2017 short fiction - misc, part 1

[psocoptera]

So at this point, I've read the four magazines I intended to read in their entirety this year (Strange Horizons, Uncanny, Lightspeed, and Clarkesworld) and what's left is a question of how much of Tor.com, Apex, or Giganotosaurus I want to poke through looking for things that catch my eye, or how many authors I like I want to look up by name to see what they put out last year in other venues.

These stories, though, are things that were in my notes file before I started systematically reading 2017 fiction - they're things that were recced somewhere and I read them and wanted to make sure I didn't forget about them.

Sidewalks, Maureen McHugh, Omni. "A speech pathologist evaluates a woman who speaks only gibberish", as it says in the subtitle. This is in fact short fiction but I believe someone linked to it as "an article" and I really enjoyed reading along thinking it was nonfiction and then getting to a point where I was like "waaaait".

Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience(TM), Rebecca Roanhorse, Apex. People were talking about this when it came out, Apex readers voted it the Reader's Choice Winner, and if there is one short story I think is likely to show up in awards consideration this year, it's this one.

Angel of the Blockade, Alex Wells, tor.com. Smuggler, very cool space hijinks. NOVELETTE.

The Dark Birds, Ursula Vernon. Wow, this is dark. But powerful. NOVELETTE

Comments

[jedusaur]

same with The Dark Birds! no WAY did that come out only a year ago! WHAT IS TIME.

[psocoptera]

Seriously, time is weird. Part of why I do my short fiction reading in one big sweep is so that I've read everything recently enough that I'm not trying to compare something I read yesterday to something from months ago. Although I do tend to end up with a bias in favor of the few things I did bother to read when they came out. (The main reason I do my short fiction reading in one big sweep is that's how I can actually do it as opposed to not doing it, but I have turned out to like it for having stuff fresher in my memory.)