Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: As Below, So Above by Ferrett Steinmetz

The story recommendation of the week is for As Below, So Above by Ferrett Steinmetz, published November 18, 2010 at Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

If I blurt out the story concept of "As Below, So Above," it will sound silly. And the story would have been silly if not handled so adeptly, right from the opening lines:

Up at the shimmering edge of the sky, where the water met the air, Son spread his tentacles out beneath the terrible shadow of his father. They were waiting for the ships. Son felt the approaching heart-thrum bouncing off the coral-crusted hulls below as the ships crested the painwall.

You don't really know what's going on yet, but you know it's pretty darn strange. Some of the strangeness is misdirection —— water is meeting air in the sky simply because the narrator lives underwater, so to him the surface of the sea is the "edge of the sky" —— but it helps put you in the right frame of mind to take in the real strangeness: our narrator is a giant kraken, who with his father guards the mysterious island home of their scientist creator.

More accurately, the scientist created the father and his late wife, and they in turn created the son. This layer of separation from their creator makes all the difference in enabling the son to begin to evaluate the krakens' place in the world dispassionately, just as the greatest assault yet on their master's hideout begins.

The proof of how well Steinmetz gets you into the skin, er . . . scales, er . . . I just don't fucking know, of his characters is that you really start to care about what happens to the giant-squid father, and about the narrator's potential moral dilemma when he meets the mad-scientist creator. Good stuff!

In the past two years, Ferrett Steinmetz has published about a dozen pieces of short fiction, including two pieces in Asimov's and a story forthcoming in Shimmer. Another name to add to the watch list.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Blighted Heart by Aliette de Bodard

This week's story recommendation is "Blighted Heart" by Aliette de Bodard, from Issue #22 (July 30, 2009) of e-zine Beneath Ceaseless Skies (cover art by David Renn).

"For years my city gave the hearts of maidens to the corn-man to awaken him," the story begins. Our narrator is Metlicue, chosen for this sacrifice by the village priests, who proceed unaware that in defiance she gave her virginity to a soldier the night before:

I felt the first cut like a violation. Pain burst in my chest, would not cease. I screamed and screamed until my voice was raw. No. No. I never asked for this! I saw a priest lift out a bloody, pulsating thing dizzyingly high above me, and a sensation of emptiness spread from the hole in my chest and swallowed me.

The priests placed my heart, still beating, in the mouth of the effigy. One of them spoke the healing spells over me. I rose, shaking, numb all over, stared at the corn-man.

His eyes opened.

Metlicue is left without a heart, her emptiness a wonderful metaphor for the alienation felt by those who have been molested or traumatized, but the story only builds from there. For Metlicue's act of defiance has in turn destroyed the innocence of the corn-man, on whom her people depend for good fortune and plentiful harvests, and Metlicue will have to face him again. "Blighted Heart" is a powerful, beautifully written story, and a great example of why de Bodard was the runner-up for this year's John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, losing out very narrowly to David Anthony Durham.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies hasn't gotten a lot of attention yet, but it has been publishing some excellent authors, such as David D. Levine, Yoon Ha Lee, Marie Brennan, Holly Phillips, Stephanie Burgis, Richard Parks, among many others. It pays professional rates, has held strictly to its publishing schedule (a two-story issue every other week) for nearly a year, and provides audio versions of many of its stories. Check it out!