2017 short fiction - misc, mostly Giganotosaurus

I think this is actually the last one of these. Nobody reads Giganotosaurus (well, nobody at Locus and nobody who votes for the Hugos) but I'm kind of fond of them. Even if they've stopped putting word counts/length categories on their stories. (They only publish longer-than-short-stories, so I'm just assuming none of these are secretly novellas.)

To Us May Grace Be Given, L.S. Johnson. Supernatural Western, which is normally a genre I don't like, but the main character and situation here worked for me. NOVELETTE.

Hungry Demigods, Andrea Tang. A witch helps a guy with a curse. Sweet, I liked the main character a lot. NOVELETTE.

Hold Me Fast, Alter S. Reiss. I didn't get what this was at first, and it was fun to catch on, but I don't know that that makes much of a rec, so I'll tell you: it's a Tam Lin retelling with sci-fi diving and time travel and it's really good. NOVELETTE


And then this is a) a Charlie Jane Anders story that b) was on the Locus list, and c) is on the internet, so hey. Big warning on this one for transphobic medical violence against trans people - this is a terrifying story, but powerful. Don't Press Charges and I Won't Sue, Charlie Jane Anders, in Boston Review.

JY Yang novellas

The Black Tides of Heaven and The Red Threads of Fortune, two 2017 novellas. I read them in the (chronological) order Black Tides and then Red Threads, having read somewhere you should definitely do that, but Yang themself says that they can be read in either order, and they actually wrote Red Threads first and then Black Tides to fill in some certain backstory. Also they apparently have ideas for two more novellas and a novel, so this may just be the beginning of the Tensorate series. I *definitely* want two more novellas and a novel, yes please! I really loved these. The world and magic system, the characters and their relationships, the writing - so much good. Gender as an adulthood choice! Gravity and momentum manipulation! Dinosaurs *and* dragons! One warning, I ended up sobbing in a semi-public place when finishing Black Tides, it is not necessarily the book you want to bring to your kid's karate class in that respect.