Quick Sips - Fireside Fiction August 2017

Well September is a busy month at Fireside Fiction. With four flash fiction stories, one short story, and the first three installments of a serial novelette or novella, it manages to pack a lot in there. Given that, it's no surprise that the themes and feels of the stories range quite a bit, from happy in the face of oblivion to heartbroken at the end of a beautiful relationship. The stories look at gods and prophets, loves and robots. These are stories that all explore what it means to be human and what it is that humans create. All the bullshit and abuse but also the beauty and the compassion. It's a difficult batch of stories to fully fit under any thematic umbrella, but the quality is certainly high and the overall feeling rather triumphant. To the reviews!

Art by Daniel Stolle

Quick Sips - Shimmer #35 (January Stuff)

The January offereings from Shimmer Magazine do a nice job of standing in the nebulous spaces. The half known and the half dark and the half hurt and half healing. These are the places where monsters and magic live, even when it turns out that what seemed like monsters are anything but and what seemed like magic might only have been a fierce desire for something different. And both stories center families. Mothers and fathers and children, all hurt and hurting each other, all seeking some measure of forgiveness and unable to quite reach through the miasma of difference to find it. These are stories of quiet tragedies and loud changes, and it's a lovely way to start a new year of stories. So yeah, to the reviews! 

Art by Sandro Castelli

Quick Sips - Fiyah #1

Ever since I heard about this project last year I've been looking forward to the first issue of Fiyah. Guess what? It more than delivers on its promise of excellent SFF stories. The issue is tightly packed with six pieces that work together marvelously, that start out on Earth and then slowly pull away farther and farther, mixing science and magic, alien worlds and our own past. These are stories that examine and challenge the idea of difference among sentient beings, that refuses to allow the "science" of intolerance and hatred to decide who should be considered a person and who should not. And the stories feature characters fighting for better worlds and better lives, fighting because to not fight is to die, to extinguish, and to be erased. It's an excellent issue and you should all rush out and buy it. In the mean time, let's get to the reviews! 

Art by Geneva B.

THE SIPPY AWARDS - The "Time to Run Some Red Lights" Sippy for Excellent Action in Short SFF

Hello and welcome to everyone's favorite awards that no one asked for, the Sippys! So far I've managed to ship my favorite relationships, cower in fear at my favorite scares, and totally not cry over my favorite tragic and/or beautiful stories of 2015. And there's still two more categories of Sippys to go! This week is all about the stories that get the heart pumping, that made me lean forward in my seat and read a little faster. Because fourth up is--

The "Time to Run Some Red Lights" Sippy 

for Excellent Action! in Short SFF

There are those who complain that short SFF these days are, well, boring. Too luminous, too poetic, too metaphorical. There are those who pine for the days of the pulp science fictions that prioritized action and plot over subtlety or meaning. To those people I ask: what the fuck are you reading? I have seen zero indication that stories now are any less intense or visceral than those written at any point in the past (that these people who complain about the decline of compelling short SFF often identify as fans of Lovecraft...confuses me). And stories today use action in subtle and profound ways, to entertain of course but also to challenge and to goad, to complicate and to reveal some ugly truths. And today I'm focusing on stories that bring the action, the battles big and small, that manage to take a breakneck pace and a visual flare and craft something deeply personal. And the winners are...

Quick Sips - Mothership Zeta #1

Amid some more somber news of publications closing, there are still some rays of sunshine, and Mothership Zeta is certainly one. Coming in as an ezine, the Mothership is the home for fun. Mostly, at least. The stories do have a flare of the fun, voices that roll from the tongue, a wry sense of humor and healthy amount of sarcasm. But stuck in here too are stories that slow things down. That break the humor in favor of topics that are much more serious. The issue manages to balance itself quite well, starting and ending with flash and moving between those two points from humor to sweet to dark and back again. There's also nonfiction and a reprint to enjoy that I will not be talking about here, but below are reviews of all eight of the original fiction stories. Here we go!

Art by Frank Wu

Quick Sips - Terraform February 2015

A set of four short stories that straddle the flash fiction length this month at Terraform. I must admit I like Terraform, but I don't really get the people who were claiming that it was going to be so much DIFFERENT than other markets out there. I mean, it's good, it has very talented writers. It has a certain style and fills a certain niche, but I don't see it's goal as somehow different from any other market. I wonder if the people who were claiming that Terraform was going to be so much better than other markets still believe that. For me, it's a solid place for short (and some very short) fiction with mostly science fiction stylings (though the last story of the month is not what I would consider strictly science fiction). But let's get on with it!

Stories:

"Gynoid, Preserved" by Malon Edwards (1669 words)

Well this story's a rather bleak look at what might be the logical progression of both crowd-funding and synthetic bodies. It's a great idea, that people would basically go into debt to bring back their loved ones and resort to crowd-funding to keep those loved ones alive. And just like crowd-funding stories now, for every success, for every "Hey I'm doing some good," there are a hundred more projects that go unfunded, unfulfilled, because the story just didn't hit right. It didn't include the "right" kind of message.  It's people picking and choosing winners and losers, and in this story the loser is a young girl whose parents are desperate to keep her and yet who don't have the money. It's striking, it's hitting, and it made me want to know more. It made me want to know about how she died, about why she doesn't really fight too hard to stay alive. There is talk that the self-preservation drive doesn't exist in these synthetic people, but that seems too simple. Perhaps she doesn't want to fight to stay alive because she sees what she costs, sees her own value, and can't help but be a little hopeless. It's a solid story, though, full of loss and grief and interesting ideas.

