Short fiction recommendations - June 2015

June was a relatively high-volume month in the short sf world — I looked at 168 stories from 34 magazines — but I'm only recommending eight stories (or, seven stories and a series of story-like works), four — half — of which come from outside of my usual list of sf venues. A bad month for the science fiction field proper, in other words.

Exciting new feature, though! If you want to make a link to what I said about any one specific story, add a # and the writer's full name without spaces, punctuation, or diacritics to the end of the URL. For example, to link to the E. Catherine Tobler story I'm recommending this month, add #ecatherinetobler to the URL for this post, for the Team IIT story add #teamiit, and so on. Are you thrilled? I'm thrilled.

[Click here to skip the boring lists and get to the recommendations]

As always, I give the full list of magazines I look at — most of them exclusively sf (or sf/f), some not but publishing sf often enough to make it worth looking at them, all of them except the ones marked with asterisks free online — and encourage you to let me know if there are any conspicuously missing. (Some of the obvious ones are missing because I haven't yet gotten around to subscribing — F&SF — or haven't been able to justify the expense to myself — Analog, IGMS — and some are missing because it feels like a safe assumption that they won't publish anything for me — Beneath Ceaseless Skies, say — but I still always welcome any recommendations, and if there's a specific story you think I should see in one of the ones I avoid by all means let me know.) So, the current full list:

Abyss & Apex, Acidic Fiction, AE, Apex, Asimov's*, Betwixt, The Book Smugglers, Buzzy Mag, Clarkesworld, The Colored Lens, Cosmos, Crossed Genres, Daily Science Fiction, Diabolical Plots, Escape Pod, Expanded Horizons, Fantastic Stories, Fantasy Scroll, Farrago's Wainscot, Fireside, The Future Fire, Galaxy's Edge, GigaNotoSaurus, The Golden Key, Ideomancer, Interfictions, Interzone*, Kaleidotrope, Lackington's, Lakeside Circus, Lightspeed, Liquid Imagination, Luna Station Quarterly, Mythic Delirium, New Haven Review, Omenana, Perihelion, Pornokitsch, Scigentasy, Shimmer, SQ Mag, STRAEON*, Strange Constellations, Strange Horizons, Terraform, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, tor.com, Uncanny, Unlikely Story, Unsung Stories, Weird Fiction Review, Words Without Borders.

Of these, no new fiction appeared in June in Abyss & Apex, Betwixt, Buzzy Mag, Expanded Horizons, Fantastic Stories, Farrago's Wainscot, Galaxy's Edge, The Golden Key, Ideomancer, Lackington's, Lakeside Circus, New Haven Review, Plasma Frequency, Pornokitsch, Scigentasy, SQ Mag, STRAEON, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, Unlikely Story, or Weird Fiction Review. Each of the remaining published at least one new story, and I at least looked at all of it.

I did not purchase, and therefore did not consider the stories exclusive to, the full so-called "Queers Destroy Science Fiction" issue of Lightspeed because, quite frankly, the free stories — not one of which was I able to force myself to finish — inspired no confidence whatsoever in the potential of the rest. Plus, I refuse to own an object featuring that hideous and offensive cover art. Considering that the Kickstarter campaign raised about a gazillion dollars in its first minute, I suspect that withholding my $17.99 (or $3.99, even) won't hurt them too bad.

The only new addition this month is Fireside — I'm not sure why I didn't have it on there before. The one deletion is Plasma Frequency, which has ceased publication. After this month I will be dropping Acidic Fiction, which is also ceasing publication (no great loss, frankly), and Liquid Imagination: they explicitly say their stories only exist to fill up your non-work time so you can go back to work and be productive, they have a regular column of writing tips from a life coach, they might as well rename themselves Corporate Imagination.

Two other notes: first of all, three of my recommendations this month come from Muse India, whose May/June edition had a huge special science fiction feature (scroll down). In addition to fiction, they published an enormous quantity of non-fiction, including among many other things an essay on climate change by Vandana Singh. Many thanks to Aishwarya Subramanian for alerting me to this issue's existence. Second, though I didn't much care for any of what I could see a way to calling science fiction in the latest issue of Interfictions, I want to point out at least Keguro Macharia's brilliant essay on Octavia E. Butler's disowned Patternist novel Survivor, which examines the novel's generic status much more interestingly and productively than most such genre-investigations can even imagine, and Richard Bowes' marvelous story "Fordham Court," which dispenses with (most of) his usual ambiguously sfnal flourishes without losing anything from his characteristically captivating efforts to reconstruct memories; and the way in which story interacts with story, document with document, is magical in itself.

And now, arbitrarily presented in reverse alphabetical order by writer's name, my short science fiction recommendations!

E. Catherine Tobler, "Somewhere I Have Never Traveled (Third Sound Remix)" (Clarkesworld)
So "poetic" as frequently to be illegible, this story nevertheless maintains the contrasting capitalist-exploitative and transcendent aspects of space travel in delicate balance (in addition to, along another non-parallel axis, the beauty and insanity of transcendence), not using the one to excuse the other as sf has often done in one direction or another, but exploring the way they infect — and propel — one another, and the pain and confusion this might cause.

Team IIT, "Dashing Through the Door" (Muse India)
I have much the same formal reservations about this story as I did about the Köhler story last month, though "scientific paper as sf story" does have an appropriateness (and history) to it (and the fact that it seems to actually have been written by a team is interesting). Even aside from those reservations, the paper's exploration of the possibilities of quantum teleportation is...a bit elementary. There's a wryness to the tone that I enjoy, though, and I particularly like the way it makes clear the complicity — and the compartmentalization of that complicity in the minds of those who are complicit — of science with domination (a suggestion for how strict border controls could be imposed is followed almost immediately by "When it is just as easy to visit Africa, as it is to visit the corner grocery store, it will undoubtedly truly transform the world into a 'global village'", and then only two paragraphs later "This system provides a powerful protocol for military deployment") though it's not actually much clearer here than in any real paper and for all I know the writers are simply engaging in that complicity rather than critiquing it. Still.

Kate Schapira, "Alternate histories" (Climate Anxiety Counseling)
I wrote about these alternate histories in my April post, when Schapira started writing them; after a month's hiatus she resumed in June. I don't have all that much to add to what I said last time, but the work continues to be vital and I for one plan to follow it wherever it goes. (The link is to the tag, so depending on when you click it you'll see different things, but I urge you to explore.)

Priya Sarukkai Chabria, "dance? he asked" (Muse India)
"that's a pretty lonely thing to do: read." People well into their second century, living with their artificially-maintained and increasingly aged bodies kept mostly in isolation, engaged in fascinating but, one senses, largely unfulfilling — or maybe better unfulfilled — intellectual pursuits (one a sort of landscape holographer, the other a paleontologist), possessing and using a lively but almost entirely non-overlapping knowledge of a supposedly shared cultural history, meet through "4-D" avatars on "The Grid." Over the course of months they slowly reveal more and more of their "real" selves to each other, each giving the other ample time to revolt against the imperfections of physical bodies and cut contact. Real? In this (or any) context, what could the word possibly mean? "i never use the word real on myself." Everything is carefully managed, everything planned, strategized, but (it's supposedly less "painful" this way than any other alternative) attended with a constant fear of disappointment, mingled with hope for surprise. How much of what the other person does is just their strategy, and does that mean it's not real? What does any behavior, any sign of the other person, or of the world, mean? The story's leaps from perspective to perspective, far from providing any authoritative standpoint from which to answer this question objectively, reinforces its mystery, or maybe its meaninglessness. "nothing is certain from remaining evidence."

