Adventures in Short Fiction: March 2019

March has been an interesting month on several fronts, and there have been more distractions than usual from reading - some good (i.e. involving dogs) and some less so. With the Hugo ballot deadline, awards shortlists starting to be announced, and a peak month for exciting novel releases in what's already feeling like an overwhelmingly good year, the habit of keeping an anthology or some stories going on the side has been trickier to maintain. Also, awkwardly for this column, for most of the month my go-to short fiction fix has been Worlds Seen in Passing, the enormous collection edited by Irene Gallo which collects many of the highlights of Tor.com's outputs over its first ten years. Around 75% of the stories are ones I haven't read before, and the quality is as high as you'd expect, but after over a month on the unicorn nightstand I'm still only just halfway through (it doesn't help that it's a 550-page doorstop hardcover that's impossible to read while commuting). Reviewing half an anthology is not the direction I want to take my life in just yet, but luckily I've also managed to put a few other things in my eyeballs between sled dog updates this March...

Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issues 270 - 272

I've been loving my Beneath Ceaseless Skies subscription so far, and these three issues - covering February and the first half of March - maintain the streak of stories which hit the right notes of worldbuilding, narrative and characterisation in a limited space, while always feeling like they're a window into so much more. Rating especially high on this front is Alix E. Harrow's "Do Not Look Back, My Lion" (Issue 470), in which Eefa, a woman who plays the stay-at-home husband role to her soldier wife struggles against the martial constraints of her society which threaten to destroy everyone else in her family. The casual reordering of family roles and decoupling from gender expectations reinforces the sense of an empire rich in its own history, tradition and bias which constrains Eefa and leads to her increasing desperation to try and protect those she loves. "Adrianna in Pomegranate", by Samantha Mills (Issue 471), also deals with families and grief, following a "calligromancer" in a world where written words hold power, and his attempts to overcome prejudice against his magic - as the ability of men to effectively practice calligromancy in this society is routinely called into question - and to recover his lost child. In both cases, the focus on small family dramas in a magical setting is also welcome, demonstrating that not every story in a sweeping fantasy setting needs to be a world-changing quest: the lives of ordinary people and families, away from dramatic events, are just as compelling.

In Issue 472, "The Boy Who Loved Drowning" is a fascinating story, about an apprentice to a diviner whose job is to dive to the bottom of a lake and capture true answers to questions. This method of divination is dangerous and antagonistic, with diviners trained to fight against the lake and its dangers to find their answers: at least, until Kal comes along. Unlike his master and her peers, Kal learns how to work cooperatively with the lake to find answers, but his ability is inevitably seen as a threat by the older generation and leads to the lake providing an answer that's as inevitable and fitting as it is brutal.

Rating: 8/10
Fireside Magazine, January - March 2019 (mostly) (read online)

This quarter of Fireside packs a big punch into its short-side-of-short fiction offerings. The vast majority of stories here are well under 1,000 words - the shortest don't even stretch two pages on my e-reader - but even when they're just fleeting images or brief moments between characters, these pieces often leave an impression that goes way beyond the space they take up.

Having said that, the story which stuck with me most from this selection is one of the longest: "By the End of the Week", a fabulously subversive magical girl story by Brandon O'Brien. O'Brien sets up expectations in his first section - a high-performing student forced to do a group project with a girl he sees as lazy and fixated on partying - and proceeds to completely turn the set-up on its head by revealing that Kelly is not lazy, but trying to save the world from aliens without compromising her secret identity or failing at school. It's a great piece of coming of age 2.0: a text that focuses on self-actualisation milestones like establishing self-worth and boundaries, and understanding when you need to let another person make their own choices about you and focus on doing what makes you satisfied rather than seeking approval from those not disposed to give it. Derek doesn't come around at all to Kelly by the end, and seems to learn nothing from the experience of working with her, but the narrative is nevertheless fairly gentle with his perspective even while it shows up the unreliable, limited perspective of his narration, and gives the ultimate victory - with just a hint of bittersweetness - to Kelly and her ability to make it through the week.

