Charles Payseur

Beneath Ceaseless Skies 1/9/25 Small Wonders 1/25 Lightspeed 1/25

January’s Beneath Ceaseless Skies issues deal with family, death, and hope, and Marie Croke does a great job of exploring those themes in “Our Echoes Drifting Through the Marsh”. In it, Embri lives in a village pushed away from its ceremonial burial marsh by the appearance of enormous, predatory birds called waders. Rather than fight for the magical place ...Read More

Worlds of Possibility 12/24 Strange Horizons 12/16/24, 12/23/24 Kaleidotrope Winter ’25

The December Worlds of Possibility is full of fic­tion and poetry that focuses on growth, seeds, and transformations, as in E. S. Hovgaard’s lovely “Journey of a Dandelion Seedling”, which follows a seedling named Wish who doesn’t want to be planted – who wants to fly free. Their nature and biology, however, seem to demand that ...Read More

Baffling 12/24 Flash Fiction Online 12/24 Zooscape 12/24

Baffling closes out 2024 with plenty of steam in an issue that mixes queer themes, speculative elements, and a particular focus on intimacy and sex. In K-Ming Chang’s “The Glass Wife”, that focus illuminates a narrator and her lover, who is made of glass. For the narrator, having a lover made of glass means sometimes losing sight of her, ...Read More

Beneath Ceaseless Skies 12/26/24 Diabolical Plots 12/24

There’s only one December issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies this year, and it contains a pair of epistolary stories dealing with injustice, royalty, and punishment. Shoshana Groom’s “The Be­loved Sisters of the Sun-Bleached Hills” unfolds as a series of letters between sisters Zarina and Durdana, who live in different kingdoms but who are facing the same alarming trend – their ...Read More

GigaNotoSaurus 12/24 Lightspeed 12/24 Small Wonders 12/24

December’s GigaNotoSaurus is Sabrina Vourvou­lias’s “Dead reckoning in 6/8 time”, a story that finds Adriana remembering her mother’s stories about being a bailadora in Mexico and losing a contest to the devil himself. Which means that, now that her mother has passed, her soul is the devil’s, and that doesn’t sit well with Adriana, who determines that she will succeed ...Read More

Cast of Wonders 12/3/24 Strange Horizons 11/18/24, 12/9/24 Hexagon Winter ’24

Alexander Hewitt defies genre horror expecta­tions in “Emily” from the December Cast of Wonders. In it, a queer couple who are trying to adopt buy an old doll in anticipation of their new family member, only for the doll to begin to exhibit some… alarming behaviors. The narrator at first attributes these spooky goings-on to her partner ...Read More

Beneath Ceaseless Skies 11/14/24, 11/28/24 Small Wonders 11/24 Lightspeed 11/24

Beneath Ceaseless Skies opened November with an issue focused on revolution, including “Another Tide” by Will Greatwich, which finds the narrator leaving their home in a long-conquered area of a vast empire to visit and study its fringes, where resistance still lives embodied in a man named Goruna. The two meet, and the narrator joins Go­runa’s cause ...Read More

Flash Fiction Online 10/24 Cast of Wonders 10/20/24, 11/11/24 Strange Horizons 10/21/24, 11/4/24

Flash Fiction Online released an extra-large issue in honor of the spookiest month, which is capped off by Christine Lucas’s haunting “Final Harvest”, in which the daughter of a rather abusive and manipulative mother returns to perform said mother’s final rites – the harvest of nekrophyta that grows on the body of the dead. ...Read More

Escape Pod 10/31/24 Worlds of Possibility 10/24 Samovar 10/28/24

Escape Pod celebrated Halloween with Ad­dison Smith’s “Mother Death Learns a Trick”, which finds the narrator passing by an old AI robot named Mother Death, who normally predicts the demise of anyone she sees. She becomes part of the background, at least until she starts predicting her own death, which knocks the narrator out of their cycle of ...Read More

Lightspeed 10/24 Baffling 10/24 GigaNotoSaurus 10/24 Small Wonders 10/24

Philip Gelatt and JT Petty anchor the October Lightspeed with “Sully the God”, which imagines Sully as the Elon Musk of magic, the man who stole the discovery from a dead colleague and turned it into the most successful business the world has ever known. He’s become so rich that money has sort of lost meaning, and yet for ...Read More

Fiyah 10/24 Beneath Ceaseless Skies 10/3/24 Diabolical Plots 10/24

The October Fiyah is themed around spacefaring aunties, and it opens with a bang with Tatiana Obey’s “Fuck Them Kids”, which finds Jaz visit­ing her mom and sister (and her sister’s kids) for the spacer holiday celebrating the settlement of Europa. It’s something Jaz’s mom participated in personally as a botanist on the first settlement ship, and under ...Read More

