It’s time for another (very late) round of short story recommendations. This one was meant to go out start of June, but life got busy as always, and I only just had time to clean up my notes.
Anyway, I hope you find these stories as enjoyable as I did.
Woodmask by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Uncanny):
This story follow Leskia, a young woman living in absolute poverty in what is basically a shed at the edge of the city. Her father constantly loses whatever money he brings in at the local tavern, so it’s up to Leskia to provide for their tiny household. She is at the very bottom of a societal ladder where everyone kicks downwards lest they should suffer more themselves. And things only get worse for her, when the city is invaded by an army who makes sure there is even less to go around for everyone. Especially the poor.
So far so good, but this could be the introduction to one of million other fantasy stories out there. What the story lacks in originality in its MC premise, though, it more than makes of for with it speculative element.
Besides the city where Leskia lives is a forest, an ancient forest far older than the city itself. Strange beings live there, people wearing eyeless makes who somehow still seem able to see more than any human could. The city dwellers fear these strange creatures and will do anything to avoid the forest. Only the poorest people will live next to it, including our protagonist.
But life pushes Leskia towards the forest. She has to chose between starving or freezing to death or going into the forest to hunt and collect firewood. This forces her closer to masked beings, and her brief interactions with them reveals something very different from the myth and legends shrouding these strangers and their masks.
I was honestly a little surprised at how much I enjoyed this story. As stated above the protagonist and her story is anything but original, and that did make it a bit difficult for me to dive into the story to begin with. Likewise, one of the main drivers of the story, that the masked beings are not what what they are presented as, should also be pretty clear right away to anyone who has ever read a fantasy story. However, Tchaikovsky still made it work. He still managed to make the masked people an interesting mystery, and when their secrets are gradually revealed, it only made them more interesting. I found that really cool, since most mysteries tend to go downhill around the big reveal.
Also, this story is set in the world of one of Tchaikovsky’s novel series. Normally, that is a big warning sign for me. All too often, this means the author will try to show too much of all the worldbuilding they did for the novels, fill the story with references for the fans, and rely on readers being familiar with the characters instead of fully establishing them in the short story itself. But while Tchaikovsky generally avoided these pitfalls.
Leskia is fully fleshed out in the story, and I didn’t feel like I was missing out by not having read any of the novels. And if anything, the world building was well done, and it very much felt like the story was part of a bigger world.
Houyi the Archer Fights the Sun by Cynthia Zhang (Podcastle)
This is a story about ancient gods and immortal heroes of old. Only… it’s set in the modern world, and it quickly turns out there’s nothing glamorous about being an immortal warrior in a modern big city. Especially not when the air con is broken, and you have to survive a whole week under the blarring sun until a technician has the time to come by.
For the macho hero archer Houyi, there’s only one thing to do: fight the sun!
Houyi wanting to fight the sun, and his wife talking him out of it is actually all there is to the plot. And at the end there’s a bit of preaching about global warming and sunpanels, but really, none of that seemed all that important to me. What made the story stand out was the humor.
I loved seeing the gods and heroes blunder through life in the modern world. Especially Houyi, who’s archaic mind definitely struggled to adapt.
Robot, Changeling, Ghost by Avra Margariti (Flash Fiction Online)
In this story, we follow a mother who has lost her child. The ghost of the child seemingly haunts the mother and her home, so she has rented a robot imitating the child in order to lure the ghost into the this mechanical body.
As the story progress, the ghost also gets their say, revealing that the mother once thought them a changeling.
At first, it seemed like the author tried to mash too much together, ghosts, changelings, robots, all in just 1000 words. At the end though, it all came together with a nice little twist, which you should really read the story to discover for yourself.
The Cuckoo of Vrežna Mountain by Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
This story takes place in a world where gods are real. Though, they are also far more vulnerable and human than in most mythologies.
Our protagonist stems from land whose trio of patron gods were corrupted by an illness called the Cuckoo. Or rather, two of their gods were, and the third they left behind. That isn’t the sort of act that is looked kindly upon by godfearing people in the rest of the world.
The protagonist now lives under the grace of a sort of foster mother in another country, but she lives a second rank citizen. Even her foster mother treats her as such and never lets our MC forget that her people are godless, that they left behind one of their gods.
Things are made worse by the fact that the foster mother is an acolyte of this other country’s patron god, The Oracle. And to top it all off, the MC is in lover with her foster brother whose betrothal will soon be prophesized by The Oracle, as is custom. And of course, that’s when the MC discovers that the Cuckoo has come to the land.
I loved the world building in this story. The gods, the cuckoo, and the believes of the foster family all felt original. Yet while they were unlike any mythology I know of, they still felt like they could have easily have come from our own history. Zorko also honed in on the relevant parts of the mythology, providing enough information to understand what’s going on but never bogging the story down.
He also managed to tie the love story and the plot related to the Cuckoo together nicely in a way that hits that balance between bitter and sweet just perfectly.
Toby Backman 