Summary:
The best of this group (and the only one I would expect to see on an award ballot) was the entertaining and thoughtful Just Enough Rain by P.H. Lee which, superficially, is about the narrator dating an angel in a world where God is manifest. I also liked the Lauren Ring and Caroline M. Yoachim stories—and would have been happy to find them in a magazine issue—but I don’t think they are award level work (and that latter observation applies even more to the Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and John Wiswell stories).
There were better stories out there in 2021.

_____________________

Editors, LaShawn Wanak, Lezli Robyn, Sheree Renée Thomas, Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas (x2)

Fiction:
Just Enough Rain • novelette by P.H. Lee ∗∗∗+
O₂ Arena • novelette by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki ∗∗
(emet) • novelette by Lauren Ring ∗∗∗
That Story Isn’t the Story • novelette by John Wiswell ∗∗
Colors of the Immortal Palette • novelette by Caroline M. Yoachim ∗∗∗

_____________________

There are five finalists in the novelette category—the winner was O₂ Arena by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki.

•

Just Enough Rain by P. H. Lee (Giganotosaurus, 1^st May 2021)¹ opens with an arresting first line:

I wasn’t surprised when God showed up for Mom’s funeral. They’d always been close.

After the funeral service is over, Annie goes over to talk with God and they have a long and wandering conversation (His friendship with her mother, His sending angels to remove the sarcomas produced by a previous bout of cancer, etc.) before God tells her He is thinking of bringing Annie’s mother back to life. Once He ascertains that Annie has no objections (expected inheritance, etc.) there are sounds of movement from inside the coffin.
This opening passage is followed by a short second chapter which tells of the parable of Honi the Circle-Drawer (Honi asks God to provide rain, and then the correct amount of rain when there is a flood) before the rest of the story settles into its groove, which is that of Annie’s love life. This latter begins with her resurrected mother telling Annie that she wants grandchildren:

“You know,” she’d say, as if I hadn’t heard it a hundred times before, “one of my great regrets was dying without getting to meet my grandchildren.”
“Mom,” I’d say, “you’re still alive.”
“Only because of a miracle, dear,” she’d say, “and we mustn’t count on miracles. What happened to Brett, anyway? I liked Brett. Good Jewish boy. And a doctor!”

After more of this kind of thing, and some of Annie’s backstory (a vision she had at 15 about saving monarch butterflies from extinction), Annie’s mother calls her and says that she has phoned God and had a word with him about Annie’s love life. Annie later experiences the result of this intercession in a hilarious passage:

I was on the Blue Line, reading The Guermantes Way–the new translation–when I noticed him–her? them?–sitting across from me, beautiful.
It was their skin, I think, that caught my attention. Strong, muscled, but still soft as a feather. I sucked in my breath and, without thinking, bit my lower lip. There was no question of going back to The Guermantes Way. I just sat, and looked at them, beautiful, God they were beautiful.
Then, just as we left Elmonica/SW 170^th, they stood up–tall, broadshouldered, the slowest curve of their chin–and unfurled their wings of holy light, almost the length of the entire train car.
“Oh no,” I said, but I couldn’t look away.
“HARK,” they said, their voice filling the entire railcar. “BE NOT AFRAID, FOR I AM A MESSENGER OF THE LORD YOUR GOD.”
Some people were fumbling with their phones, but most of them just gawped, open-mouthed. I felt the cold-warm rush of embarrassment and I wanted to hide under my seat almost as much as I wanted to keep staring.
He’d sent an angel. Of course He’d sent an angel.
The angel turned to a slightly paunchy man–nice curly hair, though–in glasses, khakis and a polo shirt. “DAVID ELIAS RUTENBERG,” it said.
David blanched and looked for all the world like he’d just had a dream about taking a final exam in his underwear. “Y-yes?” he finally managed.
The angel pointed to me and I tried my very best to blend into the seat cushion. “THIS WOMAN, ANAT BETHESDA MEAGELE, IS SINGLE. SHE HAS A GOOD JOB AND SHE’S EMOTIONALLY MATURE AND READY FOR A COMMITMENT. YOU SHOULD ASK FOR HER NUMBER. SO SAYETH THE LORD.”
David stared at me and swallowed hard. His face was covered in sweat.
“TAKE HER SOMEWHERE NICE, NOTHING TOO FANCY, IN THE $20-30 RANGE,” continued the angel, just when I thought that this couldn’t get worse. “ARGUE ABOUT WHETHER TO SPLIT THE CHECK BUT THEN PRETEND TO GO TO THE BATHROOM AND SECRETLY PAY.”
David, still sweating, gave me an appraising look that made me instantly aware of every wrinkle and sag. “She’s, uh” he started.
“YES,” said the angel, turning their magnificent gaze upon me. “HURRY IT UP.”
“She’s a bit old for me, isn’t she?”
The angel snapped their gaze back to him. “WELL YOU’RE NO SPRING CHICKEN YOURSELF, DAVE.”
Dave looked like he’d just swallowed a toad. “I-is that also the word of G-G-God?” he managed.
“NO, DAVE, THAT’S JUST A SIMPLE OBSERVATION THAT ANYONE COULD MAKE. YOU’RE NOT EXACTLY GOING TO LAND A SUPERMODEL.”
“Uh, well,” said Dave, and pulled the emergency brake.

