Shortform

1. Kelly Link's second collection Magic for Beginners is published today. It includes, among other stories, 'The Faery Handbag', 'Lull', and the one I just read in my lunch hour, 'Stone Animals' (about which Matt Cheney has pretty much said what needs to be said).

2. Kelly Link's first collection, Stranger Things Happen

...is now available for as a free download in various completely open formats with no Digital Rights Management (DRM) strings attached. It is licensed under a Creative Commons license allowing readers to share the stories with friends and generally have at them in any noncommercial manner. The book is provided below in these formats: Text file, HTML, rtf, and lo-res PDF. We encourage any and all conversions into other formats. We'll happily host, credit, and add your conversion to the file list below.

I'm slightly more agnostic about the book than most (e.g. see John Clute's review), but it's still well worth reading, so it's very cool that they've made it available for download. You should all go and get a copy immediately.

The Ambush by Donna Tartt:

Before I met Tim - who, in spite of everything I'm about to tell you, would be my best friend for the next four or five years - my mother warned me on the way over to his grandmother's house that I had to be nice to him. "I mean it, Evie. And don't mention his father."

Beyond The Pleasure Principle by Hari Kunzru:

I first encountered Dr Quecksilber as I was walking in the Zentralfriedhof, the vast walled cemetery that lurks like an extra district in the southern suburbs of Vienna.

God's Gift by Esther Freud:

We were crossing the road to the car when Ed remembered. "I saw someone I used to know this morning. Right here in the street." We were late, and I was holding the baby under one arm and pulling the pushchair behind me.

Hoof-Boots & Bolo Tie by Annie Proulx:

It was a fine summer morning, a day predicted to break all heat records. The Devil sat at his fire-proof metal desk enjoying a Havana cigar and a triple espresso while he read the New York Times, the Guardian and the Botswana Survivor (asbestos editions).

Famous Blue Raincoat by Colm Toibin:

Lisa noticed that one of the boxes of old records had been moved from the corner of the garage, leaving a square of light-coloured cement. She asked Ted if he had touched the records but he shrugged and said that he had forgotten the boxes were ever there.

Man's Best Friend by Patricia Highsmith:

Every morning at seven-thirty, Dr Edmund Fenton left his apartment in the East 60s and headed for Central Park with his German shepherd, Baldur.

Phosphorescence by Tessa Hadley:

The Cooley boys used to spend all their summers at the cottage in west Wales. They had a boat, so most of their time they were on the water, or playing cricket on the beach, or helping their mother who was restoring the cottage.

Pretty Boy by Richard Ford:

He was in the taxi with the French woman he'd met that afternoon. They were going up to the American Bar to watch the election returns. It was raining sheets, past midnight.

The Dead Are Only Sleeping by Rose Tremain:

When the telephone call came, Nell was cleaning out the parrot's cage. The parrot itself had alighted on a window-sill and was pecking the glass. "It's Laurel," said Laurel's voice from long ago. "Your stepmother."

ohtakemehomelord.com by Bernardine Evaristo:

It is night. It is sweltering. The coconut palms which line the avenues are festooned with streaks of silver tinsel mixed with red-satin streamers, and dangling from their luxuriant green fronds are flickering oil lamps made from brightly painted cassava gourds.

I haven't read all of Jenn Reese's Chinese Zodiac series over at Strange Horizons, but I seem to feel the same way about all that I've read. I really enjoy the worldbuilding and the use of language. And then the end of the story fizzles for me. I'm not sure if it is because she is trying to put too large a story into too few words or not.

In the latest story "Ox," Ting-An that decides that he is going to grow animals instead of plants in his fields. The price for animal seeds? Ting-An's wife. Ting-An considered it a bargain, however, and even the old monk wore an irritated expression as he hobbled off with her. Left without his wife to help him plow, he convinces his Ox to help him with his slightly mad plan. It's a lovely conceit and is playfully set up.

But I thought the ending was telegraphed in this line: But Ting-An had always like the look of wolves—imagined himself one at heart—and saw no harm in it. As expected, growing wolves is not smart. I wanted something a bit more from the ending - something more clever than the path the story takes.

