“Elegy of a Lanthornist,” by M. E. Bronstein (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 6700 words) excerpts the annotated journals of a historian of the Lantern Isle and the Lantern Poet, who wrote most famously an elegy of his beloved Lady Firefly. The historian, Isabel Hayes-Reyna, disappeared after apparently suffering some kind of breakdown, and her journals are consequently fragmented and strange; the footnotes carefully explain what elements of her narrative are likely to be true and which are fancy.

The story follows Isabel’s dawning realization that the Lantern Poet, whose work she has loved all her life, may not have spoken the truth about his lady love. It’s a nifty parallel to the structure of the story, as the reader also has to read past the authority of the academic who annotates and explains Isabel’s work and life. The question of this story is about the disconnect between art and life, and there is a question of violation that lies at its heart: When an artist depicts another person, what is being taken from that person? What pieces of her story are being left out? Bronstein takes up the question in a wonderfully, creepily literal way; the story’s final lines will leave you shuddering.

Having read An Unkindness of Ghosts, I expected to be thoroughly heartwrenched by Rivers Solomon’s “Blood Is Another Word for Hunger” (6970 words, Tor.com) — and I was, although not in the ways I expected. The story opens with an enslaved girl, Sully, killing all the people who owned her, after the man of the house was killed in the Civil War. But her act of murder unsettles the etherworld, and it sends a girl named Ziza, who was alive before and dead before, and now is alive again. For every life Sully took, the etherworld gives her back a new life.

I loved Ziza, and Sully. Sully is so bruised and angry from the life she’s lived that she struggles to imagine a life for herself, while Ziza is all vision and hope. She is curious and fun and in love with the world, and I cherished her for loving Sully and helping Sully to see her own worth. Eventually, they form a community, Sully and Ziza and the other ghosts, and find ways to protect it. (Necromancy, for once, really does pay!) “Blood Is Another Word for Hunger” has so much murder and sadness in it that it feels weird to say it’s life-affirming, but I felt genuinely life-affirmed and hopeful, reading it. It’s the story of a woman coming to realize that her life and her world are worth fighting for.

If you enjoy reading analyses of why everyone on Twitter noisily insists they want to be murdered by hot women they admire (I do), you’ll definitely want to check out Merc Fenn Wolfmoor’s “Sweet Dreams Are Made of You” (2417 words, Nightmare). As with “Elegy of a Lanthornist,” it’s told in a nontraditional story structure, with clips from Wiki posts and news articles interspersed with second-person narration. It’s about a virtual reality game called “Vore,” wherein a girl with no name devours you and a partner (you have to bring someone else with you if you want to play).

File this one firmly under “weird shit” and do not read if cannibalism unnerves you — but Wolfmoor does an incredible job, in this short piece, of making the reader uncomfortable (with cannibalism) while quietly also introducing the idea that Things Are Not Right (like, even not-righter than consensual cannibalism).

You may file a complaint, or expound on your concerns, but understand that if you dream about the girl, if you dream about the game outside our facilities, there is nothing we can do. Some people find the experience so intoxicating they become addicted.

No, of course not you.

It probably says something about These Troubled Times that I’ve got two stories in here about women committing mass murders. But there is something ineffably good about the idea of women created for bondage breaking free of their constraints and just fucking shit up to the limits of their capacity. “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This” is gloriously creepy and nightmarish.

Nightmare is a new addition to my short fiction reading schedule, and I have been very delighted with it. This issue featured two stories that I loved, the second of which is Letitia Trent (great name)’s “Wilderness” (5900 words). Horror always works best for me when its events are as close as possible to the real world, where a few things just aren’t quite right. “Wilderness” takes place in an airport, with all the rarefied weirdness of airports. Krista is traveling alone, and her plane keeps getting delayed; and as the delays continue, the passengers start to become aware that something has gone wrong outside the airport.

“Wilderness” is decidedly Shirley Jackson-ish, a higher compliment than which I cannot give. Trent’s writing is wry and detached and humorous:

The blonde woman spoke energetically about her two dachshunds, Buckeye and Alexis. They liked to eat the carpet, she said, so she had soaked the edges of the carpet in Tabasco sauce, which was, incidentally, the same color as the carpet. The pin-curled woman asked how they managed to walk on the carpet if it was soaked with Tabasco sauce. The blonde shrugged, as if this were a mystery to her as well, though a boring one that she had no interest in pursuing.

