All right, I am sufficiently settled into my new status as Short Story Advisor that I have decided to give this monthly feature a proper name. I am calling it Shortly Ever After, with thanks to the writers and editors of Lady Business for naming assistance, and I will never stop doing it until you pry it from my cold dead hands because I’m all about short stories now and that is just my life. Next month I’m going to have a DAMN LOGO, that’s how serious I am about my newfound short story obsession.
(Never before has a New Year’s Resolution been so successful I had to commission a logo about it. It’s kind of making me reconsider the success metrics I’ve been using in past years for my New Year’s Resolutions.)
“Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order: SVU,” by Carmen Maria Machado, was easily my favorite story in her collection Her Body and Other Parties, one among many parties to which I am very late. It’s a series of imagined episode descriptions, all with Machado’s trademark wit and insight and eeriness. My favorite:
“Sophomore Jinx”: The second time the basketball team covers up a murder, the coach decides that he’s finally had enough.
I have never seen even a single episode of Law and Order, not the mothership and not any of its offspring, so I can’t speak to the quality of this story qua fic, but as a piece of short fiction it’s unsettling and great.
The Book Smugglers’ 2018 season of short fiction kicked off with Sara Fox’s “When the Letter Comes,” a story about a trans girl who waits and waits for her invitation to magic school. But when the letter finally comes, it’s addressed to her younger sister, Gabriele.
One of the things I love about the Book Smugglers’ publishing is that they look for stories where problems are not always solved through cataclysms. Instead, they are addressed by people of good intentions trying their best. Henry, the protagonist of “When the Letter Comes,” lives in a world not entirely satisfactory to her, and she begins — slow and steady — to change things in the ways she can. It’s a dear of a story about making space for yourself in a world that — however much it might need you — isn’t asking for you. If you enjoyed the tropes-toppling of Sarah Rees Brennan’s In Other Lands, “When the Letter Comes” will also please you.
Apex Magazine published a terrific little mystery called “Cold Blue Sky” (4000 words) about an android who gets brought in for questioning in a criminal case. This was nearly a slow pitch straight down the middle for me, as I love stories about robots who know more and can do more than the humans around them maybe have realized. In the end, though, I was frustrated that the story didn’t do more with the central tension of its premise: The criminal in question uses our POV android as a weapon in his fight against people using androids and robots as if they aren’t sentient.
Ruth Joffre’s “Nitrate Nocturnes” (Lightspeed, 7620 words) is a wonderful corrective to all the things that drive me batty about soulmate stories. In this story, everyone in the world has timers on their wrists, counting down the days and minutes and seconds until they meet their soulmates. Fiona is supposed to be sixty-four when she meets her soulmate — except that her timer begins to lose minutes, as if her soulmate is coming closer to her.
And now, the moment you’ve been waiting for:
Murderbot Murderbot Murderbot Murderbottttttttt. Did I tell you that May was the month of Murderbot? It may have slipped my mind. May is the month of Murderbot! Hooray! (Other months of Murderbot will include August and October, so brace yourself for more Murderbot screaming in those posts.)
After the traumatic events of All Systems Red (poor old Murderbot), Murderbot is trying to sort out what its life is going to look like next. In Artificial Condition, it makes friends with a transport ship that also enjoys serial dramas — that part’s jolly — and makes arrangements to go back to the site of the massacre it’s supposed to have committed. That part’s less jolly. Murderbot is struggling with its identity and what it desires from life as a free robot; it’s also, of course, trying not to be discovered as a rogue SecUnit, lest it be sent back into captivity.
Is it weird to identify so strongly with a snarky, anxious, miserable, antisocial murderbot? Murderbot maintains a certain wry distance from its own feelings and desires, but its attempts at detached irony slip just often enough to make it impossible not to love. Martha Wells is achieving monumental feats of emotional echolocation with this series, and it’s an inspiration to witness.
The transport bot said, You dislike your function. I don’t understand how that is possible.
Its function was traveling through what it thought of as the endlessly fascinating sensation of space, and keeping all its human and otherwise passengers safe inside its metal body. Of course it didn’t understand not wanting to perform your function. Its function was great.
Oh, Murderbot.
All I want from August and October is for Murderbot to find happiness. Right now I do not know exactly what that would look like, but I am placing my trust in Martha Wells to find it for us.