Of the flash fiction-length pieces, the first pair in March were particularly memorable: "Parasitismo", by Alberto Chimal and translated into English by Julia Rios, is a deeply unsettling take on the psychology of myth involving brain-eating mermaids, and "The Blanched Bones, the Tyrant Within" by Karen Osborne, a lush story about women sacrificed to a dragon who find something rather different in the cavern they are sent to find it. Special mention must also go to February's "Symphony for the Space between the Stars", about a spaceship trying to fulfil its directives and keep its crew happy long after the crew themselves have departed. The theme reminded me of the achingly creepy Soviet short film of "There Will Come Soft Rains" by Ray Bradbury, but it's nowhere near as hopeless, and the journey to understanding and connection which the ship takes is well-realised and delightful.

Finally, a bonus from the archives: since it became a Nebula finalist, I finally got around to reading "The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington". P. Djeli Clark's story takes one line from a Mount Vernon historical record - the purchase of nine "negro teeth" for George Washington's dentures - and spins a myth of personhood and the subversion of control which takes place against an unfolding magical alternate history. As the tale of each tooth is told, the story goes from ascribing them to archetypes ("a blacksmith"; a "Bonny Lander") to offering up names, histories, hopes, dreams, alternate dimensions, and lives lived with as much humanity as possible under the constraints of slavery. In contrast, the famous wearer is given no agency or development and is a passive recipient of each tooth's strange magical powers. I had to revise my Hugo short story nominations after reading it, and you should certainly check it out too.

Rating: 8/10 (with a 9 for "The Secret Lives")

FIYAH literary magazine: Issue 9

This is the first unthemed issue of FIYAH and its stories weren't quite as memorable for me as those in the two preceding it, although there's still plenty of cool concepts, especially in the stories that focus on illness and death. This issue's novelette is by Nicky Drayden( a Nerds of a Feather favourite): called "The Rat King of Spanish Harlem", it dives deep into a concept combining body horror and societal change, through the eyes of Alicia, a woman working for a debt collection agency who wants the world to be a kinder place but isn't prepared for it to happen as a viral epidemic which she herself is resistant to. The disease, which affects people at work as well as her husband Javier, turns formerly mean people into kind, collaborative individuals (yay), then causes them to grow tails (hmm) which become intertwined with other infected people (nope) in ways which affect their identities and bodies still further (NOPE). For Alicia, watching this change happen from the outside, and particularly the way it affects her relationship with a husband who she was ready to leave before the infection, is a deeply complex experience: one which brings benefits and horrors in equal measure which she has no power to control. It's a weird, well-executed story with no easy answers.

Similarly good, though dealing with much darker and more difficult subject matter, is "Notes on the Plague" by Shamar Harriott, which tells of a world in which black men suddenly start coming down with a mysterious, fatal illness which only affects their group. It's a premise that draws as much on the AIDS epidemic as it is of the racist devaluing of black lives, particularly those of men, in our own societies, and the protagonist - a queer black man who watches his friends and lovers start to disappear - sits in a heartbreaking front seat to watch the devastation the epidemic causes with no compassionate response from the authorities.

Rating: 7/10
Clarkesworld Issue 150 (March 2019) (read online)

There's a hefty dose of death and decay and adaptation at extraordinary costs in Clarkesworld this month, including a reprint of Catherynne M. Valente's fantastic "The Future is Blue", set on a post-apocalyptic trash island, as well as a story of failed birth and hopeful exploration in D.A. Xiaolin Spires' "But, Still, I Smile", the slow death of a former astronaut in "When Home, No Need to Cry" by Erin K. Wagner, and a world so dystopian that the inhabitants have literally forgotten to laugh in Rich Larson's "Death of an Air Salesman". The last focuses on a pair of characters who both rent the same sleeping cubicle for a few hours a night, and their attempts to actually get to know each other like human beings in a world where such behaviour has been all but forgotten. It's impressive how the naively sweet romance between the protagonists is maintained despite the constant stream of small, awful details of their lives: the narrator has no cultural referents beyond gory cartoon images or hardcore pornography, and in their first experience of sex the two are unable to pay for the privacy settings necessary to not have their encounter filmed and, presumably, broadcast. Grim but rewarding.