"Valentine's Day" by Xia Jia, translated by Ken Liu (1862 words)

This is a fun story about what kind of thing can happen when everyone can be plugged in. Huang, a guy in a relationship with Qing, agrees to let his roommates look in on his Valentine's Day date. Of course, they release the feed to the public and the couple's date goes viral. Qing is subjected to escalating harassment while Huang finds himself completely unable to do anything about it. Or perhaps too apathetic to try. On one lever it can seem almost funny because here is Huang who is dealing with making a bad decision and seeing his relationship suffer because of it. Poor Huang, who loses his girl on Valentine's Day. Of course, there's the real message that I read into it, that to Huang this is about him, his about people being mean to him, about the universe being unfair to him, when the real abuse is being aimed at Qing. She's the one that people make inappropriate comments about. She's the one the internet wants to kiss someone. She's the one who has her privacy shattered and who gets stalked. All with the focus more on Huang, all with Huang thinking how unfair this is to him. There is a certain possessiveness that he feels toward Qing, and even though it's not him who's driving this online harassment, it still shows that he sees some sort of equality in the misfortune that befalls them. Equality despite the fact that dangerous attention is being directed at Qing and, at most, people are just laughing at Huang. It's a good story, one that made me think about what it was saying and what kind of a statement it was making about online vulnerability.

"Inter-Exo" by Julie Steinbacher (1962 words)

A group of young people forced to wear exo-suits because of their weakened immune systems find a brief respite from their imprisonment in the metal suits to have something of a party. It's a fairly wild, sensual, sexual party, with the participants allowed to actually touch, and the prose is electrically changed and powerful, describing the simple acts that are normally not possible for these people. Obviously there must be danger here as they break the rules to be together, but the story is more about how they can finally connect, how wearing the suits don't make them less human or less able to enjoy. Indeed, it seems to be about how these people need the touch more, how for them simply holding hands is an erotic act. Of course, they do not stop there. People frowning on rather explicit depictions of sex might look elsewhere, but the erotic elements of this story make sense and are handled very well. A powerful story.

"There is Nothing in the Universe That is Not Me" by Dominica Phetteplace (1247 words)

Of all the stories this month this one was the hardest to parse for me. A very much non-linear tale about a woman moving through popular cliches in stories, it shows how she's always moving forward, always after something, always pursued and pursuer. Taking aim at most of the most popular of conventions with what are the "strong, female character" tropes and also love triangles in both science fiction and fantasy, the narrator keeps going forward, keeps having realizations that she forgets, keeps pursuing...something. In the end she's left to contemplate life and the nature of things and decides to opt out, to break the cycle, to join with the universe and stop existing, but I'm left a little bit questioning what that means for those who write, for those who read. Because the story might be aiming at plot in general, the linear path, the illusion of fulfillment. That I can see. But I'm not sure what the other path is. I guess the story, for me, is saying that you can never really escape the cliches, the tropes, the illusions of progress. The only way to do so is to stop existing, is to step away. But for writers and readers that's not really the "right" decision. It seems to me that the story is saying, instead, that we have to be aware of how we are acting. We have to try. That there is no end and no rest for those who chose to do this because the only other way is to step back, but while that might put you above things, it takes away the ability to make change. Unless the story is saying change is an illusion, but I'm not really willing to see that. But what do I know? In the end I liked it, though I'm not entirely sure what to think about it.

Quick Sips - Shimmer #23 (January Stuff)

Today I'm looking at the January releases for Shimmer #23. Once again, I encourage everyone to go out and get the whole issue, but I follow these as they are released, meaning that the other two stories out in this "January" issue will get reviewed here in February. But if you like the stories, please go ahead and support the magazine! 

Stories:

"The Half Dark Promise" by Malon Edwards (3423 words)

Well damn. That is one hell of a way to open up an issue. Visceral, violent, and tinged with loss, this story of a little girl facing down a monster with a skin condition and a machete is intense. Weaving in bits of language from the girl's background, from Haiti, it builds up the struggle between her and the Pogo, the struggle that is more than just her against a monster, that becomes about her against the world, against the harassment she suffers, the terror she faces. Tired of being tired. I liked that line, and liked even more the cool calm with which she wields Tonton Macoute. It's a fun read and yet a dark read, one that isn't particularly happy. Not when her best friend has been taken, not when her father has been taken and she must face such perils and hardship alone. But it is an uplifting story, one about a little girl not running, and her fighting through and winning something that she wasn't supposed to win. It's a great story.

"Of Blood and Brine" by Megan E. O'Keefe (3064 words)

Following a young and nameless child, this story starts mysterious when an equally nameless adult arrives in her shop to by a perfume. In a society where scents are linked to identity and every adult must buy a name and wrap or else die from exposure to a deadly moon, the story does a great job of world-building, and of setting up the main character's dilemma. She needs a name and yet her mentor is a drunk who won't help. When the nameless stranger offers enough money for her to buy her name, the child takes the chance, though it draws her into a mystery of murder and betrayal. That aspect of the story was nice, the build, and yet in a story this short the final confrontation seemed just a little truncated to me. I cheered to see the girl finally have enough to make her own way, but I felt it was a little bit of a disappointment not to see more with the woman and her sister. It by no means ruined the story for me, though, and this is strong with some solid mood and a setting I want to see more of.