Happy not-September-anymore. I’m keeping busy by doing a writing thing that I don’t wanna explain, because it sounds dumb when I say it out loud. Peace and love on planet earth.
Actually I will say the dumb thing. I’m writing seventeen first chapters for seventeen different stories. Why? I dunno. It’s fun.
Essays and nonfiction
“The Monkey and the Missing Page” by Clement Killeaton
The Republic of Letters, 2026
A bunch of interesting ideas here re: the value the humanities provide. A few things were resonant with me.
Wonder what life’d be like if I’d done something other than straight STEM in college.
“Calvin and Hobbes and the Price of Integrity” by Matthew Morgan
The Republic of Letters, 2026
A reread.
I’m not an uncompromising person. And I wanna wear Watterson’s art on a t-shirt.
Now he’s been retired for almost as long as I’ve been alive, and I’m almost the same age he was when he did so.
I just had this conversation with my boss today: If I’ve got my health, I’m gonna keep working forever. I enjoy it.
Short stories
Science fiction
Adventitious, 2026
Astronauts lost in space, a carousel, and a time loop.
“When Humans Are No Longer Born Human” by Zhu Yixuan
Clarkesworld, 2026
I liked this story a lot. The premise imagines a dark future where, apparently, instead of preventing the creation of clones to skew elections, or the implantation of propaganda via brainwashing technology, we simply “protect democracy” by arbitrarily limiting who can be considered human. If you’re grown in a vat as a clone and implanted with memories of childhood and given a family, you’re not human. If you’re grown in a vat from harvested gametes and given no real childhood or family, you are human. The narrator is one of these, and they work for the government office that vets whether petitioners get certified to have full human rights.
Clarkesworld, 2026
Tabitha is trying to negotiate with aliens so that her ship will be allowed to settle on their planet. The lead alien negotiator demands to eat her arm. The twist works out fortunately for her.
“Skin and Glass” by R. P. Sand
Clarkesworld, 2026
The premise is that making eye contact reduces your lifespan, so now we’re all avoiding it, and living like that sucks.
I’m autistic enough that I don’t think I’d notice if I happened to go the rest of my life without making eye contact. I am at all times staring at your nose bridge, actually.
The Daily Tomorrow, 2026
A story presenting itself as a narrative user manual. The product is a gun that detects lies.
“Gifts We Give to the Sea” by Dinara Tengri
Grist: Imagine 2200, 2024
Madina’s daughter has come home a son, with an ambition to reverse the drying out of the Aral Sea, and its poisoning by pesticides.
“Audit of the Collapse and Convalescence of Minds” by Renan Bernardo
Reactor, 2026
A story about AIs needing therapy. Honestly, not my thing.
“The Imperfect Blue Marble” by Rae Mariz
Grist: Imagine 2200, 2024
A didactic, metafictional, metaphorical narrative told from a future storyteller to us, the people living through the “blip”: the rapacious period of human history characterized by climate destruction.
“Cabbage Koora: A Prognostic Autobiography” by Sanjana Sekhar
Grist: Imagine 2200, 2024
Three vignettes spanning 54 years about a diasporic Indian family. Technology changes, the climate changes, resource scarcity changes the world, and the old ways are revived. All the while, from Hyderabad to Los Angeles to Onigamiinsing, Minnesota, generations of women stay in touch, sharing food and love.
There’s a lot of exposition on infrastructure, the economy, and cultural practices in this story. But I’m a nerd for those things, so I liked this story.
“What the Sky Recalls” by M. Shedric Simpson
Fusion Fragment Issue 20, 2024
Why do I get anxious about doing stuff I really want to do, and so put it off for ages? That’s how I felt about this story. I knew I’d love it, so I took two years to make myself read it. Yay mental illness.
I got all misty-eyed over this story. Elizabeth Cartwright loved a woman and gave her up out of unshared ambition. Shortly thereafter, the world ended. Somebody made a Von Neumann nanomachine. Chicago went first. Because that was Elizabeth’s lost love’s home, she drives into the exclusion zone, to pay witness to an incomprehensible future.