Ray Nayler, "Mutability" (Asimov's)
I've been thinking about immortality a lot lately, and I'm always consumed with questions of memory and loss (which of course are major aspects of my thoughts on immortality), so in a way this story is a shoe-in. Despite hitting all the marks on that checklist though it feels a bit slight, reaching for the wrong kind of significance (honestly, who likes this kind of language, and what could it mean to them?) and coming up short in an uninteresting way. (It'd be better without the Mysterious Woman and the State Department Russian Exoticism, too, but hey). I might not be recommending the story to readers so much as recommending further thought and more honesty to the writer.

Alan Garth, "World Away" (Perihelion)
The boilerplate "teen" "rebellion" story is largely irrelevant in the face of the wonder and terror of Tenni's experience outside of the generation ship — though the hints of her denial of, what's the phrase, reproductive futurity, are also a bit interesting.

Ruthanna Emrys, "The Deepest Rift" (tor.com)
The delicate balancing act between patness and non-patness which the story had been maintaining most of its length collapses and falls into patness at the end, and in general Emrys and I have a lot of fundamental differences on questions of what writing is, much of which shows up here to, in my eyes, the story's detriment. But this sort of McIntyrean story (and those problems are reminiscent of some of McIntyre's work too, if I'm being honest — think of the ending of Dreamsnake, for example) of contact, embodiment, knowing, and communication has more than enough good to make up for any objections I might have.

Rimi Chatterjee, "The Cleanup" (Muse India)
This reminded me a bit of the stories in Menial: Skilled Labor in Science Fiction (for which see Benjamin Gabriel's superb review), both in its "content" — two women laborers cleaning out the inside of a statue of, literally, The Man — and in the way it seems more like a small slice of non-story than a "story" proper and, like most of the stories in that anthology, is all the stronger for it. (Unlike those it doesn't have dozens of other non-stories with similar goals propping it up, but it works regardless.) Things occur, yes, but it's not so much a plot happening so much as an event taking place, and the event is the writing itself and what it allows to come forward. What exactly has caused the situation in the story (a massive drop-off in the male population resulting in a further disempowerment of women as the remaining men clutch their waning power to themselves ever more firmly) is not explored, and what interests me particularly is that the story withholds its explicit, infodumpy statement of this situation until the very end (after a peculiar drug experience and a heartbreaking moment of antilesbian panic) not because it's a "surprise" — it's not; we learn nothing we haven't learned already through incluing — but because this juxtaposition of expository techniques is what the event that is this telling requires.

Short fiction recommendations - May 2015

[Click here to skip the damn commentary and go straight to the recommendations.]

I no longer feel a need to write introductions to these posts, except of course that here's me, writing an introduction to this post.. A large portion of the less-than-monthly magazines didn't publish this month, which means the pool of stories was blessedly smaller than usual, which in turn means I guess it's impressive that I'm recommending as many as I am (though most of these recommendations come with reservations, not that that's unusual).

One thing I feel duty-bound to mention, much as it pains me, is that both Jonathan McCalmont and I seem to have been wrong about Terraform, which despite its unsavory attachments and practices has turned out to be more worth reading than I had expected (and I would have to assume less worth reading for him than he expected, because it's only occasionally anything like he described it after its first month). To my intense horror I'm recommending three stories they published this month. I'm only unreservedly enthusiastic about one — the Brissett — and other things they've done this month make me gag at best, and even though I'm recommending his story, advisedly, with a de-monetized archive link, I really wish they wouldn't have paid Tao Lin money. But there you have it. I tend to think that Terraform's relatively strong showing says more about the rest of the field than about Terraform itself: any field that can be improved by the arrival of capitalist resource-extractors is in a dire state.

Anyway, on to the now-traditional lists. As always, if a magazine you think I should be looking at is conspicuously absent from them, let me know; same goes for one-off sf issues of or individual sf stories in non-sf magazines, etc. Note that I'm not only looking at sf-exclusive magazines but any that publish sf often enough to make it worthwhile to check them out regularly.

[Click here to skip the damn lists and go straight to the recommendations.]

The changes from last month: Fiction Vortex has ceased publishing and so has been dropped. The first issue of Truancy made it clear that its interests are not mine, so I've dropped it too and wish it well. And I've added Escape Pod, which I hadn't included before because I'd been under the impression that they only had audio — which I can't do — for their stories, but it turns out they have text as well. As of now I have no plans to make any changes for next month.

The full list of magazines I consult regularly for these posts, all free online except for the ones marked with an asterisk: Abyss & Apex, Acidic Fiction, AE, Apex, Asimov's*, Betwixt, The Book Smugglers, Buzzy Mag, Clarkesworld, The Colored Lens, Cosmos, Crossed Genres, Daily Science Fiction, Diabolical Plots, Escape Pod, Expanded Horizons, Fantastic Stories, Fantasy Scroll, Farrago's Wainscot, The Future Fire, Galaxy's Edge, GigaNotoSaurus, The Golden Key, Ideomancer, Interfictions, Interzone*, Kaleidotrope, Lackington's, Lakeside Circus, Lightspeed, Liquid Imagination, Luna Station Quarterly, Mythic Delirium, New Haven Review, Omenana, Perihelion, Plasma Frequency, Pornokitsch, Scigentasy, Shimmer, SQ Mag, STRAEON*, Strange Constellations, Strange Horizons, Terraform, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, tor.com, Uncanny, Unlikely Story, Unsung Stories, Weird Fiction Review, Words Without Borders.

Of these, no new fiction appeared in May in Abyss & Apex, Betwixt, Cosmos, Expanded Horizons, Fantasy Scroll, Farrago's Wainscot, The Future Fire, The Golden Key, Ideomancer, Interfictions, Interzone (i.e., I haven't read the fiction in the May-June issue yet), Kaleidotrope, Lackington's, Liquid Imagination, Luna Station Quarterly, New Haven Review, Omenana, Plasma Frequency, Pornokitsch, STRAEON, Strange Constellations, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, or Unlikely Story. I at least attempted to read every story published in the remaining magazines.

Now, arbitrarily in alphabetical order by story title disregarding "a" and "the", the recommendations!

"Application for the Delegation of First Contact: Questionnaire, Part B by Kathrin Köhler (The Book Smugglers)
More and more I'm wary of stories that dispense with the usual form of stories...only to replace that form with another pre-made, readily recognizable one (in this case, an institutional questionnaire); it's a move that seems to have become, in its less-prevelant way, almost as obligatory as those spoon-feeding one-line opening and/or closing paragraphs, and the impulses behind it often — as here, to a degree — strike me as being those not of writing — of feeling that the usual forms are inadequate in themselves — so much as of novelty-seeking. That said, though I don't think much of the form when considering this as a story, it does have good things to say, and says them all the better by not saying them but asking us to think about how, and whether, to say them. (Though, as an aside, I have to wonder how much thought Köhler gave to the world that produced this questionnaire; among other things, I don't say they couldn't but how do such institutions — and their language — survive if they are willing to ask such questions?) And I wonder too if sf as a field might be improved if its writers would begin setting themselves these questions before beginning, or continuing, to write.

"Dancing in the Right of Way" by Cyn C. Bermudez (Perihelion)
I'm recommending this story not because I think it's great — to be frank it's not, really — but because I sense something submerged in it that I hope, someday, could emerge. The "before they came" flashback scenes try much too hard to force a largely prefab emotion, and especially the military language of the "after" scenes is just trying (though I liked the quiet revelation that it's all a fake, an imitation, especially in the face of the suggestion that the aliens our characters are fighting are here as part of their own, unrelated-to-us war). But the sense of confusion and loss is real, and the mingling of transcendence and destruction in the last paragraph — which feels almost unattached to the rest of the story not in an incompetent way but in the best kind of jarring disjuncture that sf has long sought after — pushes the first person to the breaking point and is awful in many senses of the word.

