2021 online short SFF: Strange Horizons Jul-Dec

All Us Ghosts, B. Pladek, Strange Horizons. The Truman Show meets helicopter parenting meets the labor market? Layered and bleak and really good.

Motivation Augmentation, Clara Ward, Strange Horizons. Flash fiction about labor and co-option.

Surat Dari Hantu, Lisabelle Tay, Strange Horizons. Cycles of grief and revenge.

Coiffeur Seven, Kiran Kaur Saini, Strange Horizons. This hit me really hard for a couple of personal reasons, damn.

Strange Horizons published two pieces of interactive fiction in October, Pockets, or When the Giants by Natalia Theodoridou, and Heat From Fire by Anna Anthropy. I thought they were both interesting. Very different in tone and style, and doing very different things with the interactivity. They are apparently part of a six-story issue all dealing with sexuality, of which the other four stories haven't been finished/posted yet - I guess this whole thing was a Kickstarter project back in 2020? Both have more sex in them than most SFF; Heat From Fire in particular gets pretty porny, which I imagine could be a plus or a minus. (Since this is Strange Horizons, there are content notes available for both, and Heat From Fire in particular has detailed notes you can expand about various aspects of the content.)

2021 SFF - the Locus list

Hey, it's the Locus list!

Looking at my tentative Hugo long-fiction nominees, so far, looks like basically everything is on here. The Unraveling, Black Water Sister, She Who Became the Sun, and The Hidden Palace being my current list of novels. (I'll probably use that last slot for Desolation Called Peace, if I don't find something else I want to use it for; I also might have considered Master of Djinn, or The Galaxy and the Ground Within.) Novella-wise, I've only read four of their 28, but I have plans to read like five more of them, hopefully giving me more to nominate besides Psalm for the Wild-Built. I'll be curious how many of my short-fiction favorites are on here but that is a question for future me since I haven't, you know, read and found them yet.

In the "what have I managed to not even hear about" game, apparently Garth Nix has written a Sabriel prequel about her parents - I was not so into Clariel/Goldenhand, as I recall, so I think I'm probably at the "I don't want to read more of these in case they detract from the originals that I loved so much" point with this universe. Alaya Dawn Johnson has a short fiction collection out. E.K. Johnston's written a YA SF that wasn't on my to-read list. And a whole bunch of people have written things that were but that I've now been reminded of again. [ETA: apparently including ADJ's collection, since it *was* on my list, although my note thought it was a 2020 work, which might be why I haven't been seeing it while looking for 2021 works in particular...]