short fiction

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