"Esterhazy's Cadence" by Guy T. Martland (Perihelion)
The extremely rare exception where I'd argue for reading a work of sf metaphorically rather than literally. Taken literally, this story — with its music-that-can-kill-you, its religious riots over a sustained B-flat, and so on — is more than a little silly (and really no reading will fully rescue it from silliness, though it's a kind of silliness I at least enjoy). But metaphorically it feels to me as though it is asking the question of whether it is possible to return to (or arrive at) a way of being in which art once more is capable of founding a world, a fundamental part of life rather than a cordoned-off entertainment we always feel secretly guilty about not attending to properly. I'm also a sucker for space elevator imagery — which is my secretly guilty way of saying I find such imagery extremely moving and important without trying to explain why I feel this way — and its brief invocations here are surprisingly beautiful, given the story's more frequent flatness of feeling.

"God's Dog" by S.E. Gale (Unsung Stories)
I find myself with little to say about it (did I just hear a hallelujah chorus break out somewhere?), but this bit of angelic and/or demonic and/or alien weirdness is intriguing, even occasionally wondrous.

"In Memoriam" by Rachel Reddick (Diabolical Plots)
This tiny thing can't seem to make up its mind whether it wants to be overwrought or unassuming (and though I don't disapprove of the former this material demands the latter), but it allows for a wonderful sort of hinge moment toward the end, where the focus of the narrator's meditations shifts from the absence of the future to the absence of the past, almost as if these absences are one in the face of the isolation of the current moment.

"The Judge" by Sulagna Misra (Terraform)
The audacity of the writing here means my reaction varied between wild applause and god that's hokey from sentence to sentence. (And sometimes I felt both ways simultaneously, as with the aggressively, hilariously infelicitous opening sentences: "You'd think a time traveler would be on time, grumbles Jay. Jay T'Sevn, or J87, is a robot.") On balance I can only approve of that. (And then there's the differently audacious "Like most humans, her eyes, hair, and skin are all different shades of brown" — standing ovation.) Two stories compete for the approval of a Judge whose criteria we never learn but seem roughly to match the current standard, as far as we can see at least; both stories are about communication, about telling, though not precisely about storytelling. The first, told by the human, seems equally uncomfortable with all this writing communicating telling we do ("They wrote all the time, forever explaining themselves, forever waiting for answers") and with what might happen if we found a way to stop. In the second, told by the robot, an AI built by an alien society to explore what is to them alien finds that, in trying to explain the alien, it ends up having more in common with it than with those who built it — an inevitability perhaps only available to an intermediary.

"No Alphabet Can Spell It" by Emily C. Skaftun (Buzzy Mag)
The narrator of We Who Are About To probably wouldn't approve — and maybe Russ herself wouldn't, either — but for me at least this perfectly ordinary sf story did the extremely welcome work of reminding me that in a perfectly ordinary sf story nothing is perfectly ordinary. Skaftun is willing to get a little batty here, and God bless.

"Science Fiction Ideas" by Tao Lin (Terraform)
As "A Tao Lin Story" I don't think I would recommend this; it has its moments but more often feels weighted down, with none of the lightness of Taipei. At times it almost feels more like someone's inane parody of him than Lin himself. But my god, a science fiction story with some thoughts in its head about what science fiction is — as signaled by the title, it wonders what exactly we mean when we talk about "ideas," but also why we might turn them into stories, and what on earth a "story" is — published in a science fiction magazine? This is practically unheard of — and as it does have its moments, and as those moments are wrapped up precisely in its science-fictionality, I have to at least point it out as something worth a look. Too bad you have to be an established asshole publishing in www dot venture capital dot com to actually be allowed to try something like this. (And on that note, if you do read this on my recommendation, please use the link above; it will contribute no page views to the story.)

"A Song for You" by Jennifer Marie Brissett (Terraform)
The writer of Elysium turns her attention to the Orpheus legend. And just as that novel treated the love of Hadrian and Antinous as not so much a rigid model to follow as an ever-changing-ever-the-same shape into which to mold and remold itself, so we find here as the shape of Orpheus and Eurydice moves through a far-future world of interplanetary war, colonization, forgetting, and music. We are just astonishingly lucky to exist in a world that has Brissett's writing in it.

"Strings" by Kelly Haworth (Daily Science Fiction)
Though it succumbs to much of the patness, the canned "poetic" language, and other pitfalls of the contemporary short sf scene, "Strings" sets itself a promising project. The many allegorical reductions we may be tempted to make of it (This Is A Story About Abusive Relationships, This Is A Story About Cultural Colonialism, etc) butt up against one another uncomfortably — not erasing one another, not tearing one another down, but saying what they have to say while reminding us of the violence such reduction can do to the richness — much of it ugly, some of it not — of the world.

Short fiction recommendations - April 2015

....and once again. My third monthly short fiction recommendations post, but the first that actually covers only one month. For whatever that's worth.

[Click here to skip the boring lists & things and go straight to the recommendations]

Once again I've come across some magazines I was previously unaware of; one new one has begun and at least one has ended. As I've done before I'll list all of the magazines (slash-websites-slash-whatever) I look at so that if anyone happens to see that something is conspicuously missing they can let me know about it. (Most are dedicated sf magazines; some are not but publish sf often enough to make it worth my while to look at them for these purposes. Apart from the three marked with asterisks, all the magazines I look at are free online; there are other pay magazines I'm aware of and would like to check out as finances allow — for example I plan to resubscribe to F&SF soon — but for the moment this is it. Nevertheless, if you know of a pay magazine I might not be aware of, please let me know.)

The magazines I consult, all fifty-three (!) of them, are: Abyss & Apex, Acidic Fiction, AE, Apex, Asimov's*, Betwixt, The Book Smugglers, Buzzy Mag, Clarkesworld, The Colored Lens, Cosmos, Crossed Genres, Daily Science Fiction, Diabolical Plots, Expanded Horizons, Fantastic Stories, Fantasy Scroll, Farrago's Wainscot, Fiction Vortex, The Future Fire, Galaxy's Edge, GigaNotoSaurus, The Golden Key, Ideomancer, Interfictions, Interzone*, Kaleidotrope, Lackington's, Lakeside Circus, Lightspeed, Liquid Imagination, Luna Station Quarterly, Mythic Delirium, The New Haven Review, Omenana, Perihelion, Plasma Frequency, Pornokitsch, Scigentasy, Shimmer, SQ Mag, STRAEON*, Strange Constellations, Strange Horizons, Terraform, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, tor.com, Truancy, Uncanny, Unlikely Story, Unsung Stories, Weird Fiction Review, and Words Without Borders.

Of these, no new fiction appeared in April in The Book Smugglers, Diabolical Plots, Expanded Horizons, The Future Fire, Galaxy's Edge, The Golden Key, Ideomancer, Interfictions, Liquid Imagination, Luna Station Quarterly, The New Haven Review, Omenana, Plasma Frequency, Pornokitsch, Scigentasy, SQ Mag, STRAEON, or Three-Lobed Burning Eye. The rest all did publish new fiction and I at least looked at all of it.

After this month I will be dropping Fiction Vortex (because it has ceased publication). Everything else survives in my reading for another month.

And now! Arbitrarily in alphabetical order by writer's given name, the recommendations!

