Ecdysis (Orville Nesbit Mysteries #1), by Debra Doyle & James D. Macdonald

 

James D. Macdonald, Smashwords, ISBN 2940011288968, May 2011

Phil Paran is a police detective, investigating the latest in a string of serial killings. It's especially nasty, with the victims, always young women working as strippers, found dead and completely stripped of their skin. Remarkably neatly, too; very little blood found.

The Queen's Mirror, by Debra Doyle & James D. Macdonald

 

James D. Macdonald, Smashwords, ISBN 2940011282928, April 2011

This is a retelling of the story of Snow White, this time from the viewpoint of the Huntsman, who is completely loyal to the Queen, but also a good and decent man. This is the Queen Regnant, not Queen Consort, and he owes her obedience.

Better Living Through Algorithms, by Naomi Kritzer

Clarkesworld, Issue 200, May 2023

Linnea starts hearing about a new--from her friends, online, news stories--called Abelique. It prompts them to make changes, mostly small, in their lives. The users all seem to think it's great, but it sounds creepy to her.

Eventually, her boss, Keith, mentions it, and doesn't just mention it. He wants her and everyone else in the office to use it. "It's not a productivity app!" he insists. "It's a wellness app!"

Having already been downchecked once for being "not open to new processes," she figures she better try it.

Answerless Journey, by Han Song (author), Alex Woodland (translator)

Published in Adventures in Space: New Stories by Chinese & English Science Fiction Writers, Flame Tree Press, ISBN 9781787588158, April 2023

A person wakes up, in a chair, alone. There are two other identical chairs in the otherwise empty room. The person has no memory, and can find no way to identify themself than as "Creature." After a while, another person walks in. Creature's retained language is slight enough that they can only call the new person "Same Kind." The two start talking, exploring the space they're in, gradually retrieving more language.

The Job at the End of the World, by Ray Naylor

Tor.com, https://reactormag.com/the-job-at-the-end-of-the-world-ray-nayler/ August 2023

The story of a disaster worker, no, sorry, a resilience worker. The narrator goes to disaster areas, rebuilds, and moves on to the next disaster. They've been doing it for years. now, they're tired, and wealthy. They retire, go to the lovely home they've built in a lovely, and hopefully safe spot.

Things don't go as planned.

Could be grim, but it isn't.

The White Cliff, by Lu Ban

Science Fiction World, May 2022

A man named Yanli awakes from a rather dull dream in which nothing happens. Who has a dream in which nothing happens? It makes no sense to him.

He's living in a small cottage on a seashore, with a view of a white cliff. He lives alone, but he does have visitors, or at least a visitor, who appears along the path from elsewhere. We soon understand that she's a former student, a doctor, and they're discussing a research project, and a patient they both know well.

Resurrection, by Ren Qing

Galaxy Awards I: Chinese Science Fiction Anthology, December 2022

The cover shown is of the anthology that Ren Qing's story, a 2023 Hugo Short Story Finalist, is published. It's available on Amazon.

A woman has just received the corpse of her soldier son's body, and the notification of his death. Except, the corpse isn't really a corpse. It's an animated synthetic body, containing the partial, damaged, memory of her son. There was apparently brain damage when he was killed, so the memory transferred to the chip that now resides inside the "corpse" is incomplete and slow to activate.

But the woman recognizes her son, and tends and cares for him over the next days, as the memory strengthens and he becomes, if not the quite the son she remembers, more functional, and supportive of his mother as she is of him.

On the Razor's Edge, by Jiang Bo

2022

I've replaced the cover I originally included with  a generic cover, because I've been informed that it was indeed the wrong cover. That anthology apparently contains another story by Jiang Bo, but not this one. My apologies for the error.

Zhong Lixin is a Chinese astronaut, on China's Tiangong Space Station in 2028. He's working on his assigned projects, along with another astronaut, Duan Guozhu, when they hear what they've never heard before on the station--the emergency alarm. Soon they're working on repairs, fixable ones, fortunately, damage caused by micrometeors colliding with the station. They've been fortunate, and can continue their mission.

