Strange Puppies

As is now customary, at around this time of year I produce my Hugo nominations recommendations slate, Strange Puppies. Go forth and nominate, minions. And should you find that any of these items make it onto the ballot, you may be assured it is by your agency alone.

BEST NOVEL
Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie
The Cinder Spires: The Aeronaut’s Windlass by Jim Butcher
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
Seveneves: A Novel by Neal Stephenson
Uprooted by Naomi Novik

BEST NOVELLA
Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
The Builders by Daniel Polansky
Penric’s Demon by Lois McMaster Bujold
Perfect State by Brandon Sanderson
Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds

BEST NOVELETTE
“And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead” by Brooke Bolander
“Flashpoint: Titan” by Cheah Kai Wai
“Folding Beijing” by Hao Jingfang, trans. Ken Liu.
“Obits” by Stephen King
“What Price Humanity?” by David VanDyke

BEST SHORT STORY
"Asymmetrical Warfare" by S. R. Algernon
"The Commuter" by Thomas A. Mays
"If You Were an Award, My Love" by Juan Tabo and S. Harris
"Seven Kill Tiger" by Charles Shao
"Space Raptor Butt Invasion" by Chuck Tingle

BEST RELATED WORK
Between Light and Shadow: An Exploration of the Fiction of Gene Wolfe, 1951 to 1986 by Marc Aramini
“The First Draft of My Appendix N Book” by Jeffro Johnson
“Safe Space as Rape Room” by Daniel Eness
SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police by Vox Day
“The Story of Moira Greyland” by Moira Greyland

CAMPBELL AWARD FOR BEST NEW WRITER
Pierce Brown
Sebastien de Castell
Brian Niemeier
Andy Weir

Alyssa Wong

BEST EDITOR, LONG FORM

Vox Day
Sheila E. Gilbert
Liz Gorinsky
Jim Minz
Toni Weisskopf

BEST EDITOR, SHORT FORM
John Joseph Adams
Neil Clarke
Ellen Datlow
Jerry Pournelle
Sheila Williams

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION, LONG FORM

Avengers: Age of Ultron written and directed by Joss Whedon
Ex Machina written and directed by Alex Garland

Mad Max: Fury Road written by George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, and Nico Lathouris, directed by George Miller
The Martian, screenplay by Drew Goddard, directed by Ridley Scott
Star Wars: The Force Awakens, written by Lawrence Kasdan, J. J. Abrams, and Michael Arndt, directed by J.J. Abrams

Etc.

j/k obv

Half-Ignoring Sad Puppies

I half-noticed recently that this year's Sad Puppies' slate (perhaps not the right word) contains a sprinkling of SJW pixie-dust. My first thought was, alol, a wedge issue and bid for legitimacy courtesy of the right wing genre culture trolls, perfectly tactically commendable if perhaps a bit transparent. It's a familiar pattern in mundane politics too: divisive, nasty, "populist" tub-thumping to build your brand, then try to de-toxify it and play in the mainstream. I.e. I assumed those recommendations weren't sincere.

Just now I half-noticed that the Sad Puppies list (perhaps that is the right word) was put together by an open process (albeit one perhaps not very well-publicized outside veteran Pup circles). So while I wouldn't put it past a cadre of battle-wizened Pups to have infiltrated that process, in order to promote the very thing they hate -- a v. GG move obv., playing the long game bro -- it's much more likely it is what it seems: a collated recommendations list drawing on a right-leaning constituency, but not a totally repulsive constituency.

Obviously this Sad Puppies should have done a bit more to distance itself from last year. But my inclination would be, on the little I've seen, let's give them a break? This is deep, deep ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ territory. If you have awoken with horror to find yourself on their list, maybe don't sweat it. You're no more in a moral quandary than usual. Don't feel obliged to fall on your #SJWaward and declare yourself ineligible, or anything brave and silly like that. My hunch is, ignore it. This is probably the one time in your life you're not a pawn in somebody's grand evil scheme.

Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank The Atlantic, from whose Google cache snippet I have copypasted the shrug emoji more times than you've broken hot takes.

From Lud-in-the-Mist

By Hope Mirrlees.

Round and round trudged the pony, round and round went the hidden musical-box, grinding out its thin, blurred tunes.

Why did she cock her pretty blue eye
At the lad with the silver buckles,
When the penniless lad who was handsome and spry
Got nought but a rap on his knuckles?

