I missed one story from my review yesterday of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, July/August 2025. It was the last, and in my opinion, the best story in the issue. It was also the longest as the only novella. That story is…

“The Chronolithographer’s Assistant” by Suzanne Palmer (30,507 words) — A young man from a fishing family, terrified of the sea, seeks to become the assistant to an artist in a nearby cottage. A touching coming of age story with a twist. (My rating: 5/5)

Another post where I give my brief summaries and ratings for the stories in one of the magazines I read.

“Most Things” by Rich Larson (13,570 words) — Something from the quantum realm called the Slip has escaped and is searching for a scientist. Zany fun that reminded me of Cheech and Chong or Bill and Ted. (My rating: 4/5)

“In the Halls of the Makeshift King” by Tobias S. Buckell (4,928 words) — A pilgrim to the Alcove Above is made Makeshift King and has a big decision to make. The shaft is described slowly and in a way I found hard to picture, but the civilization-level decision foisted on one individual is intriguing. (My rating: 4/5)

“Another Mother on Mars” by Dominica Phetteplace (9,916 words) — A scientist on Mars longs to have a baby, specifically a clone. Nothing really new here for me. Well written but nothing grabbed me. (My rating: 3/5)

“Worm Song” by Derek Künsken (6,060 words) — An augmented human finds herself alienated from her wife and drawn to the worm song on a gas giant planet where dragons are in danger of going extinct. (My rating: 4/5)

“Aftermath” by William Preston (6,763 words) — An investigator and his team look into strange events. Inspired by Ray Bradbury. The writing kept me turning the pages but was still somehow a little too opaque for me. (My rating: 4/5)

“In the Gardener’s Service” by Michèle Laframboise (14,243 words) — The Questor for the Emperor is tasked with preserving the empire by coming to the rescue of a young girl. Fascinating world. The main character species is an animal that also photosynthesizes. (My rating: 4/5)

“Pirates of Highship” by Stephen Case (8,121 words) — The son of a very wealthy mother uses her money to experiment with trying to talk to a planetary mind. Very much a brief thriller with a fascinating premise (a sentient planet). Calls back to Stanslaw Lem’s Solaris. (My rating: 5/5)

“Perri’s Fate” by Robert Reed — This is a story in a world that I have never read any. It is a long novelette that I chose not to read. (No rating)

“The Courier” by Lavie Tidhar (4,292 words) — A courier makes her rounds on Mars. Nothing special here. Likable characters. Maybe you need to have read the other stories in the series. (My rating: 3/5)

“Vivienne” by E. H. Lipton (164 words) — A lover talks to his lover about a what if. Says a lot in few words but lacks some clarity and direction. (My rating: 3/5)

Average story rating: 3.77/5

One note. Going forward, I am only reading magazines where the stories are available to read for free online. This means that I will no longer be reading either Analog or Asimov’s. Neither of these magazines makes their stories available to read online. That is a pity. They have some really great fiction. Another reason I am choosing to no longer read these is that the epub formats continue to be poorly laid out. At first it seemed that they only ran their PDF through a converter and didn’t proofread it. Now, with the new owners, they are doing a poor job of properly managing the layout in the CSS file resulting in italics where they don’t belong and a lack of italics where they are needed, inconsistently. It makes reading them less than the pleasure it should be. So you can look forward to reviews of each issue of these magazines that I am now subscribed to and reading:

• Apex
• Clarkesworld
• Lightspeed
• Uncanny

And I am still reading novels and non-fiction that will also be reviewed from time to time. The schedule for these will continue to be on weekends at noon with short posts about my highest rated short stories to read coming out weekdays at noon.

Clarkesworld is my favorite short fiction magazine. Here are my mini review from the July issue.

