, and chatted about various things, including for a few of us a mutual love of writing. That became an encouragement to one another to do something with that – and so we cheered each other on as we set about writing stories, shared critiques and so on. Somewhere along the way we thought we should do something with that – and so we decided to try self-publishing a book featuring the work of some of the members of that group, which had extended to friends of friends too. And that’s how the first book, Tales From The Tavern, a short, five-story anthology of fantasy fiction, came about. We just figured, let’s try it and see. And then we went back again for more. And more.

As time went on, we broadened out to accept submissions from people who weren’t part of that group to the point where it’s now open to all.

As to our goal? Well, we just want to find good stories and share them with readers who might enjoy them. We’ve done far better than we might have expected at the start – we’ve published Sidewise Award winners twice over for alternate history! And we’ve had authors want to join us in our anthologies who we would never have thought would have been interested in little old us when we started out.

It’s also been a genuine pleasure to offer a stepping stone for new voices, including from some diverse backgrounds. It’s a real joy to see how people have gone on to other things and we love to shout about others’ successes. Back when we first started, we kind of felt that there was no place for us so we would make our own. We hope we have given a place for others along the way.

Q. If you look back on your hopes and dreams when you started out and compare it to where you’re at today… what are your thoughts on that journey? What are some of the big, and maybe small, things you’ve learned? What are some of your proudest accomplishments?

I think for me the biggest part of the journey has been seeing fellow authors who didn’t feel they might ever get anything published now be in a place where they have one, two, three, more books out there and plans for further to come. It’s seeing that transition from asking “Could I do this?” to “I am doing this.”

That’s been remarkable to see. I’m lagging behind compared to others in that regard, but I absolutely cheer them on in everything they do.

I think we’ve learned to try and simplify the process over time, because there’s only so much time in our days. We switched to payment on publication, for example, so that’s resolved and done at the outset, and then there’s deciding not to constantly chase down rabbit holes for the many, many ways of promotion that are constantly pushed at you, many of which are not terribly effective. That learning process of what does and what does not work takes a bit of time when you’re new to it all. I think the biggest thing to learn is just to be genuine. It’s easy to get swallowed up in the marketing push all the time, but the biggest benefits come from genuine interactions with people. And it’s nicer too.

As for accomplishments, I should absolutely hail the Sidewise Awards. And I do. And I should absolutely sing out about getting reviewed in Amazing Science Fiction. And I do. But my proudest accomplishment is honestly any time we publish an author’s debut. That’s where I see the heart of Inklings, particularly when it’s people from different countries or backgrounds, saying hey, we hear your voice and we’d love to help it be heard elsewhere.

Q. What are some of the best and some of the hardest things about your work in publishing for Inklings Press? How does your team work together? I think you’re all spread out all over the world, do you find that to be a challenge or is the Internet enough to keep it all together?

The main crew consists of four of us – an Englishman in Finland, an American in Japan, an Irishman (me) in The Bahamas and a Mexican who is the only one in his home country these days. We’ve certainly shifted around a lot. The internet has kept us together though my word it would be nice for us to have a meet-up in person at some point. Last year we took the year off as we had various life events happening, but now we’re stepping back into the ring.

In terms of how it works, we chat on an almost daily basis about all kinds of things – and then when we decide to go with a project, we come up with a theme, set a deadline, and divide up tasks. Ricardo is our graphic artist and cover designer, Brent and Rob tend to handle submissions and first passes at edits. Then I hop in at the end and do final edits plus compiling the book itself before hitting the big ol’ publish button. We also divide up social media promotion. The biggest task though is mutual encouragement, lifting one another up on hard days in life and in publishing, and cheering on our successes.

Q. I know there’s a recurring discussion in the field about the viability of speculative fiction zines and publishing houses, with a lot of great venues disappearing and new ones starting up. What are your thoughts on the viability of this as a business.

If your game plan is to make money, then there’s certainly easier ways to make it! People will go buy a cup of coffee every day but ask them to pay the same for a book and some will recoil at the idea.

We are lucky enough that we have between us the skills to put together what we do, and don’t have to take on particularly large costs to do so. That’s very much a privileged position to be in, and I’m very conscious that not all people are as fortunate to be in that situation.

It’s hard to keep a venue running long-term. It’s a big-time commitment from anyone in the process – from reading through the slush pile to editing to marketing to publishing to to to… you know, it just keeps going. And the price of the product at the end of that often is not enough to sustain everyone through that process. So I completely understand the burnout that comes with that, and the challenge to keep things afloat year on year, sometimes with the marketplace doing the most unhelpful of things along the way, such as Amazon recently changing the way it deals with subscriptions for some long-running magazines, or concerns over Kickstarter as a platform for fundraising, or Twitter becoming a place that I for one have stepped away from as much as possible after its ownership change.