Annie subsequently phones God and tells him not to intercede again, before asking for the angel’s telephone number. God phones her back with it, and Annie and the (monomaniacally dull) angel subsequently go on a car crash date. Worse, he then pesters her with a series of texts asking to see her again and, when those are unanswered, another series asking what went wrong.
Annie (bearing in mind her mother’s comments about being too quick to judge) eventually agrees to another date with the angel. This one works out better, even though their dinner conversation spans an eclectic range of topics (the semiotics of the translations of Remembrance of Things Lost, Korean Food, angelic languages, etc.). By the fourth date they are having sex, or whatever word you would use to describe congress between a woman and a being who, unclothed, has a distinctly inhuman form:

Their human guise–clothes, but also skin and eyes and everything–lay in a pile beneath them. What remained was a great cloud of a thousand different hands, in each hand a different eye, in each eye a different name of God, all wreathed in light and holy fire.
“THIS IS ME,” said the angel, with a voice that seemed to come from everywhere.
I stepped forward, took one of the hands, and kissed it. “You’re beautiful,” I said, and meant it.

Eventually, and after sections that detail Annie’s conversations with (a) her mother about the parable of Honi the Circle-Drawer, and (b) the angel about the unpublished Rimbaud translations in her notebooks (the story is fairly discursive throughout), Annie phones her mother to tell her that she is pregnant. The story ends with, among other things, a discussion of God’s likely reaction, what Annie intends to do with her child, and what happened “last time” (i.e. with Jesus).
This is not only an original story (the idea of a slightly bumbling God manifest in the world is relatively novel or at least underused in genre fiction) but also an amusing, and sometimes hilarious, one. It is, however, slightly more sprawling than it needs to be (the ending is a bit wafflely, for instance) and some tightening up would have benefited the whole piece. That said, I enjoyed the story’s various diversions—the parable, Annie’s butterfly vision and whether saving them was God’s purpose for her, the discussions about Proust’s Remembrance of Things Lost, etc., etc. These gave what could have been a piece of froth some thoughtful heft and, at times, made it a wise and reflective work.
Well worth a look.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 9,550 words. Story link.

•

O₂ Arena by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki (Galaxy’s Edge, November 2021)² opens with a short fight section before the story flashbacks to a point a few months earlier where the narrator, a new student at the Academy of Laws, is listening to his induction lectures. We later learn that the academy is located in a future Nigeria where climate change has damaged the atmosphere so badly that people need masks and portable air when they go outside (and where they use oxygen as a currency):

Mrs. Oduwole was at the podium now. The Head of Hostels began by stating that the generators would be on until midnight for reading and for the making of breathable air. After midnight, we would revert to our O₂ cylinders which we must keep by our bedsides throughout the night.
The tuition was expensive but was only meant to cover the central hall’s oxygen generation when lectures were on. O₂ masks filtered the bad air temporarily, for the brief periods when moving between places. O₂ cylinders were for longer periods when there were no O₂ generators.
We weren’t allowed to be in the hostels during the day when lectures were on, for any reasons. She didn’t care if you were a girl on your flow, no matter how heavy. And this was apparently the only example she felt obligated to give.

During this series of lectures the narrator goes outside the hall for a break and meets Ovole, a female friend/undisclosed love interest. During their bantering exchanges we find out she has cancer (“Do you want to feel [the tumour]?” she asks at one point).
After several pages of the above, and other data dump information about the narrator’s academy and society (various forms of institutional and political oppression make the narrator struggle to breath in more ways than one it would seem), the story kicks up a gear when he decides to visit his old gang on the mainland, a part of the story that has some interesting local colour. When the narrator later talks to an old gang acquaintance, he learns that Dr Umez, one of the induction lecturers, has a reputation for molesting both male and female students. Then, when the narrator tells the acquaintance that he needs to earn some money (for Ovole’s medical needs), they go to the O₂ arena and watch a cage fight that ends when one of the combatants is killed.
The narrator subsequently decides not to take the risk of entering the cage fights, but (spoiler) he then learns that Ovoke is in hospital and needs expensive ICU treatment. So, after a visit to hospital to see Ovoke and her parents, he returns to the arena and enters the fights. After a vicious bout he kills his opponent and wins a substantial prize pot, but it is too late—Ovoke has died in the meantime.
The story closes with the narrator using the prize money to form his own gang, and their first action is the killing of the abusive Dr Umez.
This is a bit of a mixed bag. The opening set-up (about ten pages) is overlong and plodding, and the story only really gets going when the narrator goes to the mainland. I also didn’t care for the political messages that were constantly telegraphed throughout the story (“You see, the rich deserved to breathe”, “She thought she would be nothing in a patriarchal society that valued men for their ability to provide, and women for reproduction”, etc., etc.—the author is not a fan of show don’t tell). On the other hand the mainland setting and culture is interesting, as is the idea of oxygen as a currency—so a promising piece, but not an even or polished one (its Nebula Award and Hugo nominations way overrate the story).
∗∗ (Average). 8, 150 words. Story link.

