Short Fiction Round-up January 10, 2016

Some very good stories here, at least one will likely end up on my Hugo nominations list.

"Those," by Sofia Samatar, March 2015, Uncanny Magazine
http://uncannymagazine.com/article/those/

A lyrical, haunting, many-layered story with distinct contrapuntal echoes of The Heart of Darkness, Heningen and the Ants, and other colonial literature. An aging man, once part of the Belgian colonial project in the Congo, tells his daughter stories about his life on the plantation, careless of how they sound to her ears.


"Steve Rogers: PR Disaster," ideopathicsmile, April 23, 2015, Rearranging The Alphabet (tumblr blog)
http://idiopath-fic-smile.tumblr.com/post/117149098318/steve-rogers-pr-disaster-gen-4k

Yes, fanfic counts. When it's as flat-out funny and as pertinent to my interests as this, anyway. All-American war hero Steve Rogers, otherwise known as Captain America, was brought forward to our time. The hero game hasn't changed much, but as far as social issues are concerned, he's got a lot of catching-up to do. But not in the way you might think. Our boy Steve, it seems, was quite a progressive back in the Depression days. And it's driving his publicist up the wall trying to keep him in line.


"Monkey King, Faerie Queen," Zen Cho, Spring 2015, Kaleidotrope
http://www.kaleidotrope.net/archives/spring-2015/monkey-king-faerie-queen-by-zen-cho/

Another very funny short story, in which Sun Wukong, the Monkey King from classical Chinese literature and folktales, finds himself in the European land of the Fae, and has a right royal dust-up with the Faerie Queen. This entertaining fusion of two different and ancient cultural mythos makes for a pleasant read.


"Milagroso," Isabel Yap, August 12, 2015, Tor.com
http://www.tor.com/2015/08/12/milagroso-isabel-yap/

In a future where "natural" food no longer exists, a miracle during a religious festival in The Philippines calls the value of the synthetic substitutions into question. To me, this reads as a serious critique of the whole issue of food engineering, the loss of native strains, and the way that our food is industrially grown and processed. A vividly written story that evokes both an artificial and corporatised future and a rich past that delights the senses.


"Ambiguity Machines: An Examination," Vandana Singh, April 29, 2015, Tor.com
http://www.tor.com/2015/04/29/ambiguity-machines-an-examination-vandana-singh/

This novelette left me breathless, in awe. Framed as an examination paper on the topic of machines that may or may not be possible, the text is a theoretical discourse on the permeability of boundaries that we all believe immutable - time, space, reality, sentience, the self - limned in stunning, lyrical prose. Three vignettes, each telling the story of human experience with a technology that bends the laws of what we think is possible - ambiguity machines - are presented for the consideration of the student-candidate. A theoretical physicist by trade, Singh embeds the most transcendent thoughts about the physical nature of reality into an exploration of the power of imaginative creation.


"Elephants and Corpses," Kameron Hurley, May 13, 2015, Tor.com
http://www.tor.com/2015/05/13/elephants-and-corpses-kameron-hurley/

Hurley's work is often grim, and this story is no exception. Nev is a body-jumper. He survives by inhabiting and reanimating corpses. His companion and body-manager Tera can talk to the dead. When they buy a reasonably fresh body, they stumble into more than they can handle, and it will take all of Nev and Tera's unusual abilities to survive. Hurley adds depth to the story by considering the emotional complexities of living on as a succession of corpses while those around you die.