Ancient Logic

New Year, new collection of awesome short fiction to peruse. As always, this column is meant to shine a spotlight on a few stories I really enjoyed from the previous month. Clarkesword, in particular, had a selection of great stories.  Extraction Order by Rich Larson. I loved his short story (also published in Clarkesworld) 'Meshed’ and I also loved this. Intense gritty military sci if. Not sure I fully buy the standard alien spore threat but the atmospherics here make the whole thing work.  Everyone Loves Charles by Bao Shu translated by Ken Liu. Amazing Chinese novella. “Everyone Loves Charles” the kind of story Philip K Dick might right if he grew up with social media. In a near future of transorbital races and live-streamed experiences, a wise-cracking playboy provides entertainment and inspiration for a young shut-in. Bao Shu’s style is talky but always fascinating, incorporating corporate conspiracies and sincere romanticism within the same page. Probably one of th...

February was a good month for short stories or at least I managed to luck into a great patch of excellent stories. Sketch by Morgan Crooks (2015) Under a Blood Red Sky by Edward Ashton, published in Fiction Vortex: I have a couple of reasons to like this story: appealing characters, effective sense of time scale and far-future existence, and the interesting (if familiar) look at the uses of virtual reality. Close to the end of Earth, as the sun swells into its red giant phase, a survivor of Earth’s civilization spends eons enjoying one single afternoon  in-between  marshaling the dwindling resources of Earth to fend off vultures in the closing eons of the solar system. This is big scale science fiction, all the more impressive to me appearing in a short story. It reminded me a little bit of why I love Asimov, Stapleton, Bear, and a little short story from last year called “ The Meeker and the All-Seeing Eye ” by Matthew Kressel. Meshed ...