History That Never Was

Addison Smith’s Fractured Realities (2024) is another great collection of sci-fi and fantasy fiction in small stories. There’s a mix of drabbles, microfiction, flash fiction, and a few short stories, with a trend toward stories that pack a lot of emotion into few words.

The stories in this collection include a number of previously published stories from top speculative fiction markets and plenty of stories that are new to this collection. Some of the character names appear in more than one story, and I noticed a few drabbles that seemed to be closely related to longer stories, showing the versatility of what you can do in a drabble versus how you can expand that into a longer story.

Two of the stories that really stood out for me were “A Mark Deeper Than Flesh,” which features lush prose, a person receiving a tattoo with traditional methods, and a surprise twist. The drabble “A Noble Quest” packs a strong emotional punch into just 100 words, with a final line that lingers.

If you enjoy quick reads that have a strong emotional core, check out Fractured Realities!

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Tags: Addison Smith, affiliate link, drabble, fantasy, flash fiction, microfiction, sci-fi, science fiction

This entry was posted by dawn.vogel on Wednesday, June 5th, 2024 at 6:00 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.