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The Membranes (2021)
7.0/10on Open Library
Published
A skin-care specialist works in a submerged future Taiwan where the surface has become hostile to human life. Chi Ta-wei makes boundaries between bodies, information and identity increasingly difficult to keep separate. Ari Larissa Heinrich translates the English edition. This standalone short novel is best read without an explanation of its central revelations; its compactness leaves room for queer desire and questions about who controls the account of a person's own life.
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The man who folded himself (1973)
6.3/10on Open Library
Published
An inherited time belt lets Daniel meet versions of himself, turning time travel into an unusually intimate experiment in identity and desire. Gerrold follows the implications inward instead of using the device mainly for historical tourism. This standalone short novel is useful for a reader who enjoys a premise being pressed beyond its comfortable first application. It includes explicit sexual material and a deliberately enclosed focus on the self, which can feel challenging as well as ingenious.
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Great Work of the Time (1991)
Published
Crowley's Great Work of Time gives a secret organisation the opportunity to manage history in the British Empire's interests. Interwoven accounts explore how securing one preferred future multiplies unintended consequences. The novella first appeared in Novelty and is also available separately. It stands alone, but its compressed, recursive structure asks for concentration; the attraction is the collision between an elegant temporal scheme and the political wishes driving it.
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The Tea Master and the Detective (2018)
7.5/10on Open Library
Published
A traumatised living spaceship and an abrasive scholar investigate a death in the Scattered Pearls Belt. De Bodard's concentrated transformation of the detective partnership gives the non-human character emotional fluency and her own needs, rather than making her a puzzle about lacking feelings. The novella is fully readable without other Xuya stories. Choose it for the way personhood, care and the practical business of travel become inseparable from a compact mystery.
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Walking to Aldebaran (2019)
5.3/10on Open Library
Published
Gary Rendell is stranded in the tunnels of an enormous alien structure, trying to survive and explain what happened to his expedition. Tchaikovsky keeps the setting tightly enclosed while making its scale and strangeness resist human expectations. This standalone novella is a darkly comic encounter with something people cannot comfortably understand. It also moves into body horror, so its brevity should not be mistaken for a gentle excursion.
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Mimicking of Known Successes (2023)
7.6/10on Open Library
Published
An investigator and a university researcher pursue a disappearance among the platforms where people live above Jupiter. Older makes the academic work of imagining Earth's recovery part of the novella's social world, alongside a developing relationship and a compact case. The appeal is a future that can sustain both intellectual purpose and affection. This opens the Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti series: begin here, while expecting more cases and relationship development in later volumes.
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