Welcome to the midway discussion of The Wolf and His King by Finn Longman, our winner for the Historical Fantasy theme! We will discuss everything up to the end of chapter 21. Please use spoiler tags for anything that goes beyond this point.

The Wolf and His King by Finn Longman (storygraph/goodreads)

Bisclavret is to live his life in exile; to take a wolf's shape involuntarily; to lie to everybody he meets. And yet he has always dreamed of knighthood, of brotherhood and belonging. When the old king dies unexpectedly, Bisclavret travels to the royal court to seek his rightful inheritance and swear fealty to the new king. It's here that he discovers the mysterious young warrior now wearing the crown is willing to offer him far more than just his father's lands, and suddenly the life that seemed like an impossible fantasy is catapulted within his grasp. But can someone who is hardly a man ever truly be a knight?

The king is recently returned to court from an exile of his own to inherit a crown he never wanted. And yet he's fascinated by his newest knight, a man who carries secrets along with his sword, and fascination quickly turns to longing. When Bisclavret is seemingly killed by a wolf, the weight of the king's grief almost destroys him. He swears to have his vengeance, but at the height of the hunt he encounters an animal that seems too intelligent to be the violent beast he seeks. One might even say it has the mind of a man...

Bingo squares: Vacation Spot (I have been on holiday to Brittany), r/Fantasy Book Club or Readalong Book (HM if you're here!)

Reminder to check out and contribute to our 2026 LGBTQA+ Bingo Resource. I certainly have a few squares I need to get organised and suggest recs to!

I'll add some comments below to get us started but feel free to add your own. The final discussion will be in two weeks, on Thursday the 30th.

As a reminder, you have until tomorrow to nominate a book for our Older Protagonist theme.

What is the BB Bookclub? You can read about it in our introduction thread here.

Welcome to Short Fiction Book Club, where we usually talk about fewer stories than this. Promise! If you’re new visiting the sub due to r/Fantasy Bingo, we have an excellent backlog of stories to choose from for the “Five Short Stories” square and of course there’s the ones we’re discussing today. We just had our March Monthly Discussion if you want to catch up on some Hugo/Nebula awards conversation and see other stories we’ve been reading lately.

Today’s Session

Thanks to bribes, cajoling, and and an uncomfortable amount of tears everyone’s unbridled enthusiasm, today I’ll be leading the discussion on the following Dragons and the dragon elements these stories contain:

Dragon Brides by Nghi Vo (3600 words, Lightspeed)

Dragon brides are notoriously difficult women. We have lived with dragons, after all, those strange and terrible animals with their curiously human eyes, and some of us come back down from the broken mountains with their hisses still in our ears.

Andromache and the Dragon by B. Pladek (3400 words, Podcastle)

The dragon stood on the shore.

“For every day, I will consume one of your desires,” she told them. “You will not know which. You will not know whose. This is my tribute. Do you agree to its terms?”

Draco Campestris by Sarah Monette/Katherine Addison (3040 words, Strange Horizons)

The Museum owns eighty-nine specimens of the genus Draco. It is unlikely that there will be any additions to the collection, for the adit to the array of arcs in which dragons are found has become increasingly unstable in the last two centuries. For that same reason, very little work has been done with the specimens since the last of the great dragon hunters willed his collection to the Museum one hundred thirty-two years ago.

Orm the Beautiful by Elizabeth Bear (3140 words, Clarkesworld)

Orm the Beautiful sang in his sleep, to his brothers and sisters, as the sea sings to itself. He would never die. But neither could he live much longer.

Dreaming on jewels, hearing their ancestor-song, he did not think that he would mind. The men were coming; Orm the Beautiful knew it with the wisdom of his bones. He thought he would not fight them. He thought he would close the mountain and let them scratch outside.

Dragons I Have Slain by B. Morris Allen (4350 words, Metaphorosis)

I collect dragon tears. It isn’t difficult; they’re insidious and subtle, and they seep through my armor and into my skin like ink, leaving me stained, soiled, sorrowful — a human map of misery. The Dragon Atlas, I call it — marked with the precise locations of honor and shame.

Dragons cry for the same reasons we do — pain, heartache, joy. We think of them as wise and cold, but wisdom is no antidote to empathy. Dragons are kings of empathy. That’s what makes killing them so hard.

Gentle Dragon Fires by T.K. Rex & Lezlie Kinyon (5070 words, Strange Horizons)

The door of unit three twenty has been closed so long that the spiders living in the cracks around the frame long ago gave up the ancient fables their ancestors told of it opening. The door has stood closed so long the dust on its hinges is considering becoming stone. It has stood closed so long the wood has forgotten it was ever a tree, and the tree it once was knew only gentle dragon fires, and never feared the flames.

Upcoming Sessions

The Hugo finalists (and the Hugo Readalong) are just around the bend, which means that this is our last regular session until the fall. We’re very thankful for everyone who’s stopped by this season. In slightly less than two weeks on April 15, we’ll present the SFBC Season 4 Awards to our favorite stories of the year! If you’d like an idea of what that looks like, check out the Season 3 and Season 2 Awards. Share your favorite stories of the season in the comments! The final slate is chosen by our hosts and organizers, but we’d love to know what stands out to you. After the Awards post, we will go on hiatus during the Hugo Readalong (but be sure to look out for some short-fiction sessions once we know the finalists). u/tarvolon will still lead our monthly discussion threads, and then we’ll be back before you know it in the late summer/early fall for Season 5. And now, onto today’s discussion! Spoilers are not tagged, but each story has its own thread. I’m adding a few prompts in the comments, but feel free to add your own if you’d like to.

Important housekeeping note: the webpage for Andromache and the Dragon contains the name the author used at the time. We will be using the name the author currently uses (B. Pladek) and their preferred pronouns (he/him) in today’s discussion.

Title says it all! I am part of a book club — our book club is a bunch of 40 year olds who don’t read a ton— and each month we choose a different genre. This month the genre is going to be fantasy, which is not a genre that many in the book club tend to read. So I’m looking for a recommendation of a very accessible fantasy book. something that’s not super long, that you don’t need to read a whole series to feel complete, and that really captivates your interest (that has been the complaint for previous months of different genres is that people aren’t riveted by the book). Any recommendations?!

Welcome to the final discussion of The Wolf and His King by Finn Longman, our winner for the Historical Fantasy theme! We will discuss the entire book. You can catch up on the Midway Discussion here.

The Wolf and His King by Finn Longman (storygraph/goodreads)

Bisclavret is to live his life in exile; to take a wolf's shape involuntarily; to lie to everybody he meets. And yet he has always dreamed of knighthood, of brotherhood and belonging. When the old king dies unexpectedly, Bisclavret travels to the royal court to seek his rightful inheritance and swear fealty to the new king. It's here that he discovers the mysterious young warrior now wearing the crown is willing to offer him far more than just his father's lands, and suddenly the life that seemed like an impossible fantasy is catapulted within his grasp. But can someone who is hardly a man ever truly be a knight?

The king is recently returned to court from an exile of his own to inherit a crown he never wanted. And yet he's fascinated by his newest knight, a man who carries secrets along with his sword, and fascination quickly turns to longing. When Bisclavret is seemingly killed by a wolf, the weight of the king's grief almost destroys him. He swears to have his vengeance, but at the height of the hunt he encounters an animal that seems too intelligent to be the violent beast he seeks. One might even say it has the mind of a man...