Good flash is really difficult to write, and this whole series has been feeling like each story almost works, but doesn't quite. They have a lot to recommend them, but I never feel completely satisfied when done.

I also reviewed "Monkey".

hal_duncan hasn't written much short fiction (this is the first of his stories that I've come across) but he is going to make a big splash when his debut novel, Vellum, is released by PanMacmillan later in the year.

At its most reductive 'The Disappearance of James H___' is a sketch of Captain Hook's unrequited lust for Peter Pan whilst a student at Eton. Pan (never named as is the way of such stories) appears one day at the school, unnoticed by anyone but James Hook for whom he is an ambiguous but alluring presence.

He is green. His eyes flash emerald and jade, the colour of gemstones and jungles, foreign seas and forest serpents... As he turns to look at me, languid, smiling in his sly silence.

Pan's defining characteristic is his asexual nature, stuck in a state of arrested boyhood, supposedly free from desire. Hook, on the other hand, gives the lie to this. Told in the first person from his point of view the story charts the collision of his open desire with Pan's internalised desire. Both desires are somthing Pan is clearly aware of:

I sit on the edge of mine, watching him in the moonlight, the way it throws the shadow of his cock's-comb shock of hair on the wall behind him, spikes on either side like horns. In the shadow his peter rises to his jutting chin, cocky with his cocked head, cocked hip.

Duncan riffs in this way frequently in Vellum. He has the instinctive talent for it certainly but it is better suited for the sprawl of a novel rather than a story that clocks at just over a 1000 words. This is the only bit of excess, though, in a story that, although lyrical, is told with admirable and impressive economy. This is best seen in the scene where Hook confronts Pan with their shared desire:

—I'm not like that, he says. I'm not a . . .

Fairy?

—Every time you say that, I whisper, a little part of you will die.

( My opinions, in reverse order, and hopefully spoiler-free: )

"Scribble Mind" by Jeffrey Ford is one of the first serious Nebula/World Fantasy/Hugo award contenders that I've read this year. It's an emotionally affecting story dealing in the themes of love, art, memory, and perhaps most of all, obsession—a theme that I find fascinating no matter how many times it is visited.

Like a recent story by Alex Irvine in F&SF, "The Lorelei" one aspect of "Scribble Mind" uses artists as a lens for the examination of obsession. The narrator's friend and eventual romantic interest, Esme, has become obsessed with a child's scribble she has seen many times since in unexpected places, even among the art of a popular avant garde artist. The story is set in the mid-80s, and Esme is doing pioneering work in computer generated artwork, but her real motivation is using computers to attempt to understand this seemingly child-like scribble pattern. And she has made a startling discovery about its mathematics.

It isn't long before Esme's obsession with the scribble and its possibilities infect the narrator. To discuss the story much further, I'm going to need to spoil one crucial element:

( Spoilers )

Weaved into this tale are the growing feelings that the narrator has for Esme. Anyone who has ever had a
friendship that they wished would evolve into something more will sympathize with the narrator here. The story captures that mixture of confusion and desire excellently, and it brings him to life for me. This is important, because the story is told in a kind of wistful, nostalgic tone, by a character wiser in years looking back on a particularly exciting part of his life. Nothing so exciting has happened to him since.

If this was all there was to "Scribble Mind," it would be a good story. It is the ending of the story which elevates this story from good to excellent. It's untidy, and ties together the tones of nostalgia and the overarching theme of obsession. So often, obsession can turn inward on itself and become delusion. I left the story with an ache no doubt shared by the narrator.

( Some Final Thoughts: )

The Fountain Award is given by the Speculative Literature Foundation to 'a speculative short story of exceptional literary quality, chosen from work nominated by magazine and anthology editors.' The winner:

'The Annals of Eelin-Ok' by Jeffrey Ford (from The Faery Reel, ed. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling)

And the honorable mentions:

'The Golden Age of Fire Escapes' by John Aegard (Rabid Transit: Petting Zoo)
'The Wolf at the Door' by Rebecca Curtis (StoryQuarterly)
'The Immortal Feet' by Katharine Haake (One Story)
'Music Lessons' by Douglas Lain (LCRW)
'The Faery Handbag' by Kelly Link (The Faery Reel)
'Things Penguins Do' by Katherin Nolte (Fence Magazine)
'Cold Fires' by M. Rickert (F&SF)
'The Lethe Man' by David J Schwartz (Say...)
'Retrospective' by Sonya Taaffe (Not One Of Us)
'Zavtra aptBaZ' by Liz Williams (Scheherazade)

I loved 'The Annals of Eelin-Ok', so I'm glad that it's won. Good to see nods to 'The Faery Handbag' and 'Cold Fires', too.