Alastair Reynolds, "A Murmuration" (Interzone)
The "character-driven" story is inane and tiresome, and far too convinced of its own (nonexistent) cleverness. The writing is often spoonfeedingly insipid (the paragraphing, the fucking paragraphing), and as often just plain embarrassing ("I squeeze our data until it bleeds science"). The cruelty is wholly unjustified. But struggling out from under all the garbage are moments of fascination, with a focus on work and process that remind me of Josipovici's remarks on the second half of Exodus — only now this work and process, and the focus on them, are irremediably deranged.

Aliya Whiteley, "Blossoms Falling Down" (Interzone)
People searching for genuine experience, or trying to disappear into roles, or both, in a world that is paper-thin, in which cultures and traditions and histories are less than a costume, less than a tourist destination; a shipful of people traveling through space in hope of "finding a new place and not screwing it up this time," not knowing but almost feeling that they've already screwed it up, that their ship has managed to reproduce not even the problems of Earth, but a parody of them.

Benjanun Sriduangkaew, "The Petals Abide" (Clarkesworld)
As I was reading this I kept thinking of a comment Samuel R. Delany makes about Hart Crane's use of apostrophe — a use which many find embarrassing but which for Delany is a main element of "a language...in the process of knowing...an animate object world, a world where meaning and mystery were one, indisseverable, and ubiquitous, but at the same time a world where everything spoke (or sang or whispered or shouted) to everything else." Sriduangkaew — who does not particularly use apostrophe and whose "object world" is often much more visibly animate even than ours, given the technologies its characters are surrounded by — is not much like Crane, but I think her language is up to something similar. The collision between this language and the tales of her Hegemony universe — all expansion and control, forgetting and re-membering and remaking — is something I haven't quite been able to articulate, but it is powerful. This may be my favorite of her stories I've yet read; though I still find Sriduangkaew's work somewhat fettered by the formulas of her field as she finds it (a field clinging with all it has to "genre" even as its own imperatives push it away from it), the series of dialogues here between captive and captor, two of the points of a strange and violent love triangle, emerge out of the living surround and take on a life of their own.

Emily Devenport, "Dr. Polingyouma's Machine" (Uncanny)
I don't know enough about Hopi practices (and preferences) to know how to feel about their invocation here — brief in explicit terms, looming implicitly over the entire story — but in general theory at least I find the overlapping of "non-rational" and "rational" methods suggestive. This overlapping, too, is distorted-mirrored by the narrator's focus (a distant, less pathological relation to that of Reynolds's narrator) on the repetitive, practical, procedural concerns of labor — cleaning floors, mainly — in the presence of an Event that puts the viability not only of an individual life but of reality itself into question. I was disappointed in the ending, which has the structure (though not the "content") of something like a superhero origin story and I think too much closes off the openness of what preceded it. (When will the science fiction reader stop having to try to disregard this kind of ending?) I suspect that if Devenport had taken longer with her thoughts and her work, and perhaps had existed in a critical climate that did not foster patness, this same basic material (including the "what-happens" of the ending, which in pretty much every respect I do not object to) could have given rise to something transcendent. Even as it is, though, the event (or Event) she has allowed to unfold demands to be experienced.

Jetse de Vries, "Echoes of Life (Kaleidotrope)
I'm not actually recommending this story. What I'm actually recommending is that its writer stop writing about human relationships until he learns something about them, and until he resolves not to tell lies about them. What I'm actually recommending is a hypothetical severely edited version of this story, maybe a third its current length, removing the sexist (and banal, and pointless) mom's-new-boyfriend storyline and the sudden, blindsiding appearance of racist Zwarte Piet halfway through, both of which de Vries should be embarrassed (at least) to have written and the Kaleidotrope staff should be embarrassed (at least) to have published, along with less abominable but very peculiar lapses like a team of scientists interfering with an unknown species' life cycle because individual members of that species are too pretty to die (scientists interfering in situations they don't understand? yes; like this? noooo), and the hilariously on-the-nose actual appearance of the phrases "conceptual breakthrough" and "sense of wonder" at the end of the story. What would then remain — the investigation of life on Europa; the hints of extreme technological transformation like the gengineered humans and the "Spikes of Jupiter"; the deft details about UV-spectrum decoration on the otherwise homogeneous buildings of the Europan settlement — would be a powerfully expository sf short story. If it catches you on a day when you're able to take the shit in stride — to roll your eyes and read past it — the rest may be worth checking out. Otherwise: avoid, avoid, avoid.

Joe M. McDermott, "Paul and His Son" (Asimov's)
I suppose one way to describe this story would be to say that it presents an act of desperation carried out in a world in which surveillance — from above and below — is so routine that all actions, including desperate ones, have become automatic, unreflective. But that's just one way and not quite right (the narrator is reflective, though in a peculiarly performative way); and really the story feels so...slight?, but in a good way?, that I wonder if it's best not to describe it at all — there's so little to describe; it just exists. The taut-but-bland, repetitive language is marvelously affecting, though I have my doubts as to whether McDermott has found quite the right "subject matter" for it. The introductory blurb says the story is taken from a yet-to-be-published novel, and I either very much want to read that novel or very much want to pretend it doesn't exist and this is all there is.

Kate Schapira, Alternate Histories (climateanxietycounseling)
Full disclosure, Schapira is a local friend of mine, but I really think this is some of the most exciting writing going on right now. She explains the project in the introductory post (which is what I've linked above; the stories follow on immediately in the next-post links at the bottom of each), but briefly: a while back she set up a "climate anxiety counseling" booth near the downtown bus hub, where she asked/let people talk out their worries about climate change, the future, and, in practice, just about anything. Now this past month she's written a very short story every day based on these conversations, trying to take them in warm, meaningful, useful directions. Fragmentary, ongoing, reticent but generous, utilitarian but open. Total fantasies except that there is no reason that they have to be fantasies; vigorous explorations of that illusory conceptual construct called "the future"; rigorous localism that refuses the "universal" without renouncing a broader relevance. Schapira's project cuts to the heart of writing, of science fiction, of the state of the world and our place and responsibilities in it. And then there's all the local bus route numbers, I have very strong and specific emotional attachments to all the bus routes around here.

Michael Cisco, "Excerpt from UNLANGUAGE" (Lackington's)
Another excerpt taken from an unpublished novel. On balance I don't think I "like" this (maybe better to say I don't think I'm sympathetic to it); I kept thinking as I read it that it felt like something a Lovecraft scholar might write after taking Paul Auster's City of Glass too much at face value — like I did when I first read it as a teenager, say. (And I admit I laughed a little when I got to the author bio at the end and discovered that Cisco — whose name I had heard before but about whom I knew nothing — actually is a Lovecraft scholar. Not a bad thing to be, don't get me wrong!, but still.) But this is probably the most uncharitable of all ways to describe my reaction to this fragment that does, after all, have its provocative moments (the part about parables...); and regardless I have to applaud Lackington's for publishing it, in the process taking an enormous step toward becoming the kind of space I had hoped it could be: one at least as welcoming to uncertain attempts as it, and the rest of the field, is to mere successes.

Robert Reed, "The Empress in Her Glory" (Clarkesworld)
Robert Reed, "What I Intend" (Asimov's)
I think what I like about Reed is the sense I get that if he is prolific — and he is, though not perhaps exceptionally so by sf's standards — it is because he's always thinking, and his thinking comes out in writing. (In an interview in Fantasy Scroll, which this month reprinted an older story of his, he says "My Eureka moments are constant. I endure them every day, sometimes several times a day" — which feels right for him.) His thinking isn't always perfect: both of these stories, characteristically intriguing-but-frustrating, are unintentionally silly at least as often as they are profound; "What I Intend" is too frequently glib and has a good deal of that relatively-mild-but-pervasive sexism that mars much of Reed's work; there is an authoritarianism in the telling of "The Empress" that aligns Reed uncomfortably (and not, I think, self-critically) not just with its heroine (which would be bad enough) but with the aliens who empowered her. So: far from perfect, but his thinking is always ongoing, which is refreshing and, as a project, occasionally exhilarating.