Then they get new, disturbing information. Some of that same micrometeor cluster hit the International Space Station, and have caused a fire on it.

D.I.Y., by John Wiswell

Tor Books, ISBN 009781250870209, August 2022

The opening of this story does not bring us to a happy world. Climate change has had a major impact, most strongly felt in the heat and the shortage of potable water.

The tech that's involved here, though, includes magic. The companies expected to address the problem are the great magic academies, among them Ozymandias Academy, where once upon a time, a young man named Noah hoped to become a student. When he's finally accepted, though, it's without any financial aid, and his mother, struggling just to support the two of them, has no money. Noah, being a bright young man, puts the blame where it belongs, and in some ways, that sets up later events.

Compulsory (Murderbot Diaries #0.5), by Martha Wells

Subterranean Press, July 2023

This is a short story, about an early and critical incident in the life of Murderbot, well before it meets those humans who will, unexpectedly, become its friends. Even The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon is still a relatively recent discovery.

Murderbot is under contract as security in a mine, and its duty is to protect, not the workers, but the equipment. Well, unless death or injury to an employee will negatively affect production. 

Murderbot is on duty, but watching a Sanctuary Moon episode rather than truly paying attention to what's going on nearby, when a fairly foolish argument breaks out between two humans, and results in a stupid accident which sends one of them falling down the mineshaft. When she catches herself on a piece of the equipment, fall halted temporarily, Murderbot has to decide what to do.

The City Born Great (Great Cities #0.5), by N.K. Jemisin (author), Landon Woodson (narrator)

Macmillan Audio, ISBN 9781250773302, May 2020 (original publication 2016)

The process of a great city being born as a living city starts sooner than we might realize from just the birth itself. Living cities, actual and potential have enemies, and they need protectors.

This is a short story about one of New York's midwives, a young man about a decade earlier than the actual birth, coached--and coaxed--by Paolo, the avatar of San Paolo. He's a street painter, and a singer, and he'd really rather not have the responsibility, but the city calls to him, and enemy needs to be stopped.

The narration is wonderful, and the story is a lovely addition to the two books so far in the Great Cities series.

I bought this audiobook.

The Fir Tree, by Hans Christian Andersen (author), Carol Phillips (narrator)

Bookstream Audiobooks, January 2022

This is the story of a beautiful little fir tree, living in a lovely spot with good neighbors, and all too eager to grow up, so eager he doesn't appreciate the excellent things that he has. He wants to be tall and strong, and handsome, and he doesn't take the correct lesson from the big, strong trees around him that do get cut down and carried off.

Eventually, one Christmas, he does get cut down, and carried off to be a Christmas tree. Which, initially, seems like a wonderful experience.

It's Hans Christian Anderson, well done, well translated, and well performed.

The Last Wise Man, by Eileen Enwright Hodgetts (author), Leah Klocko (narrator)

Emerge Publishing, August 2021

This is a frustrating, disappointing story. It's the Nativity story, set on another planet in the distant future. The planet has a small and dwindling population of humans, accepted or tolerated to various degrees by the egg-laying natives. We meet three of the humans, who are hearing a voice asking "Where is he?"

There's also, of course, a new star in the sky.

One of the three humans is a young man born on this planet; the second is an older man who was born on Earth before the last humans were forced to leave, and the third is an ancient monk who has been wandering in the wilderness, but now has a vital task to perform.

In Defense of the Grim Reaper, by Riya Aarini (author), Glenn Hascall (narrator)

Riya Aarini, September 2022

This is  pretty cute little story, told in first person by the Grim Reaper, trying to set the record straight about what a nice, charming, and forward-thinking guy he is.