Of course, the ones most affected by this are the ones who aren’t in a privileged position to begin with – and so that continues to count against marginalised voices.

I will say there is a greater opportunity these days for those voices to be initially heard thanks to the breadth of self-publishing and small presses now – but sustaining those platforms I think is as difficult as ever. Perhaps even more difficult. I salute those who keep a solid schedule of publications coming month after month, year after year.

Q. You also run Altered Instinct, publishing a newsletter / zine. The first issue came out late last year, featuring interviews and fiction. What has that experience been like for you and can we expect more issues in the future?

That’s… a work in progress. Yes. More in the future. But a job change kind of put things on hold while I work out where my free time fits in around the new role. But yes. Yes yes yes.

Q. You’re also a fiction writer in your own right, and you’re a journalist, working as managing editor of The Tribune in Nassau. Do you feel like your various writing endeavors clash or do they inspire each other? Is there something the fiction writer can learn from the journalist, and vice versa?

I like to think that in the day job I tell truth to expose lies, and in the night job I tell lies to expose truth. People can probably make their own mind up which is which. I think there is a lot each side can learn from the other. As a writer, I’m so used to having stories changed around and edited in the news business that I’ve long lost my brittle edges about being too precious perhaps about my words. I know things need to change around to work better sometimes, and it’s not a slight upon my earlier drafts to do so. As a journalist, you can get caught up in the rush to deadline sometimes – and I can learn from the writing side to sometimes just take a step back and let a story breathe so you know what to do with it better. In general, though, I write about different things. My day job is full of horrible stories sometimes, and so my writing lets my mind take flight to other places.

Q. How has your views of the business side of the speculative fiction publishing industry changed since you’ve become more involved behind the scenes vs. when you were “just” a writer? Have you gained any insights you didn’t previously have?

I’ll steer clear of talking about traditional publishing as I don’t really have any expertise there but when it comes to self-publishing and small presses, I think I’d say always remember that one size never fits all, and there are different ways of marketing that suit different styles of publication. What works to market an eight-book series produced at speed may not work at all for a single 120,000-word fantasy epic. There are many services – and some publishers – who look to get money out of the hands of authors, so being cautious and figuring out what works for you is always wise.

Q. For others who might be thinking about getting involved with speculative fiction publishing in any capacity, what would you say to them? Do you have any tips, advice, and/or warnings for new publishers?

I think I’d say do what you can and don’t overreach. Be aware that things crop up in life and you need to have the room to deal with those things – so if you stretch yourself to capacity, those life issues will push you over the top. So pace yourself. Enjoy it. Love it. Adore the words you work with. Immerse yourself in those dreams. But always have time to pack them away and live.

In more practical terms, spend your money where it gets you the best results. Avoid scammers – and keep an eye on outlets such as Author Beware so you’re know what to watch out for. Make sure your covers look professional. Make sure you know what looking professional means. Don’t be afraid of criticism, it helps sharpen your focus. In the same vein, don’t publicly criticise reviewers – it’s not a good look. Show respect and a professional manner, and people will react to you accordingly. Show your whole ass in public, however, and don’t be surprised if people point at it. There are frustrating days, and that’s what your closest friends’ DMs are for.

But to backtrack to what I said earlier, just be genuine. Do it because you love it, and love it because you do it.

Q. Like me, you’re one of those people who have moved across the world, living quite far away from where you were born and grew up. How has that experience influenced you as a writer, and as a publisher?

Honestly, it can be hard. I was three when I first moved to a country that wasn’t my own – England is close to Ireland, but I was reminded every day that it was not. Particularly in the 70s, when I would be called Paddy rather than my real name, or have people shout “IRA” at me, call me stupid because of being Irish, or be punched or kicked for where I came from. So I’ve been an outsider since I can remember existing.

On occasions we’d go back to Ireland, it wasn’t home either by then – I was the boy coming back from England. So uprooting from the UK and coming to The Bahamas a dozen years ago now was not the major upheaval it might have been – but only because I was often left to feel as if I didn’t belong in the first place. Like I say, I’m driftwood, and I’ve washed up on these shores now.

How that affects me as a writer? Well, it’s hard to say what culture is my own. I’m not Irish enough to be an Irish writer. I’m not Bahamian so I can’t claim that either. Regularly being told I didn’t belong as I grew up suggests that for many I can’t count on being an English writer. So where am I? What are the stories that belong to me? So I gather the driftwood around me and tell the tales that find their way to me.