•

(Emet) by Lauren Ring (F&SF, July-August 2022)³ opens with Chaya in her countryside home watching a golem dig up dandelions in her garden—these creatures of Jewish folklore are created daily by Chaya and linked to her home network:

After a few false starts, Chaya has the bestowal of life down to a science. Each morning at dawn, she molds assistants from clay, connects them to her wireless network just like any smart watch or Bluetooth dongle, and passes them the day’s variables: a list of chores, with each step painstakingly defined. The golem in charge of the dandelions finished early, but there are others of various sizes lumbering about the yard, carrying eggs from Chaya’s chicken coop and clearing loose stones from her long, winding driveway.  p. 67

We learn that Chaya is a teleworker for Millbank Biometrics, a company that is developing facial recognition software. Then, after some backstory about how Chaya’s mother taught her how to make golems and the generalities of Chaya’s job, Chaya virtually attends a company meeting where she and the other employees are given a list of thirty-six protestors that law enforcement want to track:

Confusion spreads across the faces on Chaya’s monitor. If her camera was on, she is sure that she would see the same expression reflected in her own frown. Tracking protesters isn’t exactly what she signed up for when she applied to Millbank. Sure, it’s what their software was ultimately going to be used for, but she wasn’t supposed to have to do it.
“Are there any questions?”
Chaya expects someone to ask what crimes these people committed, or what is going to happen to them when the information is turned over to the police, even though she already knows the dark answer to that. She expects questions about ethics and precedent and nondisclosure. At the very least, she expects someone to ask how they are supposed to check every partial match from every instance of every client’s software without neglecting all their other work.
No one asks any questions, though, not even her manager, so Chaya stays in line and keeps quiet. She sets the thirty-six faces to display on one of her monitors and returns to her code. What else can she do? She’s only one person, after all.  pp. 72-72

The next section of the story sees, among other things: (a) Chaya remember a childhood incident when a black friend was arrested on a false positive match (Chaya’s family didn’t do anything before the child was eventually released); (b) Chaya spot one of the thirty-six protestors in a local shop (when they talk to each other, Chaya is told about a surveillance protest in a couple of weeks); (c) Chaya garble the code for one of her golems—this makes it create another one, which in turn creates one more (“like a line of self replicating code”); (d) Chaya’s mother’s death due to cancer and health algorithms; and (e) Chaya realise, when she receives another dubious request from her company, that she is little better than a golem herself.
The story ends (spoiler) with Chaya’s long simmering rebellion, which sees her create self-replicating golems with the same faces as the target individuals, something designed to overload Millbank’s servers (she is helped with this by the man from the shop, who she meets again at the protest, and who gets the dispersing protesters to take a self-replicating golem with them to increase the area where Millbank will record sightings).
I found this story interesting but something of a mixed bag. On the plus side, the gimmick (golems controlled by computer code) is original, and the story is more multi-layered and complex than most but, on the minus side, the golem/computer mix feels a bit odd (a fantasy idea mixed with science fiction), and the politics of the story (surveillance + algorithms = bad) feels a bit simplistic (look at how much surveillance data we give away willingly).
I’d also add that the very last part, where Chaya conflates her actions with the idea of “truth” (“Emet” in Hebrew) doesn’t make much sense as they seem to be more about political values or freedom. Finally, I didn’t understand why “Emet” is the word that brings the golems to life.
∗∗∗ (Good). 7,800 words. Story link.

•

That Story Isn’t the Story by John Wiswell (Uncanny, November-December 2021) opens with Anton leaving a vampire household with the help of an old friend called Grigorii. As they leave the house in Grigorii’s car, Anton sees Mr Bird (the vampire) return:

A black town car trails up the street toward them. Sleek and black, with that short club of a man Walter at the wheel. Mr. Bird’s senior familiar. Anton knows who sits in the tinted windows and the shadows of the rear seats.
From inside the Kia, Grigorii pops the passenger door open. “Come on, man.”
Is blood spotting in Anton’s jeans? He gropes at his thighs, unsure if the moisture is sweat on his palms or if he’s bleeding. The car is getting closer. Mr. Bird definitely sees him. Anton sinks into the car. He clutches his seatbelt until they are doing forty in a twenty mile zone. He’s too worried to turn around, and too afraid not to fixate on the rearview mirror.
The black car stops in the middle of the street. A rear door opens, and a dark thing peers out. There is no seeing any detail of that figure—no detail except for his mouth. It is open and sharp. Distance doesn’t change how clearly Anton sees the teeth.

