Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Dragon Dreams on Cardboard Wings and Tiny Scraps of Yellow by Christopher Kastensmidt

My story recommendation of the week goes to Dragon Dreams on Cardboard Wings and Tiny Scraps of Yellow by Christopher Kastensmidt, published November 4, 2010 at Daily Science Fiction.

I typically have little use for flash fiction, because it is so difficult for an author to draw the reader into the characters and events of such a short work of fiction. But every so often, an author does draw me into a short-short story, and I can only marvel at his or her skill in pulling it off.

Remarkably, Christopher Kastensmidt's "Dragon Dreams on Cardboard Wings and Tiny Scraps of Yellow" tells an absorbing story in under 400 words, barely longer than this blog post. All we learn in that length about the main character is that she is a computer programmer working in a cubicle farm. Yet her yearning to escape her mundane existence strikes a universal chord.

In his author notes, Kastensmidt tells us that "Dragon Dreams" was inspired by Leonardo Amora Leite's painting "Meu Dragão I" (My Dragon I), which the artist has graciously permitted us to reproduce here (click for a larger image):

Christopher Kastensmidt is an American living in Brazil, who designs video games when he is not writing fiction and poetry. He has co-written a Little Red Riding Hood parody with Jim C. Hines and appeared in various publications including Realms of Fantasy and Every Day Fiction. Judging from "Dragon Dreams," I suspect we will be hearing much more from him in the near future.

Daily Science Fiction is a new site that publishes a story every weekday, at professional rates, and has already featured work by such excellent authors as Mary Robinette Kowal, David D. Levine, Tim Pratt, Cat Rambo, Lavie Tidhar, and Greg van Eekhout. Most but not all of Daily SF's stories are flash fiction (their pattern seems to be to publish longer pieces on Friday), so I'm not their ideal reader, but they got me with "Dragon Dreams."

I highly recommend "Dragon Dreams," and since it won't take you but two minutes to read, what possible excuse can you have for not checking it out?

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: When I'm Armouring My Belly by Gemma Files

The recommended story of the week is "When I'm Armouring My Belly" by Gemma Files, from the Edge anthology evolve, edited by Nancy Kilpatrick.

The glut of vampire fiction in the past several years has left vampires too commonplace, too familiar. In evolve, Nancy Kilpatrick has recaptured some of the strangeness of vampires by asking her contributors to imagine the next step in vampire evolution. As a result, the stories in evolve are less predictable than most vampire tales——you never know just what sort of creature will emerge. The authors in evolve are all Canadian and few are well-known (notable exceptions include Kelley Armstrong and Tanya Huff), but the stories are nearly all well-written, and I recommend the book to anyone looking for vampire fiction with a twist.

Despite their originality, however, to me most of the stories in evolve fail to recapture the ominous and disturbing nature of vampires. Through familiarity, the idea of someone sucking the very blood from your arteries has lost much of its power. Without that sense of dread, most vampire stories now feel now like fantasy rather than horror. (The same is true of werewolf stories.)

That's why my favorite story in evolve is "When I'm Armouring My Belly" by Gemma Files. This is a horror story, profoundly disturbing right from the opening line ("Much later, he would recall the exact moment when he finally forgot his own name") and the initial scene of sexual abuse ("Her insides milking him hard enough to bruise all the while, wet and tight and numbing-cold as a close-packed box of snow"). This unpleasant eroticism is far more interesting than anything we get from most of the current crop of dashing, romantic vampires.

For reasons that gradually become apparent, the protagonist of "When I'm Armouring My Belly" has a strange affinity with vampires. He is drawn to vampires and tries to aid them, even though he receives little in return but abuse and contempt. The tables eventually turn, but Files leaves it ambiguous whether the story's outcome is anything to celebrate.

Gemma Files has a knack for unsettling fiction. She is the co-author with husband Stephen J. Barringer of the striking story "each thing i show you is a piece of my death," which was on my Hugo recommendations list last year, and she won an International Horror Guild Award for "The Emperor's Old Bones." Her first novel A Book of Tongues, a weird Western, is just out from ChiZine Publications.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Near the Flame by Erin Cashier

My story recommendation of the week goes to "Near the Flame" by Erin Cashier, from the recently released Issue 12 of Shimmer magazine. This is the second SROTW to come from the pages of Shimmer, one of the best (and best looking) semiprozines in the market.

Written in the style of an African folk tale, "Near the Flame" is the story of Nygibe (meaning "Near the Water"), later renamed Nygawa ("Near the Flame"), greatest of the Women of Agawa. The Women of Agawa possess the discrete but surprisingly powerful magical talent of telling a story with smoke. Nygawa is conflicted when the new king commands the Women of Agawa to use their magic to help conquer their land's neighbors.

Wasn't this like the stories that she'd learned, the stories that she'd told? Weren't there always battles, and didn't battles always have a losing side? But those stories had just been stories, smoke high in the sky and whispers on the wind. This was life, red and real. As the fighting went on, as they walked south and south and south, whipping the fire before them like a beast, Nygawa realized that just like stories, battles needed ends.

"Near the Flame" is a memorable tale featuring a powerful narrative voice. Erin Cashier is a subtle author, yet the nuances of her writing never distract from the story (a complaint I occasionally have with Shimmer fiction, some of which employs literary techniques too self-consciously).

I am delighted to say Cashier is a fellow winner of the Writers of the Future contest. Among other places, her stories have appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Abyss & Apex, Writers of the Future, Vol. XXIV, and Footprints, with another forthcoming in InterGalactic Medicine Show. Shimmer is a great place to find up-and-coming writers, and Erin Cashier is definitely one to watch.

Writers of the Future

This blog generally focuses on promoting other authors' fiction, but today I hope you'll forgive me a bit of self-promotion.

My story "The Dualist" is a winner of the Writers of the Future contest!

The star-studded judging panel of Tim Powers, K.D. Wentworth, Jerry Pournelle, and Doug Beason picked my story as third-best of the Second Quarter 2010, out of the untold boxes of submissions they get. As one of the top three, "The Dualist" will be in Writers of the Future, Volume XXVII next year, and I will be invited to a week-long writing workshop with Powers, Wentworth, and others.

Appearing in a Writers of the Future anthology is rather a big deal. Past volumes have included early stories by such outstanding writers as Stephen M. Baxter, M. Shayne Bell, Tobias S. Buckell, Mark Budz, Jeff Carlson, Aliette de Bodard, Nicholas DiChario, J.R. Dunn, Nancy Farmer, Marina Fitch, Eric Flint, Karen Joy Fowler, Carl Frederick, Valerie J. Freireich, James Alan Gardner, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Howard V. Hendrix, Jim C. Hines, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Michael Jasper, Jay Lake, David D. Levine, Ian McHugh, Syne Mitchell, John Moore, Jamil Nasir, Scott Nicholson, Nnedi Okorafor, Michael H. Payne, Tony Pi, Ken Rand, Robert Reed, R. Garcia y Robertson, Bruce Holland Rogers, Patrick Rothfuss, Matthew Rotundo, Diana Rowland, Steven Savile, Ken Scholes, Dean Wesley Smith, Martha Soukup, Jason Stoddard, Eric James Stone, Sarah Totton, Mary Turzillo, K.D. Wentworth, Sean Williams, Dave Wolverton (aka David Farland), Stephen Woodworth, and David Zindell. The list goes on, but I think 50 names is enough to make my point. Of course, the list of former winners who did not go on to a noteworthy writing career is even longer, and I have no particular reason to expect to join the former list rather than the latter, but still . . .

To have something in common with all these amazing writers is a huge thrill. It's also strangely unsettling. I have the impression that many of the writers who enter the Writers of the Future contest are young, energetic people determined to become professional authors. I, on the other hand, am a middle-aged fellow who has never thought seriously of a career in fiction, because I never believed I had the talent. I've never even entered the WOTF contest before, figuring that none of my previous feeble efforts would have a chance.

I have always had an absurd hero-worship of professional authors, and so never dared to think that I could do what they do. But in the past couple years I've had the pleasure of meeting some of the local Colorado writers like Paolo Bacigalupi and Ed Bryant, and as much as I admire their work, they are actually not fifteen feet tall. They are very friendly and interesting people, but do not seem superhuman at all (but then, I haven't checked Paolo's closet for capes). I still don't imagine I have it in me to write quite like Paolo or Ed -- who does? -- but somehow it's feeling less ridiculous to think of at least publishing some stuff in the same field. I am looking forward to this workshop next year more than I can say.

Congratulations to my fellow winners for this quarter, Patty Jansen and Ben Mann (both Australian), and the winners for the first quarter, Brennan Harvey, David D'Amico, and Ryan Harvey (no relation). Good luck to everyone in the third and fourth quarters of the contest. Hope to see you next Spring!

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders by Aliette de Bodard

This week's story recommendation is for "Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders" by Aliette de Bodard, from the September-October 2010 issue of Interzone. Aliette de Bodard is the first three-time SROTW recipient, which will surprise no one who has read her work. Lately I've been trying to teach myself to write decent short fiction, and so I have a mental list of very good authors to read and learn from. Well, de Bodard has moved off that list, onto the list of writers I don't dare try to emulate or I might hurt myself.

"Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders" shows us a fascinating, original setting, where the Aztec Empire has been replaced by a strange, machine-dominated culture that never (quite) existed in our world. (Note that this is not the setting of de Bodard's debut novel Servant of the Underworld, although it could be in the same universe at a later date.) Even better, the story doesn't just use that setting for scenery, but to frame important questions de Bodard would not have been able to convey through a mimetic setting or a conventional medieval fantasy background.

In "Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders," the new god-machine has done away with the sacrifices and brutality of the former empire and its bloodthirsty deities. A mechanical "heirarch" arrives in a small mining town with the last of the old gods in chains, to conduct a symbolic execution of the god, who will only be resurrected for the next stop on their tour. But the ordinary people of this town are beginning to question whether they are any better off under the machine-god, which demands their hard labor in the mines to sustain it. We see the points of view of the old god, the heirarch, and the townspeople, all of whom are conflicted in different ways, but de Bodard offers no simple answers to their conflicts.

"Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders" is set after the time of the Aztecs' human sacrifices, but it prompts us to wonder what sacrifices we are still making, for which we will never be able to atone.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: You Dream by Ekaterina Sedia

"We can get over the wrongs we do, but we cannot forgive ourselves for the wrongs done to us, for our own helplessness."

My story recommendation of the week is for "You Dream" by Ekaterina Sedia, from the Apex Publications anthology Dark Faith, edited by Maurice Broaddus and Jerry Gordon.

Dark Faith is an anthology of horror fiction involving religion, although in "You Dream" both the horror and religious elements are rather understated. It includes contributions from such excellent authors as Catherynne M. Valente, Gary A. Braunbeck, Brian Keene, Mary Robinette Kowal, Jay Lake, Nick Mamatas, Jennifer Pelland, Tom Piccirilli, Lucy A. Snyder, and Lavie Tidhar. (There is also a limited edition companion chapbook, Dark Faith: Last Rites, with stories by Sara Genge and others.)

Written in second-person, for reasons that do not become apparent until late in the story, "You Dream" follows a Russian woman, perhaps middle-aged now, who was abused in her youth and learned to detach her mind from her body:

You sit up in your bed and want a smoke, and whisper to yourself, It was never sex. Never. It was a defensive reflex, the same as a lizard that aborts its tail and escapes while some predator dumbly noses around the mysteriously wriggling appendage. You'd learned to do it with your entire body, and only the spirit escaped, not watching from the distance, running instead for the hills and the razor slash of the distant horizon.

Our protagonist is haunted by the dream of a young boy from her childhood about whom she remembers little except that he was kind to her. Her fixation with and confusion about this boy tells us a great deal about her, and about all of us.

Ekaterine Sedia's first novel According to Crow flew under the radar, but her next two, The Secret History of Moscow and The Alchemy of Stone, have been very well received. Her latest novel, The House of Discarded Dreams, is due out from Prime Books in November. Sedia was raised in Moscow, but you would never know it from her wonderfully elegant writing style, of which "You Dream" is a terrific example.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Nine Bodies of Water by Monica Byrne

My recommended story of the week is Nine Bodies of Water by Monica Byrne, published today (how's that for service!) at Fantasy Magazine.

Managed by Sean Wallace, Cat Rambo, and an outstanding staff, Fantasy Magazine is one of the best sources of fiction on the web, along with plenty of interesting interviews, reviews, and other non-fictional material. Fantasy has a distinctive style of literary fantasy, of which "Nine Bodies of Water" is an excellent example.

In "Nine Bodies of Water," our protagonist Alba is overwhelmed by a miserable series of ill fortune, followed by an amazing stroke of seemingly good luck. A child's nursery rhyme triggers visions of where the combination may lead. All her possible futures seem unhappy, but it is not obvious what lesson Alba should draw from that. This is a neatly constructed, gracefully written piece, with more underneath the surface than is immediately apparent.

Fantasy tells us nothing at all about Monica Byrne [update: Fantasy has since added a bio for Byrne, as well as an interesting interview], but there are no secrets in the Google Age. Byrne is a Clarion graduate, with stories forthcoming in Shimmer and Electric Velocipede. Which means soon she will be a famous, award-winning author, able to abandon that Master's in Analytical Geochemistry from MIT (seriously) and spend her days just making up stories. And it all started with a coveted SROTW.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: The Lesson of the Scribe by Holly Schwartz-Coignat

My story recommendation of the week goes to "The Lesson of the Scribe" by Holly Schwartz-Coignat, from the Spring 2010 issue of The First Line.

The First Line is a print magazine, which selects a different opening line every issue and requires each submitting author to begin her story with that line. The magazine is predominantly mimetic fiction, and the few genre pieces are mostly by non-genre authors who don't much know what they're doing. Yet I give The First Line credit for at least attempting first lines that lend themselves to fantastic approaches. That includes the Spring 2010 issue, in which all the stories begin with the line, "Working for God is never easy."

To me, the story that engages with this premise most successfully is
"The Lesson of the Scribe." It tells the poignant tale of a brilliant Hebrew scribe of ancient Jerusalem, whose work is destroyed when the city is overrun by Babylonians. Schwartz-Coignat effectively conveys the bittersweet satisfaction of writing something beautiful that now will never be appreciated, and she nicely ties that into the theological implications of the scribe's story. Looking back on his apparently futile work in the service of God, the scribe wonders if he failed to appreciate the early advice he received: “Know that there is a difference between truth and honesty.”

Holly Schwartz-Coignat is an American living in southern France, whose work has appeared in mainstream publications such as The Battered Suitcase and With Painted Word. According to her writing blog, she has also been experimenting with genre work. I had to laugh at this statement: "It's the first time I've written specific genre fiction, the first time I've really NEEDED a plot, driven characters and action. Not just an internal struggle." Let's hope she develops a taste for writing real fiction, the kind that tells an actual story——it is obvious from "The Lesson of the Scribe" that she has the talent for it.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: Lost Canyon of the Dead by Brian Keene

Two words: zombie dinosaur.

Our first ever zombie dinosaur story recommendation of the week is "Lost Canyon of the Dead" by Brian Keene, from the anthology The Living Dead 2, edited by John Joseph Adams. Even without the zombie dinosaur, I would recommend "Lost Canyon of the Dead" for its terrific voice, simultaneously funny and frightening and nostalgic for the Old West, right from the opening lines:

The desert smelled like dead folks.

The sun hung over our heads, fat and swollen like that Polish whore back in Red Creek. It made me sweat, just like she had. It felt like we were breathing soup. The heat made the stench worse. Our dirty handkerchiefs, crusted with sand and blood, were useless. They stank almost as bad as the desert. Course, it wasn't the desert that stank. It was the things chasing us.

We'd been fleeing through the desert for days. None of us had a clue where we were. Leppo knew the terrain and had acted as our guide, but he died of heatstroke on the second day, and we shot him in the head before he got back up again.

Zombie fiction is all the rage right now, and in "Lost Canyon of the Dead," Brian Keene does it awfully well.

The Living Dead 2 is John Joseph Adams' second big zombie anthology, which might have been overkill except that this volume has a different focus. The first Living Dead was a reprint anthology, collecting Adams' favorite zombie tales from over the years. The Living Dead 2 is predominantly comprised of original fiction, and even the reprints are mostly from the last two years. So this book is a great way to sample some of today's best zombie stories, written at the height of the fad.

The past decade has seen Brian Keene emerge as one of the top names of horror fiction. He has made a closet industry of zombie stories, with a trio of zombie novels beginning with Stoker Award-winning first novel The Rising, stories in no fewer than five recent zombie anthologies, and The Last Zombie comics. Collectors out there may want to grab a copy of his latest book, A Gathering of Crows, since it was published by Leisure Books just before Leisure killed its mass-market line, so copies may soon become scarce.

Aaron's Story Recommendation of the Week :: That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made by Eric James Stone

My story recommendation for the week is "That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made" by Eric James Stone, from the September 2010 issue of Analog. "That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made" takes a strong SFnal premise and uses it as the framework for an interesting moral dilemma.

Eric James Stone has become a regular in Analog in the past five years, and has appeared in many other publications, such as Apex, InterGalactic Medicine Show, and Jim Baen's Universe. As an aside, he is the only author I am aware of to appear in two different volumes of the annual Writers of the Future anthology. I presume he was a "published finalist" one year, before becoming a full-fledged winner the next year. (The intricacies of the WOTF contest are fascinating to me at the moment, as I am currently a finalist myself.)

Analog (once known as Astounding) is the old gray lady of science fiction magazines. I confess that for years it's been my least favorite of the major magazines, but a couple more tales like "That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made" could change that in a hurry.

The setting of "That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made" is the interior of the sun, which is inhabited by "swales" or "solcetaceans," huge plasma creatures who can harness solar energy to create interstellar portals. Harry Malan is sent to Sol Central Station for business——as the site of the portals, the sun naturally becomes a center of commerce——but as a Mormon it also falls to him to serve as president of the local LDS branch, most of whose members are converted swales. (This neatly explains why Harry is on the station and in contact with the swales even though he knows little about them, prompting others to lecture him without it being too obvious an infodump.) Harry's presence is an irritant to attractive scientist Juanita Merced, who disapproves of the Mormons' interference with the solcetaceans.

Harry is contacted by a swale member, Neuter Kimball (literally a neuter, one of the swales' three genders), who fears it has sinned by being forced into sex by another swale. Harry learns that the swales have no laws or taboos against rape, since sex is always physically pleasurable for them and cannot lead to unwanted pregnancy. He determines to persuade Leviathan, the largest and most influential of the swales, to prohibit forced sexual activity. Dr. Merced believes this a fool's mission, but is excited at the opportunity for close inspection of the 38-kilometer Leviathan.

At first I found it difficult to credit that a human religion could have much appeal to aliens of such awesome size and power, but Stone reveals why some of the relatively weak among them are drawn to Mormonism, when Harry relates his initial conversation with Leviathan to Neuter Kimball:

"She told me she is the first and greatest of all swales. Isn't that true?" I asked, suddenly worried that I'd been taken in by a swale con artist.

"She told you?" Neuter Kimball said. "We are not supposed to talk of it to humans, but if she has revealed herself as a god to you, then that is her choice."

"A god? Leviathan is not a god. She's just . . ." I stopped. What was I going to say: an ancient immortal being who created an entire race of intelligent beings? If that didn't fit the definition of a god, it was pretty close. "Neuter Kimball, if you believe Leviathan to be a god, why did you join the Church?"

"Because I do not want her as my god."

Harry's efforts to persuade the swales to adopt an aspect of human morality leads him and Dr. Merced on a fascinating and entertaining journey. Typical of Analog, the characterization does not have great depth, but Stone gives the two main characters enough personality for some amusing banter, and he handles the devout Mormon businessman and the atheist scientist with equal respect. This story should work for readers of any religious background.