“History is a fairy tale”, a subtitle in Veronica Schanoes’s story “Emma Goldman Takes Tea with the Baba Yaga”, could almost serve as an epigram for the whole of her first collection,
Burning Girls and Other Stories. Schanoes, who is a scholar of fairy tales, feminism, and Jewish literature and history, brings all of her considerable resources to bear in these 14 stories, which include most of the short fiction she published since 2003. And while there is an occasional tendency to embed snippets of historical lectures as a kind of ballast for her more visceral nightmares – “Truth can be told in any number of ways,” she tells us in the Goldman story – it never mitigates the passion and anger that is the real engine of her fiction. Almost as if to illustrate, the Goldman story begins by offering us alternate fairytale and historical modes of narrative: “Once upon a time there was a girl, the third and youngest daughter of a merchant” begins one paragraph,
I write this as annus horribilis 2020 ends. Although I have no intention of continuing the new year in this manner, I simply have too many stories and not enough inches in which to cover them. Apologies to writers whom I may be slighting, but his time out I’ll be concentrating on the more outstanding stories in each featured periodical. (Or at least I will try to do so.) I’ll also strive for brevity.
Sarah Langan‘s novella “
You Have the Perfect Mask” in
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #42 is a showstopper. Set among the elite of a near-future New York City, it’s both a thoughtful tale of conscience and an examination of the sociocultural world of 12-year-old/turning-13 girls.
Deuces Down is both the 16th and 30th book in the Wild Cards series. The anthology was first published in 2002; this new version is refreshed with added stories by Carrie Vaughn, Mary Anne Mohanraj, and Caroline Spector. Although referred to on the title page as a mosaic novel, it remains – despite the linking story by Vaughn – an anthology of stories related only by the theme: deuces, folk with minor superpowers in the alternate superhero Wild Cards universe.
If you are unaware of what Wild Cards is, in brief and simplistically: created by George R.R. Martin (first book published in 1987), the Wild Card universe departs from ours in 1946 when an alien virus arrives on Earth. Ninety percent of those who contract it die; the DNA of the ten percent who survive it is altered. Nine percent acquire debilitating mutations and become known as jokers. The remaining one percent, aces, gain unique superpowers. There’s also an uncounted number of those whose powers – like the deuce
Fifteen recent (the earliest appears to have been published in 2017) stories by Canadian writer Gemma Files combine to make a terrifically terrifying collection,
In That Endlessness, Our End. Files doesn’t exactly expose the horror found in the mundane because, once the thin veneer of normalcy is scratched, very little is mundane about her fictional realm. Dreams are always nightmares, residences provide discomfort, offspring are no delight, encounters with the eldritch are common, families are invariably dysfunctional, relationships tend toward the doomed, and even the electrical grid is a thing to fear.
The indelible lead-off story, “This Is How It Goes”, is about a particularly nasty apocalypse in which folks literally split into two; the original and the “dupe” then fight to the death. A women trying to wire lighting in her condo discovers electricity can be evil (and that we all doomed). A character in “The Puppet Motel”, one of the best stories in the book, s
(Tor 978-1-250-17466-6, $25.99, 256pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, Feb 16, 2021)
Near-future thriller/SF novel. Scientist Evelyn Caldwell’s husband is having an affair with her own cloned replica.
Clones don’t seem quite as popular these days as they were back in the 1970s and ’80s, when we were treated on a fairly regular basis to stories about celebrity clones, spare-parts clones, hazardous-duty clones, doppelganger clones, identity-crisis clones, cheap-labor clones, ominous replacement clones, survivalist clones, posthuman clones,
tabula-rasa clones, and, inevitably, murder-mystery clones. Sarah Gailey touches upon that last in some ingenious ways in
The Echo Wife, a solidly written novel that gains more of its strength from the voice and conflicted character of its narrator than from its rather plot-contrived version of cloning technology.