I write this post having conducted a mass slaughter of wasps on my front and back porches, heeding the advice of the internet to purchase a wasp-slaughtering project rather than swatting at their nest with a large stick and running away. (Internet: So bossy!) Glittery, limp bodies of dead wasps litter my front and back doorsteps. This is not a metaphor for anything; it is a merely factual report. A very happy summer to you, and now let’s get to the stories!
I mostly do prefer to be positive in this space, but I was deeply, deeply frustrated with “Three Meetings of the Pregnant Man Support Group,” by James Beamon (5300 words, Apex Magazine). K. M. Szpara has a good Twitter thread on why. The story is about aliens who come to earth promising advanced alien technology if they can use human men as incubators for their young. Humanity agrees.
One of the things that I like and find exciting about short SFF is its ability to fuck around with gender. So many SFF authors of all genders write about gender and the future in ways that are valuable as representation and fascinating as fiction. This is a strength of the field: the ability to imagine many genders and sexualities in imaginary or future worlds. Which is why it’s such a disappointment to read SFF stories that revert to a binary, essentialist view of gender. Not only do stories like this erase people’s real identities and experiences (it is not risible for a guy to be pregnant! trans guys can get pregnant!), but they assume an audience of readers who also have never thought about gender outside of an essentialist binary. I am not that reader. I’m depressed that Apex assumes that reader as a default.1
Eleanna Castroianni’s “The Athuran Interpreter’s Flight” (3600 words, Strange Horizons) is about an interpreter between aliens and Earth humans. An alien mind is transplanted into a human child’s body to make interpreters like Sam-Sa-Ee; they are not supposed to dream or remember, but Sam-Sa-Ee remembers and dreams.
Eleanna Castroianni is going to be one of my first author discoveries of my short fiction reading project! I liked another of their stories earlier this year, and for some of the same reasons: They build strange, dreamy, cynical worlds where good people suffer; and then, with an unerring instinct, they place their finger on the hope in those worlds. It’s a way of writing that I find particularly valuable in this political climate — and “The Athuran Interpreter’s Flight,” though dark, has a happy/hopeful ending.
Stephanie Malia Morris’s “The Chariots, the Horsemen” (1650 words, Apex Magazine) does something I entirely adore by mixing up fantasy with real-world religion: Our protagonist begins to ascend (to Heaven, like Elijah), and her grandfather (who like Elisha does not ascend) keeps on pulling her back down. It’s a story about freedom, but also about living inside of a body and living inside of a structure of beliefs, and how those things can be burdens or they can be ways of being free.
“Chasing the Start,” by Evan Marcroft (8455 words, Strange Horizons), won me early on by featuring a slightly older lady protagonist (though not too old to outrun volcanos) and a fantasy sport. The sport is strandrunning, and you do it by running really, really fast through some of the most dangerous events in all of history, like the Battle of Waterloo or the eruoption of Vesuvius. (So, time travel, also!!) Sa Segokgo has been doing it for years, and she’s beginning to lose some of her edge, but she can’t stop yet.
I adored this worldbuilding, and I love seeing Sa Segokgo’s many strategies for keeping ahead of the young whippersnappers who think they can beat her at the sport she’s been the master of for years. If you really wanted Serena Williams to win Wimbledon this year, “Chasing the Start” is for you. I’d love to read a lowkey sequel where Sa Segokgo retires and becomes a strandrunning commentator and makes snarky comments in response to her co-stars’ sexist nonsense.
It always bodes well when a story comes accompanied with art by Anna and Elena Balbusso, and I was not disappointed in Tina Connolly’s “The Last Banquet of Temporal Confections” (7845 words). It’s about a young food-taster whose husband makes pastries for the Traitor King. Danny’s pastries have the power to evoke memories in those who eat them, and Saffron can tell that he has a plan for this evening’s meal. If only she can work out what he’s trying to tell her.
As I am in the tank for sports in fantasy, so I am even in the tank-er for food in fantasy. Connolly’s pastries sound absolutely delectable, even as their effects evoke painful memories in those who eat them. She draws some direct and clear parallels between her world and ours — the most notable being one character’s decision to start wearing clothes that say THE RESISTANCE — and “The Last Banquet of Temporal Confections” fed my soul in more ways than one.
What short fiction have you enjoyed this month?
- I wrote this paragraph before all that WorldCon mess occurred. But it’s all of a piece: The reason I want to be part of the SFF community is largely because of the incredible authors of all genders. It’s depressing to see that magazines and con organizers don’t value that community — and often even refuse to see them there. ↩