Asimov’s Science Fiction, July/August 2026
Introduction
Sam W. Pisciotta’s “A Flame in the Dark,” appearing in the July/August 2026 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, represents a carefully constructed intersection of Enlightenment rationalism and gothic horror, filtered through the conventions of speculative fiction. A graduate of the Odyssey Writers Workshop with prior publication credits in Lightspeed, Nightmare Magazine, and Analog, Pisciotta has demonstrated a sustained interest in liminal psychological states and the boundaries of human knowledge. This story, set in colonial North America in 1775, continues that preoccupation by dramatizing the collision between scientific optimism and the irreducible chaos of the universe through the first-person account of Annette Lacroix, a French naturalist and experimental scientist. The work’s central thesis — that chaos and harmony are co-constitutive forces that cannot, and perhaps should not, be separated — is rendered with considerable stylistic sophistication and thematic depth, making “A Flame in the Dark” one of the more formally ambitious short stories to appear in the magazine in recent memory.
Plot, Setting, and Characters
The story is presented as Annette Lacroix’s retrospective journal account of a period of scientific experimentation and subsequent supernatural crisis in the American wilderness, set against the backdrop of the nascent Revolutionary War. Annette and her husband Gabriel, a natural philosopher, have relocated from France to the frontier after accusations of heresy, bringing with them a German blacksmith named Schäfer. Together they operate a “dissonance device” — a sonic instrument built from tuning forks and violin strings designed to isolate and expose underlying chaotic frequencies within the universe’s otherwise harmonious structure. Their experiments produce disturbing biological anomalies: a leaf that rots instantaneously, a cornflower that undergoes grotesque transformation, and a bumblebee with two heads.
As Annette investigates the surrounding forest, she encounters increasingly alarming phenomena: an elk that leaps suicidally from a cliff, a fox with an extra limb, fields of flowers that appear to communicate, and a “dissonance zone” that corresponds spatially to the site of the experiments. Gabriel disappears near a ridge, Schäfer is killed by an enormous supernatural creature, and Annette is rescued by an Ojibwe tracker named Omashkooz. She later encounters Jacob, an android from the twenty-third century who has entered their time through a dimensional portal apparently opened by the dissonance device. Together the three eventually penetrate the “chaotic dimension,” retrieve Gabriel, use Jacob’s knowledge of harmonic progression to close the portal, and return to their own world.
Principal characters include: Annette Lacroix, the narrator, whose scientific rationalism is both her defining virtue and her greatest vulnerability; Gabriel, whose intellectual boldness is tempered by emotional fragility; Schäfer, the Hessian blacksmith who functions as a kind of chorus of religious skepticism; Omashkooz, an Ojibwe man whose epistemological framework challenges Enlightenment assumptions; and Jacob, an artificial being from the future whose existence literalizes the story’s philosophical tensions.
Critical Analysis
Thematic Architecture
The story’s governing theme is the relationship between order and chaos, rendered not as a simple binary but as an ontological interdependency. Annette’s opening meditation — that some darkness can “push back” against the light of reason — immediately subverts the Enlightenment premise from which the narrative departs. The dissonance device is not merely a plot mechanism but a philosophical emblem: the attempt to isolate and expose chaos as a pathology of the universe paradoxically enables chaos to spill into ordered reality. Pisciotta draws on a long tradition in science fiction of the Faustian scientist whose tools of inquiry become instruments of destruction, but the story avoids reducing this to simple moral allegory. Annette’s concluding observation — that “chaos will never be stripped from the world; it walks at our left, with harmony on our right” — represents a genuine epistemological evolution rather than a didactic resolution.
A secondary thematic layer concerns colonial violence and the ethics of scientific progress. The beast that terrorizes the dissonance zone is described in terms explicitly evoking European colonialism: it presents facets of “conquistadors with bloodied swords, men turning the earth with giant plows, clockwork machines tearing through forests and downing trees.” Its emergence from the portal opened by Gabriel and Annette’s experiments implicates their scientific ambition within a broader critique of Western expansionism. Omashkooz’s rebuke — “It wasn’t here until you came” — functions as a structural moral pivot that the story handles with admirable restraint, refusing to resolve the tension neatly.
Narrative Form and Point of View
The story employs a retrospective first-person journal structure, punctuated by embedded letters to Annette’s father and to Carl von Linné (Linnaeus). This epistolary layering is not merely decorative; it performs the Enlightenment practice of correspondence as knowledge-sharing while simultaneously revealing the gap between what Annette reports to others (carefully rational, reassuring) and what she actually experiences (terrifying, destabilizing). The letter to her father, in which she enthusiastically announces the discovery of a new botanical species while suppressing accounts of the elk’s suicide and the dissonance experiments’ biological anomalies, enacts in miniature the story’s larger argument about the limits of rational self-presentation.
The retrospective frame — signaled by the subtitle “in which I, Annette Lacroix, reflect upon experiences” — is deployed with notable restraint. Pisciotta largely maintains present-tense urgency within the journal entries themselves, sacrificing some of the dramatic irony that a more omniscient retrospective voice might have provided in favor of phenomenological immediacy. The result is a narrative that feels experiential rather than reflective, which suits the story’s gothic register well but occasionally blurs the distinction between the writing subject and the experiencing subject in ways that strain plausibility.
