Fergus Ferguson is a finder, and he’s been tasked with finding a sentient ship, the Venetia’s Sword, and stealing it back from the crime boss Arum Gilger. Things go spectacularly awry. First he meets a woman called Mattie Vahn, and then she dies, and then he meets a zillion of her apparent clones, the crossest one of whom insists on following him around suspiciously while he’s trying to accomplish his business. There are also some quite ominous aliens flying about the place in pointy triangle ships. Nobody is sure what they want. Probably nothing good.

Fans of madcap excursions, please congregate. I have got the book for you. Not only is Fergus banging all over the universe in this book, dashing from one planet to the next trying to get things under control; but he is also perpetually trying to triage the many many things he is forced to care about; including but not limited to:

• a very cross maybe-clone who reminds him of someone he lost
• so many different changes of clothes that it boggles the mind (some of which the previous inhabitants have peed in)
• decoding seven passwords to gain access to a sentient starship
• transportation logistics
• pointy triangle alien ships that keep re-orientating to point directly at him
• murder plague insects
• regular, annoying insects
• his better-off-forgotten past as a Martian war hero
• an unnerving number of dead bodies
• disarming a defensive perimeter using tennis balls and sex toys

All on very little food or sleep, and in increasingly parlous physical condition as various of his enemies catch up to him and thwack him with varyingly deadly weapons. So there you go; it’s that kind of book. You would know best if that is the kind of book you would enjoy. I enjoyed it massively. As the above list has perhaps made clear, Finder contains a very high number of elements. In the hands of a less talented creator, the whole shebang could have devolved into chaos — much like any of the ninety-six-thousand plans Fergus makes over the course of Finder (but especially the one with the sex toys). Instead, it bounds exuberantly forward like tennis balls with vibrators inside, and crackles like vibrating tennis balls being electrocuted by defensive measures set by a paranoid warlord.

I give Suzanne Palmer and her publisher permission to use that last sentence as a blurb for the paperback edition. Be blessed.

Note: I received an e-ARC of Finder from the publisher for review consideration. This has not influenced the contents of my review.

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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.

BUT STILL.

One of my stories is very shameful for me that I didn’t read it sooner, because everything that I heard about it was 100% “this story is the most charming angel of a story that ever there has been.” And that is correct. It is very close to as charming, if not equally as charming, as “Fandom for Robots,” the story so charming it convinced me to make this short story resolution in the first place.

What a great cover, no?

Published by the Book Smugglers, “Avi Cantor Has Six Months to Live” is a story about trans boys in love and crossroads magic. Messages start appearing all over school that all say the same thing: Avi Cantor has six months to live. Though Avi doesn’t know what to make of it, his classmate Ian seems to care quite a bit how he’s doing. Avi is cranky and Ian is sunshine, and if you’ve talked with me much around these parts, you’ll know that that’s my favorite type of romance.

Do things turn out well? Things turn out well. Which, I mean, you can’t always rely on stories about crossroads magic to turn out well. I am hard put to think of another.

Secondly: “The Secret Life of Bots,” by Suzanne Palmer (Apex Magazine)

Apparently the culture has incepted me into having a soft spots for robots who think and feel independently? What with this and “Fandom for Robots” (Jenny shut up about “Fandom for Robots”) (narrator: she did not shut up about “Fandom for Robots”) and Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries, this has evidently become a thing I love.

Basically, a crappy old bot is asked by its crappy old ship to take care of one of the thousand problems on board this crappy old ship. It is imperative that all the bots do their jobs well, because the crappy old ship is the last hope for Earth to survive an alien attack. Things are looking very grim indeed for our heroes, but Bot 9 has not yet given up. Because it is terribly plucky.

Do things turn out well? Things turn out well. Come on. What do you take me for?

Cheers to the folks at Lady Business for bringing up this story in the first place, and to my pal Sharon for reminding me it exists.

God. I am crushing this project. I am the goddamn queen of this project. I have never made such a successful resolution. (Yes I have, I am great at resolutions, I have used them to make friends, crafts, and healthy eating habits. But still this is a pretty good one.)

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