“Inheritance” by Sarah Bess Jaffe
Fusion Fragment Issue 20, 2024
Holy shit, that character voice. An atmospheric selkie story. It has a very strong sense of place. The narrator inherits a dilapidated former lighthouse in Billingsgate. I’m pretty sure that’s Billingsgate as in the lost Cape Cod Island, which the sea ate in slow bites over decades. By 1942, the island became a shoal, its former residents having long since fled for higher ground.
Fusion Fragment Issue 20, 2024
The conceit of this story is language as a fungible currency. It’s doing a metaphor about co-opting and commodifying culture. 玉河/Gillian’s mother warned her to not sell her Chinese, but, to survive, she’s had to sell almost all the words she knows—her own name included—and a whole lot of her English too. The wealthy buy up other people’s languages to become polyglots. Partway through the piece, you learn that also, with Langbase technology, even accessing your own memories requires paying a subscription fee. This really feels like the dark cyberpunk future that tech bros want.
Grist: Imagine 2200, 2024
In a post-climate-apocalypse future, a Catholic mission on a submarine in the Gulf of Mexico takes in newborns abandoned due to birth defects caused by oil pollution. Also, there are mermaids.
Fusion Fragment Issue 20, 2024
Claire Smotherman, 87571 is an exobiologist working at an under-construction Metaplex (think space Disney) Resort on an imperfectly terraformed planet. Except that’s not their name. It’s the name of their next-of-kin, who is their dead wife’s mother.
They were gonna divorce their wife, the actual Claire’s daughter. But the daughter died first, attempting to kill Claire Smotherman, 87571 in the process.
In short, the narrator is going through it. They’re a messy person. And this is before they try to slot a hacked, headless Metaplex droid into the hole that their homicidal, suicidal, dead wife left in their life.
“The Long-In Between” by Andrew Kenneson
Grist: Imagine 2200, 2024
This story is framed as a man’s journal. After the death of his daughter, who was a budding environmentalist, he buys a plot of used-up farmland and attempts to rewild it. I really liked this one.
“A Gift of Coconuts” by Melissa Gunn
Grist: Imagine 2200, 2024
Another one I really liked. This story is about a farming family in a post-post-climate apocalypse community. I enjoy the hell out of hard science fiction that spotlights daily life.
Grist: Imagine 2200, 2024
Transhumanist utopia story. The narrator’s community takes a metabolism-altering drug to enable them to make an annual migration across the desert. Unfortunately, that treatment doesn’t work for the narrator, so they have to try a custom approach.
“The Blossoming” by Guglielmo Miccolupi and Laura C Zanetti-Domingues
Amazing opening. This is a “finding yourself” story about a boy who lives in a post scarcity utopia. Humorous and full of shenanigans. I enjoyed it!
And finally, I’ve finished reading the stories from this collection. Only took me 2.5 years.
“Simons, Far and Near” by Ana Gardner
Cast of Wonders, 2022
Loved this piece. Made me cry at the office. Marking as a favorite for the year. It’s about deep space missions, sacrifice, isolation, and mutual support.
“Timelike Curves, Spacelike Curves” by P. H. Lee
Reactor, 2025
What the hell did I just read?
This is a tight-focused, erotic character piece. My first encounter with mpreg in the wild.
“If A Digitized Tree Falls” by Ken Liu and Caroline M. Yoachim
Reactor, 2025
This story has a bunch of interesting ideas about virtual models, AI, and environmental mapping. But I failed to connect with the scope.
“But, Still, I Smile” by D. A. Xiaolin Spires
Clarkesworld, 2019
This is about a woman, grieving her inability to carry a child to term, who goes on a space expedition to try to find alien life. It does something weird with a blood-drinking planet machine.
