My short SFF recommendations for 2018

As rounded up for Twitter, here are the short SFF stories I most enjoyed in 2018:

Izzy Wasserstein’s intertexual atlas of ‘Unplaces’, recorded by one desperate queer woman for her lover, recovered from the ruins of Kansas City after an all-too-imaginable theocratic war (‘Unplaces: an Atlas of Non-Existence’, Clarkesworld)

This diary of time travel gone wrong from Premee Mohamed, whose marooned palaeontologist must fend for themselves in the prehistoric past. Turns out there’s not much good eating on a trilobite. (‘More Tomorrow’, Automata)

Eleanna Castroianni’s story of asylum management on a space station at the edge of conflict and ecological disaster, with unmistakeable echoes for me of how today’s refugee crisis has hit the Aegean. (‘Without Exile’, Clarkesworld)

Elizabeth Bear’s quite literally searing portrait of the destructive relationship between a knight-errant and the dragon she set out to kill (‘She Still Loves the Dragon’, Uncanny)

Bogi Takács working Hungarian and Romani folk song into this story about a non-binary interplanetary marine biologist (‘On Good Friday the Raven Washes its Young’, Fireside Fiction)

Not So Stories (ed. David Thomas Moore), an anthology of writers of colour taking back the Just So Stories, including Joseph E Cole’s ‘Queen’ about a lioness resisting her captivity (Rebellion Publishing)

Alix E Harrow’s portal meta-fantasy of librarian witches helping their troubled patrons to escape through hidden books (‘A Witch’s Guide to Escape: a Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies’, Apex)

In transcript form, Nino Cipri’s haunting story of an ethnographer breaching ethical boundaries and hunting down ghostly urban legends in her girlfriend’s home town (‘Dead Air’, Nightmare)

The first new Maria Dahvana Headley piece I read after finishing the incredible The Mere Wife: a seedy birthday-party magician has the worst day of his life in Idaho (‘You Pretend Like You Never Met Me, And I’ll Pretend Like I Never Met You’, Lightspeed)

Sarah Gailey’s devastating ‘Stet’, where the action is all in the margins in this dissection of the politics of AI and ethics of self-driving cars (Fireside Fiction)

Kate Heartfield’s ‘A Thousand Tongues of Silver’ weaves together Ostrogoth Ravenna, Queen Christina’s Sweden and the life-story of a purple-stained manuscript (Lackington’s)

Sabrina Vourvoulias’s story of post-apocalyptic urban witchcraft could easily have been the setting for something even longer than this (‘Toward a New Lexicon of Augury’, Apex)

T Kingfisher’s ‘The Rose MacGregor Drinking and Appreciation Society’ cocked a Pratchettian snook at Highland fantasy (Uncanny)

The rising stakes and against-the-odds queer desire of Isabel Yap’s ‘How To Swallow The Moon’ (Uncanny)

Cassandra Khaw’s Monologue By An Unnamed Mage, Recorded At The Brink Of The End’: ‘What matters is that I love you and that I will always love you, and I won’t let them have you, even if I have to husk myself of all that I am and splinter the universe again’ (Uncanny)

Perhaps I should have been alarmed by how relatable I found Zen Cho’s story of a studious imugi determined to become a dragon, and its early-career academic lover (Barnes and Noble)

And an honorary place for Rose Lemberg’s ‘The Desert Glassmaker and the Jeweler of Berevyar’ (Uncanny, 2016): the epistolary romance I needed to delight me this year.