Sarah L. Johnson, "Loud as a Murder" (Crossed Genres)
A lightweight but often charming story of an autistic proofreader's love for the UPS guy who delivers him his manuscripts. What is often referred to as the "speculative element" deserves that isolating and trivializing name here: it feels mechanical and honestly a bit half-baked — and really is there any reason this had to be "speculative fiction"? — but overall I enjoyed myself.

Vandana Singh, "Ambiguity Machines: An Examination" (tor.com)
Beginning and ending (roughly) with references to "negative space," "Ambiguity Machines" is itself a kind of glorious negative space defined by a very science fictional didacticism that does not actually exist in the story itself. Much more could be said; perhaps much less should: the story says what it needs to.

William Squirrell, "Götterdämmerung" (AE)
What interests me here is neither the setting (a perfunctory sort of post-singularity straggling-remnants-of-humanity thing) nor the "plot" (a just-as-perfunctory sort of male-coming-of-age-through-violence thing) nor the "ideas" (territory taken in more interesting directions by everything from Solaris to Star Trek: The Motion Picture) but the way in which the story, though it takes place over quite a number of years, consists essentially of one single action, brought to its conclusion. By placing this action in a recognizable sf context, though, with all of the object-focused discourse that comes with it, Squirrell brings to light the ways in which no action is self-contained and in which, indeed, "one single action" is not singular; the violent final encounter between Donald and Interface may bring both of them resolution of a kind, but it has no effect whatever on the context that caused that encounter to occur (and itself occurs for reasons basically irrelevant to Interface), which has its own business to attend to; and as the looking-back frame that begins the story indicates, life, and non-life, continues — not necessarily unaffected, but hardly brought to a stop.

Zen Cho, "Monkey King, Faerie Queen" (Kaleidotrope)
An entertaining, playfully told tale of a Chinese god in Britain's Faerie Court. I may not like that this is the kind of thing "SF/F" seems most interested in nowadays, but in isolation it's a fun little story.

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Incidentally, as a corrective to the many things that bother even (or especially) me about this series of posts, I highly recommend Vajra Chandrasekera's beautiful post Atemporarility, on the subject of "keeping up" with short fiction, which I wholeheartedly endorse; I agree with every word. (With the exception of "professional," because surely not!)

Short fiction recommendations - March 2015 (with some I missed from January and February)

Part two! Mostly stories from March, but last time I wasn't aware of some interesting work that had appeared in January and February (most especially Jalada's massive Afrofuture(s) issue), so I've included that as well. The list of magazines I look at has expanded a bit from last time (and I looked at these new ones back through January), though I've also dropped two (Aphelion, for being uniformly unreadable and difficult to use anyway, and Omni Reboot, for the same reasons plus god what a terrible thing that thing is). As I did last time, I'll list all the magazines I consult — if you know of any I'm missing please let me know! (And thanks to Niall Harrison for pointing me in the direction of Jalada and Words Without Borders — which, as they and a few others on my list indicate, I'm interested in non-"genre" magazines that will sometimes publish sf as well as in-"genre" magazines.)

(With three exceptions all of the magazines on this list are free online. There are some pay magazines I'm aware of that I don't subscribe to — Arc, Bastion [if it ever returns], Fantasy & Science Fiction [now that C.C. Finlay is editor I plan to resubscribe but haven't been able to yet], Intergalactic Medicine Show, On Spec, Stupefying Stories, a few others; as finances allow I'd like to at least sample them, and if there are others I should know about let me know that, too.)

[Click here to skip the boring lists and go straight to the recommendations]

So, the magazines I now look at regularly: Abyss & Apex, Acidic Fiction, AE, Apex, Asimov's (pay), Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Betwixt, The Book Smugglers, Buzzy Mag, Clarkesworld, Cosmos, Crossed Genres, Daily SF, Expanded Horizons, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Fantasy Scroll, Fiction Vortex, The Future Fire, Galaxy's Edge, GigaNotoSaurus, The Golden Key, Ideomancer, Interfictions, Interzone (pay), Kaleidotrope, Lackington's, Lakeside Circus, Lightspeed, Luna Station Quarterly, Mythic Delirium, Nature, New Haven Review, Omenana, Perihelion, Plasma Frequency, Pornokitsch, Scigentasy, Shimmer, SQ Mag, STRAEON (pay), Strange Constellations, Strange Horizons, Terraform, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, tor.com, Uncanny, Unlikely Story, Unsung Stories, Weird Fiction Review, The WiFiles, and Words Without Borders.

Of these, no new fiction appeared in March (or, in those magazines new to my list, so far this year) in Abyss & Apex, Betwixt, The Book Smugglers, Expanded Horizons, Fantasy Scroll, The Golden Key, Interfictions, Interzone (more accurately, I haven't read the fiction in the March/April issue yet and will be covering it in next month's post), Kaleidotrope, Lackington's, New Haven Review, Scigentasy (I ask again: do they even still exist?), STRAEON, or Three-Lobed Burning Eye. The rest did publish new fiction, so if they are not represented in my recommendations it means I didn't find what fiction they published this month to be of any consequence. (I sometimes look at non-fiction and poetry, but don't include it in these posts.)

After this month, I plan to stop looking regularly at Beneath Ceaseless Skies (it is rare for me to love fantasy and they don't seem likely to publish those rarities; I'll look if someone asks me to and I'll follow a writer I care about there but otherwise no), Nature (because honestly), and the WiFiles (all soldiers, sadness about dead women, and rationalized religion; no thanks).

So now, arbitrarily in alphabetical order by writer name, the recommendations!

Gregory Norman Bossert, "Twelve and Tag" (Asimov's)
Thoroughly reminiscent of late-60s Delany, this story is however not pastiche but continuation — and it is both responsible and playful in that continuation. A strange story about strange people in a strange place telling each other strange stories for strange reasons; a moving, emotional story about moving, emotional stories that calls the concept and practice of moving, emotional stories deeply into question, in multiple ways. It shares, too, many of the concerns of Bossert's "Bloom," but explores them with greater integrity and deeper thought, to such an extent that it reads in (small) part almost as a critique of that earlier story — and certainly is a fulfillment of the promise it showed. Even the final page, an "action-packed" denouement that risks reducing everything that has preceded it into mere plot, manages to contribute rather than detract. Wonderful.

Suleiman Agbonkhianmen Buhari, "Discovering Time Travel" (Jalada)
This story has many things to recommend it (though neither its mostly pointless ending nor its shaky grasp of the history of knowledge is among them), but what primarily interests me is the disjunction between its brief opening, which establishes a narrator just as foreign to the story's future as we are, and the vast bulk of the story, told entirely (until the return of the narrator at story's end) in dialogue between two people completely — though differently — comfortable in that future.

Maria A. Bukachi, "Jestocost, Djinn" (Jalada)
The golden age of science fiction is twelve, they say, har har har, how clever. Well, I'm thirty-two and one of the better sf stories I read this month was written by a twelve-year-old. The notion that we adults have a lot to learn from kids is very popular when reduced to a condescending, Hallmark card-style sentiment but the sense in which it is true — and it is true — is much more complex and much more radical. Though there are ways in which greater "maturity" could perhaps have improved "Jestocost, Djinn," as it stands it dramatically reveals, among other things, that children understand — or at least this one child, Bukachi, understands — on a much more fundamental level than most adults what fiction ultimately is.

