Beyond Selidor

My reading this year is off to a good start, in volume if not always in quality. I'm trying something new at the moment — reading my way through online short fiction in my lunch breaks on the days I have to work in the office. This means I don't need to bring a physical book or my ereader into work. I'm hampered slightly by the fact that I only want to read things that I can log on Goodreads, which limits me, for the most part, to Tor.com original short fiction. So far, I've read:

'Of All the New Yorks in All the Worlds' (Indrapramit Das): A student of multiversal time travel slips from one version of New York to another, discovering that love may transcend timelines, but so too can heartbreak…

'Girl Oil' (Grace P. Fong): Chelle's friend, Wenqian, has everything Chelle doesn't. A slim figure, pale skin, and most notably the affection of her longtime friend Preston. Like the ocean waves she calls home, Chelle feels transparent and overflowing all at once. So when she's given body oil that promises to fix all of her mistakes, she'll use as much as it takes to reach perfection; no matter how much it hurts.

'Choke' (Suyi Davies Okungbowa): A night of food, fun, and festivities quickly turns sour. But what else can you expect when your ancestors say you will choke?

The third one was definitely the strongest, written with a slow creeping sense of horror, reminiscent of a Jordan Peele film.

I also finished a history of the Ottoman Empire by Marc David Baer (apparently the only university academic in the UK who teaches a full course on the Ottomans from start to end of their empire). Most of the broad sweep of this was familiar to me, but it fleshed out a lot of unfamiliar details and was an engagingly told work of popular history.



As for today's snowflake_challenge, the prompt is:

In your own space, add something to your fandom’s canon.

kingstoken's post about this is a partial inspiration, because it got me thinking of how often an open-ended or disatisfying ending encourages me to write fanfics for particular fandoms (and it seems this feeling is shared, since most of the fic I write is in response to exchange prompts). McKinley's Sunshine's ending is open-ended and ambiguous — and so we write fic to imagine what might happen next. The ending of The Dark Is Rising sequence is enraging (as are those of any fantasy novel — it seemed to be particularly common in the twentieth century, especially in books for children — which concludes with the doorway to the otherworld permanently closed, magic and the supernatural inaccessible or forgotten) and so we merrily find loopholes to override it. The ending of Leigh Bardugo's Six of Crows duology bothers me in ways that I think are down to my own personal circumstances — I can't stand any story that concludes that the only way for immigrants and refugees to find home and happiness is to return to their country of origin — and so I write story after story in which this band of wanderers returns to the city of their exile, the place in which they all found home and family and belonging in each other.

All of this, I guess, is adding something to various canons, and it certainly reflects my own preferences — I have an overwhelming preference for futurefic, rather than prequels or missing moments. I want to know what happens next. I want to see what the events of canon cause these characters to become.