These vulgar songs, though faded, were not really old. Nevertheless, to Master Nathaniel, they were the oldest songs in existence – sung by the Morning Stars when all the world was young. For they were freighted with his childhood, and brought the memory, or, rather, the tang, the scent, of the solemn innocent world of children, a world sans archness, sans humour, sans vulgarity, where they had sounded as pure and silvery as a shepherd’s pipe. Where the little charmer with her puce bow, and the scheming hussy who had cocked her blue eye had been own sisters to the pretty fantastic ladies of the nursery rhymes, like them walking always to the accompaniment of tinkling bells and living on frangipane and sillabubs of peaches and cream; and whose gestures were stylised and actions preposterous –nonsense actions that needed no explanation. While mothers-in-law, shrewish wives, falling in love – they were just pretty words like brightly-coloured beads, strung together without meaning.

Knights of the Thimble

There is a new free lightweight high fantasy tabletop RPG called Dungeons & Drapers added to the Games tab, whose rules may be very familiar to some of you. Other working titles: Skycrawl, Devils & Dwarves, Dweomers & Drow, Danger & Derring-Do, Dragons & Dungeons, Dystopia & Dragons, Hunger & Dragons, Dungeons & Desist.

It is what it is & any comments are appreciated (especially feedback on overall balance), but the interesting bit would really come with the supplementary spellbook, if I ever get round to writing it. There is also a kind of structural joke or provocation to do with race and class; maybe class especially, since it often feels to me that the power that high fantasy RPGs invite players to imaginatively occupy is the power of aristocracy and bourgeois finance, whatever the actual background of the character you're playing. Elf is structurally toff, isn't it? So in Dungeons & Drapers there's an attempt at a nod to the artisanal power of the early modern middling sort. Basically what I'm saying is that it's cool because you're a tailor.

Or perhaps this is just a sign of what happens when you come into some creative practice and start off making wrong & interesting things & gradually start making proper & therefore boring things? *Googles "shrug emoji"; copy-pastes it here*

Notes (mostly to self) on N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season

(Technically spoilers ahead)

* Assured, immersive, easeful, affecting, solid, a sense of being timely, up-to-date, "core." Colloquial. Ambitious without feeling strained. Makes it look easy (sprezzatura).

* The methods are obvious: good storytelling, good worldbuilding. Of course that's just the beginning. What does The Fifth Season teach us counts as good storytelling, good worldbuilding? What is a 'story' and/or a 'world' at this precise moment in history, at this particular textual nexus? (Could I go so far as to say 'strong characterization' or even 'relateable characters'? What does that consist in?)

* So very distant from Tolkienian epic fantasy. And yet finds ways to rekindle its pleasures?

* The conceit that ecological catastrophe can be averted and/or fixed through the power of the imagination (in the book, 'orogeny'). And/or: the conceit that ecological catastrophe can be averted/and or fixed through worldbuilding (cf. normal sense of orogeny, mountain-making). Comforting. Reflexive. (Surely we all fear climate change now. Perhaps the deniers most of all).

* Do storytellers only speak to their listeners? Or also for their listeners? What are the stories we most desire to hear? Are they the same as the ones we most desire to speak? Are they the stories we cannot find the words or images or names or skill to express? Are they what we fear to say, or are too traumatized to say, or rightly know we should not say?

* Anything to say about pronouns & POV?! Second person really works, especially when strands come together at the end. Cf. Banks Feersum Enjinn (structure wise) and (pov wise) Okorafor's Lagoon and Phoenix, Banks' Complicity, Leckie's Ancillary.

* A protagonist who commits massacres. "They will not realize for weeks that you killed the town in this moment" -- the town, ambiguous between object and humans. The realization "I killed Uche" rather than the realization "look what I've literally just done, look who I've killed, look who I may have killed though there is perhaps still time to do something about it." How do we think about "problematic" in relation to that huh.

* To generalize ahistorically a little about what "great storytelling" is ... could it sometimes be figuring out how to "have things both ways"? In Fifth Season I sense these are "my" politics and yet they are owned more expertly, more luxuriously than in real life: they aren't fraught with the same dangers, there is no sense of self-denial on political principle. Yes, there is conflict, there is estrangement ... but the fit between myself and the politics embodied here, that feels natural, comfortable, inevitable. Cf. story sludge.

* How much concern is there with subjectivitybuilding, i.e., how much is the strangeness of the world reflected in the strangeness of the personality types? I think not much. Just slightly though. For the most part these people, despite it all, are us. (Becky Chambers's Long Way as an example of taking it even further. Definitely contemporary personality structures projected into the future).

* A premium on educational capital. The book feels like it esteems education. Hard knowledge work.