Tracy Canfield, "Bears Punching Bears!" (GigaNotoSaurus)
A curiosity: this is one of those "hectic day in the life of a person with a wacky job involving managing the weird needs of aliens" stories that I thought no one wrote anymore. The all-time master of this kind of story, for me — the only person who ever managed to do anything more than just breezy entertainment with them, and who I had thought essentially closed off the era in which they were written — is Tiptree: "Faithful to Thee, Terra, in Our Fashion" especially, which periodically interrupts the entertainment with utter negation in the form of the extragalactic aliens. Canfield doesn't achieve anything close to this, but it's clear that she doesn't wish to; "Bears Punching Bears!" is light, clever, and fun (if retrogressive — capitalists in space, etc.), and I recommend it as such.

Vajra Chandrasekera, "Documentary" (Lightspeed)
"But then, after all, we are cameras, because we are nothing but perspectives. We have no meat. We remember nothing of ourselves, if we ever had selves of our own. We are the world regarding itself, hungry for somebody's narrative, anybody's narrative. And maybe we are the dead." I still think Chandrasekera isn't quite "there" yet, but it is abundantly clear that he's listening, carefully, to what the world is asking of him, and he's well on his way to responding fully.

Chikodili Emelumadu, "Story, Story: A tale of mothers and daughters" (Omenana)
Though my focus is science fiction, I would be remiss if I didn't make note of this decidedly not sf, folk-tale-esque "fantasy" (I guess?) of three generations of women in one mythically peculiar family, told with far greater integrity than most contemporary attempts at "folk tales."

C.C. Finlay, "Morytober" (Daily Science Fiction)
A quartet to Canfield's symphony, if I want to use ridiculous metaphors. Not likely to change anyone's life but entertaining nonetheless, this is a little day-in-the-life piece about a kind of human-alien diplomacy I could get behind. I particularly enjoy Finlay's over-the-top language, sometimes quasi-scientific (the alien "had drooped on its large, orbicular pseudopod" and has a "squeehole at the commisure of its lips"), sometimes from the board room ("If we can't monetize the technology, we'll monetize our efforts to monetize the technology"), sometimes both — a kind of poetry.

Maria Dahvana Headley, "The Scavenger's Nursery" (Shimmer)
All over an Earth that's this much closer to collapse than our own, "garbage babies" begin to wake up, grow, and take over. In some ways a triumph of everything that bothers me about the free indirect, in others an exhibition of everything I love about the extrapersonal perspective of sf (these two are of course frequently at odds in my reading). Periodically the story will throw out (pun unintended) a fascinating twist of language — not "beautiful writing," not "lovely sentences," but a fascinating twist of language that will suggest an openness, a spiraling outward of thoughts and events the story could have included, but wishes the reader to think about instead.

Laia Jufresa, "The Cornerist" (trans. Sophie Hughes) (Words Without Borders)
Often tedious, this story opens up at times — increasingly so as it goes on — to become one of the better stories of sfnal art that I've read, and even the tedium contributes. Among the many areas it explores are the ephemerality of art, and how trying to make art "timeless" can degrade it; and the coexistence in the artist of the awareness that (in this case) his art could not exist if not for the decadence of his society, and the feeling that the art itself is somehow nevertheless necessary — not untainted by that decadence, but not necessarily controlled by it, either.

Melissa Kiguwa, "Daughters of Resurrection" (Jalada)
In 735 words Kiguwa encompasses more than most multivolume sf epics could even imagine. "The bodies weigh something..." Perhaps most powerful here is the story's understanding of how far science can take it, and where it must depart from it — a reflection of its disgust with the way human life has been, and continues to be, rationalized into lifelessness (both figurative and extremely literal), and the way the rationalization itself is rationalized (in a different sense, but also the same) into nothingness.

Sanya Noel, "Shadows, Mirrors and Flames" (Omenana)
I'm too insular an American to know how to feel about the politics here, so I'll stay out of that. And I'm also unsure how I feel about the tendency to label stories "fantasy" (or "magical realism") that treat the perceptions of a child seriously (just as I was unsure above about calling a story in the form of a folk tale "fantasy"), but I'm glad at least right now for whatever categorization it was that brought this vicious story to my attention.

Mallory Ortberg, "It's 2050 and Feminism Has Finally Won" (The Toast)
Unlike last month's left-field entry — Sam Kriss's "Manifesto" — I don't particularly think this is "actually" a science fiction story, but I'm gonna include it here anyway and why the hell not. It made me laugh more than pretty much anything else has in a good long while (with the exception, of course, of everything else Ortberg writes).

Sofia Samatar, "A Brief History of Nonduality Studies" (Jalada)
Sofia Samatar, "Those" (Uncanny)
First, notes on a buried history, the interaction of lost pasts on the scale of human history and that of a human life: "I wrote these notes only for Sylvia, and she asked me to write them, I think, only for me, in the hope that they would lead me back into the world. 'It will help you to dream of the future,' she said, but I don't. I dream of the present, of the now." Then "Those," by my lights less successful, but even a less-successful Samatar is still a Samatar; I admire her efforts here at combining didacticism and deep feeling in the particular, risky way she does — culminating in the stunning final three words, which I wish I'd written but know I couldn't have.

Yoko Tawada, "The Far Shore" (trans. Jeffrey Angles) (Words Without Borders)
I went back and forth on this one a few times while reading it. First I thought it was just agit-prop — and even when, as here, the cause (anti-nuclear) is righteous and extremely urgent, I don't find pure agit-prop particularly interesting or (more importantly) effective. But then came a much more intriguing middle section, in which Tawada takes full advantage of the extrapersonal dimension of sf without succumbing to its inhuman tendencies, particularly thrilling in the moment in which she describes an economic-technological "new mechanism of corruption" while leaving it an open — and finally irrelevant — question whether she's concretely "worldbuilding" or engaging more in aesthetic reasoning. Throughout this section the story keeps falling into language, into writing, in a remarkable way — almost as if a number of Kafka parables have been strung together. But then the final section, in which the story descends firmly upon one individual human being while also accentuating the one area — its concept of the motivations of politicians — in which it has been most naive all along, is much weaker, for all that it can be sardonically satisfying at times. Overall, though, a fascinating, and welcome, attempt at something more politically engaged sf should be trying to do.

Tade Thompson, "The Monkey House" (Omenana)
In a sense — possibly a superficial one — this feels like a more human version of Thomas Ligotti's office stories. At times a bit too on the nose, at times a bit too "metaphorical" when what would serve better is the sheerest literalism, this story nevertheless Knows What's Up.

Laurie Tom, "Even the Mountains Are Not Forever" (Strange Horizons)
The writing is a bit too tastefully "good" (read: dreary) for me, and it stumbles a bit toward the end (where I wish it would be a bit more skeptical of its premises; as it is it comes across as pat triumphalism), but I otherwise admired this story, about continuity and change, about the transmission of knowledge. It lives very much in the space I talked about in my post on lost time, and in that regard I was particularly gratified by the religious aspects of it (though some more direct exploration of religious practice, along with a deeper insight into the experiential oddities that would come with the story's conceits, would have been even more welcome).

Michal Wojcik, "Home Untethered" (Unsung Stories)
It's hard to shake an unpleasant feeling that Wojcik's original impetus here was "what if The Doctor had no knowledge???"; and if I had been the editor I would have been ruthless with the ending (delete the whole last paragraph, maybe retaining a line or two to put elsewhere; shuffle the previous two around a bit...). That aside, this is a lovely meditation on location and dislocation, purpose and purposelessness.

