Analog 5-6/24
The May/June 2024 issue of Analog opens with “Uncle Roy’s Computer Repairs and Used Robot Parts” by Martin L. Shoemaker, a charming novella about a man who retires with his wife to her hometown and starts his own computer repair business only to find himself accidentally in a bitter rivalry with the town’s resident “whiz kid.” It’s a fun story that does a good job of capturing ...Read More
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Small Wonders 5/24 Flash Fiction Online 5/24 Cast of Wonders 5/29/24
I’ll start off with May’s Small Wonders, a publication dedicated to flash fiction and poetry, which includes Angel Leal’s powerful poem ‘‘Music of the Seraphim’’. A child meets an angel and is filled with a desire for something new – new experiences, a new body, a new place to be – and find their prayers and ...Read More
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khōréō 3.4
Due to an error in my logging stories for review, I accidentally left three stories out of my initial review of khōréō 3.4. The stories are reviewed here with apologies to the authors, editors, and publisher of the magazine.
“The Maiden Voyage of the Piranha Belle” by L.M. Guay is a diamond of a story, with beautiful glittering surfaces and a sharp, cutting point. The Piranha Belle of ...Read More
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Clarkesworld 5/24
The May issue of Clarkesworld opens with a charming story, which also offers up some touching emotional moments. “Fishy” by Alice Towey sees a daughter tasked with going through her father’s office after his death, trying to track down a prototype he was working on that would provide clean water to millions. His shifty business partner is after the prototype as well, but it turns out ...Read More
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Diabolical Plots 5/24 Beneath Ceaseless Skies 5/2/24, 5/16/24 GigaNotoSaurus 5/1/24
The latest from Diabolical Plots includes the aptly named “How to Kill the Giant Living Brain You Found In Your Mother’s Basement After She Died: An Interactive Guide” by Alex Sobel, which follows Grace as she tries to process her mother’s death while also dealing with the strange abomination that is the living, possibly telepathic brain her ...Read More
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Asimov’s 5-6/24
The May/June 2024 issue of Asimov’s includes three novellas, making it perfect for readers wanting to sink their teeth into some longer short fiction. The first of the three, opening the issue, is “Barbarians” by Rich Larson. Yanna and his partner Hilly have been hired to take a pair of creepy rich twins on an expedition into a decaying deepswimmer. Hilly is essentially a head ...Read More
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Uncanny 5-6/24 The Deadlands Spring ’24
Seven new stories in issue 58 of the always-commendable Uncanny. “Three Faces of a Beheading” by Arkady Martine may or may not be your cup of tea. I slurped it up with glee, but its complex construction, multiple styles and points of view, and academic angle may turn some off. Part of the premise, as Martine writes, is “Historians are liars.” The ...Read More
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Apex #144 The Sunday Morning Transport 4/7/24, 4/21/24, 4/28/24, 5/5/24, 5/19/24 Reactor 1/1/24 – 5/22/24
Apex #144 features five original stories. “Those Left Behind” by Kanishk Tantia is a deftly written SF story about two robotic caregivers crafted to look and act exactly like dead human spouses. When their elderly humans permanently leave Earth (along with every other human on the planet) the robots realize that that those ...Read More
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Cast of Wonders 4/13/24, 5/5/24 Escape Pod 4/25/24 Strange Horizons 4/29/24, 5/16/24 Lightspeed 5/24
Cast of Wonders’ April included Plangdi Neple’s “Bodies of Sand and Blood”, which follows a young trans boy trying to learn the magic of the men of his people, but who again and again is told he cannot because of his body. And yet at his lowest, he hears voices in the darkness ...Read More
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Diabolical Plots 4/24 Beneath Ceaseless Skies 4/4/24, 4/18/24 Kaleidotrope 4/24
Anne Liberton’s “Six-Month Assessment on Miracle Fresh” anchors the April Diabolical Plots, and for marketing fans (or soft drink fans) it’s a rather delightful and sharp look at capitalism, religion, and corporate interests. Framed as an internal document in a soft drink company that produces Miracle Fresh, which contains blood of the Messiah, the assessment looks at ...Read More
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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
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Analog 3-4/24 khōréō 3.4 Clarkesworld 4/24
The March/April 2024 issue of Analog opens with “Enough” by William Ledbetter, wherein a graffiti artist encounters tech designed to resist tagging and report the location of artists to authorities. Working with his ex-girlfriend and her new partner, he finds a way to co-opt the tech and broadcasts a message of hope and resistance. “A Long Journey into Light” ...Read More
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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
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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
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The Angel of Indian Lake, Stephen Graham Jones (Saga 978-1-66801-166-9, $28.99, 464pp, hc) March 2024.