* That extended subplot about getting the kind of respect they deserve. Could it seem weird and petty? The fact that it doesn't, is that because of cognitive estrangement / allegory? There is no mistaking it for something that is merely in the story-world. It is 100% about a certain style of brutally brazen interpersonal racism. Episode makes sense because it is interwoven in some way with the real world. We know this isn't just about fictional identity characteristics, fictional decorum, fictional formal equality, fictional regimes of rights. The intensity of that connection managed upward and downward in different episodes and aspects. We KNOW what word is behind the word "rogga." At other points, particularly the more institutional / systemic persecution of the orogenes, less of a one to one correlation?

* Just btw: it's one of those books where by convention the characters are assumed to literally play host to the words that are "from" their "POV." E.g. "what made her think 'ready'"? (Not exact quotes here).

* A sustained downgrading of the concept of "the end of the world." The world ends all the time, it's nbd. A sustained play on the shared planet we all live on and the (capitalist individualist?) personal world, as in "my whole world shattered that day" or "my son was my whole world" (really? Did he have an atmosphere? Arable lands?) Cf. in its many variants, "nowadays it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism." Question: how does this book make me feel, in the end, about ecological catastrophe? More anxious or more comforted? And what else? And does what it makes me think align to what it makes me feel?

* Stone people. Cf. Pollock's and especially Pratchett's (trolls and golems)? Lithic agency!

* Not happy about the Malthusian edge. And the quasi-authorial interjections about what "matters." Cf. 'Farnham's Freehold' etc. Of course again, super skilled handling of a core strand of sf, albeit an evil one.

* A lot of quiet kink. Fulcrum obviously abusers, but also the faint logic of BDSM. And the "shut up I'm here to fuck you" breeding programme stuff (although that does lead to some genuinely seriously unsexy zero enthusiasm "sex"). But a lot of the time, hard to say why exactly, but it's kinda hot. " I can't tell if this novel is flirting with me or not and the hottest part of it is that I can't even tell."

* So, HOT.

* Does it throw you in at the deep end? And then reward you for sticking it out, 100 pages or so in? At the same time it's not exactly a steep learning curve. Or at least you're I in no doubt iit is going to make sense eventually.

* The final chapters quietly virtuoso in giving the reader a lot of what it is rumoured to most like. Sex, big fights, death of reasonably major characters, a sort of structural twist (of the engineered-by-withholding kind -- cf. e.g. Banks's Use of Weapons and Feersum Endjinn -- which I find nonetheless gratifying), a show-down with a nemesis, a sort of motive twist (last word of novel, saw it coming btw, cf. Feersum again), a coming-together-of-two-storylines, a controlling gaslighting abuser resisted with a defiant existential self-assertion, horrific "sacrifices" (hmmm & cf. Ringworld), action sequences fragmented around interposed aphorisms/horoscopes ("There are moments when everything changes"), apocalypse(s), a special power leveling up, etc. Oh and a glossary!

* Title. Box sets.

* What happens when two characters merge? Cf. marriage. Cf. rightsizing, Mergers & Acquisitions. Cf. how it plays out within the folk poetics of relateability. (What if you like one character and hate the other, and they turn out to be the same?)

* Interesting thing with "you" turning out to be in the other story. Because in another way, of course you the reader had to be there all along, to bring it to life.

* Cf. the powerful and persecuted protagonist of Phoenix. One very distinctive thing: Fifth Season has a sense of record-breaking. I.e. this is something that speculative fiction often does, and here a new record has been set for doing it in a particularly difficult and intense way. (Jemisin makes it look easy, of course). One thing in particular. That is the reconciliation of being special and powerful and magical with being persecuted and oppressed and abused. Jemisin reconciles an extraordinary level of power with an extraordinary level of persecution. "Gods in chains."

Burn Out: Empathize But Organize

Check out @TeeEss and @LZats feed for some editor/agent REAL TALK.

— Natasha Neagle (@natneagle) March 14, 2016

Some eloquent and forceful tweeting about systemic overwork, burn-out, and mental health in the publishing industry.

What would YOU like to see happen? Webinars? A hashtag? A website or forum for supporting and communicating these things? I want it too 15/?

— Laura Zats (@LZats) March 14, 2016

Fwiw, I want this conversation include other kinds of working too hard as well, not just working too hard in the publishing industry!

De-stressing, developing insight, developing self-care, cultures of tenderness, honest and open conversations, sharing stories, learning to recognize affective labor alongside more traditional forms of work, calling out exploitative practices, challenging the gendered patterns of exhaustion, solidarity based on shared industry experience, raising awareness about what this or that role may entail in practice, and managing expectations accordingly: that stuff is hella important. But it's only a start. Doing all that while remaining basically neutral on contemporary neoliberal capitalism would get pretty much nowhere, obv. :P

Interzone Book Zone Hivemind

As well as the usual reviews, the December/January Interzone has some reviewers' top picks from 2015 (ish). Here's what I wrote.