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Most of the same sadnesses I had last month remain — it's clear that there are not really good magazines (though Omenana easily puts pretty much the entire rest of the field to shame so far in its first two issues; I selfishly wish their focus was more on science fiction than fantasy!); and it's a terrible lot of plodding work and a bad kind of reading to find these relatively few good stories, even if some of them, this month more so than last, are truly great. (Last month I asked if I'd remember any of the stories in a year's time, this time I feel certain that at least the Bossert, Kiguwa, both Samatar, and Tawada stories will stay with me.) But there's a wider variety of stories here (much of this is down to Jalada and WWB and Omenana, but not all of it), everything that appeared to be a pattern last time is...not so much this time, and it increasingly seems that while there are a great deal of general things you could say about the vast bulk of bad or irrelevant contemporary short sf, there is nothing at all you can say generally about what is good. Which, I suppose, is always going to be the case.

Short fiction recommendations - January/February 2015

Now that I have entered the 21st century and have one of those newfangled gadgets everyone else has had seemingly forever, it's much more possible for me to do what I've been wanting to do for a long while now: explore the contemporary short science fiction field — most of which is online — thoroughly. So I've been reading a lot. I've read, or at least looked at,* every story published in January and February in every single free online sf magazine (and other magazines that regularly publish sf) that I'm aware of (a total of, good lord, forty-four magazines), as well as two magazines I subscribe to. If possible (a big if, as you'll see later on), I'd like to keep doing this and make a monthly thing out of recommendation posts.

*I made a pact with myself that'd I'd make it at least three dotepub pages into every single story, and...most of the time I did.

Before I get into talking about what this has been like, here's the list of magazines I've looked at. All are free online magazines except for Asimov's and Interzone. (For the sake of vertical space, I will not be putting this in bullet-list form, so apologies for the difficult-to-readness.) If there are any conspicuously missing from this list, please let me know!

[Click here to skip the boring lists]
[Click here to skip the boring general commentary and get to the recommendations]

The list: Abyss & Apex, Acidic Fiction, AE, Apex, Aphelion, Asimov's, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Betwixt, The Book Smugglers, Buzzy Mag, Clarkesworld, Cosmos, Crossed Genres, Daily Science Fiction, Expanded Horizons, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Fantasy Scroll, Fiction Vortex, The Future Fire, Galaxy's Edge, GigaNotoSaurus, The Golden Key, Ideomancer, Interfictions, Interzone, Kaleidotrope, Lackington's, Lightspeed, Mythic Delirium, Nature, Omenana, Omni Reboot, Perihelion, Plasma Frequency, Pornokitsch, Scigentasy, Shimmer, SQ Mag, Strange Constellations, Strange Horizons, Terraform, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, tor.com, Uncanny, Unlikely Story, Unsung Stories, Weird Fiction Review.

Of these, no fiction appeared during January and February in The Book Smugglers, The Future Fire, The Golden Key, Ideomancer, Interfictions, Omenana (does anyone know if there's gonna be an issue 2?), Scigentasy (they don't put a friggin year on anything, do they still exist?), or Three-Lobed Burning Eye.

Of the remaining, no fiction I found to be of any note (remember that I'm talking only about fiction) was published in Acidic Fiction, Aphelion (so terrible I'll probably stop looking at it), Beneath Ceaseless Skies (though admittedly fantasy has to work a LOT harder to convince me than sf does), Betwixt (more devoted to formula even than most), Cosmos, Crossed Genres, Daily Science Fiction (not so much relentlessly trivial as trivially relentless), Expanded Horizons, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Fantasy Scroll, Fiction Vortex, Galaxy's Edge (where every story feels exactly like the worst story in an all-original anthology from 1969), GigaNotoSaurus, Kaleidotrope, Lackington's, Lightspeed, Mythic Delirium, Nature, Omni Reboot (and honestly their website is such a pain that I'm probably going to stop looking), Plasma Frequency, Pornokitsch, Strange Constellations, Strange Horizons (sorry), Unlikely Story, Unsung Stories, and Weird Fiction Review. Each of the rest had at least one story I thought was worth recommending.

Before I go on, some general comments: first of all, nearly everything I read (or looked at, if I couldn't make it through) was terrible beyond belief. Not incompetent — perhaps surprisingly, nearly everything I read, even at the smaller magazines, was competent, even accomplished — but just pointless, formulaic, tedious, unnecessary.

Second, it's become pretty clear already, only two months in, that there really isn't any such thing as a "good magazine" in this field, as far as fiction goes (there are probably all kinds of "bad magazines," but it's too soon to call for most of them). Even the magazines that had more than one good story in them, the other things they published, and in one case the editors' comments, made it clear that the editors were not recognizing what I recognized in those stories, and had decided to publish them for reasons I would find...untrustworthy, at best. Unlike Jonathan McCalmont, I don't generally want magazines to focus on a specific "type" of story. And indeed, many of the magazines (Perihelion, say, or at the other end of the spectrum Apex) clearly do have such a focus, but nevertheless seem unable to distinguish between stories that live and stories that do not. But despite this difference, and despite my many problems with his arguments, McCalmont is absolutely right that there is a desperate need for stronger editorial stances in this field.

(Incidentally, the "major aesthetic sea-change" in short sf that he identifies — and, in my opinion, mis-analyzes — in Short Fiction and The Feels, it turns out, is not as widespread in the field as it actually stands, as a whole, as I had expected. It is, however, omnipresent in the work that attracts the most attention, and it remains a problem.)

Third, related to both and more important by far, this is just a terrible way to read. It's an awful feeling to go from story to story feeling nothing but suspicion, knowing that the chances are that what you're about to read will be trivial — if you're lucky. Far from any reputation I may have gained (in the teensy circles in which I have a reputation at all) for being negative-and-loving-it, I don't want to hate things, I don't want to be closed off, to be always suspicious. I want to approach everything with sympathy and openness. But this field simply does not allow for that approach. It's true that the rare good stories are wonderful surprises in this context, but they would be that in any context. Then, too, there's simply so much of it that if you're to have any hope at all of reading any significant portion of it you simply have to move quickly, be unforgiving, give up on most stories long before they're done. This is not a good way to read, and I have serious doubts if I'll want to keep doing it.

But at least for these two months I've already done it. So what did I find that was good, or at least decent? Arbitrarily arranged by the magazine in which they appeared, those magazines arbitrarily arranged in alphabetical order, and with largely superficial comments, there was:

Abyss & Apex

Corie Ralston, "Faith Is a Nanooka"
Not the most important story ever, but I appreciated this little unassuming thing about an elderly woman spending her last day of life in search of her robot dog and an understanding of God, life, and love. I especially liked the way the sequence of encounters she has during this day doesn't particularly pretend to be "realistic."

George S. Walker, "Dreadnought Under Ice"
Though I wish Walker would allow himself a little more time in between hitting the "enter" key, this story of the encounter between two very different minds removed, in different ways, from Earth, encased, in different ways, in metal, and placed in the under-ice oceans of Europa, by capital, is very much the kind of thing that science fiction should be doing.

AE

Stephen Case, "Drying Grass Moon"
I have an irrational, indefensible, and honestly inexplicable fondness for stories about grouchy farmers stubbornly refusing to leave their farms IN SPAAAACE, and this is one of those. For me it even made up for the unsavory "heterosexual robot marriage is illegal and oppressed" storyline. I make no claim that it will do the same for anyone else.

Apex

Rhoads Brazos' "Inhale"
The language tries much too hard for a kind of warmed-over "loveliness," and the gambit at the end, as executed, is reductive, a closing off, but the conceit (time begins to run backwards, and cause-and-effect sense must be made of it), and Brazos' thoughtfulness in carrying it through, mostly makes up for the problems.