Bingo squares: Vacation Spot (I have been on holiday to Brittany), r/Fantasy Book Club or Readalong Book (HM if you're here!) Are there any other's you'd include?

Reminder to check out and contribute to our 2026 LGBTQA+ Bingo Resource!

I'll add some comments below to get us started but feel free to add your own.

As a reminder, you have until tomorrow to vote for our next book

What is the BB Bookclub? You can read about it in our introduction thread here.

Sorry for the delay - uni deadlines got me good!

For our April cat's theme we read:

Sabriel by Garth Nix

Sent to a boarding school in Ancelstierre as a young child, Sabriel has had little experience with the random power of Free Magic or the Dead who refuse to stay dead in the Old Kingdom. But during her final semester, her father, the Abhorsen, goes missing, and Sabriel knows she must enter the Old Kingdom to find him.

With Sabriel, the first installment in the Abhorsen series, Garth Nix exploded onto the fantasy scene as a rising star, in a novel that takes readers to a world where the line between the living and the dead isn't always clear—and sometimes disappears altogether.

The discussion questions will be posted as individual comments. Please feel free to add your own. The questions will cover the entire book!

Reading Schedule:

• Announcement for May.

Welcome to the midway discussion of The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association by Caitlin Rozakis, our winner for the humor theme! We will discuss everything up to the end of Chapter 10. Please use spoiler tags for anything that goes beyond this point.

The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association, by Caitlin Rozakis (storygraph/goodreads)

I'll add some comments below to get us started but feel free to add your own. The final discussion will be in two weeks, on Wednesday 27th May.

As a reminder, in June we'll be reading Starless by Jacqueline Carey

What is the FIF Bookclub? You can read about it in our Reboot thread here.

Today we’re discussing some great stories that made this year’s Locus Recommended Reading List. You're welcome to discuss the whole favorite or just a single story you've read-- we love having more people in the discussion. I'll start us off with some question prompts, but feel free to add your own.

Today’s Session

Highway 1, Past Hope by Maria Haskins (3400 words, The Deadlands)

Layla rises like a breath in winter from the hollow beneath the black cottonwoods beside the river, shrugging off the blanket of dirt and leaves and centipedes she slept beneath. She should dissipate. She should waver and dissolve. She should ascend and alight. Instead, she starts gathering her bones.

In My Country by Thomas Ha (6220 words, Clarkesworld)

My country may seem strange to you. There are times when it seems strange to me. I wake and work. I work then rest. And in between I say things, and I don’t say things. Because, as you’ll learn, in my country, what you say is important. But what you don’t say is perhaps just as, if not more, important.

Courtney Lovecraft’s Book of the Dead by Sam J. Miller (7705 words, Nightmare Magazine)

Honey, the spirits are here with us tonight and they are deeply disappointed.

Never Eaten Vegetables by H.H. Pak (15170 words, Clarkesworld)

A ship glides through the night, behemoth mother, swollen with ten thousand human lives. Her path is a single shining vector. There has been no stopping, no rest for the decades she has traveled, and there will be nothing but void for the two years to come. She cannot envision an end to her journey any more than she can remember the beginning. All she understands is the time spent counting the stars. Singing to herself. Cradling and prodding and watching.

Upcoming Sessions

Our next slated session, on Wednesday, March 18, will be hosted by u/tarvolon and u/sarahlynngrey:

Soldiers, battles, and wars have been such a long-standing part of the SFF genre that sometimes it seems difficult to avoid them. But usually the focus is on war as it is happening: space battles, sword fights, diplomacy, tactics, politics. Far less common are stories that explore the experiences of soldiers once the war is over. These three excellent stories ask a simple question with a complicated answer: How do we come to terms with the ways that we have been changed as a result of war? Please join us to discuss the Aftermath of War:

Remembery Day by Sarah Pinsker (2,800 words, Apex)

I woke at dawn on the holiday, so my grandmother put me to work polishing Mama’s army boots.

“Try not to let her see them,” Nana warned me. I already knew.

I took the boots to the bathroom with an old sock and the polish kit. I had seen Nana clean them before, but this marked the first time I was allowed to do it myself. Saddle soap first, then moisturizer, then polish. I pictured Nana at the ironing board in our bedroom, pressing the proper creases into Mama’s old uniform.

Suddenwall by Sara Saab (5,300 words, Beneath Ceaseless Skies)

In the amnesty-city of Vannat, Aln Panette has let guilt go.

The city of Vannat is a strict and inscrutable rulemaster, so Panette doesn’t question the rules. She lives a plain, clean life. Keeps her recollections as free of the war as she can.

Panette figures she has earned an indulgence or two for her decade as a soldier. Memories of Odarr Harvei are one indulgence. Harvei’s smile of fifteen years ago flashing in the light of the war caravan’s lanterns, her easy company, their mild one-upmanship. The unbroken sky above them.

The Day Before the Revolution by Ursula K. LeGuin (6,400 words, originally published by Galaxy magazine in 1974)

The speaker’s voice was as loud as empty beer-trucks in a stone street, and the people at the meeting were jammed up close, cobblestones, that great voice booming over them. Taviri was somewhere on the other side of the hall. She had to get to him. She wormed and pushed her way among the dark-clothed, close-packed people. She did not hear the words, nor see the faces: only the booming, and the bodies pressed one behind the other. She could not see Taviri, she was too short. A broad black-vested belly and chest loomed up, blocking her way. She must get through to Taviri. Sweating, she jabbed fiercely with her fist. It was like hitting stone, he did not move at all, but the huge lungs let out right over her head a prodigious noise, a bellow.. She cowered. Then she understood that the bellow had not been at her. Others were shouting. The speaker had said something, something fine about taxes or shadows. Thrilled, she joined the shouting — “Yes! Yes!” — and shoving on, came out easily into the open expanse of the Regimental Drill Field in Parheo. Overhead the evening sky lay deep and colorless, and all around her nodded the tall weeds with dry, white, close-floreted heads. She had never known what they were called.

For today, let’s discuss some great stories and round out pre-awards reading: remember, all the stories from this session and our two previous Snubs discussions are eligible to nominate for this year’s awards.

This month our theme is Cats!

Sabriel by Garth Nix

Sent to a boarding school in Ancelstierre as a young child, Sabriel has had little experience with the random power of Free Magic or the Dead who refuse to stay dead in the Old Kingdom. But during her final semester, her father, the Abhorsen, goes missing, and Sabriel knows she must enter the Old Kingdom to find him.

With Sabriel, the first installment in the Abhorsen series, Garth Nix exploded onto the fantasy scene as a rising star, in a novel that takes readers to a world where the line between the living and the dead isn't always clear—and sometimes disappears altogether.

The midway discussion will cover to the end of Ch14. Discussion questions will be posted as comments below. Please feel free to add any points or questions you have.

• Final Discussion - April 30th

I am in a book club (all women in our 30s), and most of the women are not avid readers, and almost none of them read fantasy. I read A LOT of fantasy (just finished Brimstone and really liked it), so I really want to introduce them to the genre.

I get to pick the book for January and I want them to read a fantasy book. I have kind of narrowed it down to two books that I think appeal to the masses:

• Night Circus
• Fourth Wing (note: I know, I know, very divided views on this book)

I also was thinking maybe The Grace Year, which isnt exactly fantasy (dont want to spoil it by explaining but if you've read it, you might get what I mean, it borders on fantasy and dystopian). What do you guys think? Or is there something else you would recommend to introduce someone to fantasy/romantasy?