*

Sandra Newman’s The Country of Ice Cream Star (HarperCollins) is technically a YA post-apocalyptic quest, but only in the way that, say, a jack-o’-lantern is technically a berry. Newman’s wrenching, bloodsoaked 600+ page epic is told almost entirely in a speculative English, mostly estranged AAVE with fragments of French (via Senegal) plus wry phonosemantic matches: bon becomes bone and so on. Sparks slip between what words mean to Ice and what they mean to us, so a phrase like “vally and bell” (brave and beautiful) may also ring out like a bell in a valley. It’d be easy to get hung up on the linguistic surface, but the point is really the passion, intelligence and wit unleashed from this shattering language.

Berit Ellingsen’s Not Dark Yet (Two Dollar Radio) is the kind of novella that it’s tempting to call ‘enigmatic.’ Yet it is so self-possessed, so straightforwardly timely, and gazes at you with such open, disciplined frankness ... by the final page, it feels simple and necessary, and all other stories have become enigmas. Ellingsen’s anonymous protagonist applies to be among the first to fly to Mars, while quietly living in a cabin among the owls, humans, and hurricanes of near-future ecologies. Uh, pretty dark already?

Two science non-fiction top picks: Steve Aylett’s Heart of the Original (Unbound) is ostensibly a collection of short essays about creativity; Aylett is, as he sometimes points out, a very, very, very brilliant and original writer. “They pounced, two clowns holding me by the arms while a fourth beat the bejesus out of me.” His work is also tremendously funny, and a bit rebarbative, although he is always kind enough to give the reader some way in. The way into his Heart happens to be reflexivity: there’s a lot of Aylett reflecting on Aylett, with some Thus #Lifehacked Zarathustra thrown in. Eat Aylett’s Heart out, but also beg for a new novel soon.

Laurence Scott’s witty, erudite and utterly selfie-indulgent The Four-Dimensional Human (William Heinemann) is by far the best thing I’ve read about the experience of living with – or living through, or as – social media. Although Scott’s analysis is constrained by the necessity of staying always charming, his meticulous scrutiny and figurative ingeniousness frequently take him far beyond familiar observations.

Five more, briefly: I think Kelly Link perhaps has some imitators, but her latest utterly seelie-indulgent collection of short stories Get in Trouble (Random House) demonstrates she’s still the best Kelly Link on the block. Peter Newman’s The Vagrant (Harper Voyager) is a dark science fantasy, elevated above functional swords ’n’ scariness by its deft downtime: the snatched tender lulls within a crapsack wasteland, the comic flailings of toddler and goat. Karen Lord’s social science fiction Galaxy Game (Del Ray) is a cozy-yet-creepy, subtle-yet-leaden novel of sports, psionics and cosmopolitics. It’s admirable for its serene, twinkle-eyed affront to everything holy in genre storytelling wisdom, but maybe does less with that than did its prequel, The Best of All Possible Worlds. Jonathan L. Howard’s weirdboiled crime-horror novel Carter & Lovecraft (Thomas Dunne) is contemporary, smart, pacey – and gets you to care, despite its glitching reality and homage to campy tentacles. Also see Emma Newman’s Planetfall, reviewed in the same issue.

*

And I went ahead and compiled the other reviewers' choices. If you want to see who liked what and why, get the issue!

Alexis Wright, The Swan Book

Laura van den Berg, Find Me

Sara Taylor, The Shore

Catriona Ward, Rawblood

John Mandel, Station Eleven

Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things

David Hutchinson, Europe at Midnight (more recommendations than anything else)

Chris Beckett, Mother of Eden

Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem

Cixin Liu, The Dark Forest

Ann Leckie, Ancillary Mercy

Ian McDonald, Luna: New Moon

Aliette de Bodard, House of Shattered Wings

Max Gladstone, Last First Snow

Kirsty Logan, The Gracekeepers

César Aira, 3 Novels by César Aira

Rod Duncan, Unseemly Science

China Mieville, Three Fragments of an Explosion

Kim Newman, The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School

Paul Meloy, The Night Clock

Michael F. Russell, Lie of the Land

Joyce Carol Oates, Jack of Spades

Jonathan Edwards, My Family and Other Superheroes (hey wait no fair I didn't know we were allowed poetry)

Kate Tempest, Hold Your Own

Don Paterson, 40 Sonnets

Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric

Sam Gayton, The Snow Merchant

David Baddiel, The Person Controller

Julian Clary, The Bolds

Kate Atkinson, A God in Ruins

Iain Banks and Ken MacLeod, Poems

E.J. Swift, Tamaruq

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant

Brian Taves, Hollywood Presents Jules Verne: The Father of Science Fiction on Screen

