GigaNotoSaurus 3/24 Fiyah Spring ’24 Baffling 4/24

GigaNotoSaurus’s April story, “The Grand­mother Hypothesis” by J.S. Richardson, finds the narrator jumping from reality to reality using a machine of her own creation – one that can­not take her home again. But returning to her own world was never the goal, not after losing her child, and the story follows the narrator as she loses herself trying to explore, ...Read More

Escape Pod 3/21/24, 3/28/24 Three-Lobed Burning Eye 3/24 Strange Horizons 3/18/24, 3/25/24, 4/1/24, 4/8/24

March’s Escape Pod features a unique post-catastrophe world in Pragathi Bala’s “Summitting the Moon”, which unfolds on an Earth that has experienced the Landing of the Moon, where an asteroid impact has pushed the Moon’s orbit so close to the planet that it has created a Rut and altered not only the world’s ...Read More

Subterranean 8/27/23, 4/21/24 Worlds of Possibility 4/24 Flash Fiction Online 4/24 Zooscape 4/15/24

Subterranean has been releasing individual short stories for a while now, and I recently had the chance to catch up, including with Josiah Bancroft’s rather charming 2023 story “The Small Hands of Chokedamp”, which focuses on Captain Isolde Wilby, the inaugural head of the Office of Ensorcelled Investiga­tions. Though Wilby had hoped the platform ...Read More

GigaNotoSaurus 3/24 Beneath Ceaseless Skies 3/7/24, 3/21/24 Diabolical Plots 2/24

The March GigaNotoSaurus is Amy Johnson’s nested narrative “The Fake Birdhouses of Springville”, which unfolds in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and features an aid delivery worker listening to a story about birdhouses that are not birdhouses over the course of many visits to an older woman on the route. The story is ...Read More

Escape Pod 1/25/24, 2/8/24, 2/22/24, 2/29/24 Fusion Fragment 2/24 Strange Horizons 2/19/24, 2/26/24, 3/4/24, 3/11/24 Flash Fiction Online 2/24, 3/24

Catching up with Escape Pod, their Janu­ary original “The Ballad of Starburst Smith” by David Marino finds a mostly failed musician visiting a special service called a Winnower in order to see a possible future where her music career is more than just disappointing. The downside of using ...Read More

Lightspeed 2/24 GigaNotoSaurus 2/24 Diabolical Plots 2/24 Beneath Ceaseless Skies 2/8/24, 2/22/24

Phoebe Barton returns to the pages of Lightspeed in their February issue with “But from Thine Eyes My Knowledge I Derive”, which should scratch anyone’s science-fiction procedural mystery itch. In it, Va is the head science officer on a ship sent to examine what could be a miniature black hole. When the discovery turns out to ...Read More

Reckoning Spring ’24 F&SF 1-2/24 Strange Horizons 1/29/24, 2/5/24, 2/12/24 Worlds of Possibility 2/24

The new year brings a new issue of Reckon­ing, featuring poetry, fiction, and nonfic­tion focused on issues of environmental justice. Kelsey Day is among the poets compli­cating and keenly describing the intersections of ecological and social violation in “50% off Venus Fly Traps”, which finds a person plant shopping and running into the ways ...Read More

Fiyah 1/24 Flash Fiction Online 1/24 GigaNotoSaurus 1/24 Diabolical Plots 1/24

The first Fiyah of 2024 is unthemed, but as guest editor Nelson Rolon describes, that doesn’t mean certain motifs and elements didn’t end up run­ning through most or all of the pieces – most engaged with death and what comes after. In N. Romaine White’s “D.E.I. (Death, Eternity, and Inclusion)”, a group of vampires meet to ...Read More

Worlds of Possibility 12/23 Zooscape 12/23 Beneath Ceaseless Skies 12/28/23, 1/11/24, 1/25/24 Kaleidotrope 1/24

Worlds of Possibility ended 2023 with an issue including Keyan Bowes’s “A Refugee from Fairyland”, which imagines a sudden eviction of a number of children from the “care” of the fairies. The narrator, Latasha, works with an organization seeking to either reunite these lost children with their families or provide long-term housing for ...Read More

Baffling 1/24 Cast of Wonders 12/17/23, 12/29/23, 12/30/23 Escape Pod 12/14/23, 12/23/23, 1/4/23 Strange Horizons 12/18/23, 1/1/24, 1/8/24

I’ll kick things off with the January Baffling, which (as always) features flash fiction with queer themes and characters. The issue starts strong with D.K. Lawhorn’s bittersweet ‘‘Steinway & His Sons’’, which centers a dead man watching his husband mourn for him. It’s a premise that’s already heavy with ...Read More