David Steffen

Twenty-one stories assembled from the 2014 Hugo nomination list, self-published in an anthology with the support of a Kickstarter campaign -- these stories did not all win awards, and many play with themes that others have taken on, but there are some gems of stories and gems of ideas. Among my favorites are:

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"The Breath of War" (Aliette de Bodard) -- A symbiotic relationship between women and the stonepeople they carve in puberty allows babies to quicken. Unlike most women, our protagonist show more does not have access to her breath-sibling, so she journeys to the mountains near the due date. This was my first exposure to the idea of stone people (a fascination rekindled with N. K. Jemisin's series this past year), and the tale is a beautifully written one of loss and freedom and coming of age. ★★★★

"Covenant (Elizabeth Bear) -- If we can rehabilitate felons by changing both their brains and bodies into new people, what is the fall-out for individuals? This story approaches a similar premise to Shusterman's Unwind from an adult, post-occurrence, high psychological perspective. ★★★★

"Goodnight Stars" (Annie Bellet) -- When the moon explodes, a group of kids supports one of their own in getting home to her widower father. ★★★½

"The Husband Stitch" (Carmen Maria Machado) -- Macabre, dissociated, and fascinating. A woman wears a green ribbon around her neck, and goes through the stages of life with it there. There are themes of maintaining parts of yourself despite marriage and family, and about loving others enough to give them what they want even when you don't, and bodily autonomy -- beautifully done. ★★★★½

"A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai'i" (Alaya Dawn Johnson) -- Key keeps humans in good quality arrangements in Hawaii for vampires to visit and use. An interesting approach to slavery and issues of consent and reasons people might be traitors to what others perceive as "their kind". ★★★★½

"A Year and a Day in Old Theradane" (Scott Lynch) -- A traditional fantasy trope -- wizards own a town and fight over it, a rag-tag group of misfits crosses one of them and is given an impossible task to complete by a deadline. Cute, easy read. ★★★★

"The Regular" (Ken Liu) -- An escort is murdered, and a woman goes on a personally and professionally driven quest to investigate. This is lovely speculative fiction, with its vision of a "Regulator" for brain chemistry (legally required for police), use of omni-present signals monitoring to catch criminals, and likely near-future technologies that make people feel safer but really just leave them vulnerable in new and different ways. An excellent spec fic story from Ken Liu, and highly recommended. ★★★★★

"Grand Jeté (The Great Leap)" (Rachel Swirsky) -- A Jewish girl with cancer nears the end of her life, and her bereft father creates an automaton and embodies it with all her essence and history and memories and personality. Their identities merge and diverge the last few weeks of Mara's life. Excellently structured, excellently thought through, excellently supported by a real backbone of religiosity. I've never seen the question of "if all your cells are destroyed and recreated somewhere else such that your consciousness persists unchanged, who are you?" handled in such a deft and impressive way. Very highly recommended. ★★★★★ show less

There's a few gems

For the price, this series is pretty good overall. There's some years where there's too much crazy metaphor in many stories. I prefer the years where you see little subplots of a larger 'verse that the author writes novels in

This was from the 2020 Hugo Award longlist, those that didn't make it to the shortlist for the various categories and it was an interesting collection, I thought I had read some of them from the shortlist but I hadn't and some of them I wished they had. Some were more about a point than a story but overall I'm glad I read it and would be interested in reading more like this to get a better flavour of some other books from the time.

The stories that stayed with me are: Articulated Restraint; show more Fisher-bird;Seonag and the Seawolves and Erase, Erase, Erase.

That was the first year where everything changed, these stories are from a before time. Before COVID changed how we saw disease.

Contents:
* Foreword (The Long List Anthology: Volume 6) • essay by David Steffen
* Give the Family My Love (2019) / short story by A. T. Greenblatt
* Beyond the El (2019) / short story by John Chu
* Articulated Restraint [Lady Astronaut] (2019) / short story by Mary Robinette Kowal
* I (28M) Created a Deepfake Girlfriend and Now My Parents Think We're Getting Married (2019) / short story by Fonda Lee
* A Bird, a Song, a Revolution (2019) / short story by Brooke Bolander
* The Dead, in Their Uncontrollable Power (2019) / short story by Karen Osborne
* Fisher-Bird (2019) / short story by Ursula Vernon [as by T. Kingfisher]
* How the Trick Is Done (2019) / short story by A. C. Wise
* Lest We Forget (2019) / short story by Elizabeth Bear
* Shucked (2019) / short story by Sam J. Miller
* Circus Girl, the Hunter, and Mirror Boy / novelette by JY Yang [as by JY Neon Yang]
* Deriving Life (2019) / novelette by Elizabeth Bear
* His Footsteps, Through Darkness and Light [Majestic Oriental Circus] (2019) / novelette by Mimi Mondal
* Seonag and the Seawolves (2019) / novelette by M. Evan MacGriogair
* Dave's Head (2019) / novelette by Suzanne Palmer
* Nice Things (2019) / novelette by Ellen Klages
* A Strange Uncertain Light (2019) / novelette by G. V. Anderson
* Blood, Bone, Seed, Spark (2019) / novelette by Aimee Ogden
* Erase, Erase, Erase (2019) / novelette by Elizabeth Bear
* Glass Cannon (2019) / novella by Yoon Ha Lee show less

Way too much fantasy/supernatural (much of which I skimmed or skipped altogether) and not enough science fiction. Way too many long-form novelettes that just drifted on, and hardly any short, punchy stories. There were a few very good science fiction stories but all-in-all this was a totally unbalanced collection.