short stories

Sunday recs: Strange stuff

Published on by Sara Norja

Three strange stories for you this Sunday.

Seven Commentaries on an Imperfect Land by Ruthanna Emrys (at Tor.com). A haunting, weird story about a magic land that exists in the interstices of life, and the people who live in it. Gorgeous illustrations too.

Speaking to Skull Kings by Emily B. Cataneo (at Betwixt Magazine). The world of this story is bleak and bizarre but fascinating, with strange skull kings rattling in a forest.

Observations About Eggs from the Man Sitting Next to Me on a Flight from Chicago, Illinois to Cedar Rapids, Iowa by Carmen Maria Machado (at Lightspeed). Eggs and parallel universes. Weird but intriguing.

Sunday recs: Happy-making stuff

Published on by Sara Norja

It’s still Sunday even though it’s past midnight, since I haven’t gone to bed yet, right?

Here’s three recs that I hope will make you feel as fuzzy inside as they made me:

Turnover by Jo Walton (at Lightspeed Magazine): beautiful, optimistic SF set in a spaceship called Speranza (the name isn’t subtle and I don’t even care).

Witch, Beast, Saint: an Erotic Fairy Tale by C.S.E. Cooney (at Strange Horizons): a strange and beautiful love story with a great narrator. (Note: it is indeed erotica and thus fairly explicit.)

Freyja by Nina Pelaez (at Goblin Fruit – vintage GF from 2011): a golden poem filled with summer-happiness.

Long Hidden – a brief review

Published on by Sara Norja

I recently finished reading the anthology I got this May – Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History. Here’s how the editors (Rose Fox and Daniel José Older) describe it:

There is a long and honorable legacy of literary resistance to erasure. This anthology partakes of that legacy. It will feature stories from the margins of speculative history, each taking place between 1400 and the early 1900s and putting a speculative twist—an element of science fiction, fantasy, horror, or the unclassifiably strange—on real past events. — See more at: http://longhidden.com/#sthash.oZotn2JT.dpuf

First of all: this is an excellent anthology. Get it, read it, be happy that it exists! Reading the stories in Long Hidden, I found myself wishing that every anthology and magazine would feature such a diversity of characters and settings. So refreshing, so inspiring to read stories where straight white guy is not the default main character. Also, I really like the concept of historically-based speculative fiction. (Should write more of that stuff myself, in fact.)

The time periods in the stories skew towards the 19th and (early) 20th centuries, and the settings towards the USA. This is understandable, because a) it’s easier for non-historians to write about time periods closer to our own, and b) more people wanting to write about the US submitted stories I guess? Anyway, the diversity of character even within the 19th–20th-century and the US-based stories is awesome. I would’ve loved to see more pre-19th-century stuff, but that’s just my love for pre-industrial periods showing. 🙂

Some favourites from the anthology include (in the order they appear in the book):

  • ‘The Oud’ by Thoraiya Dyer (1633, The Shouf, Ottoman Empire) – lyrical, strange, music and demons.
  • ‘Across the Seam’ by Sunny Moraine (1897, Lattimer, Pennsylvania) – Baba Yaga and gender.
  • ‘Each Part Without Mercy’ by Meg Jayanth (1746, Madras, India) – dream-magic and an especially cool setting.
  • ‘The Colts’ by Benjamin Parzybok (1514, Hungary) – zombie soldiers!
  • ‘A Deeper Echo’ by David Jón Fuller (1919, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada) – shapeshifting and family dynamics.
  • ‘Find Me Unafraid’ by Shanaé Brown (1905, Charlotte, North Carolina) – empowering magic.
  • ‘Medu’ by Lisa Bolekaja (1877, Ellsworth, Kansas) – some pretty damn awesome hair.
  • ‘The Dance of the White Demons’ by Sabrina Vourvoulias (1524, Guatemala) – fighting colonisers with earth magic.

All the other stories are great too: this is an excellent collection and a highly enjoyable read. I hope that Rose Fox and Daniel José Older will consider editing more anthologies in this vein, because I’d love to see more like this!

(Kinda) Sunday recs

Published on by Sara Norja

It’s past midnight but I’m still calling this Sunday recs because I haven’t gone to bed yet. Days, this is how they work. I’ve been good and gone to sleep before 1am for the past couple of nights, but it’s not going to happen today. But for a good reason: I’ve spent six hours editing a novelette (start to finish) and didn’t finish till past 11pm, after which I had to make the dinner that I’d neglected making earlier. Only now am I full enough and coming down from the writing high enough to even consider bed.

Anyway, enough babbling. Here’s some fairytale-themed pieces that I’ve enjoyed:

Fitting In by Katrina Robinson (in Enchanted Conversation: A Fairy Tale Magazine): this is a pretty awesome Cinderella poem – from the shoe’s point of view!

The Faerie Tailor by Suzanne J. Willis (in Goldfish Grimm’s Spicy Fiction Sushi): gorgeous flash piece, such lyrical prose.

Recognizing Gabe: un cuento de hadas by Alberto Yáñez (in Strange Horizons): this is such an amazing story! A powerful, beautiful story of a trans kid with a fairy godmother.

Sunday recs: Two poems, two stories

Published on by Sara Norja

Long time no Sunday recs. In my defence, the past month or so was intensively filled by doing PhD applications. Last weekend was my first in ages when I was free to do non-academia stuff, so I shamefully neglected my blog. But now! Rec time!

First let’s have an invocation to The God of Lost Things by Neile Graham (in Strange Horizons). The wordcraft here is wonderful, and I can picture the little god so vividly. This poem reminds me of intricate Anglo-Saxon and Celtic miniatures.