“Redemption Song” by Quan Barry
Reactor, 2025
This one had too much going on for me. Every few page equivalents, we’d get another loredrop. There are spaceships, multiple terraformed worlds, an evil corporation, an enslaved human race with toxic breath and glowing eyes, an abandoned postapocalyptic Earth, etc. The narrator is primarily characterized by being hot for the female deuteragonist whose breath should kill him. They make whoopie anyway. Also, the story’s explicitly about the anti-slavery Bob Marley song.
The Daily Tomorrow, 2026
Surreal, new weird, reality-bending military sci fi. I very much liked this one. If you know what a khert fire is, it’s like that, but if you sent a platoon of soldiers in to shoot at it, and afterwards the narrator has PTSD. Yes, it is already absurd to normalize violence and enlist men to be glorious warriors, at baseline, in our unchewed reality.
“After the Tripods” by Dale Bailey
Reactor, 2026
H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds and John Christopher’s The Tripods series were both formative for me. This novelette is in conversation with those universes, so naturally, I loved it. The perspective character is David, of London. He’s a father. Thirtyish years ago, he survived the tripod invasion as a child. His parents were killed. He was rescued by a homeless teenager and survived on the street with him. Later, he served in WWI. The narrative slips back and forth through time, tracing the emotional throughline of David’s survival, his PTSD, and how he’s trying and failing to shield his son from the existence of violence. I was riveted.
“Sunshine Hills Reality Edit” by Tina Connolly
Future Tense Fiction, 2026 I didn’t know Future Tense Fiction published stories like this one. This is a first person, gay, twee, cozy sci fi with a social focus. In this world, the USA has splintered into ideological factions, which create online resources to bolster their versions of reality. The concept of a “fact” is now controversial. The narrator, a lesbian widow, keeps a small compound with a cabin full of actual-factual books. She lives like a hermit until a peppy enby twenty-something barrels into her life, chasing slopbot created rumors of “Sunshine Hills”: a rustic queer community. Response essay here.
“The Memory Shop” by Melissa Ren
Fusion Fragment Issue 20, 2024
This is one of those stories in which a corporation lets you buy other people’s memories or sell your own. I liked its execution because it centers on a woman grieving her miscarriage. She sells the memory of her pregnancy to cope. Natural consequences, for herself and her relationship with her partner, follow.
Fantasy
“Knots of Red and Black” by Victoria Brunn
GigaNotoSaurus, 2026
Yuri with blood witches. Easy to read and easy to rec.
“A Man Who Was the Ocean” by A.D. Sui
The Sunday Morning Transport, 2026
This was an interesting story that deliberately makes use of headhopping to expose the personal secrets of two characters on a date, with the cumulative effect of gradually revealing a very strange relationship to the reader.
“Another Girl Under the Iron Bell” by Angela Liu
Uncanny Magazine, 2024
Horror fantasy about a woman who turned into a cursed spirit and is now used as an assassin. I didn’t really follow the plot because I lost track of the male characters.
“What I Saw Before the War” by Alaya Dawn Johnson
Reactor, 2025
Lore dense high fantasy about a magical war and factions of mages. I think this wanted to be the setting for a novel. The fire mages exploit the main character’s ethnic group as living batteries. The main character is losing her sight while gaining awareness of the “small magic” she inherited from her father, which is different from the main war magic. I liked the parts about the main character’s family.
“Not to have Killed a King” by E. L. Roseman
Strange Horizons, 2026
Time loops, fealty, an abused queen, and the lover who can’t remember all her other bids to save her. Vibe-forward. Told in microscenes.
“White lines on a Green Field” by Catherynne Valente
Originally from Subterranean Online, 2011
This is a reread. I love this novelette very much. Brings me joy that Uncanny reprinted it, putting it back online.
“Let me tell you about the year Coyote took the Devils to the State Championship.”
“The Red Mother” by Elizabeth Bear
Reactor, 2021
Auga Augasson, called Hacksilver, is a retired warrior, a sorcerer, and a bit too womanly for sensibility. When he returns to the far-flung farmstead of estranged friends, it’s because he’s chasing his brother’s trail, to inform his brother that he’s cleared his name of a crime he didn’t commit. His brother and his brother’s wife can return to their family’s lands. Hacksilver himself has no desire to take up their inheritance.