"Treasure Diving", by Kai Hudson, also contains moments of hope within its precarious society, this time an aquatic people reliant on energy from a radioactive substance which kills their workers even as it keeps their homes alive. And then there's the gleeful carnage of "The Thing with Helmets", with its casual death-bringing aliens and accidental roller-derby inspired first contact and glitter-infused helmets of unimaginable power and corruption. Put together, it's not exactly an uplifting issue, but there's enough points of light to make it a great read even when you're caught in the midst of its miserable themes.

Rating 7/10
The Inconvenient God and The Lilies of Dawn (Annorlunda Press)

Annorlunda Press is a small independent publisher which releases standalone short fiction in both e-book and print form. In a shameless "judge a book by its cover" exercise, I treated myself to paperback copies of the two stories that come with cover art by Likhain: Vanessa Fogg's The Lilies of Dawn, from 2016, and The Inconvenient God by Francesca Forrest, published in 2018. Sure enough, both are gorgeous (if I'm being picky, The Inconvenient God's cover is a little darker than the screen version above, but it's still amazing and The Lilies of Dawn comes in such a fetching pink that it all balances out). Potential readers might like to know if these novelettes recommend themselves beyond the pretty covers, and I'm delighted to report that they very much do! 

This pair of stories are both about the mortal world's dealings with gods, though the similarities end there. The Inconvenient God begins with an official arriving at a university to "decommission" an annoying minor God of mischief: a process which usually ends up with the God becoming mortal, unless they already ascended from mortality to godhood in the first place. From there, it jumps off into a beautifully constructed tale of empire and assimilation, asking pointed questions through its narrative developments about how our institutions define and alter their own histories, and who gets to decide what is worth remembering. Like the stories in Beneath Ceaseless Skies mentioned above, there's a beautiful balance here between presenting a narrative that works at novelette length, while providing a window on a world that feels real and complex and full of untold potential.

The Lilies of Dawn accomplishes a similar feat, although there's a core of sadness and loss here which, somehow, feels more irreparable than The Inconvenient God's matter-of-fact treatment of lost languages and forgotten pasts. The protagonist, Kai, is the daughter and heir of a woman tasked with looking after a beautiful, god-touched lily field, whose plants provide medicine and healing but are now under threat from an army of cranes. When a mysterious visitor shows up promising to save the flowers, Kai has to balance her hopes for the future of her family, her people and her now sick mother with caution about what this stranger represents - which, sure enough, turns out to be much more than he had initially told her, and somewhat less than he promised. It's a story which provides no answers to its conflicts even while it shows us the sympathetic side of everyone involved, and there's a tragic inevitability to its conclusion which hurts in the best possible way.

Ratings: 8/10

POSTED BY: Adri is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke.

Adventures in Short Fiction: February 2019

I've been on holiday in Costa Rica for the last couple of weeks, armed with my trusty e-reader and a mountain of reading intentions (and obviously some paperbacks as well for "just in case"). In between animal encounters of land and sea, I got a lot of reading done and tons of that was short fiction, filling spare moments with brief journeys into fantasy worlds and far future concepts. Along the way, I feel like I've gained more of an appreciation of what good short fiction brings to the table that longer lengths can't, hitting whatever emotional or intellectual centres it needs to with a carefully chosen balance of character, plot and world. Plus, while not every story is equally memorable - though many which I have read and forgotten from are no doubt the ones which have provoked other people to muse on and reread - the investment for reading short stories that miss the mark is much lower than for a novel, which makes a reading list of anthologies and magazines a great counterweight if, for example, you've also decided to also commit to some challenging longer stuff on the side. (Marlon James, I'm looking at you. And no, it wasn't even that Marlon James novel.)

New Suns ed. Nisi Shawl (2019).

This anthology of original speculative fiction by writers of colour has been put together by the magnificent Nisi Shawl, which is an early indication we're all going to be in for a great time. The seventeen stories within are varied and interesting and there's a good proportion of authors I already love, including Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Rebecca Roanhorse, and new-to-me names. The breadth of stories, tones and styles on display here is entertaining and, I think, important, making it abundantly clear that the work of authors of colour can't be reduced to a single set of issues or sub-genre or to the ever-shifting label of "message fiction".

