My top 10 short stories read in 2021

Every once in a while, I decide that this, this is the time when I am actually going to get into reading short fiction; so, I pick up some collection and utterly fail to get into short fiction. This has never, I should note, stopped me from buying volumes of short fiction.

About a decade ago, in early 2011, I tried to get into short fiction with the much-recommended collection Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. I borrowed the collection from my home library in Machynlleth and only managed to get through a few stories before I had to return to Oxford and report back to the science fiction society (OUSFG) that I had failed.

At the start of 2021, I decided to try again.[1] Instead of ploughing through Stories of Your Life I decided to alternate with one of many short story collections that I have accumulated over the years: the 2016 edition of Some of the Best from Tor.com.One of the best books I read in 2020 was Charlie Jane Anders’ All the Birds in the Sky, and this collection began with a companion piece to that story about one of the most pressing loose ends of that novel – whatever happened to Patricia’s cat? These were auspicious beginnings. Throughout 2021 I read 145 short stories across eleven collections and two magazines, plus about four others independently of those collections.

I think this achievement, if it can be called that, is based on several intersecting factors. I have not been afflicted, as I am aware many have, with a lack of concentration when it comes to focusing on reading this pandemic – rather, I have struggled to keep staring at a computer screen and thus have failed to binge-watch as much media content as others have done. That being said, reading short stories somehow felt right in the isolated conditions of early 2021, a time that we might call “early mid” or perhaps “mid early” pandemic. Switching between volumes after each story gave a sense of completion that I find lacking when I just read one collection straight through. If you are struggling to focus on reading as the pandemic continues, I recommend short stories, as they require your attention for less time and, when you finish them, you get a bit of that dopamine rush from finishing a novel, which will hopefully encourage you to keep reading.

Below is a list of my top ten short stories of those I read in 2021 in the order in which I read them. In collections by a single author, I limited myself to one story in order to prevent this list being “my top nine stories from Spirits Abroad by Zen Cho and Ted Chiang’s ‘Hell is the Absence of God’”. Below the top ten is a list of the collections I read all or part of this year, with a link to my Goodreads review of the volume as a whole. In some of those Goodreads reviews I did a not-terrible job of keeping track of what I thought of each of the stories as I went along.

1. Ted Chiang, “Hell is the Absence of God” in Stories of Your Life and Others (2001).

While I have not ordered these stories in any kind of hierarchy, I think “Hell is the Absence of God” is my favourite short story that I read this year. The story occurs in a world in which the existence of God is certain, because angels manifest themselves causing natural disasters and when people die it is possible to see where their souls go. The protagonist, Neil, was unconcerned about going to Hell until his spouse, Sarah, is killed in an angel visitation and goes to Heaven. In order to be reunited with her, Neil must become devout; however, when this proves impossible, he decides to pursue seeing the light of Heaven, which makes all who see it love God.

In the story notes, Ted Chiang compares “Hell is the Absence of God” to the Book of Job, in which one of the major points is that virtue isn’t always rewarded – and yet, God rewards Job’s virtue. For Chiang, the Book of Job lacks the courage of its convictions. As for me, I am fascinated with theodicy – the question of why there is suffering if God is all-powerful and all-loving. But also, in presenting Hell as just existence without God, it also appeals to my belief that human existence doesn’t need the idea of a God, or faith, to thrive.

2. Ted Chiang, “The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling” in Exhalation (2013).

In the dialogue Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates tell the story of the invention of writing by the Egyptian god Thoth. When Thoth presents this new technology to the Pharoah, Thamus, as an aid to memory, Thamus replies that it is not an aid to memory but a way of reminding people – it will not spread real wisdom, but only the appearance of wisdom. People have been whining about new technology for millennia.

In “The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling”, Chiang presents a journalist reviewing an assistive technology called “Remem”, which allows users to record their life and search back through it, essentially giving them eidetic memory. As a parallel narrative, he describes the introduction of literacy to the Tiv. In doing so, his protagonist comes to the opposite conclusion to Thamus: memory is flawed; we use our memories to construct our past in a way that explains our present state teleologically. While both oral memory and writing have their advantages and disadvantages, personal experience leads him to side with the memory enhancer.

In a past, or perhaps parallel, life, part of the archaeology course I taught included the introduction of the alphabet to the Greeks in the eighth century BCE (or thereabouts). As Chiang writes in this story, “We don’t normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology” (p. 226); like all technologies when introduced into a social setting it has consequences that change that setting – but based as much on the pre-existing conditions as on the technology itself. Two stories that aren’t part of this list are worth mentioning here: Charlie Jane Anders’ “As Good as New”, an apocalyptic genie story about how the best policy is written with a combination of literary awareness and scientific knowledge; and Malka Older’s “The Black Box”, in which a similar technology creates issues of legacy – who gets to see the footage recorded in a person’s brain since birth?

