Welcome to our newest review column! Skiffy & Fanty Speculative Fiction Short Fiction Review by our newest team member, Cameron Coulter!
It makes me really happy to write this: my favorite recent short stories are all either written by nonbinary authors and/or featuring nonbinary characters. I’m someone who has never been comfortable with masculinity, and I often wish we were more creative with gender in SF/F than we are. SF/F is a genre in which we literally make up new worlds, so there is plenty of opportunity to imagine people with alternate and/or no genders. Sure, there’s a few SF/F novels that are well known for the way they experiment with gender and pronouns, but I want more. Fortunately, I find that short fiction is somewhat ahead of the curve when it comes to diversity and inclusion. By my count, in the last two months, there have been at least six original short stories published in professional genre magazines that are either written by trans or nonbinary authors and/or featuring trans or nonbinary characters. Now, let the nonbinary party commence!
My favorite recent story is “The Substance of My Lives, the Accidents of Our Births” by José Pablo Iriarte, which appears in Lightspeed Magazine Issue 92 (January). In this story, Jamie, a teenager who happens to remember their previous lives, learns that Benjamin, the new neighbor in the trailer park, is a convicted murderer. After a little digging, Jamie realizes that Benjamin was convicted for killing Jamie in their previous life.
The characters are the best part of this story. Jamie only remembers their past lives in vague sketches, so they still feel very much like an actual teenager, albeit a wise one. I especially loved Jamie’s simultaneous strength and vulnerability. Jamie’s nonbinary. They’re comfortable and open about who they are, but since the world sucks sometimes, Jamie still struggles with their identity, especially when interacting with others. Jamie’s best friend is Alicia, a lesbian who Jamie happens to sort of maybe have a crush on. Their friendship is beautiful: accepting, supportive, slightly bohemian, and simply fun. I would love a full-length novel about the two of them. Benjamin is a great character as well—an unnerving but enjoyable blend of menacing and friendly. The main characters are well developed, much more so than usual for short stories, and most characters aren’t who they appear to be on the surface.
Characters aside, Iriarte has still written a fun, interesting story. The plot moves forward and develops with each scene. It doesn’t rush forward like an action story does, but neither does it have the slow, meandering pace of more “literary” stories. As the story progress, Jamie shifts from seeking safety and answers to wanting revenge and justice. There are a couple slight twists near the end that, at least for me, hit that perfect point of “surprising yet inevitable,” and the ending itself expertly navigated the story’s complicated themes of identity and justice.
If you’re looking for an exciting story with a sharp plot, then check out S.B. Divya’s “Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse,” which appears Uncanny Magazine Issue 20 (January/February). Divya has written a gripping, fast-paced dystopian survival story that’s both “heart-racing and heart-breaking,” as Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas aptly describe it in their editorial. In this story, an unnamed protagonist and their spouse Chula work as part of the resistance in a totalitarian state, helping to provide women with abortions. When their house is attacked, Chula is immediately killed, forcing the protagonist to go on the run with their two children. However, it’s Chula who was the strong one, the physically capable one, the leader of the resistance. The protagonist, who honestly didn’t expect to still be alive, is tasked with escorting their two young children to safety. And the narrator’s identity as a nonbinary, polyamorous, disabled person underscores a tragic (and all too contemporary) theme of the story: when fascist regimes take over, it’s people with marginal identities who are in the most danger.
This story is haunting. It juxtaposes the protagonist’s contingency plans for this apocalypse with the reality of it. The narrator is upfront: they expected to die. According to the narrator’s plan, Chula is supposed to escape and escort their children to safety. But of course that’s the nature of living in a violent, totalitarian state: nothing goes the way you plan it. This story has the incessant pacing and high stakes of a thriller. In most TV shows and novels, you usually expect certain characters will make it out alive, but in a short story, you don’t have those same expectations. I honestly wasn’t sure whether they would make it to safety. I honestly couldn’t tell whether both kids would survive. This makes for a thrilling, heart-wrenching race to the finish. Although, I should say, this story might not be for everyone. S.B. Divya takes the cultural and political schisms in our country and magnifies those in a way that calls to mind the Holocaust. This makes for a powerful, exciting, and vivid story, but also one that’s intense, tragic, and nightmarish. Given the current political climate in the United States, this story was almost a little too real for me. So if you’re already having panic attacks when you check the news, be warned.
