Memorial Day weekend is the perfect time to sit back, relax, and finish reading one of the longer novels I’ve got in my to-be-read pile.
…so of course I decided to skip that plan and read a bunch of short stories instead.
Click the jump for a look at this year’s Hugo Award nominees for Best Short Story
He’d met Rose MacGregor out on the hillside, where the grass met the sky and flowers lay spangled across the green. He was slim-hipped, broad-shouldered, and handsome as the devil.
She was short and plump, well-endowed in all directions, and she looked at him with a gleam in her eyes like a hawk spotting a rabbit on the downs below.
We can all probably think of several examples of women meeting a tragic end in a fairy tale. Kidnapped by an obsessed faerie suitor, lured into the wilderness to their death, or seduced and abandoned and left to pine themselves into an early grave, there are a lot of ways that mortal women can get into trouble with the fairfolk.
But what if the woman in question was a down-to-earth girl who knew what she wanted, didn’t give a fig for what anyone thought about it, and absolutely refused to follow the script?
Tongue-in-cheek, earthy, and funny as hell, T. Kingfisher’s story “The Rose MacGregor Drinking and Admiration Society” takes the usual fate of maidens in fairy tales and chucks it right out the window.
“What is the difference between a court magician and a street or stage magician? A court magician is a person who makes problems disappear…”
“The Court Magician” is Sarah Pinsker’s terrifying little story about power, and what that power costs. I loved the slow buildup of this one, the singsong style contrasted with the very bad things that are happening to the aspiring magician, one after another. And each time we find out a little bit more about why the entire situation is even worse than we thought.
Sarah Gailey’s “STET” is…I’m not sure how to…look, I’m just going to include the link to the story because it’s interactive and a summary is simply not enough. If you’re easily upset about fiction that includes the death of a child then you might want to skip this one. I thought at first this was just a one-paragraph entry but it’s oh so much more than that. You’ll probably struggle with how to read it because there isn’t a set order, it’s just lashing out in rage and grief through a keyboard and it’s absolutely brilliant and it will make you worry about the choices that people are going to be making very, very soon.
For anyone not familiar with editing terms, the notation “stet” roughly translates to “leave it the way I wrote it.”
I sat at the circulation desk, running returns beneath the blinky red scanner light, and breathed him in. I was expecting something like generic Arthurian retelling or maybe teen romance with sword-fighting, but instead I found a howling, clamoring mess of need.
I thought from the title and the setting that Alix E. Harrow’s “A Witches Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies” was possibly going to be a heartwarming and inspiring tale of a Librarian Witch teaching children to empower themselves through the magic of reading. But it isn’t…quite.
There’s definitely a lot of whimsy in this one, with a librarian who can sense the mood of books, so to better tell if one is feeling left out, or yearning for a particular reader, or smug that someone stayed up past their bedtime in order to read the last chapter. But the story as a whole is more bittersweet. There are just so many ways that this world fails its children. And as frustrating as it can be to not be able to help a struggling teenager, it’s even worse when you can help them, but only with methods that you’re forbidden to use.
To see it would have burst your heart, and then they would have eaten what was left of you. Really, it’s best for everyone that you weren’t nearby at the time.
The youngest of three lovely maidens is captured by a ruthless tyrant in Brooke Bolander’s “The Tale of the Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters, and the Prince Who Was Made of Meat”. You can tell from the title that this is quite a twist on the usual fairytale. Bolander has a very tongue-in-cheek storytelling style, and what feels like a lot of rage.
The story is silly and lyrical, clever and irritated, full of longing for a life that can be lived on one’s own terms, and pretty much fed up with stupidity of humanity in general and men in particular. Some people might find it a bit too much of an over-the-top revenge fantasy, but I did enjoy the way raptor sisters talk when they’re pretending to be humans.
…the blacksmith understood what masters had chosen to forget: when you make a man or woman a slave you enslave yourself in turn…
The existence of slavery is something that casts a shadow over the entire history of the United States. George Washington himself, founder of the country, was a slaveowner, and supported legislation that made it easier for slavery to continue. He even (and this is actually true) paid a small amount to the occasional slave to have teeth pulled, which were then used to make several different sets of dentures.
“The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington”, P. Djèlí Clark’s second Hugo nominated entry this year (he’s also up for Best Novella) is set in an alternate-universe Colonial America that has sorcerers and monsters, necromancers and tribal witches, spell-casting militiamen and transforming potions. And slavery.
It’s tough to figure out which one of the short story entries this year is my favorite, but this one is easily the most epic, nine mini-stories centered around nine little teeth, each one having an effect on their wearer that’s as unique as the life of its original owner.