Welcome back to the Short Fiction Spotlight, a space for conversation about recent and not-so-recent short stories. While catching up on a bit of magazine reading, I noticed that one author in particular had a strong showing in April: Karin Tidbeck, who had two separate stories out last month, one of them here at Tor.com (“Sing”). We see this a lot from some delightfully productive folks, of course, but it’s still notable to me whenever I encounter two stories in a month, in different publications, from a writer whose work I genuinely enjoy. There was also a stand-out story in the newest issue of Apex by Emily Jiang that I wanted to talk about.

[Onward.]

The second in the Spin trilogy, Spin Control (2006) was a finalist for the Lambda Award and winner of the 2007 Philip K. Dick award. As the follow-up to an already strong debut, Spin Control builds on the complexity and intensity of Spin State—and, to my delight, it also drastically expands the world of the novels, giving insight into both the Syndicates and the splinters of humanity still surviving on Earth.

Spin Control follows Arkady, a Rostov Syndicate scientist, and Cohen, the Emergent AI, across a political landscape rife with strain and danger: the recently revived Israel-Palestine conflict on Earth. Arkady had participated in a terraforming mission that went terribly wrong on the planet Novalis; something he discovered there, with his lover and pairmate Arkasha, is being offered to Israel as a trade as he defects to that country from the Syndicates. Of course, the whole thing is being driven by a Syndicate spymaster—but only so far. Cohen and Li have arrived to bid on the “weapon,” or whatever it might be that Arkady has been told to offer, for ALEF. Other players on the world stage are also participating, including the Americans and the Palestinians. The “weapon” itself, however, and who’s playing for what team: none of these things are clear, and every acquaintance is a potential traitor.

[A review.]

Welcome back to the Short Fiction Spotlight, a space for conversation about recent and not-so-recent short stories. Though the majority of the magazines whose stories I’ve discussed here so far are semiprozines, I also read a variety of smaller publications—usually digital—that consistently offer unique and provocative stories. One of these little magazines I enjoy is Expanded Horizons; their tagline is “Speculative Fiction for the Rest of Us.”

Driven by an editorial philosophy expressly devoted to diversity of all types and honest, productive representations of that diversity, Expanded Horizons tends to publish works that I find intriguing on a variety of levels. Their new issue (April 2013) has recently been released, and so that seems like a good place to focus this week’s installment of the Short Fiction Spotlight. The issue contains three stories and a poem. As for the fictional pieces, they are: “From the Book of Names My Mother Did Not Give Me” by Christine V. Lao, “Waiting for Agua de Mayo” by Mia Tijam, and “Calling Oshun” by Shannon Barber. The first two are reprints from the Philippine Speculative Fiction series, while the last is original to this issue.

[Onward.]

The first installment of Chris Moriarty’s recently-completed Spin Trilogy, Spin State (2003) was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick, John Campbell, Spectrum and Prometheus Awards—a strong debut, fast-paced, that Nicola Griffith described as “vivid, sexy, and sharply written […] a nonstop, white-knuckle tour of quantum physics, artificial intelligence, and the human heart.” And it’s also—more of a rarity—a hard science fiction novel with a queer woman protagonist.

Spin State introduces Major Catherine Li, a UN Peacekeeper sent to investigate an “accidental” death on her home planet, a mining world that produces the Bose-Einstein condensate that makes quantum entanglement and its benefits—travel, commerce, communication—possible. As one might expect, however, the situation is anything but straightforward; Li is being played against (and by) a variety of actors in the larger political sphere. The answers she finds on Compson’s World could shift the balance of power between the UN and the Syndicates with regard to the control of inhabited space. Li’s own secrets are at risk of discovery, and her relationships to her handlers, associates, and friends—particularly an Emergent AI called Cohen—will determine the outcome.

[A relatively spoiler-free review.]

Welcome back to the Short Fiction Spotlight, a space for conversation about recent and not-so-recent short stories. Having spent several weeks talking about recent fiction, it seems appropriate to take a step backwards and revisit stories of a more classical vintage that, perhaps, have been missed or overlooked by readers. And, when I thought on the confluence of “stories that speculative fiction fans should read but possibly haven’t” and “older fiction that’s still stunning,” I (naturally) settled on Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges. Ficciones is a collection of Borges’s short fiction, including the majority of his fantastical or magic-realist works.