Flash Fiction Online 9/24 Cast of Wonders 9/29/24 Escape Pod 9/19/24

September’s Flash Fiction Online starts strong with Stefan Alcalá Slater’s “Tornado Break­ers Don’t Cry”, which finds siblings Ethel and Edgar living in the shadow of their father, a famous tornado breaker, long after he’s gone from their lives. Ethel has taken up the mantel, but when she fails to break a tornado that comes through their ...Read More

GigaNotoSaurus 9/24 Diabolical Plots 9/24 Hexagon Fall ’24

September’s GigaNotoSaurus is Monte Lin’s “Here in the Glittering Black, There is Hope”, which introduces Kavita, the captain of a ship contracted out to the ultrarich to go out and bring back previous materials from the reaches of space, staying young thanks to cryo-sleep while generations pass on Earth. She’s part of a tradition, a movement to the stars ...Read More

Lightspeed 9/24 Small Wonders 9/24 Beneath Ceaseless Skies 9/5/24, 9/19/24

Gabriela Santiago returns to Lightspeed in September with the metatextual “Reconstruct­ing ‘The Goldenrod Conspiracy,’ Edina Room, Saturday 2:30-3:30”, which is framed as a pre­sentation at a fan convention dedicated to the Doctor Who–esque television show Backwards Man. The presentation is on a lost episode that has been remade by fans based on what people could remember ...Read More

Cast of Wonders 8/24/24 Strange Horizons 8/19/24, 8/26/24 Fusion Fragment 8/24

Cast of Wonders also closed out August strongly with J.M. Bueno’s haunted house story, “Double Yellow Lines”. Unlike many that use the ele­ment, this story’s haunted house isn’t nearly as malevolent as it could be. Instead, it seems to be a way for people metaphorically haunted by the past and their own grief to try and ...Read More

Zooscape 8/24 Flash Fiction Online 8/24 Escape Pod 8/22/24

The latest from Zooscape features a fresh twist on the Little Red Riding Hood story in Erin Brown’s intense “The Cloak”. Flipping the script in terms of heroes and vil­lains, the wolf narrates the action as he is stalked by a young hunter who has successfully turned the rest of his family into the warm clothes she wears ...Read More

Beneath Ceaseless Skies 8/8/24, 8/22/24 Lightspeed 8/24 Worlds of Possibility 8/24

J.A. Prentice returns to Beneath Ceaseless Skies with August’s “An Isle in a Sea of Ghosts”, which finds Kreisa on a journey to try and save her brother from a spell that changes him into a different animal every day. After two years, she has gone through almost everything she can think of, and her brother has ...Read More

GigaNotoSaurus 8/24 Diabolical Plots 8/24 Small Wonders 8/24

The August GigaNotoSaurus story is Sarah J. Wu’s “Elves in Illinois”, which finds Linnet growing up in a small rural town that abuts a forest where fae live and hire out their services to farmers to ensure prosperous crop yields re­gardless of drought or blight. Linnet’s family is initially reluctant to pay the fees that the fae ask for ...Read More

Fiyah Summer ’24 Flash Fiction Online 7/24 Escape Pod 7/25/24 Strange Horizons 7/15/24, 7/29/24, 8/12/24

The Summer ’24 Fiyah theme is disability. The issue seeks to break down stereotypes and expectations that Black people are monolithic and separate from experiences with disability, and it does sharp work of just that, as in F. Kirk’s “Worms Fill My Mouth”, which finds Isaac experiencing an acute horror that the ...Read More

GigaNotoSaurus 7/24 Diabolical Plots 7/24 Kaleidotrope Summer ’24 Small Wonders 7/24

The latest from GigaNotoSaurus is Gustavo Bon­doni’s “Sambra do Espaço”, which finds Letícia working on an orbiting solar satellite array that gives power to a lot of Earth, including a dis­proportionate number of impoverished people. And though during Carnaval she’d much rather be watching her family dance and remembering her time in Brazil, an attack by ...Read More

Flash Fiction Online 6/24 Strange Horizons 6/9/24, 6/24/24 Beneath Ceaseless Skies 6/27/24, 7/11/24

The June Flash Fiction Online features a range of rather grim stories about char­acters caught in oppressive situations. Perhaps the most surprising is Kurt Pankau’s “A Pin Drops”, which imagines bowling tech­nology advancing to the point where pins are made intelligent and sentient in order for them to protect one another and form familial ...Read More

Lightspeed 6/24 Worlds of Possibility 6/24 Reactor 6/5/24

Lightspeed ushers in June with Oyedotun Damilola Muees’s “Warning Notes from an An­nihilator Machine”, which is framed as a series of messages from said Annihilator Machine to Tijani Damilare (known online as Teejay_009) concerning the approved destruction of Earth. Despite the dire message, ANM-722 actually wants to help Tijani, providing information that might help avoid the approaching mechanical apocalypse at ...Read More