Anton then meets Luis, another stray, at Grigorii’s house, and worries about Mr Bird before examining himself in the toilet to see if the bite wounds in his thighs are still bleeding (these are semi-permanent, and bleed in the presence of Mr Bird). They aren’t, which means that Mr Bird is not nearby, or not yet.
This background feeling of menace and unease pervades most of the rest of the story, and rises and falls as different events play out. To begin with, Luis is attacked on the way back from his job, something Anton thinks may be related to his departure and which causes a fight between the two when Anton tried to inspect Luis for bites. Then Walter, Mr Bird’s familiar, approaches Anton to tell him that he must return, the first of two visits (during the second one Walter tells Anton that the twins, two of the vampire’s other victims, have also run away).
There is never any force or violence used to get Anton to return, oddly enough and, towards the end of the story, the contacts stop and Anton transitions to a normal life. Then, one evening when Anton and a new boyfriend called Julian go out for a meal, Anton sees Walter working in the restaurant and realises that he has left Mr Bird too.
The story closes a few weeks later, when Anton goes out of town with Julian for the weekend and detours past Mr Bird’s house: Anton sees the building is in an obvious state of disrepair and then, while he sketches the house, it collapses.
This has the trappings of a vampire story but is really a mainstream piece about escaping abusive relationships or situations, and one which suggests that people can choose their own destinies—the line “that story isn’t the story” is used a couple of times:

Walter asks, “What made you think you could survive without him?”
“That story is not the story I’m telling today.” [Anton replies.]

[Anton] asks [Grigorii], “What happened to your [abusive] mom? Do you ever see her?”
“That story is not the story I’m telling today, man.”

This would have been a reasonably good straight piece, but the story undermines itself somewhat by setting up the vampire menace at the beginning of the piece and then letting it fade away. That said, I realise that the idea of a perceived threat being more perception that reality may be one of the points the story is trying to make.²
∗∗ (Average). 9,000 words. Story link.

•

Colors of the Immortal Palette by Caroline M. Yoachim (Uncanny March-April 2021)² is set in Paris in the time of Manet and Monet (the mid- to late-1800s, I guess), and opens with a Japanese woman called Mariko posing for an unnamed immortal artist (who is also referred to as a “vampire” at points in the story, although he takes life energy from others rather than their blood).
Then, at the end of the session:

I’m about to give him up as hopeless when he turns to look at me. I’m lost in the darkness of his eyes, drowning in the intensity of his attention. I can barely breathe, but I repeat my invitation, “I could show you other poses.”
“Yes.” He sweeps me into an embrace that is strong and cold. White. He is snow and I am determined to melt it.
The sex builds slowly, deliberately, like paint layered on a canvas in broad strokes—tentative at first as we find our way to a shared vision, then faster with a furious intensity and passion.
After, when other artists might hold me and drift off to sleep, he dissipates into a white mist that swirls in restless circles around the room, chilling me down to the bones when it touches my skin. His mist seeps into me and pulses through my veins for several heartbeats. I feel energized, an exhilaration more intense than watching him work, a connection closer even than our sex.
He withdraws, and I am diminished. I hadn’t known until this moment what I was lacking, but now I am filled with a keen sense of my incompleteness. I long for him, for the sensation of vastness I felt when we were one.

Subsequently she becomes his lover, poses for another painting, becomes jealous of his other models, and thinks of the extra time that immortality would give her for her own art (she is a painter too). Later, she convinces him to make her immortal, a process leaves him unable to take any form but mist for over a year.
The rest of the story concerns her subsequent life and development as an artist, and telescopes in time from the point she paints another model called Victorine (which gives Mariko a new found awareness of the woman’s mortality) to (spoiler) her final painting, a self-portrait that will change with time, and which is painted after she learns that her jaded benefactor has dissipated into mist, never to recohere.
There are various other significant events for Mariko during this period: she gets married, achieves artistic success, learns of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (the birthplace of her mother), and, in one of the pivotal passages of the piece, receives a telegram in 1927 informing her of Victorine’s death:

The world has been a week without her in it, but her death did not become a truth for me until the telegram arrived. She is the last. Even Monet has ceased his endless paintings of water lilies, having passed in December. I’ve not seen either of them for decades, but tonight I feel the loss as keenly as if I’d sat with them yesterday, all of us gathered at the Café Guerbois, Victorine and I engaging the men in passionate discussions on the purpose of art, the role of the model, and whether critical outrage was an attack on the honor of the painter, this last being a topic that always irritated Manet.
They were my cohort—Édouard, Émile, Claude, Paul and Camille, and of course Victorine. I met them not knowing that I would outlive them, and without having the distance that knowledge brings. My immortal artist was right—I don’t get quite so close to mortals now, I no longer see myself as one of them. But I’m accustomed to navigating a world I do not feel a part of, a place where I am unlike all the others. This has always been my truth.
[. . .]
I have outlived my friends, my colleagues, and for what? All my paintings combined have not garnered the renown of Olympia or Impression, Sunrise. I am best known as the model from Woman, Reclining (Mari), and maybe my lack of success is not—as I have always told myself—because I am a woman and an outsider, but because I am lacking in talent.
Even being immortal, which should be simple enough, is a task that I am failing for I cannot bear the thought of stealing time from mortals whose lives are already so fleeting. I take just enough here and there from models—always with their consent—to maintain a human form, but if I cannot create beauty, cannot leave my mark on the world of art, their time is wasted, and nothing is so precious as time.

I liked this piece well enough but there isn’t much here apart from an extended historical slice of life, the angst of immortals, and talk about artists and painting. This may not be to everyone’s taste.
∗∗∗ (Good). 12,800 words.

