Category Archives: Short Stories

2021 Short Fiction Round Up 5

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Welcome back to the Short Fiction SFF Round Up! I have 5 more stories I enjoyed and want to recommend to you for this, my 5th roundup of the year. I should point out that while not present in every story there is a quite a lot of grief and loss in the stories this week. That said, when those themes and experiences are in the stories I think they are handled well and explored with empathy and in the end these five stories each hit me just right when I read them and made me want to share them.

“History in Pieces” by Beth Goder from Clarkesworld #173

I’m always happy to explore stories with interesting structure and this one provides, as it’s name suggests, something of a puzzle structure. Its pieces of the tale told largely out of order come together to paint a picture of exploration and first contact, the beginnings of connection, and tragic ending for some. By the end, the alien archivist, Tan, who is creating the puzzle record, has become a fascinating character. I very much enjoyed moving back and forth through this story and its structure.

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2021 Short Fiction Round Up 4

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Week 4! I honestly wasn’t sure I’d get four weeks of roundups in a row without a stumble, that certainly hasn’t been the case the last couple years! My goal this year has simply been to take it one week at a time, no big hopes or plans. Just make time to read a bit each day and collect some favorites. It’s been working ok so far I’d say. 5 more stories this week including two from magazines that I haven’t featured in the roundup before. Apparition Literary Magazine (or Apparition Lit) is a quarterly magazine that published themed issues. This month’s issue’s theme was justice. Mermaids Monthly is a brand new magazine that funded through a kickstarter late last year (one I was happy to support) and it intends to bring, as the name implies, art, poetry, short stories and more all centered around mermaids (defined as any cool aquatic chimeras you can think of). I’d say with issue one it’s off to a great start!

As is usually the case we have a pretty wide selection of story settings, tone, and styles this week and hopefully you’ll find something (hopefully several somethings) to love.

“Commodities” by Zebib K.A. from Apparition Lit #13

This is an interesting story of a near and in many ways scarily too possible future. One that echoes obviously strongly with the terrors that have been amplified by the previous four years of American reactionary far-right politics. Here we have an America that has dissolved and has border walls to keep people out and in. What is really interesting is that the story takes place in California where many of the oppressed originally fled to. It’s supposed to be the “good” place. Indeed some patrolling officers even say so out loud. All while they look for people who had illegally crossed the border fleeing the bad of the other side of the wall. It’s a detail that resonated particularly with me as a Canadian, we who often paint ourselves as so much better than our southern neighbors, yet who refused to make practical moves to be a safe place for those persecuted by growing official American xenophobia. Our protagonist, Miriam only wants the private quiet life she has eked out for herself. Turning away from those in need is harder than she might like though and rugged individualism on its own is not much of a a solution to oppression.

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2021 Short Fiction Round Up 3

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It’s week 3 for the Short Fiction Roundup here in 2021 and I am so happy that this week I’m kicking off the recommendations with stories from two magazines that have never been featured here before.

Constelación is a brand new bilingual speculative fiction magazine that will publish quarterly and all of it’s content will be published in both Spanish and English. Fusion Fragment started publishing last year and is on its fourth issue. I’m a big fan of the design and overall approach of this magazine. It’s a gorgeous presentation and has wonderful innovations such as key word tags for each story, and book recommendations from each author in the issue.

Stories from Flash Fiction Online, Escape Pod, and Tor.com round out the Round Up.

“The Badger’s Digestion; or The First First-Hand Description of Deneskan Beastcraft by an Aouwan Researcher” by Malka Older from Constelación Magazine #1

So I can’t lie. When deciding which story from Constelación to read first I looked over it’s content warning page1A feature I think every magazine should employ. Some do. But all should. and I chose the one that had none. That’s the kind of story I wanted at that particular moment – something to get lost in without thorns to have to be wary of and that is exactly what I got! A lovely, fascinating story with an ending that snuck up and knocked me over with how perfect it was. The theme of this first issue of Constelación is “The bonds that unite us” and this story takes it that to a very literal extreme as it follows a researcher visiting a foreign country to learn more of their legendary Beasts: kaiju-like creatures that are created by a merging of a team of humans. Some of the people of Denesk join together to become large sea serpents to protect and manage it’s harbour, others make giant kestrels to deliver messages and some are huge badgers to meet the digging needs of construction and well-making. Along with the ending, that feels as eye-opening for me as a reader as it does for our protagonist, I particularly enjoyed what the story is getting at about community. I also loved the very real feeling and layered-with-nuance view the story gives of someone exploring and trying to understand a culture not their own, and how often it is the outsider’s own cultural baggage and assumptions that can cause barriers where none would otherwise exist. Altogether, a great story with a home run use of worldbuilding.

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2021 Short Fiction Round Up 1

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Welcome to the first Round Up of short fiction recommendations for 2021. And it’s happening in the first week of 2021 even! Happy New Year. Welcome. I hope it’s a great year for everyone.

Now, a bit of a strange thing happened when I put this round up together. In attempt to be proactive and organized I started diving into some of the magazines I subscribe to that had new issues available for stories to read this week. Start the new year off ahead of the game for once, right? Well I ended up very ahead of the game as none of the stories I read and recommend below are currently available for free. Most magazines release their full issue to subscribers first and then release the content online slowly over the course of the month. That is one of the perks of subscribing. So, four of these five stories will be available for free eventually. But if you want to read them right now you’ll have to buy the relevant issue or subscribe (assuming you don’t already).

I felt a little worried about that when I realized what I’d done, but, on the other hand magazines need support to survive and I don’t feel it’s wrong to point that out sometimes. So, for now each link takes you to the website for each magazine where you can purchase a copy of the issue. As the stories are released online I will update my links to take readers directly to each story.

“Delete Your First Memory For Free” by Kel Coleman from FIYAH Magazine #17

There many different ways a story can surprise you. Some are great, like cleverly subverting and playing with tropes. Some are not great at all, like the “shocking twist” ending that is only a surprise because it was completely unearned.1These can work, especially in flash fiction, but often just feel lazy at best. This story surprised me by simply not going where I thought it would. In a story about a character dealing with anxiety and the technology for deleting memories (such as an embarrassingly bad joke told the first time you met your crush) I expected something in the sci-fi horror realm to develop. In some, perhaps many, writers’ hands I think it would have. Instead we get something sweeter. Something kinder. With more understanding of just how awful and very real it can be to kick yourself months or even years later for that awkward thing you said when you were trying to be anything but. It is also a wonderfully real take on just how things probably would play out if a nascent memory deletion technology were to become available.

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2020 Short Fiction Round Up 5

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Back with a new selection of short stories I’ve read recently and am happy to recommend to others. I think there is a fairly good mix of stories this week, though there are a lot of looking to the future in them, and quite a bit about dealing with childhood and friendships.

“All of Us” by Kathleen Naytia from Speculative City

Here is an interesting, short, alternative history and horror story. In this world the American Civil War did not end in a victory for the North but a stalemate and truce. One where the South’s slaves would be freed…slowly. Very slowly. 100 years later Laura and her family are some of the last slaves to be freed and trying to make their way to The United States of America. There is only one safe reliable transportation for the journey: The Miracle Bus, but Laura and her father have to survive the first part of their trip just to get on the bus and to the relative safety of community.

“To Look Forward” by Osahon Ize-Iyamu from Fantasy Magazine

Here we have a story about friendship and entering the liminal phase of childhood where adults expect you begin not being a child, but a person preparing to become an adult. It is a story about figuring out who you are and how to embrace that. Mariam, Ebuka, and Funke seem to know who they are and who they want to be, whether their parents like it or not. They have confidence in the story of themselves they create and share out on the swings as they look to the future. Our protagonist and narrator isn’t so sure. Not sure of being ready for the future, not sure of who she is, what she wants to do or indeed, if she is even enough to do anything. More comfortable listening to others stories than taking a spotlight to tell her own. Even that story of who she is though, the unsure, unknowing, unready child is perhaps not completely accurate. The story really hits me in the feels and nostalgia. I see so much of my past and even present in the narrator. What a strange thing to be sure of oneself. What a truth that we are often afraid to embrace ourselves even when we know the truth, but won’t admit it. And what a very accurate look at what growing up and trying to deal with the pressures, both internal and external, to know yourself can sometimes feel like.

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2020 Short Fiction Round Up 4

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Hello and welcome back to another round up of short SFF speculative fiction I’ve enjoyed recently. And wow did I really enjoy these. I think we’ve got some lighter stuff than we’ve had in recent roundups, though not everything here falls into that category. We also have a return of a couple authors I’ve featured in previous roundups. Octavia Cade, whose short fiction is a must try for me, becomes the third author I’ve recommended at least three stories of and Charles Payseur, who is, in my opinion, the premiere short spec fiction reviewer out there, has his second appearance in my roundup. And now for the actual stories:

“When We Were Patched” by Deji Bryce Olukotun from Escape Pod 730

This is a fun story and one that has left me pondering many little pieces of it. It seems pretty straightforward: it is a story about a futuristic kind of extreme tennis match as told by the AI assistant to the referee for the match. What shakes things up is that as an AI with it’s own thoughts and opinions Theodophilus finds itself as much in conflict with the referee Malik as the two fierce competitors of the match do with each other. What I find myself pondering still is how trustworthy of a narrator Theodophilus is and how much our own feelings about sport and the right and wrong way for athletes to behave might influence how much we want to trust the AI. I also really appreciated all the generally subtle but very effective worldbuilding that happens in this story.1Though I don’t think I’d particularly like the highly corporate world it hints at. Finally, though the sports match is the secondary conflict in this story it still paints a picture of a great championship match that the sports fan in me can’t help but appreciate, especially in this sports-less time we find ourselves in.

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