Fantastic news, months have returned! I read a finite, yet manageable, number of short stories in April, and I am here to tell you about the best of them. Because I am predictable, each story is about some combination of the following themes:
- the nature of truth
- flora and fauna
- living and dying
- fraught familial relationships
Aliette de Bodard’s “The Dragon that Flew Out of the Sun” (3780 words, Uncanny) is one of the first short stories I read in the month of April, and it reminded me of all the reasons I love short fiction. We begin with a girl called Lan and the story her mother told her to explain why they live the way they live: A dragon flew out of their home planet’s sun, so they had to pile on ships and escape to the cramped space station where they currently live. Not quite content with that story, Lan begins to find out more, and each story that she learns about her people’s history adds another layer of information to what she thinks she knows. This author writes a lot about people rebuilding their lives after devastation, and “The Dragon that Flew Out of the Sun” explores the different stories we tell to try and make sense of unthinkable tragedy.
Speaking of storytelling, Jamie Wahls’s “Truth Plus” (4959 words, Strange Horizons) is also about stories, even though it appears to be about the end of the world as we know it. Avi and his ex-wife are two among a small group of people tasked with saving humanity from a comet that’s heading straight for Planet Earth. She’s a scientist, and he’s a PR guy. Frankly, there isn’t a lot either of them can do. A comet is heading straight for Earth. I loved this story because I love this type of character and this take on truth:
Sometimes your audience is the intersection of the politicians and the public, where you need to tell a certain truth, and be very careful with the framing so as not prime people to think of other truths that the first truth implies.
This is put rather cynically, and of course one can navigate selective truths ethically or unethically, but: There are no unselective truths. The world is too vast to tell all the truth all the time, so we’re always choosing what to include and what to leave out. (said the INTJ girl very earnestly) As cynical as these characters sometimes are, and as tragic a story as “Truth Plus” is, it still gave me hope for our ability as humans to shine light in the darkness.
One terrific thing that Clarkesworld is doing is translating a ton of East Asian short stories, and I love them for bringing those stories to — look, I was going to say “an English-speaking audience” but lbr I actually mean “me”. Soyeon Jeong’s “The Flowering,” translated by Jihyun Park and Gord Sellar (5336 words) is a woman telling her story to an oppressive government. Or rather, not her story, but her sister’s. Her sister who has been doing something with seeds, in a future where the flow of information is controlled by the government, and it comes to a beautiful, hopeful conclusion at the end of the story.
(There’s this classic line for protestors, notably used by Mexican activists protesting disappeared students: “They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.” Though “The Flowering” isn’t referencing it, I still get a bit teary when activism and seeds are imaginatively linked.)
“Blue Morphos in the Garden,” by Lis Mitchell (4872 words, Tor.com), begins with the protagonist’s grandmother-in-law dissolving into butterflies. Though it sounds beautiful — and everyone but Vivian seems delighted by it — Vivian can only see the ugliness, weirdness, and loss. As the story continues, we realize that Vivian herself is very ill. If she marries into her husband’s family, her death won’t exactly be the end: She’ll turn into something, maybe something she chooses, maybe not, and the family will have that thing around forever. A tree. An armchair. Butterflies.
“Blue Morphos in the Garden” deals wonderfully with the challenge of navigating a family culture that is not your own, which partnered people do all the time, and the irreconcilable conflicts that can arise when one person refuses to accept the family culture of their partner. But it’s also about ownership of one’s death and legacy. Vivian’s husband wants her to die in a way that he finds comfortable and comforting for himself and their daughter, while Vivian is adamant that she wants to belong to herself. Dash’s family enchantment is never explained, but it doesn’t really need to be. What matters is the navigation of family cultures, the meaning of love for those you are leaving behind, and what counts as a good death.
Luv 2 include stories about EATING THE RICH in this round-up. “Boiled Bones and Black Eggs,” by Nghi Vo (4535 words, Beneath Ceaseless Skies), is a highly relatable story about a boorish, entitled restaurant guest and the steps the restaurant owners take to get rid of him. The protagonist works for her aunt at a restaurant called the Drunken Rooster that feeds the willing as well as the dead. It’s a good life, and they are paid by the locals to keep doing it, until the dead Lord Ning arrives at their table. No matter how glorious the food they give him, he just shouts “You will lay out your best food at once for me, for I am Lord Ning of the Eight Valleys, martyr of the Battle of West Ridge, and favored son of the Great Emperor of the Heavens. I conquered the Red Court of Shao Fan, and I will have my due,” and demands more, finer food.
Eventually the protagonist’s aunt gets tired of the dead Lord Ning and finds an excellent, excellent solution. Lord Ning makes himself particularly loathsome both in his nastiness to wait staff and the stories that he tells of brutality and conquest. It is great to see the restaurant owners triumph.
What have I missed? Tell me some of your favorite short fiction for the month of April!