•••

The best of this group (and the only one I would expect to see on an award ballot) was Just Enough Rain by P.H. Lee. I liked the Lauren Ring and Caroline M. Yoachim stories—and would have been happy to find them in a magazine issue—but I don’t think they are award level work (and that latter observation applies even more to the Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and John Wiswell).
I haven’t read a lot of 2021 stories, but I’d suggest that You Are Born Exploding by Rich Larson (story link) is better than all of the above (it would have been my pick for the award), and The Metric by David Moles (story link) is at least as good.  ●

_____________________

1. I’m surprised that Just Enough Rain by P. H. Lee didn’t end up in a better paying market (Giganotosaurus pays $100 for its stories, which is about 1 cent a word for this piece).

2. The Oghenechovwe Donald Epeki and Caroline M. Yoachim stories were also Hugo finalists.

3. (Emet) by Lauren Ring won the 2022 World Fantasy Award for best short story.  ●

Summary:
Another mixed bag of stories from a supposedly major award, with three good or better stories and three that I would not expect to see here. The good work includes Proof by Induction by José Pablo Iriarte (my favourite story sees a son visit his dead father in VR to finish a math proof and try to establish a relationship), Mr. Death by Alix E. Harrow (which has a “Reaper” from the Department of Death given a two year old boy as his next job), and Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather by Sarah Pinsker (the winner of the Nebula Award sees an online group discuss a gruesome folk song, with one of their number later doing some field research).
I suspect the other three stories by Sam J. Miller, Suzan Palumbo, and John Wiswell are here because of their “life issues” content (growing up queer, immigration and sibling issues, and chronic pain management).

_____________________

Editors, Jason Sizemore & Lesley Conner, Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas (x2), Jonathan Strahan, Sean Wallace & Clara Madrigano, David Steffen

Fiction:
Mr. Death • short story by Alix E. Harrow ∗∗∗+
Proof by Induction • short story by José Pablo Iriarte ∗∗∗∗
Let All the Children Boogie • short story by Sam J. Miller ∗
Laughter Among the Trees • short story by Suzan Palumbo ∗
Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather • short story by Sarah Pinsker ∗∗∗+
For Lack of a Bed • short story by John Wiswell ∗

_____________________

There are six finalists in the short story category, and the winner was Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather by Sarah Pinsker.

•

Mr Death by Alix E. Harrow (Apex #121, January 2021)¹ begins with Sam, the narrator, telling us that he has ferried “two hundred and twenty-one souls across the river of death” before he is given his next assignment:

Name: Lawrence Harper
Address: 186 Grist Mill Road, Lisle NY, 13797
Time: Sunday, July 14th 2020, 2:08AM, EST
Cause: Cardiac arrest resulting from undiagnosed long QT syndrome
Age: 30 months
.
Jesus Christ on his sacred red bicycle. He’s two.

Sam goes to see Lawrence several hours before his death (a requirement that helps smooth the passing of the dead across the river to “rejoin the great everything”) and, when he arrives in the boy’s bedroom, watches him stir. Lawrence’s father, alerted by the intercom, comes in and picks the boy up and takes him into the kitchen. Sam then watches the father hold and feed Lawrence, and notes the father does not know that this will be his last time together with his son. Later on in the garden, the boy (unusually) sees Sam, and the pair later play catch together.
The rest of the story switches between this kind of affecting domestic detail (we see the boy with his mother when she gets home), backstory about the premature death of Sam’s own young son, Ian, and an account of Sam’s own death and recruitment as a “reaper”.
Eventually (spoiler), Lawrence’s moment of passing arrives and, when his heart stops, Sam intervenes, putting a ghostly hand into the boy’s chest and massaging it back to life.
Sam subsequently has his tea leaves read by his Archangel supervisor, Raz (“the kind of sweet, middle-aged Black woman with whom you do not fuck”) and is given another appointment to reap the boy. Once again Sam saves him, and once again Raz appears. This time she asks Sam what he would do if she punished him by leaving him on Earth, never to cross the river and rejoin the great everything, but to fade into nothingness. Sam says he would watch over Lawrence for as long as he could, and the story finishes with Raz telling him he no longer works for the Department of Death. Before she goes she hands him a card, which says, “Sam Grayson, Junior Guardian, Department of Life”.
Although this story pretends, for most of its length, to be an edgy and dark piece, it is ultimately sentimental and feel-good—and, to be honest, quite well done. I couldn’t help but think, however, that there are darker and more profound versions of the story where the boy dies. Two options spring to mind: the first, which would appeal to the religious, is that we see the joy of him rejoining the great everything; the second just sees him die, and has the narrator reflect on the need for stoicism to get us through this veil of tears. I doubt any current SF writer is going to be writing that kind of story any time soon.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 5,100 words. Story link.

