Short Fiction Friday

This story has been up awhile, but I just got around to reading it: "A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel" by Yoon Ha Lee (whose stories have shown up as recommended reads here more than once). One of the comments on the bottom calls it "a great Calvino remix of hard-SF FTL handwaving," which really is as good of an explanation for why I like the story as any I could come up with.

I also remembered a pair of stories that I'd read this spring when I wasn't putting recommendations on the blog, both evocative and surreal stories by Genevieve Valentine: "Study, for Solo Piano" in Fantasy Magazine and "The Finest Spectacle Anywhere" in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. The stories are linked by their setting, within a traveling circus in a post-apocalyptic world, that's also the setting for Valentine's novel Mechanique. At the time I read those stories, I hadn't started hearing any of the high praise the novel has since been getting, but I bought it right away on my Nook and have been reading it slowly, lingeringly (because that's the kind of book it is, the kind you want to savor as you go) between other books ever since. It looks as if there was an earlier Circus Tresaulti story in BCS, "Bread and Circuses," that I missed when it was published...but I will be remedying that shortly.