Welcome to the Short Fiction Spotlight, a new series of reviews and discussions. As the title implies, a few times a month in this space I (and my co-conspirator, the delightful Niall Alexander) will be discussing exclusively short fiction, attempting to do some critical justice to the wealth of short stories being published throughout the field—and then some. I intend to cover a few new stories each month that strike my fancy, from various and sundry publications; I’ll also occasionally discuss an older story or two when I come across one that really catches my interest. Of course, this isn’t intended to be comprehensive—it’s a conversation about stories, not a retrospective of everything published in a given month. (And since it’s a conversation, feel free to pitch your recent short reads in the comments, too.)

For this opening installment, to give a sense of how my half of the Short Fiction Spotlight will go, I’d like to discuss one fresh story and one from somewhat longer ago: “Invisible Men” by Christopher Barzak in Eclipse Online and “Wives” by Lisa Tuttle.

[Welcome to the metaphorical parlor.]

The flap copy of Blood Oranges, the first novel by Caitlin R. Kiernan writing as Kathleen Tierney, reads like the copy for a fistful of other contemporary paranormal novels—if they had been put through a refracting lens and reduced to their component parts, pointing up the ridiculousness imbricated in their very terms. Siobhan Quinn, our protagonist and narrator, is a junky and an at-first-accidental “demon hunter” who gets bitten by a werewolf and a vampire in the same night; her life doesn’t really pick up from there.

Blood Oranges is a strange (and unmistakably fun) project, a parodic urban fantasy that at once vivisects the tropes of the genre as it currently stands and also employs them with vigor and a backhanded, wild immersion. Kiernan has described the trilogy that Blood Oranges begins as a sort of pause—between The Drowning Girl and the next Kiernan project, there are these books, by “Kathleen Tierney.” This is not a useless description; in fact, it makes a great deal of sense, because this is quite firmly not a Kiernan story, though Quinn’s opinions on her own genre frequently reflect those of her creator. The introductory author’s note makes that hilariously obvious.

[A review.]

The eleventh episode of Cosmos, “The Persistence of Memory,” moves from outer space to the interior of the mind, examining the mechanics of knowledge and intelligence. Sagan opens by discussing units of information, and then shifts to a simple thought experiment: what better way to consider the possibilities of alien intelligence than by considering the intelligences in our own oceans? This leads to an exploration of whales and whale communication—and that leads to how whales know what they know, as mammals like us: genes and brains. The rest of the episode explores the intricacies of these two containers of knowledge, and finally extends the conversation into the realm of knowledge humans store outside themselves: texts, libraries, etc.

[Onward]

The tenth episode of Cosmos, “The Edge of Forever,” is about “the beginnings and ends of worlds, infinity and eternity.” While this may sound like one of the big-idea episodes, it is more a technical one; here, Sagan explores what we know about the structure, age, and ultimate nature of the universe, and how we came to know it. Discussing things like blue/red shift and the implications for our expanding universe, the possibilities for the Big Bang, the nature of three-dimensional imagination and what we might be missing with it, and the conflict between ideas of an oscillating or perpetually expanding universe, Sagan sketches out an understandable framework of our universe for a lay audience.

[Onward.]

The ninth episode of Cosmos, “The Lives of the Stars,” is about things very small (atoms) and very large (stars). Sagan begins with a discussion of atoms—how they’re put together, how we discovered them, etc. He also explains the elements, and how the simple addition or subtraction of protons creates all of the different building blocks of life and the universe. From the elements, we move on to the stars—the sources of these building blocks (and also made of them), stars are the huge things that are connected intimately to the smallest things. The different types of stars, their life cycles, and their composition are also discussed. It’s a chain of related information, delivered with wit and joy.

[Onward.]

Spanning two volumes, The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories of Ursula Le Guin is the first major retrospective collection of Le Guin’s short fiction—something that’s been a long time coming, considering her significant contributions to the world of American letters. These volumes, Where on Earth and Outer Space, Inner Lands, have been arranged by Le Guin and are published in handsome hardcover editions by Small Beer Press (who make very lovely books, and have done so again this time around). Both volumes were released in late November, and all-together they collect nearly forty stories from across Le Guin’s expansive career.

As noted in the prior post, the second volume, Outer Space, Inner Lands, shifts the focus of Le Guin’s selected stories to her “fantastic” works—again, as the flap copy says—those stories that might be called science fiction and/or fantasy. Of course, those sorts of genre categorizations are essentially arbitrary; this volume’s introduction makes a sharp point of that, and in closing rhetorically asks us to decide “which volume of these two is the Real and which is the Unreal.” In more definite terms, this is the volume full of award-winning and critically renowned stuff: “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” “Nine Lives,” “The Matter of Seggri,” “Solitude,” etc.

[A discussion.]

