Short Fiction Review: April 2019
My favorite stories often revolve around similar themes: justice, community, gender, and religion. In April 2019, the dominant themes in my favorite stories were gender and justice (or lack thereof), two important topics that intersect our lives in countless ways. These stories include “In That Place She Grows a Garden” by Del Sandeen in FIYAH Literary Magazine; “A Conch-Shell’s Notes” by Shweta Adhyam in Lightspeed Magazine; and “Vīs Dēlendī” by Marie Brennan in Uncanny Magazine. I found these stories emotionally and intellectually engaging, and they asked me to approach the themes of gender and justice from a variety of perspectives.
Women Destroy Reviewing!
…Fantasy is a genre that tends to destroy women — or if not destroy, then de-story. –Wendy N. Wagner I’ve been quite curious what Women Destroy Fantasy!, the October 2014 special issue of Lightspeed/Fantasy Magazine, would be all about. You don’t hear so much whiny dudebro noise about girl cooties in dragon lairs as you do in rocketships; fantasy seems to have far more female protagonists and memorable secondary characters in its canon than science fiction does; more people can at least name some female fantasy authors. Fantasy seems to be a genre that is at least less inhospitable to women than science fiction is. Well, the opening quotation from the editorial pretty much sums it up. Women are often erased from the genre: the authors are not talked about; their work is marketed differently and, well, less; they’re stricken from certain genre categories. Female characters are fridged and used as gross object-fantasies. And that’s to say nothing about how many potential female readers may be alienated from the genre by frightful covers and the overwhelming numbers of books titled something like “The Half-King of the Dude-Sword,” as I was for so many years. The fight for women in fantasy is not just to exist, but to have agency at all.
