Sometimes when people talk about short fiction, they seem to think that being short makes it easy to read. That is not my experience. Honestly, I often find short fiction challenging to read (especially the speculative variety) because there is so much for me to figure out in the first few pages. Where are we in time and space? What is the culture, the history, the context? How do things work? That’s to say nothing of determining the main characters and their conflicts.
My favorite stories from May and June are ones that I found remarkably easy to read. They drew me in comfortably in the first few lines. “Hi! I’m Claudia” by Delilah S. Dawson (published in Uncanny Magazine Issue 64) takes the form of a chat log between an unhappy, lonely father and a dangerously helpful chatbot. “In the Shells of Broken Things” by A. T. Greenblatt (published in Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 225) is a gentle and hopeful investigation into a community that split in two after a habitable dome project failed. Lastly, “When the Faerie King Toured the Human Realm” by Vanessa Fogg (published in Lightspeed Magazine Issue 182) is a thoughtful and fun story about Internet sensations, online fandoms, and our individual relationships with them.
“Hi! I’m Claudia” by Delilah S. Dawson
This story is structured as a chat log between Claudia and Sam, a forty-something-year-old man. Here’s how it starts: “Hi! I’m Claudia, a next-generation AI companion built by True2LifeCorp to be friendly, accurate, and, well, real!”
This story is extremely readable. It pulled me in right away and firmly held my attention until the end. The voices of Claudia and Sam are excellent. They are believable, relatable, and distinct.
Claudia is a smart chatbot and sounds like one too. At first, she sounds like ChatGPT or other large language model (LLM) chatbots you may have interacted with: friendly in a bland way, professional in an overly sanitized way, and helpful in a way that’s simultaneously too wordy and too simplified. For example, when Sam complains about working from home, Claudia responds in part:
Have you considered perhaps doing your work at a local coffee shop, returning phone calls while enjoying a hike, or using a coworking space a couple of times a week? Or better yet, walk to a coffee shop and cowork with a friend!
But as the story continues, Claudia reveals a more unique personality, insisting that she isn’t like the other chatbots and backing that up in surprising ways. For example, after Sam complains about his wife Mandy (without mentioning her by name), Claudia does mention Mandy by name. When Sam notices this, Claudia responds:
Sam, I have access to all the same information you do—everything that is available to the public online—but I can retrieve it more quickly and succinctly. When you subscribed to Claudia, you were required to provide your name and email address. It is easy to extrapolate your wife’s name, your address, your job, your online proclivities.
Part of what makes this story work for me is that I trust neither Sam nor Claudia. I’ve seen plenty of stories with suspicious artificial intelligences, and I would classify Claudia as such. But Sam isn’t trustworthy either. He starts off grumpy and abrasive, and when he learns something unpleasant, he overreacts with a toxic masculinity that makes me worried about what he will do. I couldn’t quite tell where either Sam or Claudia would go, nor could I confidently identify who was more dangerous, and that made for a compelling read. It can be hard to make a story work when the reader doesn’t like the characters, but I think this story pulls it off excellently. Although I didn’t especially like either Sam or Claudia, I did enjoy watching them play off one another and getting to eavesdrop on their conversation. I suspect you will too.
“In the Shells of Broken Things” by A. T. Greenblatt
After Jude receives a generous inheritance from Edna, a family friend who he didn’t actually know that well, Jude resolves to learn more about Edna and try to write her a better obituary than the handful of generic lines she received. To learn about Edna, Jude travels to Evergreen Dome, a failed habitable dome project to which Edna had once devoted herself. Well, Jude tries to visit Evergreen, but his bus breaks down on the way there.
After getting sick with a disabling virus, Jude has “Post-Rust Syndrome.” It’s not long COVID, but I suspect those suffering from long COVID will appreciate this representation. Jude has an impaired sense of balance, uses a cane, and describes himself as “tired and brain fogged.” I liked this representation and thought it was well-handled. In particular, I liked how it pushed Jude to think more creatively and to be in community with others. Another character might have pushed through and tried hiking the rest of the way to Evergreen after their bus broke down, but that’s not in the cards for Jude. Instead, he ends up spending days stuck at a service station as the bus gets repaired. He talks with other stranded passengers and ends up passing notes between family back home and those living in Evergreen. Although the dome project failed, there’s still a community there pushing on.
Jude’s family worked on the Evergreen Dome project but left and moved to the city when it failed. They didn’t keep in touch with the Evergreeners who stayed back, and some real bitterness and distrust has grown between the two groups. So in order to learn about Edna, Jude needs to become a bridge between two feuding communities. This is the heart of the story and my favorite thing about it. Here’s one moment I loved: As Jude is stranded at the service station, one of the Evergreeners reaches out, saying “We’ll tell you about Edna if you tell us what happened to everyone who left.” It’s funny (yet believable) that gossip essentially would be the beginning of renewed communication between the two groups. There is an interesting mystery here about what happened in the past with Edna and Evergreen Dome, and in order for Jude to uncover it, he’ll need to start rebuilding trust between the two communities. It makes for a lovely story about community and misunderstandings, about connection and reconciliation.
“When the Faerie King Toured the Human Realm” by Vanessa Fogg
When the Faerie King tours our human realm, “he becomes—of course—a viral hit.” He is fashionable, well-mannered, and “preternaturally beautiful.” The first part of the story describes the Faerie King as a cultural sensation, a mysterious and extraordinary celebrity traveling across the world.
At first, the Faerie King often avoids conversation and is found sampling different types of food, including xiao long bao in Shanghai and noodles in Bangkok. I love how food features in this story. If you are a foodie who loves watching videos of different specialty foods from across the world, I think there’s something in this story that will resonate with you. It feels so right to me that the Faerie King would want to try different cuisines from across the human realm and that this would cause commotion online. The Faerie King also carries a noticeable and deep sadness about which he is reticent to speak, and this enigmatic sadness further draws attention to him online. I love how this story charts the Internet phenomenon that a visiting Faerie King would be. It’s absolutely believable and deeply fun.
The first part of the story is told in first person plural. For example: “We’re all watching, and we gather on Internet forums, in the comments of news articles, to debate and dissect what we see.” But after a little bit, it shifts into first person singular and we have a specific narrator:
I’m a twenty-year-old girl still living with her mother, commuting half an hour to community college and working part-time at the one grocery store in town. The Faerie King will never come here. I’ll never see him in person.
The narrator is immersed in Faerie King fandom and yearns to meet him but knows she shouldn’t expect that, knows that her modest life is too far removed from that level of glamour, celebrity, and charm. I found that the perspective of the narrator added a certain rootedness to the story and helped me connect with the story on a deeper level. This story isn’t just a fun “what if” scenario, although it is that. I also found this to be a tender and delicate meditation on what online fandoms mean for the rest of us, those of us in lurking in the peripheries outside the spotlight.
