Every few months, my RSS feed tells me there’s a new Alicorn story, and it feels like seeing a stray Christmas present under the tree.
I first discovered Alicorn when she wrote about disliking surprise gifts. But her stories are surprise gifts — the small, heavy kind that don’t rattle when you shake them.
Alicorn is among the greatest living authors of speculative fiction.1 She invented a popular microgenre and wrote least five collections’ worth of short fiction. But she’s criminally underrated; I’ve met fans of HPMOR or Worth the Candle who aren’t even aware of her.
Hence, this guide for new readers.
What makes Alicorn great
Alicorn writes without affectation. Her work is clear and easy to follow, even when a twist reframes the rest of a story. The people act like people — they have hobbies, emotions, motives, and flaws. I’ve never lost immersion because a character was acting ridiculous or a setting fell apart under examination.
Those characters and settings are deceptively deep. Reading Alicorn, I see one tiny corner of a larger world; I sense that she could start following a random side character without losing me. Her short stories feel like long stories; novellas feel like novels.
She’s gotten better over time. I reread 20 of her stories today; a few felt thin upon revisiting, but they were from 2009 and 2012. This decade, it’s been heater after heater. The concepts are denser and the twists are twistier. The surrounding worlds unwrap themselves in your mind without even needing to be written. Nearly every new story deserves a sequel — if only this wouldn’t take away time from new stories, which might deserve sequels even more.
Selected stories
I can’t say much about the plots, because discovering them is half the fun.
These are all selected from her short fiction. I’m still exploring her books, and I’ll get to the glowfic if we ever solve aging.
Under 5,000 words
Succulent: No humans in this one, but otherwise it’s the perfect starter story — premise, personality, twist, close the tab, stare at the wall.
Story Of: A remix of Arrival, with a better ending.
Dogs: “Nothing good was preserved, and nothing bad had context.” Future generations will think we were hopelessly morally confused. (If you like this, there’s a small chance you’ll like this essay I wrote, also about dogs.)
Princess Innocence: I wish I could be an eight-year-old girl reading this, or a parent sending it to my eight-year-old girl.
Threshold: Cleanest twist I ever saw. This is trans-everything fiction — it’s about changing religions and genders and genetics and substrates of reality. And it’s ten pages long!
Strax: Sympathetic non-magical parents? In my fantasy genre?
Tower: Under 1000 words, and perfect.
Over 5,000 words
Khan: A horror story about good luck.
Hollow Grove: Like Succulent, a story about things being grown by other things. There are many places you might catch the twist; all satisfy.
Specter Sanctuary: One of Alicorn’s specialties is writing futures that are better than the present, but still logistically imperfect. This one takes a top-three Black Mirror episode (“San Junipero”) and adds enough weight to anchor a multi-season series.
Ibyabek: Dystopia, but the realistic kind: stale bread and broken tech and people who steal to supplement their flimsy state salaries and crutches that must be returned to the hospital when you’re done with them. I genuinely think this deserved to be a Hugo finalist — it reminds me of many recent Hugo nominees in its themes and structure, but with better prose and fewer words.
- I’d rank her alongside Wildbow, Alexander Wales, Isabel J. Kim, Liu Cixin, Ursula Vernon, Ted Chiang, and perhaps qntm. I’m still warming up to Tomás Bjartur. Regrettably, Alien Clay knocked Adrian Tchaikovsky off the list.