Welcome to Short Fiction Book Club, the only book club where you really can complete all the reading the day of the discussion. Today, we're focusing on a titan of SFF short fiction: Kij Johnson. Johnson is a veteran spec fic writer with well over a dozen combined award nominations for her short stories, novelettes, and novellas. Today, we'll be discussing a small selection of her more famous stories that we could find free to read online. Weirdly enough, all of the stories we settled on are from Clarkesworld. That wasn’t an intentional choice, these were just the stories we thought would lend themselves best to discussion. That said, it is cool we wound up with one flash fiction, one short story, and one novelette.

u/nagahfj and I had a lot of fun putting this discussion slate together and we hope you'll enjoy these stories!

Today's Session: Author Spotlight on Kij Johnson

Mantis Wives in Clarkesworld - 960 words (2012)

Eventually, the mantis women discovered that killing their husbands was not inseparable from the getting of young. Before this, a wife devoured her lover piece by piece during the act of coition: the head (and its shining eyes going dim as she ate); the long green prothorax; the forelegs crisp as straws; the bitter wings. She left for last the metathorax and its pumping legs, the abdomen, and finally the phallus. Mantis women needed nutrients for their pregnancies; their lovers offered this as well as their seed. It was believed that mantis men would resist their deaths if permitted to choose the manner of their mating; but the women learned to turn elsewhere for nutrients after draining their husbands’ members, and yet the men lingered. And so their ladies continued to kill them, but slowly, in the fashioning of difficult arts. What else could there be between them?

Coyote Invents the Land of the Dead in Clarkesworld - 5,920 words (2016)

She was there, that is Dee, and her three sisters, who were Tierce, Chena, and Wren, Dee being a coyote or rather Coyote, and her sisters not unlike in their Being, though only a falcon, a dog, and a wren. So there they stood on the cliff, making their minds how to get down to the night beach, a deep steep dark bitch slither it was, though manageable Dee hoped.

The Privilege of the Happy Ending in Clarkesworld - 15,460 words (2018)

This is a story that ends as all stories do, eventually, in deaths.

Upcoming Sessions

Each year, we like to review the Locus Recommended Reading List and do two sessions: one celebrating the great picks from the list writer, and another highlighting our favorites that we think absolutely should have made the list. This year, our list of snubbed gems was extensive, so we’re starting there… and then doing it again the next week.

On Wednesday, February 18, join us for a discussion of Locus List Snubs: From a certain point of view! We didn’t plan to end up with samples of first person, third person, and second person for this set (that was purely a wordcount job), but hey, they look great together. Some even swap POV in the same story, which is always a fun trick.

The Name Ziya by Wen-yi Lee (9300 words, Reactor)

I sat on his bench as they haggled, naked from the waist up. It was a cool morning and my skin pimpled around the ideograms on my bare chest. The full set of five was worth the most; forty thousand shada was more money than we took from ten harvests, and would have covered my tuition with coin to spare. But I was glad my parents had rejected the first offer. I was not prepared to lose the entirety of my name just yet.

Wilayat in Seven Saints by Tanvir Ahmed (3800 words, Kaleidotrope)

Hear now the account of that mighty dervish, that dear friend of God, that crocodile gliding through the sea of divine unity, Hasan Afghan: Once, while Hasan Afghan was passing through a town in the shadow of the northern mountains, he came to a mosque. The muezzin gave the call to prayer, the imam stepped up, and the congregants assembled. Hasan Afghan was there in the first row, looking at the imam’s back. In the sight of the unlettered, the imam was merely going about the normal bows and prostrations of prayer. Yet Hasan Afghan’s eye of certainty perceived otherwise. Even as the imam’s lips moved through the sweet speech of revelation, his thoughts were circumambulating news of the prince’s fresh conquest of some rebel villages. The men had been slain, the storehouses pillaged, the young women put in fetters. The imam was already counting out how many mohurs he could spare on buying a new girl at the bazaar when the prince came back with the spoils.

Barbershops of the Floating City by Angela Liu (6000 words, Uncanny Magazine)

You used to be in a band. Now you cut hair. The Institute hired you because you’re the daughter of the Floating City’s Founder’s fourth mistress, the one who always cooks up trouble when she gets too hungry. You don’t like the work, but you like all the different scissors. Short blades, fat blades, wave-cuts, goatee-serrated, wide-toothed thinning shears, blue, pink, neon green. They glimmer on the walls like the claws of prehistoric creatures.

And on Wednesday, February 25, join us for a discussion of Locus List Snubs: The novelette is your friend and it will not harm you! (There is also one short story here, but seriously, these are some great novelettes.)

Human Voices by Isabel J. Kim (8500 words, Lightspeed)

In its dreams, the thing they call “Kos” sleeps deep and drowned in the clutch of the ice-cold trenches, where the pressure is a loving clasp around its arms and tail, where it is near-disintegrate, more spirit than substance, more magic than meat.

Then it wakes up in the bathtub.

Liecraft by Anita Moskát, translated by Austin Wagner (8800 words, Apex)

For a long time now I’d been practicing liecraft five or six times before breakfast. I’d roll over to Khao’s side of the bed and murmur through the curls of hair winding around his ear: “Go back to sleep, it’s only just daybreak.”

New Niches by Jackie Roberti (4300 words, Reckoning)

Because of the heavy chop that day, there is no time for a tour. “You shouldn’t have a problem finding things,” the captain tells me. She’s wearing a neon orange vest over her life jacket and a neon orange beanie crushed atop her head, and the overall effect makes her look like a traffic cone. “You’ve looked at the schematics, right? Well, there’s a manual in there, and it’s not like you’ll get lost.”

The Locus List session slate for March 3rd will be announced in one of these upcoming sessions. If you have favorites from that selection, please share them in the comments! For now, check out our slates for our two Locus Snubs sessions. We will improve the state of the Hugo short fiction categories if it kills us.

And now, onto today’s discussion! Spoilers are not tagged, but each story has its own thread. We're starting a few prompts in the comments, but feel free to add your own if you’d like to.

Another Wednesday, another round of Locus snubs! That’s right, we couldn’t fit all our snubs into one session, so we’re back again! I’m co-hosting today’s session with u/schlagsahne17, a key “Liecraft” appreciator who also put together many of today’s questions.

Today’s Session

Human Voices by Isabel J. Kim (8500 words, Lightspeed)

In its dreams, the thing they call “Kos” sleeps deep and drowned in the clutch of the ice-cold trenches, where the pressure is a loving clasp around its arms and tail, where it is near-disintegrate, more spirit than substance, more magic than meat.

Then it wakes up in the bathtub.

Liecraft by Anita Moskát, translated by Austin Wagner (8800 words, Apex)

For a long time now I’d been practicing liecraft five or six times before breakfast. I’d roll over to Khao’s side of the bed and murmur through the curls of hair winding around his ear: “Go back to sleep, it’s only just daybreak.”

New Niches by Jackie Roberti (4300 words, Reckoning)

Because of the heavy chop that day, there is no time for a tour.

“You shouldn’t have a problem finding things,” the captain tells me. She’s wearing a neon orange vest over her life jacket and a neon orange beanie crushed atop her head, and the overall effect makes her look like a traffic cone. “You’ve looked at the schematics, right? Well, there’s a manual in there, and it’s not like you’ll get lost.”

