2014 online short fantasy and science fiction recommendations, part 4

Giganotosaurus.

I went to Giganotosaurus looking for novellas, a so far underrepresented category in my Hugo-relevant reading. I didn't find any. But I did think half of their twelve 2014 stories were worth recommending, including one I might nominate.

Dragon Winter, Judith Tarr. Novelette. Fantasy set in a pretty ancient world.

The Curator's Job, Laura E. Price. Novelette. Great characters, felt a little like a DeLint story.

Sixty Years in the Women's Province. More Benjanun Sriduangkaew. I wouldn't nominate her for anything but I enjoyed reading this and other people might as well. Novelette.

Game of Primes, Maggie Clark. I am such a sucker for nonneurotypical narrators. This story isn't perfect - I wanted way more of the aliens, I didn't get the point of the Ruby thing, and it ended in an unsatisfying way - but it's got some good moments, and I would definitely read the novel this was the first two chapters of. Novelette.

Three Partitions, Bogi Takacs. This was hard to follow and a bunch of the character beats didn't make any sense, but - Jews in space! Nano AI dressing up in plant and animal suits to play planet! How can you resist that. Novelette.

The Dead Star, The Satirist, and the Soldier, Rachel Sobel. At first I really did not see the point of this story and then after awhile I did, wow. It's an opera, basically, the heightened archetypal characters, the tragedy... somewhat in the Stranger in Olondria Romanticist vein maybe. I think I might nominate it. Novelette.

(online fiction sidebar)

There have been a couple of times now that I've been curious about an author's gender and it hasn't been apparent from their name and I've looked them up and found out that they were neutrois or androgyne or whatever. And maybe it's creepy to be happy about other people's genders (because why the fuck am I having an opinion about other people's genders) but it always makes me happy, like, here we are living in the future, I remember when non-binary gender identities were something I had only heard of in science fiction stories and now there are real live people like that. Which makes them sound like curiosities, but I mean more like, there are real live people who *made it out*. Here in the future I have a device in my pocket that can browse the internet and make video calls and there are real live people who have gotten their heads out from this crushing ubiquitous system. I guess I'm picturing something like the end of THX-1138 when he makes it to the top of the shaft and we see that glorious giant sun and there's a Bach chorale and it's not like we think there's any hope of him changing the system but, like, he sees that sun.