Novella Project: Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko Interview

Today for the Novella Project, we're talking to Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko:

Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko is a Slovenian-born writer and translator. He grew up in Slovenia, Ireland, Australia, and the UK, and currently resides just outside Portland, Maine. He understands that his name is a bit confusing and would like you to know that “Drnovšek Zorko” is the surname. He attended Clarion West in 2019, and his work has previously appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Lightspeed, among others. In his spare time he is a keen quizzer—British readers may recognise him from that one time he was on University Challenge. Follow him on Twitter and Bluesky @filiphdz.

What made you write Between Blades as a novella? Was it a conscious plan from the start, or something that naturally evolved through the process?

The main thing was finishing writing a novel and saying nope, not doing that again*. I wrote Between Blades years ago, before I knew I wanted to take writing more seriously - it was my first ever story submission of any kind! - and looking back, I'm surprised by how joyful the experience of writing it was. Writing a novel is daunting. I'm forever thinking about structure, which I hate. Short stories are hard in the other direction. I'm always worrying they'll spiral out of control. A novella is both at once: a long short story, or a short novel. There's something freeing about that - but strangely enough, I haven't written another one since. Maybe I'm worried the first time was a fluke. (I do have ideas for several, including both a prequel and a sequel to this one!)

*narrator voice: he did that again.

When you sit down to write a story, what's the thing you start with - worldbuilding, plot, characters, ideas, something else entirely? And how do you decide what comes next?

Usually a story accretes around the relationship between two characters; but usually, all the other elements have been bouncing around my head, looking for an outlet, so I'm not sure it's accurate to say I start there. It's more like, once I know I want to write a story about some characters, I rummage around to see if I've already got a world or a plot or a cool concept that would fit.

You've had a number of short stories published in various magazines - was there any difference in the process for this? Or anything you think you'd do differently if you did ever write another novella?

I'd say the biggest difference is I wrote my short stories with a much better understanding of the publishing industry! That's a pro and a con, and it probably ties into my wariness with writing more novellas. Short stories are (relatively) quick to write and there's a lot of markets for them. These days if I write a short I feel reasonably confident I can get it published. Novellas are different. Despite the popularity of the form (with readers AND writers!), novellas are paradoxically hard to get published. For unagented writers, there's a limited number of small presses and magazines that publish a handful of novellas a year, and it's a rare agent who'll take on a client on the strength of a novella alone. The same inbetween-ness that makes them a joy to write also makes them frustrating to find homes for. Don't get me wrong, I'm not out here minmaxing all my writing for optimal career advancement, but when I have lots of projects to work on, it's easy to defer the novella-sized ones until some nebulous future when the path to publishing them will be easier.

Given all that, how did Between Blades come to be published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies? Was it something you just sent for open submissions or something more directed?

It was the ol' "have a drink with the editor" that did it for me. I'd sold a few shorter stories to Scott but I didn't meet him in person until this year's Readercon, where I mentioned in passing I had this novella I was trying to place. He invited me to submit it to BCS, which was a pleasant surprise, because I actually hadn't realised he occasionally published novellas. Lest I feed the narrative that publishing is all about connections and bar-based networking, I think the real lesson here is to be enthusiastic about your work, even (especially) the unpublished stuff. Someone might be looking for just the story you've written, but they'll never know to ask if you don't talk about it!

Talk to people? Horrifying thought :P

Flipping back to novellas more generally, you talk about the joy of writing them, but what do you think are the strengths of the format from a reader's perspective?

They're the exact right length to read on a lazy weekend afternoon. They can linger like a novel but be focused like a short story. They're like Macbeth to a novel's Hamlet. I think these are all ways of saying the same thing.

I feel like there’s a whole essay in your thoughts about Macbeth and Hamlet there, but possibly not to the purpose of this discussion. We can take that offline, as the business people say.

Moving onto Between Blades more specifically, the setting draws on aspects of the Roman empire, both in the gladiatorial games as well as in the bureaucracy, as many stories have done before. Why did you choose to go there, and what do you think it's doing for the story?

Follow up question: I find it very interesting that you have two key figures in your story called Livia and Agrippa - were they specific choices, or conveniently Roman-sounding names, or something else/in between?

Part of it was the constraint of doing a lot of worldbuilding in a smallish space. I wasn't drawing on any one culture for Leshin and the archipelago in general, which is how I prefer my fantasy worldbuilding, but that does require a little more work. In the opening half, which is where all the archipelago scenes take place, the slower pace allowed for that depth to the worldbuilding. In the latter half, the plot and the character arcs are well in progress, so it was useful to have a setting that felt familiar - it let me focus on the details that really mattered to Leris while the reader sketched in the rest.

I went with Rome as my model because, I mean, yes, gladiators and bureaucracy, but once I started thinking about it, it felt right in other ways, too. I particularly wanted to evoke the sense of a large, complex, contradictory state - the sort of place where it's not entirely clear if everyone agrees they're part of the same empire. Emona and Traiti are at odds. Livia and Agrippa are at odds. There's strict class hierarchies, too, and a confusing religion. When Leris arrives, having only experienced the Empire as a looming, hegemonic presence in the archipelago, she's immediately put into friction with this reality. It was also a small opportunity to insert myself into the story! Fun fact time: Slovenia's only been an independent country slightly longer than I've been alive, which I think is responsible for a recurring contradiction in my writing, between belonging and not. Part of but not heart of, if you like. I knew right away that I wanted to take the story somewhere other than the heart of the Empire, and why not borrow the Roman name for Ljubljana, where I was born?

As for the characters - gosh, I can't pretend I remember exactly. Livia, I think, was a specific choice. I liked the idea of putting the first Roman Empress in her husband's place, and from there it made sense to borrow the name of one of his close friends for Livia's closest friend (slash enemy).

Incidentally, I was doing the edits for Between Blades right around the time the Roman Empire was making waves on social media. I can neither confirm nor deny the frequency with which I was thinking about the Roman Empire at that time.

Picking up on the belonging part of your answer - a lot of the centre of the narrative is about that, about fitting into boxes other people make for you. Or... well, not. As a story, it's extremely gender, in the best way possible. How do you go about writing something with that strong of a message at the heart without it overwhelming the rest of the story, or likewise being overwhelmed? Especially when you only have a novella length of time to fit it into?

