Time for some more short fiction I want to share with you all. It’s been a couple weeks since the last post (which was the first of the year) and I figure I should make a note about the schedule I plan to keep as I try to once again not get derailed off this project. My desire is to make weekly recommendation posts, but I’m giving myself permission to not feel bad at all if it slips to bi-weekly at times. Too often when I start missing my own self-imposed deadlines I start feeling bad and then I start not wanting to think about it at all which makes it harder to get done which leads to more missed deadlines and more feeling bad and and and I think you see where I’m going with this, yeah? So that’s the goal: weekly, but not feeling bad if it isn’t.

Often when I’m reading and picking out stories for these posts I find themes and patterns start to emerge, and I always find that interesting and fun, but this week is a little different because I decided to actively seek out stories that fit a theme I wanted. That theme? I wanted stories that made me happy. That I would want to read again because they made me so happy. Every story I recommend is a story I like, and that I think are really good. That’s not the same thing as saying every story I recommend makes me happy. It’s been a hard couple weeks for so many people everywhere. It always is you might say, but these couple weeks have felt extra so.

And so I chose to look for the happy. That’s come out in different ways as you’ll see below. Not every story is funny or joyful, though there’s a good helping of that, but for me each of these stories left me feeling good. Made me want to read them again and let them put a smile on my face, whether that smile was the aftermath of a burst of laughter or bittersweet and tinged with memory. It is my sincere wish that you find something here that makes you smile and a little happy too.

“The Fairy Godmother Advice Column” by Leah Cypess from Lightspeed Magazine Issue 143

The first story of the week fits well into the mode of just plain fun and funny. Leah Cypess has written both middle grade and young adult fiction that engages fairy tales so it should probably be no surprise she break out the tropes well in this delightful format. The story is exactly what the title promises: It has the perfect feel of reading an advice column, except if the advice were being given by a fairy godmother. That is, until the nature of the advice starts changing bit by bit as the fairy godmother’s new friend and colleague’s influence begins to take sway. That too seems perfectly reasonable if you’re familiar with the way so many opinion writers of major newspapers have been moving over the years. One can’t help feel at the end of this that the Fairy Godmother will soon be heard from again, on probably on substack or perhaps the Big Bad Wolf’s podcast.

“The Trouble With Time Machines” by Karen Jessica New from Augur Magazine Issue 5.1

Sometimes the really happy joyful read you need is the one that just pushes all your favorite trope buttons and does it so masterfully it makes your head spin following the dancing, delightful prose. That’s what this story is for me, so I present it to you. If these things do not delight you as they do me, then please remember the ‘your mileage may very’ rule is always in effect (though the theme of this issue of Augur is “joyful imaginations”. I’ve said it before, but I adore time travel and when it’s done creatively I adore it all that much more. This story gives us that. Reading it feels like maybe being in a time machine, which is surely the point when it opens with the the full sentence the title begins: “The trouble with time machines is that it’s so hard to know when you’re inside one.”

From there it goes on to investigate grammar and language, it gets meta, it loops around itself and dances back and forth and through until the patterns begin to emerge us poor linear creatures can understand. It is such a confidently, skillfully written story and let me tell you it floored me to ready Karen Jessica New’s bio and learn this is her first professional sale. I can only hope there will be more to come. If you want to read this one in full you’ll need to purchase the issue. I promise you it’s worth it (and there are 24 other stories you get with it!).

“The Alternity of Dead Universes” by Monte Lin from Kaleidotrope Spring 2022 Issue

So this fantastical story isn’t exactly rooted in joy or happiness, but there is hope in here an rebirths of sorts and standing in the face of disaster and tyranny and uncaring and choosing better ways and finding new paths with people who also want new paths and in the end it left me feeling, yes, happy. It is the sort of story that just swings for the fences with it’s concept and invites you tag along for the ride. The title is literal. Most of the characters in this story are the cosmic consciousnesses born from the death of Universes. Entities that need twelve-dimension crystalline superstructure devices to engage and communicate with one another. Entities with names like One-2 and NoNoNo and StrangeCharm. It’s a story of weird physics beyond our imagining and a community of these entities that observe the deaths of other Universes in hopes of them also gaining intelligence and joining the Alternity. And, more importantly, it’s a story of questioning whether ones own form of intelligence and existence is the only one value, of challenging the status quo when it’s the right thing to do, of being willing to sacrifice but also of survival in the face of apocalypse level disasters of the ultimate sort. If you like far-out weird and wonderfully imaginative scifi I suspect there’s a smile here for you too.

“And I Will Make Thy Name Great” by Louis Evans from Cast of Wonders Episode 495

Here we have our second straight-up funny story. A story of an alternative version of our world that is very similar in many ways, except that God keeps having some really terrible luck because every human he tries to inspire to do his great works, from Abraham to Charlemagne and more (including some fun surprises) thinks that while God’s requests sound like they’ve got some upside to them they also seem like, you know, a lot of work and probably with some serious unmentioned consequences. It’s just not for them and they’d rather do what seems right for them. It’s a fun story with a fun ending and it even works as a thumbed-nose at great-man theory as, for the most part, Earth’s history just…carries on. Not in exactly the same way as ours, to be sure, but in *close enough* an approximation that, while there are some major cultural differences, it’s all still going on forward as you might expect. An absurd and delightful tale that just might actually cause you to laugh out loud.

“The Many Taste Grooves of the Chang Family” by Alison King from Diabolical Plots Issue 87

Finally, we come to that bittersweet smile I alluded to earlier. I felt it was a good one to end the recommendations this week for the same reason I picked the theme of stories that made me happy. It’s been a hard couple of weeks for a lot of people. I wanted humour and joy and laughter in response. Those might be hard places to consider going for some. Perhaps this sort of story is more what you may need.

It’s lovely story dealing with the kind of thing that leaves little room for joy: a parent’s early onset of a kind of dementia. Ba is losing his memories. A very real and very difficult thing for so many people and families. Important to note that the fact of what Ba is dealing with is sad, but the story largely isn’t. Here, Alison King gives us a journey through Ba and his children’s history and family bonds through the food, both great and pedestrian, that they have shared, that has been there for the moments of their lives. It is a story of memories and the power of taste and smell to take us to the big and little moments of our lives, to take us back to family, to take us home. And, there is humor. I suspect you’ll see Ba’s plot for the “remote mouth” he receives well before it unfolds, but the anticipation does not lesson it’s enjoyment. (A remote mouth, by the way, is a series of sensors used to trigger the taste and smells of food, which can then be refined and adjusted until you have the perfect recording of a taste of a food you remember but whose recipe you don’t know, so it can be recreated). In the end it is a lovely reminder that even in the dark times we are allowed our smiles and our laughs and sharing them with loved ones and it’s a reminder to cherish each other and all the moments, when we can.

And that’s it for this week. As always, if you’d like to see the full list of previous Roundups and the authors included in each you can find that here. I hope to be back in a week with another roundup. If you find something you enjoy reading in my recommendations I hope you’ll shout that story out!