ladybusiness | Short Story Long: Hugo Reading! (31/05/19) (Reply)

1. STET by Sarah Gailey [Top]
"Stet" apparently means "let it stand" – an instruction in proofreading to ignore the changes made to a manuscript, and Sarah Gailey uses it to excellent effect in this story.

STET can be read in different orders depending on the actual physical way you're reading it. If you read it on a mobile device, you get a passage from a textbook on the AI in cars and how they make decisions, then the footnotes revealing the real story, and the commentary raising the emotions to a heartbreaking level. If you read it on a computer, you get all of it interleaved together – the footnotes, the commentary, Anne's responses. I can't tell you which method is better, because I switched between those two as I went (I wasn't reading short stories at work, what are you talking about), but it's incredible on a meta level. I had a little trouble following the passage from the textbook – partially because it does a creditable impression of a textbook, and partially because I kept clicking on the footnotes to make sure that I didn't miss a thing. The dawning realisation of what the story is about, and the way that the different layers of it – Anne's grief and anger at an industry that ignored valid concerns, and the sharper rage at her editor – intersect and build on each other are beautifully done. The savagery of each "Stet" by the end is just – breathtaking. It's amazing how much emotion Sarah Gailey manages to put into each "Stet — Anne", and the way that the editing notes and the responses get more close to the bone each time.

It is really good, and I'm glad I picked it up.

[Caution warning: child death]

2. The Court Magician by Sarah Pinsker [Top]
This story feels like one that I need to puzzle over a bit more. The Court Magician follows a boy as he becomes first a street magician, then a court magician, lured in with the promise of real magic that he must use only to remove Problems for the Regent. The complicity that the Magician has in the Regent's choices – the Regent doesn't want problems solving, he wants them removing – is really well done, especially through the deliberate weighing up that we see the Magician do. The costs go to the Magician and the people around him, in a truly horrifying way, and his choice to keep paying it for the chance to figure out the secret behind real magic drives the story.

It's bleak, especially because the narrator is an almost-impersonal third party, one who understands what is going to happen to the Magician as soon as the story begins, but doesn't actually stop any of it. (The reveal of what became of them? Also horrifying!) It's well written and the Magician's descent into despair is good, especially the fact that a person's breaking point can be something utterly mundane! It just wasn't for me, I think; I wasn't in the mood for inescapably bleak narratives with no possible happy answers at the end of it.

3. The Rose MacGregor Drinking and Admiration Society by T. Kingfisher [Top]
The Rose MacGregor Drinking and Admiration Society feels like peak T. Kingfisher, to be honest; a group of handsome fae men (including a selkie and a pooka) gather to drink and be admiringly baffled by Rose MacGregor, a woman who by all accounts was unapologetically fat and lustful, collected fae lovers, and is now happily married to an ordinary human. The reversal of how fae romances traditionally go in folk tales ("She was supposed to pine," complains one of the fae, who apparently couldn't keep up with her) is brilliantly done, and the fact that all of them are in denial over their feelings for her is catnip. It's very silly and funny, and I liked it a lot.

4. The Tale of the Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters and the Prince Who Was Made of Meat by Brooke Bolander [Top]
The Tale of the Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters and the Prince Who Was Made of Meat is a weird fairytale about three beautiful raptor sisters who discover a prince in the woods, and are so confused by his complete lack of survival instinct that they suspect a trap and set out to investigate. It's funny in a really grim way; the tone of the narration about the raptor sisters, the inability of the prince or any of his courtiers to actually think, and the sheer level of Done the princess is, all hilarious in an "Oh god this fictional land is on fire" kinda way. (Or, in the last part of the story, in a "This is funny and someone's about to get eaten" way.) But I like the team-up between the raptors and the princess, I like the prince's eventual fate, and I like the way that the narration of the story walks the line between "appropriately fairy-tale-esque" and "sounds the correct degree of inhuman for a story about raptors." If you're in the mood for a Weird fairytale involving raptors and overthrowing expectations, this is pretty good!

