50 favorite shortish nerd fictions, 2010-19
It’s the holidays, so content is going to be listy for the next month
I read a lot of up-to-novella-length speculative fiction because it’s a cost-effective way of thinking about the future and therefore the past and present (or vice versa), and because the SF/F/H/etc. community is pretty efficient at picking out the best stuff. There are a handful of major 2019 stories I’ve yet to get to (would be surprised if El-Mohtar & Gladstone’s This Is How You Love the Time War wasn’t of list quality) but on the whole, this feels closer to “complete” than most of my dumb lists. Links where I can find them, otherwise sources (or publishers for standalone books) are in parentheses.
Catherynne M. Valente: “Silently and Very Fast”
Alyssa Wong: “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers”
Catherynne M. Valente: "Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time"
Catherynne M. Valente: “White Lines on a Green Field”
George Saunders: “The Semplica-Girl Diaries”
Victor LaValle: The Ballad of Black Tom (Tor)
Vina Jie-Min Prasad: “A Series of Steaks”
Catherynne M. Valente: “The Future Is Blue” (in The Future Is Blue)
Hao Jingfang: “Folding Beijing” (trans. Ken Liu)
Ted Chiang: “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom” (in Exhalation)
Nancy Kress: “Yesterday’s Kin” (Tachyon)
Catherynne M. Valente: "The Bread We Eat in Dreams"
Ted Chiang: “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” (in Exhalation)
Samuel R. Delany: “The Hermit of Houston” (in F&SF Sep/Oct 2017)
Seanan McGuire: Every Heart a Doorway (Tor)
Seanan McGuire: Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Tor)
Carter Scholz: “Gypsy” (in F&SF Nov/Dec 2015)
N.K. Jemisin: Emergency Skin (Amazon Forward)
Alyssa Wong: “A Fistful of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers”
Elizabeth Bear: “The Hand Is Quicker” (in The Very Best of the Very Best: 35 Years of The Year’s Best Science Fiction)
Aliette de Bodard: “The Waiting Stars”
Jamie Wahls: “Utopia, LOL?”
Neil Gaiman: “The Case of Death and Honey” (in Trigger Warning)
Kij Johnson: “The Man Who Bridged the Mist”
Neil Gaiman: “Black Dog” (in Trigger Warning)
Fonda Lee: “Deepfake Girlfriend”
Sofia Samatar: “The Tale of Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle”
Scott Lynch: “A Year and a Day in Old Theradane”
Vina Jie-Min Prasad: “Fandom for Robots”
James S. A. Corey: “Rates of Change”
Karen Joy Fowler: “The Pelican Bar” (in What I Didn’t See)
Ken Liu: “The Paper Menagerie”
Martin L. Shoemaker: “Today I Am Paul”
Becky Chambers: To Be Taught, If Fortunate (Harper Voyager)
Rachel Swirsky: “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen's Window”
Amal El-Mohtar: “Seasons of Glass and Iron”
Amal El-Mohtar: “Madeleine”
Ian McDonald: “The Fifth Dragon”
Nancy Kress: After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall (Tachyon)
Ted Chiang: The Lifecycle of Software Objects (in Exhalation)
Neil Gaiman: “Nothing O’Clock” (in Trigger Warning)
Saladin Ahmed: “Without Faith, Without Law, Without Joy”
Ken Liu: “Thoughts and Prayers”
Elizabeth Bear: Bone and Jewel Creatures (Subterranean)
Kij Johnson: The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe (Tor)
Neil Gaiman: “The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains” (in Trigger Warning)
Alastair Reynolds: “In Babelsberg” (in Reach for Infinity)
T. Kingfisher: “Fisher-Bird” (in The Mythic Dream)
Peter S. Beagle: “The Story of Kao Yu”
George Saunders: “My Chivalric Fiasco” (in Tenth of December)
If you’re counting, and if you’re the target audience for this post you might be, that’s five from Catherynne Valente, four from Neil Gaiman, three from Ted Chiang, two each from Alyssa Wong, George Saunders, Vina Jie-Min Prasad, Nancy Kress, Seanan McGuire, Elizabeth Bear, Kij Johnson, Ken Liu, and Amal El-Mohtar, so maybe we’ve found the one thing I’m auteurist about. You can read not-quite-substantive comments on Chiang and Valente on my favorite fiction books of the decade list.