The Weekly Fiction Rec Roundup returns with it’s 11th installment. I’ve got five stories to share with you this week.There is a lot of despair and darkness in this week’s stories, in particular through our middle three selections that have such a similarity of feel that they could easily fit together in an anthology featuring dark stories of women protagonists who are perhaps uncompromising, perhaps a bit broken, perhaps even unlikeable.

Clearly I was gravitating to the uncomfortable in my reading this weak, though that should not be taken as any condemnation of these stories. We need stories of survival and struggle, both on personal scales and larger and these have it. We also have some interesting sci-fi and a moody, though not dark, not really, jazz-age fantasy to look at. Oh, and this will also be the first Roundup to use in-line notes¹Because I tend to be mighty fond of adding parenthetical additions to my main point and I’m kind of liking using this system to both get to ramble on a bit and clean up my presentation., so there’s that.

“Sita’s Descent” by Indrapramit Das from Mithila Review Issue #10

The first story of the roundup has some very cool sci-fi ideas with scientists creating artificial, sentient “nebula” out of nanites. The government of India creates three of these beings to embody the deities of the Ramayan²An ancient epic Indian poem. and to act out their assigned role in space for the audience of everyone on earth. The problem with creating sentient beings though, is they don’t always agree to act out the role you given them in the exact manner you want.

It is obvious to me that I would get even more out of this story if I were familiar with the Ramayan, but if you’re from a western, English-language dominant culture like me, and you’re going to read a magazine like Milithia Review³Which bills itself as the Journal of International Science Fiction and Fantasy or any of the other markets striving to bring non-Western stories to English-reading audiences⁴And I think you should! then you have to accept, or better yet embrace, the fact that while you can potentially enjoy all the stories on offer, you are not going to experience them on the same level as the audiences they were originally or specifically written for.

“It’s Easy to Shoot a Dog” by Maria Haskins from Beneath Ceaseless Skies #260

The first of our thematically similar⁵Though formed through luck by my semi-random reading habits triptych of stories is probably the most straight forward of the three, but it does cut back and forth through time in the life of Susanna, her family, and her dog to lay out piece, by piece, our story in full. It’s a technique that I generally enjoy and it works well here. Susanna lives in a world that perhaps is best described as bordering on fairy tale⁶Of the Brother’s Grimm variety.. There is a witch in the woods, but you have to walk pretty far to find her. A Magical bargain bordering on a curse is made, but our protagonist will deal with the consequences quietly herself.

It’s the sort of story where nothing is really a surprise, because everything is laid out quite clearly and foreshadowed just right. It’s the kind of well done tale where even if something does throw you for a loop⁷And I’ll admit, the ending did make me go a little wide-eyed. you will quickly think, ‘ah, but of course that makes sense’ not ‘what? why? what’s going on!?’.

“In the City of Kites and Crows” by Megan Arkenberg from Glittership Episode #58

Glittership is primarily-audio⁸Though you can read the text of the stories on the website, and I most often do. market that publishes both new and reprinted fiction. This story is one of the latter and was originally published in 2016 in Kaleidotrope.⁹Which makes this a meeting point of two of my favorite “small” markets and ones I seem to consistently feature in these Roundups. Despite that, this story feels like a 2018 story. How could a story of oppression and desperation not?

Our protagonist, though apparently not much of a revolutionary, is deeply entwined (often quite literally) with several people who are. People who oppose their tyrannical senatorial government and brutal police forces. There is…not a lot of happiness to be had in this story. Oppressive regimes are not happy places to live, but if you’re going to spend time in such a place do it with gorgeous, poignant prose like we get here. Two of my favorite examples:

“Revolutions are made out of hauntings, out of missing bodies and ghosts.”

“None of us has the body we were born in. Life leaves its traces, its teeth marks on our throats, its maps across our thighs and in our fingertips, its footprints on our chests.”

No, there is not a lot of happiness in this story, but there is an immense amount of humanity in it.

“Abandonware” by Genevieve Valentine from Lightspeed Issue #100

When I began what I personally think of as my personal “third era” of being a reader, which began around the same time I began turning my eye and keyboard to “this writing thing” one of the first books I read was Genevieve Valentine’s MECHANIQUE.¹⁰It was also one of the first audio books I tried and is probably directly responsible for my love of and dedication to the format. Highly recommended. I loved it. So when Valentine’s book PERSONA came along a few years later I jumped on that too. In this story I can see the writer of both of those books, though it isn’t really like either. It has the weirdness and unease of MECHANIQUE, though it’s not nearly that weird, and the excellent sense of where the technology of our modern world is taking us found in PERSONA, though it isn’t nearly that advanced or far into our future.

Here we have a young woman, Christine, who was perhaps always a little disconnected from the world around her, despite being a formidable observer of it, thanks to a painful family situation and divorce, growing ever more unmoored from life as she obsesses over a bizarre artifact of a popular video game: a wandering deer. This is, like the two before it, not an easy story. In many ways these have all been about people trying to survive the hurt we are all too good at inflicting on one another, but at least in the other two our protags reached love in places we could understand. Christine’s story is unsettling because she turns away from such understandable sources of comfort to something more akin to the self-destruction of substance abuse. No, it is not a comfortable story, but it is compelling, formidable even, and I can’t help but think about that deer wandering around myself.

“Yard Dog” by Tade Thompson from FIYAH Issue #7: Music

Our final story for this week comes from FIYAH Magazine’s latest issue which means that if you want to read it you’ll have to purchase the issue or a subscription. As I’ve mentioned in other Roundups I mostly rec stories you can read for free, but writers deserve to be paid and markets need to get the funds to do that from somewhere. Occasionally I will recommend stories from markets that don’t have a free option. This is definitely going to happen sometimes with FIYAH. Over it’s first 7 issues it has established itself as a premiere destination for great fiction, and I don’t expect that to change.

As you may know, I’m a bit of a jazz fan and a couple weeks ago I even started a little blog project for exploring and expanding my jazz knowledge called The Jazz Chain. You can read all about that here, if you’re so inclined. So it should come as no surprise that in a magazine of Black speculative fiction with a music themed issue I looked for, and was happy to find, a jazz themed story.

The story is of the let-me-tell-you-of-that-one-weird-brush-we-had-with-the-supernatural-sort and in it our protagonist and narrator describes how his little circle of jazz musicians and their local venue had a brush up against someone, perhaps better labeled something. Of course I personally enjoyed getting to visit the jazz world with these characters, but I also loved that fact that for me this story was about the need to share our art that many, if not most, artists of any kind so desperately feel. Even this…angel? demon? cosmic horror entity? Just wanted to play for an audience. Desperately so. I can relate to that.

Now before I wrap this up I will point out for anyone who doesn’t know that FIYAH produces a Spotify playlist for every issue with the tracks picked by the writers of each issue to match their stories. The tracks that were¹¹At least I’m fairly certain they were! chosen by Thompson to mesh with his story are “Haitian Fight Song” from Charles Mingus’ The Clown, “Mr. P.C.” from John Coltrane’s Giant Steps, and Cab Calloway’s “The Hi-De-Ho Miracle Man”. Just. Perfect. The Calloway track isn’t as famous as his other “Hi-De-Ho” song “Minnie the Moocher”, but the lyrics are perfect for this story. Those first two albums, though, are two of the best jazz albums of all time from two of the absolute greatest musicians to ever live. So worth your time. And if you do follow along with The Jazz Chain project I can pretty much guarantee Coltrane, Mingus, and most of the other musicians on those albums will be featured at some point.

And that is it for this week’s Roundup. As always, you can find a page with links to all of my Roundups here. Also, as always, if you find something you really like: share it with others!