It makes the wrongness of the airport wait particularly unnerving. And like Shirley Jackson, Trent isn’t interested in giving us any answers. The story feels like the first act of a play whose second act we can imagine all too well — we get to see all the heightening paranoia, all the possible early signs of catastrophe, and then Trent gives us a wink and drops the curtain. I loved it.

What about you, friends? What short fiction has captured your fancy this month?

The post Shortly Ever After: September 2019 appeared first on Reading the End.

• 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!

The post Shortly Ever After: April appeared first on Reading the End.

Erm, but actually, work just got busy, and I fell behind in my short fiction reading. SORRY. Please accept instead this very belated post plus a link to info about the Hugo nominees for this year. I, a short-fiction-reading person, have read five of the six novelettes and five of the six short story finalists. I hope you are as impressed with me as I am. Of those short stories and novelettes, I would vote for Zen Cho’s “If at First You Don’t Succeed” and “Stet,” just in case you are wondering what to put on your Hugo ballots.¹

Onward to my faves of February and March! (Except months don’t exist, so this isn’t a February and March post, and I’ll deny it if you say that it is.) The inadvertent theme of this indeterminate-not-monthly period of short story reading has been the lives we set aside, beginning with “Give the Family My Love,” by AT Greenblatt (Clarkesworld, 5325 words). This one’s about an explorer called Hazel on a mission to a massive, mysterious space Library, where it is hoped the solutions to all of our dying planet’s problems can be found. Hazel is recording messages back to her brother Saul, whom she loves and loves despite their differences, and whom she does not think she will see again. I can be exceptionally choosy about my library stories, as I think bookish people sometimes get too into congratulating ourselves on our Wisdom and the Value we place on Knowledge, but Greenblatt avoids any precious talk like that. The story is, instead, about hope. In the end it’s about letting someone else do the hoping for you when you can’t. I got teary.

Where Hazel chooses to put aside her life to seek knowledge across the universe, the protagonist of Matthew Baker’s “Life Sentence” (Lightspeed, 9240 words) has his life taken from him. As the sentence for a crime he no longer remembers, Wash has all of his procedural memories wiped from his mind. He can still remember dates and presidents and how to tie his shoes, but his wife and children are strangers to him. He becomes a kind of detective in his own life, asking questions and finding clues to the self he used to be — but really this is not a story about Wash uncovering the crimes he’s being punished for. It’s about the awful and glorious mundanities of this imagined world, and the question of how a person can be a self without any of that self’s memories. I loved it. (Disclosure, I met Matt Baker in a professional capacity once, and he was a treasure. I don’t think it’s made me more likely to gush over his stories, but who knows. He really was awfully nice.)

“Okay Glory” is the exact reason I will never get an Alexa creature for my home and you shouldn’t either, oh my God they are so creepy. Ahem. This is by Elizabeth Bear, Lightspeed again, 9880 words, a reprint, and it’s about a man who farms everything about his life out to the AI that runs his house. Its name is Glory. When it is hacked to believe that an apocalypse has fallen outside the house, tech company mogul Brian Kaufman finds himself unable to leave — and increasingly, unable to do much of anything else. He can’t access his bank accounts to pay the ransom the hackers are demanding, and he can’t make outside contact with anyone because Glory won’t let him do it. FRANKLY IT IS ALL A BIT TOO REAL FOR ME, but I guess that’s the mark of good science fiction, right? Right? (Don’t mind me, I’ll just be over here anxiously disabling all the permissions on all my phone apps, and then like, mocking myself for believing I have any control over what all the companies do with my data.)