“Missing Helen” by Tia Tashiro (5,830 words | 24 minutes) — A woman learns that her ex-husband is engaged to her clone. A fantastic use of point of view as a reveal. Explores complications in relationships. (My rating: 5/5)

“The Walled Garden” by Fiona Moore (6,530 words | 26 minutes) — After the last of a tool breaks that was used for gardening, Morag struggles to figure out how to grow food. A continuation of the story of Morag started in “The Spoil Heap” and continued it “King of the Castle“. This story alternates passages in the present with those of her past after leaving her village. (My rating: 4/5)

“Welcome to Kearney” by Gary Kloster (9,110 words | 37 minutes) — A newly sentient android shows up at a historic town/museum where the caretaker human fixes it. Explores the complexity of human relationships and our desire to fix things and people. Wonderful! (My rating: 5/5)

“Serpent Carriers” by K.A. Teryna (14,500 words | 58 minutes) — Three stories told by an old man around a fire. This story is nearly unintelligible. But I feel like there is something there that I just missed. Not for me. (My rating:2/5)

“Bits and Pieces on This Floor” by Eric Del Carlo (4,050 words | 16 minutes) — An officer of the Galactic Collective supervises the clearing of a mining planet that is being abandoned. Great story development, with little pieces revealing more little by little. (My rating: 4/5)

“A Land Called Folly” by Amal Singh (3,660 words | 15 minutes) — A young man estranged from his space faring family returns home to his dying grandfather. A bit confusing. (My rating: 3/5)

“Hunter Harvester” by Bam Bruin (3,670 words | 15 minutes) — Women on a colonized planet who are harvesting native cabbages find out a bit more about what they are eating. All the colonizers are women. A fascinating look at reproduction and colonization. (My rating: 4/5)

Average rating per story: 3.86/5

Time for my monthly summary of the latest issue of Clarkesworld that I have read.

“Emily of Emerald Starship” by Ng Yi-Sheng (3,860 words | 16 minutes) — A mother who has become a spaceship controls her family and tries to corral her son when he falls in love with a horse stable owner. A beautiful, heartbreaking story with a clever use of vague language. (My rating: 5/5)

“If an Algorithm Can Cast a Shadow” by Claire Jia-Wen ((5,040 words | 21 minutes) — A mother whose son died in an auto accident orders a Digital Double of him. This one was just okay for me. (My rating: 3/5)

“In the Shells of Broken Things” by A.T. Greenblatt (7,050 words | 28 minutes) — A man seeks to understand his family member who left the Evergreen Domes decades ago. A sweet story of reconciliation and openness. (My rating: 5/5)

“The Eighth Pyramid” by Louis Inglis Hall (8,060 words | 33 minutes) — A lone family attempts to preserve knowledge of previous species as the leaders of their world claim it to be the pinnacle. Shows what defending truth can sometimes bring. (My rating: 4/5)

“Faces of the Antipode” by Matthew Marcus (8,680 | 35 minutes) — On a planet cooling due to the actions of its colonizers, one of them seeks answers among the indigenous people of the jungle on the opposite side of the planet. Despite prejudice, we can always learn from the “other”. (My rating: 5/5)

“The Last Lunar New Year” by Derek Künsken (5,310 words | 22 minutes) — In the far future in our dying solar system, a high court of descendants of humans considers a request from distant relatives. I love the far future feel of this story. Reminds me of a Dr. Who episode. (My rating: 4/5)

“The Last to Survive” by Rita Chang-Eppig (5,720 words | 23 minutes) — The first cyberized person returns to a place from her past desperate to hang onto her memories. A story of unwanted celebrity. (My rating: 4/4)

“Outlier” by R.L. Meza (2,930 words | 12 minutes) — A homeless person is experimented on turning her into a scorpion for use in further experiments. Explores agency. A little too confusing for my taste. (My rating: 3/5)

Average rating per story: 4.125/5

This is one of the first things I read each month. Here are my mini reviews for the latest issue.

“Brainstem Disco, 2191” by Angela Liu (1,640 words) — One of a pair of lovers interacts with the other’s post-mortem disembodied self, pining for them, wishing they hadn’t died. Lot’s of imagery, especially around sound. Unique and interesting story. (My Rating: 3/5)

“The Library of the Apocalypse” by Rati Mehrota (3,850 words) — The narrator leads a band of humans surviving in a shattered Toronto as they search each full moon for the titular library to escape briefly from their dark reality. Intriguing and well-written with a twist at the end. (My rating: 5/5)

“We, the Fleet” by Alex T. Singer (7,700 words) — A mother with inorganic children finds and saves a human woman by making her into a cyborg. A wonderful story of family and friendship told from a unique perspective. (My rating: 5/5)