Piers Bizony, The Making of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey

Paul Levitz, The Bronze Age of DC Comics: 1970-84

Lance Parkin, Whoniverse: The Unofficial Planet-by-Planet Guide to the Universe of the Doctor, From Gallifrey to Skaro

Stephen Jones, The Art of Horror: An Illustrated History

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora

Carolyn Ives Gilman, Dark Orbit

David Mitchell, Slade House

Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (ed.), Sisters of the Revolution

Julie Wosk, My Fair Ladies

Adam Roberts, Rave and Let Die

Up & Coming

In Jo's neuem Video Up & Coming zeigt sich die Autor gewohnt sexy: knappe Shorts und viel ...

An enormous free (in March only) anthology of science fiction & fantasy by 120 authors who have published their work in a "professional" publication for the first time during the last two years. Thrown together at breakneck speed by editors S.L. Huang and Kurt Hunt. Contents:

Charlotte Ashley
La Héron (F& SF) (Short story)
Sigrid Under the Mountain (The Sockdolager) (Short story)

John Ayliff
Belt Three (HarperVoyager) (Novel excerpt)

Lucas Bale
To Sing of Chaos and Eternal Night (Dark Matter Publishing) (Novelette)

Nicolette Barischoff
Pirate Songs (The Future Fire) (Novelette)
Follow Me Down (Unlikely Story) (Novelette)
In the Woods Behind My House (Podcastle) (Short story)

Sofie Bird
A' is for Alacrity, Astronauts and Grief (Zombies Need Brains LLC) (Short story)

Derrick Boden
Clay Soldiers (Daily Science Fiction) (Short story)
The Last Mardi Gras (Flash Fiction Online) (Short story)

Stefan Bolz
The Traveler (Samuel Peralta) (Short story)

David Bruns
The Water Finder's Shadow (Hip Phoenix) (Novelette)
I, Caroline

Martin Cahill
It Was Never The Fire (Nightmare Magazine) (Short story)
Vanilla (Fireside Fiction) (Short story)

Aaron Canton
Dining Out (Phobos Magazine) (Short story)
A Most Unusual Patriot (Michael DeAngelo) (Short story)

D.K. Cassidy
Room 42 (Windrift Bay Limited) (Short story)
Zach Chapman Between Screens (Galaxy Press) (Short story)

Curtis C. Chen
Zugzwang (Daily Science Fiction) (Short story)
Making Waves (SNAFU: An Anthology of Military Horror) (Short story)
Laddie Come Home (2016 Young Explorer's Adventure Guide) (Short story)

ZZ Claybourne
Agents of Change (Windrift Books) (Short story)

Liz Colter
The Ties That Bind, The Chains That Break (Galaxy's Edge Magazine) (Short story)
Echoes (Urban Fantasy Magazine) (Short story)
The Clouds in Her Eyes (Writers and Illustrators of the Future vol 30) (Short story)

Daniel J Davis
The God Whisperer (Galaxy Press) (Short story)

S.B. Divya
Strange Attractors (Daily Science Fiction) (Short story)
The Egg (Nature) (Short story)
Ships in the Night (Daily Science Fiction) (Short story)

Margaret Dunlap
Jane (Shimmer) (Short story)
Broken Glass (Wisdom Crieth Without) (Short story)
Bookburners, Episode 5: The Market Arcanum (Serial Box Publishing) (Novelette)

S. K. Dunstall
LINESMAN (Ace Books) (Novel excerpt)

Jonathan Edelstein
First Do No Harm (Strange Horizons) (Novelette)

Harlow C. Fallon
A Long Horizon (The Immortality Chronicles (The Future Chronicles Anthology Series)) (Short story)

Rafaela F. Ferraz
The Lady of the House of Mirrors (Lethe Press) (Novelette)

Sam Fleming
She Gave her Heart, He Took Her Marrow (Apex Magazine) (Short story)

Annalee Flower
Horne Seven Things Cadet Blanchard Learned From The Trade Summit Incident (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) (Short story)

Ron S. Friedman
Game Not Over (Galaxy's Edge) (Short story)
LUCA (Analemma Books) (Short story)

David Jón Fuller
The Harsh Light of Morning (EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing) (Short story)
Caged (Crossroad Press) (Short story)
In Open Air (Futurefire.net Publishing) (Short story)

Sarah Gailey
Bargain (Mothership Zeta) (Short story)
Haunted (Fireside Fiction) (Short story)

Patricia Gilliam
The Backup (Windrift Books) (Short story)

Jaymee Goh
Liminal Grid (Strange Horizons) (Short story)

