Category: Favorites and Recommendations

table full of hugos

Awards Season Is Upon Us #2: My Fiction Reccomendations

By:  TempestFavorites and Recommendations

table full of hugos

At some point I’m going to write a post about why it’s important to nominate for the Hugo Awards if you can and why you don’t need to have read everything or even widely to nominate. That’s a long post, though, and it’s Friday. What’s good for Fridays is giving you a list of things to read that will give you pleasure. i.e. My recommendations for Hugo nomination-worthy fiction.

Novel

The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin

A book that tells the brutal truth about oppression and marginalization. And it’s just damn good.

The Grace of Kings, Ken Liu

I’m not a huge epic fantasy person and this book still managed to hook me. The combination of a book set in a China-influenced fantasy world that isn’t white-gaze-Orientalist nonsense, a fantasy world that isn’t mindlessly patriarchal by default, and a grand story that encompasses gods and mortals without being as tiring as Homer made me a fan of this book.

Uprooted, Naomi Novik

One of the most well-crafted books I’ve read in a long time.

 

Novella

 

The New Mother by E. J. Fischer | Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine [Read It Here]

This novella takes place in a very near future. So near that the issues it tackles are barely removed from their current counterparts. Reproductive rights, personhood, our culture’s puritanical views on sex, religion, cloning, and so many of the other conversations connected to these topics. Fisher avoids preachiness (well, I say that because I happen to be the choir) and instead uses all of this to explore what it means to be human.

The Bone Swans of Amandale, C.S.E. Cooney [In This Collection]

It’s beautiful. I mean… I don’t even know what else to say except this is just beautiful and moved me deeply.

Trixter – The Trix Adventures, Volume 1, Alethea Kontis [Standalone]

If you’re a fan of mixed up and remixed fairy tales then you need to read all of Alethea’s middle grade books. Though this is part of that whole series/world, you can start with this short novel as an entry drug to the rest. Trix is a lot of fun.

Novelette

Entanglements by David Gerrold | The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction [Read It Here] (this was originally listed as a novella. Sorry!)

Reading this story was like wandering into a party at a big con and somehow stumbling on the corner where some giant of the field is quietly holding court, and only those lucky enough to have torn themselves away from (or escaped) some less interesting blowhard get to be witness to it. This giant of the field is telling you a story, and that story probably has a straightforward version, but he keeps veering off into these tangents, and you don’t care because these tangents include tidbits about that time Gene Roddenberry bought his first computer and Majel Barrett freaked out because the simplistic AI was just complex enough to make it seem like it was carrying on a conversation and so on…

But then, oh then, you get to the meat of the story this guy has been trying to tell for an hour and you are stunned, just stunned, because he just blew your mind with insight and you’re wiping tears from your face because you see yourself in bits of that story (especially that bit about still owning a Zune because it was better than the iPod and shut up) and now you’re contemplating the meaning of your life and he’s got up to go to the bathroom and… wait… what was that about killing a man?

Fabulous Beasts by Priya Sharma | Tor.com

This story is very dark and very engaging. The voice just sucks you in and holds you down as the story slowly builds and builds to the justified, disturbing end. This is the kind of horror I tend to gravitate to even though horror as a whole isn’t my favorite genre. The way it mixes the real and the supernatural and the woman’s tight point of view both contribute to why I highly recommend this story.

And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead by Brooke Bolander | Lightspeed Magazine

I immediately resonated with this piece based on my own history, and throughout the author plucked all the right strings in me to make me love this. It’s about the things one will do out of grief and love and pressing down sadness, wonderfully rendered and woven.

Sacred Cows: Death and Squalor on the Rio Grande by A.S. Diev | Giganotosaurus

This novelette is worth settling in to read and spend some time to think about. The imagery of a herd of cows flying through the sky is somewhat comical, though that aspect quickly dissipates as the narrative goes on. It’s a story about corruption, corporations, and rich men who get away with far too much because they are rich. That concept is hardly futuristic, I know. But so many people fail to question the doctrine of “because we can” that permeates so much of everyday people’s lives.

Something one of the characters says toward the end really sums up everything about this story: “It’s not that they are bigger and stronger. It’s not that they win every contest, and have more of everything, even while some of us truly don’t have enough. It’s that they still want more. They have to be above you, and step on you, and defecate on you. They have to rub it in your face.”

Folding Beijing by Hao Jingfang, trans. Ken Liu | Uncanny Magazine

Short Story

When Your Child Strays From God by Sam J. Miller | Clarkesworld Magazine

Snuck into this story about an evangelical Christian pastor’s wife dealing with the sinful rebelliousness of her teenage son is a really cool made up drug that sounds absolutely transformative and I want to try it (along with a few close friends… very close). Miller excels at blending cool speculative ideas with characters and situations very much grounded in our world.

These Eyes Are Not My Own by Jennifer Nestojko | Crossed Genres Magazine

Those of you who’ve ever been in a relationship with a person with different privilege or experience of marginalization than you will recognize the personal dynamics in this story. It’s very tense and sad and you’ll find yourself all tangled up in the main character’s emotions almost immediately.

Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers by Alyssa Wong | Nightmare Magazine

This story is so visceral and it doesn’t hold back on all that’s implied in this opening bit. Wong has a talent for creating horrific situations that nonetheless feel right and even righteous. It’s not easy to make a reader identify or empathize with a narrator of this nature, and yet the author manages to do so (for me, at least).

Liminal Grid By Jaymee Goh | Strange Horizons

I love everything about this story. The voice, the tone, the dialogue, the characters, the story itself. I love the core of the story, summed up here: “Tyrants must be told somehow that they will be left in the morass of their own corruption. Everyone has the right to live, grow, dream, build at their own pace. Leaving, too, is resistance.”

Catcall by Delilah S. Dawson | Uncanny Magazine

If you’ve been reading my column for a while you know my fondness for revenge and They Got What Was Coming To Them stories. That’s exactly why I like this one. It’s for every girl and woman who is sick of the neverending cavalcade of unwanted touches and roaming eyes and disgusting words and everything else that comes with rape culture and wishes she had the power to do something about all of it.

If I believed in misandry, I could call this story MISANDRY MISANDRY MISANDRY without fear or shame.

Madeleine by Amal El-Mohtar | Lightspeed Magazine

Falling into memories the way we fall into dreams—with that same hyper-real yet not real tension and thrill/terror of not always being able to escape—sounds like a thing that could be fun at first but would quickly devolve into a terrifying way to live. What if, in these memories, you found the exact thing you needed to make you feel like you should continue existing? El-Mohtar explores this and more in this gorgeous story.

The Great Silence by Ted Chiang | e-flux journal

Chiang collaborated with visual artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla to create a story based on their video piece “The Great Silence.” Not having seen the original video I can’t comment on how well each piece compliments each other. Even without that background, the story is moving, heart-breaking and beautiful — and is made up of at least 60% lines that will be quoted forever.

With the exception of the short story category, I still have room for a few other nominations. I want to what everyone else has on their short list. List ’em in the comments, use the #HugoNoms hashtag on Twitter, poke me on Facebook!

I’ll put up my recs for the not-fiction categories next week. And, of course, I am eligible for some of those categories.

 

You’re Excluding Stories By Straight, White, Cis Men? J’accuse! J’accuse!

By:  TempestThe Publishing Biz
You're Excluding Stories By Straight, White, Cis Men? J'accuse! J'accuse!

A year or so ago some dude (whose name I’ve forgotten) who writes reviews of SF/F books noticed that in the year or two (or longer) previous he had not read or reviewed any books by women. This caused him to pause and go: “Huh….” and noodle on in some surface way about how he really should make an effort to read more women.

I suggested that, since he was now aware of the issue, he should do something more “radical” and spend an entire year reading books by nothing but women.

“But I can’t do that!” book review dude exclaimed. “That would be tipping the scale too far. That would be BIAS. That would be excluding men for arbitrary reasons! That would be wrong!1”

I knew, of course, when I made the suggestion he wouldn’t accept it. Because it’s just too much of a hardship to read only women. He even said some shit about how he’d miss out on too many good books by limiting himself that way. There was not enough side-eye in the universe for that conversation.

If you’ve spent most of your adult life reading mostly men without consciously thinking about the fact that you mostly choose books written by men or mostly have books written by men recommended to you or shoved at you as Good, then a year of reading only women is not even enough to balance the scales.

Reading only women for a year takes some thought and effort. And if you do that, people hardly ever assume that it happened Just Because or On Accident or because you were Just Reading The Best Books Regardless Of The Identity Of The Author.

Unlike if you just happen to read only men for 10 years at a stretch.

Funny that.

I told you that story to tell you this one.

The first comment on my latest io9 post pointed out that all the stories I featured are by women, and asked if that was a coincidence. I’ve been running this column regularly since July 2014. It took until February 2015 for someone to notice that. Or, I should probably say, it took until now for someone to ask me about it.

A few hours later another dude came by to confront me about this in more detail. His comment is still “pending,” so it’s not initially visible when you look at the page.

In all seriousness, not trying to be a dick here, but you do seem to be purposefully excluding white men from these roundups, correct? I mean you post almost entirely women writers, and the small handful of male authors you do include are either AOC or queer authors. If you have a criteria other than quality to select or filter authors, then shouldn’t you state so somewhere in these posts? I mean at least be straight up about it. At this point there seem to be far more opportunities, in the short fiction marketplace at least, for authors of color/LGBT authors, since there are magazines who won’t accept submissions from white men altogether. And then you have magazines like Lightspeed who were recently only accepting submissions from LGBT authors for the “Queers Destroy Science Fiction” anthology. I guess I’m seeing a lot of editors/magazines making an effort to increase their magazine’s diversity, when it actually seems like there isn’t a bias against minority authors at all? If I’m wrong then please tell me how so. But if only certain types of people are eligible for these “Best Stories” posts, and if many magazines are refusing submissions from white or straight or male authors, while many others explicitly state they’re looking for diverse voices (Shimmer, Strange Horizons, Crossed Genres, Lightspeed, et al), then where exactly is the bias? Is it possible this preoccupation with identity politics has gone too far? I guess I’m just saying, if these “Best Stories” posts really mean “Best Stories By Women, LGBT, or AOC” then shouldn’t you say so?

I am certain that this person is not such a regular reader of my column that they know off the top of their heads the makeup of the authors featured. This person went back through all my posts and tallied this info up before coming back with his observations. And in the process assumed not that I just happen to like stories by women, people of color, and LGBT folks better than that of straight, white, cis men, but that I am actively excluding that last category and should be up front about it.

Funny that.

Sunil Patel, who reviews books for Lightspeed, recently tweeted:

Promoting diversity is about boosting underrepresented voices. It is about leveling the playing field. It is no coincidence that my book review column features no white male authors. They can have EVERYWHERE ELSE. Do I feel like I’m discriminating against white male authors? I kind of do. But I also know that women and POC are reviewed less. Those with privilege are getting by just fine on their own. We need to use what privilege we have to boost marginalized voices.

What I do in my column isn’t precisely reviewing. It’s more signal-boosting of the fiction I read that I liked or loved. That’s why it’s called “The Best Stories from…” and not “Stories out this week” or whatever. When I did this on my own I called it Favorite Fiction. It’s a link, an excerpt, and a short paragraph, maybe two, about what struck me about the story, why I liked or loved it, what elements I appreciated. I rarely do anything that looks like a full-on critical analysis–that’s not what the column is for. I also don’t include stories I don’t like in order to explain why I don’t like them.

Still though, I am very aware that my signal-boosting carries meaning. I’m also aware of which kinds of authors often get more boosts in what venues. That kind of thing matters to me.

I will say this plainly: If I read a story and I like it a lot, I would never not include it in my column based on the identity and background of the writer. Because the whole basis of this is what I read and liked.

I’ll also say this plainly: A reviewer who makes the choice to focus exclusively on marginalized voices is making a good choice. There are plenty of places for the privileged to get and gain attention. Making a space for everyone else is not bias, it’s a step towards balance.

Footnotes

  1. I am paraphrasing. [⇧]

Short Stories: We Need More Venues For Discovery, Recs, and Discussion

By:  TempestFavorites and Recommendations
John Chu Hugo Speech
John Chu accepting his Hugo Award, courtesy Scott Edelman on Instagram.

If you’re interested in the Hugo awards or just SFF awards in general, Justin Landon does an excellent job of breaking down the Hugo votes over at his blog. It’s fascinating to see how the instant run-off ballot affects who wins and provides insight into what voters are thinking (a little). It’s a long read but well worth it.

In the section discussing the short story ballot, this caught my attention:

Given the number of short fiction venues today, the Short Story category is becoming increasingly scattered, making it harder and harder to have a digestible slate of stories to choose from. Hopefully, the Hugo Awards can get a handle on this challenge and ensure a full nomination ballot in future years.

I’m not convinced that this is something that the Hugos or Hugo voters as a group can really change. There will continue to be a ton of great markets and plenty for people to read. There’s about to be an all-new magazine (Uncanny) that could, down the road, complicate the matter further.

What’s needed are more short story reviews and recommendations.

Locus reviews short fiction, of course. But Locus is for people involved in the business of writing and publishing and not so much for the average SFF reader and fan. Tangent still exists but I have no idea how relevant it is. The Fix is long gone. And I just plain don’t hear about most other short fiction review outlets, and I can’t be the only one.

This is one of the reasons why I started my favorite fiction posts. I read a lot of great fiction over the course of a year but might not be able to recall all my favorites once it came time to nominate. And I wanted a way to share stories I thought deserved attention and award consideration in a compact yet concrete way.

I’m really glad I have a high profile venue for those posts now in the form of io91. This is the easily digestible list of recommendations Landon is looking for, I think. I would love for there to be more of them.

I wish that it was possible to have a Goodreads for short fiction so that people could rate, discover, and recommend with the same energy as novels get. I know there are some shorts with their own entries on Goodreads, but the last time I poked around it didn’t seem like the platform wanted that and there’s not a big community push behind it. I’d love to be wrong about that.

Is Goodreads itself the best place for this kind of thing? It’s a site and community that already exists, and I’m sure plenty of people who love novels are also down with shorts. Since I don’t spend much time on the site I honestly don’t know if it would work.

Is there a place to create such a community easily? As in not having to build something from scratch (who has time for that–no one)?

The short story/novelette categories in all our major awards could benefit from more discussion and engagement, I agree2. I just wouldn’t leave it up to the Hugos to figure that out.

Footnotes

  1. Don’t forget to head over today and look for the new post! [⇧]
  2. Don’t get me wrong: I love the story that won and agree that it deserves the honor. [⇧]

Selfies With Books and other things I do for my job

By:  TempestNon-Fiction Publications

In addition to my weekly short fiction recs over at io9 I have some summer reading recs over at xoJane, too. There I did novels and short story collections/anthologies so everyone is covered. And I took selfies with a lot of books. This is becoming a theme in my life: selfies with products.

Selfies with books

The other day I stopped in a hipster electronics store to take a selfie with some headphones since the pair I owned were stolen from me a while back. The poor guy working in the store was really confused because I walked in, asked after some headphones onthe wall, took a bunch of pictures of myself wearing them, then left. As I was going out the door he was all “Uh, can I help you…?”

“Nope!” I said cheerfully as I sailed away. I’m sure he thought I was loopy. But whatever, this is New York City. He should be used to much stranger stuff than this.

Other than headphones and books, what other products should I give the selfie treatment? I don’t look good in hats. Despite the overwhelming number of beads in my house I don’t wear jewelry much. Any suggestions?

My Faves: Time Travel Fiction and Media

By:  TempestGeekitude

Fans of NPR’s Weekend Edition may have caught a familiar voice when listening to the segment on time travel fiction. I had a great time talking to Petra Mayer about time travel, a topic near and dear to my heart. Yes, I am still writing a novel with time traveling twins (same world as my story in Diverse Energies). Now that all of NPR knows about it I guess I should finally finish.

In the mean time you can enjoy my best-loved time travel books, stories, and other media!

“It’s All True” by John Kessel (contained in his collection The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories)

I mentioned this during the time travel panel at ReaderCon. In this story, a future society has invented time travel and they use it to go to parallel worlds, travel back in time, get famous people from the past, then bring them forward in time back to their own timeline. Thus avoiding changing their future. I swear this makes sense. The story centers around one guy’s attempt to convince Orson Wells to come to the future.

the freedom maze and kindred

The Freedom Maze by Delia Sherman and Kindred by Octavia Butler

I mention these two together because they share a basic premise (but are very different in sensibility as well as plot). In both, a person from modern times is thrown back into the era of American slavery, ends up with people who are her ancestors, and has to live as a slave for some portion of time. In Kindred the person is a grown woman who is pulled backward in time multiple times. In The Freedom Maze the person is a young girl who is actually white, but because she’s very tan is mistaken for a mulatto. She stays in the past for weeks and it’s unclear whether she’ll ever get back home. Both novels explore modern perspectives on the past in interesting ways.

“Past Tense” and “Trials and Tribble-ations” Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Some people will try to tell you that the best Star Trek episode about time travel is “The City on the Edge of Forever”. I don’t mind telling you that those people are wrong. As with so many things Star Trek, DS9 has the best episodes using this story vehicle. My ultimate favorite is, of course, the tribble one where the crew of DS9 travel back to the episode “The Trouble With Tribbles” and have to blend in with the original Enterprise crew. It’s awesome on so many levels from how seamlessly the effects crew blended the footage from TOS with the new footage to moments like this:

However, “Past Tense” has stayed with me all these years for a different reason. DS9 was often very social justice oriented, and this episode was chock full of it. For once, when Star Trek people ended up in the past on Earth it was not in the 20th century. Instead, they land in 2024 (still in San Francisco, though) in a dystopian America that is sadly not that hard to imagine. People who are poor, sick, or just undesirable are cordoned off into ghettos. And not just ghettos in the urban sense, but actual ghettos with walls and fences and an inability to get out where people have to fight over food rations and only get a place to sleep if the local gangs think you’re okay. It’s terrifying and not that far off the mark. This episode aired about 20 years ago. 2024 is 10 years from now. Think Star Trek will prove prescient?

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

This series didn’t get a chance to flourish fully and it ends on what could be a cliffhanger or what could seem like a satisfying end given that we sort of know what happens after. The second season dragged in the middle for sure, but overall this is one of the best entries in the Terminator franchise, right up there with T2 and way better than T3 or what weird one with Christian Bale.

The main characters in SCC don’t do much time traveling themselves. What I loved about the time travel elements is that the war between Skynet and the humans takes place not only in the future but across both the relative past, the future, and the present. Several people and Terminator models are sent back in time at different points for specific and long term missions. And each time a person or group of people are sent back, it changes the future. So that woman you knew in the resistance and see again on the street might not be the exact person you knew, but a version of them.

And even when they strike a blow against Skynet, be it by destroying tech that will lead to it or getting rid of a Terminator come to kill someone, it doesn’t necessarily mean Skynet won’t still rise, it’ll just rise at a different date. All these elements are key to the plot, and kudos to the show for making all of this relatively straightforward and understandable. It’s not just some jumbled timey-wimey mess.

I am always looking for more time travel fiction to add to my to-read pile. Rec me some in the comments, if you would!

Favorite Fiction (Feb & March 2013) plus new ways to find my faves

By:  TempestFavorites and Recommendations
Favorite Fiction (Feb & March 2013) plus new ways to find my faves

Over at io9 my list of best short stories from February and March is now live. Those ten stories represent my very top picks, but there are several more I hearted over the past couple of months. I listed them below.

Before we get to that, a couple of things! First, I created a Flipboard magazine recently where I intend to collect all the stories I favorite each month. It’s the same list you’ll see here, so it’s basically another way to see the same info. With a Flipboard magazine you’ll get an update every time I add a new story and won’t have to wait for the end of the month. Plus, the stories will just show up in your regular Flipboard, no need to do anything extra. To subscribe, search for “ktempest” in Flipboard. The magazine is called Fantastic Flippin’ Fiction.

I mentioned in January’s post that I was looking for a venue where I could discuss short stories in depth. Not just the ones I like, but any one worth discussing, including stories I don’t like. To that end, I’m doing some experimenting. I created a Google+ community. I intend for it to be a participatory thing, not just me. Anyone can post links to stories, start a discussion, or make recommendations. If you have a Google account, you can join.

Now, onto the picks!

  • Soul Song By Frankie Seymour
    I’m always down with a story about animal rights (not to mention cool, futuristic animals). Post-apocalyptic.
  • Terrain by Genevieve Valentine
    All the classic elements of the good Western are here, inflected with steampunk gadgetry as well as characters you would have found in the real west but aren’t usually the protagonists of the media about the time period.
  • Blood Amber by Keyan Bowes
    A folk tale-ish story that had me imagining how much I’d love to sail away on a magical boat that provided me with food every day. The ending doesn’t quite stick its landing. The overall story holds together, though.
  • A to Z Theory by Toh EnJoe
    There are so many ways to make fun of academia, and I’m sure anyone who’s had to deal with journal articles and competing theorems and dramas around such will appreciate this story. However, there’s another group of folks who will as well and i can’t say why without a spoiler. It’s twistier than it seem, trust me.
  • Armistice Day by Marissa Lingen
    While reading this, I kept getting the feeling that the creatures in the story were inspired by the house elves of Harry Potter. No idea if that’s true. Politics and revolution.
  • The Bolt Tightener by Sarena Ulibarri
    The old man told him not to skip a bolt. There’s a reason!
  • Bakemono, or The Thing That Changes by A.B. Treadwell
    Some interesting perspectives on assimilation and betrayal here.
  • A Family for Drakes by Margaret Ronald
    Though this feels like a setup for a novel starring Netta and Vigil, I have no problem with that. I’d like to see their further adventures given how well crafted their characters are in this piece. Good mix of adventure, mystery, and young girl kicking ass.
  • The Rescue by Margrét Helgadóttir
    I find it hard to pin down why I like this story as it’s complex, and there are several elements that engaged me on different levels. Characters dealing with solitude and duty, the devastation of discovering the world isn’t the way you’ve been taught, the struggle with self-doubt.
  • Built in a Day by Anna Caro
    I’m not sure I completely grokked this story entirely. I just like the way it spiraled through my brain and made me think and ponder and try to work it out.
  • Eternal Return by Rodolfo Martínez
    Even “minor” superpowers have their uses. Fun story of discovery that combines elements of the Groundhog’s Day theme — living a moment over and over until you get it right. From the page: “Eternal Return” was published in Spanish in Porciones individuales (February 2013, Sportula). This is its first publication in English.
  • Painted Birds and Shivered Bones by Kat Howard
    I’m a big proponent of the connection between the artist and the spiritual or even the magical world, and this story illuminates that connection well.
  • PauseTime by Mary Soon Lee
    I like that this story deals with issues you don’t often see in science fiction, like child rearing and single parenthood and how difficult it can be to raise a baby and get work done. Also the cruelty of bougie parents who value men over women. This is a story about a society that values men over women and children in a general, and it’s so harmful. Excellent commentary on our own society’s attitudes towards both.
  • The Lady Astronaut of Mars by Mary Robinette Kowal
    This story snuck up on me. I enjoy the alternate history-ness of it as well as the idea of a woman being the poster girl astronaut because the government needed to convince housewives that space travel is safe.
  • My Voice is in My Sword by Kate Elliott
    Another from the Shakespeare issue. There is so much excellence in this story. It’s for everyone who has ever loved the Scottish play and everyone who has ever had to put up with an insufferable jerk for no good reason and everyone who appreciates just desserts. I love the aliens, not only for their small role in the plot, but for how very alien they are.
  • Early Retirement By Kris Herndon
    Herndon is trying to do a lot of things with this story, and it works for the most part but doesn’t *quite* get there in the end. However, I have it on this list because, for all the reaching and falling short, the story did engage me with the main character and the setup of the world. Superheroes as corporate drones, executives pondering the nature of power and the drawbacks of such. It’s a nice blend of mundane and fantastic. (The ending I could do without.)
  • Gravity by Erzebet YellowBoy
    The hook for me is the relationship between the mother and daughter here, though that’s only one aspect of the story that I liked. A small group of people sent on a mission to the sun, hailed as heroes who will save an entire planet. You’d think a story of triumph, right? Nope. The way Yellowboy explores what goes on with these characters is both familiar and fresh.
  • The Wanderers by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam
    The SFnal furniture the author plays with here is the stuff of (what could be) tired old tropes by now. Post-apocalypse, first contact, evil aliens. This story remixes those concepts in a way that’s both fun and also makes the tropes feel fresher, in a way. Punk aliens, even if they are into splatterpunk, rock.

Visit my Favorite Fiction tag to see all the other short stories I’ve liked so far this year.

Favorite Fiction from January 2013; New Related Projects; Fiction Review Contraption?

By:  TempestFavorites and Recommendations
Favorite Fiction from January 2013; New Related Projects; Fiction Review Contraption?

First favorite fiction post of 2013 and there is a lot to talk about besides the fic I liked! I’ll begin with business.

First, I am posting a short list of favorite fic every month over at io9 now. Click here to see January’s picks. Each month I’ll choose my top favorites, usually 5 or so, to list there. I’ll also do more with print/subscription/non-free fiction there and podcasts. That list won’t mean that these lists will go away, though. There are shorts listed here that aren’t listed there.

Second, I’m now part of the Not If You Were The Last Short Story On Earth crew, so I will contribute to the Twitter account and possibly the podcast (I’m not in Australia or anything, so I have no clue how that works). So if you want to keep up with the stories I like as I read them, follow that account. I’m not the only one who tweets, so you get bonus thoughts from other folks doing the same thing I am.

Last, ever since I started reading short fic regularly I’ve wanted to have a place where I could go to have discussions about the stories. Not just the stories I like, but the ones I don’t that I still find interesting enough to discuss. Last time I brought this up on Twitter many were interested, so I’m bringing it up again. The thing I’m unsure about is where to host this discussion. G+ communities are now live and could work. DreamWidth communities might be better since it can be a little bit (but not totally) private. I’m just worried about people who may want to join the discussion feeling like they can’t unless they join DreamWidth. Maybe that’s an unfounded concern. Anyway, I would love to hear suggestions on this.

Okay, all that taken care of, it’s now time for the favorites list!

  • The Advocate by Genevieve Valentine
    Politics, bureaucracy, government ineptitude, the ambitions of petty little men. Too often stories with these elements end up being just as banal and annoying as dealing with them in real life. Here you get a reverse effect. The politicking leads to the result it usually does: something or someone is in danger. Valentine has a way of quietly and sneakily engaging you so that the reader is invested in the outcome as much as any of the characters, mainly because most of us know too well that these things rarely turn out well in real life.
  • Eleutherios by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller
    This one is a freebie from Baen and takes place in the Liaden Universe. I wasn’t aware of any of this when I read the story and I’m not at all familiar with the work of Lee and Miller. I say this to point out that the story works well on its own with no need for prior knowledge of the world. The story hooked me with the early description of a damaged organ cared for by a monk who longs to hear it played again. The Abbey he resides in also serves as a detention center of sorts for criminals awaiting trial. The story takes its time weaving together the prisoner’s story with the fate of the monk and the organ, but the payoff is well worth it. A quiet but satisfying story.
  • Daltharee by Jeffrey Ford [reprint]
    What starts out as a simple story about growing a city in a bottle takes a philosophical, then a dark turn. As you’d expect from Ford, this all flows smoothly and it’s engaging right from the start.
  • Selkie Stories Are for Losers by Sofia Samatar
    Selkie moms are the worst. Human moms can be pretty bad, too. A story about what daughters go through when their moms let them down, and there are many ways in which a mom might let a daughter down. The tone of this piece hovers between snarky, lighthearted, longing, and despairing and balances all of that really well.
  • Inventory by Carmen Maria Machado
    I’m a fan of stories with non-traditional structures, and this one combines that with my love of lists. The protagonists looks back across her life and the things that led to her current state by listing all the people she’s had sexual encounters with in order to stay sane. It’s an interesting lens with which to examine a life.
  • Goddess By Lavanya Karthik
    TRIGGER WARNING: abuse and child abuse. In times of scarcity and uncertainty, there are always people ready to take advantage of the fears and desperation of others, especially in spiritual matters. That’s the world Karthik drops us into with this story, thus it’s fitting that it opens with dreams of extreme bloodshed. The story is somewhat jangly and could do with some smoothing of the structure to eliminate confusion in the beginning, but once I got past that the characters and situation ended up being very compelling.
  • Staying Behind by Ken Liu
    In this post-Singularity story, the humans of Earth look on those who’ve decided to upload their consciousness to machines as “the Dead”, which is an interesting way to frame the issue. It’s almost a reverse ancestor worship. I liked the story, but wouldn’t say it’s one of Liu’s best. It’s a bit more straightforward than his really good fiction, but you can tell he’s going for something deeper than what’s on the surface. That reaching doesn’t mar the story in any way.
  • The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics by Daniel Abraham [reprint]
    It’s said that artists often create the best works of art when under some kind of forced restriction. This story proves the point well. originally published in “Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories” where each author had to craft a story around a specific word. The word in question here is Cambist, and Abraham masterfully crafts a story around a word that is unlikely to be found on most modern fiction, even fantasy fiction. And while the structure is that of a fairy tale, it’s by no means slight.
  • The Patrician by Tansy Rayner Roberts
    A monster hunting story with all the usual trappings, but told from the perspective of a woman as she grows from a teenager living an isolated life in a tourist town to a grandmother. I like the scope of this story as well as the viewpoint.
  • The Message Between The Words by Grayson Bray Morris
    This is the type of story where the idea is more powerful than the plot itself, yet somehow it still manages to come together well in the end. The protagonist is also engaging, which helps. Overall, this story kind of tumbles together well even though individual aspects of it don’t quite work.
  • Trixie and the Pandas of Dread by Eugie Foster
    My love for this story is white hot and burning like the sun. Trixie is a goddess of wrath, but she wasn’t born one and still struggles to reconcile her goddess-self with her mortal brain. Oh, and she smites jerks and assholes. And I love her.
  • The Performance Artist by Lettie Prell
    This story admittedly drew me in because I’ve seen my share of performance art, most of it ridiculous and pretentious and not worth my time. A common experience when witnessing PA was the reaction from the audience. People who tried to justify the mess in front of them by assigning it artistic merit or pretending to understand the “meaning” or the artist’s intent. There are reactions you could count on hearing no matter what the art. Prell nails that in this story, and this elements makes the ending more powerful for it.

Visit my Favorite Fiction tag to see all the other short stories I’ve liked so far this year.

The Best Short Fiction of 2012 (According To Me) + 2012 Fiction Stats

By:  TempestFavorites and Recommendations

Now that I’ve finished reading short stories for 2012, it’s time for some lists and statistics! I know, I know, lists can be boring. But not this one. I put together a list of what I consider the best short fiction of 2012. This is culled from my Favorite fiction lists I’ve been doing all year. Keep in mind that this is pretty much limited to free fiction online, so it doesn’t include stories from print mags like F&SF, Asimov’s, and the like.

If you plan on nominating works for awards, I encourage you to consider these. All are eligible for the Hugo, and some are eligible for other awards (I marked the ones I could think of below).

I’ve listed them in chronological order from most recently published backwards.

  • The Wisdom of Ants by Thoraiya Dyer
    Though this story is pure science fiction, it has a fantasy sensibility that I deeply love. Here again is that thing I like to read about: female empowerment mixed in with some coming of age. And comeuppance. I love me some comeuppance.
  • Good Hunting by Ken Liu
    Yet another amazing Ken Liu story. His works aren’t always a home run, but when he’s on he’s really good, and this story is just more evidence of that. There are several layers of complexity here as he folds in colonialism, imperialism, and cultural death while addressing issues of sexism and even rape culture (there are no on-screen rapes, though). Very finely crafted story. [World Fantasy, Carl Brandon Parallax Award & Kindred Award]
  • Household Management by Ellen Klages
    Sherlock Holmes fans who love Mrs. Hudson will love this story. And I’m not just talking people who like BBC Sherlock or the Downey/Law movies or people who’ve read the books and stories. It’s one that works across many of the different Sherlock-infused medium (at least, the ones that include this character. Sorry Elementary fans). short and fun and very on point (and feminist, too).
  • How to Make a Triffid by Kelly Lagor
    Despite not being a huge science geek myself, I love the way this piece entwines hardcore biological science with a richly-told character exploration and doesn’t force me to feel one particular way about the protagonist in the end. Really complex and great.
  • One Little Room an Everywhere by K.J. Parker
    This story could be read as a fun little romp, but I like the intricacies of the magic system and the protagonist. [World Fantasy]
  • The King’s Huntsman by Jennifer Mason-Black [novelette]
    This is a novelette, so be prepared to settle in for a long read. It’s well worth it, since this story uses the space to develop the main character and the world very well. Though it seems like your standard woman passing as a man in repressive patriarchy for the sake of freedom story, Mason-Black goes beyond that basic trope. I don’t know that it quite reaches the resonance the author was going for in the end, but it comes very close. [World Fantasy]
  • Said the Princess by Dani Atkinson
    DailySF usually doesn’t publish stuff I like, but this one caught me off guard. The quirkiness, mostly, and also the meta aspect. In the end it’s fun without being fluff, and I appreciated what the author did to solve the central problem. [World Fantasy]
  • The 17th Contest of Body Artistry by Alex Dally MacFarlane
    Obviously, I’m a fan of stories that take some format other than a straight up narrative, so this one hits my kink in that arena. Plus, it’s just very good and once again has me thinking about aspects of my own worldbuilding. The things that can be revealed about a culture from such things as an art contest and how people react to it is many and varied. Lovity love.
  • Mrs. Henderson’s Cemetery Dance by Carrie Cuinn
    I had no idea where this story was going when I started, but I loved where it ended up. Funny and touching.
  • Breaking the Frame by Kat Howard
    There are a million post modern, female centric takes on fairy tales out there, but I particularly like the frame (hahaha) Howard uses for this story. At first I was not down with the cliched relationship at the beginning, then I realized the author was doing that for more than just hipster irony. Highly recommended.
  • The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species by Ken Liu
    “Everyone makes books.” Not only do I just love this story for the glimpses into other worlds and other species, I also love that it made me start thinking about the kind of books exist in the worlds I create in fiction. Oddly, it’s not a question I generally ask myself, though you’d think it would be one of the first things to come to mind. Wouldn’t this make an excellent interview question for any writer? What kind of books do your characters create? [Carl Brandon Parallax Award]
  • Mantis Wives by Kij Johnson
    I’m not entirely sure this is science fiction or fantasy, but it’s certainly speculative. Regardless, Johnson pulled me in with the descriptions of these intricate art pieces.
  • Fade to White by Catherynne M. Valente
    Because I read the first paragraph of this story, got interrupted, then came back later, I didn’t remember that Cat wrote it until I got to the end and went back to read it again. I love, love, loved this and I already suggested it to the Tiptree jury. I really dug the way she played with gender roles and with the commentary on advertising and marketing slyly added in. It’s just a really good story, go read. [Sturgeon Award]
  • Song Of The Body Cartographer by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz
    I love this story’s worldbuilding and the characters. Though I felt it wasn’t truly complete the first time I read it, the great elements stuck with me for months. [World Fantasy, Carl Brandon Parallax Award & Kindred Award]
  • Astrophilia by Carrie Vaughn
    Post-apocalyptic stuff usually isn’t my thing, but this story manages to make that trope feel less like window dressing than most other stories I’ve read.
  • Winter Scheming by Brit Mandelo
    [TRIGGER WARNING: Domestic Violence.] What I like best about this story is that it starts out in an unexpected way given what’s really going on (which you understand at the end). Very well structured and executed.
  • Daddy’s Girl by Amy Sundberg
    I love the main character of this story like burning. She’s is so damn fierce!
  • Her Words Like Hunting Vixens Spring by Brooke Bolander
    Revenge story! And it doesn’t pull punches in the end. I am a fan of that.
  • Recognizing Gabe: un cuento de hadas by Alberto Yáñez
    This gorgeous folktale-like story is fierce and forthright, which I love. It also doesn’t go for easy sentimentality, which it could have slipped into with a lesser author. Yanez explores gender issues without being preachy or prescriptive. That’s not easy to pull off, but he does. [World Fantasy, Carl Brandon Parallax Award & Kindred Award]

Now as to stats.

There are 19 stories on my best of list, that’s out of 82 favorite stories for 2012. I don’t have an accurate count for how many stories I read in total, sadly, but I know I read a great deal. I can’t claim to have read every story published for free online. A lot of time I stuck to the magazines I know I like the most. But toward the middle of the year I did pick up some new reading and tried to dip into new-to-me markets more often.

Just taking the 19 stories on my Best Of list, it’s clear that I dig Clarkesworld and Lightspeed Magazines the most, since there are 4 stories from each. Next is Strange Horizons, with two stories that made the list. (Also keep in mind that this only represents stories published in 2012 and not reprints from other years).

This pattern pretty much holds when you look at the breakdown of all magazines that made my favorites list this year.

Lightspeed is at the top (again, this is with originals) followed closely by Clarkesworld and Strange Horizons. Apex also has a good showing. After that it drops pretty dramatically. For some magazines, this is because they publish far fewer stories in a year. Eclipse Online is new, so the percentage of stories I’ve liked from the magazine is high, relatively. However, it is telling that DailySF is only on my list once. If you include the reprints I liked (9 total) then Lightspeed gets 22 thumbs up from me for the year.

I would be interested to hear from the editors of these magazines on how many stories they published in 2012 so I can get an idea of what percentage of their offerings I liked.

Of my favorite stories, 60 were written by women and only 19 written by men. Two were written by persons of unknown (to me) gender. There are 18 authors of color on my favorites list. Most of the male authors I like are POC.

The SF/F split continues to be about even. 48 of the stories I liked are science fiction and 51 are fantasy. Only 4 horror stories and 3 I classed as Interstitial (with some overlap with SF/F).

Several authors show up in my favorites more than once: Aliette de Bodard, Rahul Kanakia, Ken Liu. This is partially a testament to how prolific they are, but also does represent my fondness for them. Liu in particular comes to mind whenever someone asks me about favorite authors or for suggestions on what to read. Should also mention here that I’m in Diverse Energies with both Liu and Kanakia — to be in this company makes me very happy. (I also really liked their stories.)

Overall, I’ve enjoyed reading all this short fiction in 2012. It’s definitely inspired me to write more. Plus, I like being able to see the growing expansion of the genre as I discover new gems. I will continue to read as much short fiction as possible in 2013. In fact, I’ll likely read way more.

The crew over at Not If You Were The Last Short Story On Earth asked me to join the blog, and I happily said yes. So more print mags are in my future. I also talked to AnnaLee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders about possibly doing a short fiction roundup for io9. Hopefully that will happen this month.

You can see all of the short stories I liked this year by surfing the tag on my blog or over on Delicious. On Delicious you’ll see some more numbers that may interest you.

My Favorite Fiction from November and December 2012

By:  TempestFavorites and Recommendations

Welcome to 2013, everyone! Since I was so abominably late with my October favorites I decided to spend my vacation time reading and thus get you my final favorites for 2012 just as we rang in the new year. In a separate post I’ll also put up my top picks for the year. The stories that I would put in a year’s best collection were I in charge of one.

There’s a nice, long list of great stories here with some new names among them.

  • Relic by Jeffrey Ford
    This story sits on the line between SF and F and sticks out it’s tongue at anyone who wants to drag it firmly into one territory or another. It entreats you into the narrative in waves and even when you think you understand where it’s going and what it’s doing, there’s another bend and there’s that tongue again. Very well crafted and evocative.
  • Labyrinth by Mari Ness
    Lovely and crunchy and dark, which is pretty classic Mari Ness. And you’ll hear no complaints from me about it as this story wrapped itself around me right from the start. A labyrinth!
  • The Wisdom of Ants by Thoraiya Dyer
    Though this story is pure science fiction, it has a fantasy sensibility that I deeply love. Here again is that thing I like to read about: female empowerment mixed in with some coming of age. And comeuppance. I love me some comeuppance.
  • Sprig by Alex Bledsoe
    This story is nice and cute and fun and I adored it. I’m more of a sucker for fairies than you’d imagine.
  • Firebugs by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
    I found this story really moving and engaging and I don’t feel like I’ve even plumbed its depths properly. I want to sit down with it again after a few months and read it for fresh insights. As always, Hoffman piles on so many layers and is doing so many different things that it’s possible to read it in various ways and still grok the story. Excellent.
  • A Well-Adjusted Man by Tom Crosshill
    Trigger warning on this for violence and hints of domestic violence. This dystopia isn’t so very far away from where we are now. Not in internal chronology, but culturally. Good read.
  • Seven Smiles and Seven Frowns by Richard Bowes
    I often groan when I see fantasy authors trying to create credible myths and folk tales for their created worlds. Often, they’re bad at it because they don’t understand how mythology works and the purpose of tales told to The People. So, I say to all you fantasy authors out there, if you want to create some myths and tales, read the story first. It’s also just a really good story. (With badass women)
  • A Game of Rats and Dragon by Tobias S. Buckell
    The comment thread in this story was the scene of a rather ridiculous flamewar which I fear may have overshadowed the story itself, which is quite good. I love the idea of people living out their lives in a real time, real life massively multiplayer game. And, of course, in a world like that you’ll have people scraping together a living taking small part in those worlds. I felt that the emotional resonance at the end didn’t satisfy me as much as I would have liked given the world Buckell builds up, but it does prime me for more stories or even a novel with this backdrop, perhaps even with these characters.
  • Searching for Slave Leia by Sandra McDonald
    Even though this kind o story could easy be waved off as geek pandering because of how meta it is, I think McDonald manages to avoid being twee and get to something deeper and more interesting than just fan service.
  • As the Wheel Turns by Aliette de Bodard
    It is not surprising that this story was first published in an anthology called EPIC, because that’s what it is. Cycles of reincarnation and pain plus a woman finding her power. All good stuff.
  • Good Hunting by Ken Liu
    Yet another amazing Ken Liu story. His works aren’t always a home run, but when he’s on he’s really good, and this story is just more evidence of that. There are several layers of complexity here as he folds in colonialism, imperialism, and cultural death while addressing issues of sexism and even rape culture (there are no on-screen rapes, though). Very finely crafted story.
  • Household Management by Ellen Klages
    Sherlock Holmes fans who love Mrs. Hudson will love this story. And I’m not just talking people who like BBC Sherlock or the Downey/Law movies or people who’ve read the books and stories. It’s one that works across many of the different Sherlock-inflused medium (at least, the ones that include this character. Sorry Elementary fans). short and fun and very on point (and feminist, too).
  • The Memory Eater by Holly Day
    This story is very evocative and creepy, but I wish that in the end I understood better what exactly was going on. However, I kept thinking about the story for several days after I read it, which is a good sign.
  • How to Make a Triffid by Kelly Lagor
    Despite not being a huge science geek myself, I love the way this piece entwines hardcore biological science with a richly-told character exploration and doesn’t force me to feel one particular way about the protagonist in the end. Really complex and great.
  • Heads Will Roll by Lish McBride
    I have a dubious history with unicorn stories, but give me something about badass women raining down vengeance on the deserving and you have me hooked. While this reads clearly to me as the backstory to a fabulous novel, I think it resolves itself in a satisfying way. And again: badass women get me almost every time.
  • America Thief by Alter S. Reiss
    A period piece that combines gangsters with magic. I like the moral ambiguity going on here as well as the evocation of the cultures roiling around with each other.
  • The Hateful Brilliance of His Eyes by Alec Austin
    This is a fun story, though it doesn’t come off that way at first. I imagine that there are many buddy tales of Liao Jun and Yan Ming that are equally entertaining in this author’s future (or perhaps they already exist). One of the things I like about it is that even though there’s clearly a history between these two and there are clearly more adventures, this is a complete story in itself that resolves satisfyingly on both a character and plot level. Well done!

Visit my Favorite Fiction tag to see all the other short stories I’ve liked so far this year.

My Favorite Fiction From October 2012

By:  TempestFavorites and Recommendations

Yeah… so October. I realized today that the reason I’m behind on posting this list is that I just haven’t had the energy to write up a little review/summary of why I like these stories. And that continues and continues to be the case. Since we’re deep into December and I haven’t even posted November’s picks yet, I figured I would just toss the list up.

Here’s what I’ll say about them all: I liked each of these stories and loved others. If I had to pick out one that stood out, it’s Said The Princess. That one totally charmed and amused me. I think I was most surprised because Daily Science Fiction rarely publishes anything I like.

Visit my Favorite Fiction tag to see all the other short stories I’ve liked so far this year.