SHORT STORY REX Dec 2024
1. “The Giraffe”, Charles O. Smith
Here's one of those fables that has not only sea monsters and magical potions but also op-eds and drag nights and old flamenco records. According to the “About the author” note, it’s inspired by “Apple Girl”, a story from Italo Calvino’s Italian Folk Tales, a book which I have not read, but I’d say the lineage checks out. The story also features “rangers”, each wearing their own distinctive color of uniform, but they’re park rangers, not the Mighty Morphin Power variety
2. “Richard Brautigan”, Addison Zeller
The name Richard Brautigan looms large in this brief prose piece entitled “Richard Brautigan”, so much so it reminds me of how large ‘Trout Fishing in America’ (as an activity, a concept, a character, a name for a hotel) looms in the book of the same name. Reading this I am also reminded for some reason of cel animation, of various still images superimposed on one another, probably due to how the story captures these concurrent slices of autobiography, personal geography, hagiography, all sorts of overlapping, intersecting -ographies
3. “House Traveller” and “The Sort”, Thomas Ha
If 2023 is remembered (by me, I don’t know about the rest of y’all) as “The Year of Ivy Grimes” here at Short Story Rex1, then 2024 should be thought of as the year of Thomas Ha. Ha’s fiction first popped up on my radar late last year, and ever since I’ve been psyched every time that radar signal pings. So it makes sense to be closing out the year’s short story recs with these two.
“The Sort” (which I missed in the August issue of Clakesworld) and “House Traveller” (in the most recent Bourbon Penn) are both sharp, lovingly-crafted knives of stories, honed to stab clean through the “parent” part of your brain in whatever form that may exist. I’ve heard Ha compared to Bradbury and that fits here: “House Traveller” with its alien, archetypal, nightmarish quality, “The Sort” in its treatment of ritual, its reverence for the roving animal inside the human mind.
These stories and others of Ha’s look at the various ways that the kids are not all right, at what results from the encounter of innocence with the senselessness of the world. Probably not an accident that his upcoming collection is entitled Uncertain Sons and Other Stories. Will be payched to get my hands on that book
4. “Not My Problem”, Tim Maughan
A week or so into the aftermath, I awoke to news of an important internet event that took place while I was sleeping. A boxing match had been emitted via a major streaming platform. This match pitted a famous Youtuber and idiot against an elderly, retired boxer with credible rape accusations and all the after-effects of head trauma that his status as an elderly retired boxer might suggest. Bluesky was all a-twitter with news and views and memes surrounding the event2 but one caught my eye:
Just the day before, in what was either an eerie synchronicity or a manifestation of something floating in the zeitgeist, I’d read this story by Tim Maughan. In it, the narrator shares what is purportedly an article “written mainly by [an] LLM (“Lathie”), with a little editing and direction from me […] an AI’s vision of the future of AI art in the form of a timeline of the next decade.”
For those who share my visceral hatred for the use of AI in most all walks of life, please note there is a disclaimer at the end of the piece clearing up any confusion of narrative voice and authorial identification: “This story is a work of solely human-crafted speculative fiction. No artificial intelligences, generative processes or large language models were involved in writing it.”
But it's quite obvious, I’d argue, that this story is not AI-generated because if it were, it would suck shit3.
And this piece does not suck shit. A sobering timeline of imagined future events is laid out, in which the famous “I’ll buy that for a dollar” clips from Paul Verhoeven’s classic 1987 film Robocop are expanded into their own full-length TV programs by generative AI, and end up hyperstitioning into something terrifying (and terrifyingly familiar), a scenario for people to all give into their basest impulses in time of crisis. Verhoeven Reality, indeed.
Kill the Bixby Snyder in your head
Not-a-story rec: Man is the Bastard, “Moloch”
“Happy” holidays…
To be clear, 2024 has also very much been the year of Ivy Grimes--witness the publication of her brilliant novella Star Shapes and equally--nay, even more--brilliant collection Glass Stories, and of course her interview here in Short Story Rex ↩
Speaking of AI sucking shit, and of Thomas Ha, please see his story "The Mub" which I recommended back in January ↩
Some people were referring to Tyson vs Paul as the moment when Bluesky "got the juice" and really came into its own as a replacement for what Twitter was in its heyday, or at least the mythical idyll folks think they remember Twitter used to be like. Personally, I'd argue that the “moment of juice” (as it were) actually came a month later, with the UHC shooting and the ensuing “murder is bad, actually” discourse, Luigi-posting, etc. ↩