Kelly Link, “I Can See Right Through You.” McSweeney’s Quarterly 48, 2014.
As you might expect from a story published in McSweeney’s, this is more of a slipstream than a solid genre story, about an actor best known in his role as the Demon Lover and the woman who used to be his love interest in the movies but is still his best friend and how they end up in Florida looking for nudist ghosts. Any real genre element is almost non-existent, though of course this is still a good story.
Ken Liu, “Reborn.” Tor.com, January 29, 2014.
This on the other hand positivily revels in genre: alien invasion, alien possession, memory loss, flying saucers and wraps it up in a story about identity and memory and whether the first is just the absence or presence of the latter.
Ken Liu, “The Long Haul, From the ANNALS OF TRANSPORTATION, The Pacific Monthly, May 2009.” Clarkesworld, November 2014.
Ken Liu’s second story is also fixed in genre, but in an entirely different way. Here he takes that symbol of alternate history, the zeppelin, and imagines the kind of articles a John McPhee might have written if the Hindenburg hadn’t caught fire and zeppelins were kept in service. Basically the sort of intersection of slice of life & mild technoporn you might have found in The New Yorker or summat if zeppelins were real.
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