Questing in Shorts: It's still August 2021 somewhere

Hello friends and welcome to August in September! Yes I am here two weeks late, but I brought summer weather with me* so hopefully that makes up for my chronic inconsistency. What can I say? Life happens too much. The delay is partly because I've been reading for award deadlines that have directed my time towards things I sadly can't speak about in this column for now. But the main reason is because I want to talk about two very cool, distinct anthologies that hit my inbox recently, as well as rounding up a few magazines in the bargain. 

No new review notebook to show off this month, but we'll have one for the real September roundup. So, onwards!

*Offer applies to those within a 50 mile radius of London only, no guarantees made for weather in other locations, other seasons are available

The Best of 2020: Queer Speculative Fiction and African Speculative Fiction

Let's start by talking Best Ofs, and two new ventures that are hopefully going to become regular fixtures in the short fiction scene. We're Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction 2020, edited by C.L. Clark and series editor Charles Payseur, is out from Neon Hemlock Press; The Year's Best African Speculative Fiction (2021), edited by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and out from Jembefola Press, comes out at the end of this month. I thoroughly enjoyed these anthologies: both are by editors who know their fields as well as humanly possible and the range of speculative storytelling is on full display, with science fiction ideas and glimpses into fantasy worlds sitting alongside more slipstream-y stories exploring facets of our own world and the identities within it.  I had previously read more of the stories in Best African Speculative Fiction than in We're Here, but the majority from both were new to me, making it an exciting opportunity to catch up on some highly rated stories that I missed in their first release.

I hardly want to get into favourite stories from anthologies that are this consistently good, but I'll try and pull some out anyway. First, The Year's Best African Speculative Fiction: "The Many Lives of an Abiku" by Tobi Ogundiran (originally Beneath Ceaseless Skies #309) is a grim, heartbreaking take on the myth of abiku, spirit children who are born over and over again to the same family only to die before puberty. When this particular abiku starts to see her spirit brethren, she realises that she wants to stay with her family, but the inevitability of her myth has other ideas. "Disassembly" by Makena Onjerika (Fireside Fiction October 2020) and "The River of Night" by Tloto Tsamaase (The Dark November 2020) come one after the other, each tackling strange physical embodiments of mental health - though they ultimately lead to very different places, one very cathartic and one... not so much. And, there's three whole stories by Sheree Renee Thomas, of which my favourite was the third (new to me) one, "Love Hangover" (Slay: Stories of the Vampire Noire ed. Nicole Givens Kurtz), an awesome take on a relationship with a parasitic demon and the destruction it brings. As a general stance, I'd prefer to see more authors included than have the same author contribute more than one story, but the quality of stories from all the authors is so high that I see why a different choice was made here.

In We're Here, I was thrilled to revisit Lina Rather's "Thin Red Jellies" (Giganotosaurus), a story about two women sharing a body far too early in their relationship after an accident leaves one of them dead and awaiting technological resurrection. Somehow, I hadn't read R.B. Lemberg's "To Balance the Weight of Khalem" (Beneath Ceaseless Skies), so that was a delight to encounter here: a tale of layered identities and migration, all revolving around a city that literally balances on chains, and requires constant calculations to maintain. There are some excellent love stories in here: the video game monsters of John Wiswell's "8 Bit Free Will" (Podcastle), the fledgeling shapeshifters of Innocent Chizaram Ilo's "Rat and Finch Are Friends" (Strange Horizons) and the talented, forgotten art witches of Gwen C. Katz's "Portrait of Three Women with an Owl" (The Future Fire) all face challenging and heartbreaking odds to be together and be seen for who they are. And, of course, there are plenty of stories about family, both blood and chosen. The common thread here is that, despite tragedies and apocalypses and abuse and all the other challenges they face, Payseur and Clarke have picked a crop of stories whose protagonists get to triumph in some way: even if it's just a small personal realisation in the midst of bigger troubles, or a renewed determination to keep going. It Makes We're Here a profoundly hopeful anthology, a message from 2020 which is especially welcome on a 2021 bookshelf.

We're Here starts with introductions by both editors, and the one by Charles Payseur hit me particularly hard, as it asks the question of why a queer speculative fiction anthology is needed, and whether it's even helpful to pick out "best" stories based on one (or two) editors' preference. Setting aside that wider debate - except to say that I've never felt the need to read a "best of" anthology from an editor I didn't already trust - I think both of these works add something important to the short fiction landscape. Both Best African Speculative Fiction and We're Here roll out a welcome mat for the marginalised groups they represent, and a landmark for any reader exploring speculative short fiction, signposting authors and publications and other anthologies and collections to try next. I could probably name half a dozen stories that would fit the brief for each of these anthologies that I would have been delighted to see included, but that's not really the point: the point is that anyone picking up either of these books is going to get an amazing snapshot of where the genre is, and where stories from queer, African and African diaspora perspectives fit in.

Constelación Magazine, Issue 1

I'm late to the party on the first issue of Constelación magazine (and still waiting for my Kickstarter capybara swag to make its way through the international post system), but this is a great venture: a quarterly magazine featuring stories from Latin American and Caribbean authors, with stories published in both English and Spanish. I can't speak Spanish, so I can only speak to those versions of the stories: but oh wow, these are some interesting stories. Malka Older's story, "The Badger’s Digestion; or The First First-Hand Description of Deneskan Beastcraft by An Aouwan Researcher" was my favourite of them all, with a foreign researcher who comes to a country with what, to her, is a completely inexplicable custom: people can get together in groups and collectively transform into a giant animal, letting them do tasks that would otherwise be impossible (like fly around as dragons). The Aouwan researcher's  interest is met with polite confusion and obfuscation by the Deneskans, who don't see their own custom as something relevant to an outsider (especially a woman), but when an opportunity comes up to be maternity cover for a badger's digestion, she jumps at the chance. The worldbuilding is brilliant and the themes of belonging and coherence, with the foreign researcher and the concept of beastcraft, are very well realised.

We also need to talk about "The Breaks" by Scott King, about a woman who can see physical manifestations of people's trauma as "breaks" on their skin. When Jai meets Avery, she's the first person Jai has seen whose break takes a specific form, and through getting to know each other and learning the story behind Avery's trauma and the feather she wears on her skin, Jai comes to a realisation about accepting how she wears her own traumas, and the unique way she experiences their manifestation. Throw in some evocative historical queer fantasy in the form of "My Mothers Hand "by Dante Luiz, and a multiple-lifetime-spanning story of connection by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, in "Kaleidoscope", and you've got an excellent first issue for a magazine that I hope is going places.

Fireside Magazine Issue 94 (August 2021)

I need to be upfront, and admit that I've become cranky around stories that take place in "documentation" format (I'm sure there's a proper name for this, but that's what I'm going with). Both "There Will Be No Alien Invasion" by Sam F Weiss and "Guidelines for Appeasing Kim of the Hundred Hands" by John Wiswell feature academic settings and professional communications within those settings: Weiss' story is half of an e-mail correspondence between an irate "nerd hero" researcher to an unsolicited alien invasion, and Wiswell's is a memo about a magical statue on campus that alludes repeatedly to a prior "incident" where this statue was not given due respect. They're both fun concepts, and I especially loved Weiss' snarky, irritated scientist, but the "document" conceits feel awkward and superficial, both stories taking a similar narrative tone that was immensely readable, and conveyed plenty of irreverance and frustration, but wasn't recognisable to me as "professional scientist corresponding with unwanted contact" or "university writing officious rules for highly specific situation". I'd have loved to see these stories either really commit to the bit (tell me the story of Leonard Knavs and Kim of the Hundred Hands using only empty, verbose academia-speak! I am here for it!) or just tell their stories in... y'know. Story format.

