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Short Fiction Roundup

Short Fiction Roundup

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july2010Each week, Lightspeed features a short story from its current magazine, that is otherwise available for a $2.99 PDF download. The current one is “The Zeppelin Conductor Society’s Annual Gentleman’s Ball” by Genevieve Valentine. Next Tuesday (July 27) it will be “… for a single yesterday” by George R. R. Martin.

Theodora Goss is the new Folkroots editor for Realms of Fantasy.

Here’s another take on Gary MacMahon’s The Harm, which sees a lot more in it that my own lukewarm review.

The 2009 Shirley Jackson Awards winner in the short story category is “The Pelican Bar” by Karen Joy Fowler (Eclipse 3).  Haven’t read it, nor any of the nominees (nor for that matter, any nominees any category, maybe I get out too much):

  • “The Crevasse,” Dale Bailey & Nathan Ballingrud (Lovecraft Unbound)
  • “Strappado,” Laird Barron (Poe)
  • “Faces,” Aimee Bender (The Paris Review, Winter ‘09)
  • “The Jacaranda Smile,” Gemma Files (Apparitions)
  • “Procedure in Plain Air,” Jonathan Lethem (The New Yorker 10/26/09)
Short Fiction Review# 30: The Harm by Gary McMahon

Short Fiction Review# 30: The Harm by Gary McMahon

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theharm3TTA Press, publishers of Black Static, Interzone and Crimewave magazines as well as a few books, has launched a (potential) new line of exclusive novellas, beginning with Gary McMahon’s The Harm:

We hope that this will be the first of many TTA Press novellas, stories that you’d expect to see in Black Static and Interzone but are just too long for the magazines. They will be of varying lengths, and many we expect will be much longer than The Harm, but each one will be priced the same, just £5. In time, we hope to offer subscriptions to these novellas and offer significant savings.

The Harm is aimed at the Black Static audience, i.e., horror.  The story depicts the not unpredictable intertwined fates of three now grown up victims of particularly gruesome (though the adjective may be a redundancy) child molestation, as well as that of a sister of one of the casualties.  

The title intends to convey not just the horror of physical and sexual abuse of children (and, actually, the narrative is not, thankfully, directly concerned with detailing this) but the harm to all those who survive.

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Thinking about it

Thinking about it

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193350027102lzzzzzzz193350032802lzzzzzzzFor all those recovering English majors interested in science fiction criticism, you might want to check out Paul Kincaid’s review of Cheek by Jowl by Ursula K Le Guin and Imagination/Space by Gwyneth Jones.

Also in last week’s Strange Horizons is the always erudite though sometimes unfathomable critic John Clulte’s Scores column, a comparison and contrast between Cory Doctorow and Robert Heinlein.

Also, you can read one critic’s assessment (Niall Harrison) of another critic’s (Gary K. Wolfe) collection of reviews here.

Short Fiction Review #29: Realms of Fantasy June 2010

Short Fiction Review #29: Realms of Fantasy June 2010

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094-june20101While rumors of its demise appear to be greatly exaggerated, I thought I should perhaps not wait too long to review Realms of Fantasy for this month. Just in case.

The proverbial “worth the price of the issue” story is “The Hearts of  Men” by T.L. Morganfield, who seems to specialize in a subgenre of her own devising, Aztec mythology.  I reviewed a previous story of hers, “The Place that Makes You Happiest,” that appeared in the final issue of Paradox, which postulates that colonizing Spain had not destroyed the Aztec culture and comes to predominate modern society in the Americas.  This time around, Morganfield transposes Aztec notions of the role of the gods and blood sacrifice (which Joseph Campbell devotees will note shares common themes with the central conceit of Christianity)  into the wild, wild West to ask the equally archetypical question of “Who are you, and why are you here?”

“You’re really him, aren’t you?” the boy asked, shuffling a bit closer.

“Who?” I asked

“Huitzilopochtli”

I considered a moment before answering. “Maybe.” I really didn’t know who I was; I wore six-shooters at my hips and my battered felt hat smelled of sweat and rot, but when I checked it for a name, I didn’t find one.”

p.43

Morganfield suggests that, unlike the Greek conception of inevitable and immutable  destiny, things can sometimes change for the better, even for the gods, who sometimes are as clueless as the rest of us. You just have to have heart (a joke you won’t get unless you read the story, which I recommend).

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Summer Reading

Summer Reading

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62540212Right now, I’m about a quarter of the way into Robert V.S. Redick’s The Ruling Sea, the sequel (second of a planned four book sequence) to The Red Wolf Conspiracy.  I’m reading this in part for an SF Site review, where I previously took a look at the first volume. My interest in Redick stemmed from seeing him at the 2009 Virginia Festival of the Book, held annually in my home base of Charlottesville.  To quote myself,

I was struck by how intense Redick was, how much he cared about his characters and the world he created and how eager he was to share it (and how he struggled to cover as much as he could within the constraints of his allotted time). He didn’t strike me as a “Tolkien by the numbers” kind of guy. So I was mainly intrigued by his personality to read his book.

BlackGate fans should probably put it on their summer reading lists, even if they aren’t reviewing it. Things  I’m looking forward to reading this summer that I’m not reviewing include:

  • The Magicians by Lev Grossman
  • Horns by Joe Hill
  • Angelology by Danielle Trussoni
  • Bright Dark Madonna by Elizabeth Cunningham
  • The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers by Thomas Mullen

Of course, that’s just the tip of my tottering to-be-read pile.  But I’m optimistic that I’ll manage to make a dent in it.

Short Fiction Review # 28: Dark Faith

Short Fiction Review # 28: Dark Faith

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dark_faith_frontcvra_medium1

[Hell] doesn’t exist, no more so than the entities that are called Satan and the Devil.  They’re all…storybook constructs…Know this: there is no such thing as a ‘cosmic evil.’ Evil is a human matter, fashioned by ignorance, brutality, addiction, emotional trauma—the list is endless. The cosmos doesn’t feel anything, it is just a space, it doesn’t care about either good or evil, it is simply, like Heaven, indifferent.

“For My Next Trick I’ll Need a Volunteer” by Gary A. Braunbeck

p. 275, 285

That pretty much sums up my personal view of a universe indifferent to ongoing human folly.  That said, I’m fascinated by the notion of faith and its ethical implications, so a short story collection entitled Dark Faith co-edited by Maurice Broaddus and Jerry Gordon naturally got my attention. People rely on faith to provide an orderly framework to their lives, to infuse meaning to their existence. What these  stories (as well as several poems) share is a consideration of what happens when the assumptions that underpin faith unravel. For the most part, the results are not good

The opening story, “Ghosts of New York” by Jennifer Pelland, considers the afterlife of those who made the horrific choice to jump from the Twin Towers rather than remain in a burning buidling about to collapse. The whole subgenre of 9/11 fiction is tricky, given  our collective memory of something so frighteningly incomprehensible that’s been trivialized over time with the endlessly surreal replaying loop of the imploding skyscrapers, but Pelland’s take here is vividly disturbing in suggesting that memorializing the dead can make matters worse.

Poets and sages like to say that there is clarity in certain death. That a calm resignation settles over the nearly deceased, and they embrace the inevitability of the end of life with dignity and grace.

But there was no clarity for her, no calmness, no life flashing before her eyes in a montage of joy and regrets.  There was just pure animal terror, screams torn from her throat as she plummeted toward the ground in the longest ten seconds of her life.

And then there was an explosion of pain.

p.2

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Short Fiction Review #27: Conjunctions 52

Short Fiction Review #27: Conjunctions 52

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conjunctionsThe Spring 2009  issue of Conjunctions (yeah, I know, my reading is way behind) edited by Bradford Morrow and Brian Evenson, the twice yearly literary magazine published by Bard College, is a follow-up to its New Wave Fabulists issue of about eight years ago. This time around there’s less effort expended in attempting to define a “new” subgenre. Instead, there’s a simple page-and-a-half introduction and a title, Betwixt the Between: Impossible Realism, that I find more concisely descriptive of this type of  fiction than the extensive critical commentary contained in its predecessor. Alas, I found the fiction selections overall less compelling than when the earlier volume was trying to prove something.

Part of the reason I didn’t connect with some of these stories may be the underlying premise of the objective here. I don’t have a problem with the premise. I just don’t think it was fulfilled. According to the editors,

Betwixt the Between investigates ways in which, on the one hand, works of fiction treat the impossible as if it were the solid groundwork of the real or, on the other hand how the ineffable can sometimes flash lightning-quick through the realms of the real, leaving everything the same and yet unaccountably changed. Worlds and concomitant models of logic are offered here that reveal something about our daily existence and yet turn away from it to forge disjointed realities that strike the reader simultaneously as familiar and anything but.

p. 7

I get that. But a number of these tales don’t strike me as weird for the purpose of explicating the wondrous underpinning of human existence that otherwise seems mundane, they strike me as weird just for the sake of being weird.

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