Let me tell you about my four favorite stories from July and August. ”Under the Skin” by Deborah L. Davitt (published in Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 171) examines society and technology in a manner that feels like classic science fiction but with topics that feel modern and relevant, including disreputable advertising companies, data breaches, and Internet-mediated hate speech. “The Worms that Ate the Universe” by Megan Chee (published in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 59) is a delightful, imaginative story about worms that eat the very fabric of space and time. “The Last Lucid Day” by Dominique Dickey (published in Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 170) is a character-centric story that explores the challenging relationship between an aging father and his adult son. In “Every Hopeless Thing” by Tia Tashiro (published in Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 214), a scavenger finds residents on a toxic planet that she expected to be lifeless. Now, let’s dive into the details.
“Under the Skin” by Deborah L. Davitt
In this piece of flash fiction, the narrator gets nanite tattoos that they can control via an app on their phone, but after a data breach, they end up getting hacked by racists who use the nanites to display manifestos, threats, and slurs across their body and face.
Nanite tattoos may seem like a whimsical fiction, but the rest of this story feels so familiar — in a good way. It features student loans, a troubled economy, targeted advertising, negligent corporations, a data breach, hackers, and racists. No, it’s not a happy story, but it is one that feels especially relevant to our current moment, a moment when economic necessity pushes many of us to share more of our personal information than we’d like to with sketchy companies, companies who then get hacked, leaking our data into the hands of criminals. This risk becomes more serious and more pronounced as our lives contain more and more Internet-connected devices with poor security (the so-called Internet of Things). Although this story plays with nanite tattoos, a fun fiction, it made me think of pacemakers and other medical equipment that people rely upon to live, equipment that often faces similar security risks. The story easily resonated with me, and I honestly found it quite enjoyable.
“The Worms that Ate the Universe” by Megan Chee
This is another piece of flash fiction, one quite different from “Under the Skin”. Where “Under the Skin” felt like relevant, contemporary science fiction, “The Worms that Ate the Universe” feels more timeless, fantastical, even mythical (although it does certainly include some science fictional elements).
This is a delightful and inventive story about worms, wormholes, and the end of the universe. It is literally a story about worms that eat distance and space. The worms create wormholes by eating the space between solar systems, but the problem is the worms keep eating, devouring not only objects but more and more of spacetime itself.
I loved the idea of eating space in this way, and the execution was excellent. It’s an imaginative, playful conceit that I latched onto and enjoyed watching develop.
“The Last Lucid Day” by Dominique Dickey
Like “Under the Skin,” “The Last Lucid Day” is narrowly focused on a speculative technology: in this case, an implant for people with dementia that “can tell you when your last good day—your last really good day—will be.” But where “Under the Skin” focuses on technology and society to the exclusion of character, “The Last Lucid Day” focuses on two characters and their relationship, to the point where the speculative implant is almost incidental to the core of the story.
“The Last Lucid Day” is about the narrator and his relationship with his estranged and aging father, who now lives in an assisted living facility that specializes in memory care. Put simply, they don’t have a good relationship. The adult narrator still has nightmares involving his father. They have reconnected after years apart and are on civil terms, but that doesn’t mean things are now fine or can even become so in the time the father has left. The narrator wants his father to apologize or show remorse for how he treated his son as a child, but here, on the last lucid day, that still doesn’t seem likely. This is a complicated yet meaningful story about living with trauma and being in relationship with imperfect and faulted human beings, one that examines the challenges of finding closure and the realities of aging.
If you like thoughtful stories focused on characters with complicated relationships, this one’s for you. I also appreciated and recommend this story for its depiction of aging and dementia.
“Every Hopeless Thing” by Tia Tashiro
Elodie hunts through the toxic remnants of Earth, now a long-dead planet, to find scavengeables that could justify her trip. To her surprise, she finds an impossible child who seemingly grew up underground on Earth. Elodie’s immediate instinct is to help evacuate and relocate the child and their community, but Elodie realizes that her instincts may not align with what these strange Earthlings actually want for themselves.
This is a longer story at just under 7000 words, and Tashiro uses that length well. She sketches out a believable universe, one where Earth is an abandoned, toxic husk of a world and where corporate spyware is an accepted fact of life. The story has time to set up several threads before weaving them back together to form a satisfying conclusion, threads including the origin of Elodie’s sentient spaceship and how much geneticists will pay for long-lost DNA from Earth. If you enjoy good worldbuilding, this story is for you.
The story’s title — “Every Hopeless Thing” — comes from one of the strongest lines in the entire piece, a line that leads Elodie to change her perspective and one that I’m sure will stick with me. Unlike the father in “The Last Lucid Day,” Elodie is able to see when and how she has hurt others, and she is able to issue a genuine and productive apology. It warms my heart to read stories where characters learn to apologize or share really good apologies. Apologizing is an important action that too often we misunderstand or avoid. Elodie is perceptive, empathetic, and full of grit, and I especially enjoyed her character and the journey she takes here.
Have you read these stories? What did you like about them? What were your favorite stories from the last couple months?
