2019 short SFF - short stories

And here's my shortlist of short stories:

Tower, Lane Waldman. Maaaan the imagery in this Rapunzel retelling.

The Visible Frontier, Grace Seybold. A young man on a trading voyage. The slow reveal of the situation is excellent.

Shattered Sidewalks of the Human Heart, Sam J. Miller. So, if you remember "Things with Beards", which took The Thing and made it about AIDS and it was amazing, this is a similar concept, only a different pair of things.

Such Thoughts Are Unproductive, Rebecca Campbell. Life in the surveillance state, the disinformation state.

Self-Storage Starts with the Heart, Maria Romasco-Moore. Emotions, externalized.

A Bird, a Song, a Revolution, Brooke Bolander. Great sense of deep time and the long human story in this. F/F.

Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island, Nibedita Sen, Nightmare Magazine. I like the way this format gives the impression of a slow reveal in a very small number of words.

Sturdy Lanterns and Ladders, Malka Older. Climate grief, and an octopus.

I'm thinking... Seybold, Campbell, Romasco-Moore, Bolander, Sen as my nominees? The Bolander story is on the Locus list, none of the rest are, although the Sen story is a Nebula nominee so obviously it has fans. (And Sen has two other short stories on the Locus list. Sen for the Astounding? By which I mean both that I am nominating her and predicting that she'll make the ballot.)

2019 online sff - art

Art! Someday we will reform the art categories but until then we suffer!

Some years I make note of covers and illustrations I liked but this year the only note I had was "look into Sam Hogg for artist" but did not note where I saw his name. So, I don't know what work of his I particularly wanted to acknowledge, or even whether he had a qualifying pro work, so I'm thinking maybe I'll nominate him as a Fan Artist?? Here's Sam Hogg's webpage anyways.

Rocketstackrank does a lightbox of covers of the major magazines and some book covers - you can go through it here if you're willing to use an RSR resource. I still like Julie Dillon and Donato Giancola better than basically anybody but I'm trying not to nominate previous winners, and also eliminated Stephan Martinière on that basis.

Leaving me to narrow this list down to five:
Galen Dara (do I even need a link? after four recent ballot appearances?)
Godwin Akpan (who I think does not make my final five but I did really like these two pieces)
Alyssa Winans
Jasu Hu
Rovina Cai (made the long list last year, in 12th place)
Tommy Arnold (notably, did the Gideon the Ninth cover, also just barely missed the ballot last year)
Kuri Huang

I suppose if I was really dedicated to getting new names onto the ballot, I could stop nominating Galen Dara... hm.

Also, the Current Futures anthology had gorgeous art, particularly: Nancy Liang, Jing Jing Tsong, Cornelia Li, Jazmen Richardson, Kaela Graham, Tracy J. Lee, Alyssa Winans (hey!)

2019 online SFF - two novellas

These two novellas are on the Locus list and available online:

The Work of Wolves, Tegan Moore. A search-and-rescue dog with enhanced intelligence. Interesting and sometimes trope-subversive POV.

Waterlines, Suzanne Palmer. An administrator on an ice planet deals with unexpected contact with the local aliens. Man, Palmer can tell a story.

(I am now up to having read 12 of the 32 Locus list novellas and am also partway into a 13th... and there are still more I'd like to read eventually... the world is so full of novellas now, I love it...)