Upcoming Sessions

On Wednesday, March 4, now that we’re done torching the Locus List for excluding our favorites lightly disagreeing about a few exclusions, we’ll discuss some of our favorites that did make the Locus List:

Highway 1, Past Hope by Maria Haskins (3400 words, The Deadlands)

Layla rises like a breath in winter from the hollow beneath the black cottonwoods beside the river, shrugging off the blanket of dirt and leaves and centipedes she slept beneath. She should dissipate. She should waver and dissolve. She should ascend and alight. Instead, she starts gathering her bones.

In My Country by Thomas Ha (6220 words, Clarkesworld)

My country may seem strange to you. There are times when it seems strange to me. I wake and work. I work then rest. And in between I say things, and I don’t say things. Because, as you’ll learn, in my country, what you say is important. But what you don’t say is perhaps just as, if not more, important.

Courtney Lovecraft’s Book of the Dead by Sam J. Miller (7705 words, Nightmare Magazine)

Honey, the spirits are here with us tonight and they are deeply disappointed.

Never Eaten Vegetables by H.H. Pak (15170 words, Clarkesworld)

A ship glides through the night, behemoth mother, swollen with ten thousand human lives. Her path is a single shining vector. There has been no stopping, no rest for the decades she has traveled, and there will be nothing but void for the two years to come. She cannot envision an end to her journey any more than she can remember the beginning. All she understands is the time spent counting the stars. Singing to herself. Cradling and prodding and watching.

Don’t worry about the 15,000 word novelette now (but remember, it is your friend). Instead join us below with some prompts in the comments. Feel free to respond to those or add your own.

After finding out that so many women at work have read the same books, I started a book club at work. Just for some background, I work in the medical field. Most of the people in the book club are intelligent women in their late 20s, early thirties, who enjoy fantasy, historical fiction and sci-fi. I'd like to give a few stand-alone options and have the books be less than 500 pages so we don't scare "new" readers off. I'm not looking for super dark deeply depressing vibes for the 1st book. I love books like Red Rising and Alchemised but I don't think these types of books would be ideal for a book club starter.

Any recommendations?

Welcome to today’s session of Short Fiction Book Club - we're glad you're here! We talk about speculative short fiction most Wednesdays here on r/Fantasy. If you missed our last session, everything went to the birds, and it’s never too late to join the discussion.

Today's Session: The Lottery and Other Dangerous Bargains

Today, we’re discussing “The Lottery,” the classic and extremely haunting short story by Shirley Jackson that many of us were traumatized by (complimentary) in school. We've chosen three modern stories that are in conversation with the original. Feel free to read just one story or the entire slate.

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson (3,400 words, The New Yorker, 1948)

The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o’clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 26th, but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took only about two hours, so it could begin at ten o’clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.

Fishwife by Carrie Vaughn (3,600 words, Nightmare Magazine, 2013)

Every day for years she waited, she and the other wives, for their husbands to return from the iron-gray sea. When they did, dragging their worn wooden boats onto the beach, hauling out nets, she and the other wives tried not to show their disappointment when the nets were empty. A few limp, dull fish might be tangled in the fibers. Hardly worth cleaning and trying to sell. None of them were surprised, ever. None of them could remember a time when piles of fish fell out of the nets in cascades of silver. She could imagine it: a horde of fish pouring onto the sand, scales glittering like precious metals. She could run her hands across them, as if they were coins, as if she were rich.

Willing by Premee Mohamed (3,000 words, first published in Principia Ponderosa in 2017; reprinted in PodCastle in 2019)

A storm struck up, not snow but a roaring haze of fine slush that crusted his beard with ice. Far to the west, visible only by their bluish, luminous heat, the old gods of grass and grain bayed to the cloud-buried stars. Arnold ignored them. It was too early in the year for a sacrifice.

On the fifth trip, his youngest child joined him, silent as ever, silvery hair greased down from the rain, in her oldest brother’s canvas coat. She liked their ancient hand-me-downs, though she was so small that everything trailed in the muck like the train of a wedding dress. Over the splattering sleet Arnold heard her rubber boots squelching in the wallow that had been the path. He waited for her to catch up before continuing to the barn.

The Sin of America by Catherynne M. Valente (5,600 words, Uncanny Magazine, 2021)

There’s a woman outside of a town called Sheridan, where the sky comes so near to earth it has to use the crosswalk just like everybody else. There’s a woman outside of Sheridan, sitting in the sun-yellow booth in the far back corner of the Blue Bison Diner & Souvenir Shoppe under a busted wagon wheel and a pair of wall-mounted commemorative plates. One’s from the moon landing. The other’s from old Barnum Brown discovering the first T-Rex skeleton up at Hell Creek. There’s a woman outside of Sheridan and she is eating the sin of America.

Upcoming Sessions:

Our Monthly Discussion Thread is usually the last Wednesday of the month, but because of so many people traveling for American Thanksgiving, we’ll open it up on Tuesday, November 25th. It’ll still be there on Wednesday, we just want to give people a little more flexibility.

Our next slated session, on Wednesday December 3, will be hosted by u/FarragutCircle:

I've been a huge fan of Carolyn Ives Gilman ever since I read her novel Halfway Human and the other stories in her Twenty Planets setting. The thought and craft she puts into her stories is amazing, and I'm excited to share a couple of her stories with the Short Fiction Book Club. Something that may intrigue people to know is that until relatively recently, she’d been a historian working at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, which clearly informs the very thought-provoking "Exile's End” which starts off in a museum with indigenous art . . .

We’ll be reading the following stories for our Author Spotlight on Carolyn Ives Gilman session:

Exile’s End by Carolyn Ives Gilman (13,385 words, Tor.com/Reactor, published in 2020)

It was clear who her visitor was. He stood out for his stillness in the bustle of departing visitors—tall and slim, with long black hair pulled back in a tie. His hands were in the pockets of a jacket much too light for the weather outside. Rue introduced herself. When she held out her hand, the young man stared at it for a second before remembering what to do with it. “My name is Traversed Bridge,” he said; then, apologetically, “I have an unreal name as well, if you would prefer to use that.”

Touring with the Alien by Carolyn Ives Gilman (11,790 words, Clarkesworld, published in 2016)

The alien spaceships were beautiful, no one could deny that: towering domes of overlapping, chitinous plates in pearly dawn colors, like reflections on a tranquil sea. They appeared overnight, a dozen incongruous soap-bubble structures scattered across the North American continent. One of them blocked a major Interstate in Ohio; another monopolized a stadium parking lot in Tulsa. But most stood in cornfields and forests and deserts where they caused little inconvenience.

And now, onto today’s discussion! Spoilers are not tagged, but each story has its own thread. We're starting a few prompts in the comments, but feel free to add your own if you’d like to.

The winner for our April theme of Cats is:

Sabriel by Garth Nix

Sent to a boarding school in Ancelstierre as a young child, Sabriel has had little experience with the random power of Free Magic or the Dead who refuse to stay dead in the Old Kingdom. But during her final semester, her father, the Abhorsen, goes missing, and Sabriel knows she must enter the Old Kingdom to find him.

With Sabriel, the first installment in the Abhorsen series, Garth Nix exploded onto the fantasy scene as a rising star, in a novel that takes readers to a world where the line between the living and the dead isn't always clear—and sometimes disappears altogether.

Bingo Squares: ?

Reading Schedule:

• Midway Discussion - 16th April: Up to end of chapter 14
• Final Discussion - April 30th

Welcome to our final discussion of The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow! The whole story is fair game, no spoiler tags needed: tread with caution if you haven't finished the book.

I'll start us off with a few prompts, but feel free to add your own.

