My favorite stories from July and August feature a hungry ghost, a brain implant gone awry, and a gardening challenge in a post-apocalyptic world. “Hungry Ghosting” by Anne Mai Yee Jansen (published in Nightmare Magazine Issue 154) is a ghost story that did an excellent job making me sympathize with a murderous ghost. “A Shaky Bridge” by Marissa Lingen (published in Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 227) is a touching tale about disability, recovery, and family, and it is also a bitter indictment of our enshittified tech world. In “The Walled Garden” by Fiona Moore (published in Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 226), Morag needs to work out a new method of growing fruits and vegetables in the hostile climate of her fallen world. Let’s dive in.
“Hungry Ghosting” by Anne Mai Yee Jansen
This hungry ghost story combines a few different things to great effect. First, the story introduces an app called Eternity that lets you make offerings for your ancestors with modern, digital ease:
No more going to the market, purchasing your offering, returning home, lighting incense, then (finally) burning it to send it on its merry way. Nope. Now you can just click-click-send. From anywhere, while doing anything.
I loved this bit. It felt so true to me: there’s an app for everything these days; why shouldn’t there be an app for this too? It’s a great science fictional conceit, and I truly enjoyed reading how Anne Mai Yee Jansen envisioned and articulated it.
“Hungry Ghosting” is narrated by a ghost who has “no family among the living,” so she isn’t able to benefit from digital offerings through Eternity. However, she discovers that she can be fed another way. Her profile for dating apps remains active, and “every time someone views my profile, swipes right, sends me a message, or otherwise expresses interest, it functions like a tiny little offering.”
The core of the story looks at online dating — and in particular the prejudice and racism Asian women face. The men who engage with the narrator’s profile view Asian women as exotic, and they all carry different prejudices with them. For example, meet Jake: “I’m a solid hunk of muscle looking for a tasty bit of Chinese takeout, if you get my drift. […] Let me be the kung to your pow.” Jake is exceptionally racist and cringeworthy, but over the course of the story, the narrator meets other men who carry more subtle prejudices. I particularly enjoyed reading the narrator’s interactions with Philip, who describes himself as a “passionate feminist” and “overall good human.” If you want a story about the horrors of dating, “Hungry Ghosting” is for you.
The story takes place during Ghost Months, a time when the barrier between the human world and the underworld grows thin, and hungry ghosts can take physical form. During this time, the narrator visits and preys upon the bigoted men who engage with her dating profile. It is easy to imagine the narrator as the villainous monster of another story: a cruel, hungry spirit that devours innocent souls. But this story instead makes her seem sympathetic and rather paints the prejudiced, racist men as the monsters. All the while, the narrator is still a wicked and proud creature who gets to be her own villain. This story lets you look at it through different lenses and see different monsters and different horrors, and I think that is super cool.
“A Shaky Bridge” by Marissa Lingen
After Casey’s dad has a stroke, he gets a “neural bridge” brain implant to help him recover. It works really well, “restoring his speech without even a week of therapy or a hint of a slur, letting him walk again steadily, without a cane.” However, it has side-effects: “He recites the ads for MindBridge Corp’s other products verbatim” and says weirdly effusive things about the CEO.
This story pulled me in right away and held my attention until the end. I liked the family dynamics, and I especially liked how Casey’s relationship with her father evolved over the story. They both need some time to realize and admit that something has gone wrong with the neural bridge and then to sort through what they can do about it. Casey and her dad are on the same team and on a similar journey, but they have differences, and I particularly enjoyed reading how they bridged those differences.
I thought the story did a solid job portraying someone who has recently suffered a stroke, and I appreciated seeing that representation. Obviously things are unique for Casey’s dad because of the neural bridge, but it still makes for a moving story of how one family deals with recovery and with disability.
More than that, this story tackles broader social issues that have to do with all the scummy tech corporations people have to interface with these days. MindBridge Corp is super shady and shameless and unfortunately all too believable. The story made me think of Cory Doctorow’s upcoming book Enshittification, which I look forward to reading. I particularly enjoyed how this story situated this larger social issue within the context of a more relatable family drama.
Check out “A Shaky Bridge” if you want a story about caring for a family member recovering from a stroke or if you like stories that look at how individual people are impacted by and can respond to systemic tech inequality.
“The Walled Garden” by Fiona Moore
Fiona Moore has written another Morag story for Clarkesworld, and I love it. I previously squeed about “The Children of Flame” in Short Fiction Review: October 2024. In that review, I wrote:
Morag is doing the best she can in a fallen world. After society as we know it has collapsed, Morag tends to her farm, cooperates with the people around her, and tries to help them cooperate with each other.
I’m happy to report that is still true for “The Walled Garden,” but now Morag has a new challenge. She has relied on a polytunnel to help grow fruit and veggies, a polytunnel that’s now worn down and broken, quite likely beyond repair. That’s “very worrying” because she relies on that food for vitamins and income.
The main conflict here is an engineering problem: How can Morag grow food in a hostile climate impacted by climate change and given the technological limitations of her fallen world? To find a solution, Morag needs to cooperate with others in and beyond her community. I love this type of story, and it is executed well here.
This story is what I sometimes think of as a “utopian dystopia” — a fallen world wrecked by climate change and where the political institutions that define our world have faded away. In it, we have people (at least some people — the protagonists and their people) collaborating to work things out, doing the manual, technical, and social work to survive and build society back up again, with special care taken to foster an equitable and cooperative community. It is clearly not a utopia, but the main character and their community do carry a certain and refreshing utopian ethos to them as they address the technical and social challenges on path before them.
In this way, this story reminded me of Carrie Vaughn’s Bannerless series, a favorite of mine. It also made me think of a book I’m currently reading: How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by Ryan North, a delightful explanation of how to invent civilization step by step. If you enjoyed either of these books, if you like stories with interesting engineering problems, or if you like stories where people actually cooperate to build a functional society against the odds they face, check this out. You can also check out Fiona Moore’s page on Clarkesworld to read more of her Morag stories.