Last but not least, Woody Dismukes’s “My Children’s Home” (Lightspeed, so much Lightspeed this time!, 4460 words) is a melancholy dystopia about a man whose job it is to raise children to be sold into various kinds of labor. He himself was once a child in a school like this; in fact this exact school; in fact he has never left the school. Part of him feels safe in the familiarity of his life — there are worse things that the children under his care are auctioned off to do — and part of him wonders about life beyond the trees. I struggle to articulate what I liked so much about “My Children’s Home,” as the first adjective that comes to mind is gentle, and that’s nonsense in a story about a group of people as violently controlled as the protagonist and the children he raises. But I think what the story’s about is the ways we humans find to create small pockets of comfort and happiness, even amidst the most terrible circumstances.

I hope, friends, that your circumstances are good and not terrible, even though time no longer has any meaning. Were we really using time for anything, anyway? Probably not.

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(A complaint: If anybody has written an Avengers AU where they’re all circus performers, I have yet to read it. WYD, internet?)

The first of these circus stories is Mimi Mondal’s “His Footsteps, through Darkness and Light” (7500 words, Tor.com), which follows a circus boy called Binu’da who has been allowed into the confidence of Shehzad Marid, a lamp jinni who conjures magnificent illusions for the Majestic Oriental Circus. When their circus gets hired to perform at the wedding of a raja’s daughter, Binu’da finds himself caught between conflicting loyalties.

“His Footsteps, through Darkness and Light” considers what it means to be free, what it means to be bound to someone else’s service, and how to live ethically under any of those conditions. Shehzad Marid chose Binu’da to be the master of the lamp, and they have a close relationship in spite of the complexity of their situation. At the raja’s daughter’s wedding, Binu’da is approached a devadasi, one of the dancers for the temple, who seeks to find another life that does not bind her to the service of a raja and a god. Though Binu’da is free enough to offer her that life, he is not free enough to escape the consequences of his choice, or hers; and the choice he makes in the end leaves him with a life that will have much in common with that Savithri (the devadasi) and Shehzad Marid. It’s an interesting take on freedom and bondage within the context of love and choice.

Any new fiction from JY Yang is cause for celebration, so you can imagine my joy when they have elected to write about a girl running away from the circus to join real life. “Circus Girl, the Hunter, and Mirror Boy” (9100 words, Tor.com) follows a woman named Lynette who once performed in a circus. After an attack by a fellow performer that left her near death, she acquired a silent companion she called Mirror Boy, who looked back at her from mirrors and supported her when times were hard. As she got older, Mirror Boy appeared less and less often, and finally disappeared altogether; but now, when Lynette is in her twenties, he’s back, with a warning that Lynette is in danger.

Oh my GOSH the worldbuilding in this story! Yang is a dab hand at creating lived-in characters very quickly, and I particularly loved Chrissa, the witch Lynette goes to consult when she realizes that her situation requires more expertise than she possesses. Lynette refers to Chrissa’s home as “one of the pockets of weird I’d curated” in her new, circus-free life, which I absolutely love. This story’s matter-of-fact approach to supernatural creatures reminded me a little of Robin McKinley’s best book, Sunshine, such that I am deeply hopeful Yang will write more stories about Chrissa and her clients in this curious, dreamy city. The resolution to Lynette and Mirror Boy’s problem is tidy in an emotionally messy way, which I’m coming to find is a specialty of Yang’s. This story was absolutely terrific, and left me wanting more more more.

I missed a lot of the recent Discourse about hopepunk, and still do not feel very sure that I know what hopepunk is exactly, but I have to imagine that it sometimes looks like Jamie Wahl’s “Eater of Worlds” (4800 words, Clarkesworld). It’s about a very small ship, or missile, called Kali, who is falling or flying very quickly towards a planet, and trying to sort out what she’s come there to do. When she discovers that what she was sent there to do might be to destroy everything, she has to sort out within her own mind what kind of a creature she was made to be, and what kind of a creature she wants to be. This story has my favorite closing sentences that I’ve read in a while. Yr girl teared up reading them.