There was so much interesting stuff in here that it's tricky to pick favourites: "The Galactic Tourist Industrial Complex" by Tobias Buckell hit some great notes on the theme of intergalactic inequality and dependency, casting Earth as an "undiscovered" tourist spot for aliens, and the exploration of humans trying to live their lives and maintain their own culture against the constant stream of visitors is very well done. "The Virtue of Unfaithful Translations" by Minsoo Kang, told through the form of a historical text examining a war averted between a mad emperor and an ambitious sea captain, is beautifully written and contains a well-crafted sting in the tail of what could otherwise have been a romance for the ages. Rebecca Roanhorse's "Harvest" tells of a fling between Tansi, an aspiring chef, and a deer woman with murder on her mind, and is told with Roanhorse's talent for slow burning entrapment and horror even within the space of fifteen pages. And while it was a bit left-field, I have a real soft spot for "One Easy Trick" by Hiromi Goto, about a woman who finds a way to magic her own belly fat away and learns that it was a more important part of herself than she ever imagined. This is a great anthology to dip into, either story-by-story or in one super varied read, and I'm happy that it's put some great new authors on my radar.


Rating: 8/10

If This Goes On, Ed. Cat Rambo (2019).

This collection, kickstarted last year by the small Parvus Press, sets itself an interesting goal: encompassing the sense of disaster and impending doom that current political and environmental factors evoke (mainly focused on the USA) while also incorporating notes of hope. The result is slightly uneven, as some stories contain little more than a grimly extrapolated premise, but others do shine. Of these, it was the stories with a feeling of historical weight to them which really grabbed me. "Mr. Percy's Shortcut", by Andy Duncan, recounts the tale of an Appalachian miner - one of the few in his version of the future who hasn't switched to data mining - who spends his life digging through a mountain in order to reach the other side. It's a story of almost nonsensical triumph, but it feels "lived in" and the speculative elements are compelling but understated. On the much grimmer side, the stories "A Gardener's Guide to the Apocalypse" and "Free Wifi" present very different testimonials which we have reason to suspect would never be canonically read - the former, by Lynette Mejia, is a diary charting a year in the life of a gardener recording the growth around her despite the destruction which has taken all but her and her partner; the latter, by Marie L. Vibbert, a story of young rebellion in a corporatised world which is crushed in actuality but not in spirit. Both have strong character voices, underscored by the modes of telling, which really underscore the premises and stop them from being too grim despite the subject matter.

Some other gems in here include "Welcome to Gray", by Cyd Athens, a superhero origin story with notes of Henrietta Lacks and a great subversive take on representing dialect, and E. Lily Yu's story, "Green Glass: A Love Story", a no-expense-spared romance in very late capitalism which manages to keep the protagonist's wish - to have real ice cream served at her wedding - naively sympathetic, without flinching from showing the widespread destruction and misery which surrounds those without the means to keep themselves insulated. All in all, this is a neat little collection despite its ups and downs, and while it's very tied to the political moment, if you're interested in on-the-pulse speculative fiction this is one to consider.

Rating: 6/10

How Long 'Til Black Future Month by N.K. Jemisin (2018).

This is the first collection (i.e. a set of stories by a single author, whereas an anthology is a set by a group of authors brought together by a particular editor) I've covered in this roundup so far, and it's going to be a hard act to follow. I've read a couple of N.K. Jemisin's shorts before - notably, "The City Born Great", her Hugo-nominated urban fantasy of a couple of years ago, as well as some fiction around the Inheritance Trilogy (which is notably absent here). Lack of god-politics aside, if you're a fan of N.K. Jemisin then this is definitely a collection you will want to read. Spanning well over a decade of Jemisin's writing career, and running the genre gamut from space-faring science fiction ("Cloud Dragon Skies", "The Evaluators") to alternate history ("The Effluent Engine") to dystopian realism ("The Elevator Dancer") and urban fantasy ("The City Born Great", "Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Beneath the Still Waters"). The worlds of the Broken Earth and of Dreamblood both put in appearances, in "proof of concept" stories which predate their respective novels, and there's a pair of stories, "The Trojan Girl" and "Valedictorian", set in the same post-singularity reality from very different perspectives.

