2020 Recap

2020 Recap

As we leave behind a cursed year to venture bravely into a likely cursed decade (and already very cursed year), here is a list of my writing that got published in 2020. Please feel free to read, if interested, or nominate for awards and that kind of thing, if you see fit. Also included is a list of some recommendations from books and stories I liked or loved this year, not necessarily all from this year. Feel free to nominate those for awards too, if appropriate! And may you have as wonderful, or not-awful, a 2021 as possible (bit late with the new year wishes because I’ve been dawdling on publishing this post, but hey, we’ve still got quite a few months left of ’21). We’ve difficult times ahead, but if you’re reading this (or not, but doing something else in your body, blissfully unaware of my 2020 recap post), you survived that year of plague and strife. We survived. And we’ll survive more. Enjoy:

STORIES

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‘Incarnate’ in Ann VanderMeer’s Avatars Inc. online anthology (avatars.inc), sponsored by XPrize and ANA to imagine (peaceful) future applications of telepresence technology. A short story about a political refugee from a still-fascist future India who briefly transcends borders and exile to visit her homeland of Bengal in a robotic telepresence ‘avatar’. You can read it for free by clicking here. The lovely illustration is by artist Janelle Barone.

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‘You Will Survive This Night’, in season 2 of Tor Nightfire’s audio horror anthology series Come Join Us by the Fire.  A short story about a reluctant guest navigating an increasingly nightmarish late-night winter rooftop party in Kolkata. You can listen to it for free by clicking here, but as of now, it is sadly geo-locked and restricted to readers/listeners in the United States, I believe. The story is narrated by the very talented Deepti Gupta.

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‘The Road From Kothali’, in the June 2020 Environment issue of Verve Magazine. A short futuristic musing about what the reckless treatment of India’s natural environment by capitalism and a government that couldn’t care less about the long-term survival of its people or ecosystems might lead to. You can read it for free by clicking here. The wonderful illustration is by Kashmira Sarode.

NON-FICTION

For issue 2 of the Imaginary Papers (edited by Joey Eschrich) quarterly newsletter ‘about science fiction worldbuilding, futures thinking, and the unplumbed depths of the imagination’, I wrote a brief essay about Stanislaw Lem’s The Futurological Congress (1971) and Ari Folman’s live-action/animated hybrid film adaptation of the novel, The Congress (2013), and how their different visions of futures veiled in tech artifice have come to seem quite prescient in recent times. You can read it for free by clicking here.

For the Tor Nightfire blog, I wrote an essay about the genre and feeling of horror, and how my relationship to it grew from childhood, and how it permeates all art. You can read it for free by clicking here.

RECOMMENDATIONS:

Stories:

Quiet by Aqdas Aftab (Strange Horizons)

Recognition by Victor LaValle (New York Times)

Prudent Girls by Rivers Solomon (New York Times)

Georgie in the Sun by Natalia Theodoridou (Uncanny Magazine)

Monsters Never Leave You by Carlie St. George (Strange Horizons)

Beyond the Dragon’s Gate by Yoon Ha Lee (Tor.com)

Rat and Finch Are Friends by Innocent Chizaram Ilo (Strange Horizons)

Redder by Vajra Chandrasekera (Nightmare Magazine)

The Translator, at Low Tide by Vajra Chadrasekera (Clarkesworld Magazine)

The Moon Fairy by Sofia Samatar (Conjunctions)

AirBody by Sameem Siddiqui (Clarkesworld Magazine)

Did You Die at Home? by Alexander Chee (The New York Times Style Magazine)

Teeth Long and Sharp as Blades by A.C. Wise (Pseudopod)

Wait for Night by Stephen Graham Jones (Tor.com)

teatime by Zin E. Rocklyn (Tor.com)

Here Sits His Ignominy by Tobi Ogundiran (Tor.com)

The State Machine by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne (Slate)

Hearts in the Hard Ground by G.V. Anderson (Tor.com)

The Land of Eternal Jackfruits by Rupsa Dey (Clarkesworld Magazine)

City of Red Midnight: A Hikayat by Usman T. Malik (Tor.com)

Scales as Pale as Moonlight by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Oprah Magazine)

The Wandering City by Usman T. Malik (Us in Flux)

Beyond These Stars Other Tribulations of Love by Usman T. Malik (Wired)

Inland by Vernon Jordan, III (The Black Youth Project)

And This is How to Stay Alive by Shingai Njeri Kagunda (Fantasy Magazine)

The Long Tail by Aliette de Bodard (Wired)

Six Dreams About the Train by Maria Haskins (Flash Fiction Online)

Deepster Punks by Maria Haskins (A Punk Rock Future Escape Pod)

Books:

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson

Chosen Spirits by Samit Basu

Night Theater by Vikram Paralkar

The Wall by Gautam Bhatia

The Salvage Crew by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo

With the Blade as Witness by Sloane Leong

Midnight Doorways by Usman T. Malik (technically a 2021 release; I’ll just mention it again end of this year)

The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez

This Is How You lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell

Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi

Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard

The Iron Dragon’s Daughter by Michael Swanwick

The High Priestess Never Marries by Sharanya Manivannan

Comics:

The Low, Low Woods by Carmen Maria Machado, DaNi, Dan McDaid

Wonder Woman: Dead Earth by Daniel Johnson Warren

The Seeds by Ann Nocenti, David Aja

Superman Smashes the Klan by Gene Luen Yang, Gurihiru

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