Jade Daniels – the uber-Final Girl – returns to the bloodily beleaguered town of Proofrock, Idaho, in The Angel of Indian Lake, the last installment of Stephen Graham Jones’s brilliant Indian Lake Trilogy. It’s October 2023, four years since the events of Don’t Fear the Reaper; eight years since we first met ...Read More
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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
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Cast of Wonders 2/29/24, 3/3/24 Lightspeed 3/24, 4/24 Hexagon 3/24
March’s Cast of Wonders features Megan Ng’s “Fording the Milky Way”, which is told from the point of view of a child living with her mother and father on a ranch the father owns but doesn’t really care about. The parents are incredibly different – the father brash, interested only in himself, while the mother is a ...Read More
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Asimov’s 3-4/24
The March/April 2024 issue of Asimov’s is quite a strong one. It opens with a “How Sere Kept Herself Together” by Alexander Jablokov, the third in a series of stories featuring Sere, an investigator, who in this case starts off looking into a kidnapping, but finds herself embroiled in a far more complex case. The worldbuilding is nicely done and the novella does a good ...Read More
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Nightmare 2/24, 3/24, 4/24 The Deadlands Winter ’24 The Dark 1/24, 2/24, 3/24
Of the three originals in Nightmare #137, a flash piece satisfied me the most. Jessica Luke García notes in her introduction to “First Girl” that we “live in a Final Girl world” then proceeds to give the girl who dies first in any slasher movie her telling and sometimes risible due.
Two of the new ...Read More
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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
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The Deadlands Winter ’24
The Winter 2024 issue of The Deadlands is full of lovely prose and quiet stories meditating on life and death. In the beautifully written “Threnody in Dark Wood” by Avra Margariti, a professional mourner who sings the dead through the Doorway receives a mysterious assignment to attend an empty funeral with a sealed coffin and soon realizes this is a job unlike any other. ...Read More
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The Climate Action Almanac, Joey Eschrich & Ed Finn, eds. (Center for Science and the Imagination) November 2023.
Edited by Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn, The Climate Action Almanac is an online anthology that brings together a selection of science fiction and non-fiction to fire up our imaginations about climate change and the vast range of possible responses to it. Charmingly illustrated throughout by João Queiroz, the collection strikes a ...Read More
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The Sunday Morning Transport 1/1/24 – 3/17/24 Weird Horror Spring ’24 Uncanny 1-2/24, 3-4/24 Apex #142, #143
Lots to cover this month, so let’s concentrate on the cream of the crop.
The Sunday Morning Transport publishes new fiction almost every Sunday throughout the year. Each of the stories merits a read, but of the first eleven stories of 2024, six stood out for me.
The title of Mary Robinette Kowal ...Read More
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Clarkesworld 3/24
Clarkesworld’s March issue opens with “Hello! Hello! Hello!” by Fiona Jones, a sweet story about an alien entity encountering a human adrift in a shuttle, eventually realizing that the human is dying, and carrying out a rescue mission. Jones does a wonderful job of presenting a truly alien alien, and showing the difficulties of communication between vastly dissimilar species, but also the possibilities opened up ...Read More
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Power to Yield, Bogi Takács (Broken Eye Books 978-1-40372-266-2, $17.99, 203pp, tp) February 2024.
Hungarian American poet, writer, translator, critic, and editor Bogi Takács has spent eir career promoting, encouraging, and showcasing the work of marginalised authors. The anthology Rosalind’s Siblings, edited by Takács and publishing poetry and fiction focusing on scientists erased or diminished because of their gender or sexuality, fittingly featured on the 2023 Locus Recommended ...Read More
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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
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Greatest Hits, Harlan Ellison (Union Square 978-1-4549-5337-1, $19.99, 466pp, tp) March 2024.
Harlan Ellison’s short fiction is undoubtedly far better known than Wyndham’s, but for readers too young to have followed his prolific and rather spectacular career, which peaked from the mid-1960s to mid-1980s, he might be best known for a handful of stories which have been endlessly anthologized, mostly “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” and “I Have No ...Read More
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Analog 1-2/24
The January/February issue of Analog kicks off with “Kagari” by Ron Collins, which follows the young heir to a kingdom of birdlike beings. He is in love with a commoner, and not overly enamored of the strict rules governing his society, but he is given a human named Kagari as a pet who helps him see he might work within the system to effect change. “ ...Read More
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Table for One, Yun Ko-Eun (Columbia University Press 978-0-23119-202-6, $20.00, 280pp, hc) April 2024.
Yun Ko-eun (the pen name for Ko Eun-ju) will be unfamiliar to most English-language readers unless they’ve read her one translated novel, The Disaster Tourist. In South Korea, though, she’s the multiple award-winning author of several novels and short story collections and the host of the EBS Radio show Book Cafe. Thankfully, we now ...Read More
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Kindling, Kathleen Jennings (Small Beer Press 9-781-61873-217-0, $28.00, 288pp, hc) January 2024. Cover by Kathleen Jennings.
In Kindling, the first collection of her short stories, Kathleen Jennings populates wild and fantastical places with folk looking for purpose, getting lost, and finding trouble. Jennings’s stories range from variations on fairy tales (Bluebeard and Sleeping Beauty), to high-seas adventure (but in the air); from an epic quest to an intimate ...Read More
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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
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Kurdistan + 100 , Mustafa Gündoğdu & Orsola Casagrande, eds. (Comma Press 978-1-91269-736-6, £10.99, 237pp, tp). November 2023. Cover by David Eckersall.
When you finish reading the last page of the last story in this strong anthology of strong stories, you are not yet done with the book. There is an afterword by editors Mustafa Gündoğdu and Orsola Casagrande, which probably was not part of the original concept. It is ...Read More
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