Gav Reads

Tag: short-stories

  • BFA25 Review: Fight Like A Girl 2 edited by Roz Clarke and Joanne Hall

    This is the third review from my challenge to read the 2025 British Fantasy Award Best Anthology category.

    In the introduction, Charlotte Bond writes:

    Whatever your taste, whatever you’re looking for, in these pages, you will learn one thing: how to fight like a girl.

    And I did — though I also found a few stories that weren’t to my taste, which is a shame. With fewer stories than the other anthologies I’ve read so far, the weaker ones stand out a little more — but never mind, there are still some standout tales here.

    K T Davies’s The Seamstress, the Hound, the Cook, and her Brother surprised me the most using a triptych to follow a crime through different eyes. Having seen the situation build from competing viewpoints, the shifting perspectives give the reader deeper insight into the final scene.

    Shifts in perspective are definitely a theme.

    One perspective I enjoyed — though I felt a little cheated by — was in A Human Response by Dolly Garland. Here a women’s body is replaced, and she finds herself trapped. Slowly, she pieces together what happens to her. The character is supposed to be without emotion, yet she has emotional reactions, which feels jarring. It also fades to black at a key moment in the ending, which I think robbed the character of the agency Garland had built up.

    In In More Trouble Than She’s Worth? by Cheryl Morgan, the narrator lacks agency, but her perspective offers some great observations. For example:

    I like the chrome in the sick bay, but am not convinced by the white. My crew have odd taste at times. I, by the way, am Sagaris, an Artemis Class cruiser of the Queen’s Amazon Navy, General Thomys commanding.

    And

    I got him though, didn’t I?, I thought proudly to myself. You can’t scrag a target without wobbling a few crew stomachs. A little non-fatal discomfort does the little ones good.

    In this tale, the crew picks up some very precious cargo. Morgan uses the situation to explore how women can be both mothers and fighters — and how that differs from their enemies. This one made me cry.

    The arrogance of men was explored by directly and successfully by both Gaie Sebold and Juliet E. McKenna.

    In Ambition’s Engine, Sebold takes us to high society, where a newly appointed Chief Defender of the Dominion’s Transport hatches a plan to get more from a train ride than he was commissioned for. Sebold packs in commentary about war, colonialism, and the arrogance of powerful men.

    With Civil War, McKenna examines the impact of a change in monarch when the King has no male heir. She explores the options available to the court and the guilds. This was a like watching a royal game of chess and I didn’t see final the move until it was too late. Very cleverly done.

    In the introduction Roz Clarke and Joanne Hall suggest:

    ‘…perhaps now we can look beyond a direct kick back against the idea that women can’t fight, and start to reintegrate more traditionally acceptable forms of feminine power with that warrior archetype.’

    And they’ve proved with this collection that fighting and feminine power take many forms — from the bloody, to the subtle, to the fearless — with motivations that defy the ‘warrior archetype’.

    If you don’t need convincing that women can fight, this collection is for you. There are some excellent stories here.

    And if you do need some persuasion, this collection is also for you — though you might end up a little more paranoid than before, as not all fights are direct confrontations or fairly fought.

    Anthology Details

    Title: Fight Like a Girl – Volume 2
    Editors: Roz Clarke, Joanne Hall
    Publisher: Wizard’s Tower Press
    Publication Date: Autumn 2024
    ISBN (Paperback): 9781913892845
    ISBN (EPUB): 9781913892852
    ISBN (MOBI): 9781913892869
    Format: Paperback, EPUB, MOBI

  • BFA25 Review: I Want That Twink OBLITERATED! edited by Berg, McCartney & Galey

    This is the second review from my challenge to read the 2025 British Fantasy Award Best Anthology category.

    The title of I Want That Twink OBLITERATED! is provocative. It came from a comment made in jest, which sparked a train of thought that led to an anthology of…

    …stories that reclaim the idea of pulp for a queer audience, centre masculinities in a new light, and take [the reader] on a damn fun ride. Pulp parody, pulp pastiche, and pulp deconstruction.

    And unlike Death Becomes Her, I’m going to give you a warning before you drink the Queer-Aid:

    The stories in this volume run the gamut(s!) between funny, horny, heartbreaking, thrilling, horrific, explicit, and more.

    The opening story, In the Garden of the Serpent King by James Bennett, jumps right in, presenting the promised themes of humour, horror, and eroticism.

    The tone is set by exploring the question: “How do you subvert the ‘Englishman in Congo’ trope?”

    The answer is: you hammer home how of-its-time it was—in the gayest way possible. And the hammer keeps hitting home, tale after tale. This is not a subtle collection, but it contains lots of subtleties as themes emerge and intertwine.

    An overarching one is age and beauty, but the stories also explore narcissism turned into cannibalism, perfection as slavery, and—more importantly—love and legacy.

    These stories are best approached with a camp sense of fun, because there are a couple that are so silly they might be annoying—yes, Tea, Shade, and Drag Crusades by Bailey Maybray, I am thinking about you. It takes the “lip sync for your life” idea off into space. Where I feel Bailey fell short is that there are bits in the story that fail its own internal logic.

    Just as silly, but more successful, is Dotch Masher and the Planet ‘MM’ by William C. Tracy. This time, there’s a race across space to stop a villain—but are they rivals, or are they lovers? Now that’s a question that rears its head a lot.

    The conflict between internal and external is explored in Plezure by Rand Webber, which is reminiscent of The Stepford Wives—at least at the start—but evolves as the spell starts to crumble, thanks to love.

