sophia_sol | Entries tagged with recs: annual rec list

Every year at about this time (...very approximately) I post a reclist of 10 short stories I particularly enjoyed reading in the last year, all of which can be read online for free. Here's the latest list, and I hope you enjoy them as much as I did!

1. Sestu Hunts the Last Deer in Heaven - MH Cheung
Beautiful and odd. A story of what happens after you've killed the gods, the unexpected realities and the things you have to live with. I love stories about after the climactic things traditional fantasy narratives are about, and this one excels!

2. If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You - John Chu
Two butch Asian weightlifter dudes bonding with each other and then dating, and one of them happens to have superpowers, but the superpowers aren't the focus. This is SO charming!!

3. Two Hands, Wrapped in Gold - SB Divya
This is a really cool retelling of the classic fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin from the Rumpelstiltskin character's pov, building out the world and his background and making him a sympathetic character with a specific history. Haven't seen a fairy tale retelling quite like this before and it's great! And I say that as a connoisseur of fairy tale retellings.

4. A Farce to Suit the New Girl - Rebecca Fraimow
A troupe of Jewish actors in Russia, in a time of political upheaval. This story has such a good and powerful feeling of activity and forward momentum, and of the way a community supports people even if things are weird or complicated! I love every single character and how firmly they are themselves.

5. Sheri, At This Very Moment - Bianca Sayan
The sacrifices you make to spend time with the ones you love - a snapshot of one brief visit together, out of two lives that only rarely get to align. Made me teary the first time I read it!

6. Spirochete - Anneke Schwob
An engaging second-person pov story about possession and identity. It has such a great sense of timing! And the last line GOT me even on second read when I hypothetically knew what was coming!

7. To Embody a Wildfire Starting - Iona Datt Sharma
Ahhhhhh this story is so good at embodying the horrible complexities of the choices people make in the worst of situations, that good and bad and divine and evil and just plain personness can all reside in one being. Also it's about a dragon society and the revolutionary humans who tried to make everyone into dragons, and also about parent-child relationships, and also about a bunch of other things. God it's good.

8. Obsolesce - Nadine Aurora Tabing
Is it really me if I don't have at least ONE story about robots in my rec lists? (actually I just went back and checked and in multiple previous years I inexplicably didn't, maybe it wasn't me writing the reclist in those years lol) ANYWAY who wants to have sad feelings about robots again! I know I always do! In a world where anyone who has a physical body instead of having their consciousness transferred is more and more obsolete, no matter if your body is human or robot, what do you hold onto? This one has a real good melancholy tone.

9. Letters from a Travelling Man - WJ Tattersdill
....does what it says on the tin. Letters to a dear friend, from a man travelling for the first time to the unfamiliar part of the world that friend comes from. I love the sense of place you get from the letters, as well as the deep and abiding importance of this friendship in both their lives. Another one I cried over!

10. Texts from the Ghost War - Alex Yuschik
Another epistolary one, but this time in text messages instead of letters, and between characters who start the story antagonistically! About mech pilots in a ghost war, and making connections, and finding things to care about, even when stuff sucks. I love them!! (also, I am inescapably me, whoops, it took me until I read some fanfic of this story to realize that almost certainly the story was meant to be canonically shipping the two leads, I never notice romance unless there's anvil-sized indications.) Anyway this is a really good story!

time is fake, it's APPROXIMATELY a year since my last short story rec post, have some more sff short stories I enjoyed over the course of the last year or so:

1. Concerto for Winds and Resistance, by Cara Masten DiGirolamo
A story about what making music together can do. This is gorgeous, intense and beautiful and real, and with a slow careful building towards the perfect end.

2. When Your Being Here Is Gentler Than Your Absence Hard, by Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko
When you travel to the past, is the future malleable? And does that even matter? Or is what's important LESBIAN TIME TRAVELLERS WHO LOVE EACH OTHER AND SAVE EACH OTHER.

3. Words We Say Instead, by Brit E B Hvide
About the bond between spaceship captains and their AI spaceships, after the war is over and the ships decommissioned. Makes me cry even on reread, which honestly, RUDE.

4. Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self, by Isabel J. Kim
When Rose's grandfather dies, she returns to visit Korea for his funeral, and has to confront her instance: Soyoung, the version of herself who stayed in Korea when Rose moved to the USA. Interesting and ouchy.

5. The Failed Dianas, by Monique Laban
Diana has never been able to make her parents happy, and when she meets with the original Diana she's a clone of, she learns a lot more than she thought about how she never will. Story #4 uses the idea of natural-forming clones to talk about the immigrant experience, but this one uses the idea of deliberately-created clones to talk about learning how to thrive after surviving a childhood with abusive parents. Satisfying.

6. Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather, by Sarah Pinsker
The entire story is told through a) the lyrics of a "traditional" folk song, and b) the conversation held between various people on a music website analyzing the song. There's plenty of questions left unanswered but enough is told to make some things very clear! I love it.

7. The Incorruptible World, by Anjali Sachdeva
What does it mean to live on a planet without decay? This is a fascinating story, and with a perfect ending.

8. Tender, by Sofia Samatar
A quiet, thoughtful story that's much more about the main character's inner life and of the building up of resonant themes than anything else. The main character tends to a containment facility for radioactive waste, and reflects on what her life was like before, and on her hurt friend. Highly effective at setting a mood and drawing you in, even though not much happens.

9. The Pragmatical Princess, by Nisi Shawl
An entirely charming story about a princess who is captured by a dragon, and is maximum pragmatic about the experience. This story was originally published in the 1990's, and it definitely does feel like it's more in dialogue with the genre as it was at that time, but you know, I grew up with that era, so it felt pleasantly nostalgic even on first read!

10. Comments on Your Provisional Patent Application for an Eternal Spirit Core, by Wole Talabi
Does exactly what it says in the title! Through the patent application, and the comments left on it by the brother of the patent's author, you learn a lot about the relationship between the brothers, and why this patent application is actually a Really Bad Idea.

Is it SHORT STORY REC TIME again? It might be!! (It might be later than intended. Look. We all know this has been a bit of a year.)

Anyway reading good short stories to transport you to a different world is where it's at sometimes, so here's my top 10 sff stories I read in the last yearish. They might not all take you to a better world but at least it's not the one we've been living in for the past too-many-months.

1. The Peppers of GreenScallion - Myung-hoon Bae
I love this way of framing the larger society-wide issues going on through the lens of two kids obsessed with arguing with each other. The dynamics between the kids is perfect and delightful, and the way that they make even their efforts towards genuine help towards each other's sides adversarial is great. Also: foooooooood.

2. Gephyrophobia - Rykie Belles
A story about what it's like to return home after a portal adventure. It packs a lot into a very short story, telling you the important stuff through implications rather than spelling everything out, in a way that really works for me!

3. The Moon Is Not a Battlefield - Indrapramit Das
A decommissioned space soldier and a journalist talk of the old days, when the Moon was a base for war, and what it meant for the soldiers and the future of humans and the universe when a peace treaty was finally signed. Thoughtful and bittersweet, it's excellent.

4. Every Tiny Tooth and Claw (or: Letters from the First Month of the New Directorate) - Marissa Lingen
An epistolary story told via letters between a couple who have been separated, and must communicate despite censors potentially intercepting their post in a politically chaotic time. They are perhaps a little too obvious at times in what they're saying but I suppose they have to be for a reader like me to be able to properly follow between the lines, and I did find it highly enjoyable!

5. Martian Cinema - Gabriela Santiago
Kids engaging in imaginative play on Mars. About the power of stories, and connection! And probably aliens.

6. Heard, Half-Heard, in the Stillness - Iona Datt Sharma
An astronaut goes home for Diwali and thinks about the future. Beautiful scene-setting, drawing the reader into the moment, and a beautiful ending.

7. Compassionate Simulation - Rachel Swirsky and P. H. Lee
A young woman dies in a car accident, and her relationship to her father is revealed through the reactions of an AI simulation of her brought back to provide comfort to her grieving family. Ouchy and real feeling.

