In "Nothing of Value," Aimee Ogden renders a future in which teleportation throughout the Solar System has become commonplace. What are the ethical and moral implications of what is called "transit" and involves the translation of information across vast amounts of space, information rearranged in just the way it was sent out in the first... Continue Reading →
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... Continue Reading →
The Short Story Reader #123 – Maladaptive Camouflage by Ann LeBlanc
Previous | Next I discovered "Maladaptive Camouflage" thanks to a tweet by Angela Liu (whose excellent story "The Last Gamemaster in the World" I reviewed last week). What a great find this short story is--a blending of first and second-person narrative at a critical moment in three people's lives. One of them, at first glance,... Continue Reading →
The Short Story Reader #122 – Waffles Are Only Goodbye for Now by Ryan Cole
Previous | Next Ryan Cole tells a heartfelt and intimate short story about Bertha, a refrigeration unit that puts a whole new layer of meaning to the notion of "smart appliances". Suffering from a case of PTSD after losing her family--and especially a child--Bertha bonds with a young survivor of the apocalyptic war, developing a... Continue Reading →
The Short Story Reader #121 – The Last Gamemaster in the World by Angela Liu
The Last Gamemaster in the World by Angela Liu examines the mother-child dynamic in a beautiful, fresh way through the lens of games at the end of the world - find out this and more in my short examination of the short story.
The Short Story Reader #120 – The World’s Wife by Ng Yi-Sheng
Previous | Next Here's one of the most creative pieces of flash fiction I've read in recent memory, the story of a wife whose demand to have her husband's body recovered from the vacuum of space leads to a most unexpected development. Ng Yi-Sheng imagines this body developing its own atmosphere, becoming a planet in... Continue Reading →
The Short Story Reader #114 – Papas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Slug Monsters by Erica L. Satifka
Previous | Next Titan is as hostile as a planet gets. Yet humans have colonised it through an ingenious method: liquifying their brains and inserting them within nigh-on indestructible bodies; it's a great method to earn little, live in a cramped dome-home, and mine for mother Earth (or whatever colonial corporation trades with the citizen... Continue Reading →
Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh – Book Review
Author: Emily TeshGenre: Queer Space OperaLength: 436 pages https://youtu.be/O4bhzzwbBpQ Some Desperate Glory is the kind of novel that aims to bag some desperately glorious nominations come SFF award season. The topics it examines are timely, they are attractive to the more liberally-minded of science fiction readers (and there's a good chunk of us around), and... Continue Reading →
The Short Story Reader #88 – The Rope is the World by China Miéville | Or, Conceptualising a Whole Galaxy From a Grain of Sand
Previous | Next China Mieville paints ambitious worlds in such bold brushstrokes across the various stories you'll find in Three Moments of an Explosion. What he does in "The Rope is the World" is no different, and reading its opening, I figured I'd take a few moments to highlight just how it is that Mieville... Continue Reading →
The Short Story Reader #78 – The Blaumilch by Lavie Tidhar
Previous | Next My first Tidhar story, "Unboxing", was a technically flawless piece, and one of my favourite horror stories put by Apex Magazine this year. "The Blaumilch", by contrast, is a hopeful piece. Tidhar introduces the reader to a future Mars and one of its inhabitants: Daud, a member of the Re-Born. Daud is... Continue Reading →