As a publisher, I’m very conscious there are large sections of the world whose tales are not given a chance to be told. I love when those tales come our way. I would love that to be more the case. But I’m also conscious that for some of those I shouldn’t be involved in the process of the telling.

Q. As I mentioned before, you’re also a writer. What’s up next for you as a fiction writer? And what’s up next for Inklings Press?

I’ll start with Inklings Press as that’s more imminent – we have submissions open right now for an anthology of mystery stories, but in other genres. Only Murders in the Genre as we’ve nicknamed it, but think sleuths in spacesuits, wizards and wiseguys, whatdunnits instead of whodunnits and more. That’s our comeback anthology after our year off. We’re also talking other plans, including maybe novellas. Maybe.

As for me, I so very much need to catch up with Inklings writers who have gone before me and get a novel out there. But will start with my own collection of short stories gathering up tales that have landed here, there and elsewhere over the years. The very first thing I published was a collection called Quartet to test out the publishing process on Amazon, and this feels like a return to that moment to draw a line over what I’ve done so far, ready to make the leap to the next part of the journey.

Just, y’know, give me some of that elusive time in the day…

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Huge thanks to Stephen for this interview! 

• Stephen Hunt at Altered Instinct 
• Inklings Press 

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About Behind the Zines:

In this interview series, I talk to people working behind the scenes at various speculative fiction publications. My goal is to highlight the work that goes into keeping these publications alive, and to share insights from the people doing that work. Each interview is available exclusively on my Patreon for one week, and is then posted here at Maria's Reading.

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If you want to support my work, check out my Patreon or Ko-Fi.

My Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Horror Short Fiction Roundup for February/March 2023

The art for this roundup is a detail of Asya Yordanova's cover for the March issue of The Dark Magazine. More about the artist at https://www.artstation.com/asya_yordanova.

An audio version of this roundup is available on YouTube:

For more of my story picks, check out my latest Short Fiction Treasures column at Strange Horizons: http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/short-fiction-treasures-quarterly-fiction-roundup-6/

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Icariana by Wen-yi Lee in Baffling Magazine

I adore every last bit of this story, including this masterful opening paragraph that sets up everything you need to know for what’s to follow:

I find her by the riverbed after the end of the world, wings tucked under her grubby ribs. Some new kind of being, or else some rich maniac’s attempt to engineer homo deux before it all went down. Or went up. Tides, lava, nukes, spaceships. Those last ones, especially, aren’t ever coming back down.

Lee finds beauty, tenderness, and caring in a harsh world, and stitches the relationship between the two girls, one with wings and one without, with exquisite care and skill.

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A Lion Roars in Longyearbyen by Margrét Helgadóttir in Slate

Svalbard had become a popular center in the Arctic Ocean after the Great Ice vanished. Then, as the world became increasingly uninhabitable, people sought out the Arctic for more than holidays and business. Fleeing the deadly sunlight in the south and the wars that had broken out in the wake of the fatal climate change, the swarms of refugees had steadily grown over the past century.

This story is set in a future where climate change has made much of the world difficult, or impossible, to live in, and where Svalbard, in the Arctic Ocean, has become a home for climate refugees. In Svalbard, Longyearbyen is home to thousands of these refugees, and it’s also home to a zoo inhabited by cloned animals that no longer exist in the wild. The most famous animal at the zoo is a lion, Levi, who may or may not be one of the last wild-born lions in the world. But now, Levi is gone from his cage and everyone is looking for him, including one very determined hunter. In Helgadóttir’s story, this changed world, and the many things humanity has lost, is interwoven with several characters who all have their own reasons for trying to find Levi. I love the ending, in all its sadness, violence, and tenderness.

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The State Street Robot Factory by Claire Humphrey in Apex Magazine

New story by Claire Humphrey? That’s always a must-read in my book. (Her story “Wooden Boxes Lined with the Tongues of Doves” published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies in 2017 is still one of my all-time favourite short stories.) In this new science fiction story, we follow Darius who lost both his legs in an accident and who now makes small robots that he sells, trying to make enough money to buy himself a pair of legs. Humphrey sketches in the future-Chicago Darius lives in, and the larger world, with a gentle, precise touch: “Darius was never a soldier, though. He hadn’t even been in the reserves. Not even at the height of the recent global conflict, when many of his friends had enlisted for jobs like loading supply trains or inspecting munitions.” This might be a small story, about one person trying to carve out a life in a harsh city, but it shines because Humphrey gives the story, and Darius, such a big heart.

