Available online – Uncanny Magazine Issue 25 Why do we tell ghost stories, or read or listen to them? Maybe you believe in ghosts, maybe you don’t, maybe you want to. Maybe you just want a good scare, or to feel that you aren’t alone in experiencing whatever it is that has just creeped you […]
Published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies ; Issue #225, May 11, 2017 This is a wonderful story. I actually don’t want to say anything at all about it, because I think not knowing any details is best. So that’s all I’m going to say. Just read it, you won’t be disappointed.
Humanity is dying out. Climate change. Terrorism. Disease. People have accepted that these is no future, just a slow decline and then they’ll be no more. The colonies on Mars have resulted in death, there will be no new missions to Mars. Humanity is resigned to extinction. Susannah doesn’t have any more hope than anyone […]
First published by Uncanny A Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy in May 2017. Okay, this is wonderful. There is something about Ursula Vernon’s writing that just works so well with my brain. I love her no nonsense characters, and her gentle subverting of tropes. Well, not always gentle, there can be trampling underfoot of […]
Published in Apex Magazine, August 2017 This is one of those short stories that I just didn’t gel with, I think I needed it to be longer… defeats to purpose of a short story, I know, but I needed to know a bit more about the ending. This isn’t, I don’t think, and problem with […]
Published in Uncanny Magazine, Sept/Oct 2017. Issue 17. Short stories often don’t really work for me. Either too little happens or too much. Also being so short they often don’t have enough time and space to devote to character development. And that’s often what makes a story, long or short, work for me. But I […]
A collection of five short stories by the classic western author Louis L’Amour. And by classic I mean the idealised version where men were men1 and sometimes a man had to do what a man had to do. And usually that would end in the death of other men. But they weren’t good, manly men. […]
Old Man’s War ; 1.5 This is a short read, a question and answer session between John Perry from Old Man’s War and a some citizens of New Goa, one of the colonies that Perry visits as part of a goodwill tour. Talking about where he came from and what it is to be a […]
Read it online at Tor.
reread in April, 2018 and loved it just as much.
A long time ago in Japan, when cats were new there, an earthquake shook Small Cat’s home, and her city caught fire. In escaping the fire she ran too far from her home and her fudoki. “The fudoki was the collection of stories about all the cats who had lived in a place. It described what made it a home, and what made the cats a family.” In fleeing the fire the Small Cat gets lost in the city but decides to follow the story of her aunts, The Cat Who Came From the North. And so she heads North. But she goes too far and soon is so far from home that she thinks she will never find her way to her fudoki again.
This book. I just. Okay, to start with I wasn’t sure I was even going to finish it. Tomás and his fridged wife and his walking backwards. And his troubles with the car. But midway through his story it seemed to click with me and I really started to enjoy it. In a way I […]
I’m dipping in and out of Kij Johnson’s collection of short stories At the mouth of the river of bees. The Bitey Cat is one of the stories in the collection. It tells the story of a young girl, Sarah, whose parents are not getting on, and her first pet, a cat she calls Penny. […]
Part of the Apex Blog Tour hosted by The Little Red Reviewer The problem I always have with reviewing a collection of short stories is that it is, as described, a collection of different stories. What if you hate one and love another? And especially when it is a collection by different authors. Maybe you […]