#of monologuing?

[camgoloud]

this is the same anon from justttt previously with the end of book asks. hiiiii. i have also been slowly getting into sff short fiction (and made the plunge and added a few magazines websites to my rss feed so i can be Locked In) and i want this NEXT year to be my year of sff short fiction….do u have any fave stories to rec? also some more end of year book ask: 12 and/or 13?

omg… hello again! And sorry this ask ended up taking me so many days to get to, but, you know how it is with the holidays: time isn’t real. Also, my response ended up getting, like. REALLY long. So, sorry about that! I’m putting it under a cut to be considerate, but if interested, please read on for a List of some of my favorite authors for sf/f short fiction, and also a few other specific stories I read this year that I’ve been thinking a lot about! And also my fun little Hater Rant in response to your ask game prompts!

[The referenced end-of-year book ask game is here, by the way]

SF/F Short Fiction Recommendations

Starting with some authors who I consider Masters Of The Craft:

1. Isabel J. Kim.

If you’ve been on this blog longer than a couple months you’ve probably seen me casually gush over her stuff at some point, but if not… well, you really can’t go wrong with any of it! It’s pretty much all free to read on her website. (Incidentally, this is a great time to get into her work, because she had a huge three-book deal go through with Tor earlier this year and she’s going to have novels start coming out probably by 2026 which I predict are going to do VERY well—start with her short stories now and you’ll be able to say you were into her before she really hit the big time!) A few personal favorites of mine include:

Homecoming Is Just Another Word For The Sublimation Of The Self (doing some really interesting things with diaspora! This one is also her debut publication and the basis for her forthcoming debut novel, so maybe a good place to start)

You Will Not Live To See M/M Horrors Beyond Your Comprehension (this one is quite short, only like 1k words, and also quite funny if you’re an Online sort of individual! What if Achilles went to see the Oracle of Delphi and the Oracle had an ao3 account, basically.)

Why Don’t We Just Kill The Kid in the Omelas Hole (basically, it’s about the title. A take on Omelas (have you read the original Omelas story by Ursula K. Le Guin? If not, definitely start there) with the premise: what if the Omelas universe had social media reactionaries in it. VERY darkly funny.)

Zeta-Epsilon (possibly my Favorite Of Favorites. FANTASTIC meditation on What It Means To Love Things You’re Not Supposed To Love, and also a very well-written non-linear narrative, and also, there’s a heist; truly, I love this story so much)

Day Ten Thousand (WEIRD (positive) story, I would not start here with IJK, BUT if you end up liking her stuff this one will give you a lot to chew on. Some real “I will find you in every universe” vibes going on. Lots of thinking about wheels and cycles. Also lots of thinking about suicide, so, know that going in maybe)

2. Rich Larson.

This man is like, probably the most prolific writer of speculative short fiction currently active. He's written SO MUCH. A lot of it is REALLY GOOD. Some favorites of mine:

Ice (cool Arctic-world vibes off the charts (they have a thing called FROSTWHALES) but the real highlight is the deliciously complicated relationship between the protagonist and his younger brother. It's full of jealousy and love gone sour and misunderstandings, and it makes me insane whenever I think about it. They made an episode of Love Death + Robots out of this story which is also pretty good—it ends differently than the original and isn't as impactful in my opinion, but the animation goes hard)

Last Nice Day (A bit of a Winter Soldier vibe with this one. Very moody. IS it possible to make peace with the things your body has done?)

Travelers (this one is... heavy. To say too much ahead of time would be to spoil the impact of realizing what's going on in my opinion but it's a lot. Don't read it unless you're in the right mindset to tackle some serious topics but if you ARE in that mindset it's very good)

Not actually short fiction, but if you end up liking the three short stories I listed above, I highly recommend his novel Ymir. It's got a lot of common elements with them, especially Ice.

3. Kelly Link

The undisputed queen of the SF/F short story. Everything she's written in her 20+ year career is spectacularly creative and absolutely haunting. Again, you probably can't go wrong, but my personal top three are:

Valley of the Girls [not online so I can't link to it unfortunately but it's in her collection "Get in Trouble"—you could see if your library has it?] (this story fucks me up to the MAXIMUM possible degree. It's like. Hm. It's like. What if Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh was about the teenaged children of, like, Elon Musk. And in their desperation to be noticed and remembered by a world in which literally none of their actions have any consequences ever due to the isolation born of their privilege they all became obsessed with a bastardized version of ancient Egyptian funerary culture and started building pyramids to get up to their teenaged antics within. Well okay so that's the setting. As for the plot. I'm going to leave it to Link to unfold the plot, because she does it so, so, SO masterfully. The way crucial information gets slowly revealed as the story creeps along to its ending... and the ending itself... seriously, I get SO fucked up over this story every time I think about it. Read it please!!)

The Summer People (extremely classic Link vibes on this one; might be a good place to start with her work, especially since it's online. Very atmospheric, featuring deals with fairies and prompting some interesting discussion on class within vacation destinations)

Skinder's Veil [I read this in the 2022 Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy anthology volume edited by Rebecca Roanhorse and John Joseph Adams; not sure if it's available elsewhere] (not sure what to say about this one tbh besides OOOOFF. VIBES. It was my first Kelly Link short story and the first time I'd ever read anything quite like it, and it will thus live in my heart forever <3)

Moving on to some other miscellaneous stories that I read this year and liked a lot!

Selkie Stories are for Losers by Sofia Samatar. I got recced this one by the good people of Wyrmhole (are you signed up for the Wyrmhole newsletter yet? If not, you SHOULD be - it’s a project started by Isabel J. Kim and a few other short fiction authors. Their tagline is “a terminally online newsletter for speculative short fiction”. You’re on Tumblr, you’ll probably like a lot of what they promote at least as much as I do!) It's beautiful and tragic—the story of two kids whose parents have failed them and how they find each other.

Binomial Nomenclature and the Mother of Happiness by Alexandra Munck. This one from the first 2024 issue of Clarkesworld does great work with first person POV/unreliable narration, and the tone is so quietly, profoundly sad that reading it broke my heart a little. It's about the tragically doomed attempts of the narrator to rigidly and scientifically categorize emotional responses, and letting that work blind her to the ways her actions are causing emotional harm to herself and others. Very well done!

If Someone You Love Has Become a Vurdalak by Sam J. Miller. Devastating supernatural take on addiction and the way it impacts loved ones. Really just gorgeous.

I'll stop there for the sake of brevity (lmao, as if) but there are plenty of other stories I've read and loved, and would be happy to recommend also! Anon (or anyone else!), if you'd ever like to swing by my dms and discuss—if you read anything I mention above, what your feelings are on it, if there's anything else you particularly enjoyed that strikes you as similar, etc.—I'd be really happy to chat short fiction further! I'm always looking for new recommendations myself, as well.

With that I'll move onto part two: the hater half of this love/hate saga!

Books That Suck 2k24

12. Any books that disappointed you?; 13. What were your least favorite books of the year?

As far as disappointing books go… I read this non-fiction book called “Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles” which was… well to be honest my feelings are a little complicated! Because on the one hand the subject matter is inherently interesting to me (coming-out of the closet as a Beatles enjoyer on Tumblr dot com) so I was personally pretty invested in it the whole way through and I’m on the whole glad I read it because I did learn some more Fun Facts And Minutiae. However. I don’t really feel like the information, as interesting as it was, was very well presented? I mean the thing is. Come ON. It’s literally the break-up of the Beatles. There surely must be a way to spin a bit more of a proper NARRATIVE out of this rather than presenting it as just a collection of trivia and fun facts which is sort of what I felt it was when all was said and done. And also I took issue with the spin the author gave some of said facts in the “unbiased” narrative voice but whatever, I’m a Paul girl so I’m always going to be dissatisfied with any male author’s take on the breakup lmao, so I guess that’s kind of a non-factor.

Really I think the primary reason I felt disappointed coming out of the book was its failure to live up to its title! Like. In addition to falling a little flat on the “Story” side of things… You call your book “Solid State” and I’m gonna want to see some TECHNICAL DETAILS on those consoles, baby. Tell me about the inner workings! But instead it was just very. “The new desks meant you could have more tracks which was cool 👍. George bought a Moog. Anyway here’s why the other three Beatles breaking with all precedent and overruling Paul 3-1 on the Klein issue rather than waiting until they had reached a unanimous agreement to make a major business decision means that it’s PAUL’S FAULT that the group wasn’t speaking with one voice anymore 🙄” (Side note if anyone seeing this DOES have any resources on recording technology of the 60s-70s that are a little more technical in nature PLEASE send them to me! I would really like to learn more about this!)

I don't think Solid State was my least favorite book of the year on the whole, though. That honor probably goes to Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, which... God, I really wanted to like it, and in principle it sounds like it should be a lot of fun, but I don't know. I just felt the pacing was off, I think. I didn't enjoy reading it very much. That said, I don't think it's bad, and it would probably work for a lot of people—it just didn't for me. And I didn't read that many books I disliked all the way from start to finish this year, but I did finish Shigidi just because it was such a fast read (took me less than a day to get through), so... unfortunately that's a mark against it here, I guess.

[visenyaism]

eagerly awaiting the reveal of what political science 101 concept is she going to stop the plot to teach middle schoolers about. we got bread and circuses we got the extended work on thomas hobbes my money is on haymitch starting this book as an objectivist and having to unlearn that in the face of true struggle

[eriochromatic]

You dip out, and the whole world flips over...

[kendyroy]

“They gave me runway in this film. There’s one monologue in there. I can’t tell you the details of it. I say more words in that monologue than I said in an entire movie once as Wolverine. But there are sides of the character that I’ve been scratching at for 24 years […] There is stuff in this movie where I was like, ‘This is the thing I’ve been trying to get out’ and I feel so excited about it.”

— Hugh Jackman talking about Logan in Deadpool & Wolverine (x)

[tekehu]

impulse purchase? impulse purchase? i pulse purchae? impulse ourchase? i pulse pkrcgae? imphbsi pufccjBeev? impudlwe pufxjjabwvv?

[puppppppppy]

Bridge to turnabout doodles

[corviiids]

tweet that got me kinassigned everyone from goro akechi to brennan lee mulligan

[jingler]

"this fandom is annoying" every fandom is annoying dipshit. it came free with being passionate about something.

[randomnerd737]

reblog for larger sample size

[betaphannie]

if i can speak

[juno-infernal]

the horrors are endless. but we stay silly :3

[renaissanceousia]

"it isn't how it should be. eat or be eaten. power and glory and nothing else matters. ares is that way. zeus is that way. my mother is that way. he isn't that way. he's better than that. maybe i was that way once but i don't want to be that way anymore. i won't be like all of you. i just won't."

[hallikset]

fanfiction website goes down: hundreds dead, thousands injured.

[friendlyneighborhoodevilvillain]

As always please spread for larger sample size

I’ve got 54 cousins and I’ve always assumed I was an outlier but I’m curious what the norm is.

[glassphinix]

astarion is so fuckin funny cause like. okay god he was subjected to The Horrors for 200 years straight and then happened to get nabbed by mind flayers and ejected miles away from baldurs gate so hes out in the wilderness in the sun and away from cazador for the first time in centuries and his first priority is to be a catty little bitch. like most of the stuff you can do in act 1 to raise his approval is basically just shit thats so pointlessly mean or out of pocket that its funny to him. he's broken the leash for the first time in centuries and he immediately decides he wants to Have Fun and Fuck Shit Up