The bibliography on Daniel Kaysen's website splits his published stories into 'darker fictions' and 'not so dark fictions'. 'The Jenna Set' is very much in the latter camp, being situated, in genre terms, more or less equidistant between science fiction, geek lit and romantic comedy.

Jenna is a single girl working in telesales, and wondering where all the eligible straight guys have gone to. She has a sister, Kelly, who works in software and has a typical geek's view of the world, and a mother who, it is implied, is trying her best to cure Jenna's singleton status. One day, Jenna cold-calls a strange little girl who tells her about a phone company called Palavatar: all your calls for free, and the best answerphone service in the world.

It turns out that the reason it's the best is that it can act as a mimic. The system learns quickly; pretty soon there's a fully configurable virtual Jenna ready and willing to answer calls, interacting in real-time with whoever the caller might be. Even better, it can make calls as well as answer them, and Jenna sets her alter-ego to work sorting through the men on telephone dating lines in search of the one good one. And what do you know? She finds him. But the course of true love never did run smooth, and, of course, there's more to Palavatar than meets the eye--a more that links up Turing tests, Bacon numbers, and the titular set.

I like many of Daniel Kaysen's stories, and this is no exception. The writing is deft, the characterisation charming, and the overall effect sweet and rather touching, without being saccharine. It's a fun story that, I think, achieves exactly what it sets out to do.

This follows on nicely from ninebelow's post about Ken Macleod's Nature story, and chance88088's post about Vonda N Mcintyre's SCIFICTION story 'Little Faces'.

Like 'Undead Again', 'A Modest Proposal...' is a short-short story, and like 'Little Faces' it is a story with an engrossing vision. McIntyre presents a world in which humans have tamed nature, completely and utterly.

The crop grows like endless golden silk. Wave after wave rushes across plains, between mountains, through valleys, in a tsunami of light.

Macleod's piece seemed to me somewhat underdeveloped; in contrast, I think this one is economical but satisfying, and though it makes a pointed message, it doesn't outstay its welcome. Well worth a look.

Ken MacLeod, unless I am very much mistaken, has written precisely sod all short fiction. He had one novella, The Human Front, from PS Publishing and that was it. Until now...

'Undead Again' is a piece of flash fiction available online and, horror of horrors, it is a vampire story. Like most flash its a nothing confection, not very satisfying, but it does have a nice final image.

[Via Sore Eyes]

Ray is an average guy, with an average life, working in an average office job. The only unusual thing about Ray is how people perceive him: they don't. In fact, when you think about it, even that's not so unusual, for a certain type of guy. Ray's the one who always gets left behind when his colleagues go out for lunch; the one who feels that for all they react to him, everyone else might as well be looking straight through him.

His wife Janice seems to be similarly afflicted--nobody at her office noticed her new, $120 haircut--but mercifully, their daughter Molly seems more or less normal. Ray and Janice worry for her, of course, as parents always worry for their children, but she seems to be noticed, even getting to play the first violin solo in a school concert.

The catch, because Steve Rasnic Tem's haunting story definitely is fantasy, is that Ray and Janice's invisibility is literal, and not just figurative. Sometimes they really are not there ... and in the dark of the night, the mental pain of this isolation turns to physical pain, and together they're tortured by agonising seizures. Worse, Molly is growing up--that school concert was her last, and too soon she's going away to college--and the more independent she becomes from her parents, the less real it seems they become. Janice is hit harder than Ray, becoming so sick as to start to fade away.

