Reading: Silk and Steel (6/365)

Silk and Steel, edited by Janine A. Southard, is an anthology of f/f SFF stories with a focus on pairings between swordswomen (or other warriors) and princesses (or other high femme characters). It was funded by a Kickstarter, which I backed because it sounded very much like my sort of thing, and the authors to be featured included Ellen Kushner and Yoon Ha Lee, both of whom I like very much.

Like all anthologies, I liked some of the stories much more than others, but of the seventeen stories in this anthology, there were only two that I really didn't like, and a couple of others that I thought were just OK. I liked Kushner's 'The Sweet Tooth of Angwar Bec', set in her Riverside universe and taking place shortly after The Privilege of the Sword, and Lee's standalone hexarchate story 'The City Unbreachable' very much indeed. Other favourites included Aliette de Bodard's 'The Scholar of the Bamboo Flute', which is apparently a Vietnamese take on Revolutionary Girl Utena - I'm not familiar with Utena but enjoyed the story nonetheless thought it felt like a #MeToo story and a critique of academic preferment, as well as an engaging fantasy romance; Freya Marske's parallel-universe Ruritanian caper; Kaitlyn Zivanovich's 'Positively Medieval', a cyberpunky romance between a pacifist Troll scholar and a motorcycle courier; Alison Tam's 'Margo Lai's Guide To Duelling Unprepared', a wuxia-type story featuring best friends who can't quite admit that they're in love with each other; and Chris Wolfgang's atmospheric 'Chicago Iron', set in Prohibition-era America.

I've been struggling to read due to [waves hands] All This; I tried non-fiction to see if that would be easier than trying to commit to a novel, but I really missed fiction, and this absolutely hit the spot, giving me the escape into fantasy I was craving without requiring too much commitment from my frazzled brain.