Elad Haber
Number One Hit (Interfictions Online) (Short story)

Auston Habershaw
Adaptation and Predation (Escape Pod) (Short story)
A Revolutionary's Guide to Practical Conjuration (Galaxy Press) (Novelette)

Philip Brian Hall
Spatchcock (AE The Canadian Science Fiction Review) (Novella)
The Waiting Room (Flame Tree Publishing) (Short story)
The Man on the Church Street Omnibus (The Sockdolager) (Short story)

John Gregory Hancock
The Antares Cigar Shoppe (Windrift Books) (Short story)

Nin Harris
Sang Rimau and the Medicine Woman (Lackington's Magazine) (Short story)
Your Right Arm (Clarkesworld Magazine) (Short story)

C.A. Hawksmoor
Y Brenin (Beneath Ceaseless Skies) (Novelette)
Murder on the Laplacian Express (Interzone) (Short story)

Sean Patrick Hazlett
Boomer Hunter (Grimdark Magazine) (Short story)
Entropic Order (Outposts of Beyond) (Short story)
Chandler's Hollow (Perihelion Science Fiction) (Short story)

Holly Heisey
The Monastery of the Parallels (Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show) (Short story)
An Understanding (Escape Pod) (Short story)
Contents of Care Package to Etsath-tachri, Formerly Ryan Andrew Curran (Human English Translated to Sedrayin) (EGM Shorts) (Short story)

Michael Patrick Hicks
Revolver (Dark Matter Publishing) (Short story)
Preservation (Windrift Books) (Short story)

SL Huang
Hunting Monsters (The Book Smugglers) (Short story)
By Degrees and Dilatory Time (Strange Horizons) (Short story)
Zero Sum Game (self-published) (Novel excerpt)

Kurt Hunt
Paolo, Friend Paolo (Ecotones) (Short story)
QSFT7mk2.7853 Has a Name (Perihelion) (Short story)
Tigerskin (Strange Horizons) (Short story)

L.S. Johnson
Vacui Magia (Strange Horizons) (Short story)
Little Men with Knives (Crossed Genres) (Novelette)

Cameron Johnston
The Economist & The Dragon (Buzzymag) (Short story)
Head Games (Swords and Sorcery Magazine) (Short story)
The Shadow Under Scotland (The Lovecraft eZine) (Short story)

Rachael K. Jones
Makeisha In Time (Crossed Genres) (Short story)
Who Binds and Looses the World With Her Hands (PodCastle) (Short story)
Charlotte Incorporated (Lightspeed) (Short story)

Jason Kimble
Broken (Escape Pod) (Short story)
Hide Behind (The Sockdolager) (Short story)

Paul B. Kohler
Rememorations (Windrift Bay Limited) (Short story)
The Soul Collector (Global Endeavor Publishing) (Short story)

Jeanne Kramer-Smyth
Unsealed (2015 Young Explorer's Adventure Guide) (Short story)
View from Above (2016 Young Explorer's Adventure Guide) (Short story)

Jamie Gilman Kress
And Now, Fill Her In (Daily Science Fiction) (Short story)

Jason LaPier
Unexpected Rain (HarperVoyager UK) (Novel excerpt)

Fonda Lee
Zeroboxer (Flux) (Novel excerpt)
Universal Print (Crossed Genres) (Short story)

S Lynn
Ffydd (Faith) (Crossed Genres Publications) (Short story)

Jack Hollis Marr
into the waters I rode down (FutureFire Publishing) (Short story)

Arkady Martine
City of Salt (Strange Horizons) (Short story)
When The Fall Is All That's Left (Apex Magazine) (Short story)
Adjuva (Lakeside Circus) (Short story)

Kim May
Blood Moon Carnival (WMG) (Short story)
The Void around the Sword's Edge (WMG) (Short story)

Alison McBain
Grandmother Winter (On the Premises) (Short story)
The Lost Children (Abbreviated Epics) (Short story)
The Heart of Yuki-onna (Frozen Fairy Tales) (Short story)

Rati Mehrotra
Charaid Dreams (Apex Magazine) (Short story)
Ghosts of Englehart (AE – The Canadian Science Fiction Review) (Short story)

Lia Swope Mitchell
Slow (Apex Magazine) (Short story)

Allison Mulder
Decay (Crossed Genres Magazine) (Short story)

Ian Muneshwar
Ossuary (Clarkesworld Magazine) (Short story)

Brian Niemeier
Strange Matter (Jason Rennie) (Novelette)
Nethereal (Brian Niemeier) (Novel excerpt)

