2019 Year-in-Review

Lots happened in 2019. SO MUCH! And, as it seems I report every year, I am a bit tired. But might as well celebrate as I can. Quick Sip Reviews will be turning five years old in less than a week. And 2019 saw a lot of good, including 2 Hugo nominations for Best Fanzine and Best Fan Writer! So thank you so so much for reading and following and everything!

I already went over a bunch of stuff from 2019 in my eligibility post, so I'd suggest starting there for a general update on me. Otherwise, I also posted the Quick Sip Reviews 2019 Recommended Reading List today, so there's that. Anyway, I won't dally too long (I have to go shovel snow...boo). Below are the stats for 2019 plus some thoughts and updates. Cheers!

The Quick Sip Reviews 2019 Recommended Reading List

2019 is dead! Long live 2020! Well, perhaps not quite. Before I officially pronounce 2019 over and done, there's some business to get to first, namely looking back and taking stock of ALL THE AMAZING STORIES that I read over the year. Hence, the Quick Sip Reviews 2019 Recommended Reading List! Below are 106* works spanning the entirety of the year. I admit, I kind of cheated. This is pretty much a collation of all my weekly recommendations, which I do on my Patreon as my Sip of the Week column. Every Friday I give one Sip of the Week and one Honorable Mention, with a review of the former and brief note on the later. These are patron-exclusive, so if you want to get in on weekly recs (plus lots more), I'd recommend joining.

That said, the Sips and this list have two MAJOR caveats to them. The first is that they reflect my tastes and opinions. I'm not trying to give you the best stories, but rather the stories I liked the most. Secondly, these stories are ONLY taken from venues that I cover in my reviews. This incredibly narrows my field, regardless of how much I try to read. The field is vast and I would totally read more if I could, but circumstances restrict me in what I can get to. I regret not being able to read more and wider, but I do feel that what I read now allows me to get to as much and as wide a sampling of the field as possible. I own that, and while I do make apologies for it, I also stand behind it. This is what I do. This is what limits me. I still think and hope that this list will have value to some, and might help people find some stories they might have missed. The good news is that I have reviewed all of these stories right here at Quick Sip Reviews. You can put the title into the search (at the top left of the screen on desktops...if you're using mobile you can toggle on the desktop mode by going to the bottom of the page and finding the button there). So if you're curious to know more, there will be keywords and notes and all sorts of info. Plus more if you check the posts on my Patreon.

Next some brief stats. These 106 stories came from 26 different publications and 101 different authors (7 authors have 2 stories on the list). Strange Horizons placed the most on the list with 9; followed by Uncanny and Clarkesworld with 8; Beneath Ceasless Skies, Fireside, and The Dark with 7; Lightspeed and Terraform with 6; Apex with 5; Anathema, Fiyah, Nightmare, Tor, and Flash Fiction Online with 4; Diabolical Plots and PodCastle with 3; Escape Pod, GigaNotoSaurus, Glittership, Lackington's, Omenana, Augur, and Translunar Travelers Lounge with 2; and Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Mithila Review, and Samovar with 1.

My many thanks to all of the authors, editors, and other people involved with bringing these stories into the world. They are amazing. So, without further delay, the list! Cheers!

Quick Sips - Tor dot com December 2019

Art by Audrey Benjaminsen

I'm actually surprised that Tor had two stories out in December, as in at least some years past they've taken the month largely off. Not that I'm complaining. The two stories here are interesting and find people coming up against some strange and perhaps-unexplainable things. One woman is facing a broken mirror that has effected all of time, that has rewritten reality itself. Another finds herself working for a government she knows better than to trust in a strange place that will push her to her physical and mental limits. Both deal with alternate realities, with dimensions, and both are haunting and cold, well suited for the winter. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - Escape Pod #710 & #711

The two stories from Escape Pod's December both deal with space, and isolation, and loneliness, and cooperation. Given, they do so in two very different ways, one unfolding on a station that is (now) devoid of human life, but which has also seen the "birth" of something new. The second is very much filled with humans. Too many, perhaps, for the colony they're on, given the series of accidents that threatens everyone. Both find people reaching out to people, though, despite the risk and despite the people involved largely being people who sought a kind of solitude. And the works are at turns heartwarming and wrenching, with a great holiday touch for at least one of them that makes them very appropriate for the season. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - Strange Horizons 12/16/2019 & 12/23/2019

I'm not actually sure if Strange Horizons is done for the year with this short story and two poems, or if there's a surprise waiting for me on Monday (*puts head in hands, weeps*). Maybe there will be a new Samovar! Or a special issue! Or maybe this is it. Whatever the case, the works are wonderful and focus on conflict and division, at governments and change and devastation. The works find characters dealing with their worlds being torn apart and (maybe) put back together again. But always with a price, a cost in human lives. These are some bleak-at-times works, but they reveal the beauty of the human spirit, and hope, in the face of even the worst situations. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - Beneath Ceaseless Skies #293

Art by Alexey Shugurov

At first blush the two stories in the latest issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies don’t share too much in common(a rarity for the publication). But digging a little deeper, though, finds stories featuring characters dealing with some systemic problems. Very different ones, but ones that still seek to make them complicit in evil and corruption. And that almost succeed. They’re both quiet at first but rather quickly ramp up, and their ends are both rather bloody, rather messy affairs. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - Anathema #9

Art by Grace P. Fong

December is full of presents, it seems, with Anathema giving the gift of more SFF short fiction and poetry to all the nice (or naughty, bc yolo) people of the world. The stories and poems are solidly strange and haunting, the mood rather appropriate for winter, which is where I’m reading them. They are cold, distant, and dominated by isolation and loneliness. They deal with ghosts, with gods, with loss, with transformations, and with hope. The characters here are dealing with feeling silent, with feeling cut off from needed support. From being able to truly inhabit and express themselves. To the reviews!