•

Proof by Induction by José Pablo Iriarte (Uncanny #40, May-June 2021)² opens with Paulie arriving at the hospital to discover his father has died. Standing next to his father’s wife is the chaplain, who offers Paulie the chance to enter his father’s “Coda”, a computer simulacrum of his father’s consciousness made just before his death:

Gone was the endotracheal tube. The room was eerily silent, with none of the sounds he’d associated with the hospital from his visits over the past week.
He met his father’s eyes. “Hey.”
His father smiled ruefully. “Hey.”
“Are you—”
“Dead?” His father gestured toward the inactive monitors.
“Apparently so.”
“Does it hurt?” Are you afraid, he wanted to ask, but he knew better than to talk to his father about emotions.
“Nothing hurts,” he said, picking at a scab on his leg. “I guess they have a way of turning that off.”
“Did the doctors mess up? Should I ask for an autopsy?”
His father shook his head. “Nah. I’m seventy-one, diabetic, and with a bad heart. You’re not going to win any lawsuits here.”
It occurred to Paulie that Codas could be programmed to give whatever answer benefitted the hospital.
Paulie stared out the window, over the parking lot, to the eerily empty expressway. “I really believed we were close on that Perelman proof.”
“Maybe nobody’s meant to find it.”
Easy for him to say. He’d already been beyond questions of tenure and publication; now all of that was even more meaningless for him.
For Paulie, though, Perelman would have been the home run his tenure dossier needed. He turned back toward the bed. “Okay. Well.” He put a hand on the chair he’d sat in last night while his father complained about his breathing. He should say something. Something like I love you¸ he supposed. But his father had never gone in for the mushy stuff in life, so why start now?
“Goodbye, then,” he finished instead.
“Bye, Paulie,” said his father. “Thank you for visiting.”

Paulie subsequently arranges to take a copy of the Coda home with him, and the rest of the story mostly consists of scenes where Paulie visits his father’s Coda to work on the theorem (although we also see something of Paulie’s own family life and relationship with his daughter, and the peer pressure he experiences at his university job).
The two men’s attempts to solve the theory become increasingly complicated by the fact that Paulie’s father has no memory of what has happened during previous visits, which means that Paulie has to explain everything they have done each time he enters the Coda. We also see further evidence of the emotional distance between the men, and Paulie’s attempts to make some sort of connection with his father, such as the occasion he mentions his daughter’s forthcoming dance recital:

“It just. . .it reminds me of my piano recitals.”
His father leaned on his bed railing. “Is that what this is really about, Paulie? Are you here to tell me I was a shitty father? I know. I already acknowledged that, after the divorce.”
Paulie dropped into the chair by the bed. “No,” he said at last. “Sorry. I keep thinking of what other people use the Coda technology for, and I keep waiting to hear you talk about something besides math or life insurance. I keep hoping you’ll have something profound to say.”
“I’m not the mushy type.”
“You could fake it.”
“You’re the smartest person I ever met. You would see through any faking.”
Paulie blinked. A compliment.
“I wouldn’t have blamed you if you didn’t want anything to do with me,” his father went on, “after not being there for you as a kid. But then you made me a part of your life and we got along okay. You treated me like a colleague, so I tried to treat you the same. Now you’re mad at me for not acting more like a father? I didn’t think you wanted that from me.”
Paulie waited to see if he would say anything else. That was about as close to “mushy” as he’d come since the night twenty years ago when he’d apologized for abandoning him.
After a quiet eternity, he got up from the chair. “Okay, well, I think I have enough to work on for now. I’ll come back when I have some progress.”
“Bye, Paulie. Thank you for visiting.”

Eventually (spoiler) they go on to solve the theorem, and Paulie comes to accept that his father is never going to say the things that he wants him to say.
Normally I’m not remotely interested in “Daddy” or other problematical relationship stories, but this one works quite well—probably because Iriarte handles this in a fairly muted way and not as the usual whiny adolescent psychodrama. I’d also note that the description of the mathematical processes undertaken to solve the theorem are an equal focus of the story, and are quite gripping—a significant feat considering that I had no idea about what was being discussed.
This story has an odd combination of ideas and themes, but I liked it a lot.
∗∗∗∗ (Very good). 6,250 words. Story link.

•

Let All the Children Boogie by Sam J. Miller (Tor.com, January–February 2021) starts with the narrator Laurie remembering the time she first heard Iggy Pop’s The Passenger on the radio and how, at the end of the track, there was an interruption, “staticky words, saying what might have been ‘Are you out there?’”
Then, next day in a local thrift shop, Laurie hears someone singing the song:

The singer must have sensed me staring, because they turned to look in my direction. Shorter than me, hair buzzed to the scalp except for a spiked stripe down the center.
“The Graveyard Shift,” I said, trembling. “You were listening last night?”
“Yeah,” they said, and their smile was summer, was weekends, was Ms. Jackson’s raspy-sweet voice. The whole place smelled like mothballs, and the scent had never been so wonderful. “You too?”
My mind had no need for pronouns. Or words at all for that matter. This person filled me up from the very first moment.
I said: “What a great song, right? I never heard it before.
Do you have it?”
“No,” they said, “but I was gonna drive down to Woodstock this weekend to see if I could find it there. Wanna come?”
Just like that. Wanna come? Everything I did was a long and agonizing decision, and every human on the planet terrified me, and this person had invited me on a private day trip on a moment’s impulse. What epic intimacy to offer a total stranger—hours in a car together, a journey to a strange and distant town. What if I was a psychopath, or a die-hard Christian evangelist bent on saving their soul? The only thing more surprising to me than this easy offer was how swiftly and happily my mouth made the words: That sounds amazing.