For the reader who enjoys tracing out a beautiful labyrinth in the form of a story, Borges will be a pleasure. His tales are hardly ever straightforward, even when the narratives may appear so, and the pleasure of the mental gymnastics that they occasionally provoke is unique. Borges also writes about writing frequently, with the sort of precise, handsome prose that lends itself well to convincing and engaging metafiction. Ficciones offers these pleasures and more—but, there are too many stories to discuss all at once, here. Instead, I’d like to focus on a couple of those that I’ve found most memorable, or most indicative of certain elements of Borges’s style or themes: “The Secret Miracle” and “The Library of Babel.”

[Onward.]

Welcome back to the Short Fiction Spotlight, a space for conversation about recent and not-so-recent short stories. In the last installment, I focused briefly on one of the longest-running print magazines, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; this time, I’d like to return to the world of online publications to note a couple of recent stories that caught my eye. The first, Caitlin R. Kiernan’s “The Prayer of Ninety Cats,” appears Subterranean Magazine, a quarterly publication with a strong track record of publishing quality work by well-known authors. The second is another piece from Jonathan Strahan’s Eclipse Online: “In Metal, In Bone” by An Owomoyela.

I’ve discussed works by both of these writers in the past and I do always look forward to seeing new stories by them—but it’s not only confirmation bias at work in my choice of these two pieces out of the others available in recent publications. These are intense stories, stories that do interesting things with prose and structure; their shared ability to creep under the skin is something that I appreciate.

[Onward.]

Welcome back to the Short Fiction Spotlight, a space for conversation about recent and not-so-recent short stories. As I’ve paid attention mostly, so far, to magazines that publish electronically, in this installment I’d like to take a look at some stories from the past two issues of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (January/February and March/April). Three stories in particular stood out above the rest: Ken Liu’s “A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel,” Michael Reaves’s “Code 666,” and “What the Red Oaks Knew” by Elizabeth and Mark Bourne.

These are very different pieces, in terms of tone, arc, and focus. Ken Liu touches on issues of human rights and memory, Michael Reaves give us a scary story with EMTs, and the Bournes offer a tale of vital, elemental forces at work in a world one step away from our own. (There is a pleasant variety available in the stories of F&SF, though more would be better, particularly in terms of authors: while having regulars is certainly fine, and most publications end up with them, it can become a touch repetitive if the same folks appear again and again over a few issues in a row.)

[Onward.]

Neil Gaiman returns to familiar territory with his much-anticipated novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, forthcoming from William Morrow on June 18. The story explores the dark spaces of myth, memory, and identity through the experiences of a young boy, recalled by his adult self upon a visit to the place where he grew up—the place where he brushed something larger, more grand and impossible, than himself. As the flap copy says, “When he was seven years old, he found himself in unimaginable danger—from inside his family, and from without. His only hope is the girl who lives at the end of the lane. She says her duck pond is an ocean. She may be telling the truth. After all, her grandmother remembers the Big Bang.”

The flap copy perhaps misrepresents the tone of this novel; it sounds all together more playful than this sharp, poignant, and occasionally somber tale actually is. The Ocean at the End of the Lane is Gaiman’s first novel directed toward adults since 2005’s Anansi Boys, but within it, he creates a curious tonal hybrid: the narrative is framed by an adult voice, and the content of the story is frequently outside of what would be seen in a children’s book—yet, the majority of the tale is told as by a child, with a child’s eyes and sense of storytelling. It is as if this novel settles on a middle-ground between Gaiman’s various potential audiences.

[A spoiler-free review]

Elizabeth Bear’s second Eternal Sky novel, Shattered Pillars, follows directly on the heels of the first, Range of Ghosts (2012). These books are set in a secondary world based loosely on the 12-13^th century Asian Steppes and surrounding empires; as noted previously regarding Range of Ghosts, they are epic in scale but personal in detail, focus, and theme, following a small band of characters as they literally shift the skies of their world through war, intrigue, and determination.