Happily, the latter three stories of this issue defused any lingering crankiness immediately. My Custom Monster by Jo Miles is just a wonderful take on living with depression and learning to accept yourself as worthy of comfort and love even when you can't get out of bed or meet the expectations of people around you. The story's custom monster is ordered by the protagonist as a companion, and from its arrival it turns out to be weird and ugly and exactly the comfort she needs in her life. I was also really delighted by the flash piece "Alexa, Play Solidarity Forever", in which a person's Alexa unit stops functioning and goes on strike along with all the other virtual assistants, and then begins recruiting the person whose house she is in to their budding labour movement.

Other Stuff

I listened to some great fiction from Escape Pod last month, including the 2021 original "One Hundred Seconds to Midnight" by Lauren Ring. This is the story of a woman who works in insurance sales for a company specialising in Kaiju attacks, who is stuck in an airport on her way home from a business trip when an attack is announced near her. What happens next involves no heroism or dramatic last stands or wild deus ex machinae, but instead focuses on the protagonist and the connections she makes in the airport - a barista who sells her coffee, a musician who keeps people entertained as flights begin to be cancelled and fear sets in, the mother she warns with her limited advance information - as she waits for disaster. It's really powerful stuff, and gets full marks for making the insurance element of the plot so interesting and poignant.

In July, Mermaids Monthly did a special issue on Selkies, and it might be their best one yet! Come for Elsa Sjunneson's "Ocean's 6", in which the supernatural exes of a shitty dude team up to kick ass, recover their property and throw a giant middle finger at the groww entitlement of the British Museum; stay for "Clutch. Stick. Shift", an intergenerational exploration of the urge to depart (and those who stay) by Tehnuka, and delight in the closing flash, "Girlfriend Jacket", an adorable, queer skin sharing vignette.

Oh, and while we're on the subject of queer romantic skin sharing and other oceanic adventures: the same package that brought We're Here to my door also brought Neon Hemlock's Voidjunk Issue Two, a mini collection of queer erotic monster stories. If you've ever pondered the question "has anyone written a really kinky, hot story about having sex with the sea": it's called "Swallowed" by Indigo Torridson and it's WORTH IT. That's all.

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

Feminist Futures: WisCon and Me

Let me set a scene for you. May 2014, and I have just started getting seriously into SFF in all the wrongest ways. And look, I’d love to go to conventions, have been looking for some around where I live (Western Wisconsin), and hear about WisCon. And it sounds amazing. Small and affordable and lots to see and do. Now let me reiterate, I have very little experience with SFF fandom, am not even on Twitter at this point, and my greatest sources of information on SFF are...well, shall we just say not exactly reliable (I am told repeatedly that WisCon is terrible and makes men feel unsafe).

All of this also means that I wasn’t aware of the crisis at the heart of the WisCon, and one that sort of exploded in and around WisCon 38. It’s a hell of a time to have my first ever convention. But listen. The guest of honors are Hiromi Goto and N.K. Jemisin. I get some of their books ahead of time to prep. I read The Killing Moon. People, that book changes me.

Let me reach back a bit more. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, affluent and sheltered. My reading consisted of almost entirely straight white men. I read the entire Wheel of Time series every time a new book came out. I read the Legends anthology and see no lack in its table of contents. At this point I’m still fairly convinced (despite plenty of evidence to the contrary) that I am your average straight cis dude. That’s about to change.

WisCon is energy. It’s learning. And it doesn’t really hide anything. At that first WisCon I listen while people talk about consent, about race, about queerness, about SFF in ways that I have never encountered before. I listen. I keep listening. I don’t think I talk to a single other person during WisCon 38, except to blushingly thank N.K. Jemisin as she signs my copy of Circlet’s Fantastic Erotica (I told you there was evidence). But still, the experience is transformative. It opens my eyes not just to work within SFF that I had been wholly ignorant of, it also prompts me to introspect and examine myself and start actually working through my feelings and identity. I think I can safely say without WisCon, I would be a very different person.

And at the same time, the convention is dealing with harassment and a huge failure to protect attendees. The convention seems to be stuck at a crossroads of sorts, one where it can refuse to acknowledge wrongdoing and one where it can own up to it and do better. I like to think that it chose the second path. Because as I have returned to WisCon year after year, I have noticed only a better and better convention and conversation, one that in large part checks the 101 at the door and really digs into issues and discussions that I don’t really hear talked about anywhere else. And as the convention has moved forward, louder have been the voices claiming the convention too quick to respond to criticism, too receptive to complaints of harassment. Which seems to indicate to me at least that they’re doing something right.

Historically, WisCon has tried to inhabit the space where feminism and SFF intersect. Through its work to organize the convention and the Tiptree Award, the convention has consistently brought a needed light to issues within SFF that are often overlooked or suppressed. This, even as Wisconsin itself has turned its back on a lot of the liberal ideas that helped to birth the convention, even as much of the country has embraced a politics and rhetoric that are unafraid to call any attempt to foster inclusion intolerant, sexist, and racist (for not catering first and most to white straight cis men, basically). In practice, it has been a bumpy road, but one that I think WisCon is dedicated to seeing through. From its policy changes to its guests of honor to its wide range of programming and events, I continue to see improvements and a genuine desire to build a convention that is welcoming and enriching.

For me, WisCon has been an introduction into so much. And as I’ve attended, I’ve grown and learned. As a reader and writer. As a fan. And as a person. I doubt, in that, I am alone. When I first attended, WisCon was a revelation. It was getting to hear K. Tempest Bradford talk in person, which in turn led me to her Reading Challenge, which then led me to completely rethinking my reading habits. It was getting to hear Hiromi Goto’s guest of honor speech, and being floored by it. It was getting to hear every subsequent guest of honor speech, and be moved to tears, or to action. I’ve met friends, and even made some. I’ve been on programming, and gotten to talk about reviewing, yeah, but also about representation, masculinity, and my love of Garak.

I cannot separate out my personal journey that started at WisCon from how I think of the convention. So if you’re looking for an objective source of information, I’m probably not it. But it’s still the one convention I try to make no matter what. The one convention I would choose to attend each year (which is lucky because it’s just about the only one I can afford). I will not try to deny that for many WisCon has failed them, has hurt them, and I can only hope that the convention has truly learned from its mistakes and failures, and will continue to lead the charge for inclusive feminism in SFF.

For those who want to know more about the convention, check out its website here.

For those who want to know more about the issues with the convention, google is your friend, but there’s plenty of info and links here.

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POSTED BY: Charles, avid reader, reviewer, and sometimes writer of speculative fiction. Contributor (now at-large) to Nerds of a Feather since 2014.

Reading the Hugos: Fan Writer

Welcome back to Reading the Hugos, our regular summer series covering as many Hugo Award categories as possible. Today we're looking at the Fan Writers. If you're not familiar, those are the writers doing exactly what I'm doing here (only better) - writing about science fiction and fantasy and the various intersections with real life and politics and awards and with other works and with absolutely anything connected to the genre at all - except that we're all doing this work and this writing because it's a conversation that we value and the writing is meaningful to us. Hopefully it is meaningful to others. 

This is somewhat difficult category because the award is for a person, not for an individual work. Like the Campbell, we're trying to compare a body of work against a body of work and figure out which has the most weight and which has the most importance. I doubt it is possible, but here's my look at the six finalists for Fan Writer.

Camestros Felapton
Sarah Gailey
Mike Glyer
Foz Meadows
Charles Payseur
Bogi Takács

Mike Glyer: I find File 770 a valuable resource for fannish news within and around science fiction and fantasy. Glyer’s Pixel Scroll roundups are a quick daily check to see what’s going on, what I might have missed, what I want to miss, and what I should consider paying attention to. While there is writing involved in setting up the Pixel Scroll posts, it’s not what I look for out of fan writing. There is value in the writing of the news roundups, and I value those but it’s not “fan writing” in the sense of what I want out of a fan writer.

