"Voices Without Voices, Words With No Words" by Amanda C. Davis :: Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week

My Story Recommendation of the Week is for "Voices Without Voices, Words With No Words" by Amanda C. Davis, from Issue #73 of Cemetery Dance magazine.

Jeremy lives in a house inherited from his parents, a house with no power, no heat, no telephone. He has lost his job, his girlfriend, his life. Because he has time for nothing but his work. His work is: he picks up a dead phone and hears voices. He writes down names, numbers, and words that the voices give him. Then he goes to one of the few remaining pay phones in town with a stack of quarters. He dials the numbers, asks for the names, and tells them the words. Words like "Choose the green" or "Stop at two" or "Ask for Veronica."

So Jeremy is a loon, right? Except it's easy to believe he's not. For one thing, how come he can always reach someone with the right name at the numbers he dials? This is a guy who has devoted himself to work he didn't choose, at tremendous cost to himself, in the hope it's helping people he doesn't even know. He is a sad, pathetic, very noble character. Like someone who leaves a high-paying job to work with the homeless, or perhaps even a writer who devotes her life to telling stories she's not sure anyone else appreciates.

The story begins in earnest when Jeremy dials a number but it doesn't ring. He looks down and realizes it's his number, for his disconnected home phone. The message is for him: It ends. Be at the side of the lost queen at midnight. Twenty-five twenty-one. Will he puzzle out by midnight what that means?

This is a fairly simple story concept, executed cleanly and elegantly. I've been reading a lot of short fiction lately and I fear I've been getting a bit jaded – it's hard right now to get me to really care about what happens to a character in a short story. But Amanda Davis pulled it off. I was right there with Jeremy to the end of the story. I enjoyed "Voices Without Voices, Words With No Words" very much.

Amanda C. Davis writes horror, dark fantasy, and science fiction. Her work has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show, Shock Totem, and many other publications. Incidentally, I think of Cemetery Dance as a horror magazine, but to me "Voices Without Voices, Words With No Words" is not a horror story. Good for them stretching their boundaries to publish such a terrific piece!

"Vaseline Footprints" by Jeff Bowles :: Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week

My Story Recommendation of the Week is for "Vaseline Footprints" by Jeff Bowles, from the November-December 2016 issue of Black Static magazine.

A sister magazine to Interzone, Black Static generally focuses on horror and dark fantasy, but I'd be more inclined to label "Vaseline Footprints" as bizarro fiction, with story elements at once absurd, surreal, satirical and grotesque. I like bizarro, and if you can appreciate offbeat fiction, I think you'll like this one a lot too.

From the opening line ("I keep dead women in my closet."), the narrator of "Vaseline Footprints" is oh so far beyond unreliable. He has a tough go of things, what with a boss he'd like to kill and the constant need to replace his bloody socks and his gallon container of Vaseline. But he tries to stay positive:

I love the dead women in my closet very much. I keep pictures of them on my phone. The dead women in my closet are my reason for living. I think I would probably go a bit weird if I didn't have them.

No doubt! This story may not be for everyone, particularly if you're sensitive about your religious imagery, but I thought it was a hoot and a half!

Jeff Bowles is a Colorado author, whose work has appeared in PodCastle, Stupefying Stories and other markets, and has been collected in Godling and Other Paint Stories.

"Mika Model" by Paolo Bacigalupi :: Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week

My Story Recommendation of the Week is for Mika Model by Paolo Bacigalupi, which appeared at Slate.com in April of 2016 (cover art by Lisa Larson-Walker).

Regular science fiction and fantasy readers know that Paolo Bacigalupi is awesome, but may not know to look at Slate.com for good new SF. "Mika Model" is part of their "Future Tense" series of articles exploring how technology and science will change our lives.

The technology addressed in "Mika Model" is artificial intelligence. If we really are able to create a thinking machine, which learns from experience, what's the first thing we'll do with it? In "Mika Model," our protagonist Police Detective Rivera meets an artificially intelligent sex robot. It (she?) is constantly analyzing all available data to determine how best to turn on the men she encounters. She tells Rivera she needs a lawyer:

“What do you need a lawyer for?” I asked, smiling.

She leaned forward, conspiratorial. Her hair cascaded prettily and she tucked it behind a delicate ear.

“It’s a little private.”

As she moved, her blouse tightened against her curves. Buttons strained against fabric.

Fifty-thousand dollars’ worth of A.I. tease.

“Is this a prank?” I asked. “Did your owner send you in here?”

“No. Not a prank.”

She set her Nordstrom bag down between us. Reached in and hauled out a man’s severed head. Dropped it, still dripping blood, on top of my paperwork.

“What the—?”

I recoiled from the dead man’s staring eyes. His face was a frozen in a rictus of pain and terror.

Mika set a bloody carving knife beside the head.

“I’ve been a very bad girl,” she whispered.

And then, unnervingly, she giggled.

“I think I need to be punished.”

She said it exactly the way she did in her advertisements.

Rivera's first order of business is to decide whether this is a murder case, or rather a product safety failure. Mika tries to convince Rivera she is real, and he would certainly prefer to think of her as a person.

A lawyer does show up in the story, Holly Simms, and she promptly mocks Rivera for being a predictable male, so easily manipulated by what is, after all, a rather simple machine. And she is absolutely right. Then again, Mika had Rivera feeling like she understood him, while Simms just makes him feel small.

If people are so easy to manipulate, why is it we so seldom manipulate each other into feeling good?

This is Paolo Bacigalupi's third Story Recommendation of the Week. He joins Aliette de Bodard, Samantha Henderson, Rachel Swirsky, and Catherynne M. Valente as the only authors to receive SROTWs three times.

"The Sound That Grief Makes" by Kristi DeMeester :: Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week

"Caleb had been dead for two weeks when I started pretending to be his ghost."

I do love a great opening line!

My Story Recommendation of the Week is for Kristi DeMeester's The Sound That Grief Makes, from the October 2016 issue of The Dark magazine.

In "The Sound That Grief Makes," our narrator's husband has committed suicide. She and her son Hudson are devastated. In a dubious bid to help him deal with his loss, his mother begins lurking outside Hudson's room at night, knowing that he believes the noises she makes are his father's ghost:

Every night, I knocked on his door.

Every night, my son would talk to me from behind that thin wood.

And then I found a worm, Dad. Big as my arm. Swear. And Nathan dared Scott to take a bite of it, and Scott said he would do it if Nathan handed over his entire Punisher comic book collection. Nathan said okay because he thought there was no way Scott would do it. Nathan kept the worm to keep everything fair, and then Scott showed up the next day, and ate the entire thing.

Hudson poured out his life for his dead father, and I sat and listened and understood I would never be able to give him all that he needed. I couldn’t be his father.

Eventually, the knocking would stop. Eventually, I would have to stop haunting my son.

(Since we know who the "ghost" is, this story has no supernatural element. Some would conclude it's not a horror story, but in my view horror fiction does not always require a supernatural element, and this story is a great example.)

Surprisingly, his father's apparent ghostly appearances really seem to help Hudson deal with his grief. But who is going to help Hudson's mother?

"The Sound That Grief Makes" is a simple but sad, moving, and elegantly written piece.

Kristi DeMeester's short fiction has appeared in such markets as Black Static, Apex, Shimmer, and Shock Totem. Her first novel, Beneath, is due out in April 2017.

The Dark is a fairly new on-line horror magazine, which I am digging so far. Look for more SROTWs from this publication.

"An Advanced Readers' Picture Book of Comparative Cognition" by Ken Liu :: Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week

My Story Recommendation of the Week goes to "An Advanced Readers' Picture Book of Comparative Cognition" by Ken Liu, from Liu's Saga Press collection The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (cover art by Quentin Trollip).

Science fiction and fantasy readers out there don't much need me to tell them that Ken Liu can write a decent short story. But you may not be aware that his new collection The Paper Menagerie has one new story in it (among all the reprints of award nominees and winners), and it's one you want to check out.

"An Advanced Readers' Picture Book of Comparative Cognition" alternates between brief passages explaining the systems of memory and cognition observed in various alien species and a scientist's love letter about his estranged wife, written to their daughter.

Every one of the descriptions of alien species is interesting and original enough to support its own story, but apparently Ken Liu comes up with good story ideas so routinely he can afford to toss off a half-dozen of them all at once. Show off!

The most telling of the alien passages describes a dying alien race that saved a few of their children by putting them on a near-lightspeed starship with no means of decelerating, thus ensuring that the children would live until the end of the universe—which they would experience in just a few short years. The passage concludes, "All parents make choices for their children. Almost always they think it's for the best."

In the main narrative, a husband and wife, both nerdy scientists, would each make a different choice for the future of their daughter. The parent who prevails has at least as many regrets as the parent who does not.

This is a well-constructed, emotionally charged story, right up to the sad and lovely closing line: "There are many ways to say I love you in this cold, dark, silent universe, as many as the twinkling stars."

"The Counsellor Crow" by Karen Lord :: Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week

We are between brackets of the Battle of the Books, so time to catch up on some story recommendations.

My Story Recommendation of the Week is for "The Counsellor Crow" by Karen Lord, from the anthology The Bestiary, edited by Ann VanderMeer and published by Centipede Press (cover art by Ivica Stevanovic).

The Bestiary is an anthology of short pieces, each describing a creature one suspects does not actually exist. The gimmick is that there is one strange animal with a name beginning with each letter of the alphabet, plus creatures called The Ampersand and The          .

The strength of this anthology is the array of writing talent Ann VanderMeer has assembled. How can you go wrong reading pieces by such authors as China Miéville, Catherynne M. Valente, Brian Evenson, Vandana Singh, Michael Cisco, Stephen Graham Jones, Karen Heuler, Karin Tidbeck, Felix Gilman, etc. etc.? The weakness is the pieces are similar enough that after a while the book can start to feel like a single gag repeated until it gets tiresome.

But the best pieces here are very good indeed. To me the funniest story in the book is "The Daydreamer by Proxy" by Dexter Palmer, about a genetically engineered parasite that your employer urges to try, because it will make you a wonderfully efficient worker! At least for a while. I think the most clever and elegantly done story is "Tongues of Moon / False Toads" by Cat Rambo, about an animal remarkably efficient at camouflage. ("One may go so far as to imitate an alchemist and thus fall prey to a recursive trap, lost in a mental mise-en-scène, seeking itself.")

And my overall personal favorite in the book is "The Counsellor Crow" by Karen Lord, perhaps because it has a rather more pointed message than most of the pieces. "The Counsellor Crow" describes a type of corvid whose appearances tend to coincide with human misery:

The turning point in the evolution of the Counsellor Crow took place not in Ildcrest, but in neighbouring Ilderland, where a new Prince and a resurgent nobility developed a strongly nationalistic and anti-modernist ideology that called for a return to old values and old ways. Modern technology was banned, foreigners were ousted, and the nobility tried a motley assortment of centuries-old garments, weaponry and rituals in an attempt to replace a Golden Age that never was with a New Age of their own devising. Naturally, with all the permutations and combinations of available customs, there were disputes, rebellions, and then civil war. The sacred battlefields of Ilderia returned, and the Counsellor Crows fed and grew fat.

The narrator of this scholarly article on the Counsellor Crow suspects the animal of using mimicry, speculating whether it is "the first recorded instance of a predator that mimics not the voice, nor the appearance, nor the scent of its prey, but their thoughts." The narrator ends with the alarming observation that the population of Counsellor Crows is now the highest on record.

Karen Lord, originally from Barbados, has only been publishing fiction since 2010 but already has amassed an impressive collection of awards. She does not often write short fiction, so "The Counsellor Crow" offers a rare opportunity to sample her writing in a single sitting.

"Empty Planets" by Rahul Kanakia :: Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week

My Story Recommendation of the Week is for "Empty Planets" by Rahul Kanakia, from the January-February 2016 issue of Interzone Magazine (cover art by Vincent Sammy).

One of my favorite little sub-genres of science fiction is far-future, post-scarcity stories where people sit around wondering what the hell to do with themselves.

An example I recently dusted off and enjoyed was Don't Bite the Sun by Tanith Lee from 1976, where young people work their way though a great but not inexhaustible supply of decadent and pointless ways to waste their time. Tanith Lee played the concept tongue-in-cheek, but in "Empty Planets," Rahul Kanakia applies a somber approach I like even better.

"Empty Planets" takes place in a distant future run by a (mostly) benevolent artificial intelligence called the "Machine." The humans' needs are all provided for, and so they pass their time to no apparent purpose. The students at Non-Mandatory Study are a possible exception. But when our protagonist David attends the school on a whim — he believe he has a deep thought inside that he hasn't learned to articulate — we soon find that the students have little love of learning; they simply want to answer one of the questions posed by the Machine, in order to win "shares" as a bounty. An additional share allows one's family to expand, and it's about the only commodity in this universe that people still covet. David does not much approve:

It seemed so sillly, all this looking for bounties and trying to acquire shares, when reallly there were far more important things to think about. I still hadn't quite gotten ahold of the deep thought that'd brought me to NMS, but I could see its outline. The thought had something to do with shares, I knew. And something to do with the Machine. And something to do with wealth and with the age of the universe and the destiny of mankind. And music was tied up in there too.

David falls for Margery, an intense student from a colony slowly dying for lack of shares. They travel to Altair III to study its mysterious, possibly sentient clouds hoping for a bounty, and perhaps they will find themselves there.

"Empty Planets" does a wonderful job of depicting a strange, far-future universe whose residents have problems that seem not very different from our own. And, spoiler alert, Kanakia is wise enough not to try to offer the answers to those problems.

Rahul Kanakia's short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Apex, InterGalactic Medicine Show, and other places. His first book, a contemporary YA novel confusingly titled Enter Title Here, is due in August.

"The Demon in the Page" by Joshua Phillip Johnson :: Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week

This week's Story Recommendation of the Week goes to "The Demon in the Page," a short story by new author Joshua Phillip Johnson, from the inaugural January 2016 issue of Metaphorosis Magazine.

Let me first say, you gotta be in the right frame of mind for this.

"The Demon in the Page" is about scholars laboriously translating ancient texts. There is no action at all; really nothing ever happens. But if you try to follow Johnson into his characters' minds, you realize these people have willingly devoted their lives to this work, and a new way of understanding the process of translation is the most exciting thing that could happen to one of them.

Mahj, a celebrated scholar, believes she has found a new way to conceptualize the inherent difficulty of translating ancient texts, and shows a draft article explaining her concept to her student Ochre:

“Translators,” he read from the article, “offer the metaphor of a mathematical equation, but I instead offer the metaphor of a woman on a horse. This woman is clothed in resplendent garb, and her horse clip clops proudly. The woman rides into the thick, dark wood of translation, a place never touched by the light of a sun, and when she emerges from the other side, she is very nearly the same. Her clothing is still impressive, though the colors have shifted somewhat. And she no longer rides a horse, or perhaps she does, but this horse has a long, leathery tail and wings made of ash. And the woman’s hair has grown and turned curly where it was once straight.”

“You can accuse me of purple prose if you like,” Mahj said, smiling, her enthusiasm preventing her from seeing the anxiety and worry in her student’s face and voice.

Ochre, instead, continued reading.

“Translators today spend their days examining this new woman and this new horse, categorizing and codifying the changes, questioning their meaning. But we have missed a very important question. Whom did the woman meet in the wood?”

“The demon,” Mahj whispered, sweeping a hand over the books on her table.

Mahj begins looking for the demon in the texts she translates. The trouble is, she doesn't seem to regard this as a metaphor. Ochre clearly believes Mahj is losing her marbles, but has far too much respect for his mentor to say so.

"The Demon in the Page" does a terrific job of portraying the mentor-mentee relationship, which we don't see often enough in SF/F. The characterization is excellent, and I was most satisfied with how the story played out, even if nothing much ever happens.

"The Demon in the Page" is the first published story by Minnesota teacher Joshua Phillip Johnson. One wonders if he will still write a piece like this a few years from now. By then, he'll have gotten a lot of great advice from fellow writers in workshops and writers' groups about how to punch up his fiction and get the readers absorbed in the action early on, and none of that advice will be wrong. But it isn't always right either.

"Solder and Seam" by Maria Dahvana Headley :: Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week

"No one ever thought of themselves that way, but statistically, it had to be true that some people were exactly what they thought they weren’t."

My Story Recommendation of the Week is for "Solder and Seam" by Maria Dahvana Headley, a short story from the October 2015 issue of Lightspeed Magazine.

Set in a mostly depopulated far-future Midwest, "Solder and Seam" is the story of a soldier turned farmer, who one day decides to build a whale out of wood in the middle of the prairie.

Our protagonist is building a white whale, at once putting us in mind of Noah and Captain Ahab. But we also know he is emotionally scarred from fighting in a revolution on another world. And we know he has hidden his true identity for many years:

The afternoon he painted the whale, there was a storm. It wasn’t raining where he was. It’d stopped raining on the dirt. Now storms took place above the ground and if you were watching, you could see rain disappearing fifty feet above you, sputtering out like it had hit some invisible drought. He watched the storm roll across the sky like his first wife had rolled across his bed and out the other side. He’d done that one wrong. He probably could have told her who he was, but he had a new face, and why take responsibility for his old soul when he looked like someone who hadn’t been born into it?

This is an evocative, beautifully-written story. Even if you've guessed the protagonist's identity, the way it is revealed is memorably done.

Maria Dahvana Headley is the author of the YA fantasy Magonia, the historical vampire novel Queen of Kings, and the memoir The Year of Yes. She has previously been nominated for the Nebula Award, and "Solder and Seam" is written at an award-caliber level.

"Two Will Walk With You" by Grá Linnaea :: Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week

Our Story Recommendation of the Week feature has fallen by the wayside in favor of the Battle of the Books, but I'm determined to start posting story recommendations again. In light of the hot mess that is this year's Hugo Award ballot in the short fiction categories (more on that to come), I think it's important to call attention to how much wonderful short fiction is being published in our genre.

My first Story Recommendation of the Week of 2015 goes to "Two Will Walk With You" by Grá Linnaea, from the anthology XIII: Stories of Transformation edited by Mark Teppo.

"Two Will Walk With You" begins with 17-year-old Japanese girl Ayu desperately running from the keep where she has lived for seven years, learning Christian magic. She has killed a priest in self-defense, and she knows the punishment for her crime: a Socius, or Tomo, a demon companion that will never leave her alone.

Fleeing in a passing wagon, Ayu meets an old man named Hageatama who accepts her company, claiming to be "bored," even after he learns of her curse:

They trudged silently through the wet of the Azusakawachi swamplands toward the Maibara valley. The sun shone harshly, reflecting rainbows off the misty water. Canary grass grew close and sodden to the path they forged. Neither had spoken since the night before.

Midday Hageatama broke the silence. "You have a Tomo on you, girl."

Ayu said nothing. They walked further.

"The Socius." Hageatama butchered the Latin. "The Tomo. No one escapes." He poked his walking stick at her back.

Ayu spun and slapped the stick away. "I know!" Her voice cracked. "No one knows more than I do! The Socius is woven to my soul, it won't stop—"

Hageatama cut her off, his voice loud and gentle. "It can't stop. It is made from your soul. It doesn't have one of its own." He pointed a dirty nail at Ayu. "And you can't escape."

* * *

Ayu's fear was replaced with a surprising feeling. "I almost feel sorry for it."

Hageatama's head shot up. "The Tomo?"

She rubbed her chest. "It must be awful not to have a soul."

Between the curse of the Toro and Ayu's sexual preferences, it seems impossible that things could turn out well for her, and yet she and Hageatama refuse to abandon hope.

"Two Will Walk With You" exemplifies everything short fiction can offer: well crafted language, a memorable setting, a main character we quickly come to care about, an engaging story. And—dare I say it?—a message. A message that has nothing to do with politics, a message that is conveyed with subtlety, and yet it's what the story at its core is all about. "Two Will Walk With You" grapples with how we can live our lives in a way that is satisfying and meaningful, even when fate has stacked the deck against us. It's the kind of subject, relevant to all of us, that I expect a top-notch author to examine, even if there are no easy answers. Linnaea does that beautifully.

Grá Linnaea is a fellow Writers of the Future winner whose work has also appeared in Shimmer, Apex, IGMS, Daily Science Fiction, and other places.

Amy's Random Readings :: "Pernicious Romance" by Robert Reed

"Pernicious Romance" by Robert Reed is a story in the November 2014 issue of Clarkesworld magazine.  Using a random number generator, this is the short story, out of fifty-seven from the 2014 Locus Recommended Reading List, that a digital roll of the dice selected for me (Amy) to read and review.

"Pernicious Romance" is set in the present day somewhere in America. It tells of a strange occurrence at a college football game.  At halftime, there was a brilliant explosion of light from the 50-yard line.  No videos survived because it was accompanied by a damaging EMP event.  The blast directly killed about sixty people. Everyone else in the stadium, tens of thousands of people, were knocked unconscious.  Those in the high seats, farthest from the blast, woke up later that evening.   But others, people closer to the blast, woke up weeks, months, or even a year later.   All of those affected experienced an intensely real, loving relationship subjectively lasting a week up to fifty years when they were unconscious.  Maybe due to the bad effect this had on marriages, the condition became termed pernicious romance.

At first, the explosion was thought to be a terrorist attack, but no one claimed responsibility.  There were no suspects.   It was postulated that this may have been the test of a new weapon or technology.  But no explanation was offered.

This story features the case studies of five victims.  It tells how these people's lives were transformed by this unprecedented event and their unexpected experiences.

I found "Pernicious Romance" to be an interesting, well-written short story.   It feels profound despite its improbability.   Each case study made me realize that the event was weirder than I initially thought.  The story left me contemplating it afterward.

Robert Reed is a Hugo Award-winning American science fiction author.  I've read and enjoyed a number of his short fiction stories in magazines over the years.  According to Wikipedia, Reed has also written a dozen novels.

The first two short stories I've randomly read have been vastly different, but both good.  I wonder what I'll get to read next time I try this.

Amy's Random Readings :: "Wake-Rider" by Vandana Singh

"Wake-Rider" by Vandana Singh is a science fiction story in the December 2014 issue of Lightspeed magazine. It's one of the fifty-seven short stories that made the recent 2014 Locus Recommended Reading List. I (Amy) wanted to read something from this list, but didn't know where to start. Using a random number generator, I randomly selected to read this story.

"Wake-Rider" is set elsewhere in space, sometime in the distant future when multiple planets have been settled by humans. The protagonist, Leli, is a young woman who has joined the revolution against the Euphoria Corpocracy. A nanoplague that transforms infected people into docile, servile manufacturers and consumers is spread by Euphoria.

Leli stalks an Euphoria salvage ship leaving a space station in her tiny scabship. She rides the ripples of spacetime in the wake of the salvage ship, and accompanies it across Metaspace. It takes her to a region near an abandoned planet that was cleansed by Euphoria after a failed revolution. Leli follows the salvage ship to a derelict generation ship. Onboard Leli finds no one left alive. But in the generation ship's cryochamber, she discovers evidence that the frozen dead humans, who were likely fleeing revolutionaries, may have found a cure for the nanoplague. Leli must not let the salvage crew find the cryochamber.

I thought "Wake-Rider" was a good, solo space adventure. I found Leli to be a sympathetic protagonist. There were action scenes, and interesting futuristic details. The Euphoria Corpocracy was painted as pure evil, and the generational ship as the scene of a tragedy. One thing that made this story different was that it showed how devastated Leli was by the accidental deaths of the salvage ship crew, because she felt they were once people like her.

The author, Vandana Singh, is a female Indian science fiction writer living in the USA. She has a Ph.D. in theoretical particle physics. I enjoyed this story. I'll be on the lookout for other stories by Vandana Singh.

Picking a random short story from the Locus Recommended Reading List worked out pretty well. I'll be trying this again.

"Bedtime Story" by Rhonda Parrish :: Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week

My Story Recommendation of the Week is for "Bedtime Story" by Rhonda Parrish, from the anthology Tesseracts Seventeen.

"Bedtime Story" is a simple tale of a young girl huddling in a closet, as an old doll of her mother's named Laura tells a chilling story of evil vultures and goblins. As much fun as the story itself are the audience reactions:

A brown slipper, dog-chewed and ratty, hopped out of the shadows and pressed itself against my side. I felt it trembling, and stroked its nappy surface. "It's all right." My voice sounded loud compared to Laura's creepy whisper. "Sometimes the stories have a happy ending, don't they, Laura?"

She was silent for a long while, and turned to stare at a spider scuttling its way up the wall. In profile her shadow was strangely flat and misshapen. "Sometimes. Sometimes."

Tesseracts Seventeen was published in Canada last Fall, but is just hitting American bookshops this month. The Tesseracts anthology series from Edge Publishing highlights Canadian SF/F authors like Rhonda Parrish. Parrish has been publishing since 2006, with emphasis on poetry and flash fiction.

"Bedtime Story" is a wonderfully written story, which challenges adults to remember how magical and frightening the world can appear to a child. Is a child's view of the world around her truly any less real than an adult's? Does it matter?

"Discarded" by Miranda Suri :: Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week

My Story Recommendation of the Week is for Discarded by my friend Miranda Suri, from the November 2013 issue of the webzine Electric Spec.

In short fiction, it's critical to grab the reader's interest early. In "Discarded," Miranda Suri does that with a superb opening passage:

A dragon lives on Governors Island. He is made out of chair legs, bits of discarded furniture, and afterthoughts. His eyes are the negative space left by splintered pieces of scrollwork from a banister, his scales the sawed-off ends of two-by-fours.

By day he sits on display in an outdoor art installation. Cut grass feathers his legs and his faded paint peels. He drowses in the late summer sun while weekend visitors from New York snap his picture and peer at the little plaque by his feet. It amuses him that they believe he is only a piece of art.

Suri's story was inspired by an actual sculpture on Governors Island (pictured above). In the story "Discarded," the dragon is both a work of art and an artist himself. The dragon watches as a fugitive arrives on Governors Island and contemplates what's missing from his own artwork.

"Discarded" is a beautifully written story, and a thought-provoking commentary on the artistic process, one that doesn't necessarily flatter creative people the way literature typically does. I recommend it highly.

Miranda Suri holds a PhD in Anthropology and has published extensively on her archeological research. Her fiction has appeared previously at Electric Spec and at Every Day Fiction.

"This Quiet Dust" by Karl Bunker :: Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week

I've turned over the next bracket of the Battle of the Books to Amy, which gives me time to do some other posts, starting with a few story recommendations. My first Story Recommendation of the Week in far too long is for "This Quiet Dust" by Karl Bunker, from the January/February 2014 issue of Analog.

One thing I generally find unsatisfying about alien stories (including my own) is that the aliens aren't truly alien. I suspect if we ever do encounter an alien intelligence, it will be so strange that we could easily fail to notice it's alive, let alone sentient. That's exactly what happens in "This Quiet Dust," in which an exploration vessel launched from Earth touches down on an alien planet, inhabited by an intelligence nearly too alien even to recognize.

This is an Analog story, so the tale focuses on how the aliens work, with not a whole lot of time spent on the human characters. But Bunker's eccentric, poetry-quoting main character Henrick is likeable enough, and the way he irritates fellow crewmembers makes for entertaining reading. More importantly, Bunker's aliens are fascinating, and their interactions with Henrick, both onstage and implied offstage, are very nicely handled in such a short piece.

Karl Bunker is a fellow Writers of the Future winner (Vol. 23), and has since appeared in Asimov's, F&SF, and Interzone. When you can sell to each of the top print magazines in the field, you're clearly doing something right. Incidentally, the January/February 2014 issue of Analog is a solid one, containing strong work by my friend Marie DesJardin, Thoraiya Dyer, Christie Yant, Richard A. Lovett, and others. It seems editor Trevor Quachri is doing an able job taking over for Stanley Schmidt.

"The Coldest Room in the House" by Lon Prater :: Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week

My story recommendation of the week is for "The Coldest Room in the House" by Lon Prater, from the Second Quarter 2013 issue of Abyss & Apex. (Abyss & Apex published my story "Random Fire" so, y'know, they're awesome.)

"The Coldest Room in the House" begins in familiar but very well-executed territory:

She'd tried to leave him in a blizzard once, hoping the wind and snow would fill in her footsteps the same way her own creeping indifference had filled in the holes that years of frustration had gnawed into her heart. It was so much like a hollow winter day, this business of being married to a driven man.

Our protagonist Bernice——Bernie to her friends, except her husband calls her Bernsy, even though he knows she hates it because it sounds like a cow——has suffered through an unhappy marriage and feelings of inadequacy because she couldn't have children. Now her husband is dead (heart attack while masturbating to internet porn), but still she hears his voice calling to her from the bedroom, the coldest room in the house.

This first part of the tale is a standard ghost story, but worth reading for the superb writing. But then the story takes an unexpected turn, as Prater uses his haunting to show that resentment of one's partner can turn into a kind of addiction. The story plays out effectively, and serves as a wonderful metaphor for how a couple can both become trapped in an unhealthy, codependent relationship.

Lon Prater is a fellow winner of the Writers of the Future Contest (for "Deadglass" in Volume 21), and his short fiction has appeared in such publications as Borderlands 5, Apex, Daily SF, IGMS, and many others. He has self-published some of his longer work, most recently That Time We Saved the Planet.

"The Visited" by Anaea Lay :: Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week

My story recommendation of the week is for "The Visited" by Anaea Lay, from the April 2013 issue of Lightspeed magazine. This is Anaea Lay's second SROTW.

"The Visited" is the obituary of musician Manuel Black, written by a former fan and lover. Black became a huge celebrity, because his music somehow helped people to make sense of the "Visitation," when everyone in the world had a vision of an unnaturally beautiful man or woman, accompanied by an intense sense of longing. But our narrator was a devoted fan even before the Visitation; here she describes his earlier work:

It’s still him, but now he’s angry. He hasn’t found his Morrisonian black leather pants yet, but he’s not afraid of the audience anymore. Curls fly around his face as he stares them down, challenging them to answer the questions he raises with his lyrics, to justify the world in the face of his seething despair and melancholy. Critics of the time wrote the music off as angst-ridden wankery. Audiences found it unpalatably depressing and turned instead to catchy dance pop. Listen to it now and you’ll realize his melancholy was a foreshadowing of the post-Visitation malaise waiting for all of us, that his anger was founded in an optimistic belief that things could be different if we’d just bother to acknowledge they ought to be.

In this elegantly written story, Lay makes no attempt to explain what the Visitation really was. Her focus is on the enigmatic Manuel Black, and how an artist's work can transform the meaning of what is happening in his audience's lives, to tragic or transcendent effect.

I once had a friend, who had been a Deadhead in an earlier phase of life, try to explain what compelled fans to follow The Grateful Dead from concert to concert, but I didn't understand the communal experience he was describing. "The Visited" is a piece of fiction, a form of art, yet it enables me to appreciate my friend's real-world experience in a way his factual words couldn't——and oddly enough, that's just what this story is about.

“The Long View” by Van Aaron Hughes :: Patty’s Story Recommendation of the Week

Hi.  Let me introduce myself: I'm Patty Palko, a new reviewer to Fantastic Reviews.  I thought that my first post should concern Aaron's story "The Long View" just published in the March/April 2013 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  I was afraid that Aaron would be too humble to tout how great this story really is.  So, I thought I would do it for him.

"The Long View" follows genetic engineer Emzara Ghali-Gordon on a trip into deep space with a shipload of colonists.  Many authors have used faster-than-light drives, suspended animation, or multi-generational ships to bridge long travel times.  Instead, Aaron's Ghali-Gordon is responsible for altering the settlers' genetic code to slow their bodies to 1/20th their normal speed.  Aging a mere 6.25 years for a 125-year journey is an ingenious method of allowing humans to explore the universe.  As a doctorate holder in the biological sciences, I was impressed with how well the science and complications of gene therapy were communicated.

Yet from the beginning, it is clear that this is a tale of loss:

What makes a person decide to desert everyone she knows and leave the whole world behind?  My name is Emzara Ghali-Gordon, and the first time I did it was easy.

Through the well-integrated flashbacks, Emzara describes her history as jabaan, or "coward," for fleeing her native Egypt due to its unprogressive ways.  As the story advances, her actions result in an emotional impact wrapped within an unexpected ending.  It's time well spent following this sympathetic character to find what she gains, and loses, along the way.

(If you like "The Long View," I recommend my favorite Hughes story "The Dualist," from the anthology Writers of the Future Volume 27.  There is some damn fine storytelling in those pages.)

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: The Woman Who Fooled Death Five Times by Eleanor Arnason

My Story Recommendation of the Week is for "The Woman Who Fooled Death Five Times" by Eleanor Arnason, from the July/August 2012 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. This is one of Arnason's Hwarhath stories, an oustanding science fiction series with an anthropological approach, very much in the style of Ursula K. LeGuin's Hainish series.

"The Woman Who Fooled Death Five Times" translates into English the Hwarhath legend of Ala, a woman repeatedly visited by the incarnation of Death, who each time manages to fool him into leaving without her. Of course, in a human version of this story, we would cheer for the clever hero who finds a way to outwit Death. But in the Hwarhath tale, Death comes across as not such a bad guy, while the lengths Ala goes to in order to stay alive seem rather questionable.

As always, Arnason writes in simple, understated prose that somehow manages to come together as both beautiful and wise. What makes "The Woman Who Fooled Death Five Times" especially memorable is the ending. Amazingly, Arnason manages to write an elegant, thought-provoking conclusion in the form of a "translator's note," by a translator who is a bit defensive that the tale has not played out the way a huuman story would have.

Elearnor Arnason doesn't write a lot——in a career spanning 40 years she has published six novels and just over two dozen pieces of short fiction——but she always writes well. "The Woman Who Fooled Death Five Times" is a wonderful piece, meriting serious award consideration.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Write What You Want by Eric James Stone

My Story Recommendation of the Week goes to Write What You Want by Eric James Stone, from the September 2012 issue of InterGalactic Medicine Show. This is Eric's second SROTW. His previous recommended story, "That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made," went on to be a Hugo nominee and Nebula Award winner, so the bar is set high for "Write What You Want."

The narrator of "Write What You Want" owns a magic shop, which is visited by a troubled young girl:

From the haunted look on her face, I don't think she's an aspiring magician interested in tricks. She's here for the real magic. . . . I hold up a hand and say, "Don't tell me. You're here because you want something so much it hurts."

To work this magic, the shop owner has the girl write down on a slip of paper what it is she wants so much. Interspersed through the story are the notes written down by previous visitors to the shop. The shopkeeper's magic really works, but not for everyone . . .

This is a very short piece, only slightly over 1000 words, but it succeeds on multiple levels. The key to flash fiction is to distill the story down to its essence. Eric James Stone does that effectively by telling us almost nothing about his characters except what they most want. He conveys what the young girl wants and needs in powerful fashion. He includes snippets that amount to microfiction stories about previous visitors to the shop: "I want the cancer to be gone so I don't die." / "I want to be thinner and prettier than Jasmine Rawlings." / "I want to be straight." And he ends with the narrator. All we know about her (or him) is her dearest, unselfish desire, a desire she tragically cannot always have.

"Write What You Want" is a beautifully written story, well worth the subscription price to IGMS.

As an aside, posting this today makes me eligible for Eric James Stone's contest to win his old Kindle. So yes, you can bribe me for a Story Recommendation of the Week, but only if you can write a kick-ass story like "Write What You Want."