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Them Doghead Boys by Alex Jennings at PseudoPod (narrated by Dominick Rabrun, first published in Current Affairs Magazine)

Well, carve out some time in your day and give this story a listen, or a read. A knockout, masterfully written tale set in a New Orleans neighbourhood inhabited by dogheaded boys, vampires, a few ghosts, and maybe even a few magic users capable of calling down a piece of the night. Violence, and the threat of violence, permeates every bit of this tale where families and friendships, and blood, can bind, change, and sunder people. Jennings weaves a rich and vivid world here, a world so deep and real it feels like it extends off the page, taking place in a universe all its own. It's a story with a narrator, and a voice, that grabs you by the scruff from the get-go as we are brought into a world of shapeshifters, magic, darkness, monsters, and ancient gods. 

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Mother’s Teeth by E. L. Chen in The Dark

I love this story. I love the way it absolutely chilled me to the bone. I love the way it crept under my skin. And I love the way Chen twists and turns the horror, making it glint of pain and grief and loneliness beneath the hunger and the fear. A boy is visited by a shadow every night, looming outside his bedroom window. The shadow brings his dead mother’s teeth, and her teeth tap on the window, and it brings his mother’s voice, whispering his name. There is a ghost here, but there is also the house the boy lives in, a house with a darkness of its own, reaching out for the boy, staining the room and maybe staining souls too. Chen’s prose is marvelous, tender and subtle, dark and compelling.

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Notes From a Pyre, by Amal Singh in The Deadlands

Singh's story is science fiction story about death. Does that sound bleak? It's not. Rather, this is a gentle, emotionally powerful story told in a strong, yet quiet voice about boy and the passing of his grandfather, and about the grandfather's research about the beliefs and rituals various alien species have concerning death. Singh interweaves the grandfather's research notes with the boy's account of what happens after his grandfather dies, about the rituals and rites performed, about how the people in the family react to the death. There's a beautiful web of connections spun between all these various people and creatures and the different ways they handle their dead, and how they think about death, and there is a life-affirming light shining through every word and sentence of the tale.

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About Her Bones So Bleak And Bare by Matthew F. Amati in Flash Fiction Online

The dead girl had never been a favorite of ours, and now she wouldn’t leave our yard.

I watched black birds wheel like burnt crosses over the fields. The sun fell, dragging the sky down with it until the last light shone on our freakish visitor.

A fabulous story from the March issue of Flash Fiction Online, and it feels like a dark fairytale wrapped inside the present day. In the interview at FFO, Amati says that the story was inspired by "...the early Scots border ballad “The Twa Corbies” Two crows talk about a dead knight whose corpse they’re planning to pick apart." It is a wonderfully evocative and ominous flash story.

Upon What Soil They Fed by Jennifer Mace in Flash Fiction Online (first published in Syntax & Salt)

I once visited a home where brambles had grown so high that they drank all the light before it even touched the walls.

Oh what a wondrous, gorgeously wrought story this is. A dark fairytale planted and growing in the midst of our own time and place where a sales person selling frozen meat products ends up in a house surrounded by brambles where everything grows and seems inclined to keep you from leaving.

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Unimagined Delicacy by Lyndsie Manusos in Hex Literary

He picks up dirt with one arm. And then another. The suckers on each limb grab at the dirt, and he throws it in waves behind him. There is Miracle Grow in this soil, he sees by the specks of white and the over-earthy scent. It makes his skin itch. His arms are red at the tips, the suckers are swollen. But still, he must dig.

A fabulousstory of a transformation gone awry (maybe), where the transformed must deal with the aftermath of what happened in the laboratory. Manusos masterfully tells us a full-bodied, eight-armed tale in flash fiction format, and I know I was rooting for good old Jeffrey at the end. Let's hope he made it to the ocean...

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The Field Guide for Next Time by Rae Mariz in khōréō

When a child learns to speak, their first word is a gift. It is a butterfly wing that swirls the dust motes ignited by the sunlight. A snowflake that shatters an arctic sea to match its fractal pattern. The glitter on sand in the desert at dusk. A distant star shifting its color.

This issue of khōréō is well worth picking up, and not just for this glistening tale of how better futures are possible, even after a terrible past. The story is told as if it is the text found on a winding, woven tapestry, telling the tale of a society that has survived a changing world and found better ways to live, better ways to exist in the world, than what we might think is possible right now. It's a beautiful story, filled with hope, even as the people in this better future also remember the grief and loss of the past.

For more excellent fiction by Rae Mariz, check out her novella Weird Fishes.

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Haunting the Docks, by Marie Vibbert at Cast of Wonders, narrated by Roderick Aust

No one comes to my dock anymore. It’s so empty I can hear the ping of metal struts relaxing. The sounds of life elsewhere on the station, transmitted through multiple bulkheads, are muted, inchoate moans. I cycle through checks on systems unperturbed by human hands. I tidy what is already tidy.

