The Short Story Thread

"The Queen of Erewhon" by Lucy Sussex (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September 1999) -- Creates a future where circumstances have caused the loss of much modern technology. An anthropologist from a slightly more technological society goes to visit one with less technology in order to study their custom of polyandry. She comes across two women who are lovers, and who have broken the rules of their culture. Reminds me of LeGuin. Definitely written from a feminist viewpoint, and with a great deal of gay content.

"Tomorrow is Saint Valentine's Day" by Tori Truslow (Clockwork Phoenix 3) -- Takes the form of one chapter from the biography of a fictional 19th century person, with footnotes and such. Definitely shows that the "SF" in this anthology's title stands for "speculative fiction," since this is pure fantasy. It's set in a Victorian Age where you can ride a train made of ice to the Moon, which is where the merfolk dwell when they migrate from Earth's ocean. Very lush and exotic and romantic. Might be called steam fantasy.
 
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"Spider the Artist" by Nnedi Okorafor (Seeds of Change, 2008) -- Takes place in a future Nigeria which supplies oil to wealthier nations through pipelines guarded by spider-like robots. The narrator learns to communicate with one of the robots through music. Overall, a grim story with a tiny touch of hope at the end. Later reprinted in Lightspeed, March 2011. Read it here:

Spider the Artist - Lightspeed Magazine


(By the way, for those keeping score, the story by Truslow was from 2010.)
 
"The Science of Herself" by Karen Joy Fowler (The Science of Herself plus . . ., 2013) -- I'm not sure this even counts as fiction, let alone SF. Anyway, it's a short biography of Mary Anning, a real person who gathered fossils on the coast of England and became an important pioneer paleontologist in the early 19th century. What makes it semi-fictional is a brief prologue and epilogue which connects this real figure with fictional characters in Jane Austen's novel Persuasion. More interesting as biography than fiction.
 
"The Other Graces" by Alice Sola Kim (Asimov's, July 2010) -- The protagonist is a young Korean-American woman, fresh out of high school, self-described as "yellow trash," having to deal with poverty and racism and a homeless father who is schizophrenic. The speculative content, rather minimal and possibly not needed to have the story, is the fact that she is mentally contacted by other, older selves who help her. Could be read as an allegory of "hearing voices" or as an adult looking back on her troubled adolescence.
 
"Boojum" by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette (Fast Ships, Black Sails, 2008) -- I already read and reviewed this one a while back.

Deliberately old-fashioned space opera with space pirates using living alien "ships" to raid cargo vessels. There's a reference to the seas of Venus, and the story even makes use of H. P. Lovecraft's alien Mi-Go from Pluto (AKA Fungi from Yuggoth) and their tendency to capture human brains. Not my cup of retro tea.
Click to expand...
 
"The Eleven Holy Numbers of the Mechanical Soul" by Natalia Theodoridou (Clarkesworld, February 2014) -- A man is left alone on a watery alien world with only the machines he builds for company. A hard science fiction theme told in an unusual style. You can read it here:

Clarkesworld Magazine - Science Fiction & Fantasy

"Mountain Ways" by Ursula K. LeGuin (Asimov's, August 1996) -- Set on one of the alien worlds inhabited by humans with a very different culture, as is typical of the author. On this planet, marriages are arranged among two men and two women. When two women fall in love, one of them disguises herself as a man in order to join into a marriage. A meditation on the difficulties inherent in love, sex, and marriage. later reprinted in Clarkesworld, so you can read it here:

Clarkesworld Magazine - Science Fiction & Fantasy
 
"Tan-Tan and Dry Bone" by Nalo Hopkinson (Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Spring/Summer 1999) -- Caribbean folk tale fantasy about a young woman who has killed her abusive father and the dead-but-living man whom she must constantly feed, until she gets help from an unexpected source. Written in dialect which is sometimes difficult to follow.
 
"The Four Generations of Chang E" by Zen Cho (Mascara Literary Review, April 26, 2012) -- Although set in the future and involving the protagonist winning a lottery for a trip to the Moon, this is clearly fantasy. Not only does the Moon have native inhabitants, it's also populated by sentient rabbits. It all seems to be an allegory for the immigrant experience, culture shock, feeling out of place, and so on. You can read it here:

Zen Cho
 
"Stay Thy Flight" by Elisabeth Vonarburg (originally published in French as ". . . Suspends ton vol" in Solaris, May 1992; English translation published in Bending the Landscape, 1998; no translator credit) -- Narrated by a semi-organic, semi-mechanical statue in the form of a Sphinx. Difficult to read at times, as the narrator's sense of time changes depending on the time of day, and this is conveyed through the use of unusual punctuation. Overall, a dreamy and poetic tale.
 
"Astrophila" by Carrie Vaughn (Clarkesworld, July 2012) -- Takes place in a society which has lost some high technology (like the Sussex) and among herders of wool animals (like the LeGuin) and deals with two women who fall in love (like both stories.) In this story one of the women is devoted to an astronomical telescope which has been rescued from former times, and which some consider to be a waste of time. Written in the same plain but elegant style as Sussex and LeGuin (which makes me wonder if LeGuin's work has created its own subgenre.) You can read it here:

Clarkesworld Magazine - Science Fiction & Fantasy

"Invisible Planets" by Hao Jingfang (originally published in Chinese in New Realms of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 2010; translated by Ken Liu and published in Lightspeed, December 2013) -- A pastiche of Italo Calvino's book Invisible Cities. This is a series of short accounts about various planets told by one person to another. Many of them seem to allegorical fables about the nature of storytelling. A light, charming piece. You can read it here:

http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/invisible-planets/
 
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"On the Leitmotif of the Trickster Constellation in Northern Hemispheric Star Charts, Post-Apocalypse" by Nicole Kornher-Stace (Clockwork Phoenix 4, 2013) -- Alternates two narratives. One is the story of a woman named Wasp who is an "archivist;" she somehow collects "ghosts" from pre-apocalyptic times. The other is a series of scholarly articles, apparently far in the future beyond Wasp's time, about the star maps drawn on various materials (including human skin) by Wasp's people. A strange and elusive story, in which one is never quite clear what is going on. Later expanded into a novel with the less unwieldy title Archivist Wasp. You can read it here:

Clockwork Phoenix 4
 
"Valentines" by Shira Lipkin (Interfictions 2, 2009) -- The narrator obsessively writes down everything she observes, because she has shot-term memory loss (a la Memento.) She encounters three somewhat different versions of the same waiter in what seem to be three different universes. Can be read as a study in mental breakdown and as a love story. Reprinted in Apex, June 2011, so you can read it here:

Valentines
 
"Dancing in the Shadow of the Once" by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz (Bloodchildren, 2013) -- One of the survivors of a tribal culture which was devastated by the chaos caused by their world being absorbed into an empire is augmented into a sort of living museum of tribal lore. Despite the fact that the empire is a interplanetary one, it's pretty clear that this is an allegory of colonialism.
 
"Ej-Es" by Nancy Kress (Stars, 2003) -- A team of interplanetary medics investigate a colony planet where a plague has devastated the population, and left the survivors with hallucinations which seem more real than their environment. Ponders the kind of Star Trek "noninterference" policy, and when it should be ignored. Reprinted in Lightspeed, November 2010, so you can read it here:

http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/ej-es/
 
"The Death of Sugar Daddy" by Toiya Kristen Finley (Electric Velocipede, Spring 2009) -- For the most part, a realistic story of a girl, her family, and her friends. The speculative content appears slowly and in a subtle way, as people develop small white patches on their skin and objects disappear, for a reason revealed at the end. Also contains some themes dealing with race in the USA.
 
"Enyo-Enyo" by Kameron Hurley (The Lowest Heaven, 2013) -- Dense, difficult to read story that throws handfuls of concepts at the reader and makes constant shifts back and forth in time. I'd be hard pressed to give you a plot description, but it has something to do with a woman aboard some kind of space vessel and her various experiences. Reprinted in Lightspeed, October 2013, so you can read it here.

Enyo-Enyo - Lightspeed Magazine

"Semiramis" by Genevieve Valentine (Clarkesworld, June 2011) -- Takes place in the near future, when global warming has reached a crisis point, at the Arctic storage center for seeds of the world's plants. Deals with what happens when corporate forces threaten to take control of the center. You can read it here:

Clarkesworld Magazine - Science Fiction & Fantasy
 
"Immersion" by Aliette de Bodard (Clarkesworld, June 2012) -- Set in a far future, this story deals with a technology which creates a wearable "avatar" which allows one to adopt the appearance and cultural norms of another society. The two societies involved seem to be clearly based on Asian and Western cultures, and the whole thing appears to be an allegory for cultural imperialism. Winner of the Nebula. You can read it here:

Clarkesworld Magazine - Science Fiction & Fantasy
 
"Sing" by Karin Tidbeck (Tor.com, April 17, 2014) -- Deals with a colony world where the inhabitants are in a peculiar relationship with the native birds, and what happens when an offworlder arrives. A good science fiction story with some of the flavor of fantasy. You can read it here.

Sing
 
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