It’s time for another Fiction Rec Roundup! It’s been on a mini hiatus as I took a step back from social media and other things (locking down my Twitter account with privacy settings and staying off Mastodon) for reasons of stress and focusing on job hunting. It only took two weeks for me to realize the steps I was taking weren’t really reducing my stress, so I’ve returned to business as usual.
This week I have five stories I’d like to share with you. We got aliens, time travel, undead, a lot of love and relationships (not all of which work out), goldfish, and a wonderful (if also difficult and painful at times) tribute to the power of stories and books.
“The Sixes, The Wisdom, and the Wasp” by E J Delaney from Escape Pod #612
First up we have this story that, wait for it, uses one of my favorite tropes! That’s right, I found another time travel/alternate dimensions kind of story. This one tells of the trouble a couple of elementary school students in a small school in Australia find when they start exploring Multiversal Equivalence. It’s a nice story of friendship, and how bravery means making choices when you are afraid, not, as many think, not feeling fear. It also has aliens. Also, it’s from Escape Pod so you can read or listen to it.
“Smooth Stones and Empty Bones” by Bennett North from Glittership #50
This is a much darker story than our first one, but you can also listen to or read it. Glittership hits 50 episodes with this reprint and I’m really glad for it. I’ve been finding wonderful stories to love every time I turn my eyes (or ears) their way. This one is about a young women trying to navigate a relationship with her girlfriend in the face of tragic circumstances, a small-minded community and a witch for a mother. It’s about doing anything to hold on to the ones we love, and learning that sometimes we maybe shouldn’t.
“One True Love” by Malinda Lo from Lightspeed #93
Another reprint, this one the latest from Lightspeed. This enjoyable story is straight up fairy tale, opening with a baby princess prophesized to be the downfall of her father the king. Many well known tropes and beats of the genre appear here (including a princess locked in a tower) but some get a new angle. I hesitate to say there are twists here, because I think many people will find this story, as I said, a straight up and familiar feeling (but enjoyable!) fairy tale but I guess this is a case where your mileage may very. Content warning: I feel I should also note that this story does include the “on-screen” threat of sexual assault and the strong implication of “off-screen” marital rape.
“The Temporary Suicide of Gold Fish” by Octavia Cade from Kaleidotrope Winter 2018
So this was a delightful discovery for me this week! Back in the 3rd installment of this roundup series I highlighted a story from Kaleidotrope by Octavia Cade called “The Ouroboros Bakery”. That story has got a fair bit of attention, including finding it’s way on to the 2017 Locus Recommended Reading List. Well it seems that was only the first of a series of interlocking stories about The Street of Endings that Cade is writing. This is another and I look forward to reading many more.
Like the bakery story this one brings us to a strange shop with a powerful proprietor who offers a unique business transaction. In this case, the chance to be transmuted into an apparently immortal goldfish for a random amount of time as a way to hide from life and hopefully avoid the consequences of bad choices you’ve made by outliving them. Taken together these stories left me with the strong, strong feeling that someone should be trying to hire Octavia Cade to write setting and characters for weird and wonderful cRPGs. Think Planescape: Torment or it’s spiritual sequel Torment: Tides of Numenera. The sorts of wonderful weird magic stories Cade is crafting with this series are the sort that would keep people coming back to their world again and again.
“A Witch’s Guide To Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies” by Alix E. Harrow from Apex #105
The final story I have for your consideration this week is a real knock your socks off kind of story. This is one people are going to be talking about come next awards season, I am sure. It helps a little that it’s playing to it’s audience by being partly a love letter to stories and books and their innate power, especially when they come into our lives at just the right moment. If you’re an avid reader you very likely have at least one such book or story (if not a list of them!) that were that story for you. This story though, much like many of the stories of the portal fantasy genre it’s title references does not shy away from darkness. Wonderland, for example, was not exactly a nice place. Neverland, for my money, was even worse. Here though, it is the real world that has the most pressing darkness and this story is also about the failure and breakdown of systems that stagnate and become more about perpetuating and maintaining themselves than in helping the people the supposedly exist to take care of.
That’s it for this week’s stories. As always you can find a list of all the Roundups thus far here. I hope you find something you enjoy and please, if you do, share them with others!