I think of speculative fiction as a magnifying glass. Some people feel emotions very strongly and with great certainty, and maybe they don’t need a magnifying glass, but I do. Otherwise it’s like trying to sort sand with tweezers. I’ll know that there’s something in there, in that handful of sand, a feeling or an emotion, that’s worth writing a story about it. But I won’t really know what it is until I’ve teased it out and separated it from the rest, and for that I need a magnifying glass.

I don’t really think of those two things - the emotional core of the story and the fantastical elements that make up the plot - as being in opposition. Leris’s journey is my grain of sand. The rest is the magnifying glass. One can’t overwhelm the other because they do not compete for the same space but occupy it together, one laid over the other.

Speculative fiction is good at this because it is, by definition, larger than life.

In terms of that emotional core, are there any books or authors you think do it particularly well, or ones you draw inspiration from or look to when you're writing yourself? Bonus points if they're novellas.

They’re certainly not novellas, but I want to mention Arkady Martine’s Teixcalaan books and CL Clark’s Magic of the Lost, which are very different series but share a knack for anchoring large-scale concepts of empire and identity in the emotions and relationships of their protagonists. I do love bonus points, though, so I’d be remiss not to mention Kai Ashante Wilson’s A Taste of Honey - a solid contender for the best love story I’ve ever read, with the sort of speculative twist that gently rearranges your understanding of the story.

A Taste of Honey is a masterpiece. I finished it then immediately wanted to bite it because reading it with my eyes simply wasn't sufficient.

Thinking in terms of novellas specifically, are there any trends you think might come up in the next few years, or changes you'd like to see in the format?

I have an interesting answer and a boring answer and I'll let you decide which is which. First, I'd like to see more series of novellas. I like the current trend in SFF of standalone novels that feel like they would have been trilogies back in the day - The Priory of the Orange Tree, Some Desperate Glory, and their ilk - but what if we experimented with trilogies where each installment is much shorter? (Half-Life 2 fans, avert your eyes.) In terms of total word count they'd stack up about the same, I think, so I'd be curious to see what changes when you draw sharper divides between sections of the story. Second, I'd like to see some reappraisal of the word count limits for award categories. I'm in the weeds here, I know, but those word limits are the reason we care about words like "novelette" and "novella" to begin with. At present there's an artificial gap between about forty and sixty thousands words where stories are too long for many novella publishers but too short to be marketed as a novel, so by and large they don't get published. (One exception is In the Vanisher's Palace by Aliette de Bodard, which is one of my favourite novellas.) Novellas have always been a bridge between short fiction and books, so perhaps a level of falling-through-the-cracks is inevitable, but the publishing landscape has changed massively since those limits were set. It's a good time for a rethink.

And then last question - can you tell us a bit more about Between Blades? 

Between Blades (or ebook version) is a novella about gladiators who turn into weapons, the pervasive power of hegemony, and finding yourself in the spaces between cultures. It's about the friendship between the living embodiment of the term "spear queer" and a woman who mostly just wants to be left alone to chill with her twin brother. Ultimately, if you like stories where all the fight scenes are actually stand-ins for discussions of identity and belonging, this is for you.

Thank you Filip!

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroform_tea

Novella Project: Between Blades by Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko

 You've heard of sword lesbians... now it's time for spear queers

When does a story begin? Is it at the birth of a new dynasty, following the journey of a charismatic empress-to-be and her loyal retainer as they redefine magical combat and fight their way to ultimate glory? Is it the moment that three young folks, constrained by societal expectations on their gender and social roles, choose to leave and find new ways of expressing themselves? For Between Blades, it's neither: this is a story about after those first journeys of awakening and self discovery, set largely on the outskirts of an established regime that's as Not Great as empires tend to be, with characters who are comfortable, if not entirely secure, in who they are. Also, people in this world can magically turn into sentient weapons, and use this ability to fight conveniently non-lethal gladiatorial matches for fun and profit AND as another source of confirmation and anxiety about their self-identity. Humans are resourceful like that!

Between Blades is the story of young-ish gladiators Leris a Leshin and Gerthe a Mnibo, an up-and-coming fighting duo on the outskirts of the empire. Leris and Gerthe are unusual in several respects, as fighters go. While most fighting pairs switch up the person who goes into "swordform" and the person who doesn't, giving them more fighting options, Gerthe hates transforming while Leris adores the time she spends as a sentient spear, pushing the limits of the magical form as she does. Gerthe, as a Mniboan, also has an unusual relationship with her twin brother Ulmo: they share a body, although Ulmo rarely "fronts" and never, ever fights. Leris and Gerthe are doing very well on their provincial circuit when an opportunity arises: a competition overseen by the Emperor's right-hand woman (and wielder) Maria Agrippa, where the winners will be sponsored to fight in Traiti, the heart of the empire. The gang - though it's mostly Leris doing the deciding - must choose whether push forward with an opportunity that will further their careers and increase their chances at glory, but will also bring them to the heartland of an empire: a place that will both test their fighting capacities and treat them as outsiders, with all the emotional upheaval that brings.

Leris, Gerthe and Ulmo do find themselves journeying into empire, though it's not quite as simple as they expect, and find themselves in the middle of political dynamics far beyond what they anticipated, which test all three of them in quite traumatic ways. These political dynamics are excellent, and Maria Agrippa and her empress Livia have to be two of the deepest written side characters I've ever read in a novella, conveying enormous promises of untold story when they're on the page together and even when Agrippa is carrying things on her own. But all of Between Blades' intricate, detailed worldbuilding is ultimately in service of its main characters' stories, and these are at heart stories of queerness, neurodiversity and more broadly how we present to the world.

Leris' story is very explicitly about gender: she comes from a culture where men and women have specific gender roles, symbolised by the axe for men and the spear for women respectively, and her transformation into a spear in swordform has become a sign that the men's social role that her community expected of her was wrong. The reader is given no reason not to accept this at face value - Leris uses she/her pronouns throughout and never doubts her own womanhood - but the simplicity and rigidness of her culture's binary gender roles becomes a limiting factor in how she defines herself, and it takes a rather intense shake-up to reconceptualise her relationship to... well, speariness. 

Meanwhile, Gerthe and Ulmo's roles are more in the background until the novella's third act, and we don't directly see their point of view, but the reason for their outsider status becomes a key factor in the story's climax. I won't spoil it here, but the connecting thread for both Leris and Gerthe/Ulmo is the weight of societal expectations on one's identity, and how impossible this can be to mould oneself to if it doesn't already fit. Sometimes your swordform is a spear, or an axe, or a whip, and you can't make yourself be a sword. And sometimes you are a spear one day and an axe the next, and only you get to decide what that means, no matter how ritualistically invested the rest of your community is in making you one or the other.