This is a perfectly hilarious flash fiction story about a sentient dock on Jupiter that is having a little bit of trouble attracting, and keeping, visitors. Why would people avoid this dock? Well, it might have something to do with how it seems haunted... or maybe it's the somewhat problematic way the dock chooses to communicate with visitors? Charming and funny, and with some very sassy bots to boot.

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“Narratology” by Peter Young, written by Cadwell Turnbull at Many Worlds

Gustave Flaubert was in a brothel, a woman's legs wrapped tightly around his thrusting hips when it entered him at climax. He screamed like he had been run through with electric knives.

"What is wrong with you?" asked the woman.

Gustave didn’t answer because it told him not to. He went home, and in his dreams, the thing spoke to him. It told Gustave that he would be its vessel and it would make Gustave a famous writer. 

Something happens to Gustave Flaubert that changes the course of his life, and his creativity. Something enters him, an entity described as "the narrator", and for the rest of Flaubert's life, he is never free of its influence. Turns out, the narrator is not alone, and soon other narrators will test the waters. There are several meta-layers to this story, including the bio of the presumed author Peter Young, that is another wrinkle in the tale of the narrators.

Many Worlds is a writing collective (and fair notice: I recently sold a reprint to Many Worlds, which means I am now listed as one of the collective's authors), writing stories that all fit into an overall narrative about "the Simulacrum":

"They call this entity the Simulacrum and its collection of worlds the Simulacra. The Simulacrum doesn’t just copy the world, it adjusts it, adds things to the world, deletes other things. But its most terrifying power is its ability to alter meaning: to change what people care about or find interesting or the very relationships people have to things, to other people, to themselves."

For more about Many Worlds, and more stories set in this universe, check out https://www.manyworldsforum.com/concept 

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The Book of Gems, by Fran Wilde

This novella is out later this year and is available for preorder now at: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250196569/thebookofgems. 

The official blurb from the publisher:

It’s been centuries since the Jeweled Valley and its magical gems were destroyed. In the republics that rose from its ashes, scientists craft synthetic jewels to heat homes, power gadgetry, and wage war.

Dr. Devina Brunai is one of these scientists. She also is the only person who believes true gems still exist. The recent unearthing of the Palace of Gems gives her the perfect opportunity to find them and prove her naysayers wrong.

Her chance is snatched away at the last moment when her mentor steals her research and wins the trip for himself. Soon, his messages from the field transform into bizarre ramblings about a book, a Prince, and an enemy borne of the dark. Now Dev must enter the Valley, find her mentor, and save her research before they, like gems, become relics of a time long forgotten.

I just read an Advance Reading Copy of this novella, set in Fran Wilde's magnificent, terrifying, gorgeously evocative Gem Universe. The novella is a terrific read, a true page-turner, set in a world that is gripping and vividly brought to life and where there are unique and profound ties between gems and magic and people. If this really is the last Gem Universe book, then it's a worthy, and quite spectacular ending. As so often in Wilde's work, it's relationships that are at the heart of the story. In this case, it's the friendship and bond between the gem scientist, Devina Brunai and Lurai, a young woman living in the Valley who has already lost her mother at the ancient, excavated Palace of Gems. The Book of Gems digs into the past, and finds terrifying and beautiful treasures, and maybe even a new kind of future.

I've read and loved all the other stories set in Wilde's Gem Universe. If you want to check them out, there are two short stories in Beneath Ceaseless Skies:

• “Ruby, Singing"
• "The Topaz Marquise"
  

And two novellas:

• The Jewel and Her Lapidary
• The Fire Opal Mechanism

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BEHIND THE ZINES with Jennifer R. Donohue, author of speculative short fiction, novellas, and a new novel

At Behind the Zines this month, I'm talking to Jennifer R. Donohue and going behind the zines completely to talk about self-publishing. Donohue's short fiction has been published in magazines like Apex and Fantasy Magazine. She has also self-published several novellas and her self-published debut novel, Exit Ghost, is out March 7. I'm thrilled to be able to talk to her about her experience with self-publishing and the joys and challenges of getting your work out into the world without a publisher as intermediary.

 

More about Jennifer R. Donohue:

Jennifer  R. Donohue grew up at the Jersey Shore and now lives in central New  York with her husband and her Doberman. She is a Codexian and an  Associate member of the SFWA, and short fiction has appeared in Daily  Science Fiction, Apex, Syntax & Salt, Escape Pod, and elsewhere. Her  cyberpunk novella series Run With the Hunted is available on most  digital platforms. She tweets @AuthorizedMusin.

