The second round up of the year! Will these posts become a monthly thing? I hope not. I mean, that’s a good minimum, but I’d certainly like to do better than that! That’s something to worry about next week though. For now I’ve got some stories I really enjoyed to share with you. Most of them are very recent, one is not. Most are fairly long, one is not. Overall I think just about anyone should be able to find one story to enjoy from this selection, hopefully much more than that. I, of course, enjoyed them all.
“Carry On” by Seanan McGuire from Nightmare Magazine #78
Our first story is the only reprint I’m including this week. I’ve been trying to focus on new stories, but when I saw that there’s a story by Seanan McGuire out I had to give it a read. In the last few years she has become a must read author for me thanks to her Wayward Children novella series. Those books are magical, wonderful, and full of feels of every kind. This story packs some feelings of it’s own, and, I’ll warn you, they aren’t “good” but that should be expected from a horror story, shouldn’t it? That said, it’s important to note that this story is all about the intersection of our growing techno-dystopia and fatphobia and if that kind of trauma is going to be more than you want to read right now perhaps best to move on to the next rec.
I know I certainly found the horror at work here terribly realistic, very possible feeling, and all the more terrifying for it. In the very near future “Carry On” shows us simply being in line to check in for a flight to visit family has become an ordeal of psychological terror for anyone at the intersection of modest or less wealth and ample or more size. In this future you must purchase your ticket based on the poundage you’ll be bringing on the plane. The total poundage, yourself included. For Mary, every moment of the ordeal compounds and builds to almost unbearable levels of anxiety and embarrassment. As someone who once had to do a lot of expensive and trying flying to visit my family, who has had to repack a bag on the airport floor to avoid an extra charge, who has prayed that I’d have an empty seat next to me so as not to be the fat guy someone else feels uncomfortably stuck next to for 12 hours in spaces designed to cram people in to sell a few more tickets, dignity and comfort be damned, well, the horror of this story really, really worked for me and left me glad I don’t fly much anymore.1See the recent revelations about face recognition technology and it’s connection to the U.S. DHS? Flying pretty much already is a techno-dystopic thing. This story, much like the recently hugo nominated, S.T.E.T. by Sarah Gailey is all the more powerful for just how true and possible it feels.
“Fury at The Crossroads” by Troy L. Wiggins from Beneath Ceaseless Skies #276
Our longest story of the week at almost but not quite novelette length comes from Troy L. Wiggins, now a three-time recommended author in these roundups.Though it’s been over a year since I featured a story by Troy.2That said, his influence has been present on several occasions over the course of that year as he is the co-executive editor of FIYAH Magazine, a frequent source of quality recommendations. Despite that gap of time though reading “Fury at The Crossroads” immediately had me thinking about the last story I recommended of Troy’s “Sorrow and Joy, Sunshine and Rain”.
The two stories have several overlaps in theme and ideas. Both concern the pursuit of justice, the birth and death of gods that might give people something like justice and peace and protection, and the cruelties people can inflict upon one another in the pursuit of power, the connections to ones ancestors as both a source of trauma and strength . Indeed, “Fury” felt very much to me to be a sort of ‘the other side of the coin’ to “Sorrow”. Where that story focused on new gods born in the pain of an oppressed people to seek “something like justice” this takes place in a post-apocalyptic fantasy world where the gods are mostly dead, but a wandering priest still holds enough connection to her people’s protector to need to answer the call to aid those of her people who ask. Things are not simple in complicated and trying worlds though, and the ability to hurt one another is not limited to easily definable categories of good and evil people, as Fury Mae Jackson is all too aware of. To go along with all that Troy has created a story full of magic and action and tension in a great setting. This is solid secondary-world fantasy.
A slight change in source from the usual for these Roundups this story comes from the recently released anthology edited by Nisi Shawl and published by Solaris.3And with an introduction from Levar Burton! I saw the author, Darcie Little Badger4Whose story “The Whalebone Parrot” was featured on a previous Roundup. talking about it a little on Twitter and it got me curious. When I saw the TOC for the anthology I picked it and went straight for this story. Kelsey helps the “last breaths” of people and animals find their way up into the sky; a gig that apparently doesn’t pay particularly well, but does get most of the bills paid. Things take a more serious turn though, when she’s asked to help deal with a Burdened Breath: one that consumes other breathes in an effort to remain on earth.
Now, all that certainly sounds like it might be a ghost story, but, according the the author this is not really a ghost story, and the breath here has a different cultural significance to Darcie Little Badger (who does like to write a good ghost story!) than that. Clearly I am not Lipan Apache or any other kind of Native so I must fully admit that deeper specific cultural connection is lost to me. Luckily for me5And I suspect most of you reading this. that does not detract from this story or its emotional resonance. The longing for a maintained connection, the difficulty of letting go of our loved ones, the pain at lost opportunities to better understand people who have forever moved on from this existence, these are near universal feelings. That desire not to let go, or perhaps fear of what happens if we do, permeates this story. From the old woman who keeps the Last Breaths of her family in a large balloon, to the breaths that don’t want to leave their loved ones, to Kelsey herself, who clings to the now run-down farm her parents built and the last breath of her dog, people find letting go very hard. That’s something we can all relate to, I think.
“From her Mouth, the Ashes” by Jessica Jo Horowitz from Flash Fiction Online April 2019 Issue
The stories I’m sharing this week mostly tend to the longer short story size, but I do love flash fiction and don’t always have time for longer short story, so I popped over to Flash Fiction Online and found this beautiful, yet sad, love story. The story of Eva who falls in love with Lena, who speaks in birds. Literally. Her words create birds to fill their lives. Chickadees for laughter and flocks of starlings for arguments. Some birds though, embody change and temporary situations and not everything can last forever. This story is Jessica Jo Horowitz’s first pro publication, and I’m definitely looking forward to reading more of her work in the future.
“Witches for Mars” by Eden Royce from The Drabblecast #404
Closing out this week’s recommendations is the story that recently closed out the Drabblecast’s “Women and Aliens Month” and it’s written by the author I’ve found myself recommending more than any other in these Roundups: Eden Royce.6This is the fourth time I’ve rec’d one of Eden’s stories. I really enjoyed reading this one and it felt like the perfect way to end the Roundup this week. It gives us a view of an ugly and uncomfortable world, one very much like the one we seem to be becoming,7This one just happens to have, and to always have had, witches. This, by the way, is one of my favorite story techniques: simply declare a magical or weird thing to be true in your story world and move on, trusting the reader to come with you.This same technique is also used in the Darcie Little Badger and Jessica Jo Horowitz stories in this Roundup. but there is also friendship and a suggestion of hope.
This is a tricky story to talk about without giving spoilers, so I don’t want to say too much, but I appreciated the inclusion of hope along with the struggle for survival amidst ugly bias. I also appreciated that, as with life, things are not neat and simple and every question does not come with a tidy answer, indeed the most important have no answers at all. Often the best speculative fiction is like that: allowing us to add our own speculations and fill in the empty spaces with our own stories. I know I’ve certainly being thinking about those witches and mars and the possible answers quite a bit. What more could you ask from a story?
Ok, and that’s that for this Roundup. If you enjoy any of these stories yourself I hope you’ll share them too and support the author\s by spreading the word about the stories they’ve given us. If you’d like to see the full list of previous Roundups and the authors included in each you can find that: here.