Instead of his brother, he finds death. The far-flung village was decimated by pestilence. Hacksilver’s brother, sister-in-law, and his friends’ children all perished. On top of that, ash rains from the sky. A dragon has taken up residence in the nearby volcano, stirring it to life.
Hacksilver owes a kin debt. Fortunately, solving that, the pestilence, and the dragon dovetails nicely together. Because the dragon’s venom, if she can be convinced to give it, will raise the dead.
“The Witch and the Wyrm” by Elizabeth Bear
Reactor, 2025
A direct sequel to “The Red Mother.” Hacksilver has been charged with custodianship of one of the Red Mother’s three eggs, in exchange for her revitalizing venom—eitr—and her departure from the village. The egg, fortunately, isn’t due to hatch for ages. Hacksilver raises his dead kin, and all seems well.
Except, he also wove the eitr into hay for animals, to help them survive the volcanic winter— With unforeseen consequences. Sorcery’s easy. Getting it to do only what you want, that’s the trick.
I really liked these Hacksilver stories!
“Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Memphis Minnie Sing the Stumps Down Good” by LaShawn Wanak
Originally in FIYAH, 2019
This was a reread. I actually originally read it in 2023, in a library book, in St. Louis, while waiting through the process of a family member needing major surgery. I can’t remember what exactly the library had. Could’ve been an issue of FIYAH. I just remember thinking it was pretty cool to see a spec fic collection on the shelf.
Flagging as a favorite. I love this story. It’s about an alternate history where Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Memphis Minnie get pulled off the stage and made to work as exterminators. Stumps in the shape of people are infesting New York and Chicago. Singing makes them burst, so they can be cleaned up. Find them, bag them, sing them, vacuum up the mess. Because, if you don’t, the stumps will burst into spores by themselves. People have died from inhaling those spores.
“Red, Scuttle When the Ships Come Down” by Wen-Yi Lee
Uncanny, 2025
This flew right over my head. It’s about Chinese prisoners on a British penal colony who’re forced to mine stones that make fire. Also, their blood turns into crabs.
“The Garden Must Thrive” by Anaea Lay
Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 20025
This was too high fantasy for me, especially for the short story format. There’s a novel’s worth of worldbuilding. On top of the obligatory magic, we’ve got some kind of deified genius loci thing going on, plus living priest-like avatar of those genius loci, plus weird human development (second puberty, alternate adult forms), plus alternate realities (?), plus witches, plus an ancient war.
“The Octopus Dreams of Personhood” by Hannah Yang
Diabolical Plots, 2025
A story about a depressed woman who starts letting a talking octopus possess her body, effectively dissociating for hours or days at a time.
Fusion Fragment Issue 20, 2024
Another favorite for the year. I loved this one. It’s about Nicky Tremaine, washed-up, untalented actor, and the twists and turns his career takes after he becomes associated with actual god-killing supervillain Doctor Apocalypse. Running off to read another thing by Louis Evans because I had so much fun.
“Everybody’s Got a Hungry Heart” by Louis Evans
Translunar Travelers Lounge Issue 3, 2020
“Agent Heartbreak and the Misery Muse meet cute on a lonely-hearts cruise.” I really liked this one too.
Horror and literary
“Wolf Moon, Antler Moon” by A. C. Wise
Dark, small-town secrets, human and animal skins, hunters and I guess, basically, werewolves. This novelette is doing a lot. I didn’t follow the lore, but the atmosphere is good, the prose is good, and I liked the Buffy-esque (no I didn’t watch Buffy) heroine.
“Hidden Life” by Madhuri Vijay
The New Yorker, 2026
Ever been a smart kid that had something happen to you that became part of your firmament, but that doesn’t bear talking about? This is about that.
Reactor, 2026
The Jeffers sisters signed up for a simple job: investigate whatever’s been making pets disappear in the crumbling neighborhoods around Agate Way.
What they find is a primordial force as old as nature itself.