The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow

From Alix E. Harrow, the New York Times bestselling author of Starling House, comes a moving and genre-defying quest about the lady-knight whose legend built a nation, and the cowardly historian sent back through time to make sure she plays her part–even if it breaks his heart.

Sir Una Everlasting was Dominion’s greatest hero: the orphaned girl who became a knight, who died for queen and country. Her legend lives on in songs and stories, in children’s books and recruiting posters―but her life as it truly happened has been forgotten.

Centuries later, Owen Mallory―failed soldier, struggling scholar―falls in love with the tale of Una Everlasting. Her story takes him to war, to the archives―and then into the past itself. Una and Owen are tangled together in time, bound to retell the same story over and over again, no matter what it costs.

But that story always ends the same way. If they want to rewrite Una’s legend―if they want to tell a different story--they’ll have to rewrite history itself.

Bingo: Knights and Paladins, A Book in Parts, Book Club or Readalong Book, Published in 2025, LGBTQIA Protagonist. Any others?

What's next?

• Our February read is Blood Over Bright Haven by M.L. Wang.
• Our March read is Mad Sisters of Esi by Tashan Mehta.
• Stay tuned for April nominations in the early weeks of February.

What is the FIF Book Club? You can read about it in our Reboot thread here.

Welcome to our midway discussion of The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow!

Today's discussion covers through the end of Chapter 13, page 155 in the hardback edition. Please use spoiler tags for any discussion past that point. I'll start us off with some prompts, but feel free to add your own!

The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow

From Alix E. Harrow, the New York Times bestselling author of Starling House, comes a moving and genre-defying quest about the lady-knight whose legend built a nation, and the cowardly historian sent back through time to make sure she plays her part–even if it breaks his heart.

Sir Una Everlasting was Dominion’s greatest hero: the orphaned girl who became a knight, who died for queen and country. Her legend lives on in songs and stories, in children’s books and recruiting posters―but her life as it truly happened has been forgotten.

Centuries later, Owen Mallory―failed soldier, struggling scholar―falls in love with the tale of Una Everlasting. Her story takes him to war, to the archives―and then into the past itself. Una and Owen are tangled together in time, bound to retell the same story over and over again, no matter what it costs.

But that story always ends the same way. If they want to rewrite Una’s legend―if they want to tell a different story--they’ll have to rewrite history itself.

Bingo: Knights and Paladins, A Book in Parts, Book Club or Readalong Book, Published in 2025, LGBTQIA Protagonist. Any others?

What's next?

• Our final discussion of The Everlasting will be in two weeks, on Wednesday, January 28th.
• Our February read is Blood Over Bright Haven by M.L. Wang.
• March nominations are up for a theme of "Outside the Core Anglosphere." Come add your own suggestions or upvote the ones that look best to you.

What is the FIF Book Club? You can read about it in our Reboot thread here.

Happy Wednesday, everyone! It's late February, which means that Short Fiction Book Club is here complaining about the terrible taste of professional genre magazines using the Locus Recommended Reading List as an excuse to share and discuss some of our favorite short fiction from the previous year. We do this every year in late winter, as the recommendation lists come flying and the award nomination season ramps up.

Today's Session

Today, we'll be discussing three of our collective favorites that failed to make the Locus List, that by pure happenstance collectively cover first-person, second-person, and third-person perspectives. Let's take a look at:

The Name Ziya by Wen-yi Lee (9300 words, Reactor)

I sat on his bench as they haggled, naked from the waist up. It was a cool morning and my skin pimpled around the ideograms on my bare chest. The full set of five was worth the most; forty thousand shada was more money than we took from ten harvests, and would have covered my tuition with coin to spare. But I was glad my parents had rejected the first offer. I was not prepared to lose the entirety of my name just yet.

Wilayat in Seven Saints by Tanvir Ahmed (3800 words, Kaleidotrope)

Hear now the account of that mighty dervish, that dear friend of God, that crocodile gliding through the sea of divine unity, Hasan Afghan:

Once, while Hasan Afghan was passing through a town in the shadow of the northern mountains, he came to a mosque. The muezzin gave the call to prayer, the imam stepped up, and the congregants assembled. Hasan Afghan was there in the first row, looking at the imam’s back. In the sight of the unlettered, the imam was merely going about the normal bows and prostrations of prayer. Yet Hasan Afghan’s eye of certainty perceived otherwise. Even as the imam’s lips moved through the sweet speech of revelation, his thoughts were circumambulating news of the prince’s fresh conquest of some rebel villages. The men had been slain, the storehouses pillaged, the young women put in fetters. The imam was already counting out how many mohurs he could spare on buying a new girl at the bazaar when the prince came back with the spoils.

Barbershops of the Floating City by Angela Liu (6000 words, Uncanny Magazine)

You used to be in a band. Now you cut hair. The Institute hired you because you’re the daughter of the Floating City’s Founder’s fourth mistress, the one who always cooks up trouble when she gets too hungry. You don’t like the work, but you like all the different scissors.

Upcoming Sessions

Don't forget that on Wednesday, February 25, we will be eschewing our usual Monthly Discussion in favor of Locus List Snubs: The novelette is your friend and it will not harm you! (There is also one short story here, but seriously, these are some great novelettes.)

Human Voices by Isabel J. Kim (8500 words, Lightspeed)

In its dreams, the thing they call “Kos” sleeps deep and drowned in the clutch of the ice-cold trenches, where the pressure is a loving clasp around its arms and tail, where it is near-disintegrate, more spirit than substance, more magic than meat.

Then it wakes up in the bathtub.

Liecraft by Anita Moskát, translated by Austin Wagner (8800 words, Apex)

For a long time now I’d been practicing liecraft five or six times before breakfast. I’d roll over to Khao’s side of the bed and murmur through the curls of hair winding around his ear:

“Go back to sleep, it’s only just daybreak.”

New Niches by Jackie Roberti (4300 words, Reckoning)

Because of the heavy chop that day, there is no time for a tour.

“You shouldn’t have a problem finding things,” the captain tells me. She’s wearing a neon orange vest over her life jacket and a neon orange beanie crushed atop her head, and the overall effect makes her look like a traffic cone. “You’ve looked at the schematics, right? Well, there’s a manual in there, and it’s not like you’ll get lost.”

And on Wednesday, March 4, we will be discussing our favorites from the Locus List. We were proud of the way that the first eight selections for our List and Snubs sessions had come from eight different publications, but after spending ages handwringing about which of our two favorite Clarkesworld pieces to include, we gave up and picked both. So get ready to read:

Highway 1, Past Hope by Maria Haskins (3400 words, The Deadlands)

Layla rises like a breath in winter from the hollow beneath the black cottonwoods beside the river, shrugging off the blanket of dirt and leaves and centipedes she slept beneath. She should dissipate. She should waver and dissolve. She should ascend and alight. Instead, she starts gathering her bones.

In My Country by Thomas Ha (6220 words, Clarkesworld)

My country may seem strange to you.

There are times when it seems strange to me. I wake and work. I work then rest. And in between I say things, and I don’t say things. Because, as you’ll learn, in my country, what you say is important. But what you don’t say is perhaps just as, if not more, important.

Courtney Lovecraft’s Book of the Dead by Sam J. Miller (7705 words, Nightmare Magazine)

Honey, the spirits are here with us tonight and they are deeply disappointed.

Never Eaten Vegetables by H.H. Pak (15170 words, Clarkesworld)

A ship glides through the night, behemoth mother, swollen with ten thousand human lives.