This is a story that combines two of my favourite storytelling angles: people growing and learning about themselves even after their youthful bildungsroman era is over, and ordinary people inhabiting huge, complex fantasy worlds who get to have their stories respected and told without needing to overthrow an empire (not that I wouldn't read empire-overthrowing stories in this world, to be fair). It's rich and thoughtful and it hinges on the sort of magic that simply is, with no further questions needed. It's free, it's online, it's very, very good. You should read it.

--

Reference: Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko, Between Blades, [Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 2023]

Posted by: Adri Joy, Nerds of a Feather Senior Co-Editor, @adrijjy on Twitter

Questing in Shorts, January 2022: Saturation Part 2

 I said I'd be back for a second part of my short-fiction-of-2021-marathon wrap-up, and I'm here to make good on that promise! Let's talk about some more of my favourite short stories read in January, covering a whole bunch of magazine issues from last year. (Part 1 is here, if you missed it!)

Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales of Insatiable Darkness ed. dave ring

In just a couple of short years, Neon Hemlock have become one of my favourite publishers with their range of queer speculative fiction from diverse, boundary-pushing perspectives, and this collection is an excellent place to start if you haven't picked up one of their books before. Both the theme and the aesthetic are excellent: each story comes illustrated with a full page image from Matthew Spencer, and the stories involve a range of witchy and occult premises covering everything from space station cults and oxygen maintenance (Effects of Altitude on the Blood Elevations of Love by Marianne Kirby) to sapphic triads exacting supernatural revenge on their landlord (Love and Light by H.A. Clark). There's also two comics, some poetry and two narrative adventure games: Exterior, by Mercedes Acosta, about leaving the safety of your home into the unknowable dangers of the outside; and Hold the Dark, by Allie Bustion, about you and your coven preparing for a mysterious oncoming darkness. There's even some classifieds by Jordan Shiveley, of Dread Singles fame! It adds up to a really cool package where every piece of work contributes to an engaging whole.

 But let's talk about some of my favourite short stories! Kel Coleman (and, look, I could go off on another whole tangent about how many great stories Kel Coleman put out in 2021, but you should just go check them out and not take my word for it) knocks it out of the park with "Before, After, and the Space Between", a story about an innately talented witch and her daughter, growing up as outsiders in a society where magic has been co-opted by a dominant culture that requires artefacts imbued with spirits of the dead to conduct it. Sanguine's mother narrates the growing rift with her daughter as she grows up, the circumstances of her death, and their eventual attempts at reconciliation from beyond the grave. The way the story navigates prejudice and cultural domination, wrapped up in a story between mother and daughter who have to overcome enormous barriers to come to an understanding, makes it heartbreaking and powerful and very much worth reading. I also really liked "Sutekh: A Breath of Spring" by Sharang Biswas, which creates a world based on a fictional game with strong parallels to Hades, where Osiris tries to fight his brother Set, constantly being resurrected in a pool of blood in Isis's cave when he fails. Except one day he wakes up and it's Amun-Au, not Isis, who greets him, and the two strike up a flirtatious rapport that becomes a high point of Osiris' frequent deaths, and blossoms into romance. As the scope widens to show us that this is a mod, one which becomes unstable with a subsequent game patch and stops the player from being able to progress in that version of the game, the story raises some really interesting questions about how fan engagement builds queer content into works that don't canonically care about them, blurring the line between that meta-commentary and the feelings of the characters themselves. If anything, the strong parallels to Hades and its real life studio Supergiant were drawbacks for me (Hades itself has two significant and inescapably canonical m/m romances, no modding required) but it doesn't take much to look beyond that mismatch to the general point that Biswas's story makes, and it's a good one.

There are also several great stories which build around specific places, be those the magical houses of "The Passing of Sinclair Manor, or, The House of Magical Negroes" by Danny Lore and "FOR CLOSURE" by Tania Chen, the supernatural contemporary city of "Dizzy in the Weeds" by L.D. Lewis and the future capitalist dystopia of "Undercity Spellwork", or the otherwordly juxtaposition of a trendy underground-carpark-turned-hotel (except don't call it a hotel, it's a Transitory Dwelling Experience) with the group of Black men dressed in intricate animal masks who come for a late night check-in, in "Antelope Brother" by Craig L. Gidney. That last story is narrated to perfection by bored hospitality worker Malik, who spends his mostly-dead shift reading and talking to his friend Kiki before investigating a supposed disturbance that turns into something more involved than he expected, and the slow ramping up of supernatural elements makes for a really funny, engaging story. Honestly, though, there's just not a bad story in here, and Unfettered Hexes covers a really impressive amount of ground while keeping its theme at the heart of every story. Well worth investing the time in.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Between all the issues I read last month, Beneath Ceaseless Skies has really cemented itself as one of my favourite publications, and I'd particularly urge anyone looking for slice-of-life fantasy to give their short fiction a try. Sure, there's plenty of adventure and weirdness, but some of BCS's best stories involve presenting a small corner of a much larger world, focusing on unlikely protagonists or niche professions, and building out mythologies and worlds around those folks. So you get stories like The Fox's Daughter by Richard Parks, about the challenges a spirit faces while trying to foster a high ranking Kitsune's daughter, or the fussy, nervous travelogue of "Letters from a travelling man" by W.J. Tattersdill, whose protagonist writes about visiting the home of his elderly friend and the changes it has undergone since she left. Even stories with more "traditional" fantasy elements: like the dragon slaying in "The Lingering Weight of Estrian Steel" by Rajan Khanna, or the fae power struggle in March McCowan's "Song So Pure and Cruel" or the build-up of rebellion in "The Last Days of Summer in the City of Olives" by Filip Hajdar Drnovsek Zorko, focus heavily on the protagonists' lives and hopes and fears outside of their call to adventure. The old soldier of Khanna's story has defected from the army after losing his fight with the dragon and finding love and new perspectives in the village below; the story of the fairy goddess of "Song So Pure and Cruel" is told through a childhood companion whose only interest is playing with her and hanging out, an interest that is reciprocated in the goddess' current incarnation; and Drnovsek Zorko's story features a reluctant princess who refuses to take up the position of challenging her sister directly, questioning the foundation of the rebellion that seeks to make her its figurehead even as she comes around to their objectives. Reluctant protagonists aren't new to fantasy, but at shorter length it becomes easier for that day to day life to take centre stage, and to emphasise the weight of human (or, you know, fae, whatever) connections and finding a purpose that doesn't involve violence or scheming, and the result is a reading experience that really enriches my overall fantasy diet.