“Carla With the Long Black Hair” by Tash Roberts
The Republic of Letters, 2026
I really liked this one. Wife and mother Carla is institutionalized with symptoms of psychosis.
“Occupants” by Steve Rasnic Tem
Reactor, 2026
Reactor’s summary of this one is perfect: “An American family vacationing in a formerly war-torn country encounters the echoes of the city’s recent past as it bleeds into the present.”
The story was well done.
Fusion Fragment Issue 20, 2024
Epistolary story. The narrator’s Uncle Max has funded their university education, and they write to tell him about it.
The problem with the university is that its optimized time management quickly drives the narrator crazy. Not that he realizes that’s the problem.
The Sunday Morning Transport, 2026
Keeeeeeeeerist. The ONE time I skip a featured Sunday Morning Transport story, I unwittingly end up in conversation with the author. Chris told me it was his most recent publishing success. “Oh,” I went, like an idiot, knowing I missed it, “was that one behind the paywall?”
Nope!!
Yeahhh, so Chris knows this now, because I slipped on my back foot. I apologize for being a schmuck.
I have now read it!! This is a historical horror story set on Saint Helena with a focus on the horrors of slavery and the transatlantic trade. In the present day, a scholar travels to the island to study this. And it’s wonderful, and I’m glad I didn’t miss it like I was about to!!
Reactor, 2025
I liked this one. A disabled man who’s caring for his father on hospice realizes that a ghost has been haunting them.
“Why Donkeys Have 44 Teeth” by Peter Nena
Will This Be A Problem?, 2025
This seemed like a cute middle grade story about a boy who’s having scary dreams about donkeys, up until his community gets graphically slaughtered by talking donkey/bat monsters.
Books
Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman
This is another insanely popular sci-fi book that hooked the people I know who don’t usually read, following Project Hail Mary. Aliens scour the Earth, create a subterranean dungeon complex, and force the surviving humans inside to become ‘crawlers’— Subjects of a lethal, intergalactic, reality TV show.
Carl’s one of those humans. And his party is just him and his ex-girlfriend’s pedigreed, prize-winning show cat, Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk.
Fortunately for Carl, this universe works by ‘sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic’ rules. The dungeon bestows player stats, bonus skills, loot drops, gear, power ups, and all other hallmarks of a LitRPG story. The AI running the dungeon wants to make Carl stronger—just strong enough to get into really entertaining fights. And maybe even survive.
Also, one of those magic game things gives Princess Donut the ability to talk and turns her into a player. The cat’s more powerful than Carl. She’s also the book’s breakout character. I see her merch around town all the time.
Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell
Me, yet again: “Wow! You can get away with that in middle grade?”
This is an epic fantasy with a lot of violence and character death. It’s also about and for, like, ten-year-olds. It opens with a murderer.
Ultimately, this is a high seas adventure featuring tons of fantasy animals and double chosen ones. None of that is actually my thing. However, I learned a bunch of craft stuff from reading.
The protagonists are Mal and Christopher. Mal is the flying girl of the hidden archipelago, which exists near the British Isles and is the last bastion of the world’s magical creatures. Christopher is a boy from our world who learns that he’s the heir to guardianship of the entrance of the archipelago—and is shortly thereafter sucked in to aid Mal in a quest. Because she’s the murderer’s target. And the archipelago’s magic is dying, taking the magical creatures down with it.
Mal, Christopher, and a motley crew of secondary characters who have access to various boats sail off to save the world.
The Language of Liars by S. L. Huang
This was my 2026 pick for Bro Squad Book Club. I’d been super excited to read the alien linguistics cross-cultural communication book with the awesome cover. Somehow, I missed that the perspective character is also an alien. Ro is some kind of ferret creature. He goes to ferret linguistics school to learn the language of the Star Eaters. The aim of the school is for a ferret to learn the Star Eater mindset well enough to telepathically “jump” into one of their bodies. Obviously, Ro achieves this at the end of chapter 1, despite that he struggles with alien ADD.