The eighth episode of Cosmos, “Journeys in Space and Time,” returns to the style of earlier episodes with a specific topical focus: space and time (rather obviously). It’s an information-heavy installment that takes place for the most part in Tuscany, where both Leonardo Da Vinci and a young Albert Einstein did their intellectual work. The episode begins by discussing the constellations again and uses that as a springboard to discuss issues of distance, perception, and the speed of light—all considering the stars and our relationship to them. Sagan illustrates the connections between space and time by diving into a discussion of travel to the stars and the problems posed by the general theory of relativity (time dilation, etc); that leads into a set of thought experiments on time travel and speed-of-light travel. It’s also, as might be clear by now, one of the more science-fiction-friendly episodes.

[Onward.]

Spanning two volumes, The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories of Ursula Le Guin is the first major retrospective collection of Le Guin’s short fiction—something that’s been a long time coming, considering her significant contributions to the world of American letters. These volumes, Where on Earth and Outer Space, Inner Lands, have been arranged by Le Guin and are published in handsome hardcover editions by Small Beer Press (who make very lovely books, and have done so again this time around). Both volumes were released in late November, and all-together they collect nearly forty stories from across Le Guin’s expansive career.

The first volume, Where on Earth, focuses “on Le Guin’s interest in realism and magic realism,” including her “satirical, political, and experimental earthbound stories”—as the flap copy says. In her own introduction, Le Guin explores how she chose the pieces and their arrangement, a multi-step process that took into account a number of things (no novellas, no stories too heavily connected to other universes, etc.) and eventually resulted in the first volume’s focus on realistic or “mundane” fiction. (Of course, that’s not necessarily accurate—but we’ll get into that later.) She also introduces and gives brief thoughts on the stories in question that provide the reader a bit of context before they dive into the fiction.

And then, it is time to dive into the fiction.

[A review.]

The seventh episode of Cosmos, “The Backbone of Night,” is about scientific curiosity and the history of that curiosity—its evolution, and its suppression. The episode begins in Sagan’s present-day Brooklyn with him guest teaching in a classroom where he attended school as a child, then jumps back to ancient Greece. Finally, it trends forward to his contemporary setting again, with a few familiar stops on the way. As Sagan’s memorable introduction says, “The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars. […] In our personal lives, also, we journey from ignorance to knowledge. Our individual growth reflects the advancement of the species.” This is an episode about those things: knowledge, advancement, individual growth, and the questions that drive them all.

[Onward.]

The sixth episode of Cosmos, “Travellers’ Tales,” revolves around a juxtaposition of the Dutch explorer-merchants of the 17^th century and the two Voyager craft that were sent into space during the late summer of 1977. As a whole, it is very much about “human voyages of exploration” on our planet and off of it: how those voyages have worked, what they have revealed to us, and what we still have left to explore in the vastness of the cosmos. It is a romantic episode that uplifts curiosity and the bravery required to voyage into unknown space—though, of course, there is an undercurrent of problematic implication to the delight in “exploration” when it’s read through the lens of those 17^th century Dutchmen.

[Onward.]

The fifth episode of Cosmos, “Blues for a Red Planet,” is an exploration of ideas about Mars—fictional, factual, and speculative—through history and into a future which has, to some extent, become our contemporary present. It’s one of the more focused episodes, without as much ranging and curiosity; the intensity is directed almost entirely at Mars itself, with a brief, related aside into molecular biology.

Following the last episode’s focus on Venus (and its value as a parable for Earth), this episode’s shift to Mars makes for one of the more uplifting and visually stunning installments in Sagan and company’s personal voyage through the cosmos. Sagan’s passion for Mars, as well as the West’s obsession with the planet throughout recent history, comes through clearly here: through the poetry of his language, as usual, and in the attention paid to painting a dramatic Martian-looking landscape, we are swept up into a dramatic narrative about the Red Planet. There is, perhaps, less science and more poetry in this episode than usual.

[Onward.]

The fourth episode of Cosmos, “Heaven and Hell,” deals with “bizarre natural events” and “major catastrophes” on Earth and elsewhere, particularly Venus, as well as the related makeup of comets and asteroids in relation to their place in catastrophic events. That all leads up to a commentary on human-made catastrophic events. (Plus, there’s an “Update” at the end of this one on global warming.)

Coming as it does after an episode that puts faith and science into somewhat oppositional conversation, it seems a strange thing that the fourth episode uses a metaphor straight out of religion: “heaven” and “hell,” with all the attendant value judgments. But, there seems to be a reason for the shift in terms. In a few ways, this episode is functioning as one big allegorical structure; the guiding metaphor of the title, too, ends up having either two meanings, or a meaning that yokes the two arguments of the episode.

[Onward.]

