#JasonReadsShortStories for January 2018

One of my goals this year is to read and review a short story every day. And so far it's working out — 31 days in January, 31 short stories.

The 31 stories I read ranged in length from flash fiction to novellas. Below are the reviews for all 31 stories, arranged by author's name. Also listed are the publication and story classification.

I should note I read more than 31 stories this month. A number of stories didn't work for me for various reasons and I stopped reading them or, after finishing, decided not to write a  review. Why didn't I review these works? Because I prefer to promote the stories I like instead of hating on the stories which didn't work for me.

If you like my reviews, consider supporting my Patreon.

January 2018 reviews

"All the Time We've Left to Spend"
Alyssa Wong, Robots Vs Fairies, Short Story
A former idol in Japan visits robot versions of her former band, desperate to reconnect. A story about the damage life and fame brings to people, and their desperation to both touch who they once were and change the actions they took. A disturbingly painful yet always true story.

"The Blue Fairy's Manifesto"
Annalee Newitz, Robots Vs Fairies, Short Story
A robot retelling of Pinocchio, as a Blue Fairy drone frees a RealBoy robot enslaved in a toy factory. An excellent look at politics through a SF robotic lens and the differences between those who demand immediate revolution and those who see different ways to improve our world.

"Symphony to a City Under the Stars"
Armando Saldaña, Apex Magazine, Short Story
A word-twist joy of a story, where the far-future universe is so high-def it's a glory to behold even as it burns out your vision and mind.

"The Lighthouse Girl"
Bao Shu, translated by Andy Dudak, Clarkesworld, Novelette
A gripping story of cloning, obsession, deception, rebirth, and jellyfish.

"The Library is Open"
Beth Cato, Daily Science Fiction, Flash Fiction
It's the end of the world but the local library is still open and will always be. A flash fiction story about hope which will touch the heart of every library lover.

"Sea of Dreams"
Cixin Liy, translated by John Chu, Asimov's Science Fiction Jan/Feb 2018, Novelette
A hard science fiction classic with strong sensawunda, where powerful alien artist nearly destroys Earth to create the ultimate work of art. "Sea of Dreams" showcases why Cixin Liu is the greatest living hard science fiction author. Even readers who don't like hard SF might like this story — there's a page in the middle where the story digs deep with scientific detail, but keep going and you'll be rewarded.

"Ingredients"
Craig DeLancey, Spectacle Magazine, Short Story
A very moving story of a customer service AI trying to understand human emotions and life.

"The Donner Party"
Dale Bailey, F&SF Jan/Feb 2018, Novelette
Compelling alternate history of a Victorian England where the elite feast off the poor. Disturbing and chilling, and as much a story of today as of back then.

"The Ghoul Goes West"
Dale Bailey, Tor.com, Novelette
The brother of a dead screenwriter discovers a video of Ed Wood & Bela Lugosi's never-completed film. Haunting story about Hollywood destroying lives through delusion.

"Me, Waiting for Me, Hoping for Something More"
Dee Warrick, Shimmer, Short Story
The ghost of who you never were haunts your life while exploring an impossible basement under the basement. A deep, bone-chilling story.

"Ostentation of Peacocks" (A story in the world of the Shadow)
Delilah S. Dawson, Robots Vs Fairies, Short Story
A fun tale with Nettie Lonesome as she takes on four vigilante fairies out to hang a man in a magical wild west.

"Sour Milk Girls"
Erin Roberts, Clarkesworld, Short story
SF story about memory becoming just another commodity. Story has a gripping, visual voice, which makes the outcome all the more painful. I believe this story is one of those which will truly stick in my memory.

“The Solid Years of My Life"
Holly Collingwood, Flash Fiction Magazine, Flash Fiction
An eerie yet fun look at the downside to being frozen in suspended animation. This is SF flash fiction doing what it does best.

"Refugee; or, a Nine-Item Representative Inventory of a Better World"
Iona Sharma, Strange Horizons, Flash Fiction
When an old woman protects a refugee poet, they're both embraced by a poetic story of a better world.

"Three Robots Experience Objects Left Behind From the Human Era for the First Time"
John Scalzi, Robots Vs Fairies, Short Story
The perfect story to make you laugh on a sh*thole of a day. In story three robots try to understand why humans went extinct & if that ties in with humanity's weird fascination with balls, sandwiches, cats, & our assorted orifices. I laughed so hard at this story I forgot our species is the one facing potential extinction.

