It’s August, and I am so delighted to roll out my brand! new! logo! I commissioned the marvelous Ira to design a Shortly Ever After logo, which I am now delighted to reveal to you.
In honor of this exciting occasion, I have a massive installment of the column for the month of August. Many, many novellas came out this month, and I am here to bring you the best ones around.
First up, I want to start with two novellas from Book Smugglers Publishing, whose work is consistently weird, queer, and wonderful. This month they’re releasing a paired set of stories — one fire, one water — about young people whose worlds aren’t what they thought, and who have to decide how to cope.
I read Lena Wilson’s “Accelerants” first, the story of a queer girl who can raise fire. But people with powers like hers — Omnis — are discouraged from using their powers, and Mi-na’s father sends her to what essentially amounts to a conversion therapy program for Omnis.
If that sounds dark, it is: We get to see the good parts of Mi-na’s life before coming to Omni jail (official name, the Northern California Institute for Revitalization) — they mostly have to do with her best-friend-or-maybe-more-question-mark, Jessa — but a lot of the book takes place in Omni jail, where Mi-na and her closest friend Fatima (a trans girl!) undergo daily torture (“treatment”) intended to deprogram them from ever using their powers. Like many of the stories in the Book Smugglers line, Accelerants is about making one’s way in an inhospitable world — and reshaping the damn place if necessary.
“A Glimmer of Silver,” by Juliet Kemp, features a protagonist with some world-changing to do: Jennery has been training to be a Communicator for years without ever hearing a peep out of Ocean, but in xer very last week of training — right when xe thinks xe’ll be able to leave the Communicators behind and become a musician — Ocean whispers to xer that people have been fishing. Jennery is sent on the trip out to find the fishers who have breached the contract the settlers have with Ocean, never ever to eat anything that comes out of Ocean. Everything in Ocean is part of Ocean. You don’t eat sentient beings. Period.
Of course, things aren’t as simple as Jennery believed, and xe has to learn how to communicate effectively with Ocean, xer own people, and the rogue fishers, if xe wants to preserve the fragile floating colony.
Maybe I was just in a “burn it all down” mood when I was reading these books on the plane. As much as I loved this worldbuilding — Kemp has done an extraordinary job with both relationships and setting, in a short span of pages — I struggled to connect to the story emotionally. Kemp works hard to make her colonists as un-imperialist as possible (and succeeds!) but I felt resistant to even an inadvertent colonizing of a place with sentient life. I didn’t quite register the colonizing element going in, and I think it would have helped to know ahead of time. By that I mean: I’d absolutely read another book set in this world. Kemp’s created a world like nothing I’ve encountered before, and made it queer as hell while they were at it.
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Y’all should have heard the noise I made when I discovered that JY Yang’s new novella was a story in documents. The Descent of Monsters (Tor.com) is the third Tensorate novella, and you should definitely read the first two. However, I do think you could — if you are willing to accept a few spoilers for the earlier two — go into The Descent of Monsters with no previous knowledge of the Tensorate world and still be okay.
How good is this cover? And the contents inside are even gooder. The Descent of Monsters is about an investigator for the Tensorate who has been sent to make a report about the disaster that befell the Rewar Teng Institute of Experimental Methods. When she arrives, the rebels Sanao Akeha and Rider are already in custody, and her dreams seem to be steering her in the direction of truths that the Tensorate are trying to cover up.
I’m not just saying this because I’m a sucker for a story in documents: JY Yang is getting better and better with each successive book, and there is nothing more thrilling than watching a talented author come fully into their talents. The Descent of Monsters is a strange, sad, satisfying story that promises more to come, and I dearly hope that I will get to learn more about Rider and their mysterious twin in future Tensorate stories. Meanwhile, the Book Smugglers have promised an all-new JY Yang story about illegal gods in love. I cannot wait, but I must.
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Guess what month it is, friends. Guess, guess.
MURDERBOT MONNNNNNTH. The third Murderbot book came out in August! And my mum accidentally bought two copies of it, so she gave one to me! So in Rogue Protocol, our dearest Murderbot is on a ship to Milu trying to acquire some evidence that will allow its old friend Dr. Mensah to stop saying frightening things on news channels so Murderbot can stop worrying about her. It makes friends with an annoying pet-bot named Miki, tries not to have feelings, and battles corporations bent on killing people it likes.
Spoiler-free review
It’s great, this series is great, you should read all the books in it, I love this series, and Murderbot, so much it causes me physical pain.
Spoilery review
Here’s — here’s the thing, y’all. One time when I was watching my favorite television program, Black Sails, for the very first time, I was engaged in sending a series of all-caps DMs to the person who recommended it to me to let her know how excited I was about one particular character of whom I had grown especially fond. And as I was watching the show and sending these messages, as I was doing those things, that character got, abruptly, killed.
Likewise, I took a short break from finishing Rogue Protocol to update Whiskey Jenny on how great the Murderbot series continued to be. I explained that Murderbot had made a new friend, this pet-bot called Miki, and I said that I wanted the fourth book to be like a Frank Capra movie where all the people Murderbot has helped over the years get together to save Murderbot from ruin and then talk amongst themselves about how terrific Murderbot is.
Then I finished Rogue Protocol. Guess the fuck what happens. Miki gets its humans to safety (I’m tearing up) and stays behind to help Murderbot battle a combat bot who Miki has no ability to fight against so the best Miki can possibly have been hoping for was to distract it long enough to give Murderbot time to kill it. And the combat bot kills Miki. And maybe not all of you read The Knife of Never Letting Go back in the day, but if you did read that book then perhaps you will have some idea of what my emotions were around Miki dying.
The good news is that at the end of Rogue Protocol, Murderbot decides — for practical reasons, not emotional ones, definitely not, no — to go and reunite with its old friends. We have a lot to look forward to, come October.
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And now, for some Southern girl sincerity. Bear with me, please. The 30 July issue of Strange Horizons was the Southeastern USA Special, guest edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, Rasha Abdulhadi, and Erin Roberts, and focusing on SFF by people of color from my part of the South. I want to say right up front that I loved the issue, top to bottom, and you should read every word of it. I especially liked “Dying Lessons” by Troy Wiggins and “Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone” by Eden Royce, and I’m so glad to have found new writers in this issue whose work I can follow.
The rest of the country likes to talk about the South and have opinions about the South, and that’s fine, because we all have opinions about our own places and how they’re different than other places; but what makes me so tired is people saying the South and meaning the white South. Over half the black population of America lives down here, and the states with the biggest growth in black populations between 2000 and 2010 were all Southern states (source). I am tired not only of the South being treated like a monolith, but of the assumption that the monolith comprises the stories and cultures of white people only. The South is so vast, and so varied.
When I got to Jamey Hatley’s “Always Open, the Eureka Hotel,” it brought me very close to tears, which might have been a cumulative effect from all these stories and poems that talk about for once a version of the South that I’m able to recognize. Though it’s marked as nonfiction, it reads like fiction, the story of a young woman whose family tries to send her to Chicago, except the South stretches out its hand to keep her. It’s a story about southern black freedom and self-determination, and I loved it terribly.
Tell me about the short fiction you’ve been reading!