With that in mind, it's not a surprise that the two standout stories from my recent readings are epics of an unusual type. "Quintessence", by Andrew Dykstal, is about a group of miners wintering at the top of an impossibly high mountain, kept alive by supplements and unable to venture outside due to the cold and lack . When Loren's compatriots start dying of what should be a preventable illness, and the mine's witch refuses to release the cure that would help them, he ends up murdering her and being possessed by her soul (the relationship that develops out of this is not as grim as it possibly should be, with that setup, but go with it). Between them, Loren and Rose begin to unravel the mystery behind their circumstances and the deaths, and hatch a desperate plan to escape their situation. There's a bucketload of tension and danger, and Rose is a fantastic character who gets plenty of time to shine despite not getting what she deserves within the story itself. And "A Manslaughter of Crows" by Chris Willrich is a story I want to press into everyone's hands, because it's about electoral fraud and gerrymandering in a fantasy city built on the principles of pirate democracy (otherwise known as the "swabocracy"), and the protagonist is a sentient cat who is part of a special investigations unit. Shadowdrop and his group of friends and allies (including a seagull called Purloiner-of-Chips, Hope the very good dog, and assorted humans) need to rush to unravel the plot threatening the city's election, and its connection to the newly formed bird party, before the tenets of their democracy are overthrown altogether. It's an adventure from start to finish, and I will never not be here for fantasy electoral politics.

Adventures Elsewhere

I caught up on several issues of Uncanny Magazine, which delivered its usual high quality mix from a lot of authors I know I love. "Colours of the Immortal Palette" by Caroline M. Yoachim is a really engaging story about a mixed race 19th century woman aspiring to be an artist but being held back both by her race and gender, and working mostly as a model for more famous artists around her (including Monet). When she gets an offer from an immortal painter to become immortal herself, she is given more time to break through, even as her benefactor insists that her artistic perspective is the wrong one to be worth paying attention to. Yoachim's protagonist prevails, of course, but her immortality and the difficulty of outlasting her peers makes this both a satisfying and bittersweet conclusion. "Where Oaken Hearts do Gather" by Sarah Pinsker is a story told through what are effectively genius.com annotations against a set of folk song lyrics, simultaneously telling the story within the song while also building out the characters and the simultaneous story of the commentators, one of whom stops commenting after a visit to the location where the song allegedly took place. It's haunting stuff, and the out-of-chronology comments are handled really impressively to build the tension even with the early reveal that something is amiss. I was also really impressed by the emotional resonance of "For All Those Who Sheltered Here" by Del Sandeen, which tells the story of a lynching from the perspective of the tree, and the tentative healing when it comes to be part of a family's life much later.

The Future Fire continues to impress too, and the pair of novelettes in Issue 56 were a real highlight of my reading (yes, they came out almost a year ago, no I'm not sorry for only just reading them, stories do not have an expiry date! "k.a. (birthright) by Lam Ning is the story of two former soldiers, part of a criminal warlord's army, who after several years years and a spell in prison find themselves in medical services on the other side of the conflict. The whole story takes place in a broadly sketched hostile environment - it's a planet, maybe earth, but suits and oxygen masks are required to go outside, not to mention the ongoing conflicts and rampant death-capitalism - and it's a really interesting story about struggling to survive amidst hostility, no matter how ugly your past or present might look. Then there's Listener, by Sim Kern, which is about a woman who grows up with the ability to talk to trees and plants, and how that ability and the events around it shape her relationships with her family and her best friend Delia. It's told from the perspective of the main character returning for a reunion years later, so we can see how she has built her life around an ability that she has increasingly rejected, and how returning to her home and reuniting with her family also lets her reconnect with what's actually great about talking to trees (aaaaah, sun!) and to put the pain of the past into a context that lets her move forward with self-acceptance of all she is.

Finally, I have to throw in a word for an unconventional Twitter story: Unknown Number, by Azure Husky, is a Twitter thread of text message screenshots portraying a conversation where Gaby, a 46-year-old trans woman, is randomly contacted by an unknown number who turns out to be much closer to her than she realises. It's a powerful story of the decisions around transition, and how the smallest things can make that decision either possible and validating, or difficult to the point of impossibility. I think it's worth reading for how kind the two characters are to each other, and particularly the affirmations that Gaby gives her caller  as we realise how unworthy of love and validation they feel about themselves. It's a delight, is what I'm saying, and you should read it. That's all.

POSTED BY: Adri, Nerds of a Feather co-editor, 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. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy

Questing in Shorts, December 2021: Winterval Edition

So, uh, where were we? My notes tell me I managed four half-sentences of reviewing for a November column before getting distracted, and that I haven't tried to review anything else since then, and this tracks with the very large reading-shaped hole in my memory (and the correspondingly large "replaying Breath of the Wild and doing a lot of other nonsense" entries). But today happens to be a significant milestone in my personal progress through time (i.e. it's my birthday, go say nice things to me), and in keeping with tradition in some parts of the world, I am here to offer you a gift. By which I mean, here's a short fiction column! It's a bit small this month, but it still contains good things! Welcome.

This being the end of December, I'd like to be able to offer some form of reading statistics or a year in review or something. Unfortunately, the choice is between not worrying about those things and doing this column regardless; or worrying about them, not doing them, not doing anything else, and not writing. If you're reading this, you know I stuck to choice 1, and the world is richer for it. Statistics are for nerds, anyway.

From the Bookshelf:

Let's kick off with anthologies! Tis the season I finally got around to reading Sunspot Jungle Volume 2, the second half of Rosarium Press' excellent, wide-ranging survey of genre. Editor Bill Campbell has picked out a set of stories from a whole host of the best current speculative fiction authors: Rebecca Roanhorse's award-winning Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience is in here, as are stories by Ken Liu, Sheree Renée Thomas, Bogi Takács, Nalo Hopkinson, and far, far too many other exciting names to list here. It's a really good collection, and I'm not going to go into picking favourites, but I will pick out two fun reading experiences. First, I enjoyed rediscovering The Language of Knives by Haralambi Markov, a story I loved enough the first time around that it went on the first Hugo ballot I ever submitted (2016, what a year!). Markov's story of grief and ritual combines powerful emotions with an intentional, razor sharp use of body horror and taboo, and the result is something that has stayed with me very strongly. Second, I got to find out that T.L. Huchu's The Library of the Dead had a short story in the world first!  I really like the premise of this world and its Ghostalkers, and it's always fun to find out that there's more in a world that you haven't experienced.

