Story Recommendations – September 2020

I’ll start off this month’s recommendations with an anthology series.

The Long List anthology series is put together by editor, writer, and co-creator of the Submission Grinder (a great search engine for writers looking for places to submit short stories), David Steffen. In this series, Steffen has collected several short stories and novelettes that made the long list for the Hugo Awards in a given year.

If you want to try out a wide variety of some the best SF&F short fiction published in the last couple of years, this is a great place to start.

Makeisha in Time by Rachel K. Jones (Crossed Genres): Sadly, Crossed Genres no longer publish new stories, but their archives are still full of gold and free to access.

Time travel is perhaps one of the most overused tropes in science fiction, yet in this story Jones manages to turn it into something original and interesting by mixing time travel and daydreaming. We follow Makeisha who constantly and involuntarily bends the fourth dimension, travelling back in time and living entire lives before returning to her own world. This, of course, is not without its problems, as she usually loses track of time and relations while she’s away living her other lives.

The story is light-hearted and fun, and even if it had been poorly written (which is isn’t) the premise alone would make reading it worthwhile.

A Kiss with Teeth by Max Gladstone (tor.com): On the surface, this is a bleak and realistic take on what it would be like for a vampire to live like an ordinary human, having to pretend they didn’t have super strength and super hearing, having to dumb themselves down to fit in. But it’s also about more than that. It’s a story about infidelity, about being true to yourself, about good people doing wrong, about overcoming obstacles in a relationship.

This might sound like heavy, dull reading, but the most amazing thing about this story is how the author manages not just to make a dull and ordinary life interesting but at times downright funny.

Our Lady of the Open Road by Sarah Pinsker (Asimov’s): The story follows a touring band in a world where live concerts have been replaced by streaming; people are able to get the live music experience in their own homes even with long dead musicians, making actual live music almost obsolete.

It’s a story about clinging to the old ways, about sticking with your principles, and story that shows that you can’t avoid technological progress — for better or for worse. It’s a story where the the SF element is very much at the center yet doesn’t keep the personal conflict from playing out. And Pinsker is an excellent writer who despite fleshing out the SF element in great detail never does so at the cost of the story.

Someday by Filip Wiltgren (DSF): Robots struggling in the post-apocalyptic world left behind by the long-gone humans has become somewhat of a cliché lately. Still, despite the overused trope this little flash piece manages to do so well what most robo-centric stories struggle with, creating a strong emotional connection to the non-human characters. Add to that some excellent sentence level writing and you have a compelling story that is more than worth the read.