This piece on Netflix password-sharing is incredible, but also, it has such a good update at the end.

Adam Serwer on the Jussie Smollett mess and the history of hate crime hoaxes. Zak Cheney-Rice on what this case does and doesn’t mean.

The knitting community is grappling with racism.

Carrie Ann Lucas, a vocal disability advocate, died because her insurance company wanted to save $2000 on an antibiotic.

All worldbuilding is inherently political.

Here is a completely bananas article about a fake sex doctor, although holy shit TW for dismissive, irresponsible language about suicide and attempted suicide.

I am so embarrassed that I never realized Henry Higgins in Pygmalion is queer-coded. Dammit, My Fair Lady!

Namwali Serpell considers the limits of fiction’s ability to make us more empathetic.

Nobody remembers this influential 19th-century novel, written by a woman. This article argues that it’s all Henry James’s fault, which feels like — kind of a stretch? Like, the whole of the literary canon tends to exclude women as much as possible? I don’t think we can really lay it all at the door of one obituary.

More Murderbot is on the way!

An excellent vid of the ladies of Marvel. (Though as Michi Trota points out, it also highlights the lack of Asian women in the MCU — I’d have loved for this to include some Melinda May!)

Sarah Gailey on how imposter syndrome can lead to abuse.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on Michelle Obama’s persona and her new book, Becoming.

Happy weekend, friends! If you’re in a place that’s liable to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, I hope that place is celebrating in a nice, fun way and not an awful, gropey way!

The post Henry Higgins Is Gay: A Links Round-Up 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.

(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.

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