I love short fiction, and Sunday Shorts is the feature where I get to blog about it. I’ve considered promising to review a short story every day, but that’s a lot of pressure. And while no one will fault me if I miss days, I’ll feel guilty, which will lead to not posting at all. So better to stick to a weekly post highlighting a couple/three stories, as I’ve done in the past.
Two Recent Stories From Tor.com
Kemi Ashing-Gawa’s “Fruiting Bodies” is one of those sneaky stories that appears to be one thing but turns out to be something quite different, and I loved every twist the narrative lured me through to get to the final reveal. The set-up is that a colony ship has landed (crash-landed?) on an inhospitable world and something is killing the colonists. The language used at first made me think the native species was vampire- or zombie-like, and that the narrator was looking to rescue her girlfriend from these creatures. And if that had been the story, it would have been perfectly fine as a sci-fi thriller and I’m sure very enjoyable. But the twists in world-building and reveals of character motivation start a page or so in and don’t stop until the very end, and I seriously could not read fast enough. I had to stop myself from looking ahead (something I’m not always good at). What’s really killing the colonists? Why does the narrator seem unaffected by the threat? What really happened to the missing girlfriend? I wanted to know the answers, but I didn’t want the story to end. I also appreciated how the author conveyed information about the world and the characters’ histories without awkward moments of the narrator telling the reader things any character existing in this world would already know.
In “Hush,” the always excellent Mary Anne Mohanraj takes on the xenophobia and mob mentality of the past few years. The place is Antira, a world colonized by humans but home and tourist destination to several alien species – one of which is noticeably non-human and endowed with a snake-like venomous defense mechanism. Jenny, a flight attendant on interplanetary passenger craft, comes home to Antira after her most recent flight to discover the latest anti-alien protest and a government “stay at home” order. She needs to get home to her younger son to comply with the order, a course of action complicated by her discovery that her alien neighbor’s teen daughter is also being given trouble by security because her mother has not yet arrived to pick her up. The guard is noticeably anti-alien, so Jenny rescues the girl. But their drive home is full of danger from the mob of protestors. Things, of course, start to go bad. The story is interspersed with Jenny’s memory of losing her older son, which of course affect her present-day decisions. This story is so topical and does an excellent job of presenting Jenny’s emotional struggles over both her son’s past actions and her current concern for her very-much in danger neighbor. I kept hoping the “lost son” subplot wouldn’t go where it went, but (without spoiling too much) we all know people who have fallen for rhetoric that “others” people different than ourselves.