Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish and is now hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. Each week a new theme is suggested for bloggers to participate in.

I’m bending the rules a bit here, as I’m going for 10 12 short stories and novelettes that I read, but wouldn’t have reviewed otherwise. I read all of these before the Hugos for voting purposes.

These are purposefully vague and short because I think it’s really hard to talk about short stories without giving too much away, I’m just trying to spark your interest to go check them out.

Short stories

First of all, I was not expecting these to be all so grim and dark. Wow. I’m glad I started with the short stories in my hugo-readathon because everything felt cheerful afterward.

And Now His Lordship Is Laughing By Shiv Ramdas – read it for free at Strange Horizons – darkness level – “oh shit don’t tell me this is based on something real, of course, it is”

Based on The Bengal Famine of 1942-43 this tells the story of a doll maker whose entire world and family crumbles in front of her due to starvation. I don’t think I would have been able to read this if I had known it was based on true events (same as I know I wouldn’t be able to read The Poppy War).

View Spoiler »I loved that the main character got revenge, and it was calculated and ruthless and violent. « Hide Spoiler

As The Last I May Know By S.L. Huang – read it for free at Tor.com – darkness level – what. the. fuck. – the Hugo winner! – 

This was such a powerful and harrowing story. It’s set in a world not very different from our own, 200 years after nuclear-like weapons were used. To prevent their own not-nukes being used liberally, the country that was bombed places the not-nuclear-launch-codes in the heart of a living child each time a new president is elected. This child then shadows the president, who would have to kill the kid to cut out the code. The story follows this child as war erupts.

Blood Is Another Word For Hunger By Rivers Solomon – read it for free at Tor.com– darkeness level – murder and childbirth

This story was very visceral, on the one hand, there’s plenty of murder, but that’s the chill bit.

View Spoiler »The surprise giving birth to full grown people part is weeeeeird as hell. Culminating in maximum weirdness with giving birth to yourself. « Hide Spoiler

Interesting story, not the sort I’d normally read. Really unexpected and so much weirdness packed into a short bite.

A Catalog Of Storms By Fran Wilde – read it for free at Uncanny Magazine – darkness level – children sort of missing, the most chill of the bunch

This is probably the only one of the Hugo nominees that I would normally read. It’s got an interesting world where the weather is very dangerous, and an interesting sort of poetry to it. There’s no murder here, there is a lot of loss, but it’s more of a “bravely going into battle” flavor.

Do Not Look Back, My Lion By Alix E. Harrow – read it for free at Beneath Ceaseless Skies –  darkness level – war nation

I really liked this story, in a way the least unusual of the lot. We follow a woman in a warmongering nation trying to protect her child from ending up a soldier. It’s very personal, about two wives’ relationships with each other and their children, but also does a great job of painting a clear enough picture of the world.

Ten Excerpts From An Annotated Bibliography On The Cannibal Women Of Ratnabar Island By Nibedita Sen – read it for free at Nightmare Magazine –  darkness level – cannibalism

At first, I wasn’t sure I’d downloaded the right thing. This story is told in a very unusual format, being ten excerpts from various fictional books and documents. I love unusual storytelling methods, so got on board with this pretty quickly.  It was great puzzling out a story from little excerpts. And the story itself was pretty damn shocking.

Novelettes

I ended up enjoying these a lot more. I think the slightly added length helped, and I’m sure the more optimistic tones did too.

The Archronology Of Love By Caroline Yoachim – read it for free at Lightspeed Magazine– This was such an interesting space mystery. The story follows the people investigating a new colony gone wrong. The way that they investigate is through a device that lets them see into the past. There is a lot of careful peeling back layers, both in the mystery of the plot and the mystery of the text, as the epigraphs between chapters and the title start making more and more sense. I really enjoyed this and found it quite beautiful.

Away With Wolves By Sarah Gailey – read it for free at Uncanny Magazine – This story is about a werewolf struggling to find the balance between her human and her wolf and human self and live. It has  a very strong theme of figuring out and accepting who you are, which I enjoyed a lot.

The Blur In The Corner Of Your Eye By Sarah Pinsker – read it for free at Uncanny Magazine – This one was creeeeeepy. Ok maybe not that many “e”s, but I really like where it went. It starts off with an author going to a remote cabin in the mountains with no cell phone no internet to write. Panic alert no 1, NO CELL PHONE & NO INTERNET. That gave me a lot of stress. The story is a very clever mystery.

Emergency Skin By N.K. Jemisin – the Hugo winner! – This was so gooood. It’s hard to describe without giving too much away, and I wouldn’t want to to that as it was brilliant being in the character’s mind as he figured stuff out. I loved how is story managed to be very hopeful in the future it imagines, and a stark and depressing critique at how improbable it is due to our fucked society.

For He Can Creep By Siobhan Carroll – read it for free at Tor.com -A cat main character! And more cats on top of that! There’s so much going on here, we’re at an old-timey asylum, the main character is a cat, there are demons and devil and deals. It’s quite sinister and fun.

Omphalos By Ted Chiang- This is a brilliant idea story, set in a world very much like our own with one big difference. The world was created a few thousand years ago, and this is the scientific, observable with the naked eye, truth.  And the conflict of the story is a crisis of faith and how that might affect this world which has a rock-solid belief in divinity and humanity’s purpose.