Swedish writer Karin Tidbeck’s first collection published in English, Jagannath, has recently been released by Cheeky Frawg, an imprint run by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer that focuses on translations and international fiction. The collection contains thirteen pieces of short fiction that range from whimsical to intensely discomfiting, all having a distinct touch of the surreal or the weird. Many of the pieces in question have never previously been published with English translations—though, of course, some were originally published in magazines like Weird Tales.

Jagannath has already received a great deal of word-of-mouth support from folks like China Mieville, Ursula K. Le Guin, Karen Lord, and Karen Joy Fowler, and has been reviewed quite favorably by Stefan Raets here on Tor.com. Tidbeck’s fiction is also acclaimed in her home country. As a fan of international fiction and someone interested in inclusivity in the speculative fiction community, I was particularly pleased to get my hands on this book, and it doesn’t disappoint.

[A review.]

Shoggoths in Bloom is the second collection of short fiction by award-winning author Elizabeth Bear, following 2006’s The Chains That You Refuse. The pieces included are predominantly reprints, from 2006 forward, spanning several of Bear’s recent stand-outs—such as Hugo-winning stories “Shoggoths in Bloom” and “Tideline”—as well as one piece original to the collection, “The Death of Terrestrial Radio.” There is also an introduction by Scott Lynch.

It is no grand secret that that I find Bear’s fiction provocative and engaging. Her work tends to speak to the things that I find most interesting in fiction: the sharp edges of people, situations, and issues as large (and small) as the problem of existence. The pieces collected in Shoggoths in Bloom are all in some way implicated in this exploration of the hard parts of living but in remarkably different ways. This collection is both a study in contrasts and a study in unity; the threads that run throughout Bear’s fiction are present, and so are the significant differences from story to story.

[A review.]

The third episode of Cosmos, “The Harmony of the Worlds,” is a historically-oriented exploration of the development of astronomy—as opposed to astrology. It is also implicitly concerned with the complex interplay between fantastical thinking and observational or theoretical science in human culture. The basic proposition that guides the episode is simply, “There are two ways to view the stars: as they really are and as we might wish them to be.”

[Onward.]

The second episode of Cosmos, “One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue,” is an exploration of evolution from various approaches: historical, scientific, and contextual. An overarching concern with the order of the universe and our interconnectedness with it is again a major contextual factor here. As Sagan says in the episode’s introduction, “The nature of life on earth and the quest for life elsewhere are two sides of the same question: the search for who we are.”  He uses a discussion of Earth’s development of life to introduce a consideration of how life may appear elsewhere in the universe, and how all of these things are related.

In “One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue,” there’s science, speculation, and also some neat animations. The title also provides the episode with a delightful reoccurring metaphor, which Sagan uses to contrast the one “voice” we know, Earth’s evolution and intensely connected life, to the possibilities out there in space. Are we alone, “…or is there a cosmic fugue, a billion different voices playing the life music of the galaxy?”

[Onward.]

There are some unspoken ideas that have been fueling this series since its inception—ideas about reading closely, creatively, and with an eye to finding, celebrating, and also problematizing the queer in a given text. Those ideas are a hybrid of the ways of reading that we tend to call “queer theory” over in academia and a sense of the vital importance of sharing and communicating about queer stuff from an activist standpoint. I haven’t had much impetus to pull those underlying structures out and talk them over, yet, but now I think I might.

I’ve recently read a book that I think might be fun for those readers who enjoy the work this series has been doing and want to dig deeper into the frameworks inspiring it, and that book is Donald E. Hall’s Queer Theories. It’s probably one of the best short introductions to queer theory I’ve read in a long while—accessible, intriguing, and open to any reader who likes to think about the ways they read now, and more ways to potentially try to read in the future.

Plus, the applied readings section of the book is full of speculative fiction of varying sorts—Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Woolf’s Orlando, among others.

[A discussion.]

The first episode of Cosmos, “The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean,” is an introduction to the project of the series as a whole as well as to the scale and scope of the materials under discussion: no less than the vastness of the cosmos and the full sum of time as we know it, all the way through human history and our attempts to understand the universe in which we live. The secondary and more implicit message of Cosmos—immortalized further in songs like “We Are All Connected” and “A Glorious Dawn”—is contained in the poetic and stunning speech with which Carl Sagan opens his project of exploration, summed up in one potent line: “I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this cosmos in which we float, like a mote of dust in the morning sky.”

[Onward.]

Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, consisting of thirteen episodes aired over the fall and winter months of 1980, is one of the most well-known, significant documentary series in the history of television—still the most widely watched PBS series in the world—and an emotional favorite for more than one generation of viewers, all around the globe. Written by science advocate Carl Sagan, author and science activist Ann Druyan (also married to Sagan), and astrophysicist Steven Soter, with Sagan as the narrator and presenter, Cosmos captured the imaginations and hearts of (at last estimation) around half a billion people. It won both an Emmy and a Peabody award, too.

[But, you probably know all of that already—or something like it, at least anecdotally.]