science fiction

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