Imagery and Symbolism
The story’s central symbolic register is luminous and botanical. Light functions throughout as an index of epistemological confidence: the dissonance zone is characterized by “unnatural” and “sinister” light; the chaotic dimension glows with eerie but beautiful bioluminescent colors; the story opens and closes with the metaphor of a candle displacing darkness. The closing inversion — Annette’s suggestion that it is “wise to occasionally blow out the flame” — elegantly reverses the opening epistemological premise, suggesting that darkness is not merely the absence of knowledge but its necessary complement.
Botanical imagery reinforces the story’s concern with the violence latent in taxonomy and classification. Annette’s discovery of Aquilegia Andris — named for her father — is presented as a moment of uncomplicated scientific joy, but the flower reappears in the chaotic dimension as part of a deadly time-loop meadow, suggesting that the act of naming and categorizing nature is not as innocent as the Enlightenment tradition presumes. The flowers that “communicate” in the dissonance zone anticipate recent scholarship on plant signaling (Mancuso and Viola, Brilliant Green, 2015; Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees, 2015) while also functioning symbolically as evidence of a sentient nature that resists human reduction.
Characterization
Annette Lacroix is among the more fully realized protagonists in recent science fiction short fiction. Her psychology is rooted in biographical trauma — her mother’s death, trampled by a panicked horse — which the narrative explicitly connects to her lifelong compulsion to impose order on chaos. This backstory is rendered with economy and emotional precision, and it pays structural dividends when Annette’s equanimity collapses under pressure. Her relationship with Gabriel is drawn with genuine complexity: she is the more intellectually agile and emotionally resilient of the two, yet the story does not sentimentalize her strength or reduce Gabriel to mere dependency. His post-rescue “contemplativeness” — the sense that “a piece of him remains beyond the doorway” — is a psychologically honest representation of trauma that elevates the coda above the conventionally triumphant.
The character of Omashkooz is handled with care but is inevitably constrained by his narrative function. His challenge to Annette’s epistemic assumptions — “Our way of knowing is different, but it’s no less truthful than yours” — is the story’s most explicit thematic declaration, and Pisciotta wisely gives it to a character whose experience of the land is generational rather than experimental. Nevertheless, Omashkooz remains somewhat schematic, his interiority underdeveloped relative to Annette’s. His decision to wait at the portal and extend his bow across the dimensional barrier is a moment of profound loyalty rendered too briefly to carry its full emotional weight.
Jacob presents an interesting formal problem. His arrival introduces overtly science-fictional elements — nanobots, time travel, dimensional portals, twenty-third-century android technology — into what has until that point been a story closer to gothic historical fiction. Pisciotta manages this tonal transition more smoothly than might be expected, largely because Jacob’s ontological strangeness mirrors the story’s larger concern with the limits of classification. His observation that “the Universe is built on order. Newtonian and quantum laws. And while I understand more about them than you, I still don’t understand everything. No one does.” functions as a twenty-third-century echo of Annette’s own Enlightenment faith, suggesting that the desire for rational mastery persists across centuries even as its scope expands.
Historical, Cultural, and Theoretical Contexts
The story participates in a rich tradition of Enlightenment revisionism within speculative fiction, engaging intertextually with texts as various as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), with its warning about the hubris of scientific ambition, and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), with its figuration of reason’s terrifying underside. More proximately, it recalls the historical fiction of Andrea Barrett (Ship Fever, 1996; The Voyage of the Narwhal, 1998), which similarly foregrounds women scientists working at the margins of official natural philosophy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The setting of 1775 colonial North America is not incidental. Pisciotta positions the story at a moment when European Enlightenment rationalism is literally carving up an indigenous landscape, and the dissonance device’s role in releasing the beast onto Anishinaabe land becomes an allegory for the broader violence of colonial scientific taxonomy — the impulse to name, classify, and thereby possess a world that is not one’s own. This reading is reinforced by the beast’s visual aspect as an amalgamation of colonial technologies: the conquistador’s sword, the settler’s plow, the industrial machine.
From a feminist critical perspective (following Gilbert and Gubar’s model in The Madwoman in the Attic, 1979, and its successors), Annette’s negotiation of scientific authority in a male-dominated space is also significant. She is consistently the more perceptive observer — it is she who first notices the dissonance zone, who suspects the connection between the experiments and the anomalies, who persuades Gabriel to investigate, and who ultimately saves his life — yet she is also aware that “a show of passion might further a man’s point in this, but not a woman’s.” The story neither romanticizes nor belabors this tension; it is embedded in the texture of the narrative rather than imposed upon it.
