“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.

If you haven’t yet heard about Serial Box, my friends, you are missing a trick. They do serialized fiction — mostly SFF — with some of the most incredible writers working today. The Vela (out tomorrow!) brings together some of my truest new faves from the past few years: Yoon Ha Lee, who wrote Ninefox Gambit; Becky Chambers, who wrote The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet; Rivers Solomon, who wrote An Unkindness of Ghosts; and SL Huang, who wrote Zero Sum Game. Of course, the problem with all of those authors is that they will break your heart. YES EVEN BECKY CHAMBERS. So I should have known what to expect with The Vela.

The sun in Asala Sikou’s solar system is dying, and there is an ever-worsening refugee crisis as people flee from outer planets to inner ones. Sikou takes a job from the Khayyami president to find a missing refugee ship, the Vela, the finding of which will garner political capital for the president. She is accompanied by the president’s child, Niko, an idealistic hacker eager to prove themself to their father. Asala herself is a refugee, sent away from her family (and her sister, Dayo) years ago to save her life, but she insists that this doesn’t affect her view of other refugees. Niko doesn’t really believe her. Also, Niko may be hiding secrets of their own.

tl;dr: I really, really liked The Vela. I expected to, and I did. The authors are doing a lot here, from conflicting character motives to science to political machinations, and the pieces fit together for me almost flawlessly. Serial Box is best enjoyed by accepting the company’s conceptualization of these stories as episodes and seasons of television. Thinking back on the story as a whole, I’m able to separate out the episodes in my mind — the one with all the evil spider robots, the one where they’re traversing the planet and getting help, the Very Climactic One, etc. A lot happens, and you will enjoy it most if you’re not expecting it to be the type of story a book would offer. This is a different kind of storytelling, and I remain delighted by the attempt.

The Vela is, as I mentioned, heartbreaking, and it’s heartbreaking for one of my favorite reasons that a story can be heartbreaking: because there are no good choices. We may love some of these characters more than others (bless Niko’s bunny heart), but they are all working to achieve some version of the least bad outcome. The resources of their world (the sun) are finite, and everyone has to make choices about how they want to see those resources allocated. As Asala and Niko delve deeper into their hunt for the Vela, it becomes more and more clear that the world isn’t what they thought. No matter how firmly committed Asala feels to remaining uncommitted, all the choices available to her put her squarely on the side of some power or other. Her struggles to navigate that are the best part of this story.

My most consistent problem with the Serial Box stories is how often I struggle to connect with the characters. Even when a character has an excellent hook (Asala is a refugee herself and hopes against hope to reconnect with her sister someday so, YOU KNOW, Jenny catnip), there’s something missing in the execution. I don’t know if it’s a question of plural authorship, or a case of the authors having to get through a certain amount of plot in the time allotted, or what. It’s not exactly that Asala or Niko or Soraya feel badly drawn — they don’t — or that I can’t understand their motivations — I absolutely can. Somehow, though, and this has been the case in other Serial Box stories I’ve read, they just don’t feel like fully fleshed out people to me. Make of that what you will.

Like a superb season of television, The Vela leaves us with some plotlines resolved and others wide open. The characters have been shuffled around on the board, and we stand ready to see how their conflicting loyalties and agendas will play out in season two. Of all the Serial Box stories I’ve read thus far, The Vela really does feel the most like a TV season. I’m living for it. I cannot wait for season two. Please subscribe ASAP to up my chances of getting a season two.

Note: I received an ARC of The Vela (by begging for it) for review consideration. This has not impacted the contents of my review. My high level of love for the authors involved, however, probably has.

The post Review: The Vela, Yoon Ha Lee, Becky Chambers, Rivers Solomon, and SL Huang appeared first on Reading the End.

Which is why I’m mightily grateful to Sarah of The Illustrated Page for putting me onto Rivers Solomon’s debut, An Unkindness of Ghosts. It’s a dystopian story about a generation ship, the Matilda, that sharply segregates its people by class. The (mostly darker-skinned) citizens of the lower decks are subject to forced labor, daily headcounts, floggings if they step out of line, and the whims of the guards who patrol their decks. In spite of this, our heroine Aster has managed to teach herself medicine and science from the gen ship’s archives and wangle a friendship with the ship’s revered priest/Surgeon, Theo. Poring through her late mother’s journals, Aster realizes that there may be a way to escape from the Matilda, but it will require all of her resources — and perhaps cost the lives of those she loves — to make it happen.

Friends, An Unkindness of Ghosts is dark. The lives of the people on the lower decks are filled with brutalities perpetrated by those in power, including the second in line for the throne of the Matilda, a cruel Lieutenant who resents Aster’s friendship with Theo. Solomon isn’t as graphic with the sexual violence as I was fearing, but violence of every kind stands as a constant threat, and regular reality, of Aster’s world. So be braced for it.

The book’s light is Aster’s survival, and her insistence on finding (or, more often, making) pockets of beauty and joy in a world that tries to deny that she’s deserving of either. She’s angry and dogged, and she most wonderfully refuses to pretend to be anyone other than who she is. She’s black and autistic and intersex, and no matter how many people tell her that one or all of those things makes her worthless, she persists in knowing her own worth, valuing her own intelligence, and chasing after the things she wants. Here’s what author Rivers Solomon says about the book and the question that stands at its center.

An Unkindness of Ghosts is a brutal novel with hope at its core, and it should make you really excited for everything Rivers Solomon is going to write hereafter. It’s published by Akashic Books, an independent publisher I absolutely cherish.

Thanks to my lovely friend Alice for picking me up an ARC at BEA this year! If you want to read more by/about Rivers Solomon, you can check out their Patreon for regular content (poems, flash fiction, short essays, etc).

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