Quick Sips - Clarkesworld #168

Art by Rodion Shaldo

September’s Clarkesworld Magazine is big. Four short stories (1 translated) and three novelettes remind me that this is the longest publication that I cover. And in some ways it’s an almost strange month for the publication, featuring stories that dip more into the fantasy side of things, though with plenty of science or at least mechanical elements that mean that the focus still isn’t really on magic, exactly. The pieces run from historical weird to far future colonization, from intimate stories unfolding in the human mind to conflicts that span countries and beyond. There’s a lot to get to in this issue, so I won’t waste any more time. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - GigaNotoSaurus June 2020

I’ve been consistently impressed with GigaNotoSaurus since its return from hiatus, and that continues today as I look at the June story, a wonderful fantasy featuring food, festival, family, and a dance that for the main character has been on hold for over twenty years. The piece mixes elements of myth with a strange kind of diaspora, building up a place and people that are unique and captivating, familiar but surrounded by magic. It’s an invigorating read, and continues the trends of the publication in putting wonderful works of longer-than-average length. To the review!

Quick Sips - PodCastle #616 & 620

It's a fairly full month of stories at PodCastle, with a special double release pushing the total stories to three. They aren't exactly the cheeriest of tales, dealing with grief, transformation, loneliness, and death. But the stories hold some tenderness and hope in their hearts, managing to navigate through or around the crush of emotions, the gravity of loss, and steer toward a place where maybe healing can begin. Where maybe the characters can shift the narrative away from tragedy and to a more affirming place. To the reviews!

THE SIPPY AWARDS 201! The "I'd Ship That" Sippy for Excellent Relationships in Short SFF

Welcome, dear readers, to the FIFTH ANNUAL SIPPY AWARDS! For those uninitiated, the Sippys are the SFF short fiction awards that no one asked for but I'm giving out anyway! The rules are simple: of all the stories covered by QSR over the previous year, I'm selecting my five favorites in each of five categories. That's 25 stories in total, with 5 that walk away with the prestigious and coveted Big Sip Award. This is obviously the literary achievement that people wait their whole lives to reach, yes? Anyway, these posts will go up, one a day, for the next five days. As is tradition, I'm kicking things off with the...

“I’d Ship That” Sippy Award for Excellent Relationships is Short SFF

I'm a sucker for a good relationship story. They don't have to be romantic. Or sexual. Though most of these stories do feature romance and sex, they also feature characters that interact and orbit each other in intensely beautiful ways. For some of the stories, the connections are between just two people, lovers or friends or something else. For others, the connections flow between more people, or did, and were severed. They feature people striving to find comfort and meaning in their own skins, knowing sometimes that takes help, and understanding, and compassion. And occasionally it takes kicking some ass. Whatever the case, the relationships explored in these stories have stuck with me through a very hard year.

The stories come from all over, and it's probably no surprise that most of the relationships read as queer. But it's not just that which speaks to me. These are stories about people dealing with some crushing situations. And reaching out to each other, and helping each other, protecting each other, boosting each other. Surviving. Thriving. They're beautiful and fierce and I'll just get out of the way and let them speak for themselves.

Quick Sips - Diabolical Plots #54

Art by Joey Jordan

Two stories round out Diabolical Plots' August offerings, with two rather twisted takes on familiar tropes in SFF. The first takes a look not only at inspiration but at corporate culture as well, revealing a novel way of looking at innovation and greed. The second takes aim at zombies, tying them explicitly to colonization and then complicating them further with a deconstruction of belonging, identity, and isolation. Both works definitely work with some grim themes, though they often find strange moments of beauty tucked into the gritty realities they expose. Before I give too much away, though, let's get to the reviews!

Quick Sips - Lackington's #19 [Voyages]

Art by Carrion House

May brings a new Voyages-themed issue of Lackington’s, with six original short stories to take you away from the comforts of your chair and transport you to different worlds and different times. The stories are all about movement, about the itch to travel and see new places. That might be another country or another planet. It might be a moon or just a little further down the track. But these are stories that revel in the journey and the joy and the meaning to be found through voyaging. They reveal worlds strange and familiar, haunting and affirming, and before I gush too much I should get to the reviews!

Quick Sips - Strange Horizons 04/01/2019 & 04/08/2019

Two short stories and two poems open up Strange Horizons’ April content, and it’s an incredibly strong bunch of short SFF. The fiction looks closely at homes and at monsters, at people who are trying to escape in some ways the burdens of their histories and who instead find they are trapped by the need to return. Forced into systems that they don’t necessarily want to be in. And it pushes them then to confront the monsters without and within in order to try and work toward healing and hope. It’s a bracing and beautiful batch of fiction and poetry, and I’ll get right to the reviews!

