Five Further Very Good Short Stories I've Read Lately

I've been enjoying these posts, so here's another one. This is the third in a series.

"The Prophet of Flores" by Ted Kosmatka

In school they taught him that through science you could decipher the truest meaning of God's words. God wrote the language of life in four letters—A, T, C, and G.

I read this late last year in an excellent anthology, much mentioned by me, called Twenty-First Century Science Fiction. Kosmatka was a new-to-me author. The story was originally published in Asimov's in 2007, and doesn't seem to be legally available online in text form, but it was released as an audio reading in an episode of the StarShipSofa podcast, which I've linked to above.

The story is set in a universe where science ended up showing that six-day literal creationism is true, and follows a paleontologist in that world—who ends up involved in the discovery of the very real so-called "hobbits of Flores," which threaten to upend science. The worldbuilding is incredibly well done, the story is tightly written, and it got pretty intense. Much like a similar story for Ted Chiang, it's a neat way of exploring science and technology issues in our world. It was later expended into a novel called The Prophet of Bones; this got mixed reviews but I must pick it up.

"The Silence of the Asonu" by Ursula K. Le Guin 

To perceive the Asonu thus is almost inevitably to interpret their silence as a concealment. As they grow up, it seems, they cease to speak because they are listening to something we do not hear, a secret which their silence hides.

This Le Guin story was originally published (under the title "The Asonu") in an environmental magazine called Orion in 1998; it was subsequently incorporated into her 2003 story cycle Changing Planes, which is where I read it. It has since been reprinted many times, including in Lightspeed magazine, which is what I've linked to above.

Like most of the Changing Planes stories, it takes the reader onto another "plane" and explores the people who live there. The Asonu start out capable of speech, but gradually give it up as they grow older; in one example, an Asonu elder says eleven things in the last four years of his life. The story explores the way humans want to make sense of things, want utterances to have meaning, want to ascribe wisdom to what is cryptic. Like all of Le Guin, clever and kind of funny, but also dark.

"Muallim" by Ray Nayler 

“I must go to the school, or I will be late.”
     “Are you avoiding the subject?” Irada asked.
     “The first subject is math,” Muallim said. “There is no avoiding math.”
     “Hey – that was a pretty good joke!”
     “That was not a joke,” Muallim said as it walked out of the yard. “There really is no avoiding math.”

This is a more recent story than most of what I describe in this post; it's the very first story in the most recent volume of Neil Clarke's The Best Science Fiction of the Year, and was originally published in Asimov's in 2021. It's about a UN inspector who goes to Khynalyg, a (real) remote village in Azerbaijan to evaluate the success of a program to use a robot instructor in schools. Somewhere (I forgot where now) I found a negative review dismissing it as cliché, but I actually found it a sharply observed story about how interactions between different societies can surprise us, and how often technology is put to unexpected use. Clearly written, cleverly done.

"Five Sphinxes and 56 Answers" by Kij Johnson 

And, riddles solved, Phix kills herself. She has served her purpose in advancing the hero's story, and now she is extraneous, a potential plotline complication down the road when sex with his mother, his blinding, and his ignominious death should be driving the story; and so she is hustled off-stage. She throws herself from the column and dies.
     A life depends on the answers to the Sphinx's riddles: yours, if you are wrong—but hers, if you are not.

I read a volume of Kij Johnson stories last fall and overall enjoyed them, but this was probably my favorite. (It was originally published in an online litmag called Diagram, which ISFDB does not seem to know about.) It bounces back and forth between a take of the sphinx myth, a modern girl growing up who is captivated by riddles, and embedded riddles that resonate with the events of the story. Johnson is probably one of the best writers in terms of craft in the contemporary sf&f space, and this story certainly helps show that. Like much of her work, it's a striking reflection on the stories we tell and what we think of the nonhuman.

"History Report" by Simon Rich 

My Great-Grandfather told me that all dates ended with the same custom. After the two people had finished all the alcohol they’d been served, one person would ask the other to come over to their dorm room to watch “Arrested Development.” “Arrested Development” was a non-“Spider-Man” show that you played by putting small, round disks into a machine. The reason it existed was to create a way for people on dates to gauge each other’s interest in becoming naked, without having to directly ask them. The way this worked was a little complicated, but my Great-Grandfather was able to explain all the steps. First, you asked the other person if they had seen “Arrested Development,” and they would respond, “Some, but not all of it.” This would be your prompt to ask them if they wanted to come to your dorm room to watch the episodes they’d missed. If they didn’t want to see you naked, they would say that they had to “finish a paper,” which was an expression that meant that they were not attracted to you. If they did agree to watch “Arrested Development,” it meant that they probably wanted to see you naked. But here’s where it gets complicated: sometimes it didn’t mean that. Sometimes it just meant that they wanted to watch “Arrested Development.”

Now, this story I discovered where I least expected it: driving home from dropping my family off at the airport, I didn't happen to bring my iPod and was thus forced to endure This American Life. The last segment of the episode I listened to was a reading of this, a 2022 New Yorker story about how two people fell in love, narrated by their great-grandson after everyone has left the Earth due to the climate apocalypse. (Unfortunately, Ira Glass introduces it with a joke about StoryCorps that made me confused about what it was trying to do at first.)

It's quite funny, it's nostalgic if you went to college and dated in the mid-2000s, and it's a pointed take on the things we say are important versus the things we actually act on. If you didn't go to college in the mid-2000s as I and evidently Simon Rich did, you might not find it very entertaining, but I suspect that most of the people who care about my recommendations for short fiction probably did.