3. Charlie Jane Anders, “six months, three days” in Six months, three days, five others (2011).

I’d been aware of “six months, three days” for a while, since my spouse Whitney read it a few years ago, but what prompted me to order this collection was a combination of my enjoyment of “Clover” (and All the Birds in the Sky) and the similar themes of this story and Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” – that is, how does knowing the future affect how we live? “six months, three days” is the story of what happens when Doug, the man who sees the future, and Judy, the woman who sees many possible futures, start dating.

The relationship in this story is doomed, and both protagonists know it – although one with more certainty than the other. Doug’s certainty comes across as a self-fulfilling prophecy: he knows that life will be bad, that his relationships will end, and that he will die young; his certainty makes him an asshole. On the surface, Judy is more likeable, but when I reread the story I noticed more cracks in her façade. Not only does she plan out her own life, seeing how things might work out for the best and moving toward them, but she’s also controlling, making decisions for others because she thinks she can see the best way they will turn out. She’s more sympathetic than Doug, but should she be? Her backstory is relatively benign, while his is tragic; but because he is so fixated on the negative, and she on the positive, I was more drawn to her.

For Judy, this story is about Doug’s single-focused despair overtaking her. She urges him to change his viewpoint – believes that she, with her power, is the only one who can make him change. But it is he who begins to collapse her choices into a single point, preventing her from choosing her own future. Nevertheless, her experience with him leads to an epiphany of her own.

4. Malka Older, “Perpetuation of the Species” in . . . and Other Disasters (2019).

In Euripides’ Medea, the eponymous protagonist says: “Men say that we live a life free from danger at home, while they fight with the spear. How wrong they are! I would rather stand three times with a shield in battle than give birth once.” (l. 248-251, trans. David Kovacs). In Malka Older’s story, the Space Marine Midwives don’t get that choice – they must birth a child (through artificial means) before they can become part of the military and do battle to protect the colony they are en route to found. Euripides’ gender binary is challenged in this story, but Older is not thinking about an ancient text here as far as I know. Rather, this story challenges the idea that childbirth is easy and natural, without physical and emotional ramifications; as well as linking and questioning the different ways in which the human species is perpetuated: birth, conquest, expansion, battle.

5. Philip K. Dick, “Faith of Our Fathers” in We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, Volume 5 of the Collected Stories (1966).

This Hugo-award nominated short story from 1966 begins with a 1984-in-Vietnam set up, in which a party member with doubts is enlisted in a semi-anti-party operation by a broadly characterless young woman to see the face behind the leader. As it’s Philip K. Dick, the protagonist takes drugs and sees beyond reality, as you do. But the reality he sees is a hallucinatory cosmic horror that seems to me to go beyond anything I’ve read in PKD in the past. The story is absolutely dated, but retains the interest of the best PKD in terms of writing weird shit.

6. Alyssa Wong, “A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers” in Some of the Best from Tor.com, 2016 Edition (2016).

It was probably 2016, when this story was published, that I last read anything by Alyssa Wong. In that time I was apparently able to forget how masterful she was at the horror genre, and between this story and “You’ll Surely Drown Here If You Stay”, in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year 11, I have been thoroughly reminded of that this year. I chose “A Fist of Permutations In Lightning and Wildflowers” as my favourite of the two because I’m a sucker for a time loop story, and the gut wrenching consequences of this one hit like the eponymous fist. It’s a story of family trauma and the catastrophe that ensues when the family in question includes two powerful sisters, weather workers and time benders, with different desires and reasoning.

7. Zen Cho, “The House of Aunts” in Spirits Abroad (2011).

Sometimes, I feel that there is so much I could possibly be reading that re-reading something is time that could be spent on experiencing something new. Other times I know that re-reading is not passively re-experiencing something, but experiencing it anew. With apologies to Heraklitos: you can’t read the same story twice; it’s not the same story and you’re not the same you.

The re-release of Zen Cho’s Spirits Abroad is not quite the same collection, absent one story from the ebook version I had previously read and adding several more. There were only two stories that I hadn’t previously read, but I found the experience of even those I had read in 2020 to be quite different a second time around. “The Four Generations of Chang-E”, which I have read three times now, hit me differently again. As I wrote in my notes: “The first time, I’m not sure I got it. The second, I did and I loved it. The third time it made me cry. A spectacular story and a very fitting end to this collection.”

The first time around I was underwhelmed by “The House of Aunts”, perhaps because it was the most hyped story in the collection. This time around, it formed a kind of prelude to my vampire-focused reading of the latter half of the year, especially in contrast to Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Certain Dark Things, which also uses the European concept of a vampire as part of a story concerning the bloodsuckers of another tradition. In “The House of Aunts”, the concept of a vampire is a kind of protective gloss over the tragedy in which Pontianak come to be; it is a way for the protagonist, Ah Lee, to feel romantic and cool rather than lonely and dead. Like all of Zan Cho’s work, it’s also heartfelt, and often funny. But seriously, this entire collection is worth it.

