Welcome all to the first short story recommendations of the year! To get the year off to good start, I’ve dug through various magazines and anthologies to provide quality stories for all of you people reading along (which also means this isn’t the month I finally work through my Daily Science Fiction backlog).
A Night at the Tarn House by George R. R. Martin (Songs of the Dying Earth anthology; reprinted various places, for example Clarkesworld):
A story set in Jack Vance’s Dying Earth world, a pretty depressing place where magic is leaking from the world, mages are hunted by all sorts of creatures, and, yeah, the world is dying.
It was a bit difficult to follow the story to begin with, since it seemed to require some familiarity with Jack Vance’s stories. Though, after the first page or so, it really became an enjoyable read.
The story world creates a very bleak view on the classical Tolkienesque fantasy setting, but it also has a lot of original elements in form of the creatures inhabiting the world. The real strong point, though, is the characters. They’re a strange assembly of powerful mages, charlatans, assassins, and demons, all of whom are out to get one another in some way.
Despite the setting being in some ways very much classical fantasy, this was a strange and very original story. It was quite funny too, at times. Though, I wouldn’t classify it as comedy.
Taking Jack Vance’s interesting setting and adding George R. R. Martin’s phenomenal writing on top created something that could very well be one of the best stories I end up reading the entire year.
Solution to the Fermi Paradox by Brian McNett (DSF):
A spaceship and its lone human passenger are on a doomed hunt for civilizations that have not yet destroyed themselves.
The story provides an interesting if bleak view on why we have not encountered any other advanced civilizations from outer space and an equally bleak view on where humanity is heading.
I (28M) Created a Deepfake Girlfriend And Now My Parents Think We’re Getting Married by Fonda Lee (MIT Technology Review): (The link is only for a small preview of the story unless you subscribe to the MIT Technology Review.)
A strange but interesting tale about a person who creates a deepfake artificial girlfriend to keep their parents of their back. As these things tend to do, the lie spirals out of control and the protagonist has to try to fix their mess.
It was a straight forward but very entertaining read. It was equal part funny and depressing realism, showing us what computer technology will soon be able to do and just how ill-suited humans are at handling said technology.
The Staff in the Stone by Garth Nix (The Book of Magic; editor Garder Dozois):
This is a straight forward tale about a smalltown wizard having to defend his cozy little community when a powerful magical artifact arrives and starts attracting all sorts of unwanted magical attention.
It’s an underdog story, the little mage against all the bigshot demons and mages, and there really isn’t much more to the plot than that. The story made the list, though, because of it’s original setting and how well the protagonist is fleshed out without the delivery of his backstory ever really stopping the story in its tracks. Nix got more character development into a short story than some authors manage to do in a whole novel.
Toby Backman 