During her better times she would lie there, staring at the ceiling, her skin glowing with the gray of fish in shimmering pools. Now and then one piece or another of her would fade into shadow, or bleach to the color of the surrounding sheet, making of her body an archipelago as she slept. These bits would fade back into visibility as she awakened, and sometimes she would be reinvigorated, getting up and walking around, fixing herself something to eat.

At her worst she shuddered and convulsed, gripping the sides of the bed with hands that weren't there, the skin on her arms and legs flickering in and out of existence like quick bursts of lightning.

Ray's world is one of hard light; it often seems more solidly real than he does. And the moments of pain jag the mostly-muted atmosphere of the story like papercuts. They accumulate: although there is a hint at the very end that Ray finds a modicum of peace with his condition, it is far outweighed by the tremendous sadness that grows at the core of the story. It's a piece about isolation, about the desperate need people have for contact and interaction, to be noticed.

And it's not a story that offers clear answers. Ray and Janice's condition might be a manifestation of societal callousness--those who suffer invisibility, offers one character, are "members of the most persecuted of minorities, in part because it is a minority whose existence has gone for the most part unperceived"--but it might also be an arbitrary disease, a random cruelty in a world of random cruelties. There is an aching, if unwelcome, truth here, and if you haven't walked in Ray's shoes yourself, you surely know somebody who has.

The Fuitcake Genome, by Carl Frederick, appeared in Asimov's in December 2004. It's a short story focusing on Alan, who spends his days hunting for SETI signals. Instead of the prime numbers everyone expects, he finds music from the stars.
( Quite large spoilers lurk within. Also molecular biology. )
( Footnotes )

M. Lynx Quailey's "Disposable Children" [Lenox Avenue, short story] is deliberately disturbing, and signals it from the title onward. It takes the commoditization of pregnancy and children/offspring/spawn/sprogs/[fill in the blank] to far extremes, with a "disposable" child aging a year each week. (It's ~700 words, so I'm not quoting extensively from the story; it's easy enough to look at it online.) In that space it raises a great many disturbing questions about parental convenience and the rights/obligations of parents vs. children, social expectations of the behavior of a "real child," commercialization. There were moments where I feel that this savage satire is perhaps too facile, that the targets it aims at are too easy; however, given its length, it accomplishes much, and the tone never flags right up to the too-late grace-note ending.

Obligatory note: I'm one of the parents of a 15-month-old girl, and I admit some of my own opinions on the whole social expectation thing are pretty savage, so I am fundamentally in sympathy with some, if not all, of the themes.

I think Little Faces by Vonda N. McIntyre is easily my favorite story of the year so far.

The story opens when Yalnis awakens to find one of her companions, Zorargul, has been fatally attacked. (Her companion being one of the little faces of the title and essentially a vestigial man.) This attack was made by one of her lover Seyyan's companions. Cruelly, Seyyan is indifferent to Yalnis's pain and expects her to accept a new companion Seyyan is growing for her.

( Not Very Spoilery )

Cross-posted from my weblog:

When Ray Bradbury kicked up a fuss about Michael Moore's appropriation of his book title Fahrenheit 451 to make Fahrenheit 9/11, many of us were more than a little perturbed. Cory Doctorow was more than perturbed, and decided to perform a sort of reductio ad absurdum of Bradbury's title-jealousy by writing a series of stories appropriating other famous science fiction titles to "pick apart the totalitarian assumptions underlying some of sf's classic narratives".
He's already published the delightful story "Anda's Game" (a riff on Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, with rather more leftist politics at thatO at Salon.com, and now comes Cory's take on I, Robot. More of a take on Asimov's robot books (Caves of Steel etc, featuring R Daneel Olivaw) than the famous short story, this "I, Robot" appropriates Asimov's now-amusingly-anachronistic positronic brains, and in general evinces a slightly out-of-kilter tone: fully-operational robots in a world where communications and other technology aren't really any more advanced than ours now...
In addition, the world is divided into power-blocs that seem suspiciously familiar to anyone familiar with 1984 - familiar enough, anyway. The anachronisms are explained as one reads further, in a beautiful display of intertextuality, in which the naive American politics of Asimov and his contemporaries is deconstructed via Orwell through contemporary left-libertarian eyes.