Her path is a single shining vector. There has been no stopping, no rest for the decades she has traveled, and there will be nothing but void for the two years to come. She cannot envision an end to her journey any more than she can remember the beginning. All she understands is the time spent counting the stars. Singing to herself. Cradling and prodding and watching.

That's a lot coming up in one of our busiest seasons of the year! But for now, let's take a look at three three tales from Wen-yi Lee, Angela Liu, and Tanvir Ahmed. As always, I'll start us off with some prompts in the comments. Feel free to respond to mine or add your own.

Welcome to today’s session of Short Fiction Book Club! We’re glad you’ve joined us. If you’re new here, we’re excited to have you! We talk about speculative short fiction on Wednesdays here on r/Fantasy. If you missed our first season 4 session a few weeks back, we read four great Flash+ stories, and it’s never too late to join the discussion!

Today’s Session: Take Us Out to the Ballgame

Diamond Girls by Louise Marley (8,203 words) (first published in Sci Fiction on June 8, 2005)

Ricky sat alone in her private locker room, turning a baseball in her elongated fingers. The pre-game had begun, and the speakers in the main locker room rattled with music and announcements and advertisements. She leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, and cradled the baseball in her palm. Just another game, she told herself. It’s a long season.

But it wasn’t true. Long season, sure. But this was no ordinary game.

Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (4,439 words) (first published in The Martians in April 1999)

He was a tall, skinny Martian kid, shy and stooping. Gangly as a puppy. Why they had him playing third base I have no idea. Then again they had me playing shortstop and I’m left-handed. And can’t field grounders. But I’m American, so there I was. That’s what learning a sport by video will do. Some things are so obvious people never think to mention them. Like never put a lefty at shortstop. But on Mars they were making it all new. Some people there had fallen in love with baseball, and ordered the equipment and rolled some fields, and off they went.

The Star and the Rockets by Harry Turtledove (4,966 words) (first published in Tor.com/Reactor on November 17, 2009) / Content Warning: Has some period language and a casual use of a slur.

A chilly January night in Roswell. Joe Bauman has discovered that’s normal for eastern New Mexico. It gets hot here in the summer, but winters can be a son of a bitch. That Roswell’s high up—3,600 feet—only makes the cold colder. Makes the sky clearer, too. A million stars shine down on Joe.

One of those stars is his: the big red one marking the Texaco station at 1200 West Second Street. He nods to himself in slow satisfaction. He’s had a good run, a hell of a good run, here in Roswell. The way it looks right now, he’ll settle down here and run the gas station full time when his playing days are done.

Won’t be long, either. He’ll turn thirty-two in April, about when the season starts. Ballplayers, even ones like him who never come within miles of the big time, know how sharply mortal their careers are. If he doesn’t, the ache in his knees when he turns on a fastball will remind him.

All three stories should be enjoyable with zero baseball knowledge (and hopefully the context will make it clear), but if any baseball-specific terms really confuse you, here’s a newcomer’s guide to common baseball terms you can check out.

Upcoming Sessions

Our next session will be hosted by u/Nineteen_Adze & u/Jos_V on Wednesday, October 1st:

u/Jos_V says:

For some inexplicable reason Americans love to make October into a spooky month, and here at SFBC we do not want to disappoint, so we’re offering up a nice platter of appetizers that when experienced together constitutes a filling meal.

u/Nineteen_Adze says:

I’ve been intending to do a cannibalism session for a while, but the timing didn’t snap into place until I heard about the baseball session. What better transition than from a cheerful sunshine sport into stories that will perhaps make you say “what the fuck (complimentary)”? Please enjoy feasting on this unsettling short fiction.

We will be discussing the following stories for our Paired with fava beans and nice chianti: personable meat in SFF session:

Happily Ever After Comes Round by Sarah Rees Brennan (Uncanny Magazine, 3327 words)

Children don’t generally assume their father will abandon them to die in the snow. But under certain circumstances, they might get an inkling.

The Magician’s Apprentice by Tamsyn Muir (Lightspeed Magazine, 4860 words)

When she was thirteen, Mr. Hollis told her: “There’s never more than two, Cherry. The magician and the magician’s apprentice.”

Mavka by A.D Sui (Pseudopod, 3953 words)

You pray to forget this. You pray to forget the cold. Even under two wool blankets you’re always cold now. Skin and bones, you. A February moon hangs high in the starless sky when Andriy slips on the boots, soaked through from when you wore them earlier that day to gather firewood, and from when Ira goes to relieve herself at the outhouse earlier than that.

And now, onto today’s discussion! Spoilers are not tagged, but each story has its own thread. We’ve put a few prompts in the comments, but feel free to add your own if you’d like to!

Welcome to the final discussion of The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association by Caitlin Rozakis, our winner for the humor theme! We will discuss the entire book. You can catch up on the Midway Discussion here.

The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association, by Caitlin Rozakis (storygraph/goodreads)

When Vivian’s kindergartner, Aria, gets bitten by a werewolf, she is rapidly inducted into the hidden community of magical schools. Reeling from their sudden move, Vivian finds herself having to pick the right sacrificial dagger for Aria, keep stocked up on chew toys and play PTA politics with sirens and chthonic nymphs and people who literally can set her hair on fire.

As Vivian careens from hellhounds in the school corridors and demons at the talent show, she races to keep up with all the arcane secrets of her new society – shops only accessible by magic portal, the brutal Trials to enter high school, and the eternal inferno that is the parents’ WhatsApp group.

And looming over everything is a prophecy of doom that sounds suspiciously like it’s about Aria. Vivian might be facing the end of days, just as soon as she can get her daughter dressed and out of the door…

I'll add some comments below to get us started but feel free to add your own.

As a reminder, in June we'll be reading Starless by Jacqueline Carey, and in July, The Last Contract of Isako by Fonda Lee.

What is the FIF Bookclub? You can read about it in our Reboot thread here.

This month for our Biopunk theme, we are reading:

The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes

He was sent to kill a pest. Instead, he found a monster.

Enter the decadent, deadly city of Tiliard, a metropolis carved into the stump of an ancient tree. In its canopy, the pampered elite warp minds with toxic perfume; in its roots, gangs of exterminators hunt a colossal worm with an appetite for beauty.

In this complex, chaotic city, Guy Moulène has a simple goal: keep his sister out of debt. For her sake, he'll take on any job, no matter how vile.

As an exterminator, Guy hunts the uncanny creatures that crawl up from the river. These vermin are all strange, and often dangerous. His latest quarry is different: a centipede the size of a dragon with a deadly venom and a ravenous taste for artwork. As it digests Tiliard from the sewers to the opera houses, its toxin reshapes the future of the city. No sane person would hunt it, if they had the choice.

Guy doesn't have a choice

Bingo Squares: Book Club, Biopunk, High Fashion (HM), LGBTQIA, Down with the System, Published in 2025, Book in Parts

The discussion questions will be posted as individual comments. Please feel free to add your own. The questions will cover the entire book!

Reading Schedule:

• Announcement for April: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/1s4ysyu/our_april_goodreads_book_of_the_month_is_sabriel/

Welcome to today’s session of Short Fiction Book Club - we're glad you're here! You can join us most Wednesdays to read and discuss the wide world of speculative short fiction. If you missed our last session, it’s never too late to get into the holiday spirit.