The Anti-Cinderalla: A Very Royal Christmas, by Tawdra Kandle

Tawdra T. Kandle, 2022

Kyra is readying the household and family for Christmas, which this will be spent with her husband's family,

At Windsor Castle, because her husband is one of the grandsons of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh. This bugged me through the whole story, that Elizabeth only had four children, and the story doesn't bless her with a fifth child in a slightly alternate timeline to our own. Who is his royal parent? Not Charles, obviously. In Kyra's conversation with Princess Anne, it's clear that Anne's not her mother-in-law. One hopes not Andrew, the utter disgrace of the family. That leaves Edward, and in the few references to the Earl and Countess of Wessex, well, it's not ruled out.

Maybe this bothers no one but me. It does bother me, though, that Nicholas, in order to be the grandson of Elizabeth, needs to have a parent who was Elizabeth's child, and this detail is never clarified in any way. 

The Bookstore Sisters, by Alice Hoffman

Amazon Original Stories, November 2022

Isabel grew up on Brinkley's Island, Maine, and always felt out of place. Her father ran a bookstore, but while he loved books, he was pretty bad at finances, or the most basic aspects of running a business. Family money was always tight. Their mother gave her and her sister a lot of love, though--until she died, when- Sophie was twelve and Isabel was ten. Their father did his best, and Sophie took over most of their mother's duties, but when their father died, Isabel had had enough. They had both promised to keep the bookstore running, but Isabel wants to sell it and split the funds. Sophie wins the fight, and Isabel leaves for New York.

She's only seen Sophie once since then, and that was twelve years ago, when Sophie's husband died while she was pregnant. Isabel knows she handled that really badly, and has worked hard to forget everything about Brinkley's Island. Then she gets an envelope in the mail, with a card that says nothing but HELP.

Inconstant Moon, by Larry Niven (author), Bronson Pinchot (narrator)

 

Blackstone Publishing, ISBN 9781538453490, September 2017 (original publication June 1971)

Stan, a science writer, and his girlfriend Leslie, a computer programmer, each independently realize that the sun has apparently gone nova. They're in California, on the night side of Earth when it happens, and they have only a few hours until the planet turns enough that they experience it first hand. They decide that they are going to enjoy their last night on Earth.

My Evil Mother: A Short Story, by Margaret Atwood

Amazon Original Stories, April 2022

It was never easy being a teenage girl in 1950s suburbia,, even without your mother being a witch. Well, maybe a witch. Maybe she's just very weird. Maybe she's just trying to protect her daughter from the dangers of the world.

Possibly the three aren't mutually exclusive.

Regardless, her mother doesn't quite fit in, despite pearls and floral aprons. There are the quiet but not completely secret conversations with neighborhood women in distress, suspicious plants in the garden, and the stern warning to avoid a boyfriend lest she die in the car crash that's going to kill him.

Proof by Induction, by José Pablo Iriarte

Uncanny Magazine, May 2021, 

https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/proof-by-induction/

Paulie Gifford, a mathematician going for tenure at his university, the same university where his father was a Professor Emeritus until his death just before the start of this story. Paulie and his father had been collaborating on a proof of a mathematical theorem--and on top of losing his father, Paulie has just lost his research partner.

But, in this world, at an unspecified point in our future, there is a technology called Coda; it records a dying person's brain in the moments of death. The recording is interactive, and "knows" everything the deceased knew at the time of death. It can't form new memories, but family members can "enter" the Coda, talk to this recording of the deceased, and ask such mundane and important questions as, "Do you have an insurance policy?"

Tangles, by Seanan McGuire

 

Art by Heonwha Cho

  Magicthegathering.com, September 2021

  Wrenn and her tree, Seven, have been partners a long time, and now Seven wants to retire permanently to his own world. Wrenn, who is a dryad but not quite like other dryads, will need to find a new tree there. This won't be easy, because of the ways in which she is different from other dryads.

Teferi is a mage, traveling for reasons of his own. Most immediately, he has come into the Kessig forest, where Wrenn searches for the right tree, ostensibly to help the Cathars find the white witch rumored to be there, and really to escape the suffocating hospitality of the local townsfolk. He has quietly wandered away from the Cathars.

They encounter each other, and confront a threat, and then an even bigger danger.

This is apparently a Magic: The Gathering short story. I've never played the game, but very much enjoyed this story.