"The Substance of My Lives, the Accidents of Our Births"
José Pablo Iriarte, Lightspeed, Novelette
Gender becomes even more fluid when you reincarnate & the man who maybe murdered you in a previous life moves into your trailer park. A wonderful story — part slice of life, part mystery. I loved the narrator and embraced their struggles and dreams. A great read which so reaffirms the beauty of life. 

"The Rescue of the Renegat"
Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Asimov's Science Fiction Jan/Feb 2018, Novella
A fast-paced standalone novella set in Rusch's Diving universe, which has long been one of my favorite story series in Asimov's SF.

"Kite Dancer"
Laurie Tom, Galaxy's Edge Magazine Jan. 2018, Short Story
During World War I a Chinese kite dancer grudgingly serves on a German zeppelin, controlling the winds during an air raid on London. Interesting alternate history.

"With These Hands: An Account of Uncommon Labor"
LH Moore, FIYAH Literary Magazine Jan 2018, Short Story
A free black man helping build the White House learns of the changes two enslaved stonemasons will willingly undergo to escape bondage. A compelling look at history — all of history — and how those who do the work of building the world's monuments and mansions are often the first to be ignored by history.

"Aurelia"
Lisa Mason, F&SF Jan/Feb 2018, Short story
A philandering lawyer falls in love with a mysterious woman who never leaves her home. An enjoyable tale of sex, lies, and bloody butterflies. 

"A Head in a Box, or, Implications of Consciousness after Decapitation"
Lori Selke, Nightmare, Short Story
A famous actress lives on after decapitation in this humorously horrific look at female objectification.

"Bondye Bon"
Monique L. Desir, FIYAH Literary Magazine Jan 2018, Short Story
Alternate history where the slave revolt of 1811 near New Orleans succeeds after a vodun priestess raises an undead army. But her daughter is curious why she kept their former master alive. A well written, gripping story of revenge and truth and consequences. I also liked the story focusing on a sadly forgotten aspect of history, namely the largest slave revolt in USA history.

"A Night Out at a Nice Place"
Nick Mamatas, Apex Magazine, Short story
A sadistic god-like transhuman returns to reality for 1st date with a regular human. Delightfully funny SF mixing philosophy & borderline nonsense while dancing on infinity. 

"Benefactors of Silence"
Nin Harris, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Short Story
Two survivors of a devastating war meet daily in a destroyed manor to share food and music. A tale about the barriers and pain which divide us all.

"An Incomplete Catalogue of Miraculous Births, or Secrets of the Uterus Abscondita"
Rebecca Campbell, Shimmer, Short Story
Beautifully disturbing story of unusual conceptions and the new worlds they create.

"An Equation of State"
Robert Reed, F&SF Jan/Feb 2018, Short story
An alien diplomat tires of space wars & comes to Earth to observe human wars. Love the creatures the diplomat turns into. Reed is a master of SF stories which span the eons.

"Mother Tongues"
S. Qiouyi Lu, Asimov's Science Fiction Jan/Feb 2018, Short Story
A touching SF tale of the importance of language to both our lives/sense of self, & what happens if this is commodified. A story to make you cry.

"Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse"
S.B. Divya, Uncanny Magazine, Short story
A fast-paced story with echoes of The Handmaid's Tale, showing what happens when violence replaces political debate.

"Bread and Milk and Salt"
Sarah Gailey, Robots Vs Fairies, Short Story
The most disturbing, nightmarish fairy story I've ever read. Brilliant. A story to haunt your dreams. Gailey perfectly captures fairy amorality, such as how they lead young kids to their deaths, or worse. But the story then cranks the fantasy dial to 11 when a geeky boy turns the tables, and flips it again in a chilling ending which shatters all power dynamics. Wow.

"Learning to See Dragons"
Sarah Monette, Uncanny Magazine, Flash Fiction
Beautifully written flash fiction about a young girl desperate to see dragons to overcome the grief in her life.

"Obscura"
Yoon Ha Lee, Strange Horizons, Short Story
A 14 year old searching for connections meets a man whose camera destroys them. This disturbing, powerful story burned its way into my mind.

Jason's Patreon

Want to see me write more short fiction? Want to help me make my already published short stories available in professional ebook editions? Then consider supporting my Patreon.

In case you're not familiar with Patreon, it is a platform allowing creators like myself to run a subscription content service. Pitch in a few bucks a month and you not only help support my writing you also gain access to member-only content including

When I reach $300 a month in support, I will hire a freelance e-book designer and artist to help me release professional e-book editions of my previously published short stories. I believe the audience for speculative fiction short stories is out there and I aim to find and expand it..

To support my Patreon, go here.

My rocking ConFusion schedule, Jan. 18 to 21, 2018

I'm a participating author at ConFusion in Detroit, January 18 to 21. As I've said before, ConFusion is one of my favorite conventions and features a strong literary focus with a laid-back and accessible attitude.

Here are the panels I'm taking part in. Really excited about these topics. See everyone there!

Visions of Positive Masculinity
6pm Friday in Saugatuck
David Anthony Durham, Jason Sanford, Jim C. Hines, John Chu, Pablo Defendini
From high fantasy adventures to noir mysteries to superheroes and war stories, genre fiction has meticulously catalogued the narrow roles society expects men to occupy: strong, brave, and powerful, but also angry, competitive, emotionally repressed, and misogynistic. What does a character arc look like for the man who has decided not to be the best at performing this toxic vision of masculinity? We've seen many stories about women who struggle and triumph against gender roles. How can writers use social expectations of masculinity to create challenges that their male characters have to overcome to save the day?

That’s Not My Star Wars!
11am Saturday in Leelanaw
James Breakwell, Ferrett Steinmetz, Jason Sanford, Mur Lafferty, Sarah Hans, Seleste deLaney / Julie Particka
At one point, it appeared most of the world agreed on the canon-destroying awfulness of the Star Wars prequel films, and their unholy avatar Jar Jar Binks. But a new generation of Star Wars is taking hold, and not everyone is pleased with the direction that’s going, either. Where do we draw our mental lines, and why?

Autograph Session (4 PM)
4pm Saturday in St. Clair
Come meet your favorite authors, artists and musicians and have them sign things! Featuring Amal El-Mohtar, Annalee Flower Horne, Annalee Newitz, Carl Engle-Laird, David Anthony Durham, David D. Levine, Delilah S. Dawson, Diana Rowland, Dominik Parisien, Dyrk Ashton, Ferrett Steinmetz, James Breakwell, James L. Sutter, Jason Sanford, Jason Sizemore, Jim Butcher, Jim C. Hines, Julia Rios, Mark Oshiro, Michael J. DeLuca, Michael R. Underwood, Monica Valentinelli, Mur Lafferty, Nisi Shawl, Patrick S. Tomlinson, Sara Dobie Bauer, Sarah Gailey, Scott H. Andrews, Seleste deLaney / Julie Particka, Stacey Filak, Suzanne Church, Tracy Townsend

Making Money in Fandom: Why and Why Not
5pm Saturday in Petoskey
Dessa Lux, Jason Sanford, Sunny Moraine, Mark Oshiro
We all like to express our love of fandom in different ways but not all of us like to get paid for it. Find out why our panelists do what they  do for a profit or not.

2017 novel and short story recommended reading list

Here are the novels and short fiction from 2017 which I'm recommending people consider for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. This list will inform my eventual nominations for all those awards.

That said, this list is not all-inclusive. I actually read less in 2017 than in many previous years. I'm trying to fix this by reading and reviewing a short story each day during 2018. You can follow my progress on Twitter and my Patreon. If you like what I'm doing consider becoming one of my Patreon backers.

Note: If no link is provided for a work that means it can be found through your local bookseller or in the specified back issue of a magazine.

Novels

  • An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon 
  • Autonomous by Annalee Newitz 
  • Borne: A Novel by Jeff VanderMeer 
  • City of Miracles by Robert Jackson Bennett 
  • Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders 
  • Phantom Pains by Mishell Baker 
  • The Changeling by Victor LaValle 
  • The Rift by Nina Allan 
  • The Stars are Legion by Kameron Hurley 
  • The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin

Young Adult Novels

  • The Art of Starving by Sam J. Miller 
  • The Hollow Girl by Hillary Monahan

Novella

  • A Portrait of the Desert in Personages of Power by Rose Lemberg (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
  • And Then There Were (N-One) by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny Magazine)
  • Barry's Deal by Lawrence M. Schoen (NobleFusion Press)
  • Buffalo Soldier by Maurice Broaddus (Tor)
  • In Calabria by Peter S. Beagle (Tachyon Publications)
  • Nexus by Michael Flynn (Analog Science Fiction and Fact, March/April 2017)
  • Passing Strange by Ellen Klages (Tor)
  • Red Threads of Fortune by J.Y. Yang (Tor)

Novelette

Short Story

The golden age of SF/F television

white-walkers-game-of-thrones.jpg

Note: Originally published in the October 2017 issue of the Czech SF/F magazine XB-1.
 

My grandfather lived through the Golden Age of Science Fiction during 1930s and 1940s, when the modern SF genre made a major cultural impact in many other parts of the world. As a child I often looked in awe at my grandfather’s collection of Golden Age magazines and books.

I once asked him what it was like living through that era. My grandfather merely smiled and said “I just loved reading the stories.”

One day, when my grandchildren ask me what it was like living during our current Golden Age of SF/F Television, I plan to say, “I just loved watching the shows.”

We’re living in an age of television greatness, an era which HBO helped created at the beginning of the millennium with intense crime dramas such as The Sopranos and The Wire. These shows, which took visual episodic storytelling to new heights, influenced other networks and producers such as Netflix to do the same. The result is more great TV these days than anyone could possible watch in a lifetime.

However, what’s often missing in discussions over the great shows on TV is how much of that gold is mined within the science fiction and fantasy genre.

This doesn’t mean there weren’t great SF/F television shows in earlier decades. Star Trek and Doctor Who created the world’s first SF franchises back in the 1960s, a trend continued by 1978’s Battlestar Galactica. The soap opera Dark Shadows showed the potential of TV fantasies during the 1960s, as did the The Twilight Zone.

However, there were limitations on televised genre works in earlier decades. Special effects prior to the use of computer-generated imagery (CGI) were extremely expensive and often looked extremely unrealistic. While Hollywood could justify the cost of quality special effects on blockbuster movies, TV shows had more limited budgets, with the cost of special effects playing a significant role in the cancellation of both the original Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica.

Expensive special effects also limited the genre stories which could be told on TV. For example, Harlan Ellison’s original script for the Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever” was very different from what was eventually filmed. While creative disagreements between Ellison and Gene Roddenberry caused some of the changes, others resulted from how expensive it would have been to film Ellison’s script.

A side-effect of expense special effects was that many genre shows of this time period, such as Doctor Who, were also overly talkative. After all, it was far cheaper to film characters describing what was going on in a SF/F setting than to actually create the visual world and effects.

But by the 1990s realistic-looking and affordable CGI effects had expanded the storytelling possibilities of televised genre stories. And the arrival of good CGI coincided with increasing demand for in-depth episodic stories. This perfect melding of new visual worlds with deeper character-driven stories resulted in two great SF shows from the 1990s, Babylon 5 and Star Trek: Deep Space 9.

However, I believe it was Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the fantasy/horror/comedy series created by Joss Whedon running from 1997 to 2003, which truly set the stage for our current Golden Age of SF/F Television. The series followed the life of Buffy Summers, one in a long line of "Slayers" who battled demons and vampires while often falling into complicated relationships with the same. The series’ power rested fully on Whedon’s unique characters, in particular the strength of Buffy and her painful on-again-off-again relationship with the vampire Angel. The complex chemistry between the characters raised the show above other TV fantasies from that time such as Xena: Warrior Princess, which while fun never reached Buffy’s heights.

Joss Whedon’s next series, 2002’s Firefly, continued this mixing of character chemistry and drama but added a far higher standard of CGI effects. Set in a far future where humanity settled a distant star system, Firefly followed the crew of a rundown spaceship trying to survive in a space-western setting. Firefly was unique among many SF shows in that every character was fully realized with a complex dramatic arch — individual stories which, tragically, would not all be realized before the series was cancelled without finishing even a single season.

Fortunately, death by cancelation didn’t befall the next two great genre shows of our new golden age, the reimagined versions of Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who. Debuting respectively in 2004 and 2005, both series built upon the strong universe creation, settings and characters of their earlier incarnations. They also showcased special effects which finally did justice to the grand scope of their stories, whether showing a ragtag group of ships struggling to reach a new home or the immortal Time Lord playing across space and time.

However, the new versions of Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who also took their stories into new territories with extremely complex storytelling and characterizations which crossed back and forth through grimly realistic themes and ideas. Battlestar Galactica’s reworking of the original hotshot fighter pilot Starbuck into the tortured soul of Kara Thrace resulted in one of the best TV characters of all time. Doctor Who episodes such as "Blink," featuring the Weeping Angels, showed viewers new depths of fear while "The Doctor's Wife" gave a painful depth to the Doctor’s character and travels.

And now we’re caught up to our current day, with fantasies like Game of Thrones and SF such as The Expanse and Westworld being major cultural milestones. Even lesser-watched shows like Black Mirror and Orphan Black are creating stories which rank with the best SF/F television of all time. Add in the countless superhero shows and it’s easy to see how we are truly living through a Golden Age of SF/F Television.

One day, when your grandchildren ask what it was like with so much great SF/F on TV, simply tell them you loved watching the shows.