The week’s best online fiction, with links and recommendations from FictionDaily’s editors.
Published at The Outlet
Vast images. Small space. You’ll feel this compact width when you read these two stories, and you’ll also learn a little about an Arabic literary form circa the early 20th century called “the very short story”–which is all the rage now in our own contemporary literary circles. —David Backer
DEATH’S FLAG IS NEVER AT HALF-MAST by Rahul Kanakia
Published at Redstone Science Fiction
Science Fiction is often best done subtly, but sometimes a work like “Death’s Flag is Never at Half-Mast” tosses a match in the powder keg of human knowledge and blows the limits of the mind wide. Rahul Kanakia’s fast-paced plot and deranged narrative navigation sends elements so delightfully different but oddly appropriate careening towards one another. The collision is a rollicking mix of time travel, space war and British jingoism that proves the author’s talents at core genre elements just as it proves his imagination can flex from subject to subject with beguiling agility.–Matt Funk
“LACANIANA,” by Christof Scheele
Published at La Petite Zine
“Lacaniana” reads like the lost dialogue of Vladimir and Estragon, except that Estragon’s boot isn’t the problem. A shirt is the problem. It hasn’t a bellybutton button! The “aching ghost limb” here may well be Samuel Beckett, but Scheele obviously has his own comic intuition and grasp of language. The problem with this exercise is that it ended so quickly.-Ryan Nelson
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