SHORT STORY REX May 2025

1. “Solander’s Radio Tomb”, Ellis Parker Butler

Seems less like a short story title and more like the name of some magical D&D spell (like, idk, Melf’s Minute Meteors or something) so it's got that going for it right off the bat. I know next to nothing about Ellis Parker Butler except that he was apparently quite popular early in the 20th century America as a humorist in the Mark Twain vein. This story, though, appeared in not one but two magazines published by the inventor of ‘scientifiction’ Hugo Gernsback (first Radio Times, then Amazing Stories). Without wanting to give anything away I’ll say it examines the conflict of the sacred and the profane in a time of rapid technological change. It's also quite funny

I FIRST met Mr. Remington Solander shortly after I installed my first radio set. I was going in to New York on the 8:15 A.M. train and was sitting with my friend Murchison and, as a matter of course, we were talking radio. I had just told Murchison that he was a lunkheaded noodle and that for two cents I would poke him in the jaw, and that even a pin-headed idiot ought to know that a tube set was better than a crystal set.  

RIP this guy you would have loved the internet

2. “The Hole in the Moon”, Margaret St. Clair

Sticking with the “old-school” theme, I guess, this originally appeared under the pseudonym Idris Seabright in a 1952 issue of F&SF. It reminds me another MSC story I recommended way back in the first ever Short Story Rex. Like "Squee", this one deals with the aftermath of a "'The Screwfly Solution"-before-"The-Screwfly-Solution"' scenario, not in outer space this time but rather a Bay Area junkyard inhabited by the not-proverbial ‘last man on Earth’, sole survivor of a sexually transmitted plague. There's something that feels rabidly modern, very 2015-present, about the ugly and unstable mix of hatred and lust and fear the protagonist reacts with in the face of an unattainable, idealized female form which (fittingly) may or may not even be real. As ever I love St Clair’s "both...and” approach to science fiction and fantasy, her refusal to follow strict norms about genre and about a bevy of other things as well.¹

3. “Bottles Of”, “Currency”, “Fish Eyes”, Ivy Grimes

Huge month for us Ivy Grimes fans, with these stories in Hex, Keep Planning, and The Bulb Region where Grimes continues to unravel her narrative concern with the extended family or, as it’s been called for most of human history, 'family’. So often with Grimes there's cousins and uncles, grandparents galore, an immediately apprehensible ecosystem from which her stories sprout in all their spindly, keenly felt weirdness.

The narrator tends to be both a part of and apart from this and other systems, always at a level of remove. In "Bottles Of" the family she must navigate is actually her rich friend Alison's adopted family, at Christmas no less, although “no one was murdered in that holiday house until just after Christmas, on the 26th.”

Meanwhile in "Currency” our protagonist has left his parents behind and immigrated to a new place where his uncle and grandparents now live, and must discover how best to parlay a complicated inheritance of sorts--a rare $222 bill--into a triumphant entreè to a new social milieu. And in “Fish Eyes”, the darkest of the three, there is something haunting the story that it doesn’t want to tell us about, something that happened to S (the daughter), that the narrator (her mother) doesn’t want to think about, something which everyone at this party of “old friends […] mingling with the friends of my children and grandchildren” seems to have a theory about.

“Maybe this is hell. After all, what’s the difference between hell and this party?”

4. “Scion: Afterword”, Thomas Ha

So a funny thing happened. I was immediately drawn in by this Thomas Ha piece—"This is more experimental in form than his usual stuff," I remember thinking as the text progressed from one found-fiction format to the next, from scientific communique to alien videosermons to diary entries to narrative poetry in rhyming couplets and so on. I also couldn't help but flag the throwaway names "Dr Peake", "Dr Wolfe" "Dr Koji", and while I am not at all well versed in the authors referenced, I have osmosed enough knowledge about the Pringle Man, at least, to realize at least a few friends and colleagues of mine will be reading this and doing an enthusiastic Leo point…

…but somehow, in all of this, I missed that this is apparently a companion piece for a nearly 20,000 word novella (novellette? idfk) entitled “Scion”, which came out in the same issue and which i have not read yet. It’s a testament to Ha’s writing that I didn’t even notice! Also, egg on my face! And something to look forward to…

LONGER STORY REC: “Uncertain Sons”, Thomas Ha

Speaking of Thomas Ha novellas (novellettes? idfk) I’d bought and read (re-read, in most cases) Ha’s collection Uncertain Sons and Other Stories a long while back but had set the titular story aside to savor for later. I swear I must have let my defenses down in that lapse of time because this one hits so hard in a way I should have expected and yet…Ha’s got me scoped out, got my heart in the crosshairs like it’s some space monster up in the hills that he doesn’t want to kill but knows he’s gotta do it

(coincidentally a couple days before this newsletter goes out Ha took home the Best Short Story and Best Collection awards for “In My Country” and Uncertain Sons and Other Stories, both immensely deserved imo!)

NOT-A-STORY REC: 60 Minutes of Funk, Funkmaster Flex

you—all—know—howthe—sto—ry—GOES

old school so sweet