There's so much good stuff in here, but I particularly want to highlight one which most represents the volume as a whole: the opening story, the "The Ones who Stay and Fight". As the title suggests, this is a response to Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas", set in Um-Helat, a city of generally kind people living sustainably and harmoniously, and actively working to correct the injustices of the past and maintain their society as it is. In introducing this society, the narrator holds a dialogue with a fictionalised version of the reader, challenging their inability to suspend disbelief for a society bent towards compassionate progress without any dark "catch". Why is it so hard to believe that a kinder, better society is possible - and even if it isn't, what value is there in insisting, angrily, that hatred and suffering must always be present? It's a theme taken up in so many ways, big and small, by Jemisin's stories in this collection and beyond: where protagonists are often trying to exercise agency and dream of better things in the most imbalanced, hopeless of situations, and those who stand in their way are often not the characters who do incomprehensibly awful things - who are often complex, sympathetic and sometimes even redeemable - but who uphold and insist on the status quo which brought those "evil" acts about. "The Ones who Stay and Fight" explicitly challenges us to question where our suspension of disbelief kicks in, and why, and while that self-examination isn't strictly necessary to enjoy the rest of this collection, it's an exercise that we can only benefit from.

Rating: 9/10

Tor.com Jan/Feb 2019 (Download for free)

Tor.com's short fiction output hardly needs any introduction, but what might have escaped some peoples' attention is that there's now a free subscription service where they will send you a bimonthly ebook of stories published on the site for your e-reading pleasure. While this doesn't seem to be every single one, getting a free collection like this is still a no-brainer for me, and there's a range of fascinating stuff here by some great writers. "Deriving Life", by Elizabeth Bear, is a story of life and love in a world where people can guarantee a reduced but painless term of life by becoming a host to an alien parasite, explores its concept through the lens of a relationship between a dying host and the lover they are leaving behind. It's a deeply nuanced look at autonomy and the choices we make now and for our own futures, and while it doesn't offer any easy answers it maintains a huge amount of compassion towards its (queer) characters. Another favourite was "Circus Girl, the Hunter and Mirror Boy", about a woman who used to have the ghost of a drowned boy as her reflection, who reappears in her life right as he's being hunted down. The themes of identity are particularly interesting in JY Yang's atmospheric ghostly tale.

For fans of Mary Robinette Kowal's Lady Astronaut stories, there's another piece of punch card punk history here: "Articulated Restraint", a story of Elma York's colleague Ruby working a training mission that suddenly becomes much more serious and painful than expected. Ruby's voice and drive wasn't distinct enough from Elma's to really invest me in this as a standalone story, but taken with the rest of the series it's another interesting window into the ambition and fortitude expected of women trying to break through a militarised patriarchy in this high stakes world. There's also a piece from Analee Newitz's Autonomous world, "Old Media", which follows a couple of the characters from that piece in a sweet slice-of-life story about recovery, anime and naps. Worthy stories by Mimi Mondal and John Chu round out an overall very strong set of stories with lots of variety and food for thought.

Rating: 7/10

Anathema Magazine, Issue 6 (2019) (Read Online for Free)

Anathema's tagline is "Spec from the Margins", publishing queer speculative fiction from POC/aboriginal/indigenous creators, and this is the second issue of theirs I've read. Based on my experiences so far, I can confirm it's a magazine that's well worth your time, but one which requires a particular mindset to sit down and enjoy; in this issue in particular, every single story bursts off the page with loss and grief and while it's an exquisite, well-crafted sort of pain which never feels gratuitous, it's still a hard thing to get through. Among the best, most painful experiences in here are those dealing with families going to unimaginable lengths to hold together. In "There Are Ghosts Here" by Dominique Dickey, a young boy's life cut short under violent circumstances begets a similarly grim sacrifice from his sister and cousins, held together with magic that is simultaneously mundane and extremely creepy.

"The Plague House" by Maria Chhabra follows Catia, one of the few people immune from a deadly, unpleasant plague that is sweeping through her city, as she nurses the sick, watches those around her succumb and tries to save the life of one particular girl left in her care. It's a story which handles its body horror extremely well, driving home the awfulness of the plague without dwelling too deeply on the physical horror at the expense of the wider pain that people are going through as a result. The issue closes with "Pale Blue Dot", by Kai Hudson, an understated but equally powerful story about a family's survival in the face of economic uncertainty, even with the promise of the stars on their doorstep. Also of note is "This is the Nightmare", by Aysha U. Farah, which is a compelling futuristic Sherlock Holmes riff whose eventual direction left me guessing until quite near the end. The use of technology here - and particularly the "personality" that the Sherlock character ends up giving her unwanted robot pall - will make any reader who remembers their angsty teenhood wince in sympathy, but the relationships and setting make it so much more than an exercise in vicarious teen nostalgia. All in all, Anathema is a publication that's worth giving your heart to, even when you know its going to crush it with every page.

