Clarkesworld 7/24, 8/24
“Every Hopeless Thing” by Tia Tashiro in the July issue of Clarkesworld is a sweet story about a spacefaring pilot, Elodie, who while scavenging on a supposedly abandoned Earth discovers a whole population living underground. The story carries emotional weight and paints a lovely picture of finding hope in seemingly hopeless times. “The Best Version of You” by Grant Collier is another story ...Read More
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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
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Analog 7-8/24
The July/August 2024 issue of Analog opens with the “Great Martian Railways” by Hûw Steer. An engineer named Lowell oversees the first voyage of a new prototype steam train on Mars as a rail system is being built. When unexpected complications arise, Lowell and the other engineers on board must come up with innovative solutions on the fly to avoid a high-speed disaster. “Vouch for ...Read More
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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
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Asimov’s 7-8/24
The July/August issue of Asimov’s opens with the novella “Sisters of the Flare” by Stephen Case, set in the same world as the author’s earlier story “Daughters of the Lattice”, though in a different time period. The story focuses on Tars, who encounters a woman named Petrichora who has forsaken her vows as is now on the run. Tars and Petrichora’s story is interwoven with ...Read More
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The Dark 6/24 Uncanny 7-8/24 Apex #145 Weird Horror Fall ’24
The Dark #109 features two originals. “The Abandoned” by Jack Klausner is a haunting story that begins with a little girl finding a box in the schoolyard. It takes us through tragic mystery and ends in resignation. The protagonist in Beth Goder’s interesting “Labyrinth” visits the infamous Winchester Mystery House in a story that ...Read More
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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
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The Deadlands Spring ’24
“The Slave Boy” by Denzel Xavier Scott in the Spring 2024 issue of The Deadlands looks at different forms of captivity and freedom. A young boy contemplates his own imprisonment and the imprisonment of the talking animals he’s forced to care for, pitying them, but also resenting them and the way they mock and torment him. He meets a strange man who offers him ...Read More
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Reactor 6/5/24 to 7/10/24 The Sunday Morning Transport 5/26/24 to 7/14/24 Nightmare 7/24
Reactor continues to present top-quality fiction. Rich Larson’s “Breathing Constellations” (June 5) is small-scale but excellent SF story revolving around a struggling human commune in Argentinian Patagonia seeking the permission of a pod of orcas to begin harvesting plankton in their waters.
In the heartwarming “Reduce! Reuse! Recycle!” (June 12) by TJ ...Read More
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khōréō 4.1
Anna Bendiy’s ‘‘The Goddess of Loneliness and Misfortune’’ in khōréō 4.1 effectively explores healing, going back to the place you were born, and the cost of war. Bohdana returns to her war-ravaged home and calls on a goddess for help, only to discover the goddess has a bit of an attitude and intends to put Bohdana to work before she’ll get involved. ‘‘Child’s Tongue ...Read More
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Escape Pod 7/11/24 Lightspeed 7/24 Baffling 7/24
Brian Hugenbruch features in the July Escape Pod with the rather charming “A Foundational Model for Talking to Girls”. The story unfolds with a backdrop of the ruined Earth, humans surviving in orbit of their home and living very different lives. But social awkwardness is still definitely a thing, which the narrator can attest to, as he finds himself unable to ...Read More
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Egypt + 100, Ahmed Naji ed. (Comma Press 9781912697700, 160pp, £9.99, tp) July 2024.
From the point of view of a science fiction reviewer, Egypt + 100 marks an interesting development in Comma Press’s “Futures Past” series of SWANA-focused anthologies: it is the first in the series to emerge from an active and substantial science fiction tradition. In the introduction to Iraq + 100, Hassan Blassim lamented the ...Read More
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New Adventures in Space Opera, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Tachyon 978-1-61696-420-7, $18.95, 336pp, tp) August 2024.
Dating back more than 80 years, space opera is almost certainly the longest-running term in continuous use for a particular kind of SF – though we’ll probably never finish arguing over whether it’s a mode, a subgenre, a theme, or (in the eyes of some) a mistake. In 2003, Locus ran a special issue ...Read More
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Sinophagia, Xueting C. Ni, ed. (Solaris 978-1-83786-117-0, $16.99, 496pp, tp) September 2024.
Sinophagia: A Celebration of Chinese Horror is a carefully curated anthology of contemporary Chinese horror. It’s a cultural fest that arrives with triggers warnings of corpses, childhood trauma, self-harm, torture, graphic violence, domestic violence, strangulation and, strangely, coercion/gaslighting – not commonly associated with horror, but typical of psychological abuse.
Translated and edited by Xueting C. Ni, Sinophagia: A ...Read More
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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
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Clarkesworld 6/24
“Twenty-Four Hours” by H.H. Pak starts off the June issue of Clarkesworld on a high note. The story is beautiful and heartbreaking as a mother spends a final twenty-four hours with a programmed version of her recently deceased daughter in an effort to gain closure. The story does a wonderful job of portraying grief in its various stages and capturing the feeling of wanting to spend just a ...Read More
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The Universe Delivers the Enemy You Need, Adam Marek (Comma Press 978-1-91269-775-5, £9.99, 244pp, tp) March 2024.
A large chunk of the 21 stories in Adam Marek’s new collection, The Universe Delivers the Enemy You Need – a magnificent title that’s sadly not shared by a single piece in the book – plays on similar concerns raised by Joel Dane in The Ragpicker: that technology is putting a ...Read More
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Weird Black Girls, Elwin Cotman (Scribner 978-1-66801-885-9, 330pp, $17.99, tp) April 2024. Cover by Michael Morris.
There are plenty of speculative elements in Elwin Cotman’s newest collection, Weird Black Girls, but his skill at evoking people and situations makes even the nonfantastic entries utterly spellbinding. In “Owen”, for example, a father attempts to bond with his son through a ritual funeral for wrestler Owen Hart, with a kind of ...Read More
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Asimov’s 5-6/24
The May/June 2024 issue of Asimov’s includes three novellas, making it perfect for readers wanting to sink their teeth into some longer short fiction. The first of the three, opening the issue, is “Barbarians” by Rich Larson. Yanna and his partner Hilly have been hired to take a pair of creepy rich twins on an expedition into a decaying deepswimmer. Hilly is essentially a head ...Read More
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Uncanny 5-6/24 The Deadlands Spring ’24
Seven new stories in issue 58 of the always-commendable Uncanny. “Three Faces of a Beheading” by Arkady Martine may or may not be your cup of tea. I slurped it up with glee, but its complex construction, multiple styles and points of view, and academic angle may turn some off. Part of the premise, as Martine writes, is “Historians are liars.” The ...Read More
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Apex #144 The Sunday Morning Transport 4/7/24, 4/21/24, 4/28/24, 5/5/24, 5/19/24 Reactor 1/1/24 – 5/22/24
Apex #144 features five original stories. “Those Left Behind” by Kanishk Tantia is a deftly written SF story about two robotic caregivers crafted to look and act exactly like dead human spouses. When their elderly humans permanently leave Earth (along with every other human on the planet) the robots realize that that those ...Read More
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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
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