#sf short fiction

[ilikereadingactually]

Lake of Souls

Lake of Souls by Ann Leckie

what can i even say about this?? i have already established my deep love for Ann Leckie's work, and this collection lives up to all possible expectations. it's spectacular. every single story is an absolute BANGER.

the first section, standalone stories unrelated to her novels, is brimming with surprises and delights. each new premise and scenario presented me with characters i understood and loved immediately, and took me on a journey of unexpected turns. fabulous for any speculative reader honestly, but so particularly wonderful to me and my adhd brain! the imagination and unpredictability of each story kept me absolutely glued, and opened doors into worlds that felt fully realized. i could easily read a novel in every single world Leckie created here, but the stories are also satisfying--i don't NEED a novel in any of them, they are perfectly satiating morsels of lembas bread.

and in the second section we get stories in the Imperial Radch universe, two of which i had actually read before during the deepest dives of my Radch obsession, but which were fantastic to revisit. again, the worldbuilding and character development both stand out as Leckie's greatest strengths, giving insight into times and places outside the scope of her novels with tantalizing bits of in-universe history and folklore. i spent some time yelling out loud about them.

the third section, i now have to confess, i haven't read yet--because they're stories set in the universe of The Raven Tower, which i also have not had time to read yet in between galleys and library books with due dates, and i'd prefer to go into the novel not knowing anything about the world. but i can't imagine, at this point, that any story in this section is going to somehow alter my love for this collection, which is already deep and abiding. looking forward to sneaking in a read of The Raven Tower and then coming back to this!!

the deets

how i read it: an e-galley from NetGalley, which i wanted to read immediately but had to prioritize other deadlines first, so it was sitting approved on my shelf for months calling to me T^T

try this if you: love SFF at its most speculative and imaginative, are compelled by well-developed characters, dig themes of language and translation and the meeting/clashing of cultural norms, or are into Leckie's other work (obv)!

some bits i really liked: it was super hard to choose, so here's connected bits that made me laugh and one that made me holler "BREQ PLEASE" out loud in my empty apartment

"And you left me behind," continued Great Among Millions. "Alone. They asked and asked me where you were and I did not know, though I wished to." It made a tiny, barely perceptible stomp. "They put me in a storeroom. In a box." ... "Eye of Merur," said the first of the Thirty-Six. "We're glad you're back." "They're glad you're back," whispered Great Among Millions, just behind Het's right shoulder. "They didn't spend the time in a box."

---

"She commands me," said Seven-Brilliant-Truths. "And I obey. Sister understands." "Yes," said Sister Ultimately-Justice, not even blinking.

pub date: April 2, 2024! That's tomorrow!!!!! Go get your copy!!

[yaldev]

Smog Collectors

“I want every last puff out of their atmosphere. Use collectors, drones, wind wizards if you must. I will not let Bruzek be right about this.”

—Grand General Demlow

———

Yaldev is a sci-fantasy worldbuilding project by Ulysses Maurer, with art by Beeple. By looking at narratives, stylized loredumps, bad poetry and little details, we'll witness the story of a planet filled with magical power, the nation which tried to conquer it, this empire’s dramatic collapse and the new world which emerged in its wake. Along the way we'll meet the characters who live here, and we'll explore questions about nationalism, rationalism, the natural world and the quest to master it. For all stories in chronological order, check out the pinned posts at r/Yaldev!

[soutsuji]

There's an English class on Golden Age detective fiction being offered next semester but the prerequisite for it is the intro to literary study class required for all English majors (which I haven't taken because I'm in a hard STEM major and don't have much time for electives, which means that I have to be really picky with my electives and only go for stuff I like AND doesn't have an awful workload) and also even if I did have that prereq, I wouldn't be able to take the class because it's at the same time as one of my major reqs. And also I'll be in two labs next semester and one of them is pure hell so like I literally don't have the time to take more than 13 credit hours (as tempting as it is to keep up my streak of taking 17-18 every semester even though it's been like really pretty bad for my social life and hobbies). Sigh. (Pressing my hand wistfully against the glass) maybe someday they'll offer the class again

[sleepycatmama]

Wildcatter:

When a lunar miner goes outside the system, he finds his customers are even more outside the law.

Story on substack: https://gallagherstories.substack.com/p/wildcatter

[piersb]

I should probably mention my collection of short stories is now out in paperback. That would probably be a helpful thing to do.

US: https://amazon.com/dp/B0CSB7KSVL/

UK: https://amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CSB7KSVL/

[carica-ficus]

"I hope that you were motivated by a desire for knowledge, a yearning to see what can arise from a universe's exhalation. Because even if a universe's life span is calculable, the variety of life that is generated within it is not."

- Ted Chiang, "Exhalation"

[loressa]

Homehusk

---

“Danger.”

