Winter 2023 Planning Thread

This thread is for nominations and voting on stories for inclusion in the January-March reads in this group. Please feel free to draw on the ongoing brainstorming thread for nominations, but don't limit yourself to items discussed there. There is no further obligation--even to participate in the resulting discussion if a nomination is selected! It's perfectly okay to gamble on stories the nominator has never read, although also welcome for nominators to put up stories they've enjoyed and would like to revisit. In all these years, we've never been known to dog anyone for nominating a story where readers end up taking a dim view of it.

As in past rounds, any story that gets more "No" than "Yes" votes won't make the cut; otherwise they'll be prioritized according to net-yes-minus-no, and the final list will be in OPD sequence. Ties will be broken in favor of author and period variety.

To propose a story for voting, place the title and author between HTML-style angle-bracket tags. The open tag says vote (in brackets); the close tag says /vote (ditto). Multiple polls need multiple posts. If you put the name of the author in double square brackets, it will make it a linked "touchstone" for the LT database, and first publication dates of nominated stories are appreciated. Also welcome are remarks about the story, the author, and your nomination motives, and/or a link to an online version. Here is an example (from a previous thread):


A useful resource for general bibliography info including OPD and inclusion in collections is ISFDB.

You can see a sortable list of all previous discussions here. The persistent brainstorming thread is here. Nominations repeating old discussions will be disqualified, but revival of dormant discussion threads is always welcome. "That is not dead which can eternal lie," etc.

VOTING is scheduled to END on the Winter Solstice: Wednesday, December 21.
Voting for your own nominations is permissible and encouraged.

"The Child That Went with the Fairies" by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1870) got 11 votes for Autumn but was left off the schedule, making it an auto-include for Winter. It was my own late nomination, and I seem to have just left it off the bottom when I was totting up.

Held over from the cutoff for autumn voting. Originally nominated by AndreasJ, who wrote:

A Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser tale, quite short, but has apparently been published standalone as a chapbook.

Online here, courtesy of Baen.

An early* story of hybris and retribution, retroactively incorporated in the Dreamlands cycle.

Online e.g. at Wikisource:
https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Other_Gods

* While only published in '33, it was written in '21.

I found myself thinking I should read something by GRRM one day, and noticed that this story - available in The Weird and quite a few other places - only just failed to make our schedule back in '14. So I thought it deserved a new chance.

Randy described it as a "sort of a thematic follow up to Theodore Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God"" when he originally nominated it.

A vampire story from the vampire's perspective, as might be guessed. Available at Wikisource and in a number of collections.

Ann VanderMeer describes it like this:
In a village on the distant colony of Kiruna, the outcast Aino has worked hard to created a life for herself. The fragile status quo is upset when the offworlder Petr arrives and insists on becoming a part of her life. But he has no idea what it will cost him, and has cost Aino, to belong to the people who sing with inhuman voices.

Online at Tor.

An outre story regarding an evoked entity in modern London. Variously collected over the last couple of decades.

Paging the hundreds of other members of this group - no one else wants to make some nominations? Admittedly, we've gone through a lot of stories on a weekly basis over the years, but come on - we don't bite! Some of you probably have some great ideas for nominations. You're not all merely group collectors, are you? :)

I plan to submit a few this weekend.

>9 paradoxosalpha:

Actually we did “Scarlet Dream” back in 2016:

Scarlet Dream

But if more Northwest Smith is called for I nominate Available in about the same places, and perhaps the most original entry in the series.

I've been enjoying my recent diet of Straub. Here's one that he originally published in Conjunctions 39 under his own editorship, but it's been widely collected.

Reviewing our "Shambleau" thread, I noted my quotation of Moorcock declaring this Elric tale to be "one of the most pornographic stories I have ever written." The bibliography of its appearances is extensive over the course of the many Elric collections and editions.

This story won Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards.
Available online.
Print bibliography.

This short epistolary novel written in Finnish appears in English translation of the full text in The Weird, where the VanderMeers call it "one of the most important works of post-World War II dark fantasy." It won the 2005 World Fantasy Award for best novella.

Commenting on The Unknown: Weird Writings, 1900–1937, the recent Blackwood collection from Handheld Press, Publishers Weekly noted that, "On the fiction side, the standout is 'The Wolves of God', named for a 'primordial and mysterious retributive power' that may have followed a man with a guilty conscience across the ocean to Scotland."

Also found in several other collections and available online:

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/38310/pg38310-images.html

Duffy is a contemporary author of short horror fiction we haven't yet read. This story appears in New Cthulhu and The Book of Cthulhu and a couple of other collections.

A weird western. Only print appearance is Razored Saddles, but it's also free on McCammon's website: https://www.robertmccammon.com/fiction/black_boots.html

Available in two collections: The Motion Demon and The Dark Domain

It's another train story from Grabinski.

Keller was a psychiatrist who also wrote science fiction of an anti-technological bent and horror.

Widely anthologized and also available online at https://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/03/the-thing-in-the-cellar-by-david-h-keller....

Dark fantasy featuring Davidson's scholarly detective Dr. Eszterhazy. From the World Fantasy award-winning collection The Enquiries of Dr. Eszterhazy. Also in several other collections including Schiff's Whispers II.

Less ambiguous than a lot of Harrison's stories. Usually classed as science fiction, but on a recent re-reading it struck me that the only explanation offered within the story is a mystical/magical one - the mind affecting the physical world.

Collected in The Machine in Shaft Ten and other stories, The Ice Monkey, Settling the World, Things That Never Happen, New Worlds: an Anthology

Marjorie Bowen's genre writing consists of (as far as I know) overwhelmingly "traditional" ghost stories. But this one is genuinely strange and surreal.

In the Arkham House collection Kecksies and other Twilight Tales. - Edited to add, and available online from Project Gutenberg (the story's first appearance in a book, The Last Bouquet).
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks09/0900571h.html#story13

Voting closes tomorrow!

Adding up votes now.