This passage pretty much limns the the story, which is that of one odd sock finding another and becoming a pair. The next day they set off together on a trip to a record store and, during their journey, they hear another interruption on the radio after David Bowie’s Life on Mars (the comments include mention of an airplane crash—which occurs later that day—and a “spiderwebbing” epidemic).
The rest of the tale sees the pair spend their time (in between further, increasingly meaningful, radio messages) navigating the mostly self-inflicted emotional dramas of teenage life in 1991 (during which Laurie seems perpetually on the verge of a nervous breakdown). These tempests-in-teapots include, among other situations, dealing with both sets of parents—and when Fell first meets Laurie’s parents, Laurie tells them that Fell is also a “she” to placate any potential concerns about what might happen to their daughter upstairs. Laurie then feels sick at having done so, as “It was a negation of who Fell was”. I assume from this that Fell is a biological woman who has chosen to be a trans man (but, as I find this stuff of little interest, and can’t be bothered trying to confirm my impressions, I could be wrong). Later, we also get a look at Fell’s dysfunctional family set up, which essentially consists of an alcoholic and hostile mother who apparently uses the wrong pronouns for her child (something I didn’t think you could do in 1991).
Eventually (spoiler), the content of the messages (“I don’t know if this the right . . . place. Time”; “To tell you the future can be more magnificent, and more terrifying, than what you have in your head right now”; “Two soldiers trapped behind enemy lines”, etc.) leads the pair to triangulate the signal to a nearby record shop (the massed Air Force trucks nearby seem unable to do so)—but there is no-one there. Fell concludes that an earlier hypothesis—about the affirmatory messages coming from their future selves—is correct.
This story will probably only work for those interested in safe, non-threatening (the only drama here occurs in Laurie’s head), and emotional YA material about insecure teenagers. The SFnal idea is weak and not really developed in any meaningful way (the series of transmissions from the future are concluded by the “answer” being given by Fell). It is essentially a mainstream story about growing up.³
I’d also note in passing that the gender pronoun handwringing that goes on in this feels wildly ahistorical.
∗ (Mediocre). 7,000 words. Story link.

•

Laughter Among the Trees by Suzan Palumbo (The Dark #69, February 2021) opens with Ana driving to a park in Canada, during which she recalls (a) her arrival in the country as the child of West Indian immigrants, (b) her early days in school, and (c) the birth of her sister Sab. Ana then recalls a childhood family camping trip where her younger sister disappeared during the night (Sab left the tent—against Ana’s wishes—with Greg, a boy she had been playing with earlier that day). Sab was never seen again, nor was the boy—and there was no evidence he had ever been at the campsite.
The story then moves forward in time to when Ana has grown up, her father has died, and her mother is in a care home. During one of Ana’s visits to see her mother, the old woman talks about the disappearance of Sab and shows Ana a picture of a boy that looks like Greg—it materialises that Greg was a cousin of Ana’s mother who drowned back in the West Indies in 1962 when Ana’s mother wanted to go swimming in a flooded river. She tells Ana, “‘dis go haunt you here.’ You can’t outrun the past, Ana, even if it’s dead and drowned in another country.”
The story closes with Ana going back to the camp site. Then (spoiler), on the second night, a ghostly Sab appears and tells Ana to follow her. They go to a cave, where Ana finds Sab’s remains and later lies down beside her bones. The story closes with Ana feeling a dense cold, and something gripping her throat.
This is reasonably well told, but it seems to be more an autobiographical slice-of-life than a ghost story (the immigrant background, the family accounts, and the dysfunctional relationship with her sister, etc.). I’d also add that the internal logic of the haunting doesn’t really convince: I can see why Greg would kill the mother or Sab for revenge, but why would Sab lead Ana to the same fate given it was her own childhood stupidity and wilfulness that got her killed?
Finally, there are one or two sentences or word choices that could do with being changed, e.g. the very clunky first sentence:

The highway to the campground cuts through the granite Laurentian Plateau like a desiccated wound.

What’s a “Laurentian Plateau”? Do wounds become “dessicated”? Why distract your reader with this kind of thing? Wouldn’t, “The highway to the campground cuts through the plateau like an old wound” be a simpler and more apt beginning (the story is in large part about an old wound)?
∗∗ (Average). 5,950 words. Story link.

