GigaNotoSaurus 7/23 Fantasy 6/23 Lightspeed 7/23

GigaNotoSaurus dives into secondary world fantasy with July’s “Canyon Masks” by Reed Mingault, which imagines a world where gods Mark individuals with their power, and goddess sisters of luck have chosen Lyssa to be their agent in the world. A deft hand at manipulation and planning, Lyssa finds years of work on the edge of ruin when a Marked of the ...Read More

Fiyah 7/23 Diabolical Plots 7/23 Flash Fiction Online 7/23

The theme for the July issue of Fiyah is ‘‘Car­nival,’’ celebration, costume, and commu­nity. Things that Salmik, the main character in Nkone Chaka’s novelette ‘‘Sentience’’, initially refuses to take much part in. They are a scien­tist – a famous one – who helped to stop the spread of a deadly fungal infection responsible for untold devastation across the ...Read More

Strange Horizons 6/19/23, 7/3/23, 7/10/23, 7/17/23 Beneath Ceaseless Skies 6/29/23, 7/13/23 Baffling 7/23 Kaleidotrope 7/23

Samovar’s sibling publication, Strange Horizons, opens July with, among other, C. H. Lindsay’s poem “The Legacy of Granny Van Helsing”. The piece fleshes out a bit more of the family tree of the famous vampire hunter, revealing a rich line of people who know how to keep evil at bay through herb ...Read More

Escape Pod 6/22/23 Cast of Wonders 6/24/23 Worlds of Possibility 6/23 Samovar 6/26/23

This June saw a new original from Escape Pod with Andrew Dana Hudson’s “The Uncool Hunters”, which follows Rocky, an uncool hunter (or a fucking uncool hunter to properly capture the seriousness of the profes­sion) – who wades through the actual habits of the median consumer, helping corporations to understand and profit from the ...Read More

Lightspeed 7/23 F&SF 7-8/23

Pushing on into July, Lightspeed opens with J.B. Park’s timely ‘‘Six Months After All Life on Titan Died’’, which is framed as a prompt for an algorithm-generated story, where the narrator is the prompter trying to coax out a marketable drama about a whistleblower and an accidental genocide. It’s a layered piece, commenting both on the ways algorithm-generated art can flatten and play ...Read More

Beneath Ceaseless Skies 6/1/23, 6/15/23 GigaNotoSaurus 6/23 Fusion Fragment 6/23

The first of Beneath Ceaseless Skies’s June is­sues features stories revolving around memory, death, and resistance, seen clearly in Kat How­ard’s moving “Eleanora of the Bones”, which finds a religious order dedicated to tending the bones of the dead in order to give their spirits time to come to terms with moving on to the next stage ...Read More

Flash Fiction Online 6/23 Diabolical Plots 6/23 Fantasy 6/23

Flash Fiction Online celebrated a month of fantasy stories in June, including Daniel Galef’s strange and captivating “The He-Bear”, which follows a man enjoying some time out in the country, away from the concerns of the busy hustle of city life. Until, sent on a walk with a different guest at the estate (and a terribly ob­noxious ...Read More

Cast of Wonders, 5/25/23 Strange Horizons 5/22/23, 5/29/23, 6/5/23, 6/10/23, 6/12/23 Hexagon Summer ’23

The last May originals from Cast of Won­ders share an episode and a focus on food and recipes. In Priya Sridhar’s “A Letter to A Bully’s Mother” the story unfolds as a letter from a bullied student, who is also a were-chicken, to the mother of their bully, who left a negative review ...Read More

Drabblecast 3-4/23 Zooscape 4/23 Worlds of Possibility 4/23 Beneath Ceaseless Skies 4/20/23, 5/4/23, 5/18/23

Drabblecast has been busy, with new sto­ries in March and April, and the second issue of their publication The Tentacu­lum. Inside, “Personal Best” by Michael Bet­tendorf tells the visceral and unsettling story of a young man whose parents are really into his football prospects – or so it seems. Really, they are into their ...Read More

GigaNotoSaurus 4/23 Flash Fiction Online 4/23 Lightspeed 5/23

May’s GigaNotoSaurus presents a video game-centered tale in Andrew Dana Hudson’s “Any Percent”. In the story, Luckless is a player of a simulation game where in the span of an hour people can live through sometimes multiple lives in-game, sometimes just experiencing life outside of themselves, and sometimes upping the stakes to try and speed-run a rise to the ...Read More

Strange Horizons 4/17/23, 4/24/23, 5/1/23, 5/8/23, 5/15/23 Fantasy 5/23 Diabolical Plots 4/23

Strange Horizons closed out April with the poem ‘‘In a country where history is only a memory that has grown older’’ by Michael Imossan, which imagines the world as a stage and the plot of the play something of a tragedy. The narrator has lost a brother to the violence of bullets and the people ...Read More

Flash Fiction Online 4/23 Lightspeed 5/23 F&SF 5-6/23

The April Flash Fiction Online opens with Sheila Massie’s interesting take on the fae and dance clubs in “Fae Magic on a Friday Night”. Like Biswas’s story, the standard tropes surround­ing the supernatural are subverted and turned around. The fae in this story aren’t the ones preying on humans, but rather have become sources of an almost narcotic magic ...Read More