More about Exit Ghost:

After her father is murdered and an attempt is made on her  life, New Jersey heiress and witch Juliet Duncan is supposed to be  concentrating on getting better and moving forward. Instead, Jules  summons her father's ghost using her blood and tears and his old rotary  phone to answer the question: who did it? He reveals it was Hector, her  dad’s best friend and her mom’s new fiancé.

Certain  her life is still in danger, Jules flees the family estate to the Asbury  Park apartment she shares with her best friend and fellow witch, Ashes.  When another friend joins them, all three women get caught up with a  secret boyfriend who’s also big into magic, but in all the wrong ways,  all while Jules wrestles with whether her father’s ghost was telling the  truth. But what Jules does know is that power has its cost, and she is  more than willing to pay the price in order to get her revenge.

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Q. First up: what’s your background, and what do you do outside the world of speculative fiction writing?

JD: I was born in New Jersey and went to college for psychology in a small town in central New York, where I ended up staying after graduation. My husband and I went to college together, and staying in town afterwards just made sense to us. What I do for my day job (my non writing career?) is I work at my local public library; I was on the circulation desk and then in charge of interlibrary loan for my first years there, and now I do what the library world calls “tech services,” I do the book ordering, and then receive and process them. There’s also the joke in libraryland (probably other fields as well) that our job descriptions all contain “other duties as required.” In addition to ordering materials, I’ve helped with our local history materials, I’ve researched the building’s construction projects, helped coordinate room remodels and asbestos abatement projects, and I’ve run a writing workshop there since 2014. The writing workshop feels a little bit like cheating; what a dream it is, to be able to write at work!

Since getting dogs (we’ve had them one at a time, but it’s been two now,) my ambient interest in animal behavior and dog training expanded, and I’ve said that I have to use my psychology degree for something, and so dogs it is. I was even a dog blogger for a little while, before the whole ‘fiction career’ thing got traction.

Q. What attracted you to the speculative fiction genre when you were a child or young adult (or adult)? What was your gateway into the world of speculative fiction?

JD: I was born in the 80s, and a lot of the media then (that I remember) was very fantasy/scifi/genre mashup, and I think that’s really influenced me my whole life. I read far more “literary” fiction than genre for a really long time, which might be what landed me in that “too speculative to be literary and too literary to be speculative” niche at times. The very first scifi book that I ever remember reading is The Magic Meadow by Alexander Key, though one of my aunts also lent me The Earthsea trilogy and The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings once I was old enough for those. I did used to try to write more literary fiction, especially in college when I was taking writing classes, but also in high school I hand wrote (but never finished) 1000 pages of an epic fantasy novel with many dragons and characters but no real plot.

Q. I always love reading your work and you have had many short stories published in various speculative fiction zines over the years, including "Into the Dark" in Fantasy Magazine and "A Country of Eternal Light" in Apex Magazine. Your novella The Drowned Heir was published last year, and you have a novel called Exit Ghost coming out in March. Both the novel and the novella are fabulous reads, and both are self-published. Can you talk a bit about why you decided to go the self-publishing route for these stories?

JD: Thank you so much!

I actually did try to go a more traditional route with both The Drowned Heir and also Exit Ghost. With The Drowned Heir, I submitted it to both magazines and small presses that accepted those lengths (20k words.) After a few years of that, though, and after putting out several books in my Run With the Hunted series, I thought “well fine, I’ll just do it myself,” and put it out in ebook and hardcover.

Similarly, with Exit Ghost, I queried agents with it……….starting in 2020. Querying agents is difficult in the best of times, but the pandemic really made things that much harder on all levels. I did get several full requests, and continued querying for perhaps longer than I otherwise would have while waiting on a very exciting, high profile agent to decide, and when that rejection finally came, I thought “well fine, I’ll just do it myself.”

Q. Can you describe the work involved in getting your work ready for publication when you self-publish. How do you go about the process of editing, getting a cover, and then publishing and distributing your work?

JD: Most of my covers come from screwing around with things on Canva until I arrive at something that I don’t hate. I’m actually personally a minimalist when it comes to book covers; as a reader, I’ve been frustrated with movie tie in covers, or covers that have people on them that don’t end up representing the characters as they are on the page, and I would just as soon have a black book with the title and author name on it, and maybe some cool embossed designs, like those leatherbound-with-a-ribbon-bookmark editions of things that get put out.

I benefit greatly from having very good friends (some of whom are also writers) who are willing to read my stuff for me, ranging from short stories on up to novels. My ultimate proofreader has been my friend since high school, and I’m super grateful for his keen eye.