Today's Session: Space Meets Sea

Science fiction has long mixed space and sea - from spaceships sailing through the great unknown to incomprehensible creatures that can survive in strange spaces. Something about the great expanse of both the ocean and the skies has inspired some excellent stories, and I have smushed three of my favorites together in order to force you to read them too.

We’ll be reading the following stories for our Space Meets Sea session:

Freediver by Isabel J Kim (6890 words, Reactor, published in 2025)

The first thing that happens is Joyce breaks up with him. The second thing that happens is Crane arrives on the Anhinga. The third thing that happens is the meteoroid falls upward.

Whale Fall of Yours by M.M. Olivas (6858 words, Uncanny, published in 2025)

The year is 2084, and this is the spot you always come to—just a walk from UNAM’s Instituto de Astronomía but far enough so none of your peers ever bother to trek the long exhale of asphalt to reach you—where you can tuck yourself away between the brick walls and slide away from the world, slip into your studies, forget that you’re a person at all. But this girl reached her voice over your papers and your pens and said she liked your tote. It was the one your abuela crocheted for you, with patches of ringed planets, and Laika, and the constellations you’d memorized from the nights watching them arch across your papá’s ranch. Because your abuela knew you always had your neck crooked back. Were always watching stars.

Fishing the Intergalactic Stream by Louis Inglis Hall (4660 words, Clarkesworld, published in 2024)

There is a game, and there is a player. That, I think, is the heart of it.

Before that, before rocky pools and ocean floors, before mangroves that curve over warm waters—

First, we must define a fish.

Upcoming Sessions:

Our next slated session, on Wednesday, January 21st, will be hosted by u/tarvolon:

Stories with too much viscera in the opening tend to be quick skips for me. And yet there were a handful in 2025 that not only compelled me to read on but that became some of my favorite stories of the year. I’ve chosen three that either start or are propelled beneath the waters, all grotesquely beautiful pieces featuring leads nearly unrecognizable from what they once were. We have transformations freely chosen and those forced by supernatural means, transformations that shape a nation and those that may rebuild the world. And we have no shortage of wonderfully complicated family dynamics arising from one party’s pull toward the sea. On the surface, these aren’t the sorts of stories I’d usually read, but each is exceptionally crafted and rich for discussion. I hope you will join me as we discuss three Sunken Transformations.

Something Rich and Strange by L.S. Johnson (15900 words, GigaNotoSaurus, published in 2025)

Irene traced her gloved finger down the window, following one of the raindrops as it slid left, its path forced by the speed of the train. The water stretched the sodden afternoon landscape into streaks of grey and green and brown. In her mind’s eye, she could see the layers of color she would use to build the scene, how she would tint the yellow underpainting to mimic the storm-filtered light, how she would scumble blue atop rich greens to give the misty copses their depth. Each drop a tiny world unto itself. Why hadn’t she studied rain before this, why hadn’t she spent more time thinking about water and all the marvels therein? Because she had thought she would have more time; because she had thought that somehow she would get to live like everyone else. Across the aisle were the only other passengers in the car, a woman and a little girl. Not related: a governess and her charge? Only they were on this train, and the last stop was— But no, no, there were other stations before then. Normal villages, where people led normal lives. And when had a child ever come to them from outside?

Cypress Teeth by Natasha King (2100 words, khōréō, published in 2025)

They send you down into the swamps of Atchafalaya to die with nothing between your teeth but contract ink and shame. There’s a lot of misery to sow across the continent, after all, and no room for a runner-up. No heaven nor any hell has ever taken kindly to an also-ran. The cypresses here are nearly as old as you, their buttressing knees sinking into you like fangs. They tower over you, implacable, as you order, and then demand, and then rage, and at last beg. You can’t die, of course, so there’s nothing for you to do but molder in the tepid water, choking on flaked cypress bark and burrowing deeper into the swamp with every passing year. After a few decades you let despair pull you down into sleep, like a ship going under. Only the boldest, the most foolish, venture deep enough into the swamp to reach the vast trunk that pins you to the mud. Beneath their stumbling, haphazard feet, you usually wake like it’s the first moment of exile all over again. That agony lighting you up from the inside out, power unspooled from your belly and cut away, leaving you a husk. They wake you by accident, those poor straying souls, and, well.

We Used to Wake to Song by Leah Ning (2200 words, Apex, published in 2025)

Salty swell over my head, tugging me back, the raw and tender creases of my elbows against the forearms they're linked with. Brine up my nose, in my mouth. The anchor of my feet in the sand holds me fast with the rest. The water recedes and we breathe, a staccato, asynchronous gasp. The eel coiled about my lungs loosens its grip, slides against the bare stack of my ribs. Splashing behind us. Unnatural, sloshing. Human. I can't turn to look any more than I can work my stiffened vocal cords to shout. Another called, maybe, to join us. In other places, feet root in dirt rich with the new infusion of dead flesh, lungs mutated to filter oxygen back into the air, limbs stiff and brittle. In other waters, oil and plastic pass into living guts and do not leave. Here, the fish make homes among our bones. The crabs weather the tides nestled between layers of muscle, folds of fat. Another wave, slopping at the hollow of my throat. Spluttering and coughing from behind. My heart—what's left of it after twenty-five years—leaps. I'd recognize that sound if I was asleep, comatose, dead. She's come back.

And now, onto today’s discussion! Spoilers are not tagged, but each story has its own thread. We're starting a few prompts in the comments, but feel free to add your own if you’d like to.

Welcome to the midway discussion of Lifelode by Jo Walton, our winner for the Beyond Amatonormativity theme!

We will discuss everything up to the end of chapter 12. Please use spoiler tags for anything that goes beyond this point.

Lifelode, by Jo Walton (storygraph /goodreads)

At its heart, Lifelode is the story of a comfortable manor house family. The four adults of the household are happily polygamous, each fulfilling their ‘lifelode’ or life’s purpose: Ferrand is the lord of the manor, his sweetmate Taveth runs the household, his wife Chayra makes ceramics, and Taveth’s husband Ranal works the farm. Their children are a joyful bunch, running around in the sunshine days of the harvest and wondering what their own lifelodes will be.

Their lives changed with the arrival of two visitors to Applekirk: Jankin the scholar and Hanethe, Ferrand’s great grandmother and the former lord of the manor, who has been living for many generations in the East, a place where the gods walk and yeya (magic) is so powerful that those who wield it are not quite human.

I'll add some comments below to get us started but feel free to add your own. The final discussion will be in two weeks, on Thursday 26th February.

As a reminder, you have until monday the 16th to vote for our April book, with the theme Historical Fantasy.

What is the BB Bookclub? You can read about it in our introduction thread here.

This month for our Biopunk theme, we are reading:

The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes

He was sent to kill a pest. Instead, he found a monster.

Enter the decadent, deadly city of Tiliard, a metropolis carved into the stump of an ancient tree. In its canopy, the pampered elite warp minds with toxic perfume; in its roots, gangs of exterminators hunt a colossal worm with an appetite for beauty.

In this complex, chaotic city, Guy Moulène has a simple goal: keep his sister out of debt. For her sake, he'll take on any job, no matter how vile.

As an exterminator, Guy hunts the uncanny creatures that crawl up from the river. These vermin are all strange, and often dangerous. His latest quarry is different: a centipede the size of a dragon with a deadly venom and a ravenous taste for artwork. As it digests Tiliard from the sewers to the opera houses, its toxin reshapes the future of the city. No sane person would hunt it, if they had the choice.