8. Power to Yield - Bogi Takács
A story centering the experience of aro-ace neuroatypical characters in a fascinating way. The main character develops a special interest in a difficult person, and everything else follows from that. Non-romantic relationships getting to be focused on in all the complexities that can develop is not as common as I'd like, and I loved reading this one. Unsettling but in a good way.

9. Haunted House, by Elizabeth Wein
About the relationship between a girl and a house. So lovely!

10. Many-Hearted Dog and Heron Who Stepped Past Time - Alex Yuschik
I love this!??!? About an undefined relationship that is nonetheless vital to the characters involved, and also time travel. Stylish and sharp and immersive. AMAZING.

Awwww yeah, it's time for some more SHORT STORIES! Here you go, 10 of the stories I read in the last year-ish that I particularly enjoyed. I hope you like them too!

1. The King's Mirror - M. K. Hutchins
A story set in a time of difficult politics among real historical Mayan royalty--but focusing on the lives of more ordinary people, and the things that still matter in their lives even while dynastic struggles are happening above them. Above all: a story about a loving sibling relationship and what the right thing to do is when you know an upsetting secret.

2. The Privilege of the Happy Ending by Kij Johnson
About a young girl and an elderly talking chicken running away from danger and then, eventually, towards it. I don't know what to tell you about this one, except that I'm fascinated by the way the narrative continues to draw your attention to what might happen next to the other characters Ada encounters throughout the story, and also to the structure of Story. I haven't seen another story do quite this thing before!

3. The Ocean That Fades Into Sky - Kathleen Kayembe
The politics of interacting between colonizer and colonized, resistance, identity and truth and lies and trust, family. Lots of meaningful themes wrapped up in a compelling story about the gods of another world from the perspective of one of the youngest and most vulnerable.

4. Mother Tongues - S. Qiouyi Lu
What if you could sell your knowledge of a language, leaving you without it? What if the only one you know well enough to sell at a good price is your native language? What if you need that money to give your child the best possible advantages, would you make that enormous sacrifice? AUGH.

5. Poems Written While - Natalia Theodoridou
At the end of the world, sometimes poems about stars are what get you through the day. I love how kind the main character is despite everything.

6. Boiled Bones and Black Eggs - Nghi Vo
Ghosts, lots of loving descriptions of food, and people getting things done! Very satisfying.

7. Truth Plus - Jamie Wahls
Um, this is AMAZING. A political speechwriter dealing with the imminent approach of a world-ending comet. On the ethics of lying, how to spend your time when you know you're about to die, and how love isn't enough to make a long-term relationship succeed. Which sounds terribly depressing and it is but also like.....it's complicated.

8. Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Memphis Minnie Sing the Stumps Down Good - LaShawn M. Wanak
In the context of racist 1940's USA, what if the power of using your voice is a little more literal? Featuring: the importance of gospel music, friendship in solidarity, and remembering the dead. I was cheering so hard for Rosetta and Minnie by the end!

9. How to Become a Robot in 12 Easy Steps - Merc Fenn Wolfmoor
Mmmmm yeah this is good stuff, about an aro-ace neurodivergent person who struggles with depression and wants to be a robot! The story structure involves a lot of lists which I love.

10. Asphalt, River, Mother, Child - Isabel Yap
This is one of those stories where I feel unqualified to talk about it, because I don't have enough knowledge of Philippine mythology and current politics, but I'm not gonna let that stop me from recommending this because it's great. About a goddess of the underworld whose remit is innocent infants, but who has been having older people show up of late, and investigates the tragedies behind their deaths.

(Click my annual rec list tag to see my recommendations from other years!)

It's long past time for my annual short story recommendation list! In which I tell you about 10 stories I read in the last year-ish that I think are particularly worth reading, and link you to them. As always, all the stories are SFF because that's my jam.

Here's this year's stories! (and by this year I mean from summer 2017 to summer 2018, whoops, writing story summaries/enticements is hard)

1. And Her Eyes Sewn Shut with Unicorn Hair, by Rosamund Hodge
You can tell from the title that it's not going to be a happy story about unicorns. But it's fascinating, and I love the worldbuilding, as you get drawn deeper and deeper into the awfulness of the situation. And also SISTERS.

2. The Effluent Engine, by N.K. Jemisin
A steampunk AU about Haiti and New Orleans in the time relatively recently after Haiti's revolution, featuring women who are SPIES and INVENTORS. Amazing.

3. Fandom for Robots, by Vina Jie-Min Prasad
A delightful story about an elderly robot in a museum who discovers the joys of fandom!

4. Krace Is Not a Highway, by Scott Vanyur
A robot designed for rating the safety and repair conditions of highway surfaces faces the apocalypse as the sole companion of a human, and learns how to deal with, gasp, humans having emotions. I love the extreme outside pov, where the reader can see so much more into what the human is experiencing than the robot is at all capable of understanding.

5. Oshun, Inc., by Jordan Ifueko
An immortal who serves the Nigerian goddess of love, working on making the romantic match between humans that'll make her career. A fun read.

6. Sour Milk Girls, by Erin Roberts
In an orphanage where girls who are admitted usually have their memories of their previous life taken from them, three girls who have been at the home long-term react to the latest new addition to their number. I like how although the narrative makes us sympathise with the viewpoint character, it also doesn't soften any of the difficult things about her or the others.

7. Strange Waters, by Samantha Mills
A fisherwoman blown off course spends years trying to sail back to her family before it's too late, taking imprecise time-travelling currents back and forth across the centuries. I'm fascinated by all the glimpses of this world, and how having occasional time travellers telling them what to expect from the future is just....normal. And also I have a lot of feelings about the main character.

8. The Sun God At Dawn, Rising From A Lotus Blossom, by Andrea Kail
In a future where museums create living copies of famous people of history as exhibits, a young Tutankhamun writes letters to Abraham Lincoln. The reader only sees the one side of the correspondence, but you can see so much of what's going on through the letters regardless. And as the boy grows, he also grows in his understanding of the modern world around him in all its complexities and problems, and how they relate to his own existence.

9. Umbernight, by Carolyn Ives Gilman
A colony on a planet that's occasionally subjected to dangerous radiation, and a hurried cross-country trip trying to get back to safety before it's too late. The kind of story that totally immerses you in the setting - amazingly evocative and intense.

10. unfurl/ed, by Jes Rausch
It's a story from the perspective of an orbiting solar collector. Which you wouldn't necessarily expect to work but totally does. Does wonderfully interesting things with pov!

(Click my annual rec list tag to see my recommendations from other years!)

It's time for my approximately-annual short story recommendation list, wherein I tell you about ten stories I read in the last year that I think are particularly worth reading, and link you to them. I've been reading more short stories of late so keeping the list to only ten was particularly hard this time!

Without further ado, here's some stories to read:

1. Who Will Greet You At Home, by Lesley Nneka Arimah
A story about how babies are made out of physical materials and the blessings of your mother, and the lengths to which people will go to have a baby. Strange and sad and disturbing.

2. Probably Still the Chosen One, by Kelly Barnhill
At 11 years old, Corrina was the Chosen One in a land through a secret portal only she could access. Then she's left behind in this world, expecting at any moment to be called back. It's a great look at, among other things, how the political situation you're thrown into looks very different when you're eleven than when you're an adult. I love this sort of deconstruction of tropes.

3. Seasons of Glass and Iron, by Amal El-Mohtar
In which the heroines of two fairy tales (the princess on the glass mountain, and the girl who has to walk through seven pairs of iron shoes) help each other see how terribly they've been treated. What an excellent way of doing a fairy-tale mash-up!

4. Suradanna and the Sea, by Rebecca Fraimow
I love this story so much! The worldbuilding is incredible, and the characterization, and the relationship between the main characters, and basically everything. I'll borrow a description from the author of what this story's about: "Trade routes, magical fertilizer, and one girl's centuries-long effort to impress a woman who is already in a committed relationship with a boat."

5. The Nalendar, by Ann Leckie
Leckie has written a number of short stories that all take place in the same world, broadly speaking. You can tell which stories these are by the gods. I love all these stories (so interesting!), but decided to rec The Nalendar in particular. This story is about a woman who makes an agreement with an untrustworthy small god who's after something.

6. Extracurricular Activities, by Yoon Ha Lee
This one is a fun space adventure story! (Yes I am in fact capable of enjoying and recommending straightforward adventure stories, even if you wouldn't guess it based on the other kinds of things I tend to rec....)

7. The Wreck at Goat's Head, by Alexandra Manglis
About a free-diver in the Mediterranean, one of the last remaining in the 21st century. A lovely story of grief and loss and living, and I like how well-grounded it is in its setting.

8. And Then There Were (N-One), by Sarah Pinsker
In which Sarah Pinsker is invited to a convention of multiverses of Sarah Pinskers, and then one of the Sarahs is murdered at the convention. A delightful premise, and a really interesting story.

9. The Dark Birds, by Ursula Vernon
The degree to which this story is horrifying creeps up on you the further you get - it's really effectively done. It's the story of a family where the ogre father eats his daughters, as told from the pov of the current baby of the family.

10. Utopia, LOL?, by Jamie Wahls
A man awakes from cryofreeze in the far future, and we see his introduction to this new world via the pov of his Tour Guide to the Future, who is easily-distractable and alarmingly enthusiastic. This story is weird and incredible and I was very surprised to be having feelings by the end given how much I was giggling through most of the story. I love it.

My short story rec list I made last summer has had a small surge in notes again recently, and every time I am reminded of that post's existence I am made happy again. I should do another such rec list! Maybe I should do one every year.

So here's another ten recommended short stories where only two are written by men.

(For the record, last time the authors consisted of seven women, one nonbinary person, and two men. The numbers turned out to be the same this time too.)

And somehow I neglected to mention last time around that all the stories I was reccing were sff but they were. That is once again the case! I love sff so much.

Here we go:

1. Soteriology And Stephen Greenwood: The Role of Salus in the Codex Lucis, by Julia August
So this story is written as a series of emails between various academics and also a young woman named Cara who has found an important historic artefact but has very different priorities with respect to the translation of it that she's asked for help with. I love the juxtaposition between academia and Cara, and how we the readers can figure out what's going on with Cara because we're genre readers, while the academic she's in contact with is mostly just baffled and frustrated by her.

2. The Comet, by W.E.B. Du Bois
This is an early work of Afrofuturism, written nearly a century ago (in 1920), and it's fascinating as a look at the ideas of the time. It's about a black man and a white woman who are the only survivors in New York of the deadly gas from the passing of a comet.

3. First Do No Harm, by Jonathan Edelstein
In the far future in south-central Africa, Mutende is studying to be a doctor, but is frustrated by the lack of innovation allowed. I love how grounded and immersive the story is in its setting!

4. Madeleine, by Amal El-Mohtar
Madeleine, dealing with the grief of losing her mother, is part of an experimental drug program. She has an odd reaction, with strangely intense flashbacks to her past. And then a girl named Zainab starts showing up in these flashbacks, and unlike everything else, Madeleine knows Zainab was never actually part of her memories and childhood. I really enjoy the relationship that develops between Madeleine and Zainab, and I love the ending of the story!

5. Further Arguments in Support of Yudah Cohen’s Proposal to Bluma Zilberman, by Rebecca Fraimow
The story consists of a letter from Yudah to the object of his affection, outlining exactly why he's such a catch. And this story is so charming? Like, Yudah's convinced me! I'd marry him, if I were Bluma!

6. The Scrape of Tooth and Bone, by Ada Hoffmann
Alternate-19th-century dinosaur fossil wars! OBVIOUSLY I WAS ALL OVER THIS. And it's so great, really lives up to this excellent premise! I was delighted.

7. Hunting Monsters, by S.L. Huang
Combines several different fairy tale elements into a coherent whole that gives me SO MANY FEELINGS ugh. It's a story about...family, and complicated histories, and what to do when people aren't quite who you thought they were.

8. So Much Cooking, by Naomi Kritzer
The chronicles of a family dealing with a major epidemic as told through a food blog. Such a neat premise and very well executed, I was impressed. But also the story was really good at just making me care super lots about every single character in it.

9. Grandmother-Nai-Leylit's Cloth of Winds, by Rose Lemberg
A secondary-world fantasy with absolutely wonderful worldbuilding. I love the different way of doing family structure in this culture, and the ways in which almost all of the major characters have difficulty in one way or another fitting into expectations. It's lovely and I want to read five million more words of it. (It's already the longest story on this list so that's saying something.)

10. The Six Swans, by Mallory Ortberg
Back when the Toast was still running, Ortberg had a semi-regular series called "Children's Stories Made Horrific". This story is one of those, and it's AMAZING. By far the best of the lot, imo. Worth being read as a story, not just as a humour column like a lot of the others were. It's a retelling of the fairy tale by the same name, but with emphasis placed on various horrible things that the original takes for granted, and I as a fairy tale nerd was super duper here for everything this story chose to do. And I'm pretty sure people who aren't such fairy tale nerds would like it too!

Crossposts: http://sophia-sol.livejournal.com/263819.html

Recently on tumblr I saw a list of "10 captivating short stories" being recommended, and there were just as many stories by Isaac Asimov on the list as there were stories by women. Come on. Really?

So I decided to even things up and do a recs list of ten short stories featuring only two male authors and eight authors of other genders.

This was not hard! There's lots of great short stories written by people who aren't dudes, available to read online for free. The only hard part was narrowing my list down. (Also writing descriptions of each. I'm really bad at pithy enticing nonspoilery descriptions. My apologies for the below. I did my best.)

Here you go:

1. Never the Same, by Polenth Blake
Set on another planet on a colony that isn't thriving, exploring the family stuff of the main character at the same time as exploring the reason for the colony's difficulties. It's complicated and unsettling in the best kind of ways, and has a wonderfully interesting main character.

2. The Perseverance of Angela's Past Life, by Zen Cho
I figure at this point I have recced my favourite Zen Cho story (The House of Aunts!) often enough that it's time to take a break and recommend other Zen Cho stories because she has SO MANY good stories because she's a brilliant writer; her stories are never a disappointment. This one is about dealing with an overly-literal past version of yourself who you thought you'd left behind, and it is lovely.

3. The Cage, by A.M. Dellamonica
Look it's the canadian lesbian activist community werewolf baby story of my heart. IT'S BASICALLY THE BEST.

4. The Tempting: A Love Story, by James Alan Gardner
Definitely one of the weirder stories on this list, and I love it for that. I haven't reread it in a while and I don't actually remember the plot? Haha like I ever read for plot anyways. AT ANY RATE this is a deeply interesting story and I recommend it! or it wouldn't be on this list, obviously.

5. The Bride In Furs, by Layla Lawlor
An excellent fairy-tale-ish story, with a good fairy tale feel, that is all about ladies, aww yeah. INTO IT.

6. The Lady Astronaut of Mars, by Mary Robinette Kowal
It's about an aging famous astronaut who's been wanting another opportunity to venture into space for years. What a good everything. I cried and it was amazing.

7. Burning Girls, by Veronica Schanoes
Let me go with the official description because it's better than what I could come up with: This story "is a fascinating dark fantasy novella about a Jewish girl educated by her grandmother as a healer and witch growing up in an increasingly hostile environment in Poland in the late nineteenth century. In addition to the natural danger of destruction by Cossacks, she must deal with a demon plaguing her family." YEAH. And it's REALLY GOOD.

8. Sauerkraut Station, by Ferrett Steinmetz
Little House on the Prairie in space, is more or less its hook, and it IS that but it is also a million times better than that makes it sound. I had a lot of feelings.

9. Jackalope Wives, by Ursula Vernon
Ursula Vernon won a Nebula for this! And with good reason, holy crap. I mean I love every word Ursula Vernon ever puts down on page or screen but this is definitely a particularly good piece of Ursula Vernon's words. It's... I don't know, it's a fairy-tale-ish story with a strong sense of character and of place, and about identity and about making hard decisions. And stuff. I'm bad at one-sentence plot teasers!

10. Sleeper, by Jo Walton
The official summary: "History is a thing we make—in more senses than one. And from more directions." YEAH. This story starts off slowly but is totally worth the read! It's about a woman in the future writing a biography of a man from the 20th century who had secrets.