Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Your Cities by Anaea Lay

The Story Recommendation of the Week is for "Your Cities" by Anaea Lay. "Your Cities" first appeared in the June 2011 issue of Apex Magazine, but I didn't stumble across it until a year later. Luckily, it's recently been republished in audio form at Tina Connolly's Toasted Cake podcast, which gives me a fresh opportunity to recommend it.

"Your Cities" is set in a near future when cities have inexplicably started wandering about, trampling folks in their paths. The narrator addresses the tale to a former lover, who she(?) believes is somehow responsible for these bizarre occurrences. The lover vanished in New Orleans, just before that city awoke:

I’ve tried to picture it ever since, you strolling into a city anybody with any sense had long since fled. You whistled; I’m sure you whistled. But then what? Did you crawl into the city’s bed and stroke its shoulder, nibbling on its ear and whispering tidings of morning, the way you would for me? Did you wrap your arms around it and speak of love and sex and waffles, coaxing it past the foggy stages of fresh wakening and into the warmth of your voice?

In the space of only about 1500 words, Anaea Lay creates a wonderful mood to this piece, effectively using the collapse of our urban and suburban civilization to frame the narrator's personal loss. Who can't identify with a failed relationship that makes you feel like the whole world is crumbling?

I believe "Your Cities" was Anaea Lay's first professional sale, but she has since appeared in Penumbra, and has stories forthcoming at Strange Horizons, Apex (again), and Shock Totem. I met her at Worldcon and told her I liked this story——she adamantly denies instantly turning beet red, but her giddy tweet moments later about her first fan contact is a matter of public record. I believe Anaea will soon be winning over a great many more fans.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast by Eugie Foster

This week's story recommendation is "Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast" by Eugie Foster, a novelette from the January/February 2009 issue of Interzone, reprinted here in the August 2009 issue of Apex Magazine. This is Foster's second SROTW, joining Paolo Bacigalupi, Catherynne M. Valente, Aliette de Bodard, and Leah Bobet as two-time recommendees. Perhaps even more significantly, "Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast" was nominated last week for the Nebula Award.

"Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast" is set in a world whose residents don a different mask each morning, abandoning their individual personalities (a concept utterly foreign to them) in favor of the role represented by that day's mask. Perhaps inevitably, our viewpoint character(s) encounters a person who challenges this way of life.

A story with a premise like this can easily be swallowed by its own metaphors, but Foster manages to keep the tale moving forward, using elegant but not flashy prose. This is a fascinating, absorbing story, even if I have mixed feelings about the resolution, and I will certainly be including it in my Hugo Award ballot.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Advertising at the End of the World by Keffy R.M. Kehrli

I am back to reading short fiction, and my story recommendation for this week is Advertising at the End of the World by Keffy R.M. Kehrli, from the September 2009 issue of Apex Magazine.

"Advertising at the End of the World" begins with perhaps the best opening line I have seen this year:

Five years after her husband died, two years after she moved to a cabin in Montana, and six months after the world ended, Marie opened her curtains to discover her front garden overrun with roving, stumbling advertisements.

The "advertisements" are programmed humanoids, determined to keep pitching the products of vendors long since wiped out by plague. The initial image of walking advertisements mindlessly tromping through survivor Marie's flower garden has a whimsical feel, but Kehrli soon turns the story in a wistful direction, as the advertisements remind Marie of everything she has lost.

Keffy Kehrli only began selling fiction in early 2009, but he has already published stories in Apex, Talebones, and Sybil's Garage, with more forthcoming in Electric Velocipede and Fantasy. Apex, a print magazine turned top-notch e-zine, is notable for publishing up-and-coming authors like Ekaterina Sedia, Theodora Goss, Lavie Tidhar, Eugie Foster, Jennifer Pelland, and Aliette de Bodard. If "Advertising at the End of the World" is any indication, Keffy Kehrli belongs among such company.