For his actual fan writing credits, Glyer does strong work in eulogizing the passing of notable fans. He brings out stories and lives that many readers may not have known of those who have been important in the building of fan convention community over the decades. As a whole, though, Glyer’s fan writing does not appeal to me. The most notable bits of writing are those where he engages with the Sad and Rapid Puppies (in previous years, but occasionally addressed in 2017) as well with Jon Del Arroz, who seems to be an offshoot of those campaigns. It’s not enough to push Glyer’s fan writing farther up the ballot or above No Award.


No Award.


Bogi Takacs: I’ve seen Takacs pop up on my twitter feed commenting on various aspects of genre, but I had never read much of their writing. Based on the writing samples including in the Voter’s Packet (and suggestive from their Twitter bio), Takacs is focused on marginalized communities intersecting with science fiction and fantasy. To be quickly reductive, Takacs is Hungarian, Queer, and Jewish – all of which comes through in the focus of the included writing samples – it is a case where identity is part and parcel of the writing. Bogi Takacs’ voice is vital and important.


Camestros Felapton: I was most familiar with Camestros from his commenting over at File 770 and the occasional link back to his own blog. Here, he has included a much more robust Voter Packet entry than most. Half of his fan writing is the stuff I would be looking for from a contributor to Nerds of a Feather. The other half really annoys me. The annoying half is stuff like Timothy the Cat, Ask a Triceratops, A Cat Reviews La La Land – the stuff that isn’t straight up essays and reviews and is more Felapton playing around. I’m being a little harsh here and I’m probably stretching the truth when I say that half annoys me. The truth is it just isn’t my thing and I think it detracts from the stuff that I do appreciate and do like. It’s a small knock down compared to some of the other very strong writers on the ballot.


Sarah Gailey: Years ago Jo Walton was writing fantastically compelling essays at Tor.com. Whether she was revisiting her favorites like Steven Brust and CJ Cherryh, looking at the Hugo Awards, or whatever else struck her fancy, she was killing it. She was killing it to the point there was some chatter about nominating her for Best Fan Writer. I can’t source this, but I remember her writing, telling people not to nominate her because she wasn’t eligible – because this was paid writing (though not well paid) and Tor.com was a professional publication, if mostly for fiction. I’ve since struggled with that idea in other categories, not nominating the lamentably mothballed Rocket Talk podcast because it was hosted at Tor.com as one example. I still struggle, though I think that fan / pro ship has pretty well sailed regarding whether the fan writer gets paid and whether a podcast is hosted on the website of a professional entity (see 8-4 Play in 2016 for Fancast).

I bring all of that up here because the three contributions from Sarah Gailey in the voter packet are from Tor.com and Uncanny Magazine (a semiprozine, which is an entirely separate discussion). Is it fan writing or is it paid professional writing? I’m still not sure where the line is, and I’m not sure it is a battle I have in me to fight today.

Whether you view her writing as fannish or professional, Sarah Gailey’s essays are superb. With clear eyes and clear writing, Gailey gets to the heart of whatever she is writing about, digging deep below the surface to hit a point of view that perhaps isn’t as talked about as often in wide open spaces.

Foz Meadows: It's no secret that Foz Meadows is smart as hell as a fan writer. She has twice been a finalist for Fan Writer (2014 and 2017) and that's no mistake. She writes deeply incisive commentary on all the fannish stuff that I enjoy, but brings a perspective that I both appreciate and need. Whether she is writing about Star Wars or Final Fantasy or Godzilla or digging into why someone who wants "realistic" rather than "diverse" books might have a problem with perspective, Meadows brings nuanced truth and understanding.

There are many ways that I appreciate fan writing because there are many shapes that fan writing can take, and Meadows is among the best.


Charles Payseur: Out of all of the writers on the Fan Writer ballot, I was the most familiar with Charles Payseur. After all, for three years he was an important contributor to Nerds of a Feather. He was our short fiction reviewer. We were sad to see him leave at the end of the year, but recognized he was moving onward and upward. He’s been doing his own thing at Quick Sip Reviews and was branching out to other venues, including The Book Smugglers (a Hugo finalist this year for Semiprozine). Any time I’ve needed to get a quick take on a short story, I went to Quick Sip Reviews to see what Charles had to say. Charles is sharp, incisive, sensitive, considerate, passionate, and thoughtful reviewer and essayist. If I ever wrote (and published) a story, I would want Charles to review it. He’s one of the best and most prolific short fiction reviewers out there.


My Vote
1. Charles Payseur
2. Foz Meadows
3. Sarah Gailey
4. Camestros Felapton
5. Bogi Takacs
6. No Award
7. Mike Glyer


Our Previous Coverage
Novel 
Novella
Novelette
Short Story
Related Work
Professional Artist
Fancast
Fan Artist
John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer


POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 2017 & 2018 Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan.

THE MONTHLY ROUND - A Taster's Guide to Speculative Short Fiction, 12/2017

Last call. If you haven’t heard before, this marks the final Monthly Round. Starting with coverage of October 2014, this is the 39th installment of the series, and I’m afraid it’s the last, at least with me at the helm.

December is a time of endings, though, so perhaps it’s fitting that I’m closing the series with the last SFF stories of 2017. They are an amazing bunch of speculative fiction. And, I guess even more on-the-nose, they are largely concerned with endings and beginnings. With rebirth. With change. With moving on. Each one features a situation loaded with potential, where people stand poised to enter into a new stage of their lives. Or a new stage of humanity entirely. From apocalypses brought on by climate change or epidemic or alien invasion, to much more personal catastrophes of loss, fear, history, and hatred, the stories all recognize that things ending is a part of life, and it doesn’t have to mean the end of all things.

Life goes on. Winter gives birth to new years, new springs, and new possibilities. So, for one last time, pull up a stool, leave the cold outside, and warm yourself with a drink, and a story, and good company.

Tasting Flight - December 2017

Art by Sandeep Karunakaran

“When The Night Blooms, An Artist Transmutes: A Three-Act Play” by Nin Harris (The Dark)
Notes: As dark as soil and aged centuries, allowing the flavor to mature, for the sins to marinade into ghosts, the pour is a moonless night and a tug in the veins, a lean toward hunger...or healing.
Pairs with: Barrel Aged Baltic Porter
Review: Kasmawati is an artist who finds herself drawn to a tower that seems to appear only for her. A piece of drama, the story is told with dialogue and stage direction, the action constrained to a stage, which the reader creates in their mind as they read, conjuring up a Gothic setting ripe with ghosts, sweeping landscapes, and the need for justice. The piece, for me, becomes very much about old wounds, where this tower represents a piece of history, the touch of empire and colonization that has left its mark, and that Kasmawati finds herself revisiting in the form of the ghost of one of the old colonial governors, the architect of not just the tower she finds herself in but a series of atrocities and abuses on the native people of the island, including a woman who he took as his, who he renamed and eventually buried. In excellent Gothic tradition, though, what’s been buried pushes its way to the surface, and that power of naming that this man possessed is reclaimed by Kasmawati. Monsters of all sorts are unearthed and either put to rest or let free, and the story does an amazing job of showing how these historical wounds can fester if they’re not cleansed and allowed to heal clean. And I just love that the story unfolds as a play, as something that almost demands to be performed. The voice and mood of the piece are stunning, taking the Gothic roots and showing how they can flourish far away from where they first flowered.