“Descent” by Wole Talabi (21,240 words) — A man on a gaseous planet seeks to find the planet’s surface. It has lots of foreign/made-up words without definitions and that I found not easily understood from context. (My rating: 3/5)

“Oh Time Thy Pyramids” by Ann LeBlanc (7,430 words) — I found this one confusing to the point that I stopped reading at the first break. (My rating: 1/5)

“Proxima One” by Caryanna Reuven (4,020 words) — Silicos set out to search for life in the universe and end up considering whether to create it again. Very engaging concept without much of a plot. (My rating: 3/5)

“Yarn Theory” by Marie Vibbert (1,000 words) — A mathematician knits a pattern in yarn of a message received from aliens. I liked this very much. It ended too soon. I wanted more. (My rating: 4/5)

My average story rating for this issue: 3.43 out of 5.

I decided to add a bit of short fiction back into my reading life this year. Two years ago (2023) was my year of short fiction, which I read almost exclusively. At the end of the year, I stopped as I found that there was no easy way to find good short fiction without getting subpar stories as well. But last year, I found myself missing the timeliness of short fiction magazines. So I did a bit of research on my reading in 2023 and decided to subscribe (again) to Clarkesworld magazine in 2025. This is my review of the first issue of the year.

“When There Are Two of You: A Documentary” by Zun Yu Tan (2,130 word) – In a near future world, citizens can get a copy of their mentality/personality called a Sentience. It’s kind of a snapshot of who they are. One character makes one of himself and puts it into his clone. We follow what happens with that clone after the original dies. The other main character is a woman who has her Sentience within herself. It’s kind of like the voice in your head on steroids. This is a wonderful exploration of identity and the way we talk to ourselves. (My rating: 4/5)

“Child of the Mountain” by Gunnar De Winter (2,890 words) – Taking place on a mountain in an unknown place and time, a young girl is caretaker for her genetic sisters. When they die, she extracts a “soul seed” and resurrects them. This is her purpose in life. But the ritual vultures that eat the flesh off her sisters’ dead bodies seem to be suggesting a different path altogether. A haunting tale of life, death, and hard decisions. (My rating: 3/5)

“Never Eaten Vegetables” by H. H. Pak (15,170 words) – A corporation sends a sentient ship filled with suspended embryos to a planet previously prepared for their arrival. But when something goes wrong, the ship has a tough decision to make on her own. The corporation won’t answer her questions as to what she should do as she keeps bumping into parts of herself that she has no access to. Very well written. The story just flows and it is easy to empathize and root for the characters. (My rating: 5/5)

“The Temporary Murder of Thomas Monroe” by Tia Tashiro (11,900 words) – A young man wakes up to find that he has died… again. But this time instead of being at his own hand, he has been murdered. But he doesn’t recall who killed him. At least not at first. And as he starts to remember, things get odder and odder. Another propulsive, well-written read that kept me turning the pages. (My rating: 5/5)

“Beyond Everything” by Wang Yanzhong translated from Chinese by Stella Jiayue Zhu (9,750 words) – In a future world devastated by never-ending war and environmental collapse, a new envoy is sent to seek help from extraterrestrials after all but one of the previous envoys never returned. After talking to the only returning envoy, the new one sets out to learn from the aliens, presumably more advanced than Earth, what the Earthlings can do to save themselves. The story feels muddled a bit and the writing felt clumsy to me. The author is going for something big and difficult to communicate. It didn’t quite work for me. (My rating: 2/5)

“Autonomy” by Meg Ellison (3,100 words) – A woman meets her best friend, as she regularly does, and hears about a confrontation with a man who sat on the hood of her robo taxi and the mysterious code someone gave her to use in similar future situations. Later, on her way home, the woman is assaulted in her autonomous taxi and finds out what happens when she uses that code. Has some gore and a feel of a short horror story. I thoroughly enjoyed exploring “what if” in a world with fully autonomous vehicles. (My rating: 4/5)

That’s all the fiction in the issue. There are two interviews each with a writer/editor as well as an interesting essay about termites and consciousness. The issue is rounded out by Neil Clarke’s editorial reviewing happenings with the magazine last year and a brief bio of the artist of the cover art. My average rating for the fiction comes out to 3.83 out five stars. A solid start to the new year that leaves me grateful for subscribing again. I’m looking forward to reading the next issue!