Rating: 7/10

POSTED BY: Adri is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke.

Adventures in Short Fiction: January 2019

As we wave goodbye to the first month of 2019 (I know, right? what even is time and why does it move so fast) I'm back with more thoughts on some recent short fiction, and I'm happy to announce that this is going to be a regular feature! At the end of each month, I will be taking some time to run through the rotating selection of mostly-recent magazines and anthologies that have recently crossed my eyeballs (and hopefully also my brain), and sharing some of the highlights and general impressions with you.

As I mentioned in my "pilot" roundup last month, short fiction is a new area for me and I'm still trying to establish how I can best engage with some of the amazing writers and publications in this space. I hope, therefore, that this monthly column will be useful not just for those interested in finding good stories, but especially for fellow readers who find themselves stuck in endless "I should read more short fiction but what and how" thoughts. I'm here for you, friends; let's do this together.

Without further ado, let's jump in to this month's stories:

A Thousand Beginnings and Endings ed. Ellen Oh and Elsie Chapman (2018).

This is an anthology of Asian fairytale retellings by Asian authors, bringing a range of folklore, legends and ghost stories from across the continent into new perspective. Most of the authors in this collection are new to me and while I was expecting variety in the myths and cultures represented ("Asia" encompasses over half the world's current population, after all), what I didn't anticipate was the even wider range of genre and angles of adaptation taken here. There's several straightforward retellings, which take place in recognisably "fairytale" settings even as they change the voice and agency of the story's characters ("The Crimson Cloak" by Cindy Pon leaps out here). However, there's also several stories that play with science fiction and speculative futures, including "Steel Skin" by Lori M. Lee with its take on artificial intelligence; urban fantasies like "Code of Honor" by Melissa de la Cruz with its melding of Aswang and western teen vampire stories; a take on time travel from a deeply mundane perspective in "Spear Carrier" by Rahul Kanakia; and even a spot of lovely female-friendship centred contemporary YA in "Girls Who Twirl and Other Dangers" by Preeti Chhibber.

There's also a strong thread of diaspora experience running through many of the stories, including Chhibber's tale mentioned above, as well as an interesting ghost story from Alyssa Wong, "Olivia's Table", which sees a woman taking on the mantle of her mother in catering to the needs of spirits congregating on an Arizona hotel. This category also includes my favourite story overall: "The Land of the Morning Calm" by E.C. Myers, which translates multiple narratives from Korean folklore, particularly the Chasa Bonpuli, into a tale of identity, loss and online gaming, as a young woman processes the death of her mother at a video game conference and the imminent shutdown of the server where her entire family used to immerse themselves in the world of the titular Land of the Morning Calm game. The speculative elements transition nicely between the real world and the world of the game, and there's a lot of interesting and complex emotional material here.

The stories are followed by short explanations talking about the original myth and the intention behind the adaptation, which is a feature I really like in anthologies. Here's it's helpful for really understanding the background and context to the adaptation; when the intention is to bring stories from outside mainstream western cultural consciousness to the attention of a wider audience, it's great to have space to really understand what the author intended to achieve and where it's coming from. Overall, this is a highly recommended collection (and one which, as a 2018 original anthology, is eligible for Hugo nominations now now now!)

Rating: 8/10

Strange Horizons: October and November 2018. (Read Online - Links Below)

I read Strange Horizons through their Patreon subscription issues, which are a handy way to get each month's content in an easy e-book format. Useful as this is, the drawback is that each month's "omnibus" only comes out partway through the following month, which means I am always quite far behind compared to the weekly output of new issues on the site. Also, this roundup doesn't include the fundraising drive stories which came over this period, which have been collected for backers in a separate ebook and are also available online. The silver lining to this delayed coverage is, of course, that all the original stories here are eligible for Hugo awards right now, should you wish to check them out (and also they didn't stop being good, relevant stories just because they were published three months ago.)