•

Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny #39, March-April 2022) opens with an online discussion of a song:

→This song, included among the famous ballads documented by Francis James Child, is an allegorical tale of a tryst between two lovers and its aftermath. –Dynamum (2 upvotes, 1 downvote)
.
>That’s awfully reductive, and I’m not sure what allegory you’re seeing. There’s a murder and a hanging and something monstrous in the woods. Sets it apart from the average lovers’ tryst. –BarrowBoy
.
>Fine. I just thought somebody should summarize it here a little, since “about the song” means more than just how many verses it has. Most people come here to discuss how to interpret a song, not where to find it in the Child Ballads’ table of contents. –Dynamum
.
→Dr. Mark Rydell’s 2002 article “A Forensic Analysis of ‘Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather’”, published in Folklore, explored the major differences and commonalities and their implications. In The Rose and the Briar, Wendy Lesser writes about how if a trad song leaves gaps in its story, it’s because the audience was expected to know what information filled those gaps. The audience that knew this song is gone, and took the gap information with them. Rydell attempted to fill in the blanks. –HolyGreil (1 upvote)

This passage pretty much limns the rest of the story in that: (a) it shows several people on a forum discussing the song Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather stanza by stanza—during which we learn it is about a man meeting a woman in the woods and having his heart is excised and used to grow an oak tree; (b) it illustrates the usual online friction between participants (most notably in this case between BarrowBoy and Dynamum above, with the former constantly downvoting the latter); and (c) we first hear of HolyGriel’s account of Rydell’s academic work, which leads a documentary maker called Henry Martyn to investigate further. Martyn later discovers that Rydell visited the location referred to in the song, a village called Gall in England, and (spoiler) he subsequently disappeared. Then, towards the end of the story, Martyn also travels to the village to do research for his documentary. There, he meets a very helpful (and knowledgeable) young woman called Jenny. . . .
This is very well done (the online comments and exchanges are pitch perfect), but the story has an ending you can see coming from miles away. An entertaining piece but not a multi-award winning one.⁴
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 6,700 words. Story link.

•

For Lack of a Bed by John Wiswell (Diabolical Plots #74, 16^th April 2021) opens with Noémi trying to relieve her constant pain by sleeping on the floor. While she distracts herself with social media, her friend Tariq texts with the offer of a sofa. But there is a catch though—apparently someone died on it. But, as the sofa is clean, Noémi accepts the offer, and Tariq, who is actually standing outside her door, brings it in. Noémi subsequently sleeps well.
Noémi is then woken late the next morning by Lili, her boss at the pet shop where she works; Lili (who is a succubus) tells Noémi that there has been trouble with the mogwai overnight and to head in to work (we later find that the shop also stocks gryphons and basilisks, etc.)
The story’s only real complication comes later that day when Noemi is woken again (she fell asleep after the call) by someone knocking on her door. It is Lili, it is six-thirty at night, and, after checking that Noémi is okay, Lili points at the sofa:

Lili looked like she’d bitten into an extremely ripe lime. “When did you invite her?”
“Her? Are you gendering my furniture?”
Lili pointed a sangria red fingernail at the sofa. “That’s not furniture. That’s a succubus.”
Noémi tilted her head. Giving it a few seconds didn’t make it make any more sense. “I know you’re the expert, but I’m pretty sure succubi don’t have armrests.”
“Come on. You know my mom is a used bookstore, right?”
“I thought she owned a used bookstore.”
“The sex economy sucks. With all the hook-up apps and free porn out there, a succubus starves. My mom turned into a bookstore so people would take bits of her home and hold them in bed. It’s why I work at the pet store and cuddle the hell hound puppies before we open.”
Noémi asked, “Is that why they never bite you?”
“What do you think? Everybody else gets puppy bites, except me. I get fuzzy, affectionate joy-energy. Gets me through the day, like a cruelty-free smoothie.” Lili blew a frizzy strand of gold from her face.
“But this sofa has devolved really far into this form. I know succubi that went out like her—she’s just a pit of hunger shaped to look enticing. No mind. Just murder. Where’d you even find her?”

The rest of the story (spoiler) sees Noémi, Tariq and Lili burn the sofa outside the apartment block. We subsequently learn that Noémi is till sleeping well because she kept one of the cushions.
This is a slight tale with an odd setting (e.g. a fantasy world where a succubus can become a sofa or a bookstore) and I don’t think it really works. I’d also add that the fact that it ended up as a Nebula finalist is baffling and seems to indicate a group of voters who are over-enamoured with frothy, feel-good pieces (or perhaps suffer from chronic pain themselves).
∗ (Mediocre). 2,750 words. Story link.

•••

I may as well repeat what I wrote about the Hugo Award short story finalists—this is a game of two halves, with three better than good stories (the Harrow, Iriarte, and the Pinsker), and three that, in my opinion, should not be here. These latter all seem to deal with what I suppose you could call “life issues” (growing up queer, immigration and sibling issues, and chronic pain).
And, once again, the finalists skew to online sources.  ●

_____________________

1. Mr Death by Alix E. Harrow was also a Hugo finalist and runner-up in the short story category of the Locus Poll.

2. Proof by Induction by José Pablo Iriarte was also a Hugo finalist and placed fourth in the short story category of the Locus Poll. It was a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award.

3. Let All the Children Boogie by Sam J. Miller also placed sixth in the Locus Poll.

4. Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather by Sarah Pinsker also won the Hugo and Locus Awards for 2021, and is a finalist for this year’s World Fantasy Award. This a well executed piece but it doesn’t have the substance of a multi-award winner.  ●