Five More Very Good Short Stories I've Read Recently

I liked writing this up last time, even if as far as I know it's yet another post that no one read, so here's another list of five very good short stories I've read recently (in no particular order), so you don't have to read about them buried in some anthology review or something. Go and read some excellent short fiction!

"Eros, Philia, Agape" by Rachel Swirsky

There was something about the way Rose loved him that he didn’t yet understand. Earlier that morning, he had plucked a bloom from his apricot tea rose and whispered to its petals that they were beautiful. They were his, and he loved them. Every day he held Rose, and understood that she was beautiful, and that he loved her. But she was not his. She was her own. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen a love like that, a love that did not want to hold its object in its hands and keep and contain it.

This is a 2009 short story originally published on Tor.com. I read it in the anthology Twenty-First Century Science Fiction. It was a finalist for Best Novelette at the 2010 Hugo Awards, but came in third to two stories I haven't read; it beat out a Paul Cornell story that I have read, and in that, at least, I agree with the voters.

The story is about the disintegration of a marriage, but the marriage is between a human woman and her robot husband and they have a human daughter. We simultaneously follow the woman and daughter after the break-up, the husband as he sets out on his own, and (in a series of flashbacks) how everything got to this point to begin with. It's beautifully told, well observed, and genuinely moving, with some haunting images. Yes, it's about a woman in love with a robot, but it uses that as a jumping-off point for a powerful meditation on kinds of love, especially what it means to own something you love—in many different ways.

"A Better Way of Saying" by Sarah Pinsker

The title after the mugging included an editor’s note: “Aphasia is a mental condition, vouched for by all our best novelists and dramatists.” Why was that necessary? It followed “For five years after this unfortunate occurrence, Florian’s life was a blank to him,” but it pulled the viewer from the narrative, in my opinion, by reminding them of the writers in the very moment they should have been losing themselves in the story. The acting was fine, the film well enough made, but I could barely stand to utter the words.

This is another Tor.com story, one I encountered in Pinsker's collection Lost Places; it was originally published in 2021.

It's a first-person tale set in the early twentieth century; the narrator is a boy hired by the owner of a movie theatre to read the intertitles of silent films aloud, for the benefit of the recent immigrants in the audience whose ability to read English isn't so great yet. Only he begins to decide that he could write those titles better himself. This is paralleled with his later participation in a real incident, where the actor Douglas Fairbanks on a press tour demonstrated his skill with a bow and arrow. It's a story with a small but powerfully effective fantasy element, and it's difficult to say much more about it without giving it all away. As usual for Pinsker, it's beautifully told, and it demonstrates why she continues to be the best writer of short sf&f of our times.

"Finisterra" by David Moles

Bianca had not thought hardly at all about the killing of a zaratán, and when she had thought of it she had imagined something like the harpooning of a whale in ancient times, the great beast fleeing, pursued by the tiny harassing shapes of boats, gored by harpoons, sounding again and again, all the strength bleeding out of the beast until there was nothing left for it to do but wallow gasping on the surface and expire, noble and tragic. Now Bianca realized that for all their great size, the zaratanes were far weaker than any whale, far less able to fight or to escape or even—she sincerely hoped—to understand what was happening to them.
     There was nothing noble about the way the nameless zaratán died.

This was originally published in F&SF in 2007; like the Swirsky above, I encountered it in Hartwell and Nielsen Hayden's Twenty-First Century Science Fiction. Here, I've linked to an on-line reprint of it in Clarkesworld.

It's about an engineer who's from Earth, but an Earth devastated by the economic impact of interstellar civilization; for her in particular, her options as a woman are limited with increasing conservative Muslim influence on society. She travels to a gas giant called Sky that has an oxygen atmosphere and giant flying animals, so large that communities have sprung up on their backs. It's evocatively written and sharply characterized, and it depicts a really interesting civilization that it explores in rich ways, connecting what's going on on Sky (a rich man is seeking to poach one of the giant beasts) to broader thematic concerns in the story. I had never heard of Moles before, but the story left me wanting to read more by him.

"The Education of Junior Number 12" by Madeleine Ashby

“Of course it’s funny. It’s hysterical. You’re railing at me for teaching my kid how to recognize the smutvids that won’t fry his brain, and all the while you’ve been riding a three-year-old.”
     “Oh, for—”
     “And very eagerly, I might add.”

Again, I encountered this in C21 SF. It was published on Ashby's publisher's web site in 2011, and it remains there, but somewhere along the line, a web site reformatting means that the current version of the story is missing all its paragraph breaks, so I'm linking to a Wayback Machine version of it.

This is sort of the dark mirror of "Eros, Philia, Agape" above—not that "Eros, Philia, Agape" wasn't itself pretty dark! A tie-in to a novel by Ashby called vN, it's about a self-replicating android (a von Neumann machine, or "vN") who derives its pleasure from pleasing humans at all costs, but also is forced to periodically reproduce; it trains its "Juniors" before releasing them into the world. The world of this story is a harsh one: the main character, Javier, does his best for his Juniors, but is limited by the need he has to please humans. It overrides every other desire he has. But, as the story points out in many ways, humans have desires to that aren't exactly ethical or rational, or vNs wouldn't be the way they are in the first place. It really works in its depiction of human selfishness. Is a vN so bad? They are callous to please others but humans are callous to please themselves. Cool technology, neat extrapolation of how it might be used and abused in society.

"The Algorithms for Love" by Ken Liu

“People have always associated the mind with the technological fad of the moment. When they believed in witches and spirits, they thought there was a little man in the brain. When they had mechanical looms and player pianos, they thought the brain was an engine. When they had telegraphs and telephones, they thought the brain was a wire network. Now you think the brain is just a computer. Snap out of it. That is the illusion.”
     Trouble was, I knew he was going to say that.

You might be noticing a pattern here: this story was also one I found in C21 SF. It was originally published in Strange Horizons back in 2004. Unlike most people, I find Ken Liu hit or miss, but this one I enjoyed a lot.

A lot of Ken Liu stories, I would argue, use relationships as a crutch for creating emotional investment in a technological concept, but this one is actually about the emotional relationship and the way it will be affected by technology. It's about a programmer who works on creating extremely realistic dolls, and it alternates between her life story and what she's up to in the present; eventually her dolls begin passing the Turing test—and this has her unsettled at the implications. Dark and creepy, I really liked it both for what it said about our future technologies and for what it said about ourselves.