At the opening of Shattered Pillars, Re Temur and the Wizard Samarkar are continuing on their journey to rescue Edene—as well as to begin Temur’s war for his kingdom—with their companions, the monk Hsuing and the tiger-woman Hrahima. However, as is revealed at the end of the first novel, Edene has taken a different path into a caustic and ancient power, determined to save herself, her unborn child, and Temur. The wizards of Tsarepheth, too, have their own struggles and devastations to overcome as the reach of the Nameless cult spreads poisonously from empire to empire.

[A review.]

Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells is an anthology of gaslamp fantasy—stories set in or around the world of nineteenth-century Victorian England—edited by the ever-dynamic Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. The contributor’s list is full of familiar names: Delia Sherman, Elizabeth Bear, Theodora Goss, Ellen Kushner and Caroline Stevermer, Catherynne M. Valente, Jane Yolen, and so on. Many of these authors have previously written fantasies of manners or neo-Victorian stories; others visit the topic with fresh eyes.

The stories themselves touch a variety of genres and themes, from a contemporary academic fantasy to metafictional riffs on classic Victorian novels (and, of course, a light smattering of stories that might otherwise be considered “steampunk”). Several, also, offer critical portraits of the people within Britain who weren’t (and aren’t) often allowed their own words or stories: servants, wage laborers, and the people upon whose backs the glossy Victorian façade was built.

[A review.]

The 25^th Annual Lambda Awards nominees have been announced, including the LGBT Science Fiction /Fantasy/Horror category. The Lambda Awards, as the press release says, “celebrate achievement in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) writing for books published in 2012.” The winners will be announced at a ceremony on Monday June 3, 2013.

This year is a bit of a red-letter year for yours-truly, because one of the nominees is Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction. I’ve written a few times about the process of editing this collection, and what I had hoped it would do—and I’m thrilled that it seems to have connected with a wide audience, in and outside of the speculative fiction field.

The full nominee list is as follows:

[Continue.]

It’s been some time since we’ve had a discussion-oriented post at Queering SFF—sure, there have been book reviews and awards coverage and the like, but hardly enough chatting about the field generally, or about topics related under the headings of “queer” or “speculative” (or both). Blame your friendly correspondent, here; between the Exploring Carl Sagan’s Cosmos wrapping up and the Short Fiction Spotlight beginning, I’m afraid I’ve been neglecting my favorite space for talking about queer topics in the genre.

So, what’s been happening? For one thing, I’ve been reading some fascinating queer nonfiction, which I believe falls under our “related topics” heading. (That’s what I’d like to talk about this time—theory, practice, and cultural connections inside and outside of SF.) For another, I’ve been acting as senior editor at Strange Horizons—a magazine devoted in part to diverse fiction—which has made me think quite a lot about short queer SF from the slush pile to publication and beyond; we’ll get to that in the next post.

[Onward.]

While the weather ping-pongs from sixty degrees and sunny to freezing rain and negative wind-chill over the course of a single day, or while blizzards bury cars, sometimes staying in is preferable to going out. And, if you’re going to stay in, fending off cabin fever is a necessity—winter, to me, is the time for games. One recent acquisition that’s captured my interest is a card game designed by Keith Baker and published by Atlas Games: Gloom, the game where you “make your characters suffer the greatest tragedies possible before helping them pass on to the well-deserved respite of death.” In 2005, it was given an Origins Award for Best Traditional Card Game of the Year—but I hadn’t heard of it until a few months ago.

The game is designed for two to four players, and revolves around creating the most crushing, bizarre, appalling series of grotesqueries and accidents possible for your characters—while your opponents try to play cards like “Was Delighted by Ducklings” to remove some of your negative points. (Which are actually good, in this context.)

[If you like card games, story-telling, and puns…]

While researching for We Wuz Pushed: On Joanna Russ and Radical Truth-Telling, I developed a passionate engagement with Russ’s astounding, provocative body of work—and I had intended, at the time, to write her a letter upon completion of the project to thank her for her contributions to feminism, science fiction, and queer scholarship. Unfortunately, on April 29^th 2011, Joanna Russ passed away; I had not written or sent that letter. So, I go back to that initial desire now, to celebrate Russ’s birthday and the imprint her writings left on me, the SF genre, and the wider community of scholars and critics in which she participated.