There are three original stories in the October edition, encompassing very different voices with strong sense of place and a running theme of death and loss. Fans of Aliette de Bodard's 2018 short novel In The Vanishers' Palace will find a rather different-feeling woman-dragon relationship in "The Palace of the Silver Dragon" by Y.M. Pang (1 Oct), a story which really leans into its protagonist's feelings of grief and frustrated lack of agency both in her present and in the memories of her past. The sea-dwelling slave-descended folk of "De MotherJumpers" by Celeste Rita Baker (15 Oct) - playing on a longstanding Afrofuturist concept similar to the society in Clipping's The Deep - provide background for a similarly dark and grief-heavy tale of loss and how it stretches ties within a community to breaking point. Isabel Yap's "Asphalt, Mother, River, Child" (8 Oct) deals, to devastating effect, with the deaths of innocents in the Philippines as a result of the country's destructive, discriminatory "war on drugs", bringing a fantastic sense of place and character (including use of Filipino vocabulary, for which the story provides a glossary at the end). After all that, the two reprints in the 29 October issue are a welcome shift into lighter storytelling, including the possibly-too-smutty-for-me-but-still-excellent "Fisherman" by Nalo Hopkinson.

November also brings some strong material to the table, including Chimedum Ohaegbu's weird fairytale, "Toothsome Things" (19 Nov), and the sweet "Missed Connections" by Alena Flick (12 Nov). However, it was "Some Personal Arguments in Support of the BetterYou (Based on Early Interactions)" by Debbie Urbanski (5 Nov) that most successfully broke my heart. It's the story of an asexual woman trapped within an unsupportive family, who is encouraged to create a better version of herself through technology in order to provide them with the love and attention they "deserve". The protagonist's attempts to communicate her wants and needs and to push back against the one-way expectations levelled at her are contrasted with the total resignation with which she starts and ends the story, a resignation which is framed as generational but more fundamentally asks "why shouldn't we just be someone easier for our loved ones to manage?" It's a question which, among progressive communities that encourage self-identification and acceptance, we're not supposed to ask in seriousness, but in presenting a speculative "solution" Urbanski drags that unspeakable doubt into the open, and forces us to confront it in a difficult but compelling way.

Rating: 7/10

Clarkesworld Issue 147 (December 2018) (Read Online)

Clarkesworld is a publication that's been on my radar with the occasional - usually excellent - story for a long time, and this year I've cemented my commitment to reading their work by taking out an ebook subscription. The first issue I got through this was actually the last of 2018, but it's a good place to start as it squeezes an extra new story in, with just a single reprint from the six overall pieces. It's a rollercoaster of interesting science fictional concepts, from the slightly skewed augmented reality tech of D.A. Xiaolin Spires' "Marshmallows", to the supposedly empathy-generating implants given to the young protagonist of "The Names and Motions" by Sheldon J. Pacotti, to the commodified air and its international impacts, told through a breakneck international conspiracy, of "Bringing Down the Sky" by Alan Bao. What these stories share is a sharp, effective focus on the speculative elements and the parts of the story (be it character, place or plot) that bring out the most interesting (and, in this issue, generally negative) implications. My personal favourite of the issue was "When We Find Our Voices" by Eleanna Castroianni, which deals with the relationship between "Sons of Man" - a group of all-male humans - and an "Adapted" race of bird-like people with three genders and complex, human-compatible reproductive abilities. At the point of the story, humans have managed to subjugate and exploit the Adapted. It's told through the relationship between two Adapted - a third-gendered "Etu" whose role in reproduction is to bring together genetic material from the other two partners (I had some strong Octavia Butler feels here), and their male partner, who is forced into a marriage (technically they both are) with a human man in order to give him a child. Both characters' increasing dissatisfaction and questioning of their society and the things they are forced to do plays out in different ways, and I could easily have read twice as much about these characters and the fascinating, if grim, world they inhabit.