Wendy Nikel
Rain Like Diamonds (Daily Science Fiction) (Short story)
The Tea-Space Continuum (AE) (Short story)
The Book of Futures (Broken Eye Books) (Short story)

George Nikolopoulos
A Rise to the Surface (SFComet) (Short story)
Razor Bill Vs Pistol Anne (Bards and Sages Quarterly) (Short story)

Megan E. O'Keefe
Of Blood and Brine (Shimmer) (Short story)
Steal the Sky (Angry Robot Books) (Novel excerpt)

Malka Older
Tear Tracks (Tor.com) (Short story)

Emma Osborne
The Box Wife (Shock Totem: Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted) (Short story)
Zip (Bastion Science Fiction Magazine) (Short story)
Clean Hands, Dirty Hands (Aurealis) (Short story)

Chris Ovenden
Upgrade (Penny Shorts) (Short story)
Peace for our Times (Every Day Fiction) (Short story)
Behind Grey Eyes (Daily Science Fiction) (Short story)

Steve Pantazis
Switch (Galaxy Press) (Novelette)

Carrie Patel
Here Be Monsters (Beneath Ceaseless Skies) (Short story)
The Color of Regret (PodCastle) (Short story)
The Buried Life (Angry Robot) (Novel excerpt)

Sunil Patel
The Merger (The Book Smugglers) (Short story)
The Robot Who Couldn't Lie (Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show) (Short story)
The Attic of Memories (Fantastic Stories of the Imagination) (Short story)

Laura Pearlman
I am Graalnak of the Vroon Empire, Destroyer of Galaxies, Supreme Overlord of the Planet Earth. Ask Me Anything. (Flash Fiction Online) (Short story)
A Dozen Frogs, a Bakery, and a Thing That Didn't Happen (Daily Science Fiction) (Short story)
In the End, You Get Clarity (UFO Publishing) (Short story)

Samuel Peralta
Hereafter (David Gatewood) (Short story)
Humanity (David Gatewood) (Short story)

Andrea Phillips In Loco Parentis (Escape Pod) (Short story)
Revision (Fireside Fiction) (Novel excerpt)

Mark Robert Philps
Dragonfire is Brighter than the Ten Thousand Stars (Robinson) (Novella)

Monica Enderle Pierce
Judgment (Windrift Books) (Novelette)

Ivan Popov
The Keresztury TVirs (Sci Phi Publications) (Short story)

Bill Powell
The Punctuality Machine, Or, A Steampunk Libretto (Beneath Ceaseless Skies) (Short story)

Stephen S. Power
Stripped to Zero (Nature) (Short story)
Wire Paladin (AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review) (Short story)
Automatic Sky (AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review) (Short story)

Rhiannon Rasmussen
The Hymn of Ordeal, No. 23 (Lightspeed (Women Destroy Science Fiction)) (Short story)
Charge! Love Heart! (The Sockdolager) (Short story)
How to Survive the Apocalypse (ZEAL) (Short story)

Chris Reher
The Kasant Objective (Windrift Books) (Short story)

Ethan Reid
THE UNDYING: SHADES (Simon & Schuster, Inc.) (Novel excerpt)

Kelly Robson
Waters of Versailles (tor.com) (Novella excerpt)
The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill (Clarkesworld Magazine) (Short story)
Two-Year Man (Asimov's Science Fiction) (Short story)

Andy Rogers
The Doom Of Sallee (Grantville Gazette) (Short story)
Brothers In Arms (Star Citizen Jump Point Magazine) (Novella) Lauren M. Roy The Eleventh Hour (Fireside Magazine) (Short story)

Steve Ruskin
Grand Tour (Zombies Need Brains LLC) (Short story)
KB Rylander We Fly (Baen) (Short story)

Hope Erica Schultz
Mr. Reilly's Tattoo (Fireside Magazine) (Short story)
The Princess in the Basement (Diabolical Plots) (Short story)

Effie Seiberg
Re: Little Miss Apocalypse Playset (Fireside Fiction) (Short story)
Rocket Surgery (Analog Science Fiction and Fact) (Short story)
Thundergod in Therapy (Galaxy's Edge) (Short story)

Tahmeed Shafiq
The Djinn Who Sought To Kill The Sun (Lightspeed Magazine) (Novelette)

Iona Sharma
Archana and Chandni (Betwixt) (Short story)
Alnwick (Middle Planet) (Short story)

Anthea Sharp
Ice in D Minor (Timberland Regional Library) (Short story)
The Sun Never Sets (Windrift Books) (Short story)
Fae Horse (Fiddlehead Press) (Short story)

Elsa Sjunneson-Henry
Edge of The Unknown (Broken Eye Books) (Short story)