I also read Vampires Never Get Old: Tales with Fresh Bite, a YA vampire anthology! This is not a particularly common reading area for me, but there's always interesting potential in vampire stories, and as I had picked up the anthology to read SCKA finalist "In Kind" by Kayla Whaley, I wanted to check out the rest of it as well. There's some really strong stuff here, all digging into that intersection of power and sexuality and rules that do or don't keep us safe that is well served by both vampire literature and YA more generally. In Kind is a particularly great piece of writing, about Grace, a disabled girl left for dead by a caregiver father who then turns her death into a national campaign in which he is the victim because caring for her was difficult. This being a vampire anthology, Grace gets to become a vampire rather than die as a victim of caregiver violence, and with the help of her sire, Seanan, returns to take control of her own narrative from her father. We should totally also talk about "Mirrors, Windows and Selfies" by Mark Oshiro, a story in blog form about a teen vampire raised in isolation by controlling parents who insist there is nobody else like him, and that they'll be killed for revealing his existence, and "Vampires Never Say Die", by anthology editors Zoraida Córdova and Natalie C. Parker, which is a wildly enjoyable story about a teenage Instagram influencer who strikes up an online friendship with New York's president of vampires (right?), and throws her a very ill-advised birthday party. Because vampires need pocket friends too, you know?

Apparition Lit, Issue 16

A new-to-the-column publication! Apparition is a quarterly speculative fiction magazine that came highly recommended over the course of my conversations with a fellow British Fantasy Award juror. I'm always happy to make space in my already bursting-at-the-seams magazine folder (cries) for another publication, and I was pretty impressed with Apparition's offering of fiction, poetry and non fiction.

There's some very cool weird stuff in here, notably "Cocoon" by Atreyee Gupta: a story about a woman's slow, strange transformation into rock while exploring a cave, her thoughts about impending death combining with reflections on caving, her former partner and their divorce. It's creepy and bleak, and probably one to avoid for anyone with a strong aversion to horror that plays on claustrophobia or being buried alive - but a really impressive story. Lavender, Juniper, Gunpowder, Smoke by Alyson Grauer is a painful but, in its way, very cute story about Marie, a high school witch being bullied who ends up summoning her first magic in the form of a candle wax dragon that comes to school with her and causes gradually more problems throughout the day. It's a pretty straightforward story about handling emotions and becoming resilient in the face of other peoples' opinions, and I appreciated its focus on Marie's journey and her excitement for her own potential in a way that isn't really relevant to her bullies, even as I might have liked to see some real comeuppance on that side of things.

Finally, I have a soft spot for secondary world god stories, and Apparition had me covered with A Home For the Hungry Tide by Alexandra Singer: in which Tailwind, a minor god, is tasked to drive a ghoul away from a nearby town, only to be drawn into a conversation with her as she challenges him on her right to survival, and even more importantly to ensuring the survival of her baby. It's a story that goes in unexpected directions, and the character voices at the heart of it -  pompous, heroic Tailwind and the no-nonsense ghoul - are entertaining and brilliantly written. Excellent stuff.

Questing Elsewhere

I had high expectations for Martin Cahill's The Fifth Horseman, in Fireside's October 2021 issue, after seeing Twitter recommendations for it, and wow, this story does not disappoint. Its the story of the youngest sister of War, Pestilence, Famine and Death, who comes after her siblings and visits the few things remaining in an apocalyptic world after their devastation has been through. It's packed with grief, and the bitterness of endings, and the ways that we can be kind in those spaces anyway, and it's wonderful and heartbreaking to see the combination of the fifth horseman's work itself and her musings about always being behind her siblings, her loneliness and wish to be known. You have to read the story to learn what Cahill calls this fifth horseman: all I'll say about that is it really, really works.

"Traces" by A.E. Decker, in Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issue 328, deals with a man who appears to have been captured in a fae realm by a "master" who buys memories from humans and keeps Chaser's in a box inside his coat. When he is called on to track a woman whose husband has sold the time he "owns" with her, Chaser instead becomes invested in breaking his master's hold and helping her to escape, but that escape plan also involves regaining his own memories and leaving his current identity behind, a result which he becomes more and more apprehensive of as the story progresses. The story does a great job of making Chaser's character compelling, and despite the horrors of his memory-less situation, making his choices to remain as who he is now and not return to a previous version of himself sympathetic and believable.

Finally, let's talk about Uncanny Issue 38, which contains the highly entertaining "Femme and Sundance" by Christopher Caldwell (a gay Black man and his new lover commit magic crimes and then go on the run from the magic police), the highly creepy "Tyrannosaurus Hex" by Sam J. Miller (at a fancy parents' brunch, an older kid checks in on what their younger friend is watching on his VR implants and discovers a very unpleasant procedurally generated world that his parents have no idea he's immersed himself in), and the highly feels-inducing "A House Full of Voices is Never Empty" by Miyuki Jane Pinckard. Pinckard's story is about two second generation immigrant sisters, one of whom still lives in a house packed with hoarded possessions that she hears speaking to her and that keep her company even as her family leave, and its a powerful take on heritage and what we hold on to through grief and change, with a much happier resolution than I dared hope for. It's rare I am disappointed when sitting down for an issue of Uncanny, and this one certainly delivers the goods.

Adri, Nerds of a Feather co-editor, 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. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy

Questing in Shorts, July 2021: Lovely Weather for Shorts

 Ahoy, fellow readers! Welcome to July’s Questing in Shorts, where I round up another month in short fiction reading and tell you all about the things I enjoyed (or sometimes didn’t). This month, I’m filling short fiction notebook number 2, which is this beautiful purple number with a whippet on the cover:

 

Notebook number 2 is a little beaten up from coming to my brother’s wedding (it also has an "items to pick up from the house” list written in the back) and unlike last month, I didn’t manage to fill an entire book in a few intense days of short fiction. But I’m over halfway through filling it, and the magazine folder is looking less intimidating than it has in the past, so that’s all good.