I use Draft2Digital for my formatting, and for distributing my non-Amazon ebooks. I’ve done paperback on Amazon, and the hardcovers through IngramSpark (who then will distribute to Amazon and everywhere.) I find it very frustrating that Amazon will only do preorders for digital items, and that is one reason I have not tried out their (new) hardcover options. In general, I like the Amazon book building tools better than Ingram’s, but that ability to run preorders is just too compelling.

Q. What are some of the things you’ve learned about the self-publishing process? Any insights, tips and tricks, or bloopers you’d like to share? What are some of the biggest joys and some of the hardest challenges?

JD: The very first time I formatted a book for self publishing (Run With the Hunted, back in 2018), I came to the belated realization that everything that is in the book has to be in the file when I upload it, which is VERY obvious but I wasn’t thinking about, say, an author bio, when I was in the homestretch of getting that ready. Since then, Draft2Digital has really expanded their tools, and you can add things like the dedication, copyright page, author bio, etc. in their interface (they don’t pay me for being happy with them, I’ve just found them crucial to my process!)

It’s truly a joy to see people engage with my work, be it discussion with a podcast or even just somebody responding to a meme that I put on twitter. These are characters and events that only existed in my head for however long, so seeing how they exist in the world is delightful. It’s also really exciting if somebody picks up on a reference that I’m making, or even mentions liking something that I am particularly pleased with or proud of.

Q. For writers who might be interested in doing this for themselves, what advice would you give?

JD: It’s important to be pragmatic, and behave professionally. Did I think I would be rich and famous by now, perhaps even discovered by a big publisher who wanted to do a run of my books, and then movie producers who want to bring my work to the screen? Maybe! We hear those self-publishing success stories, like with Hugh Howey, and E. L. James, and many others. I guess it could still happen at any moment, given my ever-growing back catalog, but it hasn’t yet. Does that mean I’m going to stop? Absolutely not. I write first and foremost for myself, and then also because I want to be read.

And I am read! People, not just my family or friends, but strangers have bought my books, and even rated or reviewed them, and that’s a really gratifying experience. People who I don’t have social currency with are still interested in my work, and I hope that they continue to be.

When I say behave professionally, that includes treating your fellow writer and other peers with respect, and also never going after reviewers, which is something that happens with alarming frequency, and is wildly inappropriate. Not everybody is going to love your book and give the ratings that you hope for, and that is just part of the territory. You can complain to your friends if you need to, or your group chat, venting can be really important, but that’s for private.

Q. What are your thoughts on the business of speculative fiction publishing and the challenges and joys of taking control of that process yourself? And also any thoughts you have on the challenge of getting self-published work reviewed and noticed for awards season?

JD: It’s really very freeing to be beholden only to myself. I push preorders because that is a thing that is “done,” but having a shortfall in expected preorders isn’t going to get anything canceled, if that make sense. I’ll continue to put out Run With the Hunted as long as I’m having fun with it. I’m publishing Exit Ghost as my debut because it is my most personal novel. When I publish my trilogy of werewolf books, I won’t have to worry about an editor rejecting my books 2 and 3 and sending me back to a blank page.

Admittedly, it is difficult being my own marketing department. I don’t have a background in it, and my self-promotion has largely been on Twitter, which is the social media site that’s meshed best with my own habits and how my brain works. And it is very hard getting self-published work reviewed and noticed for awards season; indeed, and I might be wrong, but self-published novellas (and probably novels, but I didn’t have a novel out when I looked this up) didn’t used to be eligible for the Nebula Award, but are now eligible for the Nebula and Hugo. But even my non-self-published short stories haven’t gotten awards nomination levels of attention, so it’s difficult to know what will hit the cultural consciousness just right and then sustain that attention right up until awards nominations. So many writers are producing work at such amazing levels, it’s really a privilege to have these stellar peers.

Q. Talk a bit about your new book, Exit Ghost. It’s a witchy story that might have some connections to a certain work by Shakespeare, with dead father, witches, and a Yorick (even though your Yorick is a dog). How did this story come to you and what kind of journey has it been to get it to publication?

JD: I’ve loved Shakespeare from my first contact, which I think was Romeo and Juliet during my freshman year of high school. That teacher taught two half-year Shakespeare electives, so my sophomore year of high school, I just spend the whole year immersed in Shakespeare, which he taught by actually just having us watch the plays, as is kind of the whole point of plays. There were a lot of BBC productions (The Taming of the Shrewwas the notable one I remember of those) and then a lot of Hollywood Shakespeare around that time, so we watched Romeo + Juliet, and Kenneth Branaugh’s Hamlet, and Laurence Fishburn’s Othello. I don’t remember which Macbeth we saw, maybe that was BBC as well, though when we did Macbethin junior year English, we watched the 1971 film that was produced by Playboy, and we as a class were very mature about that. Since then, I’ve happily watched a number of Macbeths (Patrick Stewart’s is particularly good) and King Lears (no surprise that Anthony Hopkins’ is very good) and other Hamlets.