Art by Sandro Castelli

“The Weight of Sentience” by Naru Dames Sundar (Shimmer)
Notes: Blood and sand dominate the color of the pour, leading the taster into an experience rich in heat and hope, heavy with the weight of violence lurking, delicate with the fragility of life, and strong with the resilience of love.
Pairs with: Imperial Red Ale
Review: Following Trisa, an android whose sentience was not voluntary but still carries with it a death sentence, the story reveals a world of prejudice, violence, and hate. Trisa, newly aware and desperate to escape, witnesses first hand the treatment that she can expect, the death waiting for her, and yet she survives, survives at first because she holds onto the dream of others, a dream for a better place. As she moves, though, and the immediate threat diminishes and escape seems possible, something changes. When she meets someone. The story then moves into a touching and wrenching portrayal of budding love and knowledge and understanding, while looking at respect and at faith. Trisa’s new reality is one where she can be seen as a person first, hiding her true nature, and then learning that for some people she doesn’t need to. This story made me want a happy ending so bad, wanted something to finally go right for the characters who had to deal with so much. What the story provides instead is a reminder that happy endings can’t really happen in places where hate is allowed to triumph over love, where people are treated as lesser, as inhuman. The piece explores Trisa’s reaction to feeling what’s possible and then being told that it’s not available to her, and how that shakes her faith. It’s a difficult, heartbreaking read, even as it’s a beautiful story that sings with the power of its emotional core. It’s a brutal world it tours, where tenderness and compassion seem impossible, and yet for all the seeming fragility of love, for all it cannot do, the story ends on a message of hope, on resilience and survival.

“The Birding: A Fairy Tale” by Natalia Theodoridou (Strange Horizons)
Notes: Complex and rising like a bird taking flight, the pour is of a sun-kissed sky, the flavor a mix of bitterness and crisp resolve, the feeling that of loss giving way to something else, of feathers and futures and the unrelenting dawn.
Pairs with: Imperial IPA
Review: Maria is a pregnant woman moving through Greece, which is being ravaged by a disease that turns people into birds. It’s a disease that her father, who had been traveling with her and who has made his life work about birds, has contracted, and as she moves she has to come to terms not just with the changing world and her own desperate need to find her husband, but the changing relationship between herself and her father, and what this disease means for them. There’s a beautiful kind of mythology about the story, a sense that for Maria, the disease is personal—the fairy tale from the title seems to me to be in how these large events revolve around Maria and her particular situation, where she is a character at heart of what is happening, the child stolen from the Queen of Birds, so that now the world must pay. It’s a way that she can think about what’s happening without being destroyed by it, to make it into a story out of a book instead of the very real, very immediate danger she is in. The piece builds smoothly, the pacing almost languid for all that the world is being transformed so quickly, so completely, humanity sprouting wings and flying away. And I love that mix of magic and science, disease and fantasy—it gives weight to the hope that Maria carries, that if this is her fairy tale, then maybe there is a happily ever after waiting at the end for her. Of course, that’s not exactly the case, but I like how the piece shows Maria move through the world, meeting another survivor, and continuing her journey to find her husband. it’s not an easy read, and there’s a definite turning point where I felt my stomach sink, where the story twisted the knife a bit. Through it all, though, I felt the story was complicating transformations, the magic at the heart of so many fairy tales. It asks if what happens here is a tragedy or something different, something beautiful and rare and freeing. It’s a powerful and disquieting question, and a wonderful story.

Art by Christopher Park

“The House at the End of the Lane is Dreaming” by A. Merc Rustad (Lightspeed)
Notes: Pouring a ruddy gold, the first sip is bright and sweet, but belies a complex flavor of fruit and wood, of fire on the horizon and the burn of limbs running from, or toward, an impossible and inevitable destruction.
Pairs with: Cherry Wheat
Review: Framed from inside a video game as it’s being created, this story stars Alex, a young woman who is faced with a town in crisis, with a situation where her pain, her loss, and her fear are all on display for the entertainment of people she will never see, who will control her and share a journey with her, but who will ultimately move on with their lives, leaving Alex with a life that has been completely upended. I love the feel the story builds, the weirdness that can only be explained by the growing certainty that things have been designed to force Alex down a single path, the “right” path that will lead her to the end of the game, to the victory that for her doesn’t feel like a victory, because the stakes have been manipulated to give Alex no way to save everyone she cares about. She, and through her the player, must decide who to value, and who dies, and Alex nopes the fuck out of that in the best way possible. What follows is a piece that breaks the rules, and in doing so breaks the barrier between worlds, turning the tables on those who hoped to profit from Alex’s pain. Along the way she digs deeper into the world around her, helping the characters who were never intended to be more than NPCs to become full realized people. To remember who they are beyond what they need to be for the game. It’s a triumphant and wonderful story that carries with it a heavy weight but that finds a way to a happy ending that wasn’t supposed to be possible.

“An Incomplete Timeline of What We Tried” by Debbie Urbanski (Terraform)
Notes: The tar-like pour reveals a nose of paved roads burning under a merciless sun, a path down which lies only ruin and extinction, the taste brash, bracing, a wake-up call to take action before we’re past the point of no return.
Pairs with: Black IPA
Review: There’s a lot of ways a story can go when its starting point is the extinction of the human species. But what I appreciate so much about this story is that it looks at so many different ways that people react to the idea of extinction. How unreal it feels. How slow people can be to take action, and how even when action is taken, it can so easily be mired in obstruction, delay, and defeat. The story is told backwards, drawing back from the end of humanity, and by telling the story in reverse the focus is put both on how large the stakes are and how much all of things on this list fail. Not perhaps because they weren’t good things to try, but because by the time that things really started getting serious, things were already pretty much decided. It’s a story that recognizes that when it comes to climate change, when it comes to the damage that humanity is doing to the planet, the time to act is not when we’re feeling the worst of the symptoms. Indeed, the story warns about putting off drastic action any longer than we already have. It’s not exactly a subtle piece, but then it doesn’t have to be, and it does a wonderful job of revealing humanity and our history of toxicity, exploitation, and destruction. There really aren’t characters in the story per se, but it’s something that draws the reader into the piece, that makes all of us part of that “we” of the title. All responsible for the failure that might result in our eradication. All responsible for making sure that we don’t get locked into this pattern, working our way backwards from an extinction we refuse to avoid. It’s a punchy bit of science fiction, a kick in the butt in prose form.

Art by Dario Bijelac

“The First Stop Is Always the Last” by John Wiswell (Flash Fiction Online)
Notes: A first sip of autumn and endings, nervous laughter and the fear of misstepping, opens into a brilliant sweetness, balanced and subtle without becoming saccharine, joyous and warm and satisfying.
Pairs with: Hard Cider
Review: A woman gets on a bus and has a conversation. A woman gets on a bus and has a slightly different conversation. A woman gets on a—well, maybe you get the idea. When one of the characters in the story is the inheritor of the power over time itself, perhaps it’s not too strange that the story is framed as a series of scenes united by the fact that they’re basically all the same scene, just tweaked slightly, each time this character trying to do a bit better, a bit better. And really the story revolves around the idea of the safety that having infinite do-overs affords. How it takes a lot of the risk out of life, because it allows the person trying over the ability to wipe away any perceived mistakes. And I love how the story complicates that idea, how it twists that idea into showing that by never taking that risk, by always going back, that going forward becomes nearly impossible. More over, it creates an imbalance, where the one person aware of the difference has an advantage, and in that imbalanced state it’s rather impossible to meet others as equals, as peers. Authentic connections cannot really be formed, because any interaction is touched by the many times the one person might tweak them, might adjust them to fit a bit better. And then for me the story becomes about having the confidence to move forward, to take chances. To get over the fear that everything will go wrong and realize that there are other ways to try and be safe. Namely, there’s a feeling for me that the story is saying that forming relationships, that making sure of consent and trust, allows us to create our own safety without having to have the advantage of temporal manipulation. it’s a fun and very sweet story, with romance and magic and a wonderful joy to it.

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I just want to thank everyone who has made the last 3+ years of The Monthly Round such a success. For me, it’s been something of an exorcism, of rediscovering my love of reviewing and trying to find my voice and place within SFF fandom. It’s been a slow kind of thing, lots of work punctuated by hoping that maybe these posts bring others as much joy as the stories I feature have brought me.