Then Hair by Hel Gurney (in Stone Telling). I have long hair – have had, for most of my life – and this poem really resonates with me. Hair holds so much cultural meaning; long hair, in particular, is a marker that no doubt usually gets me read as straight; and yet in the end, I wear my hair long for me. Gurney’s poem manages to catch some of my feelings about my hair (sans the implications of gender dysphoria) – amazing when poetry does that, shows your own self reflected in someone else’s words!

Now for the stories.

As you may know if you’ve read such poems by me as The Understanding, I have a major thing for fiction/poetry that uses the conventions of historical manuscripts and their editing as a literary device. Well, to my delight I discovered that the wonderful Amal El-Mohtar has written a story employing such conceits: The Green Book (in Apex Magazine). There’s a lot of subtle worldbuilding in this story that left me wondering and wanting more set in the story-world. I love how the story unfolds solely as a fragmented document – so well done. Also, I love the marginal notes. Manuscript-studies fiction ♥

My final rec of the day is The Astrologer’s Telling by Therese Arkenberg. This is a poetic apocalypse story with a really intriguing premise and a strong focus on the human experience and the characters despite the cataclysmic events. Astrology in science fiction!

Sunday recs: Mundanity, elephants, opera and a coffee shop

Published on by Sara Norja

This week’s Sunday Recs presents four very different stories – all of them awesome. (Well, duh, otherwise I’d hardly be recommending that you read them!)

Relentlessly Mundane by Jo Walton. This was published in Strange Horizons 14 years ago, but I only just found it while looking for, like, everything that Jo Walton has written ever. (I’ve enjoyed every novel of hers that I’ve read so far; should read the remaining ones too.) Anyway, ‘Relentlessly Mundane’ is a response to the question I’m sure a lot of us have had after reading the Narnia books: coming back home after saving the other world, how do you go back to ordinary life?

Njàbò by Claude Lalumière, in Expanded Horizons. Intriguing story with a warm strangeness to it. I’m actually not sure about the ending – it didn’t entirely work for me – but I really liked the story otherwise. The atmosphere is really unique, and there are polyamorous relationships that just exist as part of the background of the story, not as anything “edgy”. Refreshing and awesome.

The Suitcase Aria by Marissa Lingen, in Strange Horizons. The setting in this story isn’t something you see in every other specfic: it’s a weird eighteenth-century Berlin opera house. The strangeness in this nix story is nicely subtle.

Today’s final rec is Surprise Me by Andrew Knighton, in Daily Science Fiction. This story about a special sort of coffee shop is just adorable. Read it and feel all warm and fuzzy inside!

Sunday recs: Speculative prose and two issues’-worth of poetry

Published on by Sara Norja

I was thinking of posting a rant about how difficult writing fiction in Finnish is for me (I was attempting such a thing last night), but I think I’ll go for Sunday recs instead. How my bilingualism comes across in my writing is a topic I want to write a more thoughtful post on.

So, on to other people’s writing:

Prose

Two stories I’ve recently read and enjoyed:

In the Greenwood by Mari Ness at Tor.com. I’ve always liked Robin Hood stories, and this was a nice take on the tale. When a tale is well-known, you can write around its edges. That often makes for intriguing stuff. (Also, the illustration is gorgeous!)

What Is Expected of a Wedding Host by Ken Liu at Daily Science Fiction. I love pieces that play with the forms a story can take – this list of instructions for a person accepting an alien parasite is a great example. Also, it’s quite funny too. Always appreciated. 🙂

Poetry

As for poetry – I’m going to rec two whole issues, because there was just too much intriguing stuff in them and they work so well as a whole.

February’s Snakeskin was a special issue featuring poetry comics – here. I was going to submit some stuff to it last autumn, but in the end I felt too busy and stressed out to work on anything “new” in terms of form. Sad. Anyway, poetry comics are a form I’m interested in, and it was great to see a whole collection of them in Snakeskin. It’s inspired me to do some of my own and not stress about it so much. The art doesn’t have to be perfect. It should be fun as well. Perhaps poetry comics could be a way of keeping up my old art hobby! (It’s mostly fallen by the wayside due to all the million other things I do.)

Stone Telling’s 10th issue, Body, is all-round amazing. I love the depth of thought that has gone into selecting the poems for this issue. They tie together so well. Read the whole issue! Some poems that especially hit me were The Honey Times by Cathy Bryant
and Trance for Insomniacs by J.C. Runolfson. C.S.E. Cooney’s And I’ll Dance With You Yet, My Darling is a great final poem for the issue.

Sunday recs: Two SF stories

Published on by Sara Norja

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.

Sunday recs: Kate Elliott and Ursula Le Guin

Published on by Sara Norja

To my intense delight, Kate Elliott posted a Valentine’s Day gift for her readers on her blog on Friday: a coda to her wonderful Spiritwalker trilogy (Cold Magic, Cold Fire, Cold Steel). Since it’s a coda, this novelette obviously contains massive spoilers. So, it will only make sense if you’ve read the trilogy. (If you haven’t, why, go and get yourself those books! I’ve plugged them here before, but really, I haven’t had such a squee reaction to a series in ages, and they totally deserve all the love they can get.) Anyway, the novelette was lovely, it resolved some things I’d really wanted to know about. And I do love getting more glimpses of the world Elliott’s created even though the trilogy has ended. 🙂

And for all of you who have not read the Spiritwalker trilogy, go and read Ursula K. Le Guin’s piece Elementals over at Lightspeed Magazine. This is a wonderful secret history type piece – it’s not really a story, in the traditional sense, but it’s wonderful. It made me think about what a glorious, secret planet we live on despite the mundanity of daily life.

I’m high on writing and folk music and dance tonight, so just these two recs for now. I think it’s time for me to go and find something to eat, and then perhaps write some more.