Besides the notebook, the other news is that I’m once again a judge for the British Fantasy Awards this year, and this time I’m judging in the Magazines and Periodicals category! Most of the finalists involve short fiction in some form and there’s a mix of venues I’m familiar with and those that are new to me, so I’m really looking forward to exploring what all of them have to offer.

Fantasy Magazine

Let’s kick off with a new-to-me publication! Fantasy Magazine was kind enough to send me their July issue, with a quartet of stories whose unifying theme seems to be “a bit spooky”. Lulu Khadim’s “A Softness of the Heart” is a sweet ghost story about Louise, a girl who lives with one aunt and is advised by the ghost of another. I love a cosy matter-of-fact ghost story and this one delivers a family story with just enough interpersonal prickles to make its resolution satisfying. “There Will Be A Question and Answer Period After Your Inevitable Demise” by Marika Bailey reimagines the afterlife of an archetypal hero, putting the classical portrait of masculine prowess on a conference call where he must hear from the “monstrous” women who suffered as a result of his deeds.

My favourite story of the issue is “I Would”, by Benjamin C. Kinney, a great piece of secondary world fantasy from the perspective of a seer imprisoned by a bandit queen. As the seer navigates possible futures with two visiting women, who themselves are trying to escape her captor, she has to work out what is possible and what she – as someone used to thinking of herself as powerless – needs to do to make it happen (and maybe to end up kissing one of them at the end). The diverging future paths are a great device, one which really captures the feeling of someone trapped and desperately seeking their only path towards freedom.

FIYAH

Issue 19 of FIYAH is "Sound and Color", and within that theme lies five quite different, vibrant stories. I almost wish I’d covered this one last month because then I could have remarked upon how excited I was to come across “Lungs” by Lily Watson so soon after reading “Concerto for Winds and Resistance” by Cara Masten DiGirolamo, which I covered in June's roundup. Where DiGirolamo’s piece uses an orchestra to tell a broader story (and drops the curtain as soon as the first “real” note is played), Watson’s really focuses on bringing to life the magic of collective music, its string group overcoming the challenge of the piece before them (and their own hierarchies) to bring a God to life. Evocative stuff.

This issue also has "Meditations on Sun-Ra’s Bassim" by Yah Yah Scholfield: I loved Scholfield’s last story with FIYAH and this one is just as excellent, a one-sided epistolatory narrative from a space traveller to her sister back on the planet where they grew up. Even though we only get one sister’s voice, the story evokes such a rich family bond between its two leads, full of snarky affection and yearning for connection both across physical distance and the experiential gap of their very different lives. The story’s journey goes super well with the other two – significantly more tense – journeys in this issue: “Morning”, by Diane Russell, features a girl and the clone of her sister sent on a hopeless mission in a failing space colony, with all the pain points that suggests, and Where the Sky Becomes Milk by Jamie McGhee is a backwards story of a boy trying to find his way home through a difficult sequence of locations, the purpose of his journey unfolding as we get closer to its beginning. And to round off the issue, L.A. Knight’s story offers a great speculative take on disability, work and escapism, with a disabled jobseeker who fails to find work that will appropriately accommodate them - until approached by the supernatural entity responsible for creating portals to other worlds.

Podcastle

Not only did I read some stories with my eyeballs this month, but I also listened to two of them via the magic of the podcast! Both "Three For Hers" by Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko and "Pull" by Leah Ning are original to Podcastle, and both offered very different listening experiences. The latter is a quietly tragic slice of life story about an old man caring for his ill, superpowered wife (I’m pretty sure she is supposed to be a siren?) who can “pull” people around her into doing things and also into dreamscapes and memories – a dangerous thing to happen when implied dementia is taking away the shape of those memories. Three for Hers is a highly atmospheric fairytale-like story, about a woman in an occupied land who goes to work for a vicious, abusive Margrave who insists that nobody around him show emotions. Vida’s experiences in the Margrave’s services, and her quest for revenge, all come to a very satisfying conclusion. As you’d expect, the narration is excellent too.

Other Highlights

Two longer stories from other publications really grabbed my attention. The first is Kuemo of the Masks by Naomi Libicki, in Giganotosaurus. A troupe of players are captured by bandits and pushed to put on a show, using the special, magical masks that the protagonist’s mother had left her for just such a dangerous occasion. Of course, neither the masks – which represent archetypal deity figures whose stories are told in the plays – nor the bandits are who they seem, and everything takes a real turn once the story ends up in the underworld. The narrative voice – and the implied story-within-a-story structure, which we only get clarity on at the end – are both great in this one.

In Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Witness Bruska Lai by Aaron Perry (issue 333) grabbed and held my attention through a dense, high-context mystery in a world where all dead and future royalty live in a single palace, designed so they can keep separate but simultaneous spaces through the different ages. Perry not only sets up a very weird story setting in a straightforward, reasonable way, but also creates a mystery – that of a missing Princess – that only makes sense with the context of that worldbuilding. It’s brain bendy, but it works brilliantly, and I loved the imagery of the complex, colour-coded palace and its supposedly genius inhabitants.

Two stories in Uncanny Magazine Issue 40 stood out for me: "Unseelie Brothers, Ltd." By Fran Wilde, which has outstanding worldbuilding and some very imaginative sartorial creations all in the context of a fae dress shop whose dresses are beloved by high society regardless of price; and "Heart Shine" by Shveta Thakarar, whose overlooked protagonist gets a firefly prince to remind her of her own worth. Both hit me directly in the feels and have some wonderful character relationships to watch out for.

Finally, I resubscribed to Fireside Magazine this month after a couple of years away, and July was a really intriguing point to restart with its quartet of mostly-future dystopian concepts riffing on inequality and injustice and how our societies shape the value of human beings. There’s an intriguing set-up and a very satisfying payoff in Ann LeBlanc’s Across the River, my heart, my memory, a story of stolen sentient organs, and Forest Thing is a creepy look at academia and environmental catastrophe, told through the eyes of a Black student ostracised by her peers and suffering the effects of living in a poisoned environment – though, again, the payoff is one of satisfaction and belongong rather than lingering on body horror. I’m intrigued to see what August brings.

