Sunday Short: Amal El-Mohtar's The Truth About Owls

This week's Sunday Short (coming a day late -- sorry!) is The Truth About Owls by Amal El-Mohtar, available via Strange Horizons.

This coming-of-age story follows Anisa, a teenage girl who lived in Lebanon in a time of war and now lives in Glasgow near an owl center. It is light in terms of fantasy or sci-fi, but focuses more on Welsh folk stories and the emotional experiences of an immigrant girl. She witnesses an owl killing the family's rooster in her youth and feels the first stirrings of power / her impact on the world around her.

The story didn't pull me in as much as other short stories recently have -- I don't have too much familiarity with Welsh folktales and the story of Mabinogion / Blodeuwedd wasn't really fleshed out enough for me to appreciate it's implications in this story. There were some beautiful moments, and I did appreciate the background (another coming of age story affected by war, similar to Bodard's Breath of War featured last week).

 Favorite quote:

"You're well into this, you are."

"It's just—" Anisa bites her lip, looking at Blodeuwedd, raising her slightly to shift the weight on her forearm, watching her spread her magnificent wings, then settle, "—sometimes—I feel like I'm just a collection of bits of things that someone brought together at random and called girl, and then Anisa, and then—" she shrugs. "Whatever."

Izzy is quiet for a moment. Then she says, thoughtfully, "You know, there's another word for that."

"For what?"

"What you just described—an aggregation of disparate things. An anthology. That's what The Mabinogion is, after all."

Anisa is unconvinced. "Blodeuwedd's just one part of someone else's story, she's not an anthology herself."

Izzy smiles, gently, in a way that always makes Anisa feel she's thinking of someone or something else, but allowing Anisa a window's worth of view into her world. "You can look at it that way. But there's another word for anthology, one we don't really use any more: florilegium. Do you know what it means?"

Anisa shakes her head, and blinks, startled, as Blodeuwedd does a side-wise walk up her arm to lean, gently, against her shoulder. Izzy smiles, a little more brightly, more for her, and says: "A gathering of flowers."

 Next week's story will be When it Ends, He Catches Her by Eugie Foster available via Daily Science Fiction.

Sunday Short: Aliette de Bodard's The Breath of War

This week's Sunday Short is Aliette de Bodard's The Breath of War, published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

Cover art for BCS's Issue #142 - Sojourn by Ferdinand Dumago Ladera.

The Breath of War is set in a world where women carve breath-siblings (or stonemen) out of stone at their accession to adulthood that are needed to breathe the very first breathe of life into a baby at birth. The protagonist we follow is Rechan, who is very pregnant and on a journey into mountains to find her breath-siblings. It is rare for a woman to live apart from her carved stoneman/stonewoman, mainly because any child born without the breath-sibling present would be stillborn.

In her youth, Rechan went into the mountains and carved a mysterious breath-sibling named Sang, that didn't return with her to civilization post-carving. The reader is given small details throughout the story of Rechan at her time of carving into adulthood -- a teenage girl denied life abroad because of local war, who uses that frustration to create something altogether an antithesis of what you'd thing a breath-sibling (and bringer of life to a small, helpless newborn) would be. Years later, Rechan wants to become a mother and avoids seeking out her stoneman until the last possible moment, because confronting Sang means confronting the decisions she made and the emotions she felt in her youth

I found Bodard's worldbuilding fascinating, if a little foreign / difficult to get into at first, and I think she weaves a tale both interesting and worthy of telling. An adult is protected by the weapon she creates in her angry youth; a reminder that our lives are something more (or that they should at least be) than what we might experience or feel in our youth. And that war / violence has far reaching consequences that can be easy to dismiss in stories we read for entertainment. Maybe I am the target audience for a story like this (being in my *cough* 30s and also not exactly where I thought I'd be or want in my teenage years), but I found it unique and most timely after some of the images this week of Syria refugees.

Favorite quote:

Sang was silent, for a while. I will come back, he said.

He wouldn’t. Rechan knew this with absolute certainty—Sang was the desire to escape, the burning need for flight that she’d felt during her adolescence. Once he found space, he would be in the home he’d always been meant for; and who could blame him for not looking back? “Of course,” she lied—smoothly, easily. “You can always come back.”

 Interested in hearing another opinion on this story and the others I will cover in the Sunday Shorts this month? Check out  Alicia at The Cyborg Knight who is doing a read along with me!

Next week's story will be The Truth About Owls by Amal El-Mohtar, which is available via Strange Horizons.

announcing short story september!

I have made no secret in the past of my love for the short story format with my regular Sunday Shorts feature, where I highlight one sci-fi / fantasy / horror short story available online. I have also guest posted about my love for the short story at Oh the Books. But now I am going a step further and declaring September the month of the short story* -- Short Story September! 

What does that mean for the blog? My plan for the month is to continue with my weekly Sunday Short feature, with the following schedule for the month and where each story can be found:

September 6: The Breath of War by Aliette de Bodard available via Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

September 13: The Truth About Owls by Amal El-Mohtar available via Strange Horizons.
   
September 20: When it Ends, He Catches Her by Eugie Foster available via Daily Science Fiction

September 27: A Kiss With Teeth by Max Gladstone available via Tor.

An astute reader might notice that these stories (along with Ursula Vernon's Jackalope Wives, featured this past weekend on the blog) can be found on the short list that io9 put together on what the Hugo ballot for the short story category could have looked like this year without Puppygate. These are the stories that other WorldCon members thought were the best of 2014, and I think they are going to be fun to explore here!

