short fiction

Emergency Skin by N.K. Jemisin

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N.K. Jemisin’s Emergency Skin is a short story with a large message.
It’s a story about how much better off we might be if the world weren’t so full of greedy, self-entitled, self-important individuals. It’s a story with strong anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-imperialist sentiment showcased in a distant future tale. We have a 1,000 lightyear distant colony founded on the sort of fantasy meritocracy that might evolve from too many read-throughs of Atlas Shrugged, built on slave labor that is never acknowledged as slave labor, while the ruling class conveniently avoids any acknowledgment of the fact that they’re the real parasites. The “haves” fled an Earth approaching total ecological collapse, taking everyone and everything they valued in the process…assuming that the planet would fail without them there.
Little did they know the world could survive without them, perhaps better than it would have if they’d remained.
It’s difficult to avoid spoilers in the review of a short story, and I’ve danced around quite a few. Just read it or listen to it for yourself. It’s thought-provoking and engaging…and the audiobook is narrated by Jason Isaacs, who does a fantastic job (as I imagine you would expect).

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07X7HG6GW/

Pets During Wartime by Weston Ochse

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Pets During Wartime by Weston Ochse provides a tantalizing glimpse of a distant future where everything is simultaneously familiar and startling bizarre. While it tells a self-contained tale, it feels like an introduction to a larger story just waiting to be told. I sort of hope that’s the case, because I would love to experience more of this future America (and colonized solar system), where biological and technological evolution has created a plethora of both wonders and horrors, a version of our future of which Ochse paints a vague portrait.

As a lifelong dog lover, it’s strange to imagine a society where pets are not only outlawed, but considered deadly because of their water consumption. But this is precisely the version of Arizona we witness within this short tale. It’s a common sense, calculated bit of propaganda based on water rationing…but it’s no less depressing for the necessity of it all.

Pets During Wartime

Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones

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Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones is a haunting tale of childhood, family, and loss. Told from the perspective of an adult looking back on a tale that began when he was 12 years old, it feels authentic and captures the way a child might have interpreted things.
Jones weaves a fascinating tale of a young indigenous boy who discovers the ghost of his father lurking in their home. What begins as a story with a potentially uplifting tone gradually and insidiously becomes increasingly sinister and tense.
I particularly enjoyed the fact that there’s something akin to a combination of the mythologies associated with tulpas and golems involved in the manifestation of the ghost. I’m not familiar enough with indigenous folklore that I can pinpoint any particular element that corresponds to this story.
Listening to the audiobook for this story was particularly captivating because the narrator did an excellent job of capturing a cadence and accent that approximated the tone and speech patterns I’m familiar with from indigenous people I’ve known. That touch made the narrative feel more like someone was simply telling me a story from their own life.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/mapping-the-interior-stephen-graham-jones/1125140263?ean=9780765395108

Recrimination

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I should be writing.
I have two short stories that I need to complete if I intend to submit them before the deadline is up on two particular anthologies that are of a great deal of interest to me. It would take me almost no time to finish both of them, at which point I could relax and move along to other projects that I have in the works…projects without deadlines looming, like the novella that I had wanted to make available digitally before the end of January. Hell, I even went so far as to have the cover art designed and everything.
I should be writing…but I am not.
I haven’t been sleeping much or well lately, and my concentration has been for shit because of this. I’ve even been slacking off on my daily exercise routines, and I feel all bloated, icky and corpulent because of it.
I hope that today will be the day when I turn all of that around. I am desperately hoping for a few hours of peaceful, uninterrupted slumber to follow this post…and when I wake I hope to hit the ground running and put in a solid hour or more of exercise, including some intense cardio to get the oxygen flowing to my brain for the purpose of igniting those creative sparks that I need in order to get back to work on what I should be doing.
Because…I should be writing.