8. John Ajvide Lindqvist, “Let the Old Dreams Die” in Let the Old Dreams Die (2011).

Sometimes, I avoid going back to something because I am sure it cannot be as good as I remember it. I will have more to say about Let the Right One In – novel, audiobook, and both movies – if I get around to writing my top-ten books of the year, but after rewatching the Swedish film I was drawn back into the whole story, and discovered that it had a sequel, written principally because John Ajvide Lindqvist didn’t agree with the suggestions made about Oskar and Eli’s future in the two movies.

The story itself is largely not focused on Oskar and Eli, but is told by another inhabitant of the block of flats in which they lived. He tells the story of his friendship with Karin, one of the investigative officers into Oskar’s disappearance, and Stefan, the ticket collector of the train on which Oskar and Eli flee. Through Karin’s on-going investigation, we learn a little about what Oskar and Eli have been up to over the twenty-or-so years since the events of the novel, without getting to know too much. It’s exactly the kind of thing I didn’t realise I wanted a sequel to that story to be.

9. John Polidori, “The Vampyre” in The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre (1819).

The story is well known. One June night in 1816, the year without a summer, Lord Byron proposed to a group including Mary Wollstonecroft Godwin and her husband-to-be Percy Bysshe Shelley that they each write a ghost story. From this event emerged two of the most well-known horror monsters: Frankenstein’s creature, and the vampire.

The vampire pre-existed John Polidori’s tale, both as a creature of folklore and of English literature. Byron himself had written a poem about a vampire, “The Giaour”, and Polidori’s story is a re-working of an abandoned fragment by Byron that was to be his contribution to the contest. But Polidori’s short narrative gave the vampire a form more familiar to us today – notably, it is one of the first versions of the monster in which it takes the form of a handsome British aristocrat.

I have mixed feelings about “The Vampyre” itself: it is written with a kind of semi-omniscient narration that may or may not have been common at the time, but in comparison to the fragment by Byron, included in this edition, its shortcomings as prose are apparent. I’m surprised that anyone mistook it for Byron’s work (although it is clear that the publishing magazine did present it as such for marketing purposes) and shocked that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe called it Byron’s best work. But I still think it’s great. The human protagonist, Aubrey, and the vampire, Lord Ruthven, have a relationship that keeps the vampire close at hand throughout much of the story. It’s simple, as befits its length, while still having twists leading up to the tragic ending that show how, in a world predating modern vampire saturation, there would have been suspense and surprise. It makes it onto this list largely for the context in which I read it – saturating myself with vampire fiction and non-fiction – but it is absolutely worth reading if you are interested in vampires.

10. Sam J. Miller, “Things with Beards” in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year 11 (2016).

The first movie I watched this spooky season was John Carpenter’s The Thing, which I had never seen. The film looks amazing, has fantastic performances, and is definitely one of those films that I can see rewarding multiple viewings. But one of the reasons that I’m glad I finally watched it is because that meant I was prepared when I read Sam J. Miller’s “Things with Beards”. Miller’s story is a kind of sequel, in which a revived MacReady has returned to New York City, where there are many hidden monstrosities. At the core of this story is the AIDS epidemic, as well as civil rights activism, infiltrators, and passing. Miller considers what we keep hidden, the danger it poses, and what it means about who we are. I was a little confused at times, but I think on reflection it was me rather than the story which is ultimately very, very good.

The short story collections and magazines I read in 2021:

1. Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others (Review).
2. Troy Wiggins (ed.), FIYAH Literary Magazine 10: Hair (No overall review, but comments on each story)
3. Ted Chiang, Exhalation: Stories (No overall review, but comments on each story).
4. Charlie Jane Anders, six months, three days, five others (Review).
5. Malka Older, . . . and Other Disasters (Review).
6. Christopher Priest, Episodes (Review).
7. Ellen Daltow, Anne VanderMeer, and Carl Engle-Laird (eds.), Some of the Best from Tor.com, 2016 edition (Review).
8. Philip K. Dick, We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, Volume 5 of the Collected Stories (50% read in 2020; Review).
9. Troy L. Wiggins (ed.), FIYAH Literary Magazine 11 (Review).
10. Zen Cho, Spirits Abroad (2021 edition; Reviews of 2021 and 2014)
11. John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Old Dreams Die (Review).
12. Robert Morrison and Chris Baldick (eds.), The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre (Review).
13. Johnathan Straham (ed.), The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year 11 (Unfinished).

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[1] Incidentally, OUSFG also organized a reading group to discuss Ted Chiang’s short stories as part of their term card for Hilary Term 2021, but this only happened after I’d started reading Stories of Your Life.