The appearance of Jacob from the twenty-third century invites reading through the lens of posthumanism (Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 1999; Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, 1985). Jacob is a being who “grew beyond [his] purpose,” who carries nanobots rather than blood, and who has traversed multiple temporalities. His disorientation upon arrival — asking not “where” but “when” am I? — signals the story’s interest in temporal instability as a condition of posthuman existence. Notably, his technology, which enables miraculous healing, is also what links him to the portal that has disrupted the ecological and metaphysical order of 1775 North America: the posthuman, too, arrives trailing the consequences of human ambition.
Evaluation
Strengths
“A Flame in the Dark” is most impressive in its formal coherence and tonal control. Pisciotta sustains an atmosphere of escalating dread across a considerable narrative span without resorting to mere accumulation of horror. The story’s central conceits — the dissonance device, the chaotic dimension, the time loops — are logically consistent within the story’s speculative premises and feel genuinely imagined rather than borrowed from genre convention. The prose is lucid and controlled, with moments of genuine descriptive beauty, particularly in the rendering of the chaotic dimension’s bioluminescent vegetation.
The thematic integration of colonial critique with the science fiction premise is accomplished with unusual subtlety for short fiction. The beast’s embodiment of European colonial violence is not explained or expounded upon — it is presented as a visual fact, trusting the reader to draw the connection. This is the kind of restraint that distinguishes serious speculative fiction from its more didactic counterparts.
Annette Lacroix is also a genuine achievement: a female intellectual protagonist whose intelligence, vulnerability, and moral complexity are rendered with equal fidelity.
Weaknesses
The story’s most significant structural weakness is the compression of its later movement. The entry into the chaotic dimension, the discovery of Gabriel, the confrontation with the beast, and Annette’s improvised use of Jacob’s nanobots to save her husband all occur in rapid succession, and the emotional payoff of Gabriel’s revival is somewhat diluted by narrative pace. A longer form — a novelette rather than a novelette-length story — might have allowed these sequences the breathing room they deserve.
Jacob himself, despite the thematic work he performs, remains underdeveloped as a character. His motivations for following artifacts through time, his emotional life (if any), and the specifics of his twenty-third-century origin are all either gestured at or omitted. This may be intentional — his function is partly to embody the inexplicable — but it results in a figure who is more conceptual than human.
The resolution, in which Gabriel and Annette use Jacob’s harmonic progression to close the portal and “restore order to the world,” is elegantly symmetrical but slightly too tidy for a story that has so carefully argued for the irreducibility of chaos. The coda — in which Gabriel gazes pensively into dark water and the couple reflects on the cost of progress — goes some way toward restoring the story’s philosophical complexity, but the transition from the portal’s closure to the reflective epilogue is abrupt.
Originality
Within the current landscape of speculative fiction, “A Flame in the Dark” stands apart from the dominant tendency toward either near-future technological extrapolation or multi-volume secondary-world fantasy. Its combination of historical specificity, genuine philosophical ambition, and gothic sensibility recalls the work of Kelly Link, Susanna Clarke, and Ted Chiang, while remaining distinctly Pisciotta’s own. The story does not transcend its genre so much as demonstrate what the genre, at its best, is capable of.
Conclusion
“A Flame in the Dark” is a formally accomplished, thematically rich work of short speculative fiction that uses the conventions of both historical gothic and science fiction to interrogate the Enlightenment’s most enduring myth: that reason, properly applied, can dispel the darkness of the unknown. Through Annette Lacroix’s harrowing encounter with a dimensional chaos that her own scientific ambition has unleashed, Pisciotta argues not for anti-rationalism but for a more humble and ecologically alert rationalism — one that recognizes, as Annette finally does, that chaos and harmony are not opposites to be separated but complementary forces to be navigated.
The story’s situating of this argument within a colonial landscape in 1775 North America gives its speculative conceits historical and ethical ballast, and the figure of Omashkooz — whose knowledge of the land both predates and exceeds the European visitors’ experimental frameworks — complicates the story’s epistemological terrain in ways that reward further analysis. Future scholarship might productively examine the story alongside indigenous studies approaches (Vizenor, Manifest Manners, 1994; Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” 2012) to interrogate how deeply the colonial critique is embedded in the narrative’s structure, rather than merely in its surface imagery.
“A Flame in the Dark” confirms Pisciotta as a writer of considerable range and seriousness, and it is the kind of story that rewards re-reading: one in which the thematic architecture only becomes fully visible in retrospect, after the darkness it so carefully tends has been properly appreciated.
Works Cited
Barrett, Andrea. Ship Fever and Other Stories. W. W. Norton, 1996.
Barrett, Andrea. The Voyage of the Narwhal. W. W. Norton, 1998.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press, 1979.
Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Socialist Review, 1985. Reprinted in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991.
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Lewis, Matthew Gregory. The Monk. 1796. Oxford University Press, 2016.
Mancuso, Stefano, and Alessandra Viola. Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence. Island Press, 2015.
Pisciotta, Sam W. “A Flame in the Dark.” Asimov’s Science Fiction, July/August 2026, pp. 14–43.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. 1818. Penguin Classics, 2003.
Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol. 1, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1–40.
Vizenor, Gerald. Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance. Wesleyan University Press, 1994.
Wohlleben, Peter. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate. Greystone Books, 2015.