How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub, by P. Djèlí Clark

Uncanny, February 2023

Trevor Hemley is an ambitious young man in 19th century London. The precise period isn't clear, but to me it feels more Victorian than Regency. Those terms may be inappropriate, though, because this is a world in when Mermen are real, have lost a war with the British, amd many live in Britain doing whatever work they can get.

It's also a world in which krakens are real, well-documented, and until relatively recently, a major threat to shipping. Now they are believed to be extinct, or nearly so.

Which leads us to Trevor Hemley's ambitions.

Snipers, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

WMG Publishing, 2013

In the winter of 1913, Vienna Police Detective Johann Runge investigates the murders of two men in a cafe--Lev Bronstein and Viktor Adler. It's puzzling enough to start with, but it's soon followed by more sniper killings. Soon five men are dead, some famous, some unknown--at least in 1913.

In Vienna in 2005, bestselling crime writer Sofie Branstadter is researching what she intends to be the definitive book on the still unsolved Carnival Sniper killings. As she does her research, we gradually realize that Sofie isn't living in the same timeline we are. This timeline had The Great War, lasting ten years, and no Second World War. The League of Nations survived, and international politics is quite different. What happened?

Three Miles Down, by Harry Turtledove (author), George Guidall (narrator)

Audible Audio, July 2022

It's 1974, and Jerry Stieglitz is a marine biology grad student, working on his dissertation. He's sold a few science fiction stories, and he's a few weeks away from getting married. It's a good life.

Then three guys knock on his door, and push their way in when he answers it. They're from the CIA, and they have a proposition for him. They want him to join a secret expedition. No one is going to explain anything to him yet, but he'll be in the North Pacific, and will be able to continue his whale song research.

They're not really taking no for an answer, either, but they're willing to pay him enough to solve all his immediate problems--including paying for the cost of delaying his wedding.

As the Last I May Know, by S.L. Huang

Tor Books, October 2019

Nyma is a ten-year-old girl, raised by the Order, and now called upon to do the hardest job the Order has.

In an alternate history, Nyma's country was hit with two seres, terrible bombs that vaporized two entire cities. The country responded by becoming a major force for world peace. The country has its own seres now, but it has put a terrible price on the use of them. When a new president takes office, the launch codes are changed, and inserted, in a capsule, into the chest of a ten-year-old child. To get them, to launch the seres, the president himself must kill the child and cut the capsule out of their chest.

Nyma is the carrier for the newly elected president, and the country is at war against a dangerous enemy. She acts as an aide, and is around him nearly constantly. The idea is that, if she is a real person to him, he won't be able to use the weapons he says "should always be on the table. The question is, will it work?

It's  dark story, and yet life-affirming. I've liked the other short story finalists I've read so far, but this one just hits it out of the park. Highly recommended.

I received this story in the Hugo Voters packet, and am reviewing it voluntarily.

Hill 142, by Jason Cordova

Jason Cordova is a 2015 nominee for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best New Writer.

This is a single, small battle of World War One, with the Germans equipped with giant, venomous spiders as cavalry mounts, and the Americans equipped with giant (2000-pound) lion as mounts. There's no explanation of why or how, other than a reference to a breeding program for the lions in Texas, There's also no indication of how this affects the war, other than sending the surviving soldiers home with more fantastical stories to tell.

So what's the point? I have no idea.

Not recommended.

My Real Children, by Jo Walton (author), Alison Larkin (narrator)

Audible Studios, September 2014 (original publication May 2014)

Patricia Cowan is an old woman living in a nursing home, a bit confused, partly from dementia, and partly from the fact that she remembers two very different, and mutually exclusive, lives. Do her friends call her Trisha, or Pat? Did she have four children with Mark, or raise three children with Bee?

Has she lived a life with personal struggle, disappointment, and tragedy, but in a world of growing peace, social progress, and a thriving international space program? Or a life where she has deep love, personal satisfaction, and professional success, but in a world increasingly dark and threatened, less social progress, and several nuclear exchanges?

Three Princes, by Ramona Wheeler

Tor Books, ISBN 9780765335975, February 2014

This is an alternate history set in a timeline where Caesar lived, he and Cleopatra prevailed, and the line descended from them continues to rule an empire dominated by Egypt over 1,800 years later. Lord Scott Oken, a British prince, a younger son of a line descended from both Caesar and Cleopatra (not just one or the other), is a young man who has made his career serving as a spy and agent for the Egyptian royal court.

His mentor and friend, Professor-Prince Mikel Mabruke, is a Nubian prince, as high-ranking as anyone outside the immediate Egyptian royal family, and an expert in alchemy, which is to say poisons.

Oken, on a recent trip through Europe, uncovered evidence of a nasty plot involving ambitious native leaders in Britain, Oesterreich (Germany), and Russia. The details aren't clear, but there's a religious aspect as well as the political, and the group apparently calls itself the Black Orchid.

He arrives home from this trip just in time to help rescue Prince Mikel Mabruke from another, apparently unrelated, criminal conspiracy, known as the Red Hand.