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SFF Short Fiction Project: April Update

Y’all, I’m thinking about changing the name of this project to Shortly Ever After. Would that be fun, y/n? I’m also commissioning a little graphic for it, which I’m unduly excited about.

We are now in a new situation where my brilliant friend Julia introduced me to the bibliographic and note-taking app Zotero, which I have been using to tremendous effect in several unrelated areas of my life. One of these is that I now have Clarkesworld and Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Lightspeed and Tor dot com original fiction and Strange Horizons and Uncanny in feeds, and whenever they post new stories I get notifications. And then get this (omg I love Zotero so much), if I like one of the stories, I can transfer it to one of my folders so that I don’t forget about it come Hugo time.

(Feel free to rec other great sources of short stories, as I’m still new to this game.)

Okay, enough bragging about awesome organizational tools, and on to the stories! I read many great stories this month!

My pal Anna is constantly complaining about the lack of good mothers in SF — an extremely valid complaint. There are a lot of dead mothers. So I was particularly glad to read Samantha Mills’s story “Strange Waters(Strange Horizons, 6183 words) about a fisherwoman who accidentally slips out of her own time, leaving her children behind, and the years she spends trying to get back to them. The story’s central conceit is weird and beautiful — I’m a sucker for time travel — and I got a little choked up by story’s end.

Eleanna Castroianni’s story “Without Exile” (Clarkesworld, 6236 words) is about lost memories and lost places. Nell is a native of the dying planet Koohar who was adopted as a child by a Turm family. Now an adult, she’s doing pro bono legal work with refugees from Koohar, trying to help a parent and child gain refuge in the Turm Empire. Castroianni beautifully captures the mistrust and misunderstanding among refugees and the places that may or may not take them in. “Without Exile” is a story about homes that no longer exist, and it’s very lovely.

cn: child sex abuse

I mostly do not truck with the narrative “child sex abusers are monsters and justice demands that they be murdered.” I think it’s the kind of narrative that feels comforting but in practice makes it very hard for survivors to disclose in the first place and to be believed when they do disclose. With that major caveat, I still mostly enjoyed the creepy unfolding of the story in Brandon O’Brien’s “The Howling Detective” (Uncanny, 4850 words). I can be picky about how stories deploy mythological creatures, but I am eminently satisfied in this case.

If you are a fan of portal fantasy (I am such a fan of portal fantasy), may I recommend Adam-Troy Castro’s “A Place without Portals” (Lightspeed, 2160 words), which does the kind of gentle and affectionate trope subversion that turns yr correspondent into a puddle of fondness. The bulk of the story is charming and funny, and I’ll be pretty much thinking about the ending every time I read a particular kind of portal fantasy from now on. So that’s cool.

Did y’all read any good short fiction this month?