Additionally, I will have weekly posts devoted to some of my favorite venues for short stories online, plus a review of a recent short story anthology or two. And for the first time, I am also hoping to feature other bloggers that read / review short stories, plus maybe link up with a few bloggers who want to read some short fiction for the first time.

Which brings me to the big invitation -- are you interested in adventuring into the world of the short story with me?  If so, sign up via the linky below, and I will make sure to follow along with your short story adventure and include it in a weekly highlights post this month! You can read / review your favorite short stories, do a read along of the stories I will feature each Sunday, or do something else promoting short stories -- it is really your choice!


If you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact me at exploringworldsfiction@gmail.com or comment below!

*While doing my research putting together this post, I did find out that May has previously been declaring as short story month (to follow April's National Poetry Month), but I am pretty certain that short stories are cool enough to have an extra more alliterative month devoted to them... right? :)

Sunday Short: Ursula Vernon's Jackalope Wives

This week's Sunday Short was the 2014 Nebula award winning short story, Jackalope Wives by Ursula Vernon, published in Apex. It was also listed in io9's list of what the Hugo ballot this year could have been.

by Lauren Marx

This story begins with a young man in a town who has a touch of magic and a heap of brooding about him. On moonlit nights, this town can hear the wild music of the jackalope wives, who slip out of their jackalope skins and dance. The young man decides that one jackalope wife in particular that he would catch:

She danced farther out from the others and her horns were short and sharp as sickles. She was the last one to put on her rabbit skin when the sun came up.... She danced a little apart from her fellows, as he walked a little apart from his.

The story then takes off as he catches her and throws her skin in the fire. The jackalope wife screams, he realizes the wrongness of what he is doing, and he rescues the skin half-burned from the fire. She tries to put it on, but it doesn't transform her back into a jackalope. The young man goes to his grandma for aid.

I thought it was a beautiful story -- an interesting mash-up of the selkie fairytales and 'modern folktale' of the jackalope. The character of Grandma Harken made it shine, and the ending was delightful. This flavor of magical realism in fantasy/folktale is wonderful, especially in the short story format. This story is definitely worth a read in my book -- 5/5 stars!

Favorite line:  
Perhaps he thought she might understand him. Perhaps he found her as interesting as the girls found him.

Perhaps we shouldn't always get what we want.

Alicia at the blog Cyborg Knight will be reading along and sharing thoughts on the upcoming short stories I am featuring in September.  Look out for a post this week for more information about the upcoming short stories, in case anyone else is interested in reading along.

Next week's short will be the 2014 Nebula nominee The Breath of War by Aliette de Bodar, published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. 

thoughts on introducing kids to fandom

Another blog post? Only a day after the last, which was only a day after the last? I guess everything that happened this past weekend at WorldCon has gotten to me. And I have THOUGHTS.

There is a facebook post making the rounds post Hugo awards. Michael Rothman took his two sons the watch the Hugo awards after they'd all read and voted on them, not explaining the conflict that surrounded them this year beforehand, and they all left feeling left out when puppygeddon happened. The original post can be found here, but Brad Torgensen (one of the Sad Puppies leaders) also posted about it here.

I think if I had a chance to talk with Rothman’s kids, I would first sit us all down and watch Wil Wheaton’s speech to a newborn captured on YouTube as “Why it’s awesome being a nerd,” which you can watch below or find here: 

Find the things that you love and 

love them the most that you can.

That video always hits me in the feels.

Then, after we watched the video, I’d tell them that there will be times in fandom and in life that others don’t love the same exact thing that they love and that is OK. We all have had our own experiences, I am sure, of being told how weird it is to love the geeky things we do. Growing up geek was an incredibly lonely experience at times for me (as I imagine it was for many many others). We can’t control what other people do, and we can’t let adult conflicts (such as the Hugo awards) dictate how we love the things we love. I think that is a very important lesson for all of us to learn at some point. 

In this Hugo awards conflict, it is disingenuous to continually just say that the other side needs to make it better, be better, for the next generation. We ALL need to be better. I have sort of entered late into trying to understand everything going on, but I see issues in how things have been handled on ALL sides. 

My daughter (who is only 2, so a little ways off from fandom... although you could probably call her a Curious George / Sophie the First fangirl) will probably not like the same things as Rothman’s kids. She probably will not geek out about the same things as me, either. 

I can hope my mommy hope that she never ever experiences rejection and disappointment for her geeky loves, but it is going to happen at some point and there is nothing I can do about it unless I want to raise a bubble-child. Instead, I hope I can raise her in a way that she knows she can geek out about almost anything and find someone else who loves it too… and also probably find others that DON’T love it too.

Fandom/civilization/life isn’t composed of this homogeneous crowd that will celebrate the same things that I love, and that diversity of opinions and viewpoints isn’t a bad thing.

If it were me, I wouldn’t have brought my kids to the Hugo awards as an introduction to fandom. I’d find out what exactly they most want to see / do at WorldCon outside of the awards ceremony (that was only ever going to be some level of controversy) and make sure we did that instead — be it meet an author, attend a talk on something awesome and weird, go to ballroom/regency dancing lessons, check out the cool art on display and maybe bid on something original and unique, find a geeky pride shirt, learn to shoot a bow and arrow from the local LARP group, etc. I didn’t attend WorldCon this year, but those are the type of events that I’ve seen and participated in at my local cons and loved. And that is where I think cons shine as a way to introduce kids to fandom.