5. The Evaluators by N. K. Jemisin [Top]
Well that was creepy. The Evaluators is an epistolary story about the first contact (and subsequent trade deal, of course) between humans and the people of Dar-Mankana . It jumps around in time and format, showing the logs of conversations between people who were involved in first contact, or the people investigating what happened afterwards. It's fascinating and has this slow sense of creeping menace that I love – it feels like a late-eighties/early-nineties alien movie, where capitalism is the real danger. The way it's told is brilliant (especially the way that the different formats of the messages change how the story is told – speculation in group chats, memories in the form of audio logs, news articles...). I shrieked a little when I got to the end, because the way that the reveals build on each other brings everything that had been in the gaps before into focus, and oh nooooooo. It's great, I recommend it, someone please come by and go "Noooooo" with me!

6. Your Slaughterhouse, Your Killing Floor by Sunny Moraine [Top]
So you remember how I like repetitive story structure and tales of women becoming monsters, right? Because oh, friends, Sunny Moraine (of eyes I dare not meet in dreams has brought me a story. The story is: a girl walks into a bar. She meets another girl. They fight, they fuck, they have the power to destroy everything around them, and they're ready to use it. It's uses the repeating structure of "A girl walks into a bar" to anchor the story and the protagonist's voice – and I do like her voice, it's so good and bitter and distinct and full of gallows humour. I especially like the way it builds to the climax, to their resolution of burning down the world, because Sunny Moraine is really good at capturing the anger of people being systemically forced into a shape that doesn't fit. The story feels angry, and that's what I was in the mood for when I found it.

Your Slaughterhouse, Your Killing Floor reminds me a little of Alyssa Wong's A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers, and a little of eyes I dare not meet in dreams, and honestly I'm looking forward to this crossing

bookgazing's radar, because I'd be very excited to hear what she thinks.

[Caution warning: attempted rape]

7. Which Super Little Dead Girl^TM Are You? Take Our Quiz and Find Out! by Nino Cipri [Top]
It's a horror story about magical girls who gained their powers through their own deaths, told in the form of an online personality quiz. It's so good – it nails the overly-specific tone that personality quizzes sometimes have, while also running four creepy horror stories and tropes side-by-side. I like how it manages to keep all of the girls distinct, although you can see exactly what archetype they're supposed to fall into, and fits so much of the world-building and their stories into such a small space, and balances the narrative answers with normal-sounding questions like "What's your worst subject at school?" (The answers to those are more sad than the others, which is really effective. And the awareness that they can't grow up and they can't go home makes it so sad.) The fact that these girls and their deaths are commodified – it's specifically Super Little Dead Girls^TM, and these girls have paparazzi chasing them and websites making "fun" personality quizzes with jokes about the way they died – is a world of horror on its own!

... Or maybe I'm just overthinking it and this is the superpowered version of Living Dead Dolls! Someone else read it and let me know what they think.

[Caution warnings: child death]

8. Abandonware by Genevieve Valentine [Top]
Okay, Abandonware was Weird. I think I see what it's doing, but I'm honestly not sure. The story is definitely about Christine, an unreliable narrator who is obsessed with tracking a somewhat glitchy deer through a noir video game. It tells Christine's story through the stories of her childhood stuffed animals, the story of the game and its fanbase, and that of the deer as it dies over and over, and that's about as certain as I can be of what's happening in Abandonware because Christine is an unreliable narrator who doesn't care about her life falling apart around her. I think I liked it? The way that the themes loop together is interesting; the detailed nature of the game matches Christine's obsessive way of looking at things, the motives she attributes to the a character in the game match her attitude towards her father, and the theme of being discarded and forgotten – being abandoned, if you will – beats through every scene involving her parents.

So yes, it's a weird story, and I feel like I've picked up on all of the right individual details but can't quite put them into a coherent picture. Which would honestly be appropriate.

Reading Goals

Reading goal: 54/200 (8 new this post) Prose: 18/100 (8 new this post) Short fiction: 16/18 (8 new this post) Nonfiction: 2/12
#ReadMyOwnDamnBooks: 18/100 (0 read this post)
#unofficialqueerafbookclub: 19/75 (new this post)

Lady Business

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Short Story Long: Hugo Reading! (31/05/19) (Reply)

Short Story Long: Hugo Reading! (31/05/19)

Reading Goals

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