 

Short Fiction Round Up: June 2021

Finals season is back for German grad school (please don't ask me how our semesters work, I don't understand it either, I'm just suffering at this point) but despite that, I have some excellent recs coming your way! Second-world fantasies dominate our selection this month, though there's a touch of horror and a touch of literary fiction to add some variety. Enjoy!

The Lay of Lilyfinger by GV Anderson (Tor.com)
Anderson’s newest fantasy novelette about a scaled musician, her apprentice, and a complex and culturally fraught song was genuinely the standout in my June reading. Anderson’s deft touch with complex and layered situations is perfect. The humanity that each and every character in this densely populated novelette shows is perfect. Both these elements combine into a very enjoyable meditation on art, colonization, and memory. Highly recommended, especially for people who loved the complicated worldbuilding of RB Lemberg’s Four Profound Weaves. 

All This Darkness by Jennifer Donahue (Apex)
Written in the third person plural, this Donahue story follows an amorphous group of children of coal miners as they slowly get drawn in by the mountain. As someone currently living in Germany’s mining area, it’s unsurprising that this story hooked me in. The plot is creepy, the writing is stunning, and the imagery is haunting. I think about this first line every time I walk by my decommissioned coal mines now: “Nobody ever says we have coal in our veins; they don’t have to.” Chills!

Thirteen of the Secrets in My Purse by Rachel Swirsky (Uncanny)
The skill with which Swirsky weaves this small flash piece together is unmistakable: the lipstick, wallet and keys, the three things first mentioned, begin to affect the narrator: the tension rises quickly, until the end feels like a deeply satisfying relief.   

Hassan the Executioner Walks Out of Jawasar for the Last Time by RK Duncan (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
I love stories that play with structure, and that’s exactly what this second-world fantasy story by Duncan does: it begins at the end. The story opens with powerful sorceress and authoritarian ruler Lamia dying, and tells the story of her closest friend, Hassan, leaving the city. The setting is rich and well-described – the desert city’s newly emancipated criminals as well as its angry and oppressed occupants are happy to turn on Hassan, and as her fends them off with his slowly failing magic powers, Hassan reflects on how much of the city's anger is deserved.  

All The Ophelias In My Flat by N Theodoridou (Silvia Magazine)
Theodoridou’s literary flash piece about dozens of versions of Ophelia coexisting in a single apartment and trying to move forward with their life is heartbreaking, beautifully written, and wonderfully stylistic. Again, I don’t want to say too much about it and dull it’s effects, so all I will say is read it and weep.

POSTED BY: Elisabeth R Moore is a writer, birder and grad student living in Germany. When she's not writing strange stories or cheerful reviews, she can be found crocheting, hiking or biking. She tweets at @willowcabins.

Questing in Shorts June 2021: The Triumphant Return!

 Yes that's right, Questing in Shorts is BACK, bay-bee!

Put on your dancing shorts and boogie with me

It's been six months, during which time the subscription folder on my e-reader has been relentlessly filling itself up with enticing things. Sadly, since the start of the year my mind has mostly been elsewhere (and by elsewhere I mean "taking on the general capacity and aura of a mossy pond"). I had a few exceptions, mostly to catch up on 2020 stories from Omenana and FIYAH before Hugo nominations ended in March, but on the whole it's not been a good time for me and short fiction.

But! as of the start of this month, I've been feeling the short fiction itch again, and I've spent some time trying to come up with a system that will help me keep track of all the short fiction I read in a way that actually reflects the way I read short fiction (so, not sitting in front of a spreadsheet trying to type things in every ten minutes). After some thought, I decided to give in to the instinct that this was a problem that could only be solved with new stationery.

For once, though, new stationery really has been a gamechanger! Behold, Adri's first 2021 short fiction review notebook, courtesy of Whirling World on Etsy:

I decided to pick up a few pre-formatted review notebooks, but as they're set up for books I quickly realised that I'd need to change a lot of things to make this work for short stories. I printed out a set of form stickers to go in the middle of the page so I could quickly write in double the number of reviews, and wrote in the publication instead of a "finished date". I completely ignored the formatting of the TBR pages at the front to just put in a big ol' list of magazines (limited to things I have ebooks of, with apologies to Baffling Magazine and Omenana, both of which I read online - I needed to fix the folder backlog first!)

An incomplete list of things

I also gamified things for myself: after finishing a magazine, I rolled an eight-sided dice (because my e-reader shows eight documents per page) and read the corresponding magazine from the first page of the folder. This meant I mostly read things that I'd added more recently, but it kept me interested, and picking things randomly confirmed that I'm really happy with my current subscriptions: nothing ever came up that I was disappointed to have to read next.

And I filled this whole notebook! With 61 stories, from Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, Giganotosaurus, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Mermaids Monthly, The Future Fire and Anathema. The whims of the dice I didn't read any Uncanny or FIYAH despite having a couple of issues of each, nor did I get to the first issue of Constelacíon, so those are on the list for next time. but needless to say there's still plenty of stuff within these 61 stories to talk about...

Mermaids Monthly

A new publication to this column, Mermaids Monthly was set up by Julia Rios and Meg Frank with a simple, one-year mission: to publish content about mermaids. This month, I read their March, April and May issues, and I did indeed get a lot of delightful mermaid art, comics ("Fat Mermaid In: Wardrobe Malfunction" is a great piece from the May issue), poetry and of course short fiction, covering everything from surrealist slipstream to survivalist horror and everything in between.

A lot of Mermaids Monthly's content is flash fiction, which combines with the art and poetry to create a big, slippery mash-up blend of mermaid and siren myth where individual pieces feel subsumed into the whole experience. That's not to say that each piece doesn't stand on its own merits, of course - everything is really good! - but that Mermaids Monthly really benefits from being read as a single publication from start to finish, leaning into the thematic coherence and letting the different interpretations work together.

That said, there are some stand-outs, and as a longer-short fan it was longer stories that really caught my attention. In April, "A Minnow, Or Perhaps a Colossal Squid" by C.S.E. Cooney and Carlos Hernandez is a story about a magical world where debtors are transformed into fish while their debts are being repaid, and it alternates between Estrella, a caseworker charged with doing this magic, and a naturalist studying deep-sea sirens whose debts allow her to pursue her research in unexpected ways. The split perspective between Estrella's present on Mariposa, and the research notes of Ven. Damiana Cardosa y Fuentes, provides a great mix of worldbuilding and the sirens themselves are excellent (you'd expect no less from Mermaids Monthly, of course). In May, "The Incident at Veniaminov" is the story of an indigenous community visited by a cruise ship with a sinister agenda, in which Mathilda Zeller weaves together questions about identity with an action packed story (involving cannibalism) with excellent results.