Having bodysnatched a Star Eater, Ro will spend the rest of his life on a mining ship that’s basically a prison, where the Star Eaters delve through outer space to absorb the, uhhh, the magic space energy stuff that I forgot the name of. The magic space stuff powers ansibles and FTL travel. Everybody in the galaxy wants it, but only the Star Eaters can harvest it. Insert galactic politics here. The ferret aliens are very low in the pecking order and their moon is only sustainable through stardust-powered imports, so they put a lot of pressure on Ro to steal extra stardust for them.
The best part of this book for me was the twist. I wish I’d had it spoiled, so I could’ve spent the whole story tallying up foreshadowing. I did figure out what was happening before the big reveal, at least. The way Huang executed that was great. My book club hasn’t met yet, but I know that eighty percent of those guys have never read a story that does any of the things Huang’s doing here. I’m looking forward to seeing their reactions.
Comics
A complete sci fi Webtoon with 50 episodes. It’s Scavenger’s Reign meets Avatar (the blue alien one). Yeongsu Dong is part of a mission to “save the human race” by colonizing the planet Bumi. He arrives in stasis and wakes up to a disaster: the humans’ ship was severely damaged. He seems to be the lone survivor.
Yeongsu descends to the planet’s surface. He’s adopted into a group of humanlike aliens. He learns that they’re embroiled in a civil war. The native Bumians were in the process of being conquered by an alien parasite when humans arrived. Yeongsu joins the rebellion against the parasite-infected, psychic alien priest class. On top of that, there’s an incoming meteor on a lethal path for Bumi, and the parasites aren’t interested in doing anything about it. The parasites are going to let Bumi be destroyed—Because their plan is just to leave to conquer Earth next.
The emotional throughline of this story is Yeongsu being a peace, love, and rock ‘n roll figure. He solves a lot of conflict by making friends and teaching them the guitar. This is a fun sci fi romp with some bittersweet themes.
Yes, I finally started reading Space Boy! Holy cow is it good. This is the best MG/YA sci fi comic I’ve encountered. I wish it’d existed when I was a kid, so I could’ve grown up reading it. The characters are sweet, the art is gorgeous, and the world is imbued with a ton of love. It’s a very long running Webtoon with a ton of episodes and multiple volumes in print.
Amy was born in a deep space mining colony. When her dad lost his job, her whole family was relocated to Earth. This is a 30-year journey, taken under cryostasis. Amy wakes up to a foreign, beautiful planet where she’s 30 years out of time, and all the friends she’s ever known grew up without her, thousands and thousands of miles away.
Oliver is the strange boy in Amy’s art class at her new, Earthbound school. The rules don’t seem to apply to him. And he’s hiding a big secret. Oliver’s somehow a kindred spirit to Amy, but there’s no record of his background, or what his connection to deep space could be.
This is a comic that starts out like a slice-of-life about teen relationships and slowly takes on thriller elements as Oliver’s secrets enter the plot. It’s like, really good, y’all. McCranie’s got a talent for beautiful, atmospheric backgrounds, emotive characters, and humor. This is just such a nice story to read with a cup of tea.
Planetes volume 1 by Makoto Yukimura
I love hard sci fi so much. This comic was everything I wanted. I ordered the second half of the collection before I finished the first.
Hachirota Hoshino, Yuri Mihairokov, and Fee Carmichael are space debris collectors: garbagemen for Earth’s orbit. Everyone up in space is at least a little bit in love with it. And the future of society is on the cusp of pivoting around space enterprises. We’re established on the moon, but can we expand to Jupiter? Hachirota’s determined to be part of the first manned, round-trip mission.
I love passionate characters with a goal, I love stories that focus on teams of people working for a grand vision, and I love things that help me catch a glimpse of the sublime.
Would I be an astronaut, if I could? Absolutely not.
But do I want to see more of the stars? Yes. Always.
Planetes volume 2 by Makoto Yukimura
Couldn’t not finish Planetes! This series really holds up. Fee Carmichael is my favorite character, so I really enjoyed that she was the star of many of the chapters in the final arc.