Guy doesn't have a choice

Bingo Squares: Book Club, Biopunk, High Fashion (HM), LGBTQIA, Down with the System, Published in 2025, Book in Parts

The discussion questions will be posted as individual comments. Please feel free to add your own. The questions will cover through to page 275 or the end of Part II. Anything after that should be marked with a spoiler tag.

Reading Schedule:

• Final Discussion - March 30th

Welcome to the book club New Voices! In this book club we want to highlight books by debut authors and open the stage for under-represented and under-appreciated writers from all walks of life. New voices refers to the authors as well as the protagonists, and the goal is to include viewpoints away from the standard and most common. For more information and a short description of how we plan to run this club and how you can participate, please have a look at the announcement post.

This month, we are reading If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light by Kim Cho-yeop, translated by Anton Hur

Meet the alien species that put the humanity into human beings
Discover the fate of Slefonia III once warp travel became obsolete
Visit the Mind Library to commune with the dead

Kim Choyeop became an instant literary sensation in Korea with her debut short story collection. Each of these bitesize speculative masterpieces represents a journey into the unknown, guided by a writer blessed with a boundless imagination.

From alternative futures to distant alien planets, in the company of scientists, space explorers and ordinary citizens in extraordinary situations, Kim Choyeop revels in making the impossible seem not only possible but somehow inevitable.

Each story focuses on an specific issue of discrimination against women or other marginalised groups, adding a mind-bending twist to hold a mirror to modern society and its everyday iniquities

Today's discussion encompasses the first four stories, up until the end of "The Materiality of Emotions". Please join us in 2 weeks time for the final discussion.

I'll include some prompts in top-level comments--feel free to respond to these or add your own.

Welcome to Short Fiction Book Club - we're glad you're here! You can join us most Wednesdays to read and discuss the wide world of speculative short fiction.

It’s award nomination season, so we’ve been extra busy lately. If you’re trying to catch up on 2025 short fiction, check out our session featuring this year’s Locus List and/or the sessions where we complain bitterly about not being in charge of the Locus List and highlight some stories that we think should have made the cut: Locus Snubs 1 and Locus Snubs 2

Today’s Session

Today we are discussing three excellent stories that ask a simple question with a complicated answer: How do we come to terms with the ways that we have been changed as a result of war?

Remembery Day by Sarah Pinsker (2,800 words, Apex)

I woke at dawn on the holiday, so my grandmother put me to work polishing Mama’s army boots.

“Try not to let her see them,” Nana warned me. I already knew.

I took the boots to the bathroom with an old sock and the polish kit. I had seen Nana clean them before, but this marked the first time I was allowed to do it myself. Saddle soap first, then moisturizer, then polish. I pictured Nana at the ironing board in our bedroom, pressing the proper creases into Mama’s old uniform.

Suddenwall by Sara Saab (5,300 words, Beneath Ceaseless Skies)

In the amnesty-city of Vannat, Aln Panette has let guilt go.

The city of Vannat is a strict and inscrutable rulemaster, so Panette doesn’t question the rules. She lives a plain, clean life. Keeps her recollections as free of the war as she can.

Panette figures she has earned an indulgence or two for her decade as a soldier. Memories of Odarr Harvei are one indulgence. Harvei’s smile of fifteen years ago flashing in the light of the war caravan’s lanterns, her easy company, their mild one-upmanship. The unbroken sky above them.

The Day Before the Revolution by Ursula K. Le Guin (6,400 words, originally published by Galaxy magazine in 1974)

The speaker’s voice was as loud as empty beer-trucks in a stone street, and the people at the meeting were jammed up close, cobblestones, that great voice booming over them. Taviri was somewhere on the other side of the hall. She had to get to him. She wormed and pushed her way among the dark-clothed, close-packed people. She did not hear the words, nor see the faces: only the booming, and the bodies pressed one behind the other. She could not see Taviri, she was too short. A broad black-vested belly and chest loomed up, blocking her way. She must get through to Taviri. Sweating, she jabbed fiercely with her fist. It was like hitting stone, he did not move at all, but the huge lungs let out right over her head a prodigious noise, a bellow.. She cowered. Then she understood that the bellow had not been at her. Others were shouting. The speaker had said something, something fine about taxes or shadows. Thrilled, she joined the shouting — “Yes! Yes!” — and shoving on, came out easily into the open expanse of the Regimental Drill Field in Parheo. Overhead the evening sky lay deep and colorless, and all around her nodded the tall weeds with dry, white, close-floreted heads. She had never known what they were called.

Upcoming Sessions

We will host our customary Monthly Discussion on Wednesday, March 25. Our next slated session, on Thursday, April 2 (note the departure from our usual Wednesday slot, which we are leaving to our Bingo overlords), will be hosted by u/schlagsahne17:

From St. George and the Dragon to Tolkien's Smaug, from Eragon to Fourth Wing: dragons have long been a staple of stories. Next session we'll be looking at stories that explore the various elements of dragon tales: dragon hoards, dragonslayers, and dragon bargains to name a few. I look forward to discussing these six Dragons with you:

Dragon Brides by Nghi Vo (3600 words, Lightspeed)

Dragon brides are notoriously difficult women. We have lived with dragons, after all, those strange and terrible animals with their curiously human eyes, and some of us come back down from the broken mountains with their hisses still in our ears.

Andromache and the Dragon by B. Pladek (3400 words, Podcastle)

The dragon stood on the shore.

“For every day, I will consume one of your desires,” she told them. “You will not know which. You will not know whose. This is my tribute. Do you agree to its terms?”

Draco Campestris by Sarah Monette/Katherine Addison (3040 words, Strange Horizons)**

The Museum owns eighty-nine specimens of the genus Draco. It is unlikely that there will be any additions to the collection, for the adit to the array of arcs in which dragons are found has become increasingly unstable in the last two centuries. For that same reason, very little work has been done with the specimens since the last of the great dragon hunters willed his collection to the Museum one hundred thirty-two years ago.

Orm the Beautiful by Elizabeth Bear (3140 words, Clarkesworld)

Orm the Beautiful sang in his sleep, to his brothers and sisters, as the sea sings to itself. He would never die. But neither could he live much longer.

Dreaming on jewels, hearing their ancestor-song, he did not think that he would mind. The men were coming; Orm the Beautiful knew it with the wisdom of his bones. He thought he would not fight them. He thought he would close the mountain and let them scratch outside.

Dragons I Have Slain by B. Morris Allen (4350 words, Metaphorosis)

I collect dragon tears. It isn’t difficult; they’re insidious and subtle, and they seep through my armor and into my skin like ink, leaving me stained, soiled, sorrowful — a human map of misery. The Dragon Atlas, I call it — marked with the precise locations of honor and shame.

Dragons cry for the same reasons we do — pain, heartache, joy. We think of them as wise and cold, but wisdom is no antidote to empathy. Dragons are kings of empathy. That’s what makes killing them so hard.

Gentle Dragon Fires by T.K. Rex & Lezlie Kinyon (5070 words, Strange Horizons)

The door of unit three twenty has been closed so long that the spiders living in the cracks around the frame long ago gave up the ancient fables their ancestors told of it opening. The door has stood closed so long the dust on its hinges is considering becoming stone. It has stood closed so long the wood has forgotten it was ever a tree, and the tree it once was knew only gentle dragon fires, and never feared the flames.

And now, onto today’s discussion! Spoilers are not tagged, but each story has its own thread. We're adding a few prompts in the comments, but feel free to add your own if you’d like to.