Apex Magazine

Also new to my subscription folder is Apex Magazine, back off hiatus this year and publishing some magnificent things. I read issue 122 (March-April), which is full of stories that riff off of themes of survival, vengeance and memorialisation in one way or another. "Black Box of the Terraworms" was a weird highlight for me: the story of a strange terraforming intelligence as it battles the "gods" of a planet it is trying to make habitable to humans. The way the terraformer's objectives change as it takes on the perspective of the gods makes this a really interesting ride, combining a science fictional concept with a creation-myth story structure to brilliant effect. Elsewhere, I am a sucker for a documentary-style story and Sam Miller's "A Love that Burns Hot Enough to Last: Deleted Scenes from a Documentary" hit all my buttons in that regard, giving a range of testimonials about the life of Ti, a singer with the ability to channel magic through her songs. Ti's story - which, we know from the start, has a tragic ending - is offered up alongside the story of one of her fans, Brent, a closeted soldier who goes to one of her military concerts and is caught up in her magic. Brent's life, we learn, is changed for the better by being able to come out and build a life with his boyfriend as a result of their concert experiences; but Ti's magic can't alter the challenges of her own life and her own inability to follow her desires.

Finally, this issue of Apex includes an interactive piece by Sabrina Vourvoulias which is highly worth checking out. "Las Girlfriends Guide to Subversive Eating" is set in a magical version of Philadelphia, and offers up a fictional culinary tour of the city where food is not just a guide to the history and diversity of the city, but a way for migrants and activists to offer each other the magic they need to survive, be that through mushroom-based cuisine that can heal ailments, tamales woven with spells for keeping ICE away and paperwork rolling smoothly, or gardens which encourage younger generations to engage with the heritage of their ancestor's homelands. The formatting is fun, and the break-up of text between different pages means it doesn't feel hard on the eyes, and while the technology doesn't quite hit full intuitiveness every time (the lack of "back" buttons at the bottom of each food stop makes scrolling back up a bit of a faff) it's still a great vehicle for a powerful, engaging piece of urban fantasy.

Art by Sunmi for "The Chicken House"

Strange Horizons

Right as I started clearing my backlog, Strange Horizons dropped four months of ebooks on Patreon collecting their editions from February to May, and I ended up reading the entire set, including April's Samovar, the Palestinian special issue and the trans/nonbinary special issue. This is, quite simply, too much Strange Horizons to summarise in a couple of paragraphs, but if you're diving in on the recommendation of this column in particular, those special issues are where I'd start: the Palestine special issue brings 3 stories and 6 pieces of poetry as well as an excellent roundtable. "PALESTINE IS A FUTURISM: THE DREAM" is a brilliant piece of all-caps fury/joy riffing off capitalist exploitation and extractive industries and imagining something still strange and affected by their presence, but somehow newer and more pure. "Queer Arab Dictionary" is also an amazing piece, its stanzas looking at current and future language and envisioning how a gendered language might be reenvisioned or pushed beyond the binary. When it comes to short stories, I loved the deeply wry, satirical "A Day in the Life of Anmar 20X1" by Abdulla Moaswes, in which the future President of Palestine attempts to curate his dream palace, and his tenure's success, as his land literally constricts around him.

May's Trans special issue also has lots of good poetry (I liked "Luna" by Alexander Te Pohe), as well as some fun stories. "Women Want Me, Fish Fear Me" by Paris Green is the story of a sex worker in a world where many people have animal genes transferred into them to increase their potential for particular careers. Green's protagonist has had fish genes transferred, but remains multiply marginalised with no other options available. The story unfolds in snatches of perspective, centring on an interaction with one particular client, and while the nuances are beyond my critical capacity as a cis reader, the detail and atmosphere is extraordinary and makes this well worth the experience. "A Welling Up" by Natalia Theodoridou and "The Chicken House" by Jenny Fried are also excellent - I enjoyed the latter, in particular, for its trans take on the Baba Yaga myth.

Other highlights:

After a year off from subscribing, I'm rediscovering exactly why enjoy Beneath Ceaseless Skies' brand of "adventure fantasy". The story that took my breath away this time was "Concerto for Winds and Resistance" by Cara Masten DiGirolamo, which tells the story of a city under repressive rule from the perspective of four members of a wind orchestra and the curious, magical piece their new conductor puts in front of them. On the subject of favourite city stories, "The City, My Love" by Alexandra Seidel (The Future Fire 57) covers centuries or development and migration from the perspective of a city and the humans it loves within it

"Just Enough Rain", by P.H. Lee, is available on Giganotosaurus (it's their May story) and I loved its matter-of-fact religious exploration and its hilarious romance, and the mother-daughter relationship at its heart. I also want to mention "A Remembered Kind of Dream" by Rei Rosenquist, one of very few short stories from 2021 I read at the start of this year: it's a post-apocalyptic queer found family story that's got that perfect combination of biopunk and hopelessness and human grit and I'm glad it's stuck with me to make it into this column.

Finally, Anathema brings its usual blend of heartbreak and hope to Issue 12 after an issue off (though their December showcase is, of course, very much worth your time). This time, there's more of the latter than the former: "Cirque Mécanique" broke my heart most successfully, but "Lady Fortune" and "To Rise, Blown Open" put it together again.

From the Bookshelves:

My lack of short fiction reading has stretched to anthologies and collections, but I did finally get through Never Have I Ever by Isabel Yap, which is a showcase from an outstanding short fiction writer. The stories that draw on modern Filipino events and culture are my favourites: Asphalt, River, Mother, Child, the story of an afterlife where innocent victims of Duterte's war on drugs have found themselves stuck, is powerful and brilliant in its characters and the way it presents their journey, and "Have you heard the one about Anamaria Marquez" is a creepy take on schoolyard rumour. There's also a new novella in this collection: "A Spell for Foolish Hearts" is about a mostly-closeted witch who starts to fall in love with a beautiful man at his workplace, with adorable and very supernaturally satisfying results. I had high expectations for this collection and it certainly didn't disappoint, and I feel like I've left this collection with even more love for Isabel Yap's storytelling than I had before.

Posted by: Adri, Nerds of a Feather co-editor, 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. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy