I’m focused on short stories for next year’s Hugos. So I thought, wouldn’t it be great if I could start sharing the stories I’m reading in a highly organized way? Well sure, that would be lovely, but let’s just start with the sharing. Then we’ll move on to organized, and later on see if we can eventually attach a highly in there as well. So here are some stories I read this past month that were not necessarily freshly published this month.
Untimely Frost, Unlikely Bloom, by Hayley Stone, in Flash Fiction Online, July 2018
Lovely, creepy, and sad, this is sort of a dark fairy tale of a poisonous person who kills any creature she comes in contact. It did bring up quite a few logistical questions as I read it—how did she survive to adulthood, and how is she managing to survive now—but you really just need to accept that it’s a fairy tale.
A Most Elegant Solution, by M. Darusha Wehm, in Terraform, April 27, 2018
People are always proud of their own creations, aren’t they? Even when those creations wind up devouring everyone. It was nice of them to kill everyone else first and leave mom for last, at least. That’s the scenario as the story begins, then goes into flashback to show how we got to that point. I think the story would be a bit stronger with the last couple of paragraphs (don’t think we needed the extra explanation), but I thoroughly enjoyed it.
A Song of Home, the Organ Grinds, by James Beamon, in Lightspeed, July 2018
Holy shit, this piece. Monkeys as weapons of war, controlled by an organ grinder… you know what, describing it isn’t going to do it justice, just go read it.
Waterbirds, by G.V. Anderson, in Lightspeed, July 2018
Celia is an A.I. Companion whose employer is missing. Celia’s memory about what exactly happened seems a bit hazy on a few details, and the more pieces are filled in, the more tense it gets. What’s going to become of poor Celia now that her benefactor is gone? G.V. Anderson won the World Fantasy Award Best Short Fiction for Das Steingeschöpf in 2017, and this story is a likely candidate to be brought up in award conversations next year.