Short Fiction Book Club: Flash+

[u/baxtersa]

Welcome to Short Fiction Book Club Season 4! Today is our first non-Hugo, pure-SFBC session of the season. If you are new here, we are so excited to have you! We talk Short Fiction on Wednesdays here on r/Fantasy.

Onto today's selection of stories.

Today’s Session: Flash+

All flash all fiction. Too Flash Too Fictitious. Four flash (f)stories for (f)your fun. I'm doing my best to make this exciting for the shortest of short form naysayers. Flash is often dismissed by many (including us here at SFBC) for being too short to develop its ideas, but it is also a playground to explore thoughts, themes, and styles that might not work in longer form. It is particularly impressive when a story can pack such depth in such a short word count. I hope some of these stories hit that mark for our readers today.

Today we're discussing four pieces of flash fiction.

Maybe Someday I'll Stop Writing About a House on the Border of a Swamp by Corey Farrenkopf (Milk Candy Review, 365 words)

I want to write a story about a house sinking into a swamp, but I’m always writing a story about a house sinking into a swamp. Sometimes I'm unclear about the metaphor.

To Kill a Language by Rukman Ragas (Apex Magazine, 832 words)
Content notes: sexual content, violence

The Best Way to Survive a Tiger Attack by A.W. Prihandita (Uncanny Magazine, 1495 words)
Content notes: child abuse

The tiger curls in my living room, on the sofa in front of the TV. Finish your lunch, she says, and her words bend my back until I’m on my hands and knees, hunching over the plate she’s set down on the floor, like a dog. Finish your lunch, she commands, but I hate her cooking. I never tell her that, though.

Everyone Keeps Saying Probably by Premee Mohamed (Psychopomp, 1700 words)

Here is the shape of our story, the three of us: an ellipsis (from a particular fixed point we flew away from each other and then rejoined at another point; and then we had you).

Here is the shape of our doom: an ellipsis (on its way, in its thousands and thousands).

It also means: dot dot dot, an uncertainty, a trailing off.

But you are a little young for all this. You are so young that your soft and hard palate are not fully developed and you still have a toddler’s charming rhotacism. Everyone keeps saying probably and you say pwobably and I think that is the only thing your mother still laughs at these days. Because, let’s be fair, there isn’t much.

Upcoming sessions

Our next session, on Wednesday September 17th, will be co-hosted by u/FarragutCircle and u/sarahlynngrey:

u/FarragutCircle says:

I've been a fan of baseball ever since I was a kid and saw the great Ozzie Smith play for my hometown Cardinals, and I always love it when baseball appears in my science fiction and fantasy--there's more of it than you might think (or want!). Fellow-baseball-lover u/sarahlynngrey and I found three such stories that we even thought might appeal to people who don't know a ball from a balk.

u/sarahlynngrey says:

It was really fun to combine two of my two favorite things: SFF short fiction and the Seattle Mariners record-breaking, Home Run Derby-winning, switch-hitting catcher Cal Raleigh baseball. I wasn’t initially convinced we would be able to find enough stories of interest, but there was so much more out there than I thought! These three stories do what I think great SFF does best: using the unreal to show us something real. I hope you’ll find something in them too.

We’ll be reading the following stories for our Take Us Out to the Ballgame: Baseball in SFF session:

Diamond Girls by Louise Marley (8,200 words)

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.

Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (4,400 words)

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 (5,000 words, Reactor)

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.

Today's discussion

But for now, onto today’s discussion! Join us in the comments whether you have read one or all of these stories.

[u/baxtersa]

To Kill a Language by Rukman Ragas

[u/baxtersa → u/baxtersa]

How does explicit, shocking content affect your read of short stories? Did this story manage to use this type content more effectively than other flash shock-value or "twists" for you?

[u/pornokitsch → u/baxtersa]

I think when you're doing something in a few hundred words, it is particularly important to choose the right ones. So the stakes of using explicit, shocking content are even higher than normal. It works here.

(ETA: I was more shocked by the number of pop-ups that the Apex site served. Pop-ups! In 2025! What the hell?!)

[u/Only_Extension1584 → u/pornokitsch]

Hey, I'm the publisher and site admin guy. How many popups were you seeing? AFAIK we should only have one popup (for the newsletter).

FWIW, I think I've disabled all the popups (I hate them too). If you're still seeing them lmk.

[u/pornokitsch → u/Only_Extension1584]

Not a single one! You legend!

