The weekly short story recommendations are long overdue (more than a week), so here they are even though I don’t have as many stories to recommend as I would like. This is despite having read quite a fair deal of short stories the last couple of weeks and from a wider variety of magazines than I usually do. But I must’ve been on a streak of bad luck, because even magazine I know usually turn out great stories didn’t offer anything to my taste. So both my recommendations comes from Daily Science Fiction, once again.
Play Pretend by Alex Sobel (DSF): The author does well in giving/withholding just the right amount of information in the opening to create a strong hook. And he follows up with scenes filled with inner character conflict. Add to that a nice treatment of the theme of type casting and how minorities are treated in hollywood, and you end up with an excellent flash fiction piece.
True Enough Believers by Karl Lykken (DSF): A tale set in a classic Orwellian futuristic surveillance society but with technologies not too far from what exists today. The story nicely hightlights what it’s like to live in a world where you can’t freely express your own thoughts and how that makes it impossible to truly trust anyone, even your wife.
Toby Backman 