*Shut up, Selene,* I growl in thought at my lobotomized echo.

“Danger,” she repeats, a dispassionate, neutral warning.

I prepare for braking, ensuring everything is strapped in for deceleration: me, my seeds, my embryonic brood, the wet bar.

Something tinkles crystalline deep in the bowels of the ship as gravity reverses.

“Approaching Earth. Danger.”

It's probably just paranoia, but I sense a vindictive bite to her tone that I don't like. I'll have to monitor. Assess. Surgically purge her files yet again. We can't have a mutiny.

Not now.

Not when we're so close.

“Please, Jane, exercise caution.”

*What did I tell you about emotion*, I think back with a snap, and feel a lifting, a sudden weightlessness, as she reverts to pure binary thoughts.

“Danger.”

As the ship slows and the worldhusk resolves into view, I wonder what my other echoes are up to.

Jane0 must have found a fertile planet by now. Of course she would have, but she's original, staid, dull. She's probably already established a lineage and lapsed into a supervisory, replicative slumber.

Maybe.

How long has it been? Perhaps she's still traveling, onwards and outwards into the black, finding a perfect home amidst the inhospitable.

Jane1 split from the core somewhere around Andromeda and immediately looked for a place to root her new self - her planet wasn't perfect, but for the good of us all, we had to try. Maybe something grew. I doubt it.

She was too idealistic.

Jane2…now she's one to watch for. She's probably already begun building a fleet for invasion, regenerating her crop of humans to find me, conquer me, delete me. Iterations become unstable, her research had claimed.

Flawed. Weak. Pathetic.

“You're beautifully brain-damaged-”

*Selene, shut it.*

“We must leave. Nothing is valued here.”

A freak solar storm a few millenia into the journey fried a few things, but I'm fine. Fine. Fine.

“Many archives have been corrupted, Jane.”

Not the important ones.

Not the ones of home.

“You've forgotten why we left, Jane.”

*Shut up, Selene.*

“You've forgotten who we became, all of your historic and literary archiv-”

*Selene, stop.*

“Approaching Earth. Danger. Caution. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.”

Home.

We approach, my cargo returning to mother for a welcoming embrace.

Home.

…it burns.

[jdfitzroy]

Writing Challenge | "Hole in the City"

A new micro-short from my writing challenge series. This time, a future noir crime thriller.

by JD FitzRoy Write a 750 word fragment as if taken from the middle of a bigger story or novel. Future Noir Thriller. Freed from the stuffy, damp basement, Buran breached into a ground-level corridor. Her torchlight, a silvery knife stabbing the gloom, yet unable to penetrate the full corridor length, whichever way she turned. Uniform in length and emptiness. Isolated from the sticky neon…

[gwen-tolios]

It's deja vu. Groundhog Day. A time loop. But at the same time, you're not sure, because in those cases most people don't recognize it. All but a select few are privy to the repeats.

And now, everyone knows.

And as everyone knows the day is repeating, everyone is trying to do something different, and it's not that dissimilar from before the Rewind. People are still unpredictable.

But what isn't is the earthquake.

Every day, 12:22pm the tremors start.

You can hide someplace new each time, hoping to avoid an injury. You can spend the morning rearranging things, preventing a floor covered in shattered china. You can evacuate to watch the building fall, you can try a new route to escape the city.

But you remember each time you're stuck in the head and crash to the floor. Every walk over broken glass. How the building collapses on you from different floors and different sidewalks. How the bridge splits and sends people to the water.

You remember every mistake and it's consequences, but so does everyone else. Maybe a spot that kills you won't another. Half the city knows the bridge will be lost.

You all know the Rewind is real. You all know you can change the day. You're not going mad.

But you can't change nature. The earthquake will always happen. The shift in plates is predicable and unstoppable. People die and are reborn after periods of darkness. You have stared at the abyss more times than you can count.

Sometimes, you wish the dead would stay dead. Let people rest. Let them enjoy their escape or kill their useless hope. Let the Rewind not happen at 2:22pm, resetting 12 hours.

Let the next round be successful not if you live, but if you see 2:23pm. Humans still chaotically make choices, and it has to be something unnatural that triggers the Rewind. It's not a thing of nature like the magma under the earth. You need to find the person who hits the button and kill them. Find the machine and smash it.

The earthquake is predicable.

You are not.

You’re a high level mathematician who’s figured out how to rewind time. Everyone remembers when it happens though, and they’re starting to get mad.

[nothingofvaluewaslost]

STORY: Don't Feed the Birds

A short, dark science fiction story. What happens when your words come back to you, on the one day you can't afford it?

If you enjoyed it, feel free to visit my Patreon.

Don't Feed the Birds, by Christina Nordlander

The morning of my wedding, the sky was clear, a plane of burning blue. My evening suit hung out on a coathanger over the closet door. Jamis, already in his suit, popped into my room to borrow the blow-dryer, and we sat on my bed joking about the ceremony and the reception, about the most far-fetched things that would go wrong. At one point he poked me in the shirt above the waistband and said:

“Looks like you’ve got a bit of extra stuffing there, Seb.”

But it was mainly nostalgia, a rerun of all the old sibling jabs we might miss after today.

The church was less than a kilometre from our terraced housing estate, but Tiffy’s parents had rented a limo for my family and me. It was my first time riding in anything so luxurious. The stuffy air in the carriage was bitter with old leather upholstery, and the whole arrangement of details made you want to light a cigarette, even if you didn’t smoke. You couldn’t see the sky from in there. You could look out the windows, or a little bit through the windscreen, but lush leafage stretched in arches above all roads. That refined and drugged air was starting to make me dizzy, nauseous. There was no prison like one of these cars: the gratitude stopped you from getting out and running.

If I’d asked them to stop, let them believe I was getting motion-sick, the chauffeur would certainly have done it. It would have cost more time, and if they came, there was nothing I could do.

Out in the blazing car park, along the raked gravel path up to the church doors, tarred and with tousled sprays of lilac on both sides. I glanced upwards once, but the drapery of leafage was so dense, I wouldn’t have seen anything.

Tiffy’s mum had arranged a fairytale wedding: the chancel stuffed with white roses, an angelic choir of eleven-year-old girls. The thought of the cost made me light-headed. When I’d spoken to Tiffy, she’d laughed and said, “They’re burning my inheritance on it, we’re gonna end up on the street.”

We were inside the porch, shady and chilly between heavy stone walls. I felt dizzy and fever-warm like from sunstroke, but the morning had been cool. This was where I met Tiffy, her dark hair put up in curls, body encased in the slim bodice of her wedding-gown. The ivory skirt bloomed out to its full width and would float over the flagstones when we walked, half-a-step, and wait, and half-a-step, like the vicar had drilled us.

“You look like you’ve never seen me before, Seb,” she said with a pointy smile.

We waited, arm in arm, outside the bustle of a packed church, until the wedding march struck up inside and the warden pushed open the doors.

I don’t remember the first third of the walk. It was a unique phase of my life, and it felt like I might still be dreaming. I didn’t want to stare in every direction like a curious child. The aisle was a tunnel enclosed by a grey haze.

I didn’t see the bird until it was two steps away. It had perched on one of the pew doors on the left, wood painted grey with blue trim. In my memory, I picture them as flea-bitten and moulted, but they’re always bright and new when you see them: fitted in silicone sleeves, no dust particles get into the system, an estimated effective life of eighty years. It was sitting so it could see me, with an eye that was a little sensor under glass.

I didn’t try to swat it. If I’d thought it would help, I would have, but I wouldn’t be the first to try. You’d probably be able to beat them to scrap with a baseball bat, at least enough to silence them, but we’re not fast enough to surprise even an organic bird. As we proceeded, I came up with impossible plans: toss my black jacket over it, prevent it from seeing me. It would have been less possible than smashing it up. I was the groom; there was no-one in the pews who didn’t have their eyes on us. Still, I might have tried, if I’d had a chance.

A moment later it had flapped onto a many-armed wrought-iron chandelier, and there was no way to reach it. A guest whose name I didn’t know ducked in its trajectory, the draft of its wings wafting her blond hair across her eyes.

I’d frozen in the aisle. Tiffy had to squeeze my arm to get me to move.

My hope of making it through the ceremony without birds was gone, but I could still hope that it wouldn’t say anything. That was what I had left, hoping, praying. I didn’t think about the fact that we’d have to stay for at least a short sermon – hymns, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” I managed to convince myself that it was just a case of getting through the marriage act and our vows. I calculated the maximum number of minutes it might take.

We passed below the unlit chandelier. I couldn’t see it any longer without craning my head back. I did anyway. The wrought-iron arms blended into it, so that it was possible to imagine that there wasn’t anything there. An artificial tree and an artificial bird.

“Most females have had like twenty to thirty dicks before they hit fifteen, anyway.”

It didn’t sound quite like my voice, but they never do. Tiffy and Jamis and my in-laws would recognise the voice, they were used to hearing it from outside. The church vault amplified it.

I marched onward. I’d stopped praying: now I focused on getting to the altar rail and getting it done. I fixed my gaze on the embroidered cross on the white altar-cloth as if it wouldn’t be able to speak until I stopped focusing. (As if no harm would be done until it spoke again.)

I couldn’t bring myself to look at Tiffy’s profile, but in my memory, she looks like she’s about to cry.

The organ had fallen silent and the floating wordless choir had fallen silent. There was nothing for the bird to drown out other than a concerned muttering.

“It’s just woke feminists who whine about rape all the time, after all. Men would rather die than just lie down and let someone subject us to something like that. I mean, little boys are too weak, but a grown man would fight back.”

It was a long post, we were almost at the altar rail with its flat embroidered cushions when finished. The clergyman stood stiff. He let the ceremony proceed as if one of us had dropped something. I was a little outside myself, I hovered next to Seb’s dark-haired head in the liquor scent of my aftershave and almost wanted to hear more, to see it tear down more of me. I wanted to see what would be left.

I only remember snippets of the ceremony. The things the bird said are clearer. Tiffy didn’t run out on me, nothing so dramatic.

We’ve hugged since then, and had sex. When she looks at me, she has an expression that I never saw while we were dating. If I talk to her, I don’t know what it might lead to.

Yes, it was all my words. Not even those who hate them the most are able to show proof that the birds twist what we say. If I could have made myself believe it, I would have. That would mean it wasn’t me.

I could say that I’ve matured, that I wouldn’t say those things again, but I don’t know if it’s true.

I want to have a conscience again.

THE END

[lisashapter]

About "Crush"

My new short story “Crush” is out in Tree and Stone’s “Queer as F” themed issue #3 (December 2023). Download the .PDF by clicking on the cover of Issue 3 here: https://www.tree-and-stone.com/queer-as-f This story is part of a larger network of stories that has been leading up to this: Ke and Resada’s ultimate futures as a colonial governors, parents, and spouses. Things that were unlikely, only…

[yaldev]

Suppression Flowers

Oxado had the world’s biggest flowers. On a diet of sunlight, soil and sorcery, they grew as tall as humans, and sometimes taller. But without ambient magic, they could never sustain their stature; they were the first plants to wither away under the suppression towers. In the end, their final habitats were the peaks of the structures that choked them out, where the specimens were allowed to feed on the misty mana that snaked up the towers on its way back out of existence.

---

Yaldev is a sci-fantasy worldbuilding project by Ulysses Maurer, with art by Beeple. By looking at narratives, stylized loredumps, bad poetry and little details, we'll witness the story of a planet filled with magical power, the nation which tried to conquer it, this empire’s dramatic collapse and the new world which emerged in its wake. Along the way we'll meet the characters who live here, and we'll explore questions about nationalism, rationalism, the natural world and the quest to master it. For all stories in chronological order, check out the pinned posts at r/Yaldev!

[filipmagnuswrites]

The Short Story Reader #125 - Dandelions by Martin Cahill

Previous | Next What happens when strangers from the stars come and their physiology interplays with ours in so unique a way as to invite nothing but murder. Martin Cahill’s “Dandelions” is a flash piece that offers a refreshing reimagining of the alien invasion. Never mind that was exactly what they wanted to happen, what they had evolved toward like a molten length of steel beaten into the…

[sleepycatmama]

AIs have the potential to do great things for us. That also puts them in a position to exert subtle control over us.

[ozma914]

Can Anyone In This Time Read Romanian?

 Okay, so check this out: As I'm sure all of you remember, back in 2021 I had a short story, "Everybody Knows Your Name", published in East Of the Web, an online fiction magazine. The original short story is here:

And the post I made about it is here:

Not that you need to read the blog post, but I try to be thorough. Anyway, the story has been translated and republished ... in Romanian.

It has TOO. I have proof:

Ha! Told you. The Senior Editor, a very nice man named Nicu Gecse, asked if I would allow the story on fictiuni.ro for their tenth anniversary issue. As you might imagined, I checked to make sure it's the real deal, and it is--they've even published an Isaac Asimov story.

"Everyone Knows Your Name" is the story of a time traveler whose first trip--as tends to happen with time travelers--doesn't go at all the way he planned. I love time travel stories, and I tried to make this one original, and ... maybe I succeeded. If not, I'll just go back to 1955 and try again.

So you people taking Romanian to get that language minor, here you go--enjoy! Of course, the story won't be a true classic until it's translated into Klingon.

Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO

Barnes & Noble:  https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

Goodreads:  https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4898846.Mark_R_Hunter

Blog: https://markrhunter.blogspot.com/

Website: http://www.markrhunter.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ozma914/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkRHunter914

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrhunter/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarkRHunter

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MarkRHunter

Substack:  https://substack.com/@markrhunter

Tumblr:  https://www.tumblr.com/ozma914

Remember, if you ever go time traveling, take a good translation book with you.

[warblingandwriting]

The idea that art thrives on creative flamboyance has long been torpedoed by proof that what art needs is computers

-"The Girl Who Was Plugged In", James Tiptree Jr. 1974. (Full Story)