Hello and welcome back to another round up of short SFF speculative fiction I’ve enjoyed recently. And wow did I really enjoy these. I think we’ve got some lighter stuff than we’ve had in recent roundups, though not everything here falls into that category. We also have a return of a couple authors I’ve featured in previous roundups. Octavia Cade, whose short fiction is a must try for me, becomes the third author I’ve recommended at least three stories of and Charles Payseur, who is, in my opinion, the premiere short spec fiction reviewer out there, has his second appearance in my roundup. And now for the actual stories:

“When We Were Patched” by Deji Bryce Olukotun from Escape Pod 730

This is a fun story and one that has left me pondering many little pieces of it. It seems pretty straightforward: it is a story about a futuristic kind of extreme tennis match as told by the AI assistant to the referee for the match. What shakes things up is that as an AI with it’s own thoughts and opinions Theodophilus finds itself as much in conflict with the referee Malik as the two fierce competitors of the match do with each other. What I find myself pondering still is how trustworthy of a narrator Theodophilus is and how much our own feelings about sport and the right and wrong way for athletes to behave might influence how much we want to trust the AI. I also really appreciated all the generally subtle but very effective worldbuilding that happens in this story.¹Though I don’t think I’d particularly like the highly corporate world it hints at. Finally, though the sports match is the secondary conflict in this story it still paints a picture of a great championship match that the sports fan in me can’t help but appreciate, especially in this sports-less time we find ourselves in.

“Wars of Worldcraft” by Adrian Tchaikovsky from Stories of Hope and Wonder

So this was something a bit different for me. STORIES OF HOPE AND WONDER: IN SUPPORT OF THE UK’S HEALTHCARE WORKERS is an anthology just recently released by NewCon Press to, as the cover says, support the staff of the NHS and other healthcare workers in the UK. When I saw it mentioned on Twitter I knew I wanted to get it and I knew I wanted to include a story from it in the roundup. Most of the stories are reprints, some were only in audio before this anthology, and a few are original to this anthology. There are many names likely to be familiar to fans of SFF. Looking through the originals this story by Adrian Tchaikovsky caught my eye and I decided to give it a go.

It sucked me in wonderfully. If the title doesn’t clue you in on it’s own any fan of gaming, especially multiplayer online gaming, will pretty quickly recognize what seems to be going on in this tale, generally speaking anyway. It will also quickly be clear that something is off. For one thing, this game seemed to have been going on an unreasonably long time. Part of the fun for me was trying to figure out what exactly was really going on. The tropes of science fiction provide ample fodder for possible solutions, indeed, this is one of those stories that nicely reminds me that different writers could have written a story that seemed identical to this right up until it wasn’t and have had another perfectly fine story in the end that would have been completely different. It really isn’t the ideas or how original they are that matter, but what you do with them. I enjoy what Tchaikovsky does with them here. In particular I love that he gives his characters room to be very human, both in their flaws and their feelings.

“Otto Hahn Speaks to the Dead” by Octavia Cade from The Dark Magazine, Issue 59

I’m not sure I can pay a higher compliment to a ghost story than to say that it is haunting. This story, about the title character, Otto Hahn, being haunted by the deceased wife of a fellow scientist, is, in fact, haunting. The story is a fictionalized horror take on people who were intimately involved in real world horrors. Specifically it is about Otto Hahn who helped discover nuclear fission and in World War One would be part of choosing targets for chemical warfare attacks, and the ghost of Clara Immerwahr, a scientist herself and the wife of the man who was the actual “father of chemical warfare”.

Even with none of that real life context²I knew nothing about these people before reading this story, though I went down a wikipedia-fueled rabbit hole after reading it. it would still be a memorable and effective story. With context the story reaches new heights. Since reading it I have found myself admiring it for it’s own sake, pondering guilt and redemption, and even thinking many things about the use of real people in fiction.³My admittedly brief exploration of the real Otto Hahn makes him seem like a perhaps undeserving subject for some of the treatment his fictional version gets in this story, but he also seems like a poster boy for the idea that people are both deeply flawed and infinitely complicated and that makes the choice actually work where another, like Lisa’s husband, wouldn’t have. Content Warnings for this story would include suicide, discussions of war and chemical warfare, but if you want a good ghost story that will stay with you I recommend it highly.

“Foie Gras” by Charles Payseur from Fireside Magazine, April 202

After something as dark and unsettling as “Otto Hahn Speaks to the Dead” I wanted something light and fun to recommend for you before moving to my last rec for the week, which also has a lot of fun to it. Enter Charles Payseur’s flash fiction piece “Foie Gras”. Take a bit of Star Trek TNG, and a bit of Doctor Who and and maybe a bit Farscape⁴Because neither of those other two shows could deliver the big line here, and Farscape at least feels like it could get close. and you’ll get yourself something quite like this I think. It’s light, it’s fun, and it makes me wonder if we might get to see more of Dora (and Pollux?) at some point.

“The Ashes of Vivian Firestrike” by Kristen Koopman from Glittership, Winter 2020

First an important note about my last recommendation this week. As I make this post the episode of Glittership that this story will be a part of is not up for free at their website yet. However, the story is available to Glittership patrons over at Patreon and the Winter 2020 issue of Glittership is also available for purchase at Gumroad. Glittership consistently puts out great work and I’d love to see them be able to do even more so please consider supporting them! Now on to the actual recommendation:

I quite simply loved this story! It works from a pretty basic premise⁵Our world, but also there’s magic. adds in a less common detail for such stories⁶Everyone knows about magic. and then does something that you really don’t see that often.⁷Zeroes in on something that would obviously exist in such a world, but that most people wouldn’t stop to think about. This entire story is a small “minisode”, of what I assume is a podcast, that exists in this ‘magic is a real and public thing’ modern world called “Murder and Mayhem: Stories from the Intersection of Magic and True Crime with Amy and Christy.” And it’s just such a brilliant story device. We have true crime podcasts and blogs, don’t we? So of course in a modern world filled with public magic they would have true crime + magic podcasts and blogs.

Kristen Koopman takes this great concept and then nails the voice of it perfectly. The result is that I was completely absorbed in the mystery of the death (or not?) of Vivian Firestrike, celebrity elementalist and magic duelist. Not only that, but I want more. If someone told me I could buy an anthology that was nothing but episodes of “Murder and Mayhem” I’d be firing up the take my money gif. If they told me there was a novel staring Amy and Christy I’d ask for a preorder link. This is one of those stories that just hits my buttons and I hope everyone enjoys it as much as I did. I don’t know if stories that perfectly nail the modern internet, but with magic, is a genre, but that, generally speaking, is also something I’d buy an anthology of in a heartbeat.⁸Another great example of such a story (though it’s a totally different piece of internet style) is Nino Cipri’s “Which Super Little Dead Girl(TM) Are You? Take Our Quiz and Find Out!”

And that does it for the fourth short fiction rec roundup of 2020. If you’d like to see the full list of previous Roundups and the authors included in each you can find that here. I always hope to be back in a week with another roundup, right now the time seems to be a bit longer than that. But you can expect some more story recs to be coming soon! As always, if you find something you enjoy reading yourself in my recommendations I hope you’ll shout that story out to people you know. Short fiction authors and markets need our love and support and word of mouth is a great way to do that.