After a long summer break in July, the monthly shor story recommendations are back.
Aside from the few golden nuggets who made the list, June wasn’t a great month for reading, so I decided to change my habbits a bit; I started reading Uncanny Magazine regularly (well, listening to their podcast, mostly). That proved a good decision. After a month of reading/listening to Uncanny, they made it into top-3 of short fiction magazines, giving the flash fiction magazines I usually stick to for my regular reading a fight for their money.
All this is just to say that the monthly recommendations will likely consist of a fair deal of Uncanny stories over the next couple of months. This month in particular will be nothing but Uncanny, so I hope you will enjoy their stories as much as I have.
Unseelie Brothers, Ltd by Fran Wilde (Uncanny):
High society dressmakers might not be your favorite reading subject — it sure wasn’t for me — but this story is still worth a chance. The way Fran Wilde combined this high society setting with the element of the unseelie court from fairy folklore was very interesting and easily kept me hooked through the otherwise slow start of the story.
We follow Sarah, who is an aspiring dressmaker, niece to a woman who married into wealth, and constant second violin to her rich cousin. The story begins as the debutante ball season is soon to start and the magical dress shop of the Unseelie Brothers appears in New York. Everyone who can pay — and those who can’t — want one of those dresses. However, the Unseelies’ dresses turns out to be as dangerous as they are beautiful, and the store turns out to be connected to the disappearance of Sarah’s mother not long after Sarah’s birth.
I kind of wished Wilde had done more with this story. The opening seemed to meander, and the story ended without the MC never really being pushed to her limit. However, the concept of the fae dress shop was intriguing, and I was well entertained throughout the story.
The Book of the Kraken by Carrie Vaughn (Uncanny):
Another great Uncanny story. In this one, we follow Matthew, a young man in the British navy during an alternate 1812 war with the US. On board the ship is, amongst others, his older brother Tom who holds a higher rank and used his favor with the captain to get Matthews his position on board.
During their hunt for a notorious pirate ship, they come across a young girl in a sail-less ship drawn by what turns out to be her pet kraken. Baffled and, for some reason annoyed with the girl, the ships captain decides to try and capture the kraken.
As with the Unseelie Brothers story, I wish the author had done more with this cool concept. The conflict was primarily a very low-key sibling rivalry between Matthew and Tom, and the conflict of the captain trying to capture the kraken, despite Matthew’s protests, was resolved too easily.
Again, though, the story had an extremely original and interesting premise, and I can’t point at a single weak point in Vaughn’s prose.
The Sin of America by Catherynne M. Valente (Uncanny):
For once, it was not the speculative idea that sold me on a story. In fact, it seemed the only real weak point of the story.
The Sin of America is about a randomly chosen sineater, her meaningless life, and the drepressing town she lives in. Valente doesn’t really do much with the sineater idea other than using it in a metaphorically heavy way to critique current American society. Plot-wise, the story is also so-so, but the prose more than made up for that.
I’ve admitted before that I’m not a huge poetry lover, and rarely do I enjoy a story primarily because of the prose, but, wow, can Valente write. Her prose is simply stunning, and while the plot didn’t do much for me, the way Valente makes the small American town come alive and how real she makes each and every character feel is beyond impressive.
So, if you love stories for more than just a cool premise or great action, this might be the story for you.
Metal Like Blood in the Dark by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon) (Uncanny):
This is not the first time T. Kingfisher/Ursula Vernon has made the monthly recommendations, and since I’ve build up a small backlog of stories I want to recommend over the last month, I can safely say it’s not the last either. She just has a way with stories. She creates the most unique speculative ideas and her writing is always entertaining if not down right funny.
Here she is with a fairy tale reinterpretation that also manages to be something very different than its source material.
Two advanced robots travel into the universe alone for the first time as their creator is dying. Here, they meet a wicked being who tries to trick one of the robots into making wings for her while keeping the other robot locked up. Yeah, it’s Hanzel and Grethel. Though, while hints here and there reveal the connection, Metal Like Blood in the Dark still feels very much like it’s own story.
The setting alone make this very different from the fairy tale, and there are plenty of other differences as well. And while it does read somewhat like a fairy tale, the prose doesn’t feel jarring or stilted as fairy tale writing sometimes does.
This was entertaining all the way through.
The final recommendation for August goes to Uncanny itself. I really can’t overstate how much I’ve enjoyed reading this magazine lately. And aside from just publishing the most amazing stories I’ve read in the last couple of years, even their “worst” stories are not that bad. Plus, they do a lot of pushing for diversity both in their staff and the authors they publish, which is always nice.
Toby Backman 