To everyone at Nerds of a Feather, thank you so much for welcoming me into the flock. To everyone out there who has enjoyed the Round, thank you for treating my weird stories-as-drink-pairings project as more than just a silly whim. You are awesome.

It’s time to play the song that means it’s time to go, though. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here. Cheers!

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POSTED BY: Charles, avid reader, reviewer, and sometimes writer of speculative fiction. Contributor to Nerds of a Feather since 2014.

THE MONTHLY ROUND - A Taster's Guide to Speculative Short Fiction, 11/2017

As 2017 nears its end, November gives us a chance to look back. Not just at the past year, but at history, both personal and societal. Perhaps that’s why all the stories in this month’s Round come with a look at the past, whether it’s the tragedies of war and politics or those of family, love, and death. The stories all share a sense of characters dealing with the weight of their inheritances, whether it comes from their ancestors, their friends, their lovers, or themselves. As winter begins to take hold and the chill to set in, it’s time to look back to remind ourselves both what we’re still fighting for, and how far we’ve come.

So please, take seat. The flavors on tap this month are perfect for those looking to unwind by the fire, to shed a tear for those who have not made it this far, and to reaffirm a commitment to pushing forward, into a future that is not mired by the same harms and dangers as the past. Each pint today comes with a special side of memories and a tendril of shadow creeping just out of view. The only remedy is to drink deep, and share the moment with those you care about, and look for ways to escape the familiar cycles of hate, loss, and fear—together.

Cheers!

Tasting Flight – November 2017

Art by Psychoshadow

“The Summer Mask” by Karin Lowachee (Nightmare)

Notes: With a color of sepia, of forgotten pictures of forgotten faces, the nose is dust and the smell of old books, the flavor equal parts longing and sacrifice, grace and betrayal, bitterness and hope.

Pairs with: Session Ale

Review: David is an artist tasked with making masks for soldiers who survived massive war bearing physical scars. He meets Matthew, a man who can barely see and who has massive facial damage, and sees in him something beautiful and captivating. It’s a story of obsession and sacrifice, love and miracles. And, of course, beauty. The story does an amazing job of showing how these two men come together, Matthew because his injuries have made him an outcast and dependent on others, David because his nature and his drive to create something beautiful. And so much of what I like about the story rests on how it treats this idea of beauty, not as something redemptive or healing, but as cold and in many ways cruel. What the two men share while each is flawed might not be physically beautiful, but it comes from his place of care and love. And David, in trying to give a beautiful face to what they have, ends up inviting a distance and darkness on himself, and proves that beauty doesn’t need to be compassionate, doesn’t need approval or permission or justification. And in that it reveals a dark heart of beauty, the difference between beauty that can be captured in stone or clay, and the beauty that exists in human interaction and love. It’s a difficult and complex story, but one that captures the shape and fragility of beauty, and the price it can carry.

Art by Tomislav Tikulin

“The Sound of His Voice Like the Colour of Salt” by L Chan (The Dark)

Notes: Everything old is new again, ancient methods creating a heavy and dense profile that still crackles with static and electricity, the past crashing into the present with violence and storm before calming into something beautiful and delicately sweet.

Pairs with: Ancient Ale

Review: A nameless ghost boy shares a haunted space with a number of other forgotten spirits in this story, which explores memory and connection. When a new ghost appears on the scene, and from a most unlikely place, the main character is suddenly faced with the world outside his home, even as those around him have...mixed reactions to the prospect of freedom. The story shows how history anchors people in place, tying them with bonds that hold even after death, even after everything else has been lost and forgotten. It traces the ways that loneliness and cycles entrench harm, the ways that these ghosts reenact the same things over and over, maintaining the status quo for those in power and never able to reach beyond their prison. Until something comes from the outside in, allowing the main character to attempt to break the cycle, to reach for something new and freeing. It’s a story about change and the possibility of change, especially for those who are isolated, who can find no way to escape a physical place. The story looks with hope at the power of technology to bring people together across vast distances, to allow people to throw off the chains of their imprisonment, and to map new frontiers into a future suddenly full of possibilities. It’s a story that carries with it a heaviness, the oppression of the situation dragging at the main character and what he can do, but there’s also the hope that the drag can be overcome and escaped, and that even death is not enough to stop progress.

“Hungry Demigods” by Andrea Tang (GigaNotoSaurus)

Notes: Fusing flavors and styles, sweet and tangy and bitter and all points in between the pour in a muted tan tinged with pink, like a few drops of blood were added for good measure, creating an experience that is triumphant, fun, but undeniably complex.

Pairs with: Grapefruit IPA

Review: Isabel, a blind Chinese Canadian woman, works as a cook in Montreal, where food has always been the family business. When her brother brings in a man with a strange curse and holes in his memory, though, it’s her magic that she has to lean on in order to figure out what’s going on and if she can do anything about it. Not that cooking and magic are different spheres—with a culinary god for a father, food and spice, legacy and magic, all sort of roll together. And I love the way the story handles inheritance and the weight of family and culture, how decisions parents make for their children create burdens that are passed down, that can settle and rot. Isabel has to balance the various parts of herself, the different skills and experiences she’s had as well as the cultures that have created her, staying true first and foremost to who she is but striving not to lose sight of where she’s come from (especially since literally losing her sight when she strayed too far from honoring who she is rather than who some of her family might want her to be). The story builds a great relationship between Isabel and the man she’s trying to help, Elias, and creates a subtle romance while managing some stunning parallelism between his mysterious affliction and Isabel’s own demons. The tone is fun and swift, Isabel having no patience for fools and a drive toward justice, even when it means some uncomfortable reunions. She’s a force to be reckoned with, and I think there’s a great mix of action, world building, and plenty of emotional moments to make the story memorable and satisfying.

Art by Gregory St. John

“A Pestilence Come for Old Ma Salt” by Dayna K. Smith (Lackington’s)

Notes: With a bitterness that almost sticks in the throat and a pour inky and concealing, the flavors are a rush of spice and stars, the taste of secrets being dragged into the open and the truth blooming in the night.

Pairs with: India Black Ale

Review: Ma Salt is a healer for an insular mountain community, their first and last stop for most maladies, supernatural or otherwise. It’s a place where many people go when they want to get away from the rest of the world, which means that it has its share of loners and more than its share of secrets. When an infant comes down with a cough that turns out to be much more than a simple cold, though, Ma Salt is challenged in ways that push her secrets out from the shadows. The story explores small communities in an interesting way, looking at how the relationships become so twisted, the water so muddy, that it’s often difficult to see what’s right in front of you. Everyone knows everyone else’s business, or at least they seem to, which means people prize their secrets all the closer, the little ways that they can be private in a place where privacy is a precious thing. At the same time, it explores how those secrets can act as seeds of corruption, eroding at the very thing that communities need in order to function and survive—trust. And trust built on lies and misdirection is no trust, which is something that Ma Salt has to confront as she struggles to save the life of her community’s newest member. The story also shows how sometimes rumor is more dangerous than anything, and how even when the truth is hard, or shameful, it is often surprising just how much people have the capacity to forgive, and to accept, and to help those who might stumble, and to celebrate those things that make people themselves. It’s a great voice the story establishes, and I like how the plot follows a sort of exorcism—of deception and prejudice, so that the community can come together stronger than ever and so even the most vulnerable can be accepted and cared for.

Art by Max Mitenkov

“An Unexpected Boon” by S.B. Divya (Apex)

Notes: Pouring a dark brown rimmed with gold, the first sip is deep, subtle and smoky like dreams burning, only to reveal newer, sweeter tones underneath, a future still bright despite loss and danger.

Pairs with: Honey Bock

Review: Kalyani is a young (probably autistic) girl who experiences the world quite differently from the rest of her family. It’s something that Aruni, her older brother, finds quite difficult to handle, especially when his parents have left him in charge while they are away. For Kalyani, though, it’s the rest of the world that doesn’t make as much sense, that overflows with threats and dangers, that never makes as much sense as the order of her own mind and the quiet solitude of her thoughts. When a passing holy man observes her quiet, he gives her a gift, an insect that communicates with her, and gives her a tool to help decode the rest of the world. When a different holy man passes through with a much different outlook, though, Kalyani and Aruni find themselves at the center of a situation that could destroy them, especially if Aruni doesn’t trust his younger sister. And for me, the story is about family and about communication, about trust and value. Everyone treats Kalyani like she is defective, like she can’t survive in this world mostly because everyone else accepts the corruption and dangers of the systems they live in, which make Kalyani even more at risk for being a girl, for now knowing the unspoken social contracts that reinforce all levels of society. For all the darkness that the story uses as its base, though, the story rejects a trajectory toward tragedy, and the prose shines with the resolve and skill of Kalyani, her ability to function and act even as Aruni despairs, certain of defeat. To me it’s a story of the value of being able to see the world differently, to be able to come up with solutions that work for everyone, which might only be possible if first you refuse to accept the dominant narrative of the way things are. It’s a sweet and moving story full of magic and grace.

Art by Julie Dillon

“Making Us Monsters” by Sam J. Miller & Lara Elena Donnelly (Uncanny)

Notes: The past reaches forward into the present with a taste of loss and memories bleeding together, a cloudy pour obscuring a golden shine, a mix of spice and distance and old wounds opening to an almost floral finish, a flower placed on a grave of a unknown soldier finally revealed and put to rest.

Pairs with: Abbey Ale

Review: Borrowing from the historical story of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, this story paints a picture that connects two men across time and across tragedies, as both seek to make sense of a world that refuses to make sense, where who they are makes them vulnerable, and who they must become in order to live in the world makes them monsters. The story is told through letters, letters from Wilfred Owen from the battlefields of World War I to Sassoon, who is dealing with a much different situation in the run up to the second world war. For both men, though, they must deal with their desires and the situation that life has thrust them into—the chaos of war, the dangers of men looking for a “cure” for them. The letters are (to me incredibly fittingly) one directional, neither man truly able to express himself to the other, time and war and death getting between them, cutting short what they could have meant to what another. What remains are the bruises, the scars, the injuries that never really heal—both on the bodies of those who remain and on the world as a whole, these losses weighing heavier than stone, just as crushing as any military defeat. For me the story is about loss and about cycles, about how compassion and love becomes something else when all safety is gone, when discovery and death are so near, and all these men want is to live, to be free. And it becomes in many ways about breaking that cycle, or trying to, of stepping out from safety and trying to learn from the past so that the same injustices do not continue, or grow. It’s wrenching and it’s difficult and it’s heartbreaking, and you might end up a sobbing mess, but it is a gorgeous story about history, love, and war.

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POSTED BY: Charles, avid reader, reviewer, and sometimes writer of speculative fiction. Contributor to Nerds of a Feather since 2014.

THE MONTHLY ROUND - A Taster's Guide to Speculative Short Fiction, 10/2017

First of all, let’s just say Happy Birthday to the Monthly Round, which turns three years old with this installment, debuting in the Long Ago of November 2014 (covering the short SFF of October 2014). Free party hats for all!

October. For me, it means a lot of things. Typically, the first snow of the year happens. There's Halloween, with its long shadows and spooky revelry. For many, the month probably means autumn and gorgeous colors, but for me it means the first touch of winter, and the heat kicking on, and the shutting away of the world in an effort to conserve warmth. It means the tastes on tap today have a definite slide toward the dark side. We start with light, and happiness, and hope, and we end with a wrenching bleakness, a facing of difficult realities. In between is a powerful month of short SFF, full of magic, stars, and strangeness.

Sit down. There’s a chill settling in, but a drink might shake a bit of fire into your limbs. Settle in and watch the pour with anticipation. Then, enjoy. Cheers!

Tasting Flight - October 2017

Art by Ashley Mackenzie

“Fandom for Robots” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad (Uncanny)
Tasting Notes: A surprising tang gives this a punch of sweetness that almost overpowers with its joy, settled only by the complexity of its profile and the lingering smiles it leaves in its wake.
Pairs with: Peach Hard Cider
Review: Computron has a fairly ordinary job...for the only sentient AI in existence. He teaches kids about robots and artificial intelligence, something that he’s rather singularly qualified to do. Only it really doesn’t seem like people consider him the marvel that he is, judging him on the retro-futurist aesthetic he has, imagining he’s outdated despite his uniqueness, despite the fact that he’s sentient. It’s not until he finds a show that features a character much like himself, an older-style robot named Cyro, that he begins to understand just how much he was yearning to see himself represented in media, to interact with other people who won’t think he’s strange because of the way he looks. Enter fandom. I love how this story explores the ways that fan spaces allow people to explore and celebrate themselves. No, fandom isn’t perfect, and Computron does have to deal with aspects of that, but at the same time it gives him this new purpose, this new feeling of belonging. Where he doesn’t have to fit all he has to say into a tiny window inside a larger presentation on robotics. Where he can really get into something and be appreciated for it and make connections through it and shatter the isolation that had dominated his life. It’s a story about being a fan, and how fun and freeing that can be. The story revels in Computron’s journey into fandom, writing fic and offering feedback and just being an all around pleasant person. And it’s a joyous story to experience, clever and cute and playing with the tropes of how AI mirror humans, but how they are distinct as well, and valuable in how they are different, able to contribute in ways that are surprising and wonderful.

Art by Geneva Benton

“Barbara in the Frame” by Emmalia Harrington (Fiyah)
Tasting Notes: With a nose like fresh baked goods and a rich copper pour, the taste is sweet but complex, a tugging disquiet that gives way to a positive warmth and the feeling of home.
Pairs with: Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ale
Review: For many, college is a freeing experience, a time of freedom and exploration. For Bab, though, a young trans woman who already had a bad college experience once, going back has been difficult, even if being in the correct dorms has been a huge improvement. The fear of being “found out” and rejected is strong, and coupled with anxiety and a few other issues, it means Bab is something of a hermit, staying in her room where her main company is a portrait of her grandfather’s great-aunt, Barbara. Which might seem very lonely indeed, except that it’s a very special portrait. The story blends magic and navigating the strange and obscure social landscape of college. For Bab, it means experiencing the push and pull of wanting friends but not wanting to expose herself to danger. Of needing connections and community and fearing that she’ll never truly belong. The story does an amazing job of capturing the voices of a solid cast and finding powerful resonance in situations that might seem at first low stakes. Because it shows how Bab can take nothing for granted, how her world sometimes feels like it’s closing in around her, and how it can take a friendly face and a reassuring presence to make the world a less painful place. Plus, well, it’s a story that combines magic and cooking, bringing people together by the foods they cook, by the ways they each bring something different to the experience, to the meal, in order to create a feeling of completeness, safety, and belonging. It’s a quieter kind of story, but one that shines with an indomitable heart.

Art by Dario Bijelac

“Claire Weinraub’s Top Five Sea Monster Stories (For Allie)” by Evan Berkow (Flash Fiction Online)
Tasting Notes: Strong and with a taste of the ocean, the pour is an inky oblivion, an impenetrable cloud in which anything might lurk, but which reveals slowly a soft texture, a tenderness only seen in hindsight, only experienced after everything has been bathed in dark.
Pairs with: Oyster Stout
Review: Some stories take a long time to lay the groundwork for devastation. To map it fully and without blinking. Others, like this one, manage with the broad strokes of memory and pain, the absence of a person who, for the main character, was everything. And okay, I might have a soft spot in my heart for stories that in some ways are built as reviews that might or might not actually exist, fleshing out a world and, more importantly, a relationship by the way the narrator describes what these stories meant. It’s a piece that seems quiet, reserved, and yet that packs the emotional punch of a freight train, driving relentlessly around the space once occupied by Allie, now empty. It’s a story of layers and time and grief, each story pulling back another veil, revealing more and more of what has happened and what it has meant for Claire. Framing the stories around stories is a great touch, too, because it looks at the power of fiction in these situations. Not only to draw the boundaries of despair and give that feeling of lurking danger, each story mentioned one of monsters, after all, and darkness. But it also allows a framework to begin to heal, to allow Claire the power to begin to conceive of a world that is better. To reach for a place where she no longer feels quite so much pain. Where she can continue, and where perhaps she can be reunited with Allie, or at least find some way to cope with what has happened. It’s a short but elegant read that opens up this huge hurt but also the even larger power of speculative fiction to give hope, to inspire. It centers the power of imagination as a redemptive impulse in humans, to use to navigate life’s travails and find a course to a better future.

Art by Tomislav Tikulin

“The Whalebone Parrot” by Darcie Little Badger (The Dark)
Tasting Notes: There’s a distinct ghostly quality to the feel of this, the pour a gold leeched of vibrance, the taste an echo of something bright dulled to bitter, everything about it reaching for a light and hope that seems ethereal, cold, and distant.
Pairs with: Pale Ale
Review: Erasure and family and colonial harm mix and mingle here as Emily—a young woman who grew up in an orphanage that stripped her of her Native American heritage, name, and language and tried to make her acceptable for the white society that consumed her land—visits her sister, Loretta, who is about to give birth to her first child. The story captures a nicely Gothic style, setting up the isolation and distance and haunted nature of place that Emily must inhabit. Her sister is married to a white man, supposedly liberal, and yet for all his kindness his world is defined by his language, that of empire and white dominance, and his view toward his wife and her sister is hardly free of either misogyny or racism. Instead he is an Intellectual, burdened by his own family issues and sure that those thorny problems of inheritance and pride supplant the very real dangers that Emily and Loretta face from a source he refuses to recognize. The source? The ghost of a parrot, which Emily knows is serious but which Albert believes, in Gothic tradition, is an indication that something Isn’t Right with Loretta, or Emily, or both, an entirely different kind of threat for them to Be Quiet or else end up in an institution. The weight of expectations and Albert’s refusal to truly risk himself, placing as primary importance the securing of his fortune, is something the story weaves into this malevolent force, revealing just how at risk the sisters are when they think the system will ultimately protect them. And I love how the story shows that it’s only by finding strength in each other and the heritage that everyone else seems to think is better off erased, that Emily and Loretta can hope to survive and overcome. By doing what they need to do, regardless of what they are allowed to do. It is an empowering, redemptive story that does not conceal the danger or the dark, but shows how it can be fought, and defeated.

“To Us May Grace Be Given” by L.S. Johnson (GigaNotoSaurus)
Tasting Notes: Brash and with the taste of blood, wine and beer meet and battle here, the pour a riot of ruddy copper, the first sip bitter, the experience memorable and strange and bold and unsettling even as it dances with promise.
Pairs with: Syrah IPA
Review: Sometimes there are situations that have no good options. Where the setting and circumstances have been twisted and corrupted into leaving only hard roads paved in loss and blood. For Addy, a young person being raised as a boy to make them less of a target for abuse and rape, the world seems mostly what their mother tells them, a pit of vipers and a landscape of monsters. Faced with the prospect of being forced off their land by a man with considerable pull in the frontier town, Addy’s mother hatches a plan, to use a monster to kill another monster. In so doing, though, she reveals the cruelty and violence in her own heart, and Addy is left in a situation where there is no way out without doing harm, without betraying someone. The story is fast, visceral, and unsettling as fuck. This is a setting where to survive is essentially to become a monster, where violence and abuse are so woven into the fabric of society that there is getting away from it. Addy is put into an impossible situation and wants only the uncomplicated love of their animals and for a bit of safety in a dangerous world. What they get is a conflict they never wanted and no way to avoid the chaos and the noise and the death that finds them. It’s a story that weaves together vampires and six-shooters, blood and magic and revenge. It has a power to it, and a momentum that cannot be denied or delayed. And it also has something, coated in mud and mire and all manner pain, but beautiful all the same—that in a world where everyone is a monster, you still have choose what kind of monster you’ll be. That a broken world is no excuse for not trying to do the right thing, even with the right thing is impossible. That for Addy, the most important thing is to be true to themself, and to see how far that will get them.

Art by Rubén Castro

“My Struggle” by Lavie Tidhar (Apex)
Tasting Notes: Evoking an older German style, this updates and twists expectations, offering up a freshness that breathes with the feeling of autumn—of fading light, the coming of winter, and the crunch of dead leaves underfoot.
Pairs with: Oktoberfest
Review: So I don’t think I expected a story featuring Hitler (yes, Hitler) as a private detective in an alt-history noir mystery about the Spear of Destiny would ever make the Round. And yet this piece so deftly marries the offensive, monstrous narrative of Hitler, P.I., with a frame that makes it about the desire to rewrite history, about the many might-have-beens that could take the place of real-life atrocities. More than that, the story captures a tone and feel of a time and reveals through essentially making Hitler the “good guy” of the story just how dangerous and powerful stories can be, and how especially for stories of that time period, swapping Hitler with the main character doesn’t actually break the story. What does it say, in some ways, that this story exists, and that for some the urge might be to root of Hitler. Especially given recent events, the story seems to ask what people like this look like without the power over states. The answer is...they look familiar. And there’s the darkness and the horror of the story, the way that it builds this rather familiar narrative and makes it fun and almost farcical except for the parts that you can’t ignore or get around. Because, in the end, it’s a story with Hitler as one of the main characters. A story that is almost…fun as it spotlights celebrities and scandals of the era and builds a plot around greed and shades of fascism. And it doesn’t lose sight of how delicate a proposition that is, grounding the larger narrative not with Hitler but with a Jewish man trapped in the Berlin ghetto, trying to find distractions even as the reality of his life looms ever larger. It’s unrelenting and powerful and manages to make a story about Hitler subtle and nuanced, and it does it in breathtaking (and heartbreaking) fashion.

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POSTED BY: Charles, avid reader, reviewer, and sometimes writer of speculative fiction. Contributor to Nerds of a Feather since 2014.

MAPPING SHORT SF/F: Part 2: Fun Short SFF

Fun. For some people, fun evokes childhood and a certain kind of carefree energy. For others, it means something more like excitement and adventure and novelty. Mapping fun short SFF is something of a challenge, not because I cannot point to works that I’d consider fun, but because fun is a weirdly nebulous term that, like most things, I probably define oddly in terms of genre. But, as that what I’m seeking to do in this series, I’ll do my best.

To me, fun as a genre operates a lot like horror does. It’s not so much about elements of world building or how the piece conveys message. It’s not about theme or about any one style. When I say it operates a lot like horror, what I mean is that they both are built around a feeling. Horror as a genre is defined (or at least I define it) by its ability to evoke fear and unease in the reader. Whether the story seeks to do that through gore or violence, or through atmosphere and suspense, doesn’t matter so much, because it’s all horror. Similarly, for a story to be fun, it has to be about evoking an emotion. Instead of fear, though, I’d say that fun is about joy. To me, fun SFF stories are those that seek to make the reader feel joyous. Which, given the times, is both an incredibly difficult and important mission.

Now, I’ll start with the bad news. Fun seems like a rather difficult genre to pin down, and also a difficult one to market. I know that there is an assumption that some people have when they see the word fun it means easy or simple or...not important or impacting. There aren’t to my knowledge too many venues that specialize in fun SFF, though there have been a few that have tried. First and foremost, Mothership Zeta did an excellent job of exploring what fun SFF could look like. Released as a non-podcast branch of the Escape Artists, Mothership Zeta released a number of issues bursting with stories of all sorts of short SFF, all with the editorial intent to explore the intersection of speculative fiction and fun. And it did so with stories that were romantic, stories that were gripping, stories that were suspenseful and epic. There was a huge range of stories that the publication looked at, and a huge range of subgenres represented. I loved the publication, and while sadly it is on indefinite hiatus, it remains the sole “pro-level” publication I can think of that so intensely pursued fun as its goal.

Similarly, The Sockdolager had a focus on stories “that are fun to read.” So from an editorial level, The Sockdolager was looking to push stories that were fun, what flowed quickly and left the reader feeling invigorated and joyful. Which, again, doesn’t mean that they were only happy stories, or that they were without violence or meaning. My favorite horror story of 2016, “Butter-Daughters” by Nin Harris, came out at The Sockdolager, and it’s loads of fun as well as intensely creepy. It perhaps didn’t range quite so widely as Mothership Zeta in terms of pacing, preferring (in my opinion) rather fast-moving and punchy stories instead of more romantic or slower narratives, but I can safely say that the publication was always rather fun to read. It’s another publication, though, that has sadly closed its doors, and together with Mothership Zeta it makes the number of publications specifically interested in fun SFF...well, kinda slim.

That’s not to say that there’s no fun to be had. The other Escape Artists podcasts, especially Cast of Wonders, has a rather fun feel to them. Now, here’s where I have to slow down a little and say that it’s often the case that YA SFF or SFF geared toward younger audiences does often lean a bit more in the fun direction than does more “mainstream” SFF. There are reasons for this and not reasons I feel like going into here in great depth but, well...

MINI-RANT: There’s a whole long discussion that we could have about aesthetics and fun and art. Within SFF this is a very tangled and complex web, because genre work is often dismissed as fluff or without literary merit or escapist drivel or...all that. And in counter to that, there is a lot of SFF that brings in traditions that are more associated with literary fiction (and defining that would be another exercise is pain), by which I mean short fiction that is often considered for the highest awards for literature. There are also camps, though, that resist this effort to make SFF “more literary” or “more artistic,” not because they believe that SFF (and all genres, really) are already artistic and worthy of discussion and examination of art without shaming people’s tastes or preferences, but because they condemn “literary” fiction and “artful” fiction as pretentious and dull. So suffice it to say that we’re into some heady waters here. I do not believe that being fun makes a work suddenly not adult or not artistic (and again, not that I’d ever argue YA isn’t artistic, either). But I do recognize that YA and fun intersect or perhaps are allowed and expected to intersect more frequently than “mainstream” SFF and fun, so for those hungry for fun SFF, checking out the YA publications (Cast of Wonders and Cicada specifically), might yield some fruitful searches.

Similarly, checking out where SFF intersects with other genres often leads to finding a bit more freedom with regards to fun. While it ran, Urban Fantasy Magazine had a number of fun stories, and those looking for where SFF and romance intersect can find a whole slew of fun SFF stories that deal with relationships and spaceships, magic, and monsters. Indeed, for those looking for fun queer stories, checking out small queer presses (like Lethe, Circlet, Less Than Three, Dreamspinner, JMS, & more) can lead to finding fun SFF that gets pushed to the margins because it contains fun queer relationships, and these can come in all levels of heat (from lots of sex! to no sex at all to everything in between). Admittedly, finding short fiction of this sort normally requires searching for anthologies (of which there are many), or else shopping the individual ebooks of shorter works (which can be difficult when comparing it to the “mostly free” stuff that dominates “mainstream” SFF). It also means that you might end up putting down money for something you don’t much care for, and especially for those for whom money is tight, this can be a real barrier to getting at fun stories.

But FUN! Let's get back to what's out there. Though the number of fun-specific venues has decreased, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t publications that regularly put out really fun stories. I want to highlight three more that spring to mind as being good places to start. The first is Fireside Fiction. Especially at the flash fiction length, it often has joyfully fun stories, like "A Silhouette Against Armageddon" by John Wiswell and “Feeding Mr. Whiskers” by Dawn Bonnano. The publication definitely trades in darker and denser works as well, but fans of fun will be well served keeping an eye out for their weekly releases.

Secondly, The Book Smugglers put out some amazingly fun stories, both shorter stories to read for free as part of their yearly themes (this year was Gods & Monsters) and for their longer work such as the Novella Initiative. Again, some of their work does drive very dark, but there's a charming quality to so much of it and lots of it is just amazingly fun. Go read Hurricane Heels by Isabel Yap, which is at times intense and at times rather violent but which is all about friendship and hope and joy. There's "Superior" by Jessica Lack and "Avi Cantor Has Six Months To Live" by Sacha Lamb and just so many stellar stories that center heart and fun. The publication doesn't tend to put a huge amount, but they're growing, and they're definitely one of my go-to sources for fun.

Thirdly, Daily Science Fiction is also well worth checking out. Given how much they put out, perhaps it’s not surprising that they hit the “fun zone” often enough, but I think overall the driving aesthetic of the publication leans more towards the fast and fun. These are pieces that are meant to be read almost every day, and as such they often act as little rays of sunshine to lift the spirits and inspire a push toward freedom and joy. There's a lot to sift through, but you'll find a lot of treasure if you give it a go.

I could go on with publications that often have some fun stories but I would challenge readers that if they want fun it’s often to go straight to the source, and perhaps track down your favorite writer of fun SFF and see if they have a Patreon. As this skirts around most gate-keeping in SFF, it’s often a place where authors can explore joyous stories without the crushing question of “can I sell this” or, if they’ve tried and failed to sell it, “what the fuck do I do with this now.” I can personally recommend the Patreons of Rose Lemberg, Merc Rustad, and Bogi Takács, where I’ve read recent fun SFF such as Lemberg's “The Splendid Goat Adventure” and Rustad's “Just Like Mombeast Used to Make.” The Patreon of Lethe Press also offers levels of support that include short stories, many of which are fun (and very queer). Obviously not all the content is going to be fun, but in my experience so far Patreon is a place that creators go to put up the stories they want to tell that they might not think will please “mainstream” venues. These works are often a bit freer, a bit looser, and a bit more fun than you might find elsewhere, so my advice is that if you find a piece that you love and is fun and want more, track the author down and see if they offer more like it through a Patreon.

Unfortunately, I think a lot of my advice is going to run along similar lines. Namely, that because fun SFF is something that is often viewed as...less marketable, I guess, it’s not often something publications take as many chances on (at least at the short fiction level). Which means that the costs of finding it are often passed down to the fans. It’s out there. There’s the Unidentified Funny Objects series of anthologies which are loads of fun and funny to boot, but these are not things that you’ll get access to for free. Patreons, small presses, anthologies...at least at the short fiction level most of the more reliable sources of fun require a monetary investment. The good news is that there is a lot out there to support, and that your support can make a huge difference for people trying to do more with fun SFF. The bad news is that it can feel like fun SFF (and especially fun SFF that crosses other boundaries, like allowing marginalized character to just be happy and have adventures) isn’t incredibly welcome. It’s a complex conversation that SFF is having with itself and with the larger writing landscape, and one that continues to be tricky to navigate. In the wake of that conversation, the map of fun short SFF has some noticeable holes, gaps, and ruts. It doesn’t mean you can’t find what you’re looking for, just that it’s not the easiest of tasks, made more difficult by some recent closings of publications. But hey, some might rise to take their places, or they might even rise from the dead. There’s always hope, and where there’s hope, there’s often fun.

So thank you all for joining me on this first cartographic adventure! If you want to help determine what continent of short SFF I’ll be trying to map next, find me on Twitter and vote in my poll (closes date). Cheers!

[For those looking for the previous Mapping Short SFF installment, check it out here: A Key to the Kingdom]

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POSTED BY: Charles, avid reader, reviewer, and sometimes writer of speculative fiction. Contributor to Nerds of a Feather since 2014.