I’ve been reading some pretty awesome SF stories lately. Here are two favourites from Strange Horizons:

The Serial Killer’s Astronaut Daughter by Damien Angelica Walters. This near-future (I assume!) story set in a space station orbiting Earth treads the borderline of speculative and mainstream pretty neatly. Also, Aliens references FTW. 🙂

The Long Road to the Deep North by Lavie Tidhar. Simply put: this story blew me away with its awesomeness. It has poems in a linguistically viable asteroid pidgin! I love it when people deal with language in stories (and I often do so myself – can’t help it, I did linguistics at uni and language has always been deeply fascinating to me). The atmosphere is lush, full of the kind of science-fictional future details that I love: strange quirky things that build the story-world into such a delightful creature that I wish there was more of it. And yet this is a brilliant story exactly the way it is. I almost cried at the end because of the sheer beauty of words and images. Please read this. It’s an unconventional story in some ways, but so gorgeous.