Charles Payseur

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

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

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

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

Strange Horizons 11/13/23, 11/20/23, 11/27/23, 12/4/23, 12/11/23 Cast of Wonders 12/3/23 Hexagon 12/23 Flash Fiction Online 12/23

At Strange Horizons, November brought a rather chilling look at future technology with Sam Kyung Yoo’s “Nextype” (to all practical scien­tists reading, please do not invent Nextype). In it, Mirae has been implanted with the titular technology, a brain implant meant to give her an advantage in life – one ...Read More

Escape Pod 11/30/23 Beneath Ceaseless Skies 11/30/23 Three-Lobed Burning Eye 11/23 Fusion Fragment 11/23

Escape Pod closed out November with a gem in Uchechukwu Nwaka’s gripping “Chal­lenges to Becoming a Pro Dragonracer in Apapa-Downtown”, which takes place in a future Nigeria where people like Ishola live rather vulnerably, trying to do their best for themselves and their families but facing the grim lack of infrastructure and pervasive ...Read More

Lightspeed 11/23 Beneath Ceaseless Skies 11/2/23, 11/16/23 GigaNotoSaurus 11/23 Flash Fiction Online 11/23 F&SF 11-12/23

The November Lightspeed shows a keen inter­est in storytelling forms, with stories framed as recipes, as reviews, as confessions, and with Regina Kanyu Wang’s “A Record of Lost Time” (translated by Rebecca F. Kuang) as a series of personal narratives surrounding a new technol­ogy called FastForward, which allows users to experience “sped ...Read More

Beneath Ceaseless Skies 10/5/23, 10/19/23 Escape Pod 10/12/23, 10/19/23, 10/26/23 Worlds of Possibility 10/23 Cast of Wonders 10/14/23, 10/25/23, 10/27/23

Beneath Ceaseless Skies celebrated their 15th anniversary in October with a special double issue including Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko’s novella, “Between Blades”, which unfolds in a world where some people can adopt “sword­form,” wherein one in a pair of people becomes a living weapon – a sword ...Read More

Fantasy 10/23 Flash Fiction Online 10/23 GigaNotoSaurus 10/23 Baffling 10/23

Unfortunately, October brought the final issue of Fantasy, which closed in impressive fashion. First, in fiction, Ruoxi Chen’s “Fandom for Witches“, finds Lara, a Chinese-American girl lightly obsessed with the (definitely not Supernatural) fictional television show Sanctu­ary Road. The story deals with yearning, with fitting in, with all the messy bits of growing up and feeling alone and ...Read More

Strange Horizons 9/18/23, 9/25/23, 10/2/23,  10/9/23, 10/16/23 Lightspeed 10/23 Fiyah 10/23 Kaleidotrope 10/23

Strange Horizons closed out September with some memorable poetry, including Bob Hicok’s “No stones”, which lingers on the image of “dirt birds” – the marks left behind when birds impact glass. As the title might im­ply, the poem places the narrator (and readers) inside glass houses, fragile but solid enough to withstand these small ...Read More

Beneath Ceaseless Skies 9/7/23, 9/21/23 Fusion Fragment 9/23 Fantasy 9/23

September’s Beneath Ceaseless Skies covered a lot of ground, with its first issue focusing on young people fleeing violent and murderous men. In “Little Red Hands” by Jonathan Louis Duck­worth, that comes in the form of Loaf, a young man running from a dark and bloody past, hoping to escape what’s behind him. It’s not easy, though, ...Read More