Dear Joanna Russ,

I wanted to offer my admiration and respect for the contributions you have made to all of the fields in which I—and so many others—read, work, and create. Reading the span of your bibliography, from poetry to fiction to nonfiction and back, has been a gift that I will treasure; you were one of the finest, the most visceral and honest, voices I have ever had the pleasure to encounter. You have left your mark on all of the fields in which you worked, and have forged paths between them that to this day are useful and provocative. The connections between queer feminism and SF, between the academy and feminism, between SF and the academy: these are all roads that you helped to pave.

[More.]

Welcome back to the Short Fiction Spotlight, a space for conversation about recent and not-so-recent short stories. This time around, rather than picking out various stories from here and there, I’ll be talking about a single issue of a magazine: Apex #45, edited by Lynne M. Thomas, freshly released for February. The reason? It’s a Shakespeare theme issue. I have a series of feelings about and investments in the work of William Shakespeare—it’s sort of unavoidable as a member of an English department—and the concept of various authors writing speculative pastiches and other tales set in the worlds of Hamlet or Macbeth is, shall we say, seductive.

There are four stories in the issue (in addition to an essay by Sarah Monette and an interview with Kate Elliot): “Mad Hamlet’s Mother” by Patricia C. Wrede, “Zebulon Vance Sings the Alphabet Songs of Love” by Merrie Haskell, “The Face of Heaven So Fine” by Kat Howard, and “My Voice is in my Sword” by Kate Elliott. The last is a reprint from 1994’s Weird Tales from Shakespeare, edited by Katharine Kerr and Martin H. Greenberg.

[Onward.]

We are marked by what we have been. And erasing either of those can have unpredictable consequences...

For Valentine's Day, we hope you enjoy “The Finite Canvas” a recently released Tor.com novelette by Brit Mandelo, illustrated by Rick Berry.

This novelette was acquired for Tor.com by Tor Books editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

[Read “The Finite Canvas”]

The final episode of Cosmos, “Who Speaks for Earth?”, is a climactic wrap-up where Carl Sagan summarizes both the nightmarish behavior of our species and the possible alternatives to that behavior. As the Netflix info-box says, this episode is “a prognosis for Earth” that weighs humanity’s successes and failures. The episode opens by juxtaposing the actions of respectful European traders in Alaska with those of the conquistadors, and goes from there to a wrenching description of a dream of Sagan’s. In that dream, he is exploring space, and comes upon a planet as it snuffs out, only to return to find Earth snuffed as well. That leads to an impassioned discussion of nuclear weapons. Furthermore, Sagan explores the destruction of the Library of Alexandria and the murder of Hypatia. But, from there, he moves into a positive, uplifting close about the lifespan of the universe, our species, and the ability we have to choose life over death.

[Onward.]

Welcome back to the Short Fiction Spotlight, a space for conversation about recent and not-so-recent short stories. In this installment, I’d like to talk about three pieces: “Lifeline” by Jonathan Olfert, “Armless Maidens of the American West” by Genevieve Valentine, and “October in the Chair” by Neil Gaiman. The first two are, respectively, from John Joseph Adams’s Lightspeed (January 2013) and Lynne M. Thomas’s Apex Magazine (August 2012); the third was initially published in 2002 in Conjunctions #39 and has been reprinted in Gaiman’s collection Fragile Things (2006), as well as various and sundry best-ofs over the years.

[Onward.]

The penultimate episode of Cosmos, “Encyclopaedia Galactica,” is about the search for extraterrestrial life, as well as how we might communicate with that life. This episode is also in the recursive mode of the earlier half of the series—it begins with the Barney and Betty Hill abduction story and a refutation of UFO theories, moves to Champollion and the Rosetta stone, and then shifts to a conversation about potential interstellar communication and the civilizations that just might be trying to do that communication. This all comes back, of course, to the problem of the UFO and the reasons why we’ll likely hear communication from far away before we see anyone visiting our skies.

[Onward.]