Mysterious contraptions! "Bird-Girl Builds a Machine" by Hannah Yang + Bonus book!
BogiReads brings you the daily speculative reading recommendation of editor Bogi Takács.
Today's recommendation -
Author: Hannah Yang
Title: “Bird-Girl Builds a Machine”
Venue: Clarkesworld, Nov 2023 (ed. Neil Clarke)
Type: Short story – 2940 words
Themes: Science fiction, mother-daughter relationship, (some of the themes would be spoilers)
Where to read: Text free online / Audio free online / Subscribe
I’m mostly posting 2024 stories at this point, but I still have some 2023 favorites scheduled – this is one of them.
(By the way, this is entirely unrelated, but I still haven’t managed to get the Friday subscription fixed – I was teaching a course that just ended yesterday, so I’ve been really busy, but maybe today!)
“Your mother spends every evening working on her machine.” This is how the story starts, and how it ends might be unexpected. The protagonist (the second-person you?) is raised by her single mother, who’s overbearing, frantic, resentful. “I had to drop out of college to raise you,” she tells her in between breaks of always building the machine. But what is it for?
This seems like one of those literary sci-fi stories where there is a speculative contraption that’s entirely metaphorical, and everything it does is interpreted in a framework of allegory. And why it seems like that is probably because the characterization is relatable, the prose is excellent, and so on. However! That’s not how the story goes, at all – and I loved it at least in part because of that. The machine is an actual machine. You might still whip out your allegory though.
(Don’t get me wrong, I love some good, chunky metaphorical technology. But what is being done here I possibly love even more.)
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Also, unrelated but! Ramadan mubarak! Whether you are observing Ramadan or not, I have a great middle grade fantasy graphic novel recommendation where the story takes place during Ramadan and that's integral to the plot. Nayra and the Djinn by young Palestinian American comic creator Iasmin Omar Ata! Here are some associate links as usual where you can buy the book: Amazon US, Bookshop.org.
See you next time,
Bogi.