Two short stories and a novelette round out the SFF originals from Tor this month, with a definite focus on science fiction, on futures of humanity interacting with the universe and, perhaps more importantly, with the Earth. Whether that means dealing with the touch of climate disaster and change, or working to move beyond the bounds of our terrestrial home through uploading and flight, or gaining a new and non-human presence to co-inhabit the planet with, the pieces look at how humans see the Earth, and how that perspective shifts as the gaze becomes less incorporated in a human body. It's a month full of strangeness and longing, risks and looming dangers, and it makes for a fascinating bunch of stories. To the reviews!
August brings two short stories and two very short flash fictions to Fireside Magazine, each of them circling around memory and difference, hurt and acceptance. In each of the stories, a character is dealing with being put into a hostile situation, where they aren't wholly sure of the rules. For some, this means they try to define those rules, to give them shape when it seems there isn't any. For others, though, it means deciding to act regardless of what rules they might be breaking, and forging their own ways forward despite the danger and oppression. It's a rather wrenching month of stories that have a definite fantasy lean, and a fantasy where magic is pushing in on the "real world" to varied results. So let's get to the reviews!
There’s two new Awakenings season novelettes at The Book Smugglers! The first evokes and complicates fairy tales and specifically a fairy tale romance, and is cold and in some ways very cruel. As cruel as reality, at least, which it turns out is quite cruel indeed. It’s a story that in some ways embraces what it means to be a fairy tale, full of darkness and magic and hope. But at the same time, it seems to me to hesitate short of providing a completely expected experience. Instead, it challenges the reader about their assumptions about what these kind of stories look like, and how they should end. And the second looks follows a young girl growing up, reaching for an adulthood where she can finally take control of her own life after years and years of dealing with waiting, abuse, and a pressure to conform. Both stories do a lot of interesting things, and build maintain very different styles while still pairing well, showing the world in all its complex, beautiful cruelty. So yeah, to the reviews!
The second half of August brings two poems and a novelettes to Strange Horizons, as well as other nonfiction content that is well worth checking out but that I’m not looking specifically at. The fiction is intense, a noir mystery that’s really a revenge story, but circles around justice and guilt, denial and tragedy. The poetry is actually very nicely linked, as both pieces are framed as advice, as instructions. For very different things, it turns out, but still very important things. And the issues as a whole have a rather bleak feel to them. Of harm that cannot be erased or ignored. Of the slow approach of death, and fragile beauty of voices raised against the tide of time, holding on to what they can. To the reviews!
I’m switching things up a bit today with a look at a slender collection of short SFF from Spanish author Marian Womack, Lost Objects. And in doing so I hope to sort through my own hesitation to look at short fiction collections here at Quick Sip Reviews. I will not be looking at each story individually, but rather will try to wrap my thoughts around the project as a whole, with special attention to perhaps some of the stories that I found most appreciated or challenging. That all said, I’ll go ahead and dive right in to this luminous and haunting book!
August brings a new Heroic Fantasy Quarterly into my greedy hands, with four stories (one novelette and three short stories) plus three poems, all diving into myth and magic, war and longing. The pieces have a bit more of a battle focus in this issue, moving from battlefield to battlefield and finding knights, giants, dragons, and necromancers aplenty. The stories do more than just provide an action-packed fantasy read (though they do that, too). They dive into the realities and horrors of battle, and the reasons people have for entering into them anyway. It’s a varied and resonating issue, and before I give too much away, I’ll get to the reviews!
These two new stories from August’s Beneath Ceaseless Skies turn the action up to eleven with stories of teamwork and fighting against horror and oppression. In both works, the settings are defined by loss, by conflict. In one, people must live above a storm that ravages the ground below because of a war that involved separation and enslavement. In the other, a world must sacrifice its future to an alien creature in exchange for a twisted taste of immortality. And in both, people find that talking doesn’t work, and so resort of fists and blades and magic and flight to fight back against the tyranny and reach for a future that people tell them is impossible. To the reviews!