Asimov's

Eneasz Brodski, "Red Legacy"
I suspect that what I liked in this story is entirely different from what Brodski — who seems to be into a horrifying-sounding thing calling itself "rationalist fiction" — wanted me to like in it. Its investment in cycling through "tropes" and its treatment of personal tragedy are both frankly insipid, but the collision of the bizarrely, almost humorously disjointed structure with the melancholic tone is intriguing, as is its exploration of an alternate world in which strict Lysenkoism is both 100% true and useful.

Buzzy Mag

Paul Levinson, "Sam's Requests"
Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, "The Obvious Solution"
Both messy nostalgia, both the kind of dumb-but-fun stories I can enjoy while rolling my eyes at them.

Clarkesworld

Tang Fei, "A Universal Elegy" (trans. John Chu)
Bewilderment on a vast scale. I'd hoped to re-read this story — which I didn't know what to make of and am not even sure I liked — before writing this post, but it wasn't to be. But it is rare enough for a contemporary sf story to call for re-reading that I feel moved to recommend it regardless. The story's transmutations live in a realm very little sf cares to inhabit anymore.

Interzone

Christien Gholson, "Tribute"
A bit schematic, like so many stories a bit too trying-for-beauty in its language, but the central action of the story, a centuries-long encounter in which both parties feel themselves to be facing an inexplicable monstrosity, is immensely striking.

The New Inquiry

Sam Kriss, "Manifesto of the Committee to Abolish Space"
Surprise! The New Inquiry wasn't on my list, and it isn't even an sf venue. Of course not — there is no way that Kriss's "Manifesto", which is already likely to be the best work of science fiction for all of 2015, could have been published in any of the existing sf spaces. This is why I protest. If I were fool enough to buy a Worldcon membership, I would nominate this for a Hugo in both the short story and related work categories. If you only read one item on this list, if you only read one thing ever again in your life, make it this. And then work, please work, to make sf a field in which this piece, both in its perspective and in its form, could have a place.

Perihelion

First of all, let me just say: Perihelion publishes a lot of fiction, and most of it is not only bad but reprehensible. Most of the stories seem to have all of the weaknesses of quote-unquote "golden age" sf, with none of the strengths. Before I came across the first of the stories from them I liked, I started to wonder if their submissions guidelines said, "When describing women, objectifying language is a must." Just for example. Go to almost any of their stories and search in the page for variations on the word "curves" if you don't believe me. (Their sub guidelines, by the way, do not say that, but they are gross in other, intimately related, ways.) In amongst all the dreck, though, I did find two pretty good stories, of a kind I doubt I'd find anywhere else. Dammit.

Karl Dandenell, "Human Faces"
Structurally reminiscent of Samuel R. Delany's "Aye, and Gomorrah," but with a sentimentality that put me in mind, not unpleasantly, of Clifford D. Simak's lesser works, and a well-done feeling of dislocation throughout.

A.L. Sirois, "Halieis Anthropon"
The Biblical reference in the title is a bit of an unnecessary distraction in this case (he said, as he prepared to send a story with a Biblical reference in the title to yet another magazine). Melancholy and the remembrance of things lost. The quailing of the mind in the encounter with the inexplicable. I may sound like a broken record sometimes with these things, but it's not repetition, it's necessity. This story is, though not without flaws, necessary.

Shimmer

Malon Edwards, "The Half-Dark Promise"
If you'd asked me what I was looking for when I started out reading these stories, "YA steampunk" would not have been any part of my answer, but — if that's what this is — here we are. Not My Kind Of Thing, maybe, but it's real.

SQ Mag

Michelle Ann King, "The Visitors"
As with many (or most) good contemporary sf stories, I could wish that King had let this story stay longer in her mind before writing it, or before finishing it (or at least I presume that is the problem; it is unfinished, not in the sense of being unpolished or too short or not detailed enough or lacking an ending, but in the sense of not being fully thought, fully experienced). But its puzzled, dread-filled approach to that classic sf theme, "transcendence," is more than welcome.

Tim Major, "Like Clockwork"
I read this story, centered on a powerful man who tries to make his Martian environment as much a nostalgic portrait of Earth as possible, as a critique of sf's frequent tendency to retreat inwards, playing around with "tropes" and trying to make everything always-already familiar. (In this way the steam-, gears-, and train-oriented nature of that portrait is particularly telling.) That it performs this critique without being condescending — indeed, with a very sympathetic sadness — is impressive. Meanwhile, the editors' comment that the "detail of Tim Major’s world and the strange characters who inhabit it recommended this story" to them is almost horrifying in its tone-deafness, the world being very pointedly undetailed (when pieces of the world outside bleed through toward the end it is with a jolt), the characters being anything but strange.

Terraform

Yes, Terraform. I'm as surprised as you.

Julie Steinbacher, "Inter-Exo"
This story of teenagers sneaking off to get out of their body-covering suits (which they must wear at all times to avoid contagion) and have sex is little and almost inconsequential, but wonderful in its sense of bodies and the amazement of embodied, tactile experience.

Mark von Schlegell, "How a Dream Machine Works, Exactly"
This story is, frankly, 90% stupid bullshit of various kinds, but something in the other 10% nags at me. Every once in a while its account of reality's encounter with its own destruction-from-within (most of which account is, again, just bullshit) brushes against something that resists articulation.

tor.com

Benjanun Sriduangkaew, "And the Burned Moths Remain"
More than anyone — anyone — else who uses the contemporary sf formula (the one-line opening and closing paragraphs, the heightened, "poetic" diction, etc etc), Sriduangkaew seems to me to be, one, using it in order to slip more lively work past editors who wouldn't otherwise know what to do with it, and two, thinking about what this formula is doing. To a large degree this just makes me sad, thinking about what she could be doing if she weren't forced into it (as with all of her stories that I've read this one seems to be straining uncomfortably against limitations not of its own choosing and not conducive to its own health), but nevertheless it is nice to see.

Uncanny

Richard Bowes, "Anyone with a Care for Their Image"
I can easily see a reading of this story that would dismiss it as "kids these days with their newfangled internet," but there's much more going on here than that. It's not even, as it would be easy to think, about disconnection, because its narrator is very often In The Thick Of Things and very well aware of it. It's more to do, perhaps, with the shifting of priorities that occur when mediation — or representation — achieves both primacy and invisibility, and of course with the infinite weirdness of the rich.

---------------------------------------------------

So...it's both better and worse than I'd expected. Worse, because it's looking like sorting through all the noise to find the good work will be an unsustainable amount of labor. Despite the interventions of so many editors, it's essentially still slush reading. I'd hoped to be able to identify a good magazine or three but, again, it's already apparent that there are none, there are only randomly-placed good stories. Then, too, it is disheartening to realize that, though some of the magazines have distinct characters, there is no real difference between the large magazines and the small ones — the small ones serving mainly as overflow for the large ones. There don't seem to be any magazines taking advantage of their smaller size to publish work that could not find a place elsewhere.

But better, because I didn't expect when I started out to be able to recommend nineteen stories in this post — if we're talking averages, almost ten a month. (Speaking of statistics, yes, I'm aware that these stories skew male, at a rough count slightly more than the field-at-large does. I could speculate as to why this is, but it would probably sound, possibly be, disingenuous, and I prefer to wait and see if the pattern repeats itself.) Though then again — will any of these stories matter to me, or anyone else, after any amount of time has passed? They've all lingered in the mind enough that I didn't have to refer back to any of them to write these blurbs, but even just a year from now, or even next month? It's hard to say. With "Manifesto" as one major exception, in most cases it seems unlikely.