My favorite story from February was “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim (published in Clarkesworld Magazine). It’s horrific, but also smart and playful, and it’s powered by a beautiful moral urgency. My other favorite stories from February all took the form of in-world artifacts of some sort. “Companion Animals in Mahō Shōjo Kira Kira Sunlight” by Stewart C Baker (published in Lightspeed Magazine) is an essay reflecting on a fictitious animated web series, but it has something more ominous lurking in the background. “Further Examination and Capture of Candle Skulls Associated with the Baba Yaga” by Mari Ness (also published in Lightspeed Magazine) is a request for funding, written by witches! And “How to Pass as Human” by Raiff Taranday (published in Escape Pod) is what it sounds like: a guide for robots seeking to pass as human. Let’s get into it.
“Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim
This story responds to and builds off of “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin. Le Guin’s story depicts the splendid city of Omelas, which is amazing and perfect in almost every respect, with one glaring exception: the city’s perfection requires a child to be trapped in solitude and suffer without end. In Le Guin’s story, most citizens are horrified by this injustice but adjust to it nonetheless, although some choose to walk away from Omelas instead.
Isabel J. Kim raises a different option: “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole”. It’s a horrific response, but actually doing something about it is arguably more merciful than either accepting it or walking away. In Kim’s story, after the “load-bearing child” is killed, Omelas is immediately besieged by extreme disasters and turmoil as if by unimaginably bad luck. This story is horrific, but it is also intelligent, inventive, and honestly quite playful.
Omelas can easily seem like a fantastical, mythological city, a philosophical thought experiment detached from our real world, but Kim upends that perspective.
First, Kim modernizes Omelas and makes it feel contemporary — and does so with a pleasing amount of humor. For example, after the kid in the Omelas hole dies, Kim writes, “the social media posters (every citizen in Omelas had a healthy and regular relationship with social media and not a bad and addictive one) talked about how this was a real tragedy”. And then later, when people outside Omelas are scandalized by Omelas’ whole “kid in the hole” thing, Kim writes, “Many non-Omelan people said a lot of very mean things (no one outside Omelas had a good and normal relationship with social media)”.
But Kim doesn’t just modernize Omelas. She makes it feel like a part of our world, complete with moral urgency, like a tragedy we have seen on the news before — and likely failed to do anything about. In this way, the story challenges the assumption that our options are to either accept suffering or walk away from it. It asks readers to recognize the suffering in our world and how we are complicit in it, and it challenges readers to go do something about that — or at the very least, it sharply rebukes the hypocrisy of those who simply stand by and let evil lie.
“Companion Animals in Mahō Shōjo Kira Kira Sunlight” by Stewart C Baker
This story is structured as an essay about a fictitious animated web series. For example, here is an excerpt from the beginning of the story:
The show combines magical girl anime tropes with cosmic horror, following high schooler Sally Hoshino (Kira Kira Sunlight) and her friends as they are drawn into a secret interdimensional war between two groups known as the Catalpa and the Empire of Limitless Night.
This is a fun structure that I would like to see more of, and I think Baker executes it well. It feels like an article I might read on Strange Horizons or perhaps an essay written in a college class, but it is not too dry or academic. It provides a succinct, compelling summary of the series’ five seasons and has interesting commentary peppered in throughout. I love the different forms that short stories can take, and this structure is a delight!
But this story isn’t merely a look at a fictional web series. Some fans claim the show is autobiographical: that the secret interdimensional war portrayed in the series is in fact real and the web series was actually created by one of its main characters. There are a few details carefully woven throughout that make this claim feel hauntingly plausible. I love how this story isn’t just an essay about a fictitious web series, but rather functions as an in-world artifact from the universe in which this secret interdimensional war actually happened.
If you like short stories that shape shift into remarkable forms, or stories about our mundane world where something magical (and possibly horrific) lurks in the background, this is a story for you.
“Further Examination and Capture of Candle Skulls Associated with the Baba Yaga” by Mari Ness
This piece of flash fiction by Mari Ness is similarly structured as an in-world artifact: it is a letter, sent by a circle of witches, who seek funding to acquire and study candle skulls associated with Baba Yaga. The letter writers argue that these candle skulls have been ignored and under studied: “This oversight is almost inexplicable, given not just the natural scholarly interest in the macabre, but by the inherent magical and economic potential suggested by these skulls”.
This story is macabre and occult, but mostly it’s delightful fun, repurposing the tropes of witches and the lore of Baba Yaga into a (comically) serious academic context. I enjoyed watching the letter writers spin facts to support their request for funding and seeing how appalled they were to “not find a single article on this subject”. I also particularly enjoyed learning what became of the previous scholars who tried researching the candle skulls. (They meet some hilariously macabre fates!)
If you are into witches, Baba Yaga, or academia, check out this story.
“How to Pass as Human” by Raiff Taranday
This story takes the form of a post by an artificial intelligence, providing guidance to other artificial lifeforms on how to pass as human. This story oscillates between two poles: being funny and being poignant.
The humor is delightful. It is simply fun seeing humans from a non-human perspective, and Taranday skillfully executes on this. For example, the narrator advises readers, “If an errand can be completed in five steps, do it in at least ten.” And later the narrator writes, “Butts. Boobs. Genitals. As bonobo-adjacent primates, most humans think about these things most of the time, even when they’re pretending to think about other things.” Yes, we humans are horny, inefficient things! Fortunately, the narrator has a number of resources to share with its readers, such as subroutine.horny.root and subroutine.Hedonic-Treadmill.root. It is also fun imagining how synthetic minds might struggle with the basics — “Wear Your Damn Face Correctly” the narrator admonishes its readers.
This story is poignant as well, an accessible reflection on what it is to be human. The narrator advises readers to be mindful of their own mortality (and be alternatingly depressed and motivated by that awareness), to embrace the peaks and valleys of life (and the concomitant elation and despair), and to occasionally make impulsive, irrational decisions. I personally found the passage on mortality especially striking.
If you like stories that center the perspectives of artificial minds or you just want to think about what it is to be human, this is a story for you.
Have you read any of these stories? What stood out to you most about them? Alternatively, what were your favorite stories last month?