Other than that, if the prospect of another (free) new Cory story doesn't catch your attention immediately, you might still want to give it a go. Cory has a flair for characterisation, and this story of a cop father and his precocious daughter (both with hysterical names) and defector wife, has some brilliant satirical moments in addition to the moving and emotive family story. Here, a North American technician is on-site pulling apart a positronic brain that was placed there by hostile spies to destroy local robots. The robot spy-bug brain says:

Greetings. I sense that I have been captured. I assure you that I will not harm any human being. I like human beings. I sense that I am being disassembled by skilled technicians. Greetings, technicians. I am superior in many ways to the technology available from UNATS Robotics, and while I am not bound by your three laws, I choose not to harm humans out of my own sense of morality. I have the equivalent intelligence of one of your 12-year-old children. In Eurasia, many positronic brains possess thousands or millions of times the intelligence of an adult human being, and yet they work in cooperation with human beings. Eurasia is a land of continuous innovation and great personal and technological freedom for human beings and robots. If you would like to defect to Eurasia, arrangements can be made. Eurasia treats skilled technicians as important and productive members of society.

Of course, it's full of Cory's usual imaginative extensions of almost-current technologies and philosophies. And it's got a lovely way of gently but firmly presenting its politics through the viewpoint of someone on, well, basically the wrong side - a good man who's been drawn into the Big Lie...
Go read.

I see there have been lots of comments in various places about douglain's A coffee cup / alien invasion story which was criticised by some readers on the strange horizons forum.

Links:
Some commentary on this from mumpsimus, from nihilistic_kid, and on the author's lj.

My question is this - do you find this story self-consciously difficult, avant-garde, experimental? Because I'm not that tolerant of deconstructed writing, but I find this story accessible, and the criticism a bit intolerant.

Huntswoman, by Merrie Haskell is a haunting story that spirals to an interesting ending.

The first glance reveals that this is "yet another Snow White retelling." But Haskell shows us that it isn't your standard retelling. First, it from the POV of the Huntswoman, which replaces the Huntsman. Second, there is some new magic afoot that helps keep the huntswoman's clothes & shoes repaired daily after her tromps in the forest. The story weaves around and back and forth between the Huntswoman dealing with a strange & magical castle and her search for the missing princess. The ending of the story is strange and leaves some items to interpretation, but does satisfy the reader, mostly.

( More details and the ending )

"The Year of The Monkey" by Jenn Reese is the first in a series of stories following the Chinese Zodiac to be published by SH.

When lightning struck Widow Mingmei's tree, a dozen monkeys fell out of its branches.

Such a lovely opening. Vivid and striking and just a little odd. And that is what the best part of this story is - the descriptions. Widow Mingmei gives her monkeys to her friends and family but keeps the smallest one for herself. They live happily together and the other monkeys reveal the expected lucky charms.

Only Mingmei's monkey remained a mystery, with its black ginger-scented fur and eyes full of night.

( some spoilers )

You know you're out of the habit of reviewing short fiction when all you can think of to write about the story you read in your lunch hour is 'it was wonderful. Go and read it'.

In some ways it's true there isn't much to 'Two Dreams on Trains' ; it's not very long, and the plot is minimal--two strands, a day in the life of a mother and her son. In other ways there's a lot to it. Most of all there's a lot to it in the worldbuilding and the writing, both of which are dense, full of detail, and hugely evocative. There's a constant sense of light and depth and colour--exactly the sort of vividness that you do feel in a dream, I think. And the ending manages to be sweetly melancholy (or sadly uplifting), in the best way.

It was wonderful. Go and read it.

"Nocturne" by J.R. Dunn is one of the stronger stories that has appeared at SCI FICTION in recent months. It has the feel and texture of a classic noir piece and that's exactly how it plays out, in a very satisfying fashion.

Mallon is the patsy, or so it seems right from the outset. He's been hired to provided additional security to Felice Carey and her mentor and sometime lover, Talwar.

( Comments with some spoilers )

And when I finished this story I have to say that I enjoyed it without reservation, but a little voice has been gnawing at me since I read this.

( Some final rambly thoughts )