There is an unfortunate category of my writing that is “my dad died and I’m sad about it,” and this novel falls under that heading.

My original idea for this novel was actually two separate ideas for two separate novels, one a thriller-y sort of thing that was a modern girl Hamlet but not speculative, and one that had nothing to do with Hamlet and was two friends who were witches in 1970’s Asbury Park, NJ. Both of those drafts petered out, as things sometimes will, and then I got the notion to combine them, so I essentially shuffled them like a deck of cards, picking the elements that I liked from both, and then wrote to The End. Then came my own rewrites and edits and adjustments, and then my trusted first readers got it, and then the dreaded query letter and synopsis, and Exit Ghost started hitting agent inboxes in January of 2020.

In the course of querying, I did get several full requests, some of which took longer for that rejection than others, and I waited an entire year to the day for a particularly high-profile agent’s full rejection. Had that agent not requested the full, I might not have queried for more than two years, but in November of 2022, when all was said and done, I’d written four more novels while waiting (they always say “write something else,” right?) in addition to three Run With the Hunted novellas, and I decided that I didn’t want to wait for rounds of small press slush pile submissions. I was seeing witch novels getting published, I was tired of waiting, and that was that.

Q. As a fellow dog lover, I approve very much of Yorick in this story. I know you are a Doberman lover in real life too, so I’m guessing it was important for you to include not just any dog, but this particular dog. What’s so great about Dobermans? 😊

JD: It’s funny, first draft Yorick was actually a mastiff, due to their occasional historic estate guardian roles, and then I thought it would be very funny if he was a Great Dane, giving the certain work by Shakespeare that Exit Ghost is inspired by/in dialogue with, but really, he always needed to be a Doberman. The Doberman Party Line is that they are the first/only breed that was created with personal protection in mind, and while I have never protection trained a dog, I can absolutely testify to the breed’s need to be with their people at all times. Our first Doberman, Elka, was eerily intelligent, and our current Doberman, Ulrike, is one of the sweetest dogs that I have ever known, and both of them performed the important role of “rest for my left elbow” as I’ve sat on the couch with a laptop in addition to their other duties of alerting us to neighborhood goings-on an getting me out of the house for constitutionals. Dobermans want to be with their people, and also would love to share whatever it is that you’re eating. I’m absolutely heart and soul sold on them as the breed for me.

Q. I loved your novella, The Drowned Heir, and found its description of magic and the society it takes place in to be fascinating and uniquely imagined. It’s a place where people are literally magicked into being possessed by the deceased. Tell us a bit about the inspiration for that story the world you created.

JD: I literally dreamed the first line of The Drowned Heir: “They drown me when my uncle dies.” I woke up and immediately wrote that down, so I wouldn’t lose it, and then texted it to one of my aforementioned writer friends who was like “well that’s a lot.” I went about my morning, but the sentence stuck with me, and the general textural feeling of that scene, the place in the rocks where the water comes up, the salt, the strangeness of it all. I very rarely plan when I write, and it was no different when I wrote The Drowned Heir; I started at the start, and wrote to the end. The first draft was about half the length but contained essentially the entire plot arc, and then I went back and expanded it because it just didn’t seem like enough.

Q. Is there anything in particular you want to promote here, some exciting projects coming up for you in the near future?

JD: With all of my Exit Ghost promotion, I don’t yet have any sense of what comes next. There will be another Run With the Hunted in October (book 6! Title as yet undecided!) so that gives people who are new to the series plenty of time to catch up with the first five novellas. I’ll release a Run With the Hunted short story collection eventually, but need a few more to make it a reasonable length. It’s such a fun project, and I love playing with those characters and their points of view.

I do have a short story forthcoming in Interzone, and another that’s a secret right now, because the anthology hasn’t yet done the Table of Contents reveal but that I’m very excited for.

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Thanks so much to Jennifer R. Donohue for talking to me!

• Jennifer R. Donohue's website.
• Get Exit Ghost.

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About Behind the Zines:

In this interview series, I talk to people working behind the scenes at various speculative fiction publications. My goal is to highlight the work that goes into keeping these publications alive, and to share insights from the people doing that work. Each interview is available exclusively on my Patreon for one week, and is then posted here at Maria's Reading.

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If you want to support my work, check out my Patreon or Ko-Fi.