2021 Short Fiction Round Up 3

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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The Jazz Chain – Link 7: Freddie Hubbard

Time to pick up The Jazz Chain again! This is my exploration of jazz where for each entry I look at an album led by a musician who appeared as a player on the previous entry. Last time on the jazz chain I went over Max Roach’s Drums Unlimited. Freddie Hubbard played trumpet on that album and this week we’ll check out his 1970 album Red Clay.

Red Clay – Freddie Hubbard – 1970

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2021 Short Fiction Round Up 2

The roundup returns with 5 more stories I’d like to share with you. 5 things I read this week and enjoyed. There is a lot of dark and horror on the slate this week but there is also some pure fun and funny of the light hearted and macabre sort. Every story this week is available to read for free, though I always encourage you to support your favorite magazines when and if you can. By word of mouth for stories you particularly like if nothing else. Now, on with the recommendations!

“There, in the Woods” by Clara Madrigano from The Dark #68

Kicking things off with a good old ‘there is something in the woods’ story. It’s grim (though not gruesome) and the weight of near-hopelessness descends by the end but the story drew me in, much like the woods our protagonist lives by, and I found myself wanting to stay with it to the end. After, as I thought more and more about the story of Lucy and the creepy land and forest that has taken her parents, her husband, and a local boy she didn’t even know I found myself trying to decide if she had been fated to some kind of doom from the moment, as a child, when her parents moved the family to their new house by the woods, or from the moment she let herself fall for her husband Nick. Perhaps one led, in an inevitable sort of way, to the other. “There, in the Woods” feels like, as Chuck Wendig has described Paul Tremblay’s writing, “supernatural-adjacent” horror and it is the parts of the story that would be unsettling even if there weren’t something in the woods that will likely leave you thinking over the story again later.

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2021 Short Fiction Round Up 1

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

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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Book Recommendation: Savage Legion by Matt Wallace

As usual, before I get to why I loved and recommend Savage Legion I’ll point out that I have a little explainer of my approach to book and short fiction recommendations and you can find it here.

Next, let’s be clear here and get the bias out of the way: I am a Matt Wallace fan. I can not claim to have been a fan for his entire journey so far as a writer, but I’ve been a fan for quite awhile and have delved into the things that came before I was aware of him. There is nothing of his I’ve read I would say I haven’t enjoyed and quite a bit I’ve loved. In particular, one of the really fun things I’ve enjoyed about being a fan of Matt Wallace is that he is always doing interesting and frankly innovative things with his work.

To be really frank about it? I believe it is fair to say Matt Wallace tends to be cutting edge in the things he tries with his work and that has made being a fan delightful even as it has likely made it harder for him to break through to the wider audience that work deserves (it doesn’t always pay to be one of the first people with their foot through the door). Examples? He was one of the very early explorers of podcast fiction and his serial novella series SLINGERS was self-published (including exploring options for directly selling to fans outside of the Amazon option) a year before Tor.com announced the inaugural list of their very successful novella line and declared novellas the future of publishing (Wallace would be a part of that list, with another series of novellas that wasn’t afraid to be boldly, wonderfully gonzo in it’s combining urban fantasy with cooking and catering).

With that it in mind it really didn’t surprise me, though it did intrigue me, when I heard that his next works would be delving into all new territory for him as he would be branching into contemporary middle grade and into epic fantasy. It is that last, the recently released SAVAGE LEGION that I want to talk about more fully here.

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