Quick Sips - Clarkesworld #150

Art by Arthur Haas

There’s lots of news in this March issue of Clarkesworld Magazine, plus six new stories (five short stories and one novelette). Mainly, the publication will be adding more translations to its offerings, replacing reprints with new translations of Korean SFF. I trust this doesn’t mean that the Chinese translations will stop, though the current issue again doesn’t have a translation. What is here are some stories that deal very poignantly and viscerally with grief, with oppression, and with people reaching out to other people. That finds people dealing with loss in very profound ways but working through those losses to try and find community, or joy, or love, or purpose. The stories feature moments great and small of people starting something, taking a chance and sparking change. And life. And hope. So without further delay, let’s get to the reviews!

Quick Sips - Beneath Ceaseless Skies #272

Art by Flavio Bolla

The two stories in the latest issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies are linked by water, by characters who find being submerged to be more natural than being on land. Who are not afraid of the dark and deep. But who are also not free. Who have to live on the demands of others, bound to service that they don’t exactly understand. And they both want freedom, though of different sorts. And when the time comes where it’s within their grasps, they have to make the decision of if they will reach for it, and how. The pieces are very different in tone and style, but both are intense and satisfying reads and I’ll get right to the reviews!

Quick Sips - Clarkesworld #139

It’s a phenomenal April of fiction at Clarkesworld Magazine, with four short stories and a translated novelette to bite into. And these are evocative, emotional stories that look at connections and cooperation. That look at people helping people in many different ways. To comfort one another. To protect one another. But also to push one another to do better. To reach a fuller potential. To push toward a better future where we aren’t defined by hate and loss and sorrow. The stories are at times tinged by grief and tragedy, but they shine with a lovely strength, and a flowing sweep of language and ideas. It’s just a fantastically strong issue, and I’ll get to those reviews!

Art by Arthur Haas

Quick Sips - The Dark #35

It’s March at The Dark Magazine and with spring comes two stories about women in isolation, surrounded by hunger and by darkness, and what they do to escape, to fall victim to it. Both stories find characters who are struggling with being on their own, either because their husband isn’t always around or because they don’t have one. The distance between them and other people becomes a place where dark things brew and ferment and begin to leak into their world, into their space. The characters must take action in an attempt to avoid the grasping hands of the dark, and yet not all actions will keep them safe. The stories explore the difference between waiting for the dark to come in and trying to get away from it. It makes for a tense, nail-biting issue, and I’ll get right to the reviews!

Art by Caro von Chaos

Quick Sips - Beneath Ceaseless Skies #243

Normally with Beneath Ceaseless Skies, it’s pretty easy to tell the binding theme or element that holds the two two together. It’s one of the reasons I always look forward to sitting down with a new issue, because of this resonance that allows the stories to act in synergy, and if D&D has taught me anything, it’s that synergy bonuses are the best. Now, this second issue of 2018 might seem oddly paired at first glance. Certainly the mood of the stories is very different, one wrenching and one fun. But I think the element that binds and complicates these stories, and this issue as a whole, is the idea of banishment. In each, a character finds themself cast out of what they thought of as their home, looking for a way back to the way things were. In each, it’s not really through any fault of these people that they’ve lost a place, and there’s a part of them that feels it’s unfair that they should be cast out. Only, in both, getting back seems an impossible thing, though for very different reasons. So yeah, let’s get to the reviews!

Art by Dimitrije Miljus

X Marks the Story - January 2018

X Marks the Story is now live at The Book Smugglers. This is the spiritual successor to The Monthly Round and covers five recent short SFF stories that I loved from late 2017/early 2018.

So thrilled to have my column go live. Please go check it out at The Book Smugglers! Links to just the stories are below:

“When The Night Blooms, An Artist Transmutes: A Three-Act Play” by Nin Harris (published in The Dark Magazine #31, December 2017)
“The Weight of Sentience” by Naru Dames Sundar (published in Shimmer Magazine #40, November/December 2017)
“The House at the End of the Lane is Dreaming” by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor (published in Lightspeed Magazine #91, December 2017)
“The Heaven-Moving Way” by Chi Hui, translated by Andy Dudak (published in Apex Magazine #104, January 2018)
“The Epic of Sakina” by Shari Paul (published in Fiyah Literary Magazine #5, January 2018)

Cheers!

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The Monthly Round - December 2017

This is the last one, as I'm starting a new monthly recommendation/review column at Book Smugglers called X Marks the Story (the first of which will be out next Wednesday). But please join me for the final Monthly Round over at Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together.

As, for those who just want links...

Tasting Flight - December 2017

“When The Night Blooms, An Artist Transmutes: A Three-Act Play” by Nin Harris (The Dark)
“The Weight of Sentience” by Naru Dames Sundar (Shimmer)
“The Birding: A Fairy Tale” by Natalia Theodoridou (Strange Horizons)
“The House at the End of the Lane is Dreaming” by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor (Lightspeed)
“An Incomplete Timeline of What We Tried” by Debbie Urbanski (Terraform)
“The First Stop Is Always the Last” by John Wiswell (Flash Fiction Online)

Cheers!

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Quick Sips - The Dark #31

December brings a pair of stories to The Dark Magazine that focus sharply on observation and theater. In both, women drawn into roles where they are closely watched by men, and in both these experiences are further framed in terms of a sort of voyeurism. In one, a woman is filed, in the other, a woman is part of a play. Both feature stages and bring the reader in as spectators and in some ways as participants. We are the eyes that act as camera and as audience. We get to peek into the private worlds of these character, the inner thoughts dragged out into the light. These are two interesting and at times very unsettling stories that do some fascinating things with style and tone. To the reviews!

Art by Sandeep Karunakaran

Quick Sips - Uncanny #19 [November stuff]

It’s an extra helping of SFF poetry for November’s Uncanny Magazine, with three original stories and four original poems, all exploring love and resistance, history and harm. The stories range quite widely, from a wrenching historical fantasy to a strange alt present to a love story from an artificial to a human. They interrogate art and love, design and trajectories. They feature characters wondering what to do next, fleeing violence and abuse, reaching out for kindness and trust. The poetry is rich and reveals a sense of place and family and the need to come together and work toward a better world, to rewrite the accepted past in order to find justice and identity and a space to be. It’s a full month of content and an excellent crop of short SFF, so I’ll get right to the reviews!

Art by Julie Dillon

Quick Sips - Lackington's #15 [Diseases]

Lackington’s is back with a new issue, and this one’s all about diseases. Ick. And yet for an issue devoted to sickness and corruptions of various sorts, the stories are as beautiful as I’ve come to expect from the publication, with prose that sings and stories that provide some complicated and lovely views of disease and those effected by disease. As much as the stories are about sicknesses, too, they are also about conventions, about the ways that we are taught to treat disease, and how effective (or not) those treatments can be. Often times, the stories show that diseases are but symptoms themselves of deeper maladies, ones that cannot be easily excised, that must be confronted and dragged into the light, dissected and examined and exorcised. My diagnosis? Review time!

Art by Gregory St. John

Quick Sips - Strange Horizons 08/21/2017 & 08/28/2017

Well, we’ve made it to the Strange Horizons annual fund drive! If you haven’t chipped, I strongly encourage you to. Strange Horizons is a non-profit publication and it does some very incredibly work, lifting up voices in SFF while keeping an eye out for awesome poetry and providing a nice assortment of nonfiction. Strange Horizons is one of my very favorite publications, and today I’m looking at a short story and a whole lot of poetry. Because of the nature of the fund drive, bonus content is being released on a rolling basis as they reach funding goals, so I will try to keep up with what’s been released there as well, but please forgive me if I miss a little bit. Anyway, there’s quite a bit of awesome to look at, so I’ll just jump right into those reviews!

Quick Sips - Clarkesworld #131

It's another full month of stories from Clarkesworld, though only the translation this time is a novelette. The stories are dense, though, and wonderfully strange, revealing the topography of meat, the tapestry of stars, the malleability of human flesh, and the tenacity of scientists working to protect data. There is a theme running through many of the stories of form and perseverance. People stand against the enormity of societal pressures to conform, to accept erasure or corruption or expectation. They follow what they know to be right even as it threatens to tear them apart. It makes for a nicely balance, emotionally impacting issue. To the reviews!

Art by Pascal Blanche

Quick Sips - Clarkesworld #125

February is a short month and for Clarkesworld that means this issue has slightly less than I'm used to seeing, but still provides four original stories, including a translated novelette. All four stories are science fictional, one of them near-ish future Earth sci fi but the rest either off world or so otherwisely alien that it might as well be. These are sweeping visions of the galaxy and universe that imagine humanity in a much different place than now. As still learning from past mistakes but no less in love with the feeling of discovery. With pushing the boundaries of what is known and what is possible. The stories all look at the damage that can cause, but also at the progress that can be made. In how it seems to take us farther and farther away from our roots but actually returns us closer to them. It's a nice collection of stories that lean toward action and keep things going at a fast pace. So let's get to the reviews! 

Art by Benedick T. Bana