Better late than never. Sorry for not delivering the monthly story recommendations in July. I’ll spare you the bad excuses about being busy and summer vacation and all that and just admit that I was lazy and needed a break.
Hopefully, the stories I’ve gathered for you this month will be worth the long wait. I think they will; I have saved some excellent reading material for you. Starting of strong, we have:
Though She be but Little by C.S.E. Cooney (Uncanny Magzine/Podcastle (and several Best-of anthologies)): This is a delitefully weird story. It was interesting in a strangely compelling way right from the odd opening scene where I had no idea what was going on. And it only became better and better as the reality of the story world was made clear.
It’s a world were the characters one day wake to a silver sky and each of them having been turned into exactly who they truly are as a person. It’s also a story about not growing up (a Pete Pan for adults), about friendship, and not fitting in.
It’s difficult to explain in more details as it strays pretty far from conventional story structure, but it was a highly original story and one of the best I’ve read in 2020. It’s well worth a read.
Next by Terry Bisson (Asimov’s/Lightspeed): Many aspects of this story was so-so; there’s not really a setting and very little resolution at the end, but the format is quite interesting. The story told as a series of mini-scenes about a couple, both people of color, trying to get the proper forms to get married.
It’s a story about predujice and institutionalized racism. That it’s from 1990 should really tell you all about how little we as a society has done to combat this problem. What’s really impresive about this story, though, is that the author manages to highlight such heavy theme in a comedic way. Despite all its shortcomings, this was a hilarious read, satire at its best.
The Seven Billion Habits of Effective Robots by Aiden Doyle (DSF): Of course, it’s not a proper Story Recommendation post without contributions from Daily Science Fiction.
You probably won’t be surprised that this is a comedic riff self-help books (the meta in the title will likely be lost in a few years, though). And there are robots too, because robots and/or dragons makes everything better.
The plot isn’t exactly mindblowing — a mildy coherent, kill all humans premise — but for a flash piece it was okay. And as with Bisson’s Next above, it was the brilliant humor that sold me on this one.
Another End of the Empire by Tim Pratt (Strange Horizon/Podcastle): I must really have been a sucker for comedic stories this month. This one really blasted past the rest of them, though. It’s the rare kind of comedic piece where both the characters, plot, and humor stays interesting throughout the story.
I loved the subversion of the dark lord trope and the prophecy decrying his downfall. The plot was a bit predictable, but the story was entertaining enough that I didn’t actually realize how straight forward the plot was until after the story had ended.
Mr. Pratt manages to use both the interesting characters, the setting, and the classical dark lord fantasy tropes to create excellent jokes consistently. The execution is just flawless. While the plot might’ve been predictable, the jokes never were. This is the funniest fantasy story I’ve read since the last time I dived into Pratchett’s Discworld series.
Toby Backman 