    Love is powerful. These authors have drawn on it and utilised it. The love can be familial (found or blood), friendly, or romantic. And it’s strong.

    I can now say I’ve read Aliette de Bodard. In The Tutelary, the Assassin, and the Healer, we encounter love in its negative and positive forms—grief and anger alongside romantic bonds—as it asks the question: What would you do for those you love? Taking a journey on a potentially insane ship seems to be one of them.

    In Yesterday’s Heroes by Charlie Winter, a warrior comes out of retirement to find someone he loves—but I’ll let you figure out what type of love the Boy in the tale represents.

    And despite the title’s request, not all twinks are obliterated. They are celebrated. And in some cases, they need to continue to be heard.

    Like the Tharsis Courier in Dusk and Dawn in the Grand Bazaar by John Berkeley, and the acquisition specialist in Hazard Pay by Malcolm Schmitz.

    I can’t leave this review without mentioning two of my favourites, as I’ve not had a way of slipping them in thus far—but I hope we get to see the twinks in these:

    • Narcissus Munro, Thief for Hire by Kieran Craft
    • In Sheep’s Clothing by Caleb Roehrig

    Before I go, it’s clear that despite some clumsiness in a few stories, I found them emotionally resonant. That might not be the case for every reader, but I think the editors hit their goal of reclaiming the idea of pulp, with stories that centred masculinities in a new light—and took this reader on a damn fun ride.

    Anthology Details

    • Title: I Want That Twink OBLITERATED!: A Radical Anthology of Queer SFF
    • Editors: Trip Galey, C.L. McCartney, Robert Berg
    • Publisher: Bona Books
    • Publication Date: November 1, 2024
    • ISBN: 9781068731112
    • Format: Paperback

  • BFA25 Review: Nova Scotia Vol 2 edited by Neil Williamson and Andrew J Wilson [2024]

    This is the first review from my challenge to read the 2025 British Fantasy Award Best Anthology category.

    Nova Scotia 2 Cover Art

    An anthology, to me, is a little bit like a selection box—mostly treats you’ve never tried before. There might be an author or two you’ve read previously, but for the most part, they’re new experiences. And I can say that’s true of this anthology.

    Jon Courtenay Grimwood and Ken MacLeod are authors I’ve read and enjoyed before. The others—apart from Grant Morrison—were unknown to me.

    The editors, Neil Williamson and Andrew J. Wilson, in their introduction to this collection of new speculative fiction from Scotland, ask and answer the question: What is speculative fiction?

    “It’s writing that challenges consensus reality. Speculative fiction includes science fiction, fantasy, horror, and all the variants and subgenres of these imaginative approaches to storytelling. What does it have to do with Scotland? Everything!”

    They also explain how they see the contributors’ connection to Scotland:

    “The contributors are all Scots. They’re Scottish in the broadest sense: some were native-born while others have chosen to make their home here; some are Highlanders and islanders, others urbanites; and this gives us an extraordinary range of perspectives. We wanted this collection to be inclusive, not exclusive, and we wanted not only the tight focus of introspection, but also the ability to see ourselves, as Burns had it, as others see us.”

    Did every story give me a sense of connection to Scotland? Not quite. There were definitely some stories that didn’t evoke that feeling, despite the editorial postscript often trying to explain the link. That sense of connection swings from strong to weak, and in a couple of cases, I felt their inclusion was tentative at best.

    The opening story by Ken MacLeod threw me slightly. It resurrects two folk singers from an earlier story (Newton’s Wake)—I’ve no idea how significant they were, as I’ve never met them before. Ken places them on a future Mars where AIs have not been a gift to humanity. But what niggled me was the use of “Joint Chiefs” in a military context. It felt like an odd Americanism in a story that should centre Scotland.

    Not understanding the importance of political and protest songs to Scotland reflects my own ignorance. And opening with what ends up being a very clever story, with multiple layers, set me up for the whiplash that followed.

    The whiplash effect comes from jumping between strong voices—at least at the beginning. There’s a TV star whose family traditions lie in curses, a homecoming that could lead to confrontation, a detective who gets too nosy about a specialist investigation team, and a good old-fashioned locked-room murder.

    A story that’s exceptional but felt out of place is Lise and Otto by Pippa Goldschmidt. It describes the rise of the Nazis but doesn’t, as hinted in the introduction, lean into the idea of “as others see us.”

    Another story I enjoyed was Broderie Écossaise by Eris Young. Again, it lacked a grounding in Scotland, though I’m glad I read such a clever story about embroidery and desire.

    We slip into body horror with Grimaldo the Weeping, as Ali Maloney explores the power of stories—and how often they’re closer to reality than we’d like.

    Junior by Lindz McLeod floored me. You’ll see why when you read it.

    There were also a few skips—sorry, Grant, I just couldn’t get into it.

    There’s environmental exploration in a couple of stories, volunteering that goes wrong, and the cutest—but saddest—dodo story.

    I need Doug Johnstone to write another story set in the world of Under the Hagstone—ideally with the same characters.

    There were more skips, and a few misses, but overall I’d say there’s enough variety and story strength to justify reading this all the way through—skipping where appropriate.

    Anthology Details

    • Title: Nova Scotia Vol 2: New Speculative Fiction from Scotland
    • Editors: Neil Williamson, Andrew J. Wilson
    • Publisher: Luna Press Publishing
    • Publication Date: July 30, 2024
    • ISBN: 978-1915556431
    • Format: Paperback