Daniel Arthur Smith
The Diatomic Quantum Flop (Windrift Books) (Short story)
Tower (Holt Smith ltd) (Short story)

Hugh Howey
Lives (Holt Smith ltd) (Novella excerpt)

Lesley Smith
The Soulless: A History of Zombieism in Chiitai and Mihari Culture (Windrift Books) (Short story)

William Squirrell
Götterdämmerung (AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review) (Short story)
Fighting in the Streets of the City of Time (Bewildering Stories) (Short story)
I am Problem Solving Astronaut: How to Write Hard SF (Blue Monday Review) (Short story)
Dan Stout Outpatient (Nature) (Short story)
The Curious Case of Alpha-7 DE11 (Mad Scientist Journal) (Short story)

Naru Dames Sundar
A Revolution In Four Courses (Daily Science Fiction) (Short story)
Infinite Skeins (Crossed Genres) (Short story)
Broken Winged Love (Strange Horizons) (Short story)

Will Swardstrom Uncle Allen (Windrift Books) (Novelette)
The Control (Windrift Books) (Novelette)

Jeremy Szal
Daega's Test (Nature) (Short story)
Last Age of Kings (Fantasy Scroll Magazine) (Short story)
Skingame (Perihelion Science Fiction) (Short story)

Lauren C. Teffeau
Forge and Fledge (Crossed Genres Magazine, Issue 16) (Short story)
Jump Cut (Unlikely Story) (Short story)

Natalia Theodoridou
The Eleven Holy Numbers of the Mechanical Soul (Clarkesworld Magazine) (Short story)
On Post-Mortem Birds (Interfictions: A Journal of Interstitial Arts) (Short story)
Android Whores Can't Cry (Clarkesworld Magazine) (Short story)

Joseph Tomaras
Bonfires in Anacostia (Clarkesworld Magazine) (Short story)
Thirty-Eight Observations on the Nature of the Self (Haikasoru) (Short story)
The Joy of Sects (Unlikely Story) (Short story)

Vincent Trigili
The Storymaster (Windrift Books) (Short story)

P.K. Tyler
Moon Dust (Evolved Publishing) (Novelette)
Avendui 5ive (Windrift Books) (Short Story)

Tamara Vardomskaya
The Metamorphoses of Narcissus (Beneath Ceaseless Skies) (Short story)
Acrobatic Duality (Tor.com) (Short story)

Leo Vladimirsky
Collar (F& SF) (Short story)
Dandelion (Boing Boing) (Short story)

Nancy SM Waldman
ReMemories (Fantasy Scroll Magazine) (Short story)
And Always, Murder (AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review) (Short story)
Sound of Chartreuse (Perihelion Science Fiction Magazine) (Short story)
Thomas M. Waldroon Sinseerly A Friend & Yr. Obed't (Beneath Ceaseless Skies) (Novelette)

Jo Lindsay Walton
It's OK To Say If You Went Back In Time And Killed Baby Hitler (Self-Published) (Short story)

Kim Wells
The Book of Safkhet: Chronicler of the Journey, Mistress of the House of Books (Windrift Books) (Short story)

Alison Wilgus
King Tide (Terraform) (Short story)
Noise Pollution (Strange Horizons) (Short story)

Nicolas Wilson
Trials (Windrift Publishing) (Novelette)
Multiply (Windrift Publishing) (Novelette)

Alyssa Wong
Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers (Nightmare Magazine) (Short story)
The Fisher Queen (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction) (Short story)
Santos de Sampaguitas (Strange Horizons) (Short story)

Eleanor R. Wood
Fibonacci (Flash Fiction Online) (Short story)
Pawprints in the Aeolian Dust (Sci Phi Journal) (Short story)
Daddy's Girl (Crossed Genres) (Short story)

Frank Wu
Season of the Ants in a Timeless Land (Analog) (Novelette)

Jeff Xilon
H (Daily Science Fiction) (Short story)
All of Our Days (Fireside Fiction) (Short story)

JY Yang
A House Of Anxious Spiders (The Dark magazine) (Short story)
Temporary Saints (Fireside Fiction) (Short story)
Song Of The Milagroso (Tor.com) (Short story)
The Oiran's Song (Uncanny Magazine) (Novelette)
Good Girls (Shimmer Magazine) (Short story)

Jo Zebedee
Inish Carraig (Self published) (Novel excerpt)

Jon F. Zeigler
Galen and the Golden-Coat Hare (Uncanny Books) (Short story)

Anna Zumbro
The Pixie Game (Daily Science Fiction) (Short story)
The Cur of County Road Six (Grievous Angel) (Short story)

Some direct download links: epub, mobi; more download options on the anthology's main page at Bad Menagerie.