Swamped with short stories

Here’s the compiled list of freely available short stories from the sources mentioned in the previous post (apart from the Locus list and Sheet of Doom which are too long), complemented with a couple of other good stories I’ve enjoyed (but which haven’t been on any recommendation lists so far):

• “Elephants and Omnibuses” by Julia August
• “Covenant” by Elizabeth Bear
• “This Chance Planet” by Elizabeth Bear
• “The Breath of War” by Aliette de Bodard
• “The Truth about Owls” by Amal El-Mohtar
• “When it Ends, He Catches Her” by Eugie Foster
• “Cimmeria: From the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology” by Theodora Goss
• “Tuesdays with Molakesh the Destroyer” by Megan Grey
• “Copy Machine” by Shane Halbach
• “Hunting Monsters” by S.L. Huang
• “The Meeker and the All-Seeing Eye” by Matthew Kressel
• “She Commands Me and I Obey” by Ann Leckie
• “Resurrection Points, Usman” by T. Malik
• “The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family” by Usman T. Malik
• “Death and the Girl From Pi Delta Zeta” by Helen Marshall
• “Still Life, with Oranges” by John P. Murphy
• “Icarus Falls” by Alex Shvartsman
• “The Eleven Holy Numbers of the Mechanical Soul” by Natalia Theodoridou
• “Bonfires in Anacostia” by Joseph Tomaras
• “Jackalope Wives” by Ursula Vernon
• “The Floating Girl: A Documentary” by Damien Angelica Walters
• “Santos de Sampaguitas” by Alyssa Wong
• “The Fisher Queen” by Alyssa Wong
• “The Tongtong’s Summer” by Xia Jia
• “Patterns of a Murmuration, in Billions of Data Points” by JY Yang
• “Five Stages of Grief After the Alien Invasion” by Caroline M. Yoachim

I’ve read maybe half of these myself, and hope to get them all read before the deadline. The Breath of War, Covenant, The Truth about Owls, The Fisher Queen and Hunting Monsters are maybe the best ones so far, but that may change when I get to the end of the list.

Going through Hugo recommendations

There’s couple of weeks until the Hugo nominations deadline, and I still have a lot of reading to do, especially in the short fiction department. The number of interesting short stories and novelettes published is so great that nobody can really keep up with everything. That’s why I’ve been going through a number of different recommendations lists.

I’ll share some interesting lists in case you want to take a look at them:

• Nebula award shortlist
  Nebulas are voted on by professional SFF writers who are members in SFWA. Everything on the shortlist is usually worth reading.
• Aidan Moher of A Dribble of Ink
  Last year’s Hugo winner in the fanzine category catalogues his favorite novels of 2014.
• The Book Smugglers blog
  Ana and Thea of the Book Smugglers give their nomination picks.
• Author Ken Liu
  Ken Liu’s recommended reading list focuses on shorter fiction, which is great, because I can always use help with that.
• Author Jason Sanford
  I’m going to vote for one of Sanford’s picks at least: the novella Where the Trains Turn by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen.
• Critic Liz Bourke
  Interesting stuff here as well.
• Critic Abigail Nussbaum (added 2/3/15)
  Another interesting list with nice introductions for every suggested story.

In addition, there are some lists that are not limited to just the few picks per category:

• 2015 Hugo Sheet of Doom: a public Google document everybody can edit and supplement with their own favorites
• Locus Recommended reading list by the SF Magazine Locus
• Open recommendation thread in John Scalzi’s blog Whatever

Finally, there’s the infamous Sad Puppies campaign by a bunch of conservative-minded/right-wing/whatever authors. I’ll probably discuss the whole thing later on in more detail but here are the lists in case you’re interested:

• Sad Puppies slate by Brad Torgersen, Larry Correia et al
  The reasoning behind the list is discussed quite thoroughly in Torgersen’s blog, even though most of their arguments don’t feel very convincing to me. The few works on their list that are available for free didn’t make much of an impression.
• Rabid Puppies slate by Vox Day
  This is a more radical variation of the SP slate, I guess. It seems that Torgersen and Correia have made an effort to avoid the controversy caused by having someone with hateful fringe opinions on their slate (this is what happened last year). Sad and Rabid Puppies are still a coordinated thing with a lot of overlap, same graphics etc.