• 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.

Disney princesses reimagined as cement mixers.

Here’s what’s going on at Tumblr.

Period-tracking apps benefit men, and marketers, and medical companies–not women.

What it’s like hearing Anne Carson lecture.

This journalist went to a Scholastic book fair and didn’t find it as magical as she remembered — but somehow this article just made me feel MORE fond and MORE magical about Scholastic book fairs. So, win?

“The work of black public intellectuals is shaped by white gatekeepers….There is power lost when the oppressor serves as interlocutor.” Mychal Denzel Smith on what it means to be a black public intellectual.

Jezebel talks to a biographer of Queen Anne to find out the truth behind the new movie The Favourite.

Here’s all the money the American taxpayer is spending on Confederate monuments and iconography.

An excellent profile of NK Jemisin, who is an excellent writer. Yay!

What happens when a fic goes mainstream?

Another excellent piece about the missing mothers of SFF, this time by Aliette de Bodard, a writer I like more and more as time goes on.

Author Ijeoma Oluo unpacks a few of the ways systemic racism functions in this interview.

Let’s find a way to put to rest the idea that there are “male brains” and “female brains.” (Yay Cordelia Fine!)

Here are the stories of eight “token black actors” from 90s TV shows.

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(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.

Yên is living on borrowed time. After the world was poisoned by the Vanishers, who introduced viruses and gene mutations and ruined everything and then left, villages only keep people around if they’re useful, and Yên knows she isn’t. So it’s not much of a surprise when the village offers her to the shapeshifter dragon Vu Côn in payment of a healing Vu Côn has performed for them. When she gets to Vu Côn’s palace, she learns that she’s to be a tutor: Vu Côn is a mother, and doesn’t have the time to provide an adequate education to her twin teenagers. But the longer Yên stays at the palace, the more drawn she is to Vu Côn.

The device of the Beast needing the Beauty for something specific is a brilliant one. So often in these retellings, the Beauty character has nothing much to do except wander around the palace poking her nose into things and getting into trouble. Here, Yên immediately has a task, and Aliette de Bodard won my heart completely with these two kids. The truism about teenagers is that they’re sulky, uncompliant, and irresponsible. Thông and Liên are definitely finding ways to separate themselves from their mother, as teenagers do, — especially Thông — but they both care deeply about being good people and doing the right thing. It’s a major subplot in the book! How to raise children into good people; how to be a good person despite one’s worst instincts. In these troubled times, but also always, these are themes that resonate with me very strongly.

The bigger pitfall in “Beauty and  the Beast” stories is, of course, consent. Fairy tales have a dreamy, unspecified quality that makes it possible for them to get away with leaving a lot of things unexplained. Retellings don’t have that luxury, and it’s rare for me to feel happy with the way an author manages the question of whether Beauty, a lifelong prisoner, can meaningfully consent to a relationship with her captor. In the Vanishers’ Palace cares deeply about this question, and the broader corollary of what it looks like to be the more powerful one in a relationship. What can we decide for the ones we love? What should we? Vu Côn grapples with this throughout the book, and I love where she ends up.

An atmospheric gem of a retelling. Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy when it comes out tomorrow.

PS: In the language of the book, “I” pronouns are gendered, so that when a person says “I” you immediately know what pronouns to use for them. What a great idea! Is English working on this? Gendered first-person neopronouns? Can we have those?

PPS: I received an e-ARC of this book for review consideration.

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THAT IS A BOOK-FINDING TIP. YOU ARE WELCOME.

The House of Shattered Wings is about creepy angels. Does anyone not love creepy angels? These ones roam the streets of a battered and ruined Paris, trying to survive. Our dubiously ethical hero, Philippe, is neither Fallen nor human, but an Immortal who has been cast out of his native Vietnam and is struggling to find his place in France. When he’s caught by the powerful House Silverspires harvesting the bones of a newly Fallen woman called Isabelle, he finds himself a House prisoner and Isabelle’s unlikely ally. But a dark power is stalking Silverspires, and the House can no longer promise safety to its occupants.

Aliette de Bodard has created a secondary world that’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before. All of her characters are ethically compromised, which is, of course, my fave — only Isabelle comes without baggage, and by the end of the book, the world she lives in has forced her to change what she believes and what she will stand for.

But in particular, The House of Shattered Wings excels at atmosphere. I wasn’t overly engaged with the characters on an emotional level (when I read the end and found out about a major death I shrugged), but the atmosphere was more than enough to carry the book. The being that is targeting Silverspires moves through the world like a shadow, and you’ll be glancing over your shoulder if you finish this book at night in a darkened apartment.

You know what else, too? I haven’t read nearly enough books about creepy angels, I’m now realizing. Drop your best creepy angel book recommendations in the comments, por favor!

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