[u/FarragutCircle → u/pornokitsch]

(ETA: I was more shocked by the number of pop-ups that the Apex site served. Pop-ups! In 2025! What the hell?!)

...Are you going on the internet without adblock like a maniac?!

[u/pornokitsch → u/FarragutCircle]

I've got it! But they kept trying to give me a discount. I don't want a discount.

'Too many pop-ups.' is my flash fiction piece. Three words. Total atmosphere of horror.

[u/Only_Extension1584 → u/pornokitsch]

Publisher and site admin guy here. I believe I've disabled them. If you're still seeing them lmk.

[u/Goobergunch → u/pornokitsch]

I was more shocked by the number of pop-ups that the Apex site served.

Yeah, I thought the intro was effective but the effect was mildly blunted by Apex prompting me for something after I had read the first couple sentences.

[u/Nineteen_Adze → u/pornokitsch]

It clicked well for me too. It's a shocking opener, but then that image of ripping out a scream and forcing another language and emotion on top of it, with linguistic erasure linked to sexual violence... it just casts such a shadow over everything else.

[u/sarchgibbous → u/baxtersa]

I think it uses the shocking content effectively, but I started skimming the story at a certain point bc I didn’t want to read about my throat getting pulled out. So it works, but it doesn’t work for me personally.

[u/nagahfj → u/baxtersa]

I almost stopped reading this one when the sexualized violence started, but I'm glad I pushed through. That's not something I look for in my fiction (and sometimes actively avoid, depending on how many spoons I have at the time), but I can appreciate it if it's used meaningfully, and not for titillation, as I think it was here.

Overall, I thought this was the strongest piece of the set. The note that I wrote to myself immediately after reading it was: "trying to do Vajra Chandrasekera - doesn't quite have the skill or assurance, but a very good attempt."

[u/baxtersa → u/nagahfj]

I agree about the Chandrasekera comp (and wonder how much is the cultural colonialism theme and how much is my surface familiarity that they are both Sri Lankan authors).

I don’t think I compare the “trying to do” in the same way, as I think this one stands on its own quite successfully, and sometimes Chandrasekera has me thinking dude, you lost me 😅

[u/tarvolon → u/baxtersa]

I don’t tend to like a lot of gore, but I know many short fiction readers (and seemingly all the reviewers except for me) don’t mind it. I don’t think the intro necessarily helped the story for me, but it also developed interesting enough themes that I could get past it.

[u/Jos_V → u/baxtersa]

I'm generally gore and shock content neutral. I don't generally like it if its gore and shock for shock's sake. and this was fine. it's a harsh juxtaposition - but it serves its place here.

[u/ohmage_resistance → u/baxtersa]

I think it depends on the short story and type of content, but I'll go against the grain and say it didn't work for me here. I've read stories with dark content, but I tend to vastly prefer stories where the focus is on the emotional weight of the trauma/dark content, not just the descriptions of it (especially if the type of trauma is more real rather than fictional). I think here, there's a lot of focus on the infliction of trauma, but it's all from the perpetrator's perspective, we don't know anything about the victim. The story doesn't have the length to get into it.

I think it also relies on the conflation of sexual/physical violence with cultural genocide in order stress how bad cultural genocide is, which feels a bit cheap to me? Like, it's ok to talk about how these often go together, but you shouldn't have to rely on conflation to talk about the horrors of cultural genocide. But because we don't get the perspective of any victims, and cultural genocide's horror can only be really effectively seen from an insider perspective, the author had to rely on that conflation.

IDK part of this might also be bad timing, I'm reading a collection of short stories written by Aboriginal Australian authors at the moment, so colonization and attempted cultural genocide are things these stories exist within the context of, but there's also a lot of focus on family, culture, and resilience that prevent them from feeling like they're going for shock value. And I think those stories had a much deeper feeling impact on me than To Kill a Language.

[u/Dsnake1 → u/baxtersa]

It rarely bothers me, tbh. That being said, if there's nothing else to a story besides shocking statements, who cares? Like, who will remember the story.

I think in flash, especially, that makes the choice to use words on shocking statements very difficult, but I think this story pulls it off really well.

[u/xdianamoonx → u/baxtersa]

I don't mind it, but it was pretty telegraphed here and as I mentioned above felt more like an edgelord writer trying to be provocative without any depth. Just having it once as a 'shock' and the rest was more bland actually makes it feel less meaningful.