Short Fiction Fridays #14: Music
Honeysuckle, pop stars, cost-benefit analysis, and more...
Welcome back to Short Fiction Friday! This issue's theme is Music. I'm not a musician myself, but reading these pieces made me wish I had an instrument or song to call my own. The following stories cover a wide range of SFF subgenres and include honeysuckle, cost-benefit analysis, blue raspberry slushies, Hebrew phonemes, and more...
“Wind Will Rove” by Sarah Pinsker
The long, shifting history of a folk song intertwines with the narrative of a generation ship that has lost its own history. Rosie is a grandmother, a history teacher, and most importantly, a player in the second fiddle tier of the OldTime music group. When one of her students refuses to study the Earth he never knew, Rosie turns to music for answers. Stirring, soaring, and thoughtful.
CW: Suicide (mentioned), historical erasure
People on Earth wrote about blue skies because they'd stood under grey ones. They wrote about night because there was such thing as day. Songs about prison are poignant because the character knew something else beforehand, and dreamed of other things ahead. Past and future are both abstractions now.
Read "Wind Will Rove" from Asimov's, courtesy of Sarah Pinsker's website
“You, Tearing Me Apart Onstage” by Matthew B. Hare
Terry Weldon, pop star, has been a teenage heartthrob for almost a decade. His label controls his body both in meatspace and in QUBLA, the spiraling galaxy of servers that form an amalgamated virtual reality. In the audience of a show full of bootleg avatars, he sees himself onstage… Surreal, glitchy, and frenzied.
CW: Body horror, gore
The stage opens up like the mouth of Hell, and out steps John Lennon—not just any John Lennon either, but the John Lennon. The official, meticulously programmed, historically digi-electrometastisized John Lennon®, ripped straight from the car insurance commercials. And it’s got to be ripped, because nobody has the kind of money for that license.
John Lennon opens his mouth and starts belting out screeching white noise.
Read "You, Tearing Me Apart Onstage" in Fusion Fragment
“Requiem Without Sound” by Izzy Wasserstein
Evie was created by Chavez, the solitary overseer of barely-sentient mining bots, but she died before Evie first woke. As an unauthorized strong AI, all they have ever known are video logs and the inevitability of their own destruction. In the videos, Chavez sings. Resonant, mournful, and yet full of wide-eyed curiosity.
CW: Death of family members
A rigorous technician, Chavez left notes in Evie’s code, though there was no one to read it besides Chavez, and now Evie themself. The annotations are clear: she was growing Evie because she was lonely. Evie considered one particular notation at length: I’m tired of singing to myself.
Read "Requiem Without Sound" in Escape Pod
“The Song Between Worlds” by Indrapramit Das
Because Varuna’s parents never listen to them, they’re spending their birthday on Mars. They resent their wealthy family’s wasteful tourism and fear the dangers of space travel. When Varuna strikes out alone to hear the real sounds of Mars, the contract-savvy shepherd Nayima seizes the opportunity to be heard back on Earth. Glossy, artificial, and sincere.
CW: Transphobia (misgendering), emotional abuse
The tourists were surrounded by lamps that flickered to mimic flaming torches, facing a stage where one of the silver-robed figures gestured in dance. The performer was surrounded by holo projections that showed close-ups of her beautiful face singing behind the glass of her helmet. Enjoy a private performance of shepherds singing the ushengaan, the silent song of Mars, the ad suggested in multiple languages, words drifting like snow around the images.
Read “The Song Between Worlds” in Slate
“The Noon Witch Goes to Sound Planet” by Kristina Ten
It’s not fair that no one ever wants to hang out with Hailey. Just because she inherited her mother’s power as the Noon Witch—sunstroke incarnate, scourge of the fields, immortal force of nature—doesn’t mean she’s going to use it. She sets out to prove herself at the Sound Planet festival, armed with good old-fashioned sunblock and water bottles. Light-hearted, stubborn, and sweltering.
CW: Death of family members
Hailey’s plan is simple. So everyone thinks she’s a monster? So everyone thinks she was put on this earth to make them sick? Well, joke’s on them. She’s going to go to Sound Planet, the most extreme, exposed environment she can think of, and when everyone comes out of it hunky-dory, the picture of good health, they’ll have no choice but to believe her.
Read “The Noon Witch Goes to Sound Planet" in Lightspeed
“His software sang the words of God. Then it went silent.” by S.I. Rosenbaum
This nonfiction article details the history of TropeTrainer, a complex software for teaching Torah chanting, and Thomas Buchler (z"l), its sole creator. When he died unexpectedly, there was no one else who could maintain or recover the software. At the end of the article is a short clip of song that showcases TropeTrainer’s unique cantillation synthesis. Somber, touching, and wistful.
CW: Death
I first heard it played to me over the phone from a copy that hadn’t yet ceased to function. It was a voice unlike any I’d ever heard: not human but made by humans, generated by a piece of computer code dating to the 1980s, singing words of a text from the Bronze Age in a cadence handed down, from one singer to another, over thousands of years.
Read “His software sang the words of God. Then it went silent.” in Inverse
UP NEXT
I always love when I can recognize historical or literary parallels in a modern story, and I'm especially impressed with the ways SFF authors can evoke emotions about familiar characters in unusual ways (like body horror and John Lennon, featured above). The next issue's theme will be Unexpected Characters.
THANK YOU FOR READING
If you enjoyed any of these stories, please support their authors and the magazines that published them. I’d also love to hear any suggestions for future list themes! Just reply to this email or contact me elsewhere and I’ll use your theme (within reason) for a future newsletter.