And we’re back! Time again for another round up of stories I’ve read recently and liked so much I just had to share them with you all and shout them out to the best of my ability. There’s no real theme this week other than my genuinely enjoying all of these stories and wanting to encourage others to give them a try too and I’m afraid I find myself without the mental energy to say much more than that in this intro. I’ve been up since 4am as I right this because I had to get my kid to his school for his grade 8 grad trip by 5. So the brain is not at it’s best! There’s plenty more capable thought below though talking about the actual stories. Please, read on, check them out, see if something grabs your attention.
Continue readingTag Archives: Apex Magazine
2021 Short Fiction Round Up 6
A couple days later than I originally planned but the 6th Round Up of Short SFF Fiction of the year is here! Quite a bit of darkness in these stories this week but also a lot of hope. There is also a lot of gorgeous writing and striking imagery and I think there are plenty of little pieces of these stories that will haunt you in the best way. A lot of stories on the longer side than much of what I’ve been featuring here lately, including the longest story of the year for the round up so far: our first novelette of the year!
“A Remembered Kind of Dream” by Rei Rosenquist from GigaNotoSaurus
Take a Mad Max post-apocalypse vibe and mix in your favorite mind-and-or-memory bending story (Inception, Vanilla Sky, or Memento for example) and you’ll have a pretty good comparable for this intriguing novelette. The setting is a really good (and terrifyingly creative) take on a nearish-to-medium future post-apocalypse, one where the world has been largely abandoned to being an ecological horror wasteland and those who remain scrounge and scavenge to get by as best they can. The story starts in a way that feels pretty familiar for such a style – with the go-it-alone nomad finding themselves throwing in with a small group of survivors against their better judgement. As it goes on though, author Rei Rosenquist adds layer after layer of complexity and intrigue (or perhaps I should say they reveal those layers) until we are left with a great blending of genres and something more hopeful than I expected.
(Note: while the story does not have a lot of the nastier things that post-apocalypse stories can go in for, there is a scene of gruesomeness and eventual death that is not malicious, but definitely potentially stomach churning and disturbing all the same.)
Continue reading2021 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.
Continue readingWeekly Fiction Rec Roundup 14
Well, damn. The last two weeks have been pretty busy for me so these story recs are coming out much later than I had planned. Luckily, a good story is a good story and these lists are never intended to only cover stories from the week they’re published anyway. No particular theme cropped up this time, though a majority of the stories involve mothers and daughters in some way, and a lot of them get dark and unsettling. We do have a mix of tones though, and some really interesting things going on in these stories. I hope you check them out and find some things here you enjoy too. Continue reading
Weekly Fiction Rec Roundup 12
I swear I don’t set out to find themes for these roundups. I guess it’s no surprise they happen though.
My process for making these lists is pretty simple: I pick a story and read it, if I like it enough to share it goes on the list. I try and get a story every day, but I’m most often hitting 5 a week.
Reading though, is, of course, a very subjective experience. Stories are not the static things we so often think of them as, but are more like conversations between the author and reader1Or creator and audience if we want to be inclusive of all kinds of stories.. Sure, only one person (the author) gets to do the talking in this conversation, but as readers we bring our own thoughts, feelings, current mood and other baggage to the experience. It’s why one person can love something another hates and why we can have evolving2Or devolving in some cases. relationships with stories we engage with years after our first experience of them: I rewatched the Matrix the other day and was able, for the first time, to see some of what it was saying, what it had always been saying, but I never understood when I watched it3Many, many times. years ago, about the trans experience. I rewatched some Seinfeld episodes today and cringed at the explicit rape culture jokes.
So, yes, it should come as no surprise that in a week that has had me4And, many, many others. wondering about how we live in a society, and indeed world, that seems doomed, possibly within our children’s lifetimes, that I might “click” most often with a certain kind of story. This is…a dark place to find oneself, a dark conversation to be having, but I feel like most of these stories fit in this conversation and while I won’t say they have answers5I’m not sure there are definite answers to the questions these conversations raise, only ideas and choices. I do think they’re good conversational partners for the week6Oh if only it were really just this week though, eh? so many are having. Continue reading
Weekly Fiction Rec Roundup 7
Missed another week there with frustrating issues (like my hard drive dying!) but the Roundup is back this week with 5 more stories I enjoyed and hope you will too. I should say there are quite a variety of themes, styles, and lengths going on this week across these 5 tales, so even if everything isn’t to your liking probably something will be. So let’s get this going. It starts with one of my favorite authors.