As many readers will know, Clarkesworld has an ongoing focus on bringing Chinese science fiction in translation to the English-language market, and this issue brings “Master Zhao: The Tale of an Ordinary Time Traveler” by Zhang Ran, translated by Andy Dudak. I wasn't quite sure what to make of this one initially - it doesn't help that it's not a super smooth translation, although I'm confident it gets across the message of the original - but by the end I was very invested in the story of Zhao, who finds himself constantly travelling back to points in his own timeline - generally after disasters befalling either himself or his chronically ill wife - and can make different decisions to try to bring about a better outcome. Zhao's story is being told within the narrative to Zhang, an unemployed 30 year old living rent free in Beijing, and that framing is used to explore the practicalities of Zhao's ability (there are many diagrams involved). But I think the story's most compelling aspects lie in how it exposes the sense of inequality and hopelessness in which Zhao, a working class man in a country with no social safety net, is forced to repeatedly confront the limitations of his own position and his inability to find better support for his wife.

Rating: 8/10

Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issues 268 and 269, January 2019 (Read Online 1, 2)

I'm also new to Beneath Ceaseless Skies' subscription, but I've consistently enjoyed the fiction I have read from them and this pair of issues (they release two stories biweekly, I think?) was a great start to my more regular commitment. The first kicks off with "The Blighted Godling of Company Town H", by Beth Cato, in which an abandoned guardian struggles to protect her people from decay and destruction, in a world where the company that originally formed them is clearly long gone. "The Beast Weeps With One Eye" by Morgan Al-Moor is a story of ravens and havens. To be more specific, it's about people finding havens to save them from ravens. To be even more specific and perhaps a bit less flippant, it's a neatly situated fantasy story about the last of a tribe, the Bjebu, who have fled destruction only to find they need to make an offering of three sorrows to the Father of all Ravens. It's worth spending the time on, and as a debut author Morgan Al-Moor is one to add to your Campbell watchlists.

I liked "La Orpheline" by Jordan Taylor, a historical urban fantasy with an operatic setting, but the story that really struck me in Issue 269 was "The Deepest Notes of the Harp and Drum" by Marissa Lingen. What I love about this tale is how matter-of-factly amoral it is: the narrator tells us within the first page that she has killed her sister over what can only be described as dubious provocation, and the story is mostly about her and her new partner attempting to escape any repercussions from those past crimes. The women recount their struggles in a way which is so reflective of the way we expect wronged parties' troubles to be addressed in fairy tales that it's very hard not to root for them, and the "moral" that the creatures of the wider world have better things to do than pay attention to humans, even when they are murdering each other for fun and (maybe) profit, is neat on one level but introduces some real "wait... what?" moments on further consideration. It's fascinating to have the trappings of this kind of story used to tell "here's a couple of complicated but frankly Not Great people making peace with their consciences and getting away with murder", and assuming it was an intentional subversion, I really like the food for thought it brings.

Rating: 8/10

Uncanny Issue 26, January-February 2019. (Read Online)

The last couple of Uncanny Magazine issues have knocked it out of the park to the extent where it almost feels unfair to compare this issue to what's gone before. That said, I did struggle somewhat to connect with some of the fiction here, in which every story appears to be an involved family drama, or a quiet post-apocalyptic moment, or an involved family drama after the apocalypse. That might be my failure as a reader to give every story enough space to sink in as a distinct entity, but the only imagery that really stood out was Fran Wilde's story, "A Catalog of Storms", which brings her trademark skill at weird worldbuilding and applies it to a tale of sentient storms. It's safe to say I am a guaranteed customer for Wilde's future short story collection as and when it comes out, but even the story here didn't make a huge impression on me beyond the "hook". Beyond Wilde, I did like some of the other things in here too: "The Willows" by Delilah S. Dawson is a really creepy, claustrophobic tale of haunting in an isolated farmhouse, and Dustdaughter by Inda Lauryn recounts the story of a young girl coming into her power against her mother's wishes and is also pretty great. There's also a reprint of "The Duke of Riverside", an Ellen Kushner story which recounts a pivotal moment in the Tremontaine-Riverside saga. Overall, though, I came out of this feeling like the juxtaposition of this particular group of similar, quiet tales left me struggling to do justice to each story in turn - perhaps they'll work better for me on a revisit someday.

Rating: 6/10

POSTED BY: Adri is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke.