Questing in Shorts: Nerds on Tour Special (Nov/Dec 2020)

Welcome to a special Nerds on Tour edition of Questing in Shorts, featuring anthologies from three different continents for your reading pleasure!

A Larger Reality: Speculative Fiction from the Bicultural Margins ed. Libia Brenda

This anthology sprang from the Mexicanx initiative, a fundraising drive led by John Picacio in 2018 to sponsor 50 Mexicanx creators to attend that year's Worldcon in San Jose. In physical form, A Larger Reality is a flipbook, printed from one end in Spanish and the other in English, from Mexican and Mexican-American creators. Sadly, the flipbook formats doesn't quite translate to digital, and one of the stories doesn't make it into this edition too, meaning I wasn't able to read the contribution from Verónica Murgulía. Nevertheless, this anthology packs in twelve intriguing stories that cover a ton of ground, making this feel like a much longer anthology than it is. I was delighted by the graphic offering, "Rhizome" by Libia Brenda and Richard Zela, in which an interviewer turns up to interview their favourite speculative fiction writer, only to be let in to the secrets of time travel. The art style is simple, the panels focusing almost entirely on the two characters, but it's an intriguing dialogue and the expressions and visual cues really help to sell it. I also really appreciated "A Truth Universally Accepted" by Julia Rios, in which a dimension-hopping protagonist comes to grips with a failed relationship over the course of a conversation with a version of a trusted friend in the coffee shop where her ex- and/or would-be lover works. It's a story that lets the relationship itself, and the reader's judgement of it, unfold seamlessly over the story, and I left feeling really touched by its close.

Elsewhere, the anthology touches on themes that stick around for a couple of stories - I assume coincidentally - before morphing into something new. "The Binder" by Angela Lujan and "Ring a Ring 'o Roses" by Raquel Castro, tr. Ruth Clarke both involve young protagonists messing with the supernatural in weird and amusing ways: in "The Binder", a kid fights off a thief trying to steal their new piece of stationery and the experience transforms them into a superhero, fighting for justice for the binders of the world, deciding on their disappointingly narrow place in the world after some false starts and a run-in with another strangely specific superhero, the protagonist. "Ring a Ring 'o Roses" is the story of a child who brings a zombie into school for her kindergarten year, and the cheerfully morbid adventures which she and her murder-pal get up to as they terrorise the school and its inhabitants. I was surprised when I went back to check on this story, how short it is: it definitely stuck in my mind far more than the . Following seamlessly on is "Shoot" by Pepe Rojo, a stream-of-consciousness tale of zombie shoot-em-ups, digital crunch and losing sight of reality. The association-y curation of stories makes this a really fun, coherent set of tales despite the wide range of ground covered.

Omenana to Infinity ed. Chinelo Onwalu and Mazi Nwonwu

Omenana is a fixture of the speculative short fiction scene, and I was excited when I saw that the African SF storybundle from earlier this year contained the first anthology featuring some of its highlights from its six years of publication. This collection most certainly didn't disappoint - the only story I've previously read is the opener, "A Short History of Migration in Five Fragments of You" by Wole Talabi, which is an excellent intergenerational story about journeys and adaptation rooted in the experience of the transatlantic slave trade and the generations afterwards, so I knew I was in for more good things.

I've been gravitating towards quieter, gentler stories recently and Tiah Marie Beautement's "Memento Mori" really hit my sweet spot in that regard. It's the story of a woman with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome who begins taking visits from Death, who often brings gifts and eventually becomes a part of her family. It's a story that very much begins in media res - we never find out why Death might have started visiting this particular woman in the first place, just that their presence isn't a threat - but the growth of the relationship and the support they provide each other, juxtaposed against the protagonist's experience of disability, makes this a really heartwarming read. While it's a more challenging emotional ride, the payoff of "Tiny Bravery" by Ada Nandi is similarly sweet in how its group of youths affected by genetic mutations find belonging and courage with each other.

I also really appreciated some of the collection's urban fantasy or near-future offerings, from the culinary shenanigans of Suyi Davies Okungbowa's "Of Tarts and New Beginnings" to the dystopian company of Sanya Noel's "The Company". The other story which really stood out on this front was "Sin Eater" by Chikodili Emelumadu, whose protagonist gets a roommate, Nchedo, who ends up dragging her into a world of supernatural violence and justice through her Sin Eating abilities. The relationship between the two characters is fantastic, the protagonist going from terrified bystander to reluctant accomplice to something more, and her point of view comes with an empathy for Nchedo, her relationship with her sisters, and the challenges of her calling which humanises their relationship even as it doesn't sugar coat the horror of what Sin Eating entails in this world (it's gory, and only women can do it). All in all, this was a fantastic sampler for the world of Omenana, and while the anthology may not be available outside of the Storybundle it was presented in, I recommend looking up the table of contents if you're looking for places to start with this free online magazine.

The Book of Shanghai ed. Jin Li and Dai Congrong

This collection of ten stories, all set in the city in the title, might not be a speculative fiction collection per se, but even beyond stories by Chen Qiufan, Cai Jun and Shen Dacheng which quite definitely are SFF, almost all of these stories feature a sense of mystical impermanence about the lives of characters in Shanghai. All of its characters are thrown into a literary version of a city city where connections can be made and lost in heartbeats, the cost of living can be prohibitive on more than just the financial front, and repressive gender roles are alive and well, particularly for older women. Some of these stories are tragedies, like Wang Zhanhei's "The Story of Ah-Ming" (Tr. Christopher MacDonald), while others, like Ah Fang's Lamp (Wang Anyi tr. Helen Wang) and "Woman Dancing Under Stars" (Teng Xiaolan tr. Yu Yan Chen) offer bittersweet depictions of the challenges and unexpected beauty of city life. The latter story is particularly beautiful, in spite of its slightly uncritical attitude to the gendered expectations on its protagonist and her marriage to her husband. A recently-married woman meets a much older lady, Zhuge at a tea shop, their connection turning into a friendship full of quiet, beautiful moments and realisations, until the protagonist suddenly has to leave the city and accidentally severs their connection. "Snow", by Chen Danyan (tr. Paul Harris), feels almost like a mirror to Teng's story, with its protagonist, Zheng Ling, trying to hold on to a specific ideal of older womanhood while worrying about what people will think of her as a woman, alone, reading a book at a KFC, as the city moves on around her. Unlike Zhuge, Zhen Ling's experience of loneliness - even a temporary one - invokes a state of anxious soul-searching that doesn't really get resolved as the story comes to its close. Loneliness and connection is also a big part of "The Lost" by Fu Yuehui (tr. Carson Ramsdell) in which a man loses his phone - and with it, a substantial portion of his contacts - and grapples not just with the hardware loss but with a sense of isolation and existential angst that doesn't go away once he gets a replacement.

Being the kind of reader I am, the more speculative stories also worked really well for me. It's almost a spoiler to say that "The Novelist in the Attic" by Shen Dacheng (tr. Jack Hargreaves) is one of them, and I certainly didn't see its final twist coming; once it arrived, though, I really couldn't imagine the story being anything else. Cai Jun's "Suzhou River" (tr. Frances Nichol) is a dreamy, slipstreamy delight, with even its more mundane elements - the setup of a clandestine meeting between its protagonist and a mysterious woman called "Z" - feeling strange and uncanny. Rounding out the collection, Chen Qiufan's story (tr. Josh Stenberg) is a confusing, experimental but ultimately fascinating story of what seems to be a singularity of some sort, or at least a breakdown of individual human consciousness, in which some of the sequences were literally written by an AI trained on the writer's style. It's a story I come away from not fully understanding, but that's a great way to end this collection about a city that's bursting with strangeness and transience and incomprehensible happenings, at least from the telling of these authors.

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: April 2020

Happy Thursday, friends! April has been a month of ups and downs but I'm tentatively celebrating the return of my reading mojo to, if not normal, then at least to an acceptable pandemic level. I've been a little low on magazines this month, but I do have a full length round-up for you and I'm once again making the resolution to give my full-to-bursting Kindle magazine folder some love in the next month.
The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by Ken Liu (Head of Zeus, 2020)

Ken Liu's fantasy series and translation work are both very familiar to me, but I've experienced less of his short fiction - so when the opportunity arose to own this super colourful collection (seriously, my copy is an orange hardcover with purple sprayed edges - it doesn't get more delightfully clashy than that) it was not in my power to resist. What I got was a wide-ranging collection with an interesting focus on the development of artificial consciousness and how humans might look at the singularity from both sides of the technological divide: what we gain from technological advancement, and what we might leave behind. Stories from the nested tales of interplanetary adaptation of "Ghost Days", to the slow decaying heartbreak of "Staying Behind" to the surprising time dilation of "Seven Birthdays" deal with migration and intergenerational communication, giving both older and younger generations things to offer to each other even when the characters themselves don't realise it. A couple of interesting shared universes (or maybe one big shared universe?) offer continuity within the middle part of the collection: in particular, the trilogy of "The Gods Will Not Be Chained", "The Gods Will Not Be Slain" and "The Gods Have Not Died In Vain" tell the single story of a girl who has lost her technological genius father, only to rediscover him via an emoji-heavy chat programme, once again looking at communication across a gulf but in a very different way to the classic "parent child" dynamic. There's also an apparently shared conception of the singularity which offers a very human, understandable sense of what it might be like to be a consciousness that no longer lives in the human world. I'm not sure I'm ready to live in a fourteen-dimensional hypercube myself, but Liu's vision of our possible technological future makes it feel like something tangible and lived in, rather than acting as the death of all we currently hold valuable.

There are some fantasy stories here as well, including an excerpt from the final book in the Dandelion Dynasty trilogy (a satisfyingly standalone piece, but I'm now even more impatient for 2021), the intriguing "Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard" about a trio of shapeshifters, and the title story, "The Hidden Girl", in which the youngest of three sisters raised as assassins decides, on her first mission, to save her target and defeat her siblings instead. All in all, this is exactly the level of accomplishment I'd expect from Liu, and I'm already making plans to hunt down his first collection and stuff that into my eyeballs someday as well.

Giganotosaurus: February, March, April 2020

Three stories over three months for the dinosaur semiprozine: February brings "Thin Red Jellies" by Lina Rather, the story of a near future where it is possible to save and reimplant a human's consciousness after their death, either in an artificial body or compartmentalised into the brain of another person. When Amy's girlfriend Jess dies in a car accident, she offers her brain as a stopgap, but the long-term solution for two young women without good health insurance in a future USA is further out of reach than they thought. It's a story which deals with intrusion: the challenges faced by both women as they adjust to life and communication in one body, the accommodations and sacrifices each has to make for the other, and the horrifying assumptions which a privatised health system and the companies which own it make about workers' autonomy and quality of life. Rather doesn't pull punches about what this does to Jess and Amy's relatively new relationship, and the story's abrupt ending doesn't offer much in the way of catharsis but it does underscore the inescapable nature of their situation.

March's story, by ZZ Claybourne, is "The Air in My House Tastes Like Sugar", a very atmospheric piece about nomadic witches : very atmospheric story about a family of nomadic witches whose youngest member, Amnandi, is trying to overcome the loneliness of her situation. And April gives us "A Wild Patience" by Gwynne Garfinkle, a story that literally had me grinning from ear-to-ear in the first twenty percent once I realised what was going on. In a town where a large number of men have always had perfect, home-making wives, things start to get a bit... messy... when the doctor dies, and Gretchen and Jessica suddenly find their Mom is more interested in reading the poetry of Adrienne Rich and discussing self-actualisation with the other mothers than fulfilling her role. Turns out, there's a semi-secret robot-wife cult in town, and neither the mothers themselves nor their daughters and the other women around them are interested in keeping the mens' dirty little secret. What I enjoyed most about this story was the focus on Gretchen and Jessica's wellbeing and the caring, if different, relationship they build with their Mom once her secret is revealed; every attempt at the men in the story to reclaim authority and project threat is laughed off and non-violently swatted down, leaving the misogynists of the story looking ridiculous and exposed as their "perfect" lives cease to be.

Summoned to Destiny Ed. Julie Czerneda (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2004)

I've had this cute looking older anthology on my physical TBR for a while, having picked it up as an impulse buy in Forbidden Planet back in the days when in-person book browsing was a thing. It finally called to me last week, and I discovered a fun fantasy collection of shorts that deal in some way with coming of age or call to action moments for their various protagonists, from magical awakenings to bardic apprenticeships to rituals of power. That focus on the call to action lends itself a little bit to a "the end of the story is where the novel would begin" sequence, and while none of the stories explicitly end with "they smiled: there was so much work to do" - my least favourite story ending ever - it felt like a close thing. But there's a great range of worldbuilding (especially when it comes to developing the sacred) and character development here which overcomes the sense of reading a series of prologues, and makes this an intriguing collection in its own right.

The story I enjoyed most is by far the longest in the anthology: "The Colors of Augustine" by Michelle West (Michelle Sagara). This is the story of Joseph, an orphaned boy in a world where some people are able to paint visions of the future, who discovers he is talented but whose colourblindness (and implied neurodivergence) makes use of that talent challenging without the constant help of his friend Caroline. When both are picked up for an apprenticeship by another member of the Augustine Painters (and a former orphan himself) they are thrown into a world with a mixture of magical and mundane threats, and pushed into service to try and avert danger to the King while also staying alive themselves and protecting Caroline from a predatory Count who has his eyes on her. Unlike many of the other stories, which focus on a single unique young person finding their way into life-changing situations, West's story explicitly focuses on the relationship between Joseph and Caroline and the way that they support each other to shape the future together. While it's Joseph who is more outwardly "special", Caroline's role in the story and in his success, and her own independent strengths, are treated with constant respect by other sympathetic characters and by the narrative itself.


FIYAH Literary Magazine Issue 14

No novelette in this quarter's unthemed issue of FIYAH, but four interesting short stories that range from epic fantasy to cyber thriller via a pair of urban speculative stories that straddle each side of the science/magic divide. On the fantasy side, Tobi Ogundiran's "Guardian of the Gods" packs a great deal of adventure into its short length, telling the story of Ashâke, an acolyte who has been left behind by her classmates because she can't hear the gods. When she learns the forbidden truth behind the place she's been brought up, Ashâke has a crisis of faith and returns to right the wrongs she feels has been done to her - only to find out the truth isn't nearly so straightforward. I could happily read a full novel set in this world, and the same goes for the issue's other fantasy story, "Your Rover is Here" by LP Kindred, which offers a high-action magical altercation in an urban fantasy world where bigotry and economic inequality looks much the same as it does in our own. The 2,000 words of this story do an amazing job of sketching a world with various types of magic, political structures at play, and putting an interesting character at the heart of it all.

On the science fictional side, "A Terminal Kind of Love" by Veronica Henry is the story of a tech genius who is in the process of divorcing her unfaithful husband, who unfortunately also happens to take away the company they helped build together. When Athena tries to get her revenge, it winds up not working exactly to plan and brings their problems to a head in an unexpected way. While the prose in this one is a little "explain-y", the emotional weight of the situation is well handled and I liked the touches of Freetown in the setting. "Uniform" by Errick Nunnally rounds out this quartet with another deeply emotional story, this one about a Marine veteran who was turned into a mechanised soldier following fatal injuries, and who is now attempting to find his place in a world where he is regarded as a killing machine. The story turns from a touching slice of life moment to an unexpected opportunity for heroism, and while the ending feels a little neat, it still allows the protagonist a moment of choice and recognition which allows it to be earned and for some of the themes of the story to be laid to rest.

Bonus Round: Prose and Politics

Over the past couple of months, I've read some interesting works that combine fiction and non-fiction in different ways. Europa28, edited by Edited by Sophie Hughes & Sarah Cleave from Comma Press, incorporates fiction that ranged from dreamy slipstream to continental personifications to mythical retellings within a set of mostly non fiction essays, all written by women from different countries in Europe. It's a tricky book to review in this context, as none of the fiction entries really stand up on their own as stories; what makes them interesting is how they juxtapose with the memoirs and analyses of other parts of the collection to build up a patchwork of perspectives that coalesce into a snapshot of a complex, fractured continent grappling with ghosts of the past and the inequalities of today. It may just be the cynical former EU intern in me, but the project of creating shared European cultural identity can be prone to simplifications that are cringey at best, and enormously problematic and neo-colonialist at worst. Europa28 does occasionally veer into cringe (the story "In Human Form", about an entity coming to Earth to learn about what it is to be "Europe", and the extended metaphor of "Europe as a house" gave me the feeling most persistently) but it's more than balanced out by the nuance in many of the more geographically focused pieces, and I particularly appreciated works from Eastern European perspectives which are less regularly heard in English-language conversations.

I've also made some progress on my resolution to read more of PM Press' Outspoken Authors series, a series of short collections or novellas which combine fiction, non fiction and an interview from a particular author, often highlighting work that hasn't been collected elsewhere. Nisi Shawl's Talk Like A Man is one such collection and one of the series' more recent titles, bringing together a handful of short stories, a long essay on the relationship between science fiction and religion through the lens of Shawl's practice of Ifa, a West African religion, and a long, wide-ranging interview with series editor Terry Bisson. The setup here is more "traditional" with non-fiction coming after the fiction, but there's still a sense of getting to know an author over the course of the collection that feels qualitatively different somehow from reading a normal collection, despite the shorter length. The highlight of the fiction pieces here was "Walk Like a Man", a story that combines a gritty, aggressive version of female adolescence with a cyberpunky aesthetic exploring reality, relationships and belonging.

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.