Michael Damian Thomas

The SF magazine Uncanny was founded in 2014; this 2019 anthology collects highlights from its first few years. It's a generous sampling, at nearly 700 pages, containing 34 stories and 10 poems. And it's superb. I didn't find more than two or three stories here that clunked so badly I couldn't finish them, and the best stories are working at the very top of the genre.

The authors are young, which isn't surprising for a new magazine; established authors already have relationships with existing show more publishers, so are less likely to submit to an unknown new outlet. They're overwhelmingly female, at least based on this sampling. One hesitates to make assumptions about such things these days, but is you count the pronouns in the 42 author bio paragraphs at the back of the book, you get 31 she/her, 6 he/him, and 5 they/them.

Some of the highlights:

•Brooke Bolander's "Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies," the shortest, and the best, of several stories dealing with sexual harrassment and abuse. I suspect those two adjectives aren't unrelated. Fury, no matter how justified, is difficult to sustain for long, for both reader and writer; it can be exhausting at length.

•Caroline M. Yoachim's "The Words on My Skin" finds a lovely way to explore the extent to which parents can (or should) take responsibility for shaping who their children will become.

•Arkady Martine's "The Hydraulic Emperor" is about a film collector who might finally get to see a long-lost film; I suspect that its themes of artistic obsession would resonate with many here at LT.

•A pair of stories re-imagine the history of very different cultural icons: Sam J. Miller's "The Heat of Us: Notes Toward an Oral History," on the Stonewall riots, and Maria Dahvana Headley's "If You Were a Tiger, I'd Have to Wear White," about Leo, the MGM lion.

•Best-in-book honors go to Sarah Pinsker's ingenious "And Then There Were (N-One)," which as you might guess from the title, is an SF variation on a theme by Agatha Christie.

You might have noticed that the Uncanny editors like their titles to be long and poetically evocative. See also "I Frequently Hear Music in the Very Heart of Noise" (Pinsker again), "You'll Surely Drown Here if You Stay" (Alyssa Wong), and "Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand" (Fran Wilde).

These stories are so good, so consistent, and so closely in line with my own taste in SF that as soon as I hit the "post message" button, I'm going to the Uncanny website to order myself a subscription. show less

This book gives you exactly what it says on the cover: glitter and mayhem. I have never read so much disco, roller skating/disco/derby, glitter, and drugs in one place. And I loved it.

I tried to make a list of the stories that stood out for me and realized I was listing pretty much the entire table of contents. It's hard to pick favorites, though "Sister Twelve: Confessions of a Party Monster" by Christopher Barzak was a great retelling of a fairy tale and will stick with me for a long show more time.

(Note: I participated in the Kickstarter for this book.) show less

Another great story from one of my very favorite authors...

In Ye Highlands and Ye Lowlands we learn that the world as we know it it’s ending and that the present situation is the direct consequence of a precise chain of events – indeed the words “things have consequences” keep resonating throughout the story, much like an ominous warning. Or a funeral dirge…

The main character, a mother with two teenaged kids, seeks some respite from what we understand is a long journey with little show more or no hope, and we learn through a series of flashbacks what happened before: the amazing discovery of a portal toward another world, the observation of this alien land where a few robotic probes have been sent in search for life, the encounter with an alien species – and the beginning of the end.

There is a painful dichotomy between the grim present, where people are running from certain death toward the few safe places – as long as they last, of course – and the hopeful, enthusiastic past, when people joked about the portal wanting to call it “the Stargate”, or when they sent the robot probes supplied with “every known human language—including Klingon”, in a giddy reach for contact with other forms of life that could not be disconnected from the number of fictional presentations that used to fire our imagination. There is even some commentary about the fickleness of the human soul, when even the images of an alien world stop making the news, because “..quickly people got over the magnitude of our discovery”.

I’m not going to reveal what the twist in the tale is, of course, but I feel comfortable in saying that it’s a painfully surprising one, and also a warning about the dangers of overconfidence, of putting one’s dreams above all else: “we’d been so busy wallowing in intellectual ideals that we’d never stopped to think”. Despite the grimness, despite the hopelessness, I enjoyed this story very much because no one like McGuire is able to deliver a tale of ultimate doom while keeping her readers engaged, enthralled by the way she weaves her words into a clear, mesmerizing picture.

Not a “happy” story, not by a long shot, but a powerful one that makes you think about the outcome of our choices, and the dangers of taking our customs and thinking processes for granted. Because, in the end

THINGS HAVE CONSEQUENCES
HELLO show less

"Ye Highlands and Ye Lowlands" by Seanan McGuire - a fairly prosaic unintended consequences/first contact story, but I liked it.
"The Sound of Salt and Sea" by Kat Howard - a terrific, resonant, mythical story about the rituals of the returning dead and their attendants; reminds me strongly of Stiefvater's The Scorpio Races - not just in the kelpie-like creatures, but in the prose and the almost dreamlike island setting.
"The Blood that Pulses in the Veins of One" by JY Yang - an incredible, show more incredible second-person story about two immortal, regenerating, cannibalistic aliens who share memory in their flesh, ripped away from the community of their fellows - I loved this, a lot
"You'll Surely Drown Here If You Stay" by Alyssa Wong - a weird west necromancer story, with a company town, and multiple powers working not entirely at cross-purposes, and a young shapeshifter who knows who he is. I like this, but it didn't reach into my gut and grab me like "Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers."
"The Drowning Line" by Haralambi Markov - a seductive story about an ancestral family haunting; eerie and oppressive.
"The Plague Givers" by Kameron Hurley - cranky old queer warrior women making stuffed animals! Nonconformity to nonbinary genders! Creepy, weird, disease-based magic! I love Kameron Hurley.

Plus an essay on how we think about diversity from Foz Meadows, one on gaming communities from Tanya DePass, and two on Labyrinth from Sarah Monette (about how it's a movie about saying no to sexualized femininity, which really sheds a whole new light on why I love it so much) and Stephanie Zvan (about the dubious value of that exact same thing). And poetry: "Deeper than Pie" by Beth Cato, about grandmother magic; "Brown woman at Safety Beach, Victoria, in June" by M Sereno, about a dream of dragons; "Alamat" by Isabel Yap, about folktale women. And interviews with Kat Howard and Alyssa Wong. show less