Five Subsequent Very Good Short Stories I've Read Recently

The fourth in an intermittent series.

"The Commuter" by Philip K. Dick

"We don't have any service to Macon Heights." 

Over the last few years, I've been working my way through the short stories of Philip K. Dick. Many of them are justly praised, but this is probably my favorite of the three volumes I've read so far; originally published in 1953, the story is collected in volume two of the Gollancz Collected Short Stories. Above I've linked to it on a not-at-all dubious site.

Like Dick's best stories, it takes place in the real world with a sense of unreality creeping up on you. In this case, a guy who sells tickets to railway commuters has someone ask for a ticket to a suburb that doesn't exist... or does it? It's a simple story, I suppose, but effectively done, Dick doing what really only he could do.

"Born with the Dead" by Robert Silverberg

She turns to him and their eyes meet and he touches her and they make love in the fashion of the deads.

I read this as a potential story for my class on life extension in science fiction. It's about a future society where people who die get a second life—but they want nothing to do with those who they knew in their first life. The protagonist is a man who can't move on when the woman he loves dies and is reborn. Originally published in 1974, but unfortunately, there seems to be no online copy of it that I can fine, legal or even illegal. I read it by borrowing The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Four from the library, but you can see on ISFDB that it's been anthologized a lot, including in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Four, which I do own, so I don't know why I didn't just read it there. I ended up not assigning it in my class; it's very good, but at seventy pages a bit too long compared to the amount the social issues we were interested in actually turned up.

Anyway, I really liked it. Silverberg is a writer I've read very little of but almost always enjoy when I do. This story is very creepy in its depiction of the ethos of the new dead, and it does that doubling thing I love so much in science fiction: it's both about a weird new society and it's about the world that we live in, the protagonist's inability to move on from his dead wife being a literalized metaphor for when we can't move on from a dead relationship... but man, it is a creepy and disturbing story on top of all that. Good stuff.

"Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole" by Isabel J. Kim

This sentiment made the Omelans kind of upset. They pointed out that Omelas was a better place to live than most other places because at least you knew the load-bearing suffering child suffered for a reason, as opposed to all the other kids who were suffering for no reason. Out there, kids had their arms ripped off while they were working in chicken processing plants, kids were left in baby boxes, and kids lived in perfect quiet misery with one parent who was an alcoholic and another parent who beat them. In Omelas, there were only good parents and no child suffered except the single one who did. How dare you say shit about our fair city and our single child, when you won’t even help your own.

You've probably read Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," the justly famous thought experiment. Courtesy of Clarkesworld, this is a gonzo over-the-top reaction to it, about people trying to solve the problem by just killing the kid. There have been a number of Omelas responses and riffs over the years, but this one surely has the most jokes. I nominated it for the 2025 Hugo Awards; based on the buzz, I'd wager it has a good chance of being on the ballot.

"Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU" by Carmen Maria Machado

“Sophomore Jinx”: The second time the basketball team covered up a murder, the coach decided that he’d finally had enough.

I discovered this story when I was on my hermit-crab story kick last year; it was recommended to me on Reddit. The story is written in the form of a Law & Order SVU episode guide. It's very effective; I've never seen SVU and so at first the descriptions all came across as perfectly plausible summaries of episodes. But as you go on, they get increasingly weird and increasing creepy. Between the lines, a bizarre story of doubles and duplicates, of violence and crime, emerges. It will take you a while to read, and I don't recommend trying to plow though all twelve seasons in one sitting, but it's worth spending some time with it.

"If We Make It through This Alive" by A. T. Greenblatt

And as terrifying as the Mississippi River was, Fern knows it’s the West that kills the most teams.

This story was originally published in Slate, as part of its "Future Tense Fiction" series; I of course read it in a Best Science Fiction of the Year volume from Neil Clarke (number 8, which I'm still working my way through). It's set in the future, after some kind of climate apocalypse. Infrastructure has largely collapsed and nature is taking back America's transportation networks. The three protagonists are a team of racers, competing to make the dangerous trip from East Coast to West and hopefully win themselves new lives in the process. Beautifully told, in terms of characters, prose, world, and theme. As is often the case, I found myself wishing I'd read it at the time it came out; I probably would have ranked it over anything on the year's Hugo Award for Best Short Story ballot (other than "Rabbit Test").