For instance, in Divya’s story, the protagonist and their spouse face a difficult question: do they leave for safety before it’s too late, or do they stay and help those most oppressed by the regime? They chose to stay, which results in the story’s horrific beginning, but throughout the story the question keeps echoing back, was that the right choice? How much good were they able to do? How much danger are they putting their kids in? How do you weigh what’s good for your kids versus what’s good for the rest of society? Throughout the story, I kept weighing those questions in my head, and when I was done reading, I found myself pondering how they relate to my present-day life in the US. It’s tough to identify what the right choice is, and even tougher to say whether I would do it, but I appreciate that “Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse” is not only a thrilling, heart-wrenching read, but also one that leaves me with an interesting, timely question to ponder.
I also loved “Four-Point Affective Calibration” by Bogi Takács, which appears in Lightspeed Magazine Issue 93 (February). In this story, an unnamed narrator undergoes a four part test in which they are prompted to contemplate various emotions, apparently as part of a preliminary effort to communicate with aliens. In this story, aliens have shown up and want to talk, and researchers are attempting to communicate through emotions. It’s a weird but fascinating premise for a story. We too often assume that when aliens show up, we’ll somehow be able to speak the same language. But what if neither we nor the aliens could figure out how to speak to each other? What if, instead of attempting to communicate through language, we attempted to communicate through universal emotions?
The best part of this story is the narrator’s voice, which is scatterbrained, defensive, quirky, and witty. The narrator is a person of ambiguous religious, ethnic, racial, and gender identity, but it’s clear that the narrator has a marginal identity along at least a few of those axises. The narrator also reveals that they have autism, are an immigrant, wear a headscarf, and are “not a Muslim.” The narrator is openly skeptical of the idea that certain emotions may be universal across all cultures. Of course, their own marginalized position within society informs their skepticism. The narrator doubts that their emotions can be neatly compartmentalized and calibrated in a way that will be acceptable to the researchers administering the test. I loved how some of the narrator’s words appear as “[uninterpretable]”, underlining how the narrator themself doesn’t fit neatly into the boxes of mainstream society.
The ending of the story is both moving and beautiful in its own modest way. The narrator eventually confesses, “I want to talk to aliens, because I’m fed up with humans sometimes.” They go on to reflect on how they used to be a resident alien, and how they want to talk to the extraterrestrial aliens because the extraterrestrials just want to talk, not “shoot, destroy, evaporate, invade.” It’s hard not to read that line as a critique against the narrator’s own, adopted country. “Four-Point Affective Calibration” portrays a smart, quirky, self-conscious narrator, a person who never quite fits in, who wants to talk to the friendly aliens because, perhaps, they can help each other. Perhaps the narrator and the aliens will understand each other.
In addition to these stories written by and featuring nonbinary people, Strange Horizons has recently published a special issue celebrating SFF from trans and nonbinary communities. The special issue features original fiction by Yoon Ha lee and Jamie Berrout, as well as “Beyond 101”, a discussion about transgender, nonbinary, and queer SFF which I found to be simply amazing. So make sure you check that out. “Beyond 101” a bit of a long read, but it’s well worth it.
And that’s not all! In January, Capricious, a genre magazine edited by A.C. Buchanan, released a special issue dedicated to gender diverse pronouns! I love Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel R. Delany and every novel by Ann Leckie because of the way they experiment with pronouns, so this issue of Capricious is a must read for me. I look forward to enjoying it next.