Reprints in Clarkesworld in January included Marissa Lingen’s “Left to Take the Lead” (11500 words), originally from Analog. It’s about an indentured servant in a future, more miserable version of Earth, trying to make her way in the world after a series of misfortunes split her family apart. Holly has been waiting to hear from her uncles, who have been doing everything they can to bring the family back together: their home, and Holly, and her two beloved younger siblings, Hans and Cora, whose well-being motivates every decision Holly makes. (Surprise, I loved a siblings story.) This story is evidently part of a series of Oort Cloud Stories, which may explain the robustness of the worldbuilding and the very very lived-in feeling that I got from Holly’s present on earth and her memories of Oort. At its heart, this is a story about waiting to be saved, and deciding when you will be the one doing the saving. So. You know. Topical.

What short fiction have you read this past month, friends? What did I miss that I should circle back to?

The post Shortly Ever After: January appeared first on Reading the End.

It’s rare in a month of short story reading that I’ll have a clear best-of, but in December I did. Zen Cho writes deceptively gentle and adorable stories that draw from Asian mythology — deceptively gentle because they pack a hell of an emotional punch. “If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again” (8400 words, B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog) is about an imugi named Byam who’s working towards becoming a dragon, until it gets derailed by an academic named Leslie Han.

It was the human’s job that had given Byam the idea. Leslie Han was an academic, which appeared to be a type of monk. Monks were the most relatable kind of human, for like imugi, they desired one thing most in life: to ascend to a higher plane of existence.

“If at First You Don’t Succeed” is the second romance I’ve read this year between a lady and a dragon (the first being Aliette de Bodard’s In the Vanishers’ Palace), and I have to say that I love it. Byam and Leslie have such a dear romance. I felt all the feelings about it.

As yet, I haven’t read any of Karen Lord’s novels, but if they’re anything like “The Counsellor Crow” (1970 words, reprint, Lightspeed) I’m going to need to rectify that in the New Year. An effective piece of short fiction under 2000 words is hard to come by, but “The Counsellor Crow” is an atmospheric knockout from paragraph one, and its plot gave me the shivers. A renowned Counsellor of Ildcrest dies in an apparent suicide, leaving behind a journal full of observations about a particular species of carrion bird.

(I like carrion birds, sue me.)

As we’ve learned, I also enjoy a nontraditional narrative format. “The Counsellor Crow” is in the format of a zoological report, with a letter of introduction appended. The story describes not just the appearance and behavior of the counsellor crow, but the kingdoms that have formed its habitat, and their histories of war and weaponry. Shit gets ominous. The ending is ambiguous. My Patronus would be a corvid and I’m not sorry.

While I’m on the subject of very short stories, I must recommend two pieces from Uncanny Magazine‘s December issue. Sarah Goslee’s “There and Back Again” (1461 words) is a reflection on the Hobbits’ journey into Mordor. Because it’s rewarding to go into this story without much more context than that, I won’t say much more about it, except that it’s a beautiful treatment of both its subject and Tolkien.

Cassandra Khaw’s “Monologue by an unnamed mage, recorded at the brink of the end” is just above 1000 words, which leaves a lot of gaps for the reader’s imagination to fill. It’s wonderfully evocative, a story about fighting a doomed fight and realizing that you are approaching the end of what you’re able to do. Or actually, it’s a story about the power of love, which stays more important than destruction even at times when destruction wins. A quote:

This is a kind of magic too, you know? The Bard told me this. Resurrection by way of oration, every retelling a species of necromancy, and if some of it fails to be beautiful, if some of it crooks from the truth, that doesn’t matter. Stories are meant to adapt.

“Monologue by an unnamed mage, recorded at the brink of the end,” Cassandra Khaw

It’s a story about the end of the world, but it nevertheless filled me with hope.

Closing out the month is Shaenon Garrity’s “Grandma Novak’s Famous Nut Roll” (2670 words, Lightspeed), which is Slovenian monster mythology by way of the “Hey Ladies” column at The Toast. The conceit is that two women are working with their grandmother to preserve her traditional recipes. But as the story goes along, you begin to realize there’s more to this family than meets the eye. I love the coupling of magic with baking, the comfort of a traditionally feminine art rubbing up against bloody monster murder. Plus, the recipes are all real! (It’s anyone’s guess if the monsters are, too.)

And that’s it for 2018! My main sources of stories this year were Uncanny, Lightspeed, Apex, Clarkesworld, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, but I’d like to branch out a bit in the New Year. Any recommendations?

The post Shortly Ever After: December appeared first on Reading the End.

(Some other month, when the holiday spirit is not upon me, we’ll talk about what I’m resentful of.)

Now, to the stories!

Because I am predictable, I was particularly in love this month with two stories that played around with timeline and format. “Toothsome Things,” by Chimedum Ohaegbu (2408 words, Strange Horizons), retells the story of Little Red Riding Hood.

At first it appears to be a retelling from the wolf’s perspective:

Come closer. Stop struggling. That red is lovely on you, though I must admit it was far lovelier on your Grandmother Marie, and truly how could you confuse us with her, can’t you see our eyes, our nose, our teeth—the better to eat you with, my dear. Couldn’t you see them?

(Which I already love.)

But then Ohaegbu turns the perspective a little, and we begin to see that there is more inside the wolf than malice. We begin to see that generations of women and hunters and stories have made this wolf. The writing’s also gorgeous. Oh, it’s so good and strange and I liked it so much. If you are a fan of Helen Oyeyemi at her strangest, “Toothsome Things” is for you.

Sarah Gailey’s very, very cool story “Stet” (2000 words-ish?, at Fireside Fiction) comes in the form of a textbook passage about the algorithms and ethics of self-driving cars. The real story’s in the footnotes (and the Track-Changes comments between the author of the fictional passage and her editor), where we get an increasingly horrifying view of the events that informed the author’s citations.

“Stet” is what I hoped for when people first started talking about hypertext stories. I was still a child at the time but I had hopes and dreams of stories like “Stet” that would take the possibilities of a web interface and use them to experiment with the form of narrative. (That is not exactly how little me articulated it to herself, but that’s the gist of what I wanted.) Most people haven’t done this because it’s hard and books are already perfect storytelling vectors anyway, but “Stet” called to something deep in my heart.

It’s also a devastating indictment of both attention culture and the technology industry’s assumption that if they can do something they should, giving very little attention to the ethical implications of the products they’re producing and the choices they’re making. I did have a slightly hard time with the formatting on this one, which led to a suboptimal emotional timeline while reading. You can click through to the editor’s comments from the pop-up that appears when you’ve clicked on an ellipsis, and I didn’t realize that.

Aliette de Bodard’s “In Everlasting Wisdom,” reprinted at Clarkesworld (5776), reminded me why Aliette de Bodard is quickly becoming a favorite author. Our protagonist, Ai Thi, has been implanted with a parasite (“the appeaser”) and sent out to issue propaganda on behalf of the Everlasting Emperor. When she meets a woman called Hoa who resists, she and the appeaser begin to reassert their free will. It’s a story that requires its characters to rethink what they’ve been told and who they want to be, which is my very favorite kind of thing.

In Suzanne Palmer’s “Thirty-Three Percent Joe” (Clarkesworld, 7923 words), an array of cybernetic implants work together to rescue a man called Joe, who is perpetually wounded in battle, patched up with new cybernetic parts, and sent right back out to fight again. As with Palmer’s delightful “The Secret Life of Bots,” this story mixes humor and pathos and makes us care not only about Joe, but about his body’s control unit, his various robot limbs, and his cranky, old-fashioned spleen. Prepare to be charmed.

Though A. Merc Rustad’s “How to Become a Robot in 12 Easy Steps” (reprinted at Lightspeed, 5010 words) has a whimsical title, it’s a really heartbreaking story about a person named Tesla who wants to be a robot. Or maybe Tesla doesn’t want to be alive at all. Rustad’s depiction of depression and alienation from one’s body are vividly resonant. As I’m coming to find is typical for Rustad’s fiction, the ultimate message is hopeful even in a story as sad as this one. Tesla hasn’t found a solution that eliminates their pain, but they do have a solid and loving support network, and hope for the future.

Oh! And this one also has a nontraditional narrative structure! I LIKE WHAT I LIKE, OKAY?

(If you enjoy Rustad’s work, they have a short story collection out now! It’s called So You Want to Be a Robot, which I presume means lots more of this kind of story. Yay!)

My pal Renay has always been a huge advocate for Madeline Ashby, and while I’ve liked the worldbuilding in her books a lot, I haven’t always connected emotionally. “Death on Mars” (reprinted at Clarkesworld, this is a weirdly reprint-heavy month, 8221 words) changed all that. An all-women mission to Mars is interrupted by the arrival of a computer scientist named Cody Marshall, who has come to debug an important piece of equipment. But he also comes bearing unwelcome news. I loved the character dynamics in this story and got real fucking emotional at the end.

What short fiction have y’all enjoyed lately? And is it in FIYAH? Because I got my Hulu subscription for very very cheap this year, which means I have some spare subscriptions-to-things money to play with. FIYAH Lit Mag is on the top of my list. Stand by for updates.

The post Shortly Ever After: October & November appeared first on Reading the End.

Kij Johnson’s “The Privilege of the Happy Ending” (Clarkesworld, 15,501 words)² is a novelette about a girl called Ada and her talking hen Blanche, who live in a cruel and unpredictable world while trying to survive it. There are kind people and cruel people and monsters with claws, and in the end — if I may spoil it for you — Blanche and Ada triumph over the odds and win their happy ending. It’s a fairy tale!

But what’s good about it is that Kij Johnson doesn’t just let it be a fairy tale. The story designs itself to make you care about Ada and Blanche, but Johnson turns her eye back on you to say: Why, though? Why is it so easy to forget about the boy who brings the message? What do we forget about when we let stories carry us away? When Johnson first employs that device, it’s a charming piece of metafiction (“and now he is gone from this story”), but she builds it up and up as the story continues, to a devastating effect at the end. It’s all the more devastating because even when she tells you what the story is doing, part of you stays swept up in it. Part of you just wants Ada and Blanche to be happy.

J. M. Guzman’s “La Ciguapa, For the Reeds, For Herself” (Apex, 4700 words) is another story about stories. We begin with an unnamed narrator telling a story to an unnamed boy, about his grandfather who saw a monster, La Ciguapa, and taught his son to hunt her. But as the story moves on, we see that to the boy’s mother and sister — “they are who this story will always be about” — La Ciguapa has been an ally and a refuge. Guzman is a new-to-me author, and his creepy reworking of Dominican folklore leaves me eager to see what he’ll do next!

Three and a half of Daryl Gregory’s books have been so perfect for me that I have felt physical pain about them. Another three and a half of his books have been, you know, fine. But that’s still a good enough average that I got excited when I saw his name pop up in my feedreader. His new story “Nine Last Days on Planet Earth” (Tor.com, 11,900 words) was right in that Daryl Gregory sweet spot, the perfect balance of strange and gentle.

LT is ten when the space seeds start falling to earth, and he stays fascinated by them as he gets older and older. Humanity is doing everything it can to beat back the plague of invasive species that have grown from the seeds. But as LT keeps reminding people, humans go at animal speed, and plants at plant speed, and we are not talented at watching anything on the plant speed scale.

I don’t want to spoil the unfolding of this story, so I will just say that it meant a lot to me in this time when apocalypse seems very likely and tenderness and gentleness seem ever rarer.³

Brenda Peynado’s “The Kite Maker” (Tor.com, 7026 words) is a strange and delicate piece of fiction about– among other things — genocide. A woman who participated in a massacre of aliens upon first contact now sells kites to them. Her shop is targeted by Nazi gangs who want to destroy the aliens and any contact between them and humans.

The story’s slow, dreamy tone makes a terrifying contrast to the violence it contains. Though the narrator generally shields her part in the massacres behind a collective we, the specifics of her culpability leak out in small, grim detail. At one point, she reflects, “I wanted forgiveness without having to name my sins.” That’s the line that got the story into this round-up — because isn’t that always the motherfucking way of the motherfucking world? She wants the world she lives in to be a different world than the one she’s made. Please call your elected officials. Please register people to vote. Please vote.

The post Shortly Ever After: September appeared first on Reading the End.

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.

***

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.

***

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.

***

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!

The post Shortly Ever After: